Civil or Subversive
Individualist Writings from the UK

Originally published as
Anarchism: Civil or Subversive

published under creative commons

darkmatter.noblogs.org
325.nostate.net
This publication is dedicated to Alfredo Cospito, Nicola Gai, Olga Ekonomidou
and the memory of Renzo Novatore, beautiful rebels...

Contents

Introduction by DMP

Subversive Disassociation by L

Beyond the Movement — Anarchy! by DMP

To address moral elitism within the anarchist milieu in response to the rioters of August 6^th onwards... by Anon

Against the British ‘anti-capitalist movement’: Brief notes on their ongoing failure by Anarchist-nihilists

Scandalous Thoughts by VQ

Fragment: Violence by L

Against Society & Civil Anarchism

Fragment: Illegality by L

Disruptable Mavericks by VQ

Fragment: The She-Wolf by L

Into the Abyss — Chaos by L

Our Vessel is Revolution, Our Guiding Star is Anarchy by DMP

The Submissive Crowd by L

Fighters! Do not Despair! by VQ

Fuck Indymedia and the Anarcho-Left by Anarchist-nihilists against the activist establishment

The Disappeared by VQ

Anarchy — Lifeforce of the Planet by Nihilist-anarchists

Appendix
Declarations to the court of Genoa
Alfredo Cospito & Nicola Gai

Introducing...

In the spring of 2012 I published a pamphlet called August 2011 Revolt: Anarchy in the UK about the recent insurrectionary riots.

In this pamphlet I wrote about the fundamental divide between those of us who knew the moment was ours, and those who found it was scary and horrifying, or at least, problematic. I wrote about seeing my so-called non-political friends rising up and rioting.

All our back and forths about anarchism seemed irrelevant knowing my friends loved real anarchy much more than many of the politico anarchists I’ve met who don’t seem to have a drop of the spirit of revolt and anarchy in them. To me it showed the domesticated irrelevance of the activists and their political circuses; it was real, human, not crippled by representation and politics.

I went on:

The 2011 August insurrection showed up the majority of UK Anarchists and Revolutionaries as cowardly citizens who, though they like to whine and complain about the evils of the world, are fundamentally content as passive slaves. Currently most UK Anarchists appear happily bitter simply to tag along behind state socialists and liberals as the impotent Good Conscience and/or rowdy margin who wear black and use swear words. This is pathetic. Speaking the language of politics, of creating a reasonable and programmatic anarchist project, the result is an anarchism thats neither fish nor Jowl. Failing both as political pragmatics and as anarchic rebellion, civil anarchism limps along sadly.

Since then other anarcho-insurrectionalists in the UK have further criticised the people we’ve come to term civil anarchists, who, like good citizens, continue to talk and walk the road of obedience to the State and the reactionary mores of Society.

The liberalism and weakness of the extra-parliamentary anti-capitalist/anti-state social movements and political tendencies in the UK, and of the individuals who make up this spectrum, cannot be examined without looking at the social/class context here. While the insurrectionary current has never disappeared in the UK, it’s clear that (following the armed and conspiratorial Luddite insurgency in the early 19^th century against industrialisation), antagonism from the exploited was subdued by a combination of state terrorism and the recuperative influence of trade unionism and democratic socialism[1].

The legalisation of trade unionism alongside the extension of the vote and the inclusion of the working class in democracy via the Labour Party was an important factor in the domestication of a proletariat that once terrorised middle class society and the rich. The fact that the move from rural feudalism and a more primitive mercantilism to industrial capitalism was brought about without a wholesale bloody revolution, such as happened in France, means that the UK ruling class and state system has a continuity and stability unlike many other parts of the world. The sickly cross-class social contract based on the spoils of imperialist empire poisons the minds and spirits of the people of the UK. The disgusting herd instincts of obedience to the law, fear of the anti-social and the unpopular, hatred of The Other, institutional mediation and social dialogue between the oppressed and the oppressors have been deeply rooted in large parts of the population through the democratic/social-democratic system and the all-powerfulness of the Law, its cops, courts, and prisons. We now find ourselves in a bleak and desolate landscape of law-abiding citizenism, spirit-impoverishing democratic protest, populist demagoguery that soothes the petty egos of the sold-out masses, and cowardly social cannibalism.

So much for the old working class-but a bad dream haunts Capital’s social peace, the underclass excluded from production, disrespectful of the law, and hungry for the impossible dream of the modern consumer lifestyle. The ghettoised excluded are a large minority of the population largely without a stake in institutional mediation or a voice in the democratic arena and are the enemy within that the state fears while using as a scapegoat (immigrants, unemployed, lawbreakers, drug users, etc.). As Alfredo Bonanno predicted (From Riot to Insurrection, 1988) the excluded have in general lost the common language with the included that formed the basis of the old reformism and social contract[2].

The lack of major political violence and revolutionary struggle, and insurrections that have been sporadic and disorganised (in time and in consciousness), means that while the UK has a very strong democratic-social (cross-class) tradition, it lacks the sort of conflictual tradition of other European countries. This is the political landscape of the UK within which the anarchist/far Left is firmly situated.

The civil anarchist phenomena is not confined to the workerist scene of internet forums and pub get-togethers but likewise includes the soggy camp of the eco-activists. These two poles of the official movement are based around, on the one hand, the formal Anarchist Federation (AFed-IFA), the Solidarity Federation (SolFed-IWA), and the web collective Libcom, and on the other hand Earth First!, with local groupings and scenes gravitating towards these national tendencies.

The workerists are no more than appendages of the far Left, pretty much invisible to the wider population, functionally serving to drag young people (mainly from punk rock and Left-wing politics) interested in an anti-state revolutionary perspective into the dead end of theoretical dogmatism and a lifestyle of being something like a “normal worker” (pub, TY, beer), while doing the gritty working-class organising of handing out boring bulletins with info about public sector union action and economic statistics, perhaps going along to a tenants association or becoming a shop steward or such. These latter actions might be worthwhile activities for revolutionaries to undertake if they were part of a revolutionary projectuality based on creating real autonomous resistance but the leadership of UK leftist anarchism (yes, of course there’s a leadership of boring old blokes) have carefully removed any dangerous elements of anarcho-communist praxis and enjoy simply going on with their Dungeons-and-Dragons style of playing revolutionary. Hence their hatred of the deceased tendency Class War, which-despite its faults-was actually oriented towards revolutionary conflict, insurrection, and resistance. Hence the fact that the civil anarchist leadership tried their best to make sure none of the social insurrectionary theory and practice, developing in, specifically, Spain, Italy, and Greece, ever reached the ears of their member (who, like most English people, have a narrow island-based view and a poor or nil—like me personally—grasp on any foreign language). Cases like the Libertarian Communist Comrade who researched crowd control for the police, and was defended for this by the UK anarcho-workerists[3], flesh out the picture. Or the “anarcho-communist revolutionary organisation” that stood by its sister group in Eastern Europe with nazis against an antifascist prisoner[4]. Or the denouncements of revolutionary attacks on top taxmen, bankers, and nuclear industry bigwigs[5].

The eco-activists on the other hand are a different kettle of fish, arising out of the anti-roads protest movement of the 1990s and the squat culture. They are more numerous and enjoy greater social support, playing a more important role in British politics by, on the most part, repeating spectacular political stunts that use the language and symbolism of civil-democratic dissent. Feeding the image of debate and participation modern totalitarianism hides its ugly fascist face to maintain its legitimacy.

In fact the essence of what I’m referring to as civil anarchism is what we could call a horizontal citizenism, which speaks the language of democracy (rights, laws, social inclusion, consensus, protest). Civil society is the non-governmental organisations of democracy and a key part of the spectacle of popular sovereignty. Apart from maintaining democracy’s image of dialogue and permitted dissent, civil society also is a recuperating mediator and handily picks up services for the state and business, curbing some of their excesses to allow the smoother functioning of the system. Many anarchist (or rather libertarian) activists work for NGOs, trade unions, and the parasitic den of academia. There’s a direct feedback loop through academia, activists, and the social bureaucracy about the bizarre language codes and identity politics of political correctness.

Well, there’s some theory or observations. Challenging the recuperators of anarchy is a pleasure. Fuck them and their stupid game. Following on from “Subversive Disassociation,” which outlines our broad critique, this little compilation of individualist anarchist essays against civil anarchism and for total liberation continues with three pieces from 2011 published in 325 #9. Here are outlined an anarcho-nihilist critique of spectacular and conformist anarchism and moral elitism-as demonstrated by some anarchists’ reaction to the riots that shook the country earlier that year-alongside more in-depth critical notes on the UK anti-capitalist movement. Next are a few texts (“Scandalous Thoughts,” “Violence”) dealing with the denouncements and political bullshit that spewed from civil anarchists in 2012 following the kneecaping of a nuclear conglomerate CEO by anticivilization anarchist group Olga Nucleus/FAI-IRF. Other essays lay out some of the individualist rebellious feelings, thoughts, and positions of contributors.

Some were previously published in Dark Nights, 325 #10 (“Disreputable Mavericks,” “Illegality”) and Wolfi Landstreicher’s My Own (“Into the Abyss — Chaos,” “Fragment: The She-Wolf’). Others are brand-spanking new. Issues explored include being true to yourself rather than following the herd (even a herd of friends), breaking with the certitudes of life, and rising up against the system.

On the 30^th of October, 2013, anarchist comrades Alfredo Cospito and Nicola Gai were brought before the High Court in Genoa, Italy, where they read statements claiming political responsibility for the shooting of the Ansaldo Nucleare CEO. We include these statements in the Appendix of this zine (page 102) to show the strength of will and courage of these two comrades. Their words stand as an example of anarchist determination and coherency when compared with the pacified hypocrisy of mainstream society and its tame and civil loyal opposition.

Life long anarchy!!!!

Subversive Disassociation

The critique of civil anarchism, that has been put forward in a few fleeting texts by the nihilist-egoist comrades of Dark Matter Publications[6] and in an article by Venona Q, Scandalous Thoughts[7] has revitalised a needed rebuke against a typically (but not only) British line of thought. The critique hasn’t yet aimed to be comprehensive or even far-reaching, as it consists of only a few sketches, but it has hit a nerve. For the best part of a decade civil anarchism in Britain has been perfecting its theoretical denunciations unchallenged, so it is refreshing to see it being taken to task. This fragment is meant to be another contribution to refresh the critique of civil anarchism with some of my thoughts.

If action is the defining feature of the new anarchic praxis that is antithetical to civil anarchism, I quote the CCF (Conspiracy of Cells of Fire) when they declare that comrades who honour their words with their actions constitute the most ideal beginning of an authentic dialogue between the tendencies of the anarchist movement. What we despise are the reformist-fake anarchists who make comfort and cowardice their political theory and idealize it.

Civil anarchism is not so much a political current, but an open term to outline the refuge of cowardly, reformist, and collaborative individuals who use anarchism as a crutch to escape the repression in society and the necessity to act.

I don’t take issue with these people or their civility based on the form of organisation they adopt or the methods of direct action they choose, it is for them to persist in whichever way they like. It is not my concern, other than when they attempt to impose their will on me.

I have nothing against mass organisation per se and see it as an observably fundamental principle of almost all revolutionary activity, but from being close to this civil anarchism for a considerable time, and having had space to consider its present development and direction, I believe this flock to have serious problems with allowing diversity of opinion and perspectives to be expressed that counters the group-think party line.

As anarchists, they believe in their heart, or at least their propaganda extols as much, that the human being, the bad animal, can be redeemed by their political program. Leaving that question aside for the moment, as anarchists we appear to share more than we disagree about, and I concede that followed to their conclusions the ideas of the civil anarchists could be congruent with a social insurrection, but I doubt they will be.

In Britain, one of the key values of civil anarchism seems to be activist political work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to an end; so, instead of moving towards social conflict and insurrection, it placed itself inside a small niche in the media/political-spectacle and largely avoids putting itself at risk. It can do this also because democracy as a concept has been so completely misused for the neo-liberal project that an attempt to clean up its image and “get back to true and participatory democracy” (or citizenship and civil investment in government) is beginning to seem radical (although it is not). Anarchist legalism does not claim its force of negation, but becomes indistinguishable from the democratic politics it pretends to go beyond. Civil anarchism will never evolve into an identifiable feature of conflict on the social terrain, because it has no specific nature, it follows the crowd and jealously picks at the heads of those who dare calculate their refusal ahead of the rest.

These grouplets are often so concerned with protecting their own existence in the face of society, that they adopt the position least troubling to power, and act simply as interest groups for very marginalised people who are isolated and seeking power. Through the psychological substitution of power by the mechanism of the formal organisation, they attempt to hide bad behaviour with political reasoning. This is to reject, censor, and vilify individuals and groups that they cannot control or influence, as they attempt to police the behaviour of others.

Civil anarchism turns on any anarchist or activist who dares reject the group-think and organise themselves outside of acceptable limits; and like all political groups, the civil anarchists tend toward homogeneity, centralisation, hierarchy, delegation, and censorship, however much it is all dressed up as consensus. Despite the insistence that these methods of organising are actually something radical, they are casual, with almost no difference to the style of library and creche rota found in community groups everywhere. If some anarchists find strength in this, I think they are naive about what they are fighting against.

