ON EQUAL TERMS - Against identitarian authoritarianism

ON EQUAL TERMS
Against identitarian authoritarianism

We are some anarchist comrades who took part in the ‘Sabotiamo la guerra’1 assembly. With this writing we want to speak out on a bad episode that happened at our assembly (not the only one of this kind, but the most serious), but above all on a forma mentis and an ideology that now make such episodes systematic. If we present ourselves in such a circumscribed manner, it is because ‘Sabotiamo la guerra’ is precisely an assembly, made from time to time by those who participate in it, and we cannot speak on behalf of all its many past, present, and future participants. Having said that, let us begin to explain ourselves.

On 11, 12 and 13 October 2024, the ‘three-day’ discussion ‘Sfidare la vertigine’ (challenging vertigo), organised by our assembly and dedicated precisely to some of the vertiginous but inescapable questions posed by the present (starting with those related to the war, which constitutes no more and no less than the historical horizon), was to take place at 'Villa Occupata' in Milan. The ‘three days’ was postponed sine die, indeed cancelled, due to the opposition of some (we emphasise: some) frequenters of the Villa, who accused a comrade participating in this path of rape, and the assembly itself of supporting him. It would have been simpler and more convenient for us to ignore this episode and carry on, as we have done on other occasions when similar attempts have been made to thwart our initiatives due to the presence of this comrade on our path. Instead, our consciences told us to express ourselves.Being aware of the dynamics that led to this serious accusation, and having good reason to consider it groundless, it seems to us a real injustice that these rumours continue to circulate without anyone saying anything. An injustice to our comrade and then to our assembly. Reasoning about it together, we realised that it was impossible to address the issue without going into the ideological, ethical and mental assumptions underlying this episode. Still, doing so is something we already felt was necessary. While the accusation against the comrade is indeed a very serious one,unfortunately it is not an isolated incident.It has become common practice - in ‘antagonist’ circles as well as in vast sectors of society - to accuse this or that individual, this or that group of infamous faults (related to the sexual sphere or to relations between genders or even to generic ‘dynamics of power’) without taking responsibility of giving reasons, nor giving anyone - be it the person concerned or others - the opportunity to discuss the consistency of the accusations made, or even to independently evaluate how to deal with them if they turn out to be well-founded.In addition to this, it seems to us that a certain mentality and ideology (which we will call ‘identitarian’ here for reasons that will become clear when reading on) has for years been producing a series of dynamics that go far beyond the sphere of sexuality and interpersonal relations and to which, at least on our part, we have waited far too long to attempt a critique (however, better late than never). These reflections led to creation this paper, which is intended to be an act of denunciation and a contribution to the debate that extends far beyond the affair from which it arose.If this type of issues is tearing more and more worlds apart and leading in ours even to forms of desolidarisation towards entire realities heavily affected by repression, then the ideologies behind them havein our opinion even deeper and profoundly harmful consequences. Hence the need to look at all this even in perspective.

On the accusation itself, we do not intend to enter here. Certain facts, as say ‘delicate’ (and also potentially sensitive from a criminal point of view) must be addressed in appropriate spaces and at appropriate times; at least not to provide cops and pundits with material on which to speculate. We limit ourselves to saying that if we considered our comrade to be a rapist, we would not organise ourselves with him. It is also implied - but it is worth making it explicit - that both we, as authors of this paper, and also the directly accused comrade are willing to confront each other face to face with anyone who’d like to do so. On the other hand, we have much to say about the ways in which such accusations are increasingly being made, the mindset behind them and the consequences they bring.

We believe that when a person denounces having suffered violencewe must listen. That said, however, this cannot be used as an alibi for not discussing the facts for what they are (or, more humbly, for how they appear to us poor mortals), nor for branding anyone with stigma without even giving them a chance to respond. We stubbornly continue to think that anyone who makes heavy accusations against someone - whether of having committed a sexual assault, of having stolen money from a collective fund, or of being an informer - should take responsibility for what they say, backing it up with clear and circumstantiated arguments, and within appropriate spaces and moments. The fact that this moment of confrontation has been missed yet again seems to us to be the result of a mentality that has substituted conditionforfact, and victimhood for thought. Since the problem is not trivial, we have to approach it a bit broadly and make some premises.

