From

Riot to
Insurrection
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Radical Reprint #47

From Riot to Insurrection

Analysis for an anarchist

perspective against post-
industrial capitalism

alfredo m. bonanno
Introduction [p. 1]

For an analysis of a period of change. From post-

industrial illusions to post-revolutionary ones [p. 8]

Changes in society [p. 8]

Islands of lost men [p. 10]

Two reservoirs of the revolution [p. 11]

State precautions [p. 14]

The end of irrational competition [p. 17]

Consciousness and ghettoisation [p. 19]

Generalised impoverishment [p. 23]

Two phases [p. 25]

The sunset of the worker’s leading role [p. 27]

The sunset of some of the anarchists’ illusions [p. 29]

Speed and multiplicity [p. 33]

End of reformism, end of the party [p. 34]

The dumb excluded [p. 35]

From irrational riot to conscious insurrection [p. 39]

Spoken contribution to anarchist conference held in

Milan on October 13 1985, on the theme “Anarchism
and insurrectional project” [p. 41]

Introduction
There can be little doubt left anywhere on the
planet that a fundamental change is taking place
in the organisation of production. This change
is most obvious and most felt in the centres of
advanced capitalism, but the logic of information
technology and decentralised production is now
reaching what were once remote peripheral areas,
drawing them into an artificial communitarianism
whose only real common element is exploitation.

In the “western world” the traditional worker, 1

cornerstone of the authoritarian revolutionary
 thesis and still a principle element in many
anarchist ones, is being tossed out of the grey
graveyards of docks, factories and mines, into
the coloured graveyards of home-videos, brightly
lit job-centres, community centres, multi-ethnic
creches, etc., in the muraled ghettos.

As unemployment is coming to be accepted

as a perspective of non-employment, capital
continues to refine its instruments and direct
investment to areas more befitting to its perennial
need for expansion. Production of consumer
goods is now realised by an intercontinental team
of robots, small self-exploiting industries, and
domestic labour, in many cases that of children.

The trade unions are at an ebb, and the parties of

the left are creeping further to the right as areas
for wage claims and social reform are disappearing
from the electoral map. What is emerging instead
are wide areas of progressive “democratic dissent”
in political, social and religious terms: pacifism,
ecologism, vegetarianism, mysticism, etc. This
“dissenting consensus” sees its most extreme
2 expression in the proposals of “delegitimisation”
and “deregulation” by a privileged intellectual
strata that reasons exclusively in terms of its own
rights.

An ideal society, it might seem, from capital’s

point of view, with social peace as one of its
prime objectives today; or so it would be, this
“self-managed” capitalist utopia, were it not for
the threat coming from outside the landscaped
garden. From the ghetto areas, no longer confined
to the Brixton, Toxteth model, but which take
many forms: the mining village of the north, the
gigantic, gloomy labyrinths of council estates in
urban complexes, many of them already no-go
areas to police and other forces of repression, and
other ever widening areas which until recently
housed secure well-paid skilled and white collar
workers, are on their way to becoming new
ghettos. The ghettos of the future, however, will
not necessarily be geographically circumscribed,
as the hotbeds of unrest are farmed out to
bleak and manageable dimensions, but will be
culturally defined, through their lack of means of
communication with the rest of capitalist society.

The presence of these ever widening ghettos 3

and the message that is crying out from them is
 the main flaw in the new capitalist perspective.
There are no mediators. There is no space for the
reformist politicians of the past, just as there is
none for the essentially reformist revolutionaries
of the old workerist structures, real or imaginary.
The cry is a violent one that asks for nothing. The
mini riots or explosions that are now common
occurrences, especially in this country, do not
have rational demands to make. They are not the
means to an end like the bread riots of the past.
They have become something in themselves,
an irrational thrusting out, often striking easily
identifiable targets of repression (police stations,
vehicles, schools, government offices, etc.), but
not necessarily so. Violence in the football
stadiums cannot be excluded from this logic.