Capital is not something that can be fought in the workplace or one’s community with certainty any more, unless I have mistaken the last thirty years of global economic restructuring and class recomposition as a victory for classical anarchist methods. I may be wrong, but I do not see any future for the traditional forms of anarchist organisation, as the social model they rested on has not only been defeated by capitalism, the conditions in which it had any relevance have changed.

This, naturally, brings me to my further point: what is revolutionary, or even, anarchist, about the adoption of Marxian and Left communist thought? I am not sure, though from my two decades of personal experience I would say “not much.” In the past couple of years the anarchist-insurrectionalist groups created a cross-border destructive solidarity and next-generation urban struggle. It is ridiculous to think that such groups come out of nothing and have no positive relevance. Civil anarchist methods and ideas have long been irrelevant in the struggle of the countries where they are largely based (if they were ever relevant at all in some places), but some claim a definitive historical legacy and method of practice and theory, and that is a starting point for my antagonism towards them, coinciding with my refusal to accept the so-called anarchist disavowal of individual action and propaganda by deed.

I think it is accurate to say that the fullness of anarchist praxis-from organising in workplaces through to assassinations-is being reduced by these civil anarchist groups to only those methods not be seen as alienating to democratic society. This is not the vision of the classical-era social anarchists so these latter-day groups have no right to claim any historical legitimacy. The conclusion is that I declare myself an antagonist to the fiction of civil anarchism and its aims.

Whilst this fragment does not focus on the social level of struggle in its entirety and is written in good faith to those who can be bothered to try and understand my points. This text is simply a short polemic and not particularly comprehensive or even coherent in its direction.

With that in mind, I point out that the following verdicts have been issued by anarchist management in Britain as elsewhere:

• “Dangerous” publications and anti-social ideas, particularly anticivilisation ones, are forbidden.

• Claiming your actions and life of refusal, sabotage, and attack is forbidden.

• Expressing solidarity with specific anarchist prisoners and projects (often named terrorists) is forbidden.

If what you would expect from a vibrant revolutionary tendency is courage, discussion, debate, and interchange, you’ll be disappointed as civil anarchism is not interested in your opinions, only your compliance.

When they are not looking away whilst comrades are being imprisoned, they are often helping with the repression, because they despise the idea of being misrepresented in the media and resent the anarchists of praxis for their actions. But the anarchists of praxis represent no one but themselves and their actions belong solely to them, not to the movement.

I dedicate this article to all those who are investigated and detained in Italy.

Beyond The Movement — Anarchy!

The world is one pestilent church covetous and slimy where all have an idol to fetishistically adore and an altar on which to sacrifice themselves.

A movement of anarchists would, you’d think, be a collective project of individual realisation and freedom, mutual aid and solidarity, honest communication and individual responsibility, of violent attack against the institutions, managers, and structures of domination and alienation, against mental programming and unconscious behaviours, against the reproduction of authoritarian society in our relationships, thoughts, and actions.

What does the muddle of casual hierarchies, ideological rackets, miserable cliques, identity ghettos, would-be leaders, dishonesty, and backstabbing that we see before us if we look at much of the self-identifying anarchist movement have to do with that project? Very little except perhaps in words or in a stunted form. Clearly the movement in general is more interested in protecting ideological fortresses, recruiting followers, preserving the suffocating comfort of their scenes, and above all, following their harmless hobby, than in anarchy.

Navigating and trying to find a reference point in the movement can be disorienting. Young or new comrades entering the movement (or rather, the scene) are frequently snatched by one of the brands of package-deal politics or forced to pick between the false choices of proffered products served up by the various ideological rackets. Whenever a system of ideas is structured with a sovereign abstraction at the centre-one that assigns a role or duties to you for its sake-this system is an ideology: a system of repressive consciousness in which you are no longer a willful, singular individual, but a component, a cog.

In this commodity-based world, the image of rebellion can be just another product, just as we can commodify, abstract, and systematise our own expressions of our thoughts and desires into its alienated form, its commodity, an interchangeable formideology. This happens even-in fact most subtly and dangerously-when we are not conscious of what we are doing. In the various ideological organisations, in scenes, and in much of the media of anarchists, a narrow consensus view of reality is enforced around specific parameters.

Free communication that goes beyond the boundaries of interior discourse is shut down by verbal attacks and mocking, by physical exclusion, by warnings of state repression or of non-acceptance by society, and simple, dogmatic refusal of heretical thoughts. Like any lifestyle or identity in the democratic marketplace of society, anarchism has its package deals — complete with attitudes, opinions, styles, activities and products, all under handy labels.

I should mention at this point that, as someone who feels affinities with others of an anti-systemic and insurrectional tendency around the world, I am aware that ‘Insurrectionary Anarchism’ or whatever can be turned into an ideology to be bought into, and even easier, a fad or style. Certainly recently this seems to have truth in some quarters. But perhaps this is due to the recuperative influence of the Tiqqun intellectuals and their The Coming Insurrection, a book that, like Call, seems to have influenced many young radicals, but which appears to be written by Marxists and nowhere validates individual self-responsibility, free will, desire, or consciousness. Their insurrection may be coming, mine has come: it is an individual revolt.

The collectivist message of The Coming Insurrection has little in common with insurrectional anarchy: the revolutionary theory flowing from the individuals passionate uprising to appropriate the fullness of life for themselves, attacking all that controls and exploits, finding commonalities and affinities with others from which spring the real commune-the friends and accomplices of the guerrilla war against the totality of authoritarian society.

With no sovereign systems of morality, theory, principles, or social abstractions standing above the singular individual, the nihilist anarchist attacks all systems, including identity and ideology systems, as obstacles to our self-realisation. The struggle is against not only the domination of controlling social organisation and widespread tranquilisation, but also against inherited repressive programming and the force of daily life, and so our struggle is a constant tension in which what we must destroy and transcend is much more obvious than where we might end up.

For some faced by this oppressive reality, it is enough to come up with an alternative, a just and reasonable social system (or utopia) in their head. Some again just hold this as a pleasant fantasy land, while others wish society to actually change and either come up with or (more commonly) buy into an A to B recipe (or programme) for social transformation, for the reprogramming of the social system. This is simply a form of repressive (systemic) consciousness.

Frequently the envisioning and laying out of these alternative social systems (including those of many anarchists) is down to those of the managerial strata of this class society, the avant-guard that is responsible for the constant social restructuring of the modern world. Workplace democracy, decentralised production, green technologies, multi-culturalism, and so on-all are experimented with by the dominant order, thus strengthening it.

Theorisation of abstract social systems-and all social systems are based on abstractions-only strengthens domination. But if you start from your own life and refuse to be a component of anything, refuse to represent others or have others represent you, embrace your inscrutable uniqueness, knowing that all you face in life are choices, then you are a danger to authority and order, a walking microcosm of anarchy.

This then is a call out to avoid the casual hierarchies and cliques of the official anarchist movement, to avoid ideological systems and political identities, to savour the pleasure of thinking for yourself, of following your desires, the dignity of honestly following through to whatever unknowns of truth, negation and passion, setting no abstraction above yourself. In the war to the end, only choices matter, and only you are responsible for the choices you make.

Examine your feelings and thoughts, eliminate all moral and ideological systems from yourself, be aware that Common Sense (or rather social consensus rationalism) is the strongest support of the existent, don’t be afraid of where your inner (and outer) struggle takes you.

Smash all the idols, even and most particularly the revolutionary idols!!

To address moral elitism within the anarchist milieu in response to the rioters of August 6^th onwards...

Since the riots and looting of early August, acts committed in response to the death of Mark Duggan-shot in cold blood by officers of the state in London-have been judged as mindless acts of violence and greed and disregarded, as “apolitical,” by the government, media, the right, nationalists, the left, liberals, and also by anarchists within the radical movement who propose that these riots were not political as they were not “conscious. ”

David Cameron has stated that the riots were the result of “deep moral failure. “ The people responsible have done bad things and should be punished, he said. Not only have the rioters been immoral, he said, but in many cases so have their parents. At no point has Cameron addressed the immorality of the cops who killed Mark Duggan, without reason or trial, or the three other victims of state violence in the following month...

Whilst people who posted on Facebook inciting others to riot are sentenced to years, the morality of MPs’ fiddling expenses and looting a nation is barely acknowledged.

Who are government officials to talk of morality? To condemn the behaviour of the rioters is to protect and benefit the system and to confirm its governing ideologies. We are conditioned by the state and judicial systems to believe in absolutist concepts-stealing is wrong, violence is criminal-regardless of context and despite the surreptitious use of those exact methods by the economic and state authorities to gain ever-increasing control. Theft is not always justified, situation is always a consideration, and the individual must determine their morality.

However, to denounce looting, an act of damage against property and theft against capitalism, is to conform to the imposed suffocating morality of commerce, state, and media. To condemn expropriation gives voice to the counter-revolutionary cop in the head, ensuring we self-contain ourselves through moralism and that we reconfirm an imposed illusionary morality.

Besides, why is it “just” if a self-proclaimed anarchist shoplifts as an act of rejection against capitalism, yet “mindless greed” if a youth loots a store during a riot?

The desire to have is a product of capitalism, not simply innate human greed nor a question of morality. It is capitalism that teaches what one should desire, demands that we crave commodities: status-awarding, life-affirming commodities that are impossible to attain as unemployment rises, benefits are cut, and taxes increase.

Humiliated everyday by the advertisements and billboards flaunting all that will never be in their grasp, the youth of the ghettos in the UK galvanised their common rage and reached out to take what they could have by no other means.

A conscious decision isn’t necessary to act against a system that imprisons you. It is a sane, emotive, visceral response to the frustrations of being born into an insane, authoritarian, capitalist society that provides you nothing.

It is self defeating for anarchists to ostracise by judgement those at the forefront of the struggle, who experience to the greatest extremities the repression and control delivered by Capital and the State.

These are the people the most vulnerable to the system. Their revolution, is revolution. Their organisation, fearlessness, strength in numbers, strength in bond, has eclipsed the anarchist revolution within the UK They have achieved within the last year far more than the anarchists dream of. Their means do not mirror those of the theorists, but their ends are being actualised. They are comrades.

Anarchist action, on the other hand, has been measured and found wanting. It has been shown to be contrived, symbolic, redundant.

Whilst genuine insurgence occurred in the UK, few self-proclaimed anarchists were on the street, or elsewhere, in solidarity. The anarchist collaboration appears, for example, working against council authorities who propose to evict parents of those charged, not convicted, with rioting-a purely reactionary form. It is an arrogant conclusion that anarchists, the predominantly white, middle-class anarchists, know what the revolution requires, and are most capable of delivering it. Often they do not know the condition of the relinquished. Their participation in revolutionary action is CHOICE. Educated, white people have the CHOICE to evade the system or be accommodated.

Choice, opportunity, accommodation are luxuries not afforded to the non-privileged youth of the estates throughout the UK.

Their rebellion (inclusive of the looting of stores that are independent but none-the-less complicit with the modus operandi of commerce and private ownership, even if they do not have specific responsibility) is a compulsory rebellion. Looting is part of our methodology in a struggle against a capitalist state. Injustice has become law and so criminality has become necessary to act against it.

The future of revolution may well be dangerous and chaotic. It certainly will not be prescribed by anarchists or their idea of a noble revolution. There is a global nexus of commerce, state control, and resistance that becomes more complex and intricate. We should aim not to be swept along, but to leave our present current for the unknown, one that, at the very least, is not this. As destruction is a method toward creation, we should join efforts to plunder and destroy that which plunders and destroys.

Those who do not stand with the oppressed, stand alongside the oppressor.

Against the British Anti-capitalist movement: brief notes on their ongoing failure

Organisations, legislative bodies and unions: Churches for the powerless. Pawnshops for the stingy and weak. Many join to live parasitically off the backs of their card-carrying simpleton colleagues. Some join to become spies. Others, the most sincere, join to end up in jail from where they can observe the mean-spiritedness of all the rest.

– Renzo Novatore

2011 has become an important year, the year when the August uprising and the ongoing anarchist attacks here in the UK left the low ebb of struggle that had lasted for a decade. After the central London anti-capitalist riots of June 18^th, 1999-which could have stood as a valuable touchstone for a new and combative social struggle-the movement did not evolve into a dangerous or dynamic tendency, as happened in other places. Rather there was a retreat from the reality of revolutionary possibilities.

Between 2000 to 2003, the UK protest movement reached a dead end full of symbolic actions based around pre-arranged dates (Mayday etc.) and was largely defeated on the streets and in the minds of the people by a twin attack. On the one hand there was a war of attrition by the State and its police agents to kettle, beat, profile, taunt, infiltrate, disrupt, and imprison. On the other there was undermining by the self-policing, non-violent stance of the anti-war movement and counterculture, which quickly reached a position of accommodation with and recuperation by the State and corporate forces, which continues in the tactics and themes of the climate change, anti-war, and anti-cuts activists of the present day. It can also be seen in the recuperation of the free-party and squat scene into one more fashionable part of alternative chic, replete with ketamine and faux poverty.