Through the mediation of what can be defined as intersectional feminism, an ideology has arrived from overseas that says more or less the following: the idea of thinking of ourselves as free and equal human beings who attempt, as far as possible, to experience here and now relationships of reciprocity ('what you can do, I can do too, and vice versa') is nothing but an old humanist fairy tale.Since in that permanent war we call society, we are de facto unequal - criss-crossed, often without realising it, by the dynamics of overpowering that revolve around the lines of gender, color, physical or intellectual ability, age, etc. - we need to be awake and vigilant (woke, American slang expression for awake), catching all the violence that is constantly invisible and intervening in human relationships to restore the lost balance.On the one hand, by exercising a permanent moralisation of behaviour (starting with the wellknown obsession with language), especially if «acted» by those who have (or would have) some «privilege», i.e. an extra share of social power; on the other hand, by giving morepower to those who would socially have less of it. (It was with these ‘criteria’ that several years ago, in the United States, some feminists proposed to make the vote of women and African-Americans double). The background and - at the same time - the corollary of this kind of vision is postmodernist philosophy. If factual truth does not exist or cannot be found, the only ‘criterion’ for orienting oneself and deciding on the facts, which nevertheless do not stop happening, becomes the emo-partisan adherence to the viewpoint of those who are considered more «oppressed». The truthfulness of the fact is replaced by the belonging to a particular subject.

While it would take a long time to produce a comprehensive critique of this ideology, and we certainly cannot do it here, one of its first consequences is clear: the endless balkanisation of humanity. If there is no possibility of discussion between equals, because our experiences and therefore our points of view are unequal, the result can only be the war of all against all, punctuated by more or less precarious alliances. With a corollary: since in the post-modern universe there are no longer any values but only one disvalue - to affirm something with some presumption of certainty - the winner of the confrontation is not the one who brings the most cogent argument or incontrovertible facts, but those who can best display their identity status as ‘victim’, and who have enough academic literature (so-called «studies») behind them to be considered as such.

While this ideology may seem ultra-libertarian to some, to us it seems to be the carrier of an authoritarianism that is all the more dangerous the more it hides behind its alleged postmodern weakness. While it is indeed evident that these positions demolish any possibility of reciprocity between concrete individuals (what you can do, I can do, so my word is as good as yours), they also let re-entry through the back door that ideology of the subject that anarchism had long since kicked out from the front door. Foreseeing that «the religion of humanity» would soon generate its own priests and bureaucrats, back in 1844 Stirner wrote that he sided with the proletariat, but refused to «sacralise its callous hands».Out of metaphor, Stirner states that if the condition of oppression suffered by proletarians is to be recognised, one should avoid like the plague to think that the proletariat is always right, for the simple fact that, as a «subject», the proletariat... does not exist (there are only concrete individuals who, among other things, are proletarians), and therefore can be neither right nor wrong. In step with the times, the same thing should be said about women and black people, homosexuals, immigrants and transgender people.While we acknowledge the different specific oppression suffered by individuals belonging to these categories, we fight it only where we tangibly recognize it, without ever renouncing our autonomous judgement and without giving any blank delegation to those who inscribe themselves in this or that part of persecuted humanity. Not only because we value our freedom as much as anyone else's, and therefore we would not give even the world's most harassed and humiliated individual what is effectively a delegation of power; but because we know very well that when it is established that someone, for whatever reason, must count for more than another, it is not ‘the oppressed’ who benefit, but their self-appointed representatives.To make ourselves understood, we have to get into the most uncomfortable part of the matter. When, in our small communities, more or less well-founded accusations of sexual or gender abuse are raised, those who have something to say are dogmatically told that «one must listen to the ‘female comrades’». Now, this statement in itself contains an implicit accusation that is not necessarily justified (one may well do listen to «the female comrades», but does not agree with what is said); but above all: are all female comrades and women really being considered? In our experience, the answer is no. Only those female comrades and that comrades(men) aligned to already defined positions, that is, to the dogmas of the new global left, are considered. All other women are ignored, when not stigmatised as accomplices of their «internalised patriarchy». On closer inspection, in this new art of getting right, what makes the difference is not so much the concrete belonging to an offended category, but the adherence to the ideology that sanctifies it.Demanding ‘listening’ (i.e., in reality, a rigid and schematic alignment) is the new sensibilist and politically correct Church... quite other than «the female comrades», the «non-whites» or the «non-standard bodies»!