Anarchists, since the first major riots—Bristol,

Brixton, Toxteth, Broadwater Farm—have seen
these events in a positive light, often joining in
and contributing a number of extra bricks in the
direction of police lines. Anarchist journals exalt
these moments of mass insurgence, yet at the same
time (the same papers) provide organisational
4 proposals which, if they might have been valid at
the beginning of the century or in the ’thirties,
certainly bear no resemblance to the needs of the
present day. The best the most updated ones can
offer, using the riots as their point of reference, is
to create a specific movement of anarchists with
the aim of instilling some revolutionary morality
into these patently amoral events. Once again the
poverty of our analytical capacity comes to bear.

Up until now, when anarchists have had need of

some theoretical content in their publications,
they have either resorted to personal opinion, or
given a summary of some of the Marxist analyses,
critically, but often underlining that there are
some points in Marxism that are relevant to
anarchist ideas. This gives a “serious” content
to a periodical, shows that we are not against
theoretical discussions, but leaves the field for
anarchist action barren. Without analysis, even
at the most basic, rudimentary level, we cannot
hope to be in touch with reality. Intuition is
not enough. We cannot hope to act, pushing
contradictions towards a revolutionary outlet,
by simply responding to events as they arise, no
matter how violent these events may be.
5
The Marxist analyses are now nothing but
 obsolete relics of the dark ages of industrialism.
What must be done is to develop our own theses,
using as a foundation the wealth of our anarchist
methodological heritage. The great strength
of anarchism is the fact that it does not rely on
one fundamental analysis anchored in time.
The living part of anarchism is as alive today as
it was four decades ago, or a century ago. What
we need to do is to develop instruments that
take what is relevant from the past, uniting it
with what is required to make it relevant to the
present. This can only be done if we have a clear
idea of what this reality is. Not what we would
like it to be, but what it is, of what is emerging
as the real battleground of exploitation today,
for battleground it is, even though the dead
and wounded have a different aspect to those of
yesterday, and the just response of the exploited
takes new, less explicit forms. The need to act gets
pressing as the ghettos become encapsulated and
segregated from the mainstream language and
communication of the privileged.

The analysis we are presenting here opens a

6 door in that direction, gives a glimpse of what
is happening around and stimulous to develop
further investigation and seek to formulate new
forms of anarchist intervention that relate to this
reality, trying to push it towards our goal of social
revolution.

The first text was originally written and presented

as the theme of an anarchist conference in Milan
in October 1985, held by the comrades of the
Italian anarchist bimonthly Anarchismo. The
second part is a spoken contribution by the same
comrade. This explains the concise nature of the
text. The author has in fact dedicated many more
pages to the insurrectional thesis, work that he
has developed through his active involvement in
struggles in Italy over the past two decades.

Jean Weir

7
 For an analysis of a period of
change. From post-industrial
illusions to post-revolutionary ones
Changes in society
In the evolution of social contradictions over the
past few years, certain tendencies have become so
pronounced that they can now be considered as
real changes.

The structure of domination has shifted from

straightforward arbitrary rule to a relationship
based on adjustment and compromise. This has
led to a considerable increase in demand for
services compared to such traditional demands as
durable consumer goods. The results have been
an increase in those aspects of production based
on information technology, the robotisation of
the productive sector, and the preeminence of
the services sector (commerce, tourism, transport,
credit, insurance, public administration, etc.) over
industry and agriculture.
8
This does not mean that the industrial sector has
disappeared or become insignificant; only that it
will employ fewer and fewer workers while levels
of production remain the same, or even improve.
The same is true of agriculture, which will be
greatly affected by the process of industrialisation,
and distinguishable from industry in statistical
rather than social terms.

This situation is developing more as a “transition”,

not something that is cut and dried, but as a
trend. There is no distinct separation between
the industrial and post-industrial periods. The
phase we are passing through is clearly one of
surpassing the obsolete institutions that are
being restructured; but it has not yet reached the
closure of all factories and the establishment of a
reign of computerised production.