This growth of liberalism was helped a great deal by the demise of the radical part of the Earth First! (EF!) Network and the birth of its ugly activist brother, the Dissent anti-GS 2005 network.

As one example amongst many, this happened as a result of a critical annual EF! gathering in 2004 prior to the Stirling 2005 summit debacle. It was critical because despite the participation of lots of people in covert GM-crop trashings between 2000 and 2003, arguments over tactics revealed how excruciatingly liberal many participants were. Very few people were involved in the final anti-GM, anti-Bayer campaign and it confirmed that only a small handful of individuals were serious about taking action and developing a revolutionary project. Unlike the eco-anarchist counterparts in the USA, who had become the Earth Liberation Front (ELF)—carrying out numerous high-impact sabotage actions against environmental destruction—in the UK the G8 was coming up and there was a shift away from nascent militancy into substitute activity. It was clear that there was not going to be even the chance of a discussion about actual confrontation.

At the GS, under the watchful eyes of the secret police, risky organising for street-fighting and property destruction was largely left to outsider and international comrades, while the British Dissent/EF! activists mostly played only support and infrastructural roles. The approaching GS gave a window of opportunity for the reformists and movement builders. Those who had been part of EF! had to make a choice: to radicalise further despite perceived isolation or to breathe a sigh of relief as the pressure to be radical was removed and, through the summit-mobilising process, some could more openly become the conformist liberals, academics, cooks, paramedics, and drunks who had been the secret heart of this movement all along. It was also a prime opportunity, as these events always are, for various undercover agents to embed themselves in activist groups around the country.

An arguably pivotal point came during the bombs of 717. On the first day of the 2005 summit itself, the central activist assembly overseeing the counter-summit voted to dissolve the blockades and hop in line with the war-on-terror discourse of the government, calling off any further demonstrations (which could have lead to conflict with the already beleaguered State).

The autonomous few left on the streets were overwhelmed by police numbers and by the complicity of the movement. At an important moment to take a clear position on the street against repression, militarism, and statist terror, cops and activists could be found lighting candles together at a hastily-arranged memorial at their protest camp, in an act of remembrance and tribute to the victims.

Over the Atlantic, in 2005–6, when the repression against North American militants of the Earth Liberation and Animal Liberation Fronts became furious, we were broken-hearted to see almost no solidarity, or even comprehension of their struggle, on this side of the ocean. Similarly, when the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) campaign was being attacked by the government on behalf of the vivisection industry, the activist/anarchist movement in UK was largely nowhere to be seen. As the tempest raged and prisoners received unusually long sentences resulting from political and corporate policing, there was an emblematic lack of solidarity on the part of the movement and a lack of commitment and identification with the struggle for earth and animal liberation.

So, we make the case that for years the movement in the UK has been a stagnant trap of inaction and reactionary theory of the worst type. It can be said that the UK movement is a massive policing and self-policing operation for very spectacular-themed events revolving around rotten ideas.

Wilfully ignorant of the militant and violent struggles being waged not just in Europe but around the world-unless they happen somewhere exotically foreign and afflicted with the hope of democracy-the escalating social war will draw a deep cut into these people, as their opinions and methods become increasingly irrelevant.

Expectations-about what is achievable in terms of attack-has gone up in flames with the August riots. Now the failure of the British anarchist/activist movement is obvious. That the anarchist/activist movement failed to have any kind of meaningful role in the August riots is yet another sign of the almost total lack of connection to many parts of society that are fighting the existent order. Either as affinity group action, or the mythical ‘community/workplace meeting’, activities are not spread out enough or violent enough to have any important impact. Outbreaks of sabotage, on the other hand, have spread well beyond the spectacular borders of the activist world. While the anarchist/activist movement deliberates about “what the people want” and come up with inclusivity strategies with the primary goal of not “alienating people,” the people took what they wanted and burnt the rest, attacking cops as they went.

The August riots surpassed the British anarchist movement. The rioters showed their ability to act in small fast-moving groups, able to loot and burn what they wanted, and disappear before the armies of police swamped the area. The rioters showed an example of how to spread the disturbance to specific targets hitting different points in coordination. The anti-capitalist/anarchist movement here has not taken the opportunity to move like that for years, if ever. Conflict is largely not a feature of the British anarchist/activist movement.

The texts addressing the August riots and the aftermath that have come from the British anarchist/ activist movement, have been overwhelmingly moralistic and repetitive, serving only to outline a movement distant from the struggle for freedom on the streets, and failing to interact with the stratas of society that are in real conflict with the system. Many in the movement displayed a hostility to the actual rioters that is a symptom of a reactionary municipalism, which has lost its reference in a nihilistic present where hopes for social progress are ruined forever.

Whether bickering amongst themselves on the web forum Libcom.org or scraping the barrel of the citizens discontent like ordinary oppositional groups, the UK activists and anarchist political scene-the informal activist networks and the formal anarchist organisations of membership fees, propaganda organs and party structure, such as the Solidarity Federation, AFed etc.-are floundering and irrelevant in the face of social war. The movement is barely able to escape its own dogma and limited influence and movement-oriented groups cannot stand up to repression—they are political in the sense that they deal with the rule of the symbolic and not with actual subversion.

Through the appearance of professionalism, a cartel of older, managerial activists-whose increasingly cultural sense of importance and careers/identities depend upon struggle that is only symbolic-have been able to gain and retain control, and have made this scene one of little challenge to hierarchy or power.

Sabotage, property destruction, black bloc, and direct action have been put aside, if not denounced, by not only activists but also members of the traditional anarchist organisations, as if they exist in some superior isolation. For years, the insurrectional and unmanageable anarchic tendency has weathered the revival of anarcho-syndicalism and its poor counterpart, community activism. Some of the predominant individuals from these groups have actively undermined the basis of the continuous growing attacks and sabotages, trying to prevent the insurgent tendency spreading, like the leftist citizen-cops that they are, mistakenly trying to protect a day-dream that never really escaped from their books, pint-glasses and day-dreams. Chasing the coat tails of “the workers” and “good citizens” is a pastime only for the nostalgic and the unionist, ever using each new social development as fuel for their dabbling in oppositional politics.

This is perhaps why the leftists, alternatives, activists, and anarchist groups run after the big demos or the next campaign, or lose themselves in “community” and “workplace organisation: “ to give themselves substitute activities to explain the loss of dignity in their own compromise with the system.

Some of these so-called radicals treat the uncontrollables in the same way that the readership of the tabloid papers or the police would treat them: curiosities; dangerous; at minimum, problematic. In answer to that, we have decided that certain traditional strategies are no longer of interest to us and we don’t care for opinions about what is or what is not desirable, possible, or realistic.

So rather than tenuously try to build reactionary campaigns or alternatives that end up being effectively assimilated into the lie of democracy by our enemies anyway, we choose primarily to attack. We understand that only when all that remains of the dominant techno-industrial capitalist system is smouldering ruins, is it feasible to ask, “what next?”

A movement of blind and shallow individuals can never find a way out, the false culture of the movement is full of deceit and manipulation. How can there be any trust, respect, and co-operation? There is little to none in the society. When the general population scheme, compete, and connive against each other for the smallest gain as a way of life, can you expect better from their faithful mirror-image-in-opposition?

Revolutionary action is not only an ambitious experiment in attacking targets of the capitalist system and the State, but also in attacking the slavish attitudes, fears, and cowardice that are present everywhere. Here in the UK, capitalism has eroded and broken the values of friendship and solidarity, replacing them with obedience to the herd and distrust of the unknown.

Many of those in the movement know the truth of the fictional nature of their movement but actively choose to conform to its dictates to prevent not only repression from falling on their heads, but also the kind of social isolation they fear, removed from people to fuck, meetings to attend, and bins to scavenge.

Some other worthy activists choose to persecute, ostracize, and humiliate those who have come to the end of reasoning with the movement.

People who denounce servitude and act with individual determination are anathema to those who value the representation of revolt more than the people who forget to be reasonable and embrace their own passion.

It is the young people and the autonomous affinity groups-insurrectional, anarchic, nihilist, anti-systemic, and anti-social that have revitalised the antagonistic flame of revolution.

Dignity and strength are values unknown to the included classes and their managerial-class children. For them, submission to the herd is found in the assembly and in the consensus of direct democracy, and the included are rulers of this place too, this playground of insecurities.

We know that more of our comrades are to be found in the places where the Left might not even be an idea, and the idea of the Movement would be laughable.

For us, to continue to live and act as if these twin concepts were a good idea in the first place is to maintain the lie that thrives on good will, providing a non-threatening and pacifying avenue for altruistic drives and desires for a change in social conditions, entangling people in realistic and reformist programs that are immediately recuperated by policy makers of some managerial stripe.

The decrepit and fanciful Movement seeks to control and limit the perception of not only struggle, but reality, and what can be achieved by the individuals who have no interest in waiting for an assembly or a political organisation to approve their actions or ideas.

Of course, we had hoped that at some moment a mass of people in this consumer democratic regime, as around the world, would recognise and rise up against the conditions of exploitation and profound degradation that we fight against. But it has to be said that so far at least we have seen only limited evidence of it in the movement here.

We had hoped that there were many out there with strong hearts and a desire for free, whole lives, who would rebel and fight, and that we would reach a critical point some day, but for us now in this miserable and sick consumer society, we have thrown away the idea of waiting for them.

We have shared and developed our methods of conceptualisation, reconnaisance and attack with an eye to pushing forward a revolutionary project that has more in common with our international comrades than with those at home; we have no time for an inward looking petty nationalism when the majority of the people in the UK movement are mostly worthless hobbyists and tourists.

We act, as one of us has written, mostly for ourselves, but not because we are selfish and do not care, but because we have come to the conclusion that we cannot predict what others want and because we cannot predict the results of our actions. The beauty of choosing to live in struggle, in informal and friendly situations with chosen friends, is a favoured path to discovering our potentials, characteristics, qualities, and abilities, will be the foundation of our future world of total liberation.

Outside the gaze of the secret police and their activist allies with their boring hierarchies of control and power can be found the play of our own lives, where the self organisation of the attack and the circulation of ideas acquires more substantial and significant outcomes-here we’ll go into freedom and exit the seated theatre of radicalism.

Scandalous thoughts — a few notes on civil anarchism

Response to statement by UK AFed denouncing the shooting of Ansaldo Nucleare CEO Roberto Adinolfi by a cell of FAI-IRF, 7 May 2012

Every so often, cyclically, collective or social anarchism becomes restrictive to some anarchists and an anarchist individualism reasserts itself. It happened at the turn of the twentieth century when some of the great anarchist thinkers began to question some of the more communistic dogmas. It is happening once more, and once more we witness some of the social anarchists writhe in panic as their comfortable dream is disturbed and they wittingly or unwittingly reinforce the stranglehold of the State by condemning their unruly sisters and brothers who appear to threaten the pursuit of what one comrade has aptly called civil anarchism.

It is a horrible creature, this civil anarchism. A slathering, craven, and despotic monster with eyes in the back of its head, one that tries to be what anarchism will probably never be-palatable to the modern consumer masses.

One of the major qualities sought by those engaged in making attacks is to recover knowledge of themselves and each other, to recover personal power, to enact a radical and dramatic break from Society, with its intolerable cage of social norms and the consequent deadening of individual sensibility. Some communiques from this tendency are flowery and poetic in the extreme, and are not to everyone’s taste, but reading an Anarchist Federation statement is deadening. It is the materialist death-march of politics against life, the patriarchal voice of political reason against the wild rebel spirit, of the political against me.

The combatants seek to recover volition and dispel the inauthentic. This can only start from your experience, not from the experience or dogmas of others, although it involves your relationship with a few comrades within The Mass or the Working Classes. Until it is active, on the street, there is little genuine struggle to be found in some abstract crowd of people you have no relationship with. It seems incredible to read the thoughts of those who identify as (Formal) Federation anarchists and even more pointless to have to critique it. It is a bit like critiquing the performance of a clown by the standards applied to a serious drama. The issue for me here is the same denial of individuality that the State imposes-some herding of unique human beings into some utilitarian category by pedagogues and masters who find individuals unwieldy and dangerous, and abstract ideological cages immensely comfortable.

This lack of authenticity, and the somewhat anachronistic politics of their revolutionary organisation in general, is reflected in the Federation’s outrage at the shooting of Italian nuclear boss Roberto Adinolfi, and the letter bomb sent to the Chief of the Italian tax office, Marco Cuccagna. The Federation disingenuously manipulated language-prostituting their particular ideology-by describing the boss of the tax department as “a worker. “ Not only is this insulting to anyone’s intelligence, since clearly the target was one of the bosses who rob them every day of their hard-earned wages, but it is puzzling because the Federation pretends to care about the suffering of these targets and to state categorically that The Working Class care too. If I am being authentic to myself, then I can say I do not care a bit if this bureaucratic robber is attacked, injured, killed. Actually, I am happy about it. I imagine many people would also not care and may even feel satisfaction or even joy at the news.

Some basic questions of the Federation that do not really require answers: who are these working class people you speak of; how many working class individuals do you personally know; how do you know that all these people disagree with attacks on capitalist infrastructure, bosses, and tax collectors; what gives you the right to speak for anyone but yourself; what do you say about the working class people who rioted in London in August 2011 (and throughout history)? To even ask these questions seems ludicrous, but a quick look at Federation discourse seems to necessitate them since the Federation seems so sure of themselves.