Obviously, we are aware that sexual violence, in its various forms, does not always correspond to the common imagery of mere physical aggression; we are aware that violence on both a small and large scale also exists in our environments, and that women (but we could broaden the spectrum to include many other oppressed groups) have found and often finds great difficulty, resistance and boycotts when denouncing it. Moreover we are in favour of addressing abuse and violence collectively and, if necessary, applying sanctions against those who have committed it. It seems legitimate to us, for example, that a collective should remove someone from a certain space, or even from an entire territory, if their presence makes them intolerable to a seriously offended person; or that a collective should refuse to organise itself (for a certain period, until a decisive clarification or even forever) with someone whose behaviour has broken or lost the trust of its comrades.What we do demand, though, is that all and sundry - tutte e tutti - have an equal say in the matter; that accusations need to be put to the test of facts, insofar as a given situation permits (it would be atrocious, for instance, to demand that the victim of violence recall it in full; but between this and a blank delegation of trust, there are practically always other possibilities); and that the accused one should be given the opportunity to defendoneself even by denying the fact, when it is thought or claimed not to have committed it. If these simple demands, recognised by mankind throughout the ages and at the time wrested from the Absolute State through struggles, may have some resemblance to ‘bourgeois law’, let us reflect on the fact that the opposite criteria bring us back no more and no less than to ‘inquisitorial law’, in which the only way to acquittal was the admission of guilt (today, in tune with the times, «of responsibility»).It will be said that events of this kind are particularly difficult to resolve, because - besides calling into question subtle interpersonal dynamics - they usually take place in private and intimate settings, where no one else can see. This is very true. But come to think of it, the vast majority of human events that give rise to discussion take place away from the gaze of others, or under a few gazes that easily contradict each other, having perhaps only caught clues regarding the consummation of an act (think, for instance, of a situation in which money has gone missing and only a certain person has been seen nearby: someone claims to have seen the person in question at a certain time with a certain attitude, someone else in another, but no one saw him or her stealing). Scabrous gestures carried out in a public square or witnessed by ten people who say more or less the same are, since the beginning of time,a minorityand immediately attract general reprobation.By what criteria, then, in uncertain situations, is it decided whether someone has or has not committed something? Generally, one relies on verisimilitude, i.e. the comparison of the dynamics of the fact with those experienced, seen or heard at other times and in other situations (in other words, past experience). In the presence of discordant versions, this is only possible by listening to and comparing several accounts, several bells. Can one make mistakes by applying this criteria? Of course, and it has been done since the dawn of time.But listening to only one side of the argument, uncritically and for its own sake, can only give some people the privilege (this is a real one) of lying, since it relieves them of the burden of making credible statements. Whatever, even very reasonable, one might object to this (for instance, that the differences in «socialisation» and experience between men and women do not allow certain nuances to be fully grasped), it does not eliminate what remains an inescapable consequence (unless one contends that members of oppressed categories cannot harbour ulterior motives, and tell others and themselves fibs - a particularly high risk in this age of almost psychedelic subjectivism).

In addition to this, is it ever possible that, even in the case of verified facts, the same method is applied almost automatically (removal of the person, and scorched earth around those who continue to organise with them), without any assessment of either the specific gravity of the fact or possible, and perhaps commensurate, forms of reparation?

