SENZA CENSURA N. 23
november 2007 - february 2008
EDITORIAL
All the offenses and crimes have a certain social feature. But among all the social crimes what should be considered the worst is the impertinent demand to want to change again something in this society, that thinksto to have been up to now also too much good and patient; but that does not want to be criticized again. [Guy Debord, Commentaries on the show society, 1988]
We decided to dedicate the editorial of this number to the subject of the violence. The reasons that pushed us to do this choice are mainly two: the first is that this subject is more and more often at the center of the campaigns (repressive and/or mass-mediatic) of attack to the most varied shapes of organization or of resistance that parts of the class express, and the second one is that we record a large difficulty (we are the first) to face this subject and consequently to give an adequate answer to these attacks. We would want to explain immediately than it is not simply to discuss if we like or not violence: we give for deducted that everyone of us probably has like supreme desire to live in peace in a right and free society. If however on the concept of "peace" we believe is now enough clear the necessity to compare its abstract meaning to the concreteness of the present social relations, we also retain that this effort to should be done also on the concept of violence.
Therefore we have to face the matter, though simply schematically, from the point of view of the state and from the point of view of those who want instead to develop opposition and resistance. We live in a violent society, structurally violent. The society of the capital is obligatory a violent society, that imposes with weapons the exploitation of man and territory for its own reproduction and for the consequent enrichment of few privileged to the damages of billion persons all over the world. The war industry and the military search are the drawing sectors of any capitalist society, that since always makes war its main tool of development and competition to international level.
In order not to fall in a sterile moralistic/philosophical analysis and try to maintain the reflection in the boundaries of the politics is however necessary to our warning to introduce the concept of monopoly of the legitimate violence by the state. In a phase in which the reply to the increasing economical difficulty is the more widespread restriction of the spaces of "democracy" in which the social dialectics more is armored inside more empty and insignificant shapes of delegation, the material cultural and moral monopoly of violence is for the state a strategic element than does not admit anomalies or exceptions.
Violence is objectively admitted, or rather, scientific programmed and organized, but only if directed to the defence of precise economical and political interests. This involves two concrete passages: the first one is the transversal and massive alignment of every social component to this strategic line as condition for its "compatibility"; the second is the widespread attack to all what it is moved in a manner or te other outside of this perspective.
Politicians, journalists, magistrates, columnists become so champions of this social model hurling themselves furiously in the television talk shows and on the pages of the newspapers (or of the legal acts) against every shape of resistance. Good against evil, the reasonable against unreasonable people. And this diagram is just the declension of a strategy proposition from the power to international level and quite synthesized in the so-called "struggle to terrorism".
It should be too easy to emphasize the hypocrisy of this people that, for conviction or for opportunism, defends at any cost a power dripping of blood.
We want however to note some aspects of this political campaign that can affect immediately our fields of intervention. The first is that one of the political fundamental passages that carried to the definitive clearance of the "communist" areas of the parliamentary oppositions both on the European plan and on the national ones and to conclusion of a long restorer trial, was the choice to express as ideological and perspective condition the road of non-violence, trying so "to file" definitively a historical political and cultural property since always fundamental tool in the hands of the exploited. The second is that now the so-called "intellectual", admitted that we can find some of them again, historically voice outside from the chorus because potentially outside from the gears of power, were almost completely co-opted in this "battle of civility" and often do not represent other that the rotting court of this or that potentate. The third one, many times faced in the work and in the pages of Senza Censura, is the non-stop development of repressive daily actions against y the political work of a lot, many of us.
But let's come to us.
We have to say that surely this campaign of political, cultural and repressive bombing that more and more often has to the center in a clearly instrumental manner the subject of violence, is conditioning the work and political discussion of a lot of experiences, organized or not, even in the field of opposition and antagonism. In a lot of cases, above all in the youngest situations or less consolidated, there are not the tools to clash or face these attacks with a more spacious and comprehensive key of reading.
Other times, like we have signalled with worry in other occasions, there is who chooses "to chase" the limits of the imposed compatibilities, instead to denounce and to clash them, thinking with this behaviour to be able to be guaranteed of a space of livability and of own reproduction. It's obvious that in the present painting of total war described briefly above this attempt can only result unrealistic and arrogant and has to our warning like only concrete result that to offer a comfortable "bank" to the strategies of imperialism. In some cases, instead, the choices are shiningly politic or accomplices.
For example in these months we assist, markof the times, to innumerable celebrations on the 1977 movement in which they make the most of the variegated political and cultural aspects of that period, settling however almost always in scientific manner the discussion about the use of violence and the experiences that put it into practice in those years. A hypocritical removal, accomplice, almost about it is a skeleton in the closet, that would want to reduce to insanity of few "terrorists" what instead in those years was a central discussion among hundred of thousands of militants to national level and, more in general, thanks to the development of the much national liberation struggles sustained by guerrilla armies in the world, to international level. A discussion that, inside a concrete perspective of transformation, put in discussion also the monopoly of legitimate violence by the state and its cops.
Here we have neither to discuss to share or not the choices of the many revolutionary organizations developed in these years, nor to talk about a sterile nostalgia; here we simply discuss about history, political history, our political history. Or, to give it also a greater value, we call it memory. A memory that materializes in all its topicality in the thousands of revolutionary militants shut away still today in the prisons of all of the world and in a political and social context,both on the internal and on the international front, not reconciled.
This attack then should be clashed, at least on the political and ideological level, because the matter goes beyond the specificity of violence but will check always more the possibility to measure itself forward on the general plan of the perspective of liberation.
We believe that since always the social and political movements have tried to take back, also with the use of force, those political spaces scientifically denied by power and its institutions.
And if it is obvious for everybody that the matter of the use of violence, in this phase, cannot be put to the center of the discussion of the movements or organized experiences that move inside themselves, it has not to be settled with sufficiency or, worst, with moralism, above all by those who try to work inside a real perspective of transformation. Also because the crash with the repressive/police/cultural equipment of the state is practically daily, and it is more obvious that the attack goes also through this continuous process of removal. It is not an easy ground, and surely itcannot be discussed schematically or in superficial manner. We are however convinced that it is a huge mistake to leave the initiative only to the state and to its army of cops, executioners, and that instead we have to find, tested, also in the present phase, new shapes to consolidate the dialectics between resistance of class and revolutionary perspective.
We decided to discuss it and to propose these short and surely limited reflections because we believe that renouncing to any political tool of critic on these subjects does not mean only to give indirectly support to the present strategies of the state, but it means also to risk in the perspective "to disarm" culturally and politically the new generations and with them every possible future path of transformation.
international@senzacensura.org