The Federation/Libcom mindset continues with its psychometric assessment of supposed “terrorist tactics.” They borrow another meaningless spook from the hostile media and the State-the mindless, indiscriminate anarcho-insurrectionalist “terrorist.” Again, how many of these individuals does the Federation know, and how does the Federation know that such acts are not part of a rich and complex life. Furthermore (to state the obvious), insurrectionist methods are widespread amongst the disaffected of the world, as widespread as organising, and sometimes have more in common with working class rebellion than anything the Federation comes up with. The Federation is tellingly silent on this reality in the main, preferring only some parental nod to a working class anger that could be so much more constructive if only the unruly would acknowledge the wisdom of Federation physicians and swallow their prescriptions.

Here the Federation again reveals itself to be incapable of liberating itself from the shackles of ideology, which denies the complex human being and shunts us into some useful abstract category. But as we look at the Federation’s reactions to other anarchists, it actually becomes more sinister, in that they are frequently almost indistinguishable from our enemies. Its choice of forum is the internet. A brief review not only of critiques of technology, but also experience of it, reveals how destructive this form of faceless, mass interaction is. Furthermore, the language used by the Federations is like the fist of repression coming down on the human face of anarchism. The Federation reinforces the State, by adopting the rhetoric of the industrial-military-technological system, such as its aforementioned recent condemnation of anarchist “terrorist tactics.”

In the quest for liberation, the individual must be allowed to express itself, to follow itself. The individual is not always at odds with the collective, but to try to squash individual drives into some collectivity or society against its will is antithetical to anarchy. The individual will sooner or later rebel because a mass collectivity forged at the expense of the free individual will entail rules and regulations (albeit informal or even unspoken), which are against liberty of life, feeling, and thought. These tendencies have been at war before, and it is worth reading the essays of Voltairine de Cleyre on this matter. She suggests that the individual anarchist be free to express their rebellion in their own way. Violent attacks against the bosses and the State will alienate some people, but not all. Pacifist action will alienate some people but not all. Even if we could once and for all identify every working class person and also get them to agree that they are working class, do the Federations really think that this mass of people will hold one homogenous view on social change, on the causes of misery, and on the best way to liberation (if all agree that liberation is their goal). The civil anarchists are searching for a purposefully-driven, conscious proletarian class that no longer exists in the manner they describe. They have embarked on a hollow search that ends in sterility at the level of the actual uncontrollable mass social clash, and anyway largely failed to follow their own politics through to their conclusions.

The separation of people into classes is in some ways nonsense, when it is not based on people’s individual opinions or actions. A brief look at Native American history, as one example, shows us how banal and inaccurate it is to speak of “the Native American people” in one homogenous outpouring of bad breath: there were indigenous warriors fighting genocide and assimilation and there were also indigenous folks who colluded with the American State and turned on their own people to accumulate money and power.

Those of us who might be allotted the label of insurrectionist, individualist, and/or nihilist do not claim to know how revolution will come about. There is a great humility in the words of the emerging rebels and armed struggle groups. I would say that at this point in history, when so much has been tried and so much has failed, let us admit that we do not know what is right, what will work. People are far more complex than that, and the world is huge.

The Federation’s distillation of everything down to working class struggle is a problem. The working class as it used to be has all but gone, and anyway, like democracy, it was originally rooted in horror and lies for many. Democracy was invented on the backs of a Greek slave class and the Industrial Revolution first imposed the destruction of the individual and introduced the dispossessed herd as it ushered in this age we hate. Focusing on the working class in this way is like shuffling between different forms of oppression, saying that we prefer that form of oppression over this one: people fought tooth and nail against becoming subsumed into a working class at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The assimilation of artisans and rural peoples into the industrial working class was bloody, so why are some anarchists attempting to reify it now (especially now that the machine has moved on and is now subsuming the traditional working class into the postindustrial consumer class). It is not just questionable, it is bizarre. This is not to deny that a class struggle has always been and continues to be fought, but I prefer the term “social war” to “working class struggle,” largely because it includes more individuals and their choices, including those who consider themselves traditionally working class. Class as a concept and as a social binder has become increasingly muddy over the years. People can be more crudely divided-if we must-into the rich and the poor, the included and the excluded, the critical and the uncritical regarding the State and civilisation.

To be denied individual autonomy, recognition, and relationships causes alienation and disempowerment. The authority of a ghostly mass over the individual does nothing except assist the project of the State and capitalism by agreeing that the individual human being is merely an economic unit, part of a vast and faceless aggregation of economic units. Is this really how we wish to define human beings and do anarchists really think that such a perspective is liberating? To negate the role of individual action in favour of a vague conception of the class struggle of yesteryear is a dangerous fiction. Certainly, since it is also the project of the State to destroy the volition and value of the individual; it cannot be called revolutionary, except in the autocratic uber-political sense of being ruled by statist apparatus-none of which desire empowered individuals or like-minded groups of individuals who want freedom. It is not the role of anarchists to replace one tyranny, be it democratic, monarchist, collectivist, or any other kind of rule, with another.

What is this issuing of statements condemning the acts and opinions of other anarchists? It is to play the political game of “good anarchist vs bad anarchist” for the media and the repressive machine of the police. It is to undermine the very meaning of the term anarchy; a complicated and shifting web of principles, praxis, and relationships with the goal of liberation, not a singular state of being, no more than it is a State.

Moreover, the fact that the Federation feels the need to make statements against acts of other anarchists must surely show them that their project is doomed. At the end of the day, I say to the Anarchist Federation and their fellow travellers: I do not agree with you, I do not desire the world you envision. I say I am not alone in finding your statements and perspectives antithetical to my own rebellion and my personal concept of liberation, which is based on my understanding and experience of State oppression. And since your project depends on the absolute agreement of the mass of which I am a part, and since it appears from the debates and statements of the Federation that what is envisioned is a mass anarchist society, I declare that I want freedom not only from the State but from Society and from you. I ask then: what are you going to do about me?

I began this article by essentially wishing to encourage those of us who call ourselves anarchists to cease mutual condemnation and to assert that actually not one of us has The Answer. However, I end by sensing that some of us know so little of what it means to be liberated in heart, thought, and action, and so little of what class solidarity and struggle really mean, that I can only imagine the kind of anarchist society that appears to be the aim of the Anarchist Federation, as one as fraught with repressions and various prisons as this one. That is, unless those who would impose their faceless societies on the rest of us realise their futility.

Fragment: Violence

This fragment is simply a meandering series of thoughts, the results of a notepad and a rainy afternoon, rather than a manifesto or the kind of dry political statement that it is in response to.

I

By having carried out dozens of attacks against targets of the system, with especially destructive material results, we were and will always be precise. We aim specifically against the institutions and the officers of the system, giving special attention to not injure someone who is not a target to us.

– Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF)

Violence is neither good nor bad. It is the State’s basis for its domination and consent. Any one who breaks this relationship is usually deemed criminal and/or insane. Any acts used in this transgression are usually deemed unlawful or further, terrorist.

II

There are no innocents. We all make part of the social machine of Power. The question is whether we are oil or sand in its gears. Therefore, we reject the notion of the apparent innocence of society. Silence is never innocent. We hate both the hand that holds the whip and the back that passively endures it. – CCF

The willing citizens, media, police, law courts, judges, prisons, and military are the lines of defence for the order of this relationship in Society. Anarchist violence is the shattering of this order, the reclamation/expression of our power and the rupture of the complicity of the submissive crowd. It is the seizure of the existent reality and the beginning of its destruction.

III

Life obtains value based on the choices every individual makes. – CCF

It is obviously still needed to say that when anarchists use force, it is never indiscriminate. The civil anarchists, whose sole domain really is in the realm of politics, react to the rhetoric of “terrorism”-which is imposed by the State-by merely repeating their dogmas about risking the lives of postal and clerical workers. It’s clearly a matter of technics and operations, to strike the intended target, but I won’t cry for the secretaries of Swissnuclear[8], the Chief Director of Equitalia[9], nor for the boss of Ansaldo Nucleare.

Nor will I be alarmed if an employee of an embassy is harmed, for everyone other than an idiot understands what those places represent. The new anarchist guerrillas don’t look for clemency based on their clear targeting but express their opposition in their own terms in their own ways.

IV

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of

– William Blake

The civil anarchists draw the same line as the Marxists regarding the criminals and themselves: there are the Good People who are within the laws of their self-designed parameters of behaviour and the Bad People who are condemned by their rules. Outside of the UK many of the comrades have a much closer relationship to violence and criminality through bank robberies, organising attacks, fierce demos, stealing, fraud, counterfeiting, etc. and also the experience of clandestinity or living underground. Illegalism is the bread of the insurrection. Many have gone to prison already and we can learn about their cases in many places. In the UK there is a widespread lack of experience concerning the organisation of the attack, the recognition of the ideas and relationships of the affinity groups to the criminal acts. Going beyond the law is part of developing the anarchist-insurrectional project and this is part of the reason why the civil anarchists despise and neglect the cases of the imprisoned and fugitive comrades because they reject their actions, the tendencies of attack, and the global discourse of anarchists of praxis. Individual acts of violence/ negation that are not approved by their group-think are regarded as part of the criminal or terrorist sphere and smeared as provocations. In this way, the civil anarchists become part of the discourse of power and compose themselves as a sector of repression.

Ask yourselves, in all their rhetoric of the worker- where is the criminal? Not all criminals are rebels but there is an entire world that is not touched upon. It is not a mistake, the civil anarchists despise criminals and do not seek the end of prisons, but simply their reformation. They are scared of the anti-social mob, King Mob, who has come back to torch all the houses of the politicomeritocrats and burn the city, because the civil anarchists are the cops of the future.

For the civil anarchists, essentially in their Christian-socialist thinking, the worker is simply one who toes the line in their projection, does what everybody else does, does not take more than he is due as a worker. The criminal does not toe the line, she is an Outsider. The criminal takes what they want, even more than they need, and bows to no one. The criminal is not to be managed by civil servants or civil anarchists, and so the criminal is excluded from their conversation. Or suppressed. It’s the same process for the uncontrollable Unique.

V

For us, there is no middle ground. They who declare openly their anarchist intentions are facing a decisive dilemma, to either act or give up anarchy forever. There can never be anarchy at the rear of coffee shops and gossiping... Either act or shut up...

– CCF-FAVIRF,

Consciousness Gangs-FAl/IRF, Sole-Baleno Cell

Attacks are the primary goal of the new anarchist urban guerrillas, to disrupt the patterns of activity of functionaries, conduits and engines of the economy—megamachine, and to spread terror amongst the included classes. Destruction of banks, businesses, electrical infrastructure, internet transmission, mobile phone networks, television and radio antennas, and attacks on technologies of domination might not be properly defined as “violence” or “terrorism,” but the blows they inflict are troubling enough to the authorities to be regarded as such by them. Property destruction aggravates the enemy and the submissive crowd, and has a clear insurrectional purpose. I reject the label of “non-violence” that is often attached to actions of sabotage, and consider them part of the polymorphous struggle reaching beyond such definitions that benefit social control.

Anarchist violence is criminal in the sense that it goes against expectations of order and consensus, so it is probably perfectly acceptable to presume-especially within the postindustrial core, where the sense of social peace is high-that the closest enemies the anarchists can expect to prevent them enacting their deeds are other anarchists-civil anarchists-those who are eager to avoid repression and carry on with their harmless routines in the metropolises of the world.

VI

We speak through fire. To remember and always keep on our mind, our sisters and brothers who are kidnapped by the state and seized behind bars. To continue the urban guerilla warfare against enemies of freedom. Let the action speak for us.

– Anger Unit FAVFRI Indonesia

I don’t regard the shooting of CEO Roberto Adinolfi as being particularly violent, but more as an anarchist act of free will and liberty. These acts are sadly rare, it’s a challenge to try harder. Certainly I consider such actions one of the constitutive parts of any anarchic insurgency, and despite the elitist bleating of the civil anarchists I am yet to get really upset that the Federazione Anarchica Italiana share the same acronym as the Federazione Anarchica Informale. This is because its not necessary to give glasses to someone who cannot read. It’s been ten years since the Federazione Anarchica Italiana declared that the Federazione Anarchica Informale was a police phantom. A false opinion that the civil anarchists in UK have eagerly parroted for a decade already because it suits their blind politics. In their statement decrying the shooting of Adinolfi, they conflate separate actions of attack as the acts of a singular group, but the FAI does not exist in the way that they like to portray Not incidentally, it’s the same way that repression promotes in manoeuvres like Operation Ardire, the Marini Case, etc. They try to spread the lies around, so what goes for one, goes for the other, a priori.

Their aim was denunciation and suppression of an uncontrollable new anarchic tendency that threatens their organisations. They fear criminalisation of their hobby groups, drinking holes and minor events, so they aid in the criminalisation of the next generation of anarchic struggle and attempt to repress it. As they have made their decisions, we have made ours, and the results are there for anyone to see-an informal international insurrectional force that multiplies and doesn’t rely on one single line, theory, or method, and is true to anarchist ideas. I return the charges of vanguardism and elitism back to the controlling organisations of civil anarchist tedium and reserve. I do not need to become a signed member of a centralising political cult or give a percentage of my income to the committee to be an anarchist! Or to organise!