No, this is made impossible. Because identity activists are not at all interested in finding better ways for people to live together, but only in cleansing the world of everything they do not like. It is no wonder that, for some time now, certain people have been moving from trying to wipe out certain individuals to the cancel culture of ideas and what most conveys them: books. In fact, there are people who have launched veritable campaigns against publishers, editions and distributionsmore or less related to the ‘movement’ (either because they are run by people accused of abuses, or because they publish texts considered «problematic»), as well as proscription lists against authors considered transphobic, homophobic or sexist, based on a distorted interpretation of their texts, their participation in initiatives organised by 'indicted' others, or simply for reviewing the work of others. What’s more, we know of some comrades who have never been accused of any violence but have been warned against appearing in certain contexts because of their critical stance towards the LGBTQ+ movement, that would lead them to be accused of «transphobia».While we wonder with dismay since when anarchists have been committed to defending reformists, this position is simply hallucinatory in terms of political and intellectual dishonesty. The LGBTQ+ movement is precisely a political movement that, however much it plays at representing all homosexual and transgender people, in reality represents nothing but itself. To say that those who criticise the authoritarianism of certain queer groups are homophobic or transphobic is like saying that those who criticise Black Lives Matter are thereby racist. Nothing more, in fact, than politics in the worst sense of the term.

We are sorry, but behind so much (and growing) accusatory and persecutory fury, which is ruining the lives of more and more comrades on the basis of more and more ‘audacious’ and fanciful accusations, we cannot see only a sincere will to oppose sexism and harassment, or to accept demands that have been silenced for too long. We also see in it an assumption of that culture of punishment that in other spheres is called justicialism: punishing the unlucky one on duty (whether he or she is actually ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’) in order to set an example to everyone else. We also see in it an eagerness for power and control.But above all, we see, more generally, an authoritarian and reactionary poison that from US universities and other laboratories of power has slowly penetrated into anarchism, and that seriously risks extinguishing it from the inside (while repression continues to hit hard from the outside), overthrowing its principles while claiming to radicalise them. If there is one concept shared by all anarchists, it is that authority does not limit the tendency of humans to overpower one another, but aggravates it and makes it more structural. That being said, the abolition of authority and thus freedom is not the panacea that will free oppressed humanity from all evils, but «the way open to every improvement» (Malatesta): a turning point and a beginning, but precisely for this reason necessary. No matter how much it gives itself libertarian and ultra-radical airs, the post-modernist and identity-oriented left reasons in exactly the opposite way.There is no way out of the present misery, only an eternal struggle between subjectivities (which feel) oppressed within a ramified and omnipresent network of micro-powers, which can only find some peace in a kind of negative reciprocity: instead of a principle that proclaims: ‘I do what I want to the extent that you can do what you want’, a creed that more or less goes: ‘I won't do what I want as long as you don't do what you want’. In short, an endless series of prohibitions.One can see this very well in certain universities occupied by younger generations, where on the walls, instead of incendiary leaflets, one increasingly finds intimations not to do this or that, together with directions to the care team if one does not feel safe enough. An essentially Hobbesian model: if individuals, having become wolves after centuries of “white hetero-patriarchy”, sink into the war of all against all, then artefacts must be invented to curb them: the eternal justification of the police. While anarchists have always advocated destroying the present society in order to allow individuals to evolve, but freeing them as they are, the identity-driven left claims to change society by changing its mores, with the pretension of proceeding from the individual to social relations instead of vice versa. Pure reactionary crap, worthy of the Church Fathers or 16th century Calvinist Geneva.

With the principle of reciprocity gone, the very basis of class self-organisation, and the class struggle itself, is lost. From this point of view, it is significant that among the various «privileges»pointed out by the identitarians, education is never mentioned, which nevertheless traces a very deep furrow between classes, and not only in terms of access to work. Years ago, a comrade, who had been in prison for many years, told us how much ‘being educated’ made a difference in prison, both in terms of knowing one's legal ‘rights’ and in the ability to assert oneself in front of the authorities. When one considers their university background, and the adoption of their precepts made by people who attend or have attended university, can this absence amidst studies devoted to all kinds of conditions and harassment really appear accidental? (With this, we hope we are not unwittingly giving the suggestion to open a new persecutory vein, or pushing someone to abandon their studies in a Franciscan way: cultural means are very much needed! and, like other means, they should not be abolished, but made available to the struggles and to our class).Even when certain ideologies end up reaching the more or less proletarian youth by entering ‘movement’ areas, they are in fact typically promoted and assumed by the middle class and in particular by its cognitive variant, the one that does not want to change the world but to make it more civilised. This leads to the avoidance of the issue of education, which often goes hand in hand with disdain for that proletariat (especially the white proletariat, grotesquely considered 'privileged'), which is unable or unwilling to adopt the language and categories of the left-wing 'cognitariat', who perceive and present itself as the authentic model of the respectable global citizen. If this substantial indifference in class matters should suggest to us how much identity theorists really care about the damned and exploited on earth, it is no wonder that they do not realise (do they really not notice?) how much their ideology ends up on the one hand undermining the very possibilities of organising among the exploited, and on the other hand reinforcing the bosses' securitarianism. How can one organise together, when one adopts a schizophrenic vision that considers one's comrades as bothcomrades, indeed, and potential (not even so much) enemies, marked by the original sin of one's own more or less «privileges» of birth? When personal qualities - commitment, candour, trustworthiness, courage in its various forms, the ability to reason and argue, consistency with what one proclaims - are disqualified to mere means of overpowering?When can no common decision be taken without the ghost of «over-determination» being evoked? If one stops considering equality as a boundary concept (the space that allows the expression of differences, and in which some inequalities also necessarily emerge), the result can only be paralysis, and a generalised misery in which differences, namely what makes the richness of any collectivity, are annihilated in the name of an abstract and disciplining egalitarianism (while those prevailing are, Orwellianly, those who claim to be «more equal than others»).