For them, Capitalism is only a social relationship that can never be changed without adhering to the “aims and principles” of their formal organisation that speaks of a “culture of resistance,” which there is no evidence of them ever creating. Speaking for myself at least, Capitalism is only a small part of the domination I face today with my comrades scattered around the world, who fight against the totality of the existent and accept all anarchist methods and consequences of using them. The international actions of the FAVIRF and the anarchists of praxis are more than just vapid hot air and vacuous socialist propaganda speaking of “a world where our whole lives are really under our own control. ”

VII

Moreover, do not forget that actions fallow speech. — CCF

Unlike the civil anarchists, I consider there to be no essential difference in validity between individual or collective revolutionary anarchist-insurrectional violence, whether it comes out of a “broad-based class-struggle movement” or not. A small action or a big one, a minor fracas or a large riot, a banner drop, a broken window, a trashed corporate office, a burned bank, an act of solidarity, a favour, a gift, a meal, a bed, a pamphlet, an article, a poster, or a spray-painted slogan can eventually become a bullet in the head of authority, and remains as valued by the new anarchist black international.

VIII

FAI!IRF is an international conspiracy of anarchists of praxis that sets fire to the defensive positions of reformist society-ist anarchists. It gets rid of the smell of mold that has settled in anarchy seen at amphitheatres, and fills the air with the smell of gunpowder, black anarchy, night time, explosions, gunshots, sabotages. This explains why the International Revolutionary Front of FAI and Conspiracy is on top of the anarchist dangers list, as cited in recent Europol reports.

– Conspiracy of Cells of Fire-FAl/IRF Consciousness Gangs-FAVIRF Sole-Baleno Cell

In this collapsing world I consider my words, ideas, and deeds as raindrops adding to a storm of catastrophic proportions brought forth by my known and unknown comrades. It is already causing havoc across the world and the pressure fronts still build. Together with other wild, violent Unique ones we will meet in the days and the nights to commit crimes against Society and the State.

A hug to my friend Giannis Naxakis. An incendiary hug to all the imprisoned comrades.

Against Society & Civil Anarchism

The days are coming when they try. -CCF

Another war is here, from the Arabian cities to the Mediterrean rim, beyond the housing estates and sterile zones of Northern Europe. From Chile to Indonesia, from USA to Russia, the asymmetric war against power, corporations, capitalists, and parasitic ruling elites. It’s a war that was not only forced upon us by the dominators and their lackies, but one we chose to fight because life is defined by the struggle for freedom or it is nothing.

The seemingly-entrenched position of the corrupt power elites is not impenetrable to attack; everyone can define objectives in their own lives to begin the revenge against those who have taken everything from us and sold it back to us. In these new ruptures of the social peace, new enemies and new allies become known out of the breakdown. Some of the enemies are well-known, others have remained covered by the trappings retained in the privileged positions of post-scarcity consumer capitalism. The legal part of the anarchist movement, that part still so dedicated to the social activism of democracy, is one of those enemies. Collaborating in the recent repression against the FAI-IRF and the anarchists of praxis, with so-called public political condemnation, and open speculation (with propagandistic and repressive aims), these enemies have exposed their reactionary weaknesses and anachronistic nature. In various places, these anarchists loudly shout out their ignorance, but what is clear is their total irrelevance and shabby performance, both historically and presently.

Cowards, informers, and civil anarchists-these arse-lickers of the herd are similar to the reactionary mass of society, eagerly repeating the script of the political police and their anti-terrorist jargon. They have found themselves a place within the Inquisition and the protection they seek from the state is clear in their denouncements.

We remember the hatred-vengeance reserved for snitches and collaborators.

Long live the incendiary revolutionary solidarity and thefire of international anarchic-insurrection.

Fragment: Illegality

This text does not aim to be comprehensive, and concerns expropriations/robberies, the black market, fraud etc.

As people seek a way out of the alienated exploitation we are forced into, illegal actions are increasingly popular and necessary. When anarchists choose illegality, we do not mean actions at the expense of others, although at times each of us might choose our own path to follow, regardless of the perspective of a collective or whatever relationships we are involved with.

As well as supporting the struggles of those who end up in prison-not out of compassion, but from affinity and solidarity in struggle, I’m with all those proper rebels who are in a life of extra-legality, illegality, or alegality, as they like to define it: those who are forced by this system to be outlaws and those who choose it.

The requirements for a decent living should be shared and given to any who needs them, with education and liberation of each and every individual always as a goal. Our anarchist individualism, our alegalism, i.e. our disregard for all rules made by the powerful classes, is shown in the values of each decision we make, without acting from premises set by society, and that is precisely what the law and the conforming citizens dislike. What difference an act, illegal or legal, if it diminishes anarchist ideas of self-organisation and mutual aid? As an anarchist, I reject moral codes, but I have the measure of my principles to hold against my life, and no government, police officer, or security guard will take that from me.

Illegalism is as good a means as any to acquire funds for our lives and struggle, and putting aside for a moment that crimes against property or oppression are perfectly valid, the main question is perhaps, what are my values in this act: are they harmful to the development of libertarian realities or not? rather than respecting the harm caused to any imagined social good, rights, or laws of society.

The prisons and the police are how the politicians in session impose their decisions, creating a detention economy for criminal people and attempting to resolve the contradictions of their world. This whole world is made for a judicial-penal-corporate system that will never rehabilitate anyone. Few things sustain it more than the morals taught to citizens by the media and the state. As criminality is just another way of living for a sizeable sector of society, across many classes, it is a business with the same demands and variations, but it is deeply part of the hidden history of power and capitalism.

For anarchists involved in revolutionary acts, the tension around illegalism is often about the moralism it rouses and the police attention it generates. It can bring problems: break the law often enough, and chances are, sometime or other, you’re going to get caught. It’s a law of the possibilities of criminal averages. You either have to develop yourself-get wise about it-or fail spectacularly if you let your gall run away with your senses. And then there are the mistakes. Anarchist history provides examples of the failures of illegalist anarchist actions, sometimes encouraged and disrupted by informers or undercover police. However, nobody hears about the successful crimes other than as a statistic in the police records or a TV bulletin, and armed robbers and thieves very rarely issue communiques.

These experiences, realities, and memories exist outside acceptable behaviour in society, but some of these realities contain a shared struggle, self sufficiency, and a lack of respect for the system and its willing dupes. All this is rarely written down, and the motivations of the people involved are mostly lost.

Grim realities exist wherever poverty spreads and for the capitalist system, prison is its chief remedy, and it is the main method of suppression. Those who have contempt for the law in an era of widespread hypocrisy can only expect its hatred, and to be painted in the worst images, whilst the expert terrorisers continue their business legally.

As for myself, I am criminal and selfish, and I do not apologise to anyone.

Disreputable mavericks — a measure of unpopularity

Most people want to be liked. It is how we get on in the world. It’s what we learn to do as infants. We are cute, affectionate, and vulnerable and in this way we get looked after and we survive. As adults, we still want to be liked, using this measure to navigate the social, political, and cultural codes in order to get on, impact our world, be happy, and survive further. We want to be liked by employers, neighbours, friends, colleagues, fellows, and comrades, and by the people. But, as adults and even as children, it is in fact a poor survival that is lived at the expense of the self and when being liked means compromise and the stifling of the individual.

In the last couple of years, a tendency has re-emerged in anarchism where the desire to be liked plays second fiddle to other considerations. Nihilists, anarcho-insurrectionalists, and individualist anarchists have dared not to care what others think of them, including that messy group known as The People. This has been met with a certain fury from within the activist-anarchist milieu. The fury is dressed up as theoretical difference and derision, but I think it reaches deeper than that. It seems that there is something absolutely enraging about coming across people who do not care what you think and will continue not to care what you think regardless of whether they end up friendless, ostracised, in prison, dead, or wrong.

Anarchism has always been a minority game. It is not the desire of anarchists to be minoritarian, but it is the reality. We would all love it if seven billion people decided to live according to the various anarchist principles, to fight for these principles, to experiment, to refuse civilisation and authority, and create a new world together. Activism, which has come under some attack by the more unwieldy of the anarchists over the last couple of years, is fettered less by the-potential or real-radicalism and goodness at the heart of the people who define themselves as activists than by the desire to be liked (leading to the bizarre decision that Ordinary People are terribly put off by certain ideas, which says a lot more about the anarchist-activist and their cultural-class origin than about the Ordinary People).

The educational system trains us to be liked at all costs. It is the first step towards social control through conformity and de-individuation. Plunged into the impersonal and social educational arenas of control at a young age, the overriding programme is to be popular. Interestingly, the least popular children are often those who are viewed as the favourites of authority (the teachers), but by the time people leave school, fitting in with the social norm-the one dictated by authority and reinforced by social consensus (the group mind)—is what makes you popular. The eccentrics at this point-the ones who were the teachers’ pets—have now switched their position from one of a perceived allegiance to authority to a frequent and actual distaste for authority and therefore remain unpopular. I don’t have an answer for this apparent contradiction: I have a feeling that it is less about authority itself than about the individual (driven to learn rather than socialise) versus the group. This is the story of Society versus the individual and it is Society that maintains the State.

Frequently being liked means being in denial of the self, of who we are as individuals or as small groups of individuals. Throughout history, there have been people who put being liked to one side in pursuit of a greater ideal: innovation, hereticism, individual truth, and rebellion. Indeed these things can only come into their own when one has achieved a certain freedom from popularity, and because they are pursued with honesty and integrity—not from a desire to manipulate others into agreeing with or liking you—will ultimately be met with respect if not agreement.

The nihilists have embraced not being liked because they understand this. Many infamous historical figures lived and died in poverty and isolation: seminal writers, ground-breaking thinkers, scientists, and rebels have lived on the margins, shunned by neighbours and murdered by the Church, the people, and the State of their times. I don’t want to glorify the condition of alienation, loneliness, or antisociality, but there is a point at which if we are to remain true to ourselves and also more united amongst ourselves as anarchists of slightly different persuasions (in both vision and tactic), a certain amount of these qualities to our lives must be dealt with: we are unlikely to be popular.

It has been written that we are all born out of the time we would be best in. This means that our presence in the world will necessarily be uncomfortable as our very essence is in contradiction with the times. I know what this writer means, but I don’t entirely agree with her. But if Fate has a hand—as she seems to suggest—then I would add that we are born in the time that is intolerable to us so that we can fight against it. Perhaps we are anarchists from the future, with the mission of steering the present. It is always an exhilarating time to be an anarchist, and now that Capital and the State stand naked in their plunder, brutality, and indifference to The People, anarchism as an idea is especially resonant, particularly the more uncontrollable kind, with words and actions reflected in the spontaneous rebellions of the excluded.

We are all good people. But it has to be enough for us alone to know it or we are doomed to forever draw back from the brink of dramatic social change (change that will always be fought against by the majority—up to a point) by watering down our politics or withdrawing altogether.

We want something different. We want an end to all this, where most are willing to tolerate it. We want an end to the injustice, poverty, depression, the deathly social peace, and we must want it at any cost. In order to succeed, at least in ourselves, we have to accept, we have to learn to value, what seems to be heresy in this age of the science of happiness. We have to be comfortable with our unpopularity, to even take joy in standing against the mass when it is against us, to take joy in our individuality, and even to take joy in the terror caused by the State and the Mass for all of us, no matter how softly we try to tread.

Fragment: The She-Wolf

The nihilist-anarchist doesn’t have to pretend that she belongs to a History or a Movement but chooses how her life will be in her own way, with the methods that she alone chooses with the close ones around her. She does not make excuses why she organises with an intimate group of two to three of her close friends. Her creative output circulates at the level she chooses and provides for, are co-created by those who have decided between them that they’ll be together for some activities or correspondence. She knows alegalism and informality suit her and has no pretence of democracy, mass appeal, or mass action. Life provides the space for her thoughtful actions already. She has become the crowd, and in her she has annulled time and society; she can do anything she likes, if she puts her mind to it and accepts the consequences. No one gets out of life alive. To live or to die, and to hold the life of an enemy in her hands: squeeze the trigger, or not, if she chooses. Her life is her own. She is not a victim but an aggressor. The enemy will live and die at her choosing, not theirs. All is decided by her will, which is hers alone. She has no strategy other than seizing her opportunities, and no tactics but her dignity and determination to succeed against the odds.

With methods suited to each individual, linked through action, rather than identity, she follows her bad passions[10] to hell, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Dedicated to Edizioni Cerbero, Parole Annate, FAI Olga

Nucleus, and the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire

Into the Abyss — Chaos

Chaotic nihilism perceives the condition of dualism but does not care for the twins of category, it seeks to achieve any arbitrary perceptual perspective of the abyss at will.

A rage of selves, the negation of silence-the tempest and tsunami. Only the greatest determination can win even a few moments from unconsciousness and automatism.

Chaos cannot be experienced directly, because it is the basis of consciousness. It has no fixed qualities and appears like a reflection of light through a prism. The elusive “I,” which confers self awareness but does not seem to consist of anything: mostly trapped in aimless wanderings of thought and identifications with experiences, clusters of opinions, and viral patterns.

Anarchist individualism aims to unlock chaos through the destructive nihilism of the existent. It is the medium by which non-existent chaos translates itself into real effects. It forms a backdrop out of which real events and real thoughts materialise. Thus are will and perception extended into areas of time and space beyond the material body and history.

The key to this puzzle is in the phenomena of the plane of duality. We are in a labyrinth where there are no accidents and no mistakes, everything appears significant, although void. There appears to be no freedom from duality, other than in transgression.

Motionlessness and action, meaninglessness and determination coincide.

Liberated thought; power, genius, and ecstasy in action.

Our Vessel is Revolution, Our Guiding Star is Anarchy

Out of the violent chaos where the phoenix of anarchy spreads its fiery wings over the modem necropolis new figures emerge from the smoke and promise themselves: revolution or death. Survival is cheap. Enduring to senility may be the right of the controlled mass in the West but the criminal intensity of living, for the one in revolt, is much sweeter.

Better to die young and free than survive terminal boredom to croak at eighty-eight hooked up to a machine in the sterile alienation of a hospital, mind pickled with pharmaceuticals. Better to fight, get caught, and be jailed, than never escape captivity in the first place and go through life as our own jailers locked in immaterial prison cells.

The pettiness of all the reforms on the lips of the social movements and political groups-in the face of the catastrophe of modem existence-hardens the revolutionary nihilism of the “rebels without a cause,” who are, whenever possible, amongst the uncontrollable element in the clashes that increasingly light up the streets of the high-tech metropolitan areas, intensifying (or hoping to intensify) the liberating violence.

Now, in the escalating frantic apocalypse of overstretched and impossible 21^st century civilization, where the end of the world is easier to imagine than the consciously chosen end of the global capitalist system, the choices and conscience of the social mass stands out starkly to the rebellious individual. Indiscriminate violence by individuals tormented by social reality is becoming more common-rocks off overpasses, murder sprees, random ultraviolence-and shows the alienated and hopeless rage of imprisoned beings. In this existential absence others smile, arm their conscience, and go into revolution. Some would rather aim their rage at those who are most responsible for their misery and at the infrastructure of the system they hate.

We have needs that must be met if our souls are not to shrivel and die. Our struggle is existential-for our dignity, our self-respect as free beings, the rational defense of our proud individuality, the joy of revolt in a situation of domination and abuse, the satisfaction of revenge against the individuals and structures that oppress us with their violence and ugliness.

For some of us, we know ourselves as more than the brittle, imprisoning, character-armour of alienating domestication-as more than the legal-social fictional person, more than that society, more than even Humanity. We know ourselves as a great web and family and circle of life beyond the controlling obsessions of anthropocentrism/ humanism. We are animals whose home, whose circle of relatives, is the community of life. To fight for ourselves means to fight for the destruction of the mechanistic leviathan of control and exploitation: civilization, rapidly annihilating the biosphere and replacing it with a giant imprisoning technosphere, annihilating wild nature-which includes our wild nature, our primal freedom, and the few remaining uncivilized humans.

Our struggle is for the destruction of civilization and the re-wilding of all life. For me here in the UK, and others in domesticated metropolitan core territories, this means internal destabilization and sabotage of the system, moved by feelings and analysis that go beyond humanist or social reasoning, and that could be called biocentric.

But that’s not all. Our survival needs, our dignity, and our enthusiasm for the fight against all oppression brings us into social struggles and urban chaos, in the miserable places where we sometimes must work and live. We participate in the social/class war as rebellious individuals with an interest in going beyond-forward into permanent revolt, anarchic revolution.

We also sometimes want to achieve particular objectives-wage increases, the defense of squats, landlords fucking us about, ecological conservation, or whatever. As anarchists we want struggles to move in directions that are unmediated by institutions (unions, parties, environmental groups, all that bollocks) and that are based on self-organisation, conflictual direct action, and rebellious spirit and conscience. This is all pretty obvious stuff. We are part of the proletariat, our struggle is part of the greater struggle against the proletarian condition of dispossession and imprisonment, and we aim to destroy class society. When we’re at work we aim to sabotage and subvert, organize mutinies, and spread opposition to the system if we have workmates willing to listen or who are similarly minded already. That’s our workplace resistance groups! And theft and the black market are our “economic self management. “ From my point of view its no good complaining about losing your job, pay cuts, or unpleasant restructuring (same for benefits too)—after all, if you don’t self-organise to create a force but just leave your life at the mercy of people who obviously don’t have your best interests at heart that’s how it goes. It’s disgusting how in times of economic prosperity most people just “get on with it,” enjoying a hollow consumer paradise and getting angry at people who rock the boat, but all indignant when their bank accounts start suffering ...

To destroy class society means to destroy hierarchy and alienation: the complex division of labour of the techno-industrial system and science, the cities and mass society, the control and conditioning structures, ALL OF IT. Trying to run the economy and the technosystem just means a change in the management, like we’ve seen in the past in Bolshevik Russia and even anarcho-syndicalist Spain. To destroy class society means the dissolution of the stratified, production-oriented, mass society into a free forming chaos of autonomous communities and individuals, without the division and institutionalization needed for complex social technological systems. If we want to survive and thrive after fossil fuel has run out (which can’t be far off!) and live free from the green fascism and technological dehumanization the elites have planned to perpetuate their system, we’d best destroy the economy and the state, kill all the oppressors and authority-lovers, and profoundly change our way of being in the world. Perhaps living without electricity in the playfully re-imagined ruins, warming our hands over the embers of civilizations’ Great Cultural Achievements, once again becoming gatherers and hunters, cultivators and scavengers: future primitives! Hahahaha!! Yes! Where there’s a will there’s a way. I urge folk to look into and think rationally about whether domestication, agriculture, civilization, mass society, and industry are all actually ecologically unsustainable and inherently repressive and exploitative.

I am a pessimist but determined, and not afraid of the contradictions and improbabilities of our burning desires and urgent needs. We are informalist heretics with restless spirits and light feet, not doctrinaire synthesizers of eternal Truth in big ugly textbooks only good for bashing people ‘round the head with. Despite my refusal of ideological-religious utopias or panaceas for my misery, I don’t cynically reject the torment of the infinite ideal that carries our dreams beyond this grey, dreary, ugly world of poverty, material and spiritual, and slaves and masters ... The ideal of anarchist revolution is not an idol on the alter of duty, to which I sacrifice myself. It is a vessel for my desires. And for me the revolution is not some far off religious-style event that falls from heaven but a timeless flame that burns in the anti-authoritarian individual conscience and in the collective revolutionary memory of the oppressed. A flame that continues to transform reality through all the acts of subversion and insurrection that strike the reign of misery, the robotizing machine system, and the oppressors themselves. The revolutionary ideal has always been the complete destruction of class society, of privilege, of authority, and the victory of self-organisation, freedom, truth, and beauty-the liberation of the individual and the renewal of egalitarian community. This creative-destructive tension towards anarchistic communisation is the heart of the true revolutionary movement.

If we prepare ourselves by constituting a current of struggle with clear anti-civilization revolutionary discourse and visible ongoing attacks, however minimal, we are better placed in the gathering storm of ecological and social chaos to decisively strike a system that may well crucially weaken. Let us strike the economic technological system, liberate ourselves from the rule of work and the rhythm of the machine society, and show that the oppressors and the system are not abstract but can be struck directly.

Onwards to the unknown!

The Submissive Crowd

All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self-justifying-a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.

– Edward Abbey

You can be the most pleasant, easy-going, kind-hearted person, but it really doesn’t matter to the normal members of Society-the followers, those who are scared and hostile towards anybody they see as different from what they perceive to be acceptable or decent. Wearing differently-cut clothes or having a weird haircut is enough to risk the ire of the Good People it seems, without even mentioning possessing manners from, or perspectives counter to, the mainstream. If you have ideas that challenge the status quo, and you’re determined to experience them, be ready for anger and grudges. With narrow minds and low horizons, the submissive are the eyes, ears, and mouths of repression; Grovelling conformists, who-when they are not looking out for terrorists and criminals-are busy sniffing and snitching out those who don’t go through life like one of a herd of sheep.

Sheep who scrabble for money, lie, cheat and backstab to get what they want, dominate other people when they can, and beg for protection and mercy from the authorities. Neighbors, communities, and citizens–labels that are mostly just names for those who fill the streets with xenophobia, nationalism, and hypocrisy: Those who respect social mediocrity and fawn for power deserve my contempt. Their world must go. What is normal? I ask because obviously, from the reaction of those strangers I live amongst, I am not remotely normal. Holding down some shit job, marrying and breeding, running to own your own house, consumerism, drinking beer and watching TV after a day at work: this is supposed to be the good life, this is the normality that those who love Society check everyone else against. These citizens hate anybody who dares to shine brighter, and will do everything in their power to destroy the light-bringers. Because it is the Unique ones whose light makes the ignorant aware that their own grovelling conformity is nothing but a shadow of life.

The overwhelming feature of Society is submission to the systematic violence of the rich, and the suppression of any individual or group of individuals who challenge their order. It’s always been like this and it always will remain so. The struggle of the individual against Society and the State is an eternal fight against the loss of historical memory and human dignity. It’s the struggle of the Unique against the existent.

I never forget that subversion is not just explosion and wildfire: it’s the steady constant perversion of the dominant values and morals of those in control of my life, like the crowds of people who deny my autonomy, my space, and my liberty. Most people are little more than robots who willingly gave up their control over their life. l will attack their Society and the State with my speech, written words, and deeds.

My ideas will never perish, as they do not belong to me. They return in every generation, in the few Unique ones who I share my nature with, like the stars in the night sky that call forth life across the infinite wastes. For me, anarchy is the black void of nihilist chaos that appears as the source of all creation and destruction. It’s not merely a method of economic and social reformism as preached by the civil anarchists like good Christians with the rest of the socialists.

In the daytime the streets, and in the nighttime the air...

Fighters, do not despair or hesitate!

Fighters, do not despair or hesitate! We are at war. And as in all wars, distinctions begin to gather-rebels; fighters; discreet purveyors of safe houses, information, and weapons-and collaborators, the acquiescent, those who sit it out and keep their heads down, the new police force that is made up of friends and lovers, not only the obvious enemies.

We must understand that anarchism is a word that can be taken by anyone and so we must look to action as well as to speech. Not every anarchist is an anarchist, not every anarchist is for us. This is the first wound of war, but it need not be fatal.

Comrades, do not be afraid to attack your friend if this becomes necessary, because it is only when war is declared and we wake from more somnambulent times (I do not say peaceful), that the things we let pass in the past, now become essential to confront. Years of creeping irritation and depression become outright argument. And not only that. Last year, in response to heightened nighttime attacks against infrastructure by antisocial anarchists, a social anarchist group in Easton, Bristol, (UK) cut back some trees on a cycle path “in broad daylight” so that the nice middle-class cyclists who are gentrifying the area could be safe from the teenage underclass muggers. They even wrote a communique (as if it were an anarchist action!) in a blatant attempt to insult and recuperate the attacks by the anarchists of praxis and the new FAI. IMC Bristol collaborated with this by promoting this action of the Smart Casual Anarchist Federation to their newswire, whilst they repeatedly allow the claims of responsibility that accompany insurgent anarchist arsons and bank smashings to remain nothing but trollbait. Meanwhile, for some years now, the only activity or attack made by the civil anarchists of the Federations and Libcom has been to isolate, undermine, disparage, banalise, and grass on those who are nihilist, individualist, and insurrectionary-and to defend and align themselves with the collaborators and servants of the cops, Aufheben and their academic affiliates. A series of fake insurrectional claims penned and posted by a Libcom member was accompanied by a forum-based assertion that the uncontrollable anarchist tendency must be “liquidated. “ Who needs cops when you have comrades like this?

As society disintegrates, as civilisation does away with what little subtlety it had and demands absolute slavery of us, then “as above, so below,” those lies we told ourselves in another time-including that of “our movement”-also unravel. We are not all the same anarchists, with identical or compatible ideas, just as we are not all the same human being with the same values. We are at war, simply this, and in times of war, perhaps our friends cease to be our friends, but reveal themselves as our enemies. This is not so terrible. It is better that we see it than to persist in delusion.

We should not be shy of infighting, nor think it cheap or disruptive to attack false comrades. We should never forget that war is never fought solely at the top, against uniformed enemies. War is always everywhere-in the seemingly smallest as in the biggest element. So fighters, do not despair or hesitate. Our enemies-within and without-will stop at nothing and nor shall we. This is the moment of rupture.

Fuck Indymedia and the Anarcho-Left

Indymedia (IMC) UK & Bristol have repeatedly allowed their websites to be used as platforms to smear and denigrate the insurrectional projects of the FAV CCF/IRF, 325, and the anarchists of praxis.

It has been known for a long time that these Indymedia sites allow the spreading of lies and falsities against the insurrectionals, and that they publish photos of demonstrations without blurring participants’ faces, compromising their security, and most disgusting, those being arrested, aiding in this way the filling of police files.