Of course even ‘classism’, in its own way, is identitarian; but we are dealing with a way that profoundly differs from the various identitarianisms of gender, ‘race’ and whatnot, and which opens up entirely different possibilities. Without denying that the gender line and the skincolour line play a role in the articulation of power relations, oppression and exploitation (and in the overall economy of present-day capitalist domination), it is only the class line that opens up a universal liberation, creating that vertical rupture in which the liberations of women, homosexuals and transsexuals, of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ (post-)colonial minorities (to name but a few), can be realised without diverging into new configurations of power and of domination. Being exploited (whatever gender) has at least two different aspects from being women, black people, etc. The first is that it is a purely social condition, not related to physiological traits: one is exploited as long as there is a society based on exploitation; with the end of racism and sexism, one would stop being «socialised» as men and women, «racialised» as blacks, etc., but one would not stop being men, women, blacks. The second aspect is that gender, skin colour, sexual orientation etc. are characteristics that - with some exceptions, of course - the vast majority of individuals would not want to lose in a process of liberation, but simply to be able to embody without all the discrimination, humiliation and stereotypes associated with them - i.e. they are characteristics that are not undesirable in themselves;but no one (labourist-statist psychosis aside) would want to remain exploited.In its mere negativity, whose ultimate outcome is the self-suppression of the exploited class as it suppresses the exploiting class, only the class line can realise a non-abstract humanism (no equalisation between exploited and exploiters in the name of common ‘humanity’, but a process that can shape a different humanity), opening space for the liberation of each and every one, while striking where the system can at best withdraw, but not recreateitself as an exploitative system: a capitalism without racism, sexism and even without gender and «racial» differences, could at least in the abstract exist; a class society without classes, no.Transfeminism, ‘critical race theory’, etc. tend to apply the almost absolute antagonism of classism - possible because it is based on merely social otherness - to othernesses embodied in beings (in philosophical language: ontological ones) and/or of which individuals do not (and should not) necessarily want to get rid. The result is almost always a mess in which a certain reverse-racism emerges, in which certain individuals (male, and then in turn heterosexual, white, ‘able-bodied’, etc.) suffer a basic disqualification for what they are and not for what they do, and in which the same people are on the one hand recognised as oppressed and potentially complicit, and on the other, as soon as a conflict arises, treated as ‘category enemies’ against whom to close their ‘own’ ranks.This does not mean that conflicts of a different nature than class conflict do not exist or never have reason to be opened up, even harshly if necessary (we reiterate: we do not sacralise callous hands): what we are questioning is the way of considering and treating them, which should have its own specific characteristics. If one is unable to make these distinctions, the consequences are catastrophic. Faced with a struggle in a factory or a warehouse, we are always on the side of the workers, and little do we care who is saying the ‘true’ (we can also tell each other that the workers are talking bullshit, but this remains an inter nos issue, which if anything we will discuss on this side of the fence).Can we say the same when the conflict arises between a male comrade (an exploited one, a friend) and a female comrade (an exploited one, a friend)? Or, cascading, between a gay (or trans, or black) comrade and a straight (or cis, or white) one? When a master or a government makes a misstep - one that attracts public disapproval in one way or another - it is perfectly sensible to attack it, taking from it what can be gained for the advancement of the struggle, without dwelling too much on how ‘serious’ what it has committed actually is. Can the same thing be said… etc?