Not only do they allow the publishing and dissemination of rumours, which only serves repression, but they have acted as judges on the supposed nature of the sabotages and attacks. They sought to impose their discrimination on the attacks and upon the action groups, aiming at a dominating influence on their behaviour, like the civil anarchists who also believed through their hysterical denunciations they could impose their own servility on the uncontrollables.

Their hostility to our projects is nothing surprising, as IMC UK & Bristol are tiny forums for the last desperate cries of the British activist herd who are stuck in the mire of legalism and so-called direct democracy. Despite continuous anarchist property destruction and the riots of 2011, the movement has been shown to be almost totally out of touch and out of date; the fire of individual insurgency was not in need of amateur journalistic fleas, keyboard kaisers, or do-gooder hyaenas.

The new anarchist international war also does not need or require such useless people, because it has created its own information structures, and helped co-create and form many more, that have solidified struggles in the social and anti-social. The informal international translation and counter-information network has a specific reality that comprises much more than any of its individual parts, one that has eclipsed many Indymedia sites that have been based on a very weak set of political and social values (largely on the phoney social contract of civil rights, negotiation, and legal defiance of democracy that characterised the anti-summit/anti-globalisation period from where it sprang thirteen years ago). The informal internet anarchist network overcomes many of these previous sites of information activism, and an ongoing development is taking place internationally. Many of the prior spaces of the movement, physical and virtual, are now in the hands of the enemy, or might as well be.

Nothing but a stale socialist breeze of nostalgia for better days will come from the social anarchist movement in the UK. Their civility is the polar opposite of the evolution of the new internationalist anarchy and next generation armed struggle. Civil anarchism denounces the new anarchist war, its methods and principles, and the insurrectional consciousness, revolutionary language, and individual awareness of the immediacy of the attack.

The recent trial in Genoa of Alfredo Cospito and Nicola Gai returns us to the Anarchist Federation UK/Libcom’s denunciation of the shooting of CEO Roberto Adinolfi. The imprisoned anarchists of the Olga Cell/ FAI proved their dignified and revolutionary position against the court and to their courage. What is the legacy of civil anarchism in this moment? That of inaccurate and panicked statements proving their cowardice in the face of anarchist terrorism! Bickering, backstabbing traitors, they are closer to the Socialist Workers Party, than the anarchist communists of the past or the young rebels of today.

Only eager for substitutive power, because in their own lives they have none, the civil anarchists circulate around a symbolic movement like identity clones, their spaces and groups marionettes for police surveillance. Many of them immersed in illusions of quantity and social acceptance, they are still isolated by their cultlike subculture, and their actions have reinforced social peace as part of the democratic mechanism that keeps their inclusion within the regime’s political trap. Never will they risk their cultural niche.

Avoid the redundant corpses of the old anarchist organisations, activist groups, and social centres. They are traps to ensnare and profile the unwary and well-meaning. In the UK you will find few revolutionaries there.

Develop your own revolutionary friendships, educate yourselves, train, strive for health, arm yourselves, research your targets, and strike. Don’t waste your time with the lies of the amateur professionals of the anti-establishment. Believe in yourselves, burn your past, and live.

The Disappeared

Isn’t it strange how those who most loudly talk about the masses, the people, the community-who repeat ad nauseam the importance of the social and pour scorn upon individualists, that these people should begin their project by separating themselves from their professed acolytes? And that-in their wild vitriol against those anarchists who refuse to submit to their rule and their group-think-they impose a separateness on us who, in our anonymity and getting-on-with-it-in-our-own-way, are simply some of the people? When we break with the movement and submerge back into the mass (whatever that means), the civil anarchists attempt to crush us, to ridicule our thoughts, our goals, our personal strategies for life; they describe our daily lives, activities, and characters in their arguments-as if they knew us-in order to shoot us down. And in this microcosmic revelation of the social tyranny, we see how this way is no more for liberation than Society’s: it is for conformity and the erasing of the difficult elements-a dystopia.

And isn’t it strange-what a funny contradiction—how those who pursue their own path, whose primary goal is not the liberation of the mass (because you cannot liberate others-they must come to this idea for themselves, perhaps through contact but not through convincing), but simply the exploration of the Self and the Self in relation to disparate, unaffiliated others, in the end find themselves disappeared back into the people, the mass, just as somehow the civil anarchists are apart from it. Leaving behind the false edifices of politics and political gangs, the individualist and her small group of friends becomes one of many ones, interacting not on the level of phantom identities and phantom goals, but face to face, free to come and go as she will amongst people, actions, and ideas; meeting each moment anew, unencumbered by crude moral frameworks that dictate roles, language, and affinity; discovering that the mass as perpetrated by the social anarchist groups is a glorious, enjoyable, curious, depressing, sedentary, ignorant, hungry, angry, reactionary, thoughtful aggregation of individuals who sometimes confirm your worst fears and at other times take you completely by surprise. You have no true path to show your acquaintances in life outside the movement, no joining card to give to the people you meet every day. They can eat what they want in your kitchen. And if you offend each other, you part ways without guilt. There is only you, and you find that your very presence-stripped of slogans, badges, meetings, and commandments-creates some spark in others, and through them, and because of them, you find new understandings and appreciations of things you had forgotten in the grand game of politics. Realise how impossible the dream written on a thousand banners really is, how the people do not exist as a revolutionary totality, how each individual can only find their way with a lot of other individuals, in this war between slave-souls and wild-souls.

It is not the easiest way, the individualist path, cut off from the apparent securities of the subcultural world: to allow a free self to emerge, to break chains that had the appearance of freedom, to be vigilant against the call of codes by which to live-the construction of ever smaller, narrower, and more airless prisons. But it is a life nonetheless with principle, meeting those bodies and minds and hearts who we rub shoulders with on the street and at work, with freshness, with quietness but boldness and assertion also, to live with an unflinching desire for destruction knowing that this cherished dream is an incalculable horror to most of those around you. But it is the same inside the anarchist movement and outside it; actually I am freer. Each person you meet is a potential friend and a possible enemy, but you have slipped past the guards, crossed the frontier, and now you are out in the wilderness of Society. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It is individuals who learn to exist according to their own centre-and only they-who can finally discover freedom.

Anarchy — Life force of the planet

Anarchy appears to us as the life force of the planet, the creative destroyer that has never been extinguished from the pages of civilisation by the determined forces of ignorance and repression. Not only an economic form of anti-capitalist organisation and self management, anarchy is the total destruction of all oppression and all forms of pre-programmed morality. Anarchy is the beautiful life that every individual is promised by the system–that is if they bow their head, work hard in life, and obey. Anarchism on the other hand does not demand slaves, it calls for each to know and master themselves. The liberation of each individual at its most full potential is the fire of anarchy and the vision of freedom that will take us beyond the stars.

Unleash the power of imagination and creative will. In revenge for the destruction of the environment and against the advancement of systems of control and exploitation.

Fire, attacks, destruction, refusal, is the non-recuperative. The more devastating and uncontrollable, through simple techniques anyone can put to use, the better; insurrectional violence targeted against the capitalist system and the developers and scientists of the futurepresent technological prison world.

Appendix

Declaration of Alfredo Cospito to the court

From The Belly of the Leviathan

... dreams are to be realized here and now, not in a hypothetical future, because the future has always been sold by priests of whatever religion or ideology in order to steal from us with impunity. We want a present worth living and not simply sacrificed to the messianic expectation of a future earthly paradise. For this reason we wanted to talk of an anarchy to be realized now and not in the future. The “everything now” is a bet, a game we play where the stakes are our lives, everybody’s life, and our death, everybody’s death...

– Pierleone Mario Porcu

Science is the eternal sacrifice of life, fleeting, ephemeral but real, on the altar of eternal abstractions. What I predict is therefore the revolt of life against the government of science.

– Mikhail Bakunin

Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. Art—the Arts—arose supreme, and, once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had elevated them to power.’

– Edgar Allan Poe

The empire that reigns sovereign founded on nothing is collapsing. It cannot bear the weight of truth.

I recommend a massive dose of life!

I recommend a massive dose of life!

At least that way you will be able to say you have lived it.

– Congegno

Bastards... I know who sent you!!

– Roberto Adinolfi

In a wonderful morning in May I acted, and in the space of a few hours I fully enjoyed my life. For once I left fear and self-justification behind and defied the unknown. In a Europe dotted with nuclear power stations, one of those mainly responsible for the nuclear disaster to come fell at my feet. I want to be absolutely clear: the Olga FAI/FRI nucleus is only Nicola and I. No one else took part in this action or helped or planned it. Nobody knew about our project.

I won’t allow my action to be placed within an obscene and absurd media and judicial cauldron in order to divert attention from its real goal, a cauldron made of “subversion of the democratic order,” “conspiracy,” “armed gang,” “terrorism”: empty words that fill the mouths of judges and journalists.

I am an anti-organization anarchist because I oppose all forms of authority and organizational constraints. I am nihilist because I live my anarchy today and not in waiting for a revolution, which-if it ever came about-would only produce more authority, technology, civilization. I live my anarchy with ease, joy, pleasure, without any spirit of martyrdom, by opposing this civilized existent with all my strength, an existent I cannot bear. I am antisocial because I am convinced that society can only exist in the differentiation between the dominant and the dominated. I do not strive for any future blissful socialist alchemy, I do not trust any social class; my revolt without revolution is individual, existential, overpowering, absolute, armed.

There’s no feeling of omnipotence in me, no disdain for the oppressed, for the people. As an eastern saying goes: “don’t scorn the snake because it doesn’t have horns; one day it might turn into a dragon!” Similarly a slave can turn into a rebel, one man or one woman can become devastating fire. I scorn the powerful of the earth with all my strength, be they politicians, scientists, technocrats, leaders of all sorts, bureaucrats, army and religious chiefs.

The order I want to knock down is that of civilization, which destroys everything that makes life worth living day by day State, democracy, social classes, ideologies, religions, police, armies, your very court, are shadows, ghosts, cogs of a all-embracing megamachine that can be replaced. One day technology will do without us and will transform us all into atoms lost in a landscape of death and desolation.

On that 7^th May 2012 I threw sand in the cogs of this mega-machine in the space of a second, and during that second I fully lived and made a difference. On that day my weapon was not an old Tokarev but the deep and ferocious hatred I feel towards technoindustrial society I claimed the action as FAI/FRI because I fell in love with this lucid madness that has become true poetry, at times a breeze, at others a storm, blowing halfway around the world, undaunted, improbable, against all laws, commonsense, ideologies, politics, science and civilization, against all authorities, organizations and hierarchies.

A concrete view of anarchy that doesn’t contemplate theoreticians, leaders, cadres, soldiers, heroes, martyrs, organization charts, militants or spectators. For years I had been witnessing the development of this new anarchy as a spectator. For too long I’d been looking on. If anarchy doesn’t turn into action it rejects life and becomes ideology, shit or a little more, in the best of cases a powerless outburst of frustrated men and women.

I decided to go for action after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Far too often we feel impotent in the face of such big events. Primitive men faced danger, they knew how to defend themselves. Civilized and modern men are helpless in the face of the constructions-constraints of technology. Just as sheep look at the shepherd for protection, the very shepherd that will slaughter them, so we civilized men confide in the secular priests of science, the very priests that are slowly digging our grave.

We saw Adinolfi smiling slyly and playing the victim from television screens. We saw him lecturing against terrorism in schools. But I wonder: what is terrorism? A gunshot, a searing pain, an open wound or the incessant, continuous threat of a slow death devouring you from inside? The continuous incessant terror that one of their nuclear plants can vomit death and desolation upon us all of a sudden?

Ansaldo Nucleare and Finmeccanica bear huge responsibilities. Their projects continue to sow death everywhere. Recently the rumour has spread of probable investments in the enlargement of the nuclear plant of Kryko, Slovenia, a high seismic risk area very close to Italy. In Cernadova, Romania, several incidents have occurred since 2000, caused by Ansaldo’s stupidity during the construction of one of their plants. How many lives have been lost? How much blood shed? Technocrats of Ansaldo and Finmeccanica, all facile smiles and a ‘clean’ conscience: your progress stinks of death, and the death you sow all over the world is shouting for revenge.

There are many ways to effectively oppose nuclear power: blocks of trains carrying nuclear waste, sabotage of the pylons carrying electricity produced by nuclear power. I had the idea of striking the one most responsible for this mess in Italy: Roberto Adinolfi, managing director of Ansaldo Nucleare. It didn’t take much to find out where he lived, five sessions of laying in wait were sufficient. There’s no need for a military structure, a subversive association or an armed gang in order to strike. Anyone armed with a strong will can think the unthinkable and act consequently.

I’d have liked to have done it all by myself but unfortunately I needed help with the bike. I asked Nicola and appealed to his friendship. He didn’t back down. I bought the gun for three hundred euro on the black market. There’s no need for clandestine infrastructures or huge amounts of money to arm oneself. We left by car from Turin the night before. Everything went smoothly, or kind of. Nicola was driving. I struck right where we had decided to strike. An accurate shot, I ran towards the bike and then the unexpected, the angry cry of Adinolfi, the shouted sentence that froze me: ‘Bastards... I know who sent you!’

At that very moment I had the absolute certainty that I had hit the target, and was fully aware that I had put my hands into a cesspit: money interests, international finance, politics and power, mud and cesspit. Those stolen seconds allowed Adinolfi to read a part of the number plate, which we hadn’t covered due to inexperience. Thanks to the numbers they traced the bike and then the camera.

It won’t be the sentence of this court to turn us into bad terrorists and Adinolfi and Finmeccanica benefactors of humanity. The time has come for the great refusal, a refusal made of a plurality of resistance, each of them special. Some are possible, necessary, improbable; others are spontaneous, wild, solitary, arranged, overflowing or violent. Ours was solitary and violent. Was it worthwhile? Yes! If only for the joy we felt when we heard of the defiant smile that Olga Ikonomidou, brave sister of the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, threw in the face of her jailers from a solitary confinement cell of a Greek prison.

I’m happy to be what I am, a free man even if I’m ‘temporarily’ in chains. I can’t complain much, given that the vast majority of people have chains well-placed in their brains. I’ve always tried to do what I thought right and never what was convenient. Half measures never convinced me. I’ve loved a lot. Hated a lot. And for that reason I won’t surrender to your bars, uniforms, weapons. You’ll always find me an irreducible, proud enemy. Not alone. Anarchists are never alone, sometimes they are solitary but never alone. A thousand projects in our minds, a hope in our hearts that stays alive, stronger and stronger, determined and shared more and more. A concrete perspective that risks changing the face of anarchy in the world. Small, great earthquakes that will stir a cataclysm one day. It will take time, never mind, for the time being I am enjoying the earthquake that broke out inside me from all this desire for joy and struggle.

I conclude with a quotation from Martino (Marco Camenish), unconquered warrior, prisoner for over twenty years because of his profound love of life, today locked up in an aseptic Swiss prison. I make his words my own:

... the courage to think things through, to break the technological police bans of the “impossible” and the “unconceivable”, the courage to thinking other and in another way act consequently. Only this can take us beyond the tepid toxic dishwater of modernity into places where nothing and nobody will lead us, to a place without security, the place of responsibility in first person, for non-submission with all its consequences. Freedom is hard and dangerous and there’s no life without death. For fear of losing our lives we often surrender to slavery and annihilation.

Death to civilization

Death to technological society

Declaration to the court by Nicola Gai

Nobody can judge me Not even you.

The truth hurts you, I know. — C. Caselli

A few words to make a few simple points before the “truth” is pronounced by the court; just in case it’s not clear, I am using the word truth ironically as I don’t recognize any tribunal other than my own conscience. The only ones responsible for what happened in Genoa on May 7 2012 are Alfredo and myself. None of our friends or comrades knew what we were planning and then carried out. No matter how far you dig into our lives and relations to find accomplices of the crime you won’t be able to demonstrate anything to the contrary; of course you’ll try but it’ll be a lie and an attempt to incriminate some enemy of the existent. I understand that those who have dedicated all their lives to serving authority won’t find it easy to accept the idea that two individuals, armed only with their determination, could decide to try to jam the gears of the technoindustrial system instead of contributing to running it in a disciplined way; but that’s just how it is. After years spent witnessing the systematic destruction of nature and all the aspects that make life worth living carried out by the never too highly praised technological development. Years spent following with interest, but always as a spectator, the experiences of the rebels who, even in this seemingly pacified world, continue to raise their heads and affirm the possibility of a free and wild life. Following the Fukushima disaster, when Alfredo proposed that I help him carry out an action against Roberto Adinolfi, I accepted without thinking twice. At last I could concretely demonstrate my refusal of the techno-industrial system, and put an end to participating in symbolic protests that far too often are just demonstrations of powerlessness. Nobody with even the slightest intelligence can deceive themselves that the result of a referendum or the clowning of some green economy guru can erase even just the most harmful aspects of the world we are forced to live in. Anyone who wants to can see that Finmeccanica and its subsidiary [Ansaldo Nucleare. Trans.] continue to produce weapons of mass destruction; they simply do this beyond the Italian borders, as if radiation respected these vile barriers.

In Romania (Cernadova, unfortunate area known mainly for countless incidents at its nuclear plant), Slovakia and the Ukraine, to mention just the most recent and direct investments, Ansaldo Nucleare continues to spread death and to contribute to the destruction of nature. As should be obvious to everybody, with another 190 nuclear power stations in Europe alone, the problem is not wondering if another Chernobyl might occur but when it will. And moreover, we mustn’t forget that these monstrosities don’t just kill when they are functioning but also do so with their nuclear waste. This is transported back and forward all over Europe with nobody knowing what to do with it. The nuclear waste from the Italian power stations, closed down decades ago, is now being transported to France in order to be made safe: they get fuel from it to supply more nuclear reactors, and also a few kilos of plutonium that can only be used to make bombs Qust to remind us that there’s no difference between military and civil use as far as nuclear power is concerned), then the waste is sent back as dangerous as it was before. On this question, who knows what the Americans will do with the uranium that was secretly transferred to the USA in the summer from a nuclear waste site in Basilicata. I could talk about the damage and destruction caused by nuclear power for hours, give countless examples, go over what’s going on in Fukushima (where some are saying that no deaths were caused by the nuclear power station...) but I’m not here to seek justification. Perhaps nuclear power is the one element of this civilized world where the senseless monstrosity of the techno-industrial system can be understood by anybody, but we have to realize that we are sacrificing all protection of our individual freedom and the chance to live a worthwhile life on the altar of technological development. Now it is up to each one of us to decide whether we want to be obedient subjects or whether we want to try to live, here and now, the refusal of the existent. I have made up my mind, with joy and with no remorse.

We’ll get out of here branded as terrorists, the amusing thing is that you can say that without seeming ridiculous: it is what the law states. One thing sure is that words have lost all their meaning; if we are terrorists, what would you call those who produce weapons, tracking systems for missiles, drones, fighter-bombers, equipment to hunt people trying to cross borders, nuclear power stations, those who do deals with assassins in uniform and famous dictators, in other words, how would you define Finmeccanica? Well, your bosses certainly don’t have much imagination, so much so that in order to dispel any doubts about the real function of this company they recently appointed former policeman Gianni De Gennaro company director: given his responsibility for the torture at Bolzaneto and the massacre at the Diaz when he was police chief at the time of the GS of 2001, they naturally thought that he was the right man in the right place.

To get back to the reasons for this declaration of mine I’d like to make a few points about the “brilliant” operation that led to our arrest. Who knows how many handshakes and pats on the back for the cunning hounds that managed to exploit our one, but fatal, mistake due to inexperience and the urgency to do something after the Fukushima disaster. In fact we didn’t notice a cctv camera placed by a zealous bar owner in order to protect his sandwiches. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t see it when we were studying the route from the spot where we left the moped and the bus stop where we changed buses and reached the city suburbs in the direction of Arenzano where my car, that we used to go to Genoa and come back, was parked. To tell the truth, the camera was not our only mistake, we also lost precious moments when we were leaving the place of the action, as the angry shout of the apprentice sorcerer of nuclear power: ‘Bastards, I know who sent you!’ froze us. It’s not up to me to jump to conclusions about the meaning of that sentence, it wasn’t the right moment for calm thinking, nor am I in the habit of building castles in the air out of someone else’s words, but personally I drew the conclusion that we had put our hands on a pile of shit. Everything else used to justify our detention is either distorted or simply false. The famous piece of phone tapping about the “big pistol,” where I allegedly stated I fired the shot, is totally unintelligible; there’s no point in getting experts involved to dismantle it, but as I was driving the moped it would have been impossible for me to also be holding the pistol, just as it seems logically absurd to me that I would be saying this to precisely the person who had taken part in the action with me, i.e. Alfredo.

As for the printer that was seized from my parents’ house, which the forensic stated was the one used to print the leaflet, it’s not even worth talking about. I bought the computer and printer and we destroyed them both after using them (it should be noted that after the court of review reconfirmed our arrest, even the scientists of the RIS realized that the seized printer was not the one used for the leaflet). As far as the theft of the moped is concerned, which we are accused of along with non-existent “unknown persons,” things are not as complicated as your efforts to recreate them. We went around the city trying to solve the problem as we had no experience of this kind of thing. As we know, good luck favours the brave, and in the pleasant locality of Bolzaneto we bumped into a scooter with the keys still in the ignition; we took them and decided to go back a few days later with a helmet. The bike was still in the same place, I just got on it, started the engine and drove it to the vicinity of the Staglieno cemetery, where it remained parked until fifteen days before the action, when I moved it near to Mr Adinolfi’s house. I apologize to the owner for removing the helmets and other objects that were under the seat and for throwing away the back trunk, these objects would have been obstacles to the action and certainly it wouldn’t have been a good idea to have tried to get them back. Another element that the investigators have embellished and, I’m afraid, will try to use in their role as good inquisitors in the future, is some phone tapping by the CSL in Naples, where some comrades allegedly comment on the leaflet they allegedly got via e-mail as a world first. I don’t know what they are talking about, I won’t go into how difficult it is to understand the dialogue, to say the least, nor is there any point in dwelling on the obvious consonance between Valentino and volantino [leaflet in Italian], but I do know for sure that the communique was only sent via ordinary mail (we posted the letters during the change of buses on our way back, in a post box on the seafront near the ferry terminal), so it is impossible for the comrades to have received it via e-mail.

I know for sure that you will use our case to make an example, that your revenge will be draconian, that you will do anything to keep us isolated (suffice it to say that our letters have been subjected to censorship for more than a year), but I want to give you some bad news: your efforts will be in vain. For at least 150 years judges, some even more ferocious than yourselves, have been trying to erase the idea of the possibility of a life free from authority, but with poor results. I can calmly assure you that your repressive actions, no matter how wide and indiscriminate, won’t be able to disarticulate or eradicate anything.

If you think that, thanks to us, you will be able to trace other anarchists who have decided to put the chaotic, spontaneous, and informal possibilities of the FAI to the test, you are absolutely mistaken and you will draw a blank, like always; neither Alfredo or myself know anyone who has made this choice. You are chasing a ghost that you can’t lock up in the petty procedures of your legal codes. That is because it manifests itself in the instant in which the destructive tensions of those who animate it come together in order to act, in the instant when free women and men decide to put anarchy concretely to the test. Now that the experience of the Olga nucleus is concluded I can only assure you that I have found new reasons to feed my hatred and motives to desire the destruction of the existent composed of authority, exploitation and the devastation of nature.

Love and complicity to the sisters and brothers who make the mad dream of the FAVFRI real with their actions all over the world.

Love and complicity to the comrades who, anonymously or not, continue to attack in the name of the possibility of a life free from authority.

Love and freedom to all anarchist prisoners.

Long live the black international of the rebels against the deadly order of civilization.

Long live anarchy!

[1] See Outside and Against the Trade Unions by Wildcat (Treason Press) and Industrial Domestication by Leopold Roe.

[2] By greatly reducing the utility of the written word, and gradually replacing books and newspapers with images, colours, and music for example, the power structure of tomorrow could construct a language aimed at the excluded alone. T hey, in tum, would be able to create different, even creative, means of linguistic reproduction, but always with their own codes and quite cut out of any contact with the included, therefore from any possibility of understanding the world of the latter. And it is a short step from incomprehension to disinterest and mental closure. Reformism is therefore in its death throes. It will no longer be possible to make claims, because no one will know what to ask for from a world that has ceased to interest us or tell us anything comprehensible.

From Riot to Insurrection, Alfredo Bonanno (Elephant Editions)

[3] For more info on so-called Aufhebengate and the libcops check out dialectical-delinquents.com/?page_id=9

[4] See the statement by Anarchist Solidarity (indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/06/481277.html) on UK AFeds cowardly politicking re: their Bulgarian sister group in paper organisation, The International of Anarchist Federations, which is matey with neo-Nazis and despises anarchist comrade Jock Palfreeman (imprisoned by that country for offing one of their pals). If you’ve got a strong stomach cast your eyes over the reaction by AFed UK bigwigs to the Anarchist Solidarity statement on libcom.org (libcom.org/forums/anarchist-federation/maybe-af-should-reply-27062011) — dishonest saving-face doublespeak to match any paid politician’s.

[5] See AFed statement [libcom.org/library/anarchist-federation-statement-kneecapping-nuclear-executive-informal-anarchistfederation]

Compare this with the FAI-IRF communique for the shooting of the nuclear CEO-in English at [325.nostate.netl?p=5278] — or the statements of responsibility by comrades Alfredo Cospito and Nicola Gai when captured after the action (see Appendix, page 102).

[6] See Anarchy in the UK : August Riots 2011 (Dark Matter Publications)

[7] See “Scandalous Thoughts-some notes on civil anarchism,” which was hailed as “an insult to anarchism itself’ by an idiotic member of the Italian Anarchist Federation on libcom.org.

[8] 325.nostate.net!?p=2059

[9] 325.nostate.net!?p=3668

[10] See “Bad Passions-The Rights of the Ego-From an anti-Christian point of view” (Edizioni Cerbero, [325.nostate.net/?p=4093])