The mechanical application of typical class-struggle logics to conflicts of another kind ends up killing the struggle for liberation. By being fragmented into a series of micro-conflicts, moreover easily exposed to logical short-circuits (who is more oppressed between a «non-white cis-hetero» and a «white transgender»? Who would one side with in case of disagreement?), the vertical conflict (exploited versus exploiters, revolutionaries versus the state) is engulfed by a perennial horizontal conflict. A paradigm that moreover resembles (are we the only ones to notice this?) a sort ofleft-wing counterbalance to the war between the poor fomented over the years by the right-wingers; and which, embracing safety instead of security, contributes to the same objectives of social pacification (rights for *everyone* and everywhere, freedom for no one and nowhere). The desire to be protected and secured in one's isolation against one's peers, increasingly perceived as dissimilar, replaces the urge to free oneself together with everyone else.

Before concluding this series of considerations, we would like to clarify one point, in order to avoid possible (perhaps sly) misunderstandings. The above criticisms cannot be applied mechanically and in toto to all identity-inspired groups: what we are interested in is taking a picture of tendencies, and it is in this sense that these considerations should be read. In the same way, unlike others, we do not want to attribute to all those who variously adhere to identity-postmodernist ideologies and approaches the blame for all the drifts that have crossed the antagonist movements in recent years (from adherence to securitarianism-Covid to support for a non-existent ‘resistance’ in the war in Ukraine).If the victimism typical of these ideologies has provided, especially abroad, a more than ‘generous’ contribution to these drifts (see the international gathering in Saint-Imier in 20232), similar drifts have often been transversal to ideologies and areas (there have been, for example, by groups of various Marxist or libertarian tendencies that have little or nothing to do with post-modern identitarianism), while in Italy, especially in the anarchist and libertarian realities, there has been a healthy overcoming in opposite direction that has crossed different worlds, including some queer and transfeminist circles.We are also pleased to note, on an international level - we are thinking above all of the United States - that the attempts by the powers to create distance from Palestinian resistance by waving the spectre of ‘religious obscurantism’ and the alleged ‘rape of Hamas’ (a fake news that some initially took the bait for and others continue to do so) have largely failed, and that many comrades of the transfeminist, intersectional tendency have sided body and soul with the oppressed Palestinians (with the blessing of Pope Judith Butler).Faced with these simple observations, certain overly - manichean analyses seem inadequate to the confused, complex, changing reality of our time, and we do not make them our own. What we want to suggest is something more subtle, having to do with the way ideas act on a social and individual level, taking individuals even where they do not want to go. When you start reasoning in a certain way, Malatesta used to say, you do not go where you want to, but where reasoning takes you. An example will clarify what we mean.

It does not exactly seem to us a coincidence that not only the market and the show business, but even the institutions, police and military have now embraced rhetoric inspired by woke identitarianism, with valuable returns in terms of social control (militarisation justified by the «defence of women», automatic life imprisonment for «feminicides», but also ever more frequent interventions by the cops in schools, against gender violence, «bullying», «ableism» and so on, flanked by floods of psychologists on the hunt for insecurities, discomforts and… clients).That many (trans)feminists reply that most rapes actually take place at home and by people they know, or oppose to such instrumentalisation the presence and direct self-defence of women in the streets, or the denunciation of the «patriarchal» character of the police and even of the «system» as a whole, is undoubtedly valuable, but it is also insufficient in the face of all-pervasive propaganda that reaches more and more people (and especially the very young) directly on their smartphones, and that pushes more and more categories (women, homosexuals, transsexuals, ‘coloured’ people, people with disabilities, ‘neurodivergents’, etc.) to feel perpetually under attack by those who would have a few more «privileges» (or with a few less problems).[Not so many years ago, in France, anarchists who were guilty of proclaiming and practising their intolerance against all religions were attacked with the charge of «Islamophobia»3, while in several territories of the United States, by dint of wanting to serve the interests of ‘minorities’ by sheltering them from the snares of the ‘privileged’, there is a de facto return to racial segregation, with separate schools and classes for blacks only4.] Would it not be the case to attempt a deeper reflection, before it is too late? Unfortunately - and here, vice versa, we have to bring into play most of the realities infected by the identity disease - what is done is systematically the opposite: as soon as someone raises issues that are uncomfortable for their ideologies or for some of their allies, the identity activists - with the silent-consent of their more ‘moderate’ friends - go for the throat pointing the finger at this or that poorly worded statement, this or that word, this or that misplaced comma(often mixing, as needed and without shame, what one writes calmly at one's desk with what comes out of one's mouth in the heat of an argument, or over a glass of wine); and thus avoid having to face the issues themselves. What is put in place, in effect, is a series of devices that prevent one from discussing as much as from thinking (without the possibility of confrontation, thinking dies in the long run).

This is the Church air that we have had to breathe for too long, and of which we have gotfed up. This is what we denounce, beyond the occasion that generated this denunciation. The problem, for us, is not so much that this series of devices turned into ideology has generated, in our circles, a great deal of scuffles (if not always useless or unfounded, almost always mismanaged); but above all that, by dealing deadly blows to critical thinking, it has triggered a veritable process of ethical, cognitive and spiritual degradation. What kind of moral and intellectual environment can be produced when one stops reasoning on facts, leaving the field open to an unrestrained - and simultaneously imprisoned in watertight categories - subjectivism, which goes so far as to propagate demented dogmas (as demented as all dogmas, the essence of which is to be believed while remaining incomprehensible) such as «violence is what a person perceives as such» (and «violence» can be replaced at will by «over-determination», «power», etc.)?Interiority without exteriority, said Hegel, is empty. Without passing through the encounter-counterpoint with reality as its moment of verification, and thus without presupposing its existence and the possibility of investigating it, subjectivity becomes nothing more than a perpetual whirlwind of sensations, emotions, perceptions (and paranoia).If, in this historical phase, it is individuals in general who are increasingly produced as worldless individuals by rampant ultra-subjectivism (and the computerised dematerialisation of reality); and if any ideological setting acts as a filter, determining which human types will tend to approach or move away from certain environments, it is fatal that, where woke paranoia dominates, the most inconsistent, rambling and tendentially resentful types will approach and get closer and closer to ‘movements’.Those with little inclination to reason and much inclination to complain; those who do not like to make serious efforts to identify and fight Power (the real one), and very fond of the cheap fight against the widespread ‘power’ everywhere… but, above all, close to them; those who seek a group that takes care of their blues, instead of challenging every collectivity and thus enriching what is freely chosen with the originality of one's own tensions and ideas; those who do not want to be irrepeatable individuals, and thus irreducible to any category, but, precisely, subjects.

In this race towards the annihilation of reality and simultaneously of the thinking individuality, in which authoritarianism finds a cosy home and where the old fetters of reaction resurface in a new form, an episode like the one in Milan, and like others occurred to our assembly in its year and a half of life (but more happily solved), sadden us but do not surprise us. Authority and authoritarianism always make human beings smaller and relationships uglier. It is therefore not strange that, in this midnight of the century, all the doors are wide open to the little Torquemadas and the opportunists without principles, and closed in the face of those who insist on speaking clear words about a present that is much more tragic than serious.

In the midst of so much returning reactionary crap, we go forward, with our principles firmly in our fists.

Italian peninsula, spring 2025

Five Little Indians off the Reserve

1 'Sabotage the war' assembly

2 For a look at what happened on that occasion, see the text Big trouble in St Imier on the blog of the radio programme ‘ la nave dei folli’, on this page:https://lanavedeifolli.noblogs.org/files/2023/09/Grosso-a-guaio-a-St-Imi...

3 For instance,https://danslabrume.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/24/anti-anti-racialisme/

4 Cfr. Yascha Mounk, La trappola identitaria, Feltrinelli, Milano 2024

Italian version: https://ilrovescio.info/2025/07/01/da-pari-a-pari-contro-lautoritarismo-... _____   https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2025/07/02/da-pari-a-pari-contro-lauto...

Other translations are coming soon.