The tendency to break up units of production

and the demand for small self-exploiting nuclei
within a centralised productive project will
predominate in the next few years. But within the
industrial sector this will be accompanied by such
slow adjustments, using traditional means, as are 9
expedient to the cautious strategies of capital.
 This argument relates more to the British and
Italian situations which remain far behind their
Japanese and American models.

Islands of lost men

Torn from the factories in a slow and perhaps
irreversible process, yesterday’s workers are being
thrown into a highly competitive atmosphere.
The aim is to increase productive capacity,
the only consumable product according to the
computerised logic of the centres of production.
The atomised (and even more deadly) conflicts
within capital itself will extinguish the
alternative, revolutionary struggle, with the
intention of exacerbating class differences and
rendering them unbridgeable.

The most important gains for the inhabitants

of the productive “islands”, their seemingly
greater “freedom”, the flexible working hours,
the qualitative changes (always within the
10
competitive logic of the market as directed by
the order-giving centres) reinforce the belief that
they have reached the promised land: the reign of
happiness and well-being. Ever increased profits
and ever more exacerbated “creativity”.

These islands of death are surrounded by

ideological and physical barriers, to force
those who have no place on them back into a
tempestuous sea where no one survives.

So the problem revealing itself is precisely that of

the excluded.

Two reservoirs of the revolution

The excluded and the included.

The first are those who will remain marginalised.

Expelled from the productive process and
penalised for their incapacity to insert themselves
into the new competitive logic of capital, they
are often not prepared to accept the minimum
11
levels of survival assigned to them by State
 assistance (increasingly seen as a relic of the past
in a situation that tends to extol the virtues of
the “self-made man”). These will not just be the
social strata condemned to this role through
their ethnic origin—today, for example, the West
Indians in British society, catalysts of the recent
riots in that country—but with the development
of the social change we are talking about, social
strata which in the past were lulled by secure
salaries and now find themselves in a situation
of rapid and radical change, will also participate.
Even the residual supports that these social strata
benefit from (early pensions, unemployment
benefit, various kinds of social security, etc.) will
not make them accept a situation of growing
discrimination. And let us not forget that the
degree of consumerism of these expelled social
strata cannot be compared to that of the ethnic
groups who have never been brought into the
sphere of salaried security. This will surely lead to
explosions of “social ill-being” of a different kind,
and it will be up to revolutionaries to unite these
with the more elementary outbreaks of rebellion.

12 Then there are the included, those who will

remain suffocating on the islands of privilege.
Here the argument threatens to become more
complicated and can only be clearly situated
if one is prepared to give credit to man and his
real need for freedom. Almost certainly it is
the “homecomers” from this sector who will
be among the most merciless executants of the
attack on capital in its new form. We are going
towards a period of bloody clashes and very
harsh repression. Social peace, dreamt of on one
side and feared by the other, remains the most
inaccessible myth of this new capitalist utopia,
heir to the “pacific” logic of liberalism which
dusted the drawing room while it butchered
in the kitchen, giving welfare at home and
massacring in the colonies.

The new opportunities for small, miserable,

loathsome daily liberties will be paid for by
profound, cruel and systematic discrimination
against vast social strata. Sooner or later this
will lead to the growth of a consciousness of
exploitation inside the privileged strata, which
cannot fail to cause rebellions, even if only
limited to the best among them. Finally, it should
be said that there is no longer a strong ideological 13
support for the new capitalist perspective such
 as existed in the past, capable of giving support
to the exploiters and, more important still, to
the intermediate layers of cadres. Wellbeing for
the sake of it is not enough, especially for the
many groups of people who, in the more or less
recent past, have experienced or simply read
about liberatory utopias, revolutionary dreams
and attempts, however limited, at insurrectional
projects.

The latter will lose no time in reaching the

others. Not all the included will live blissfully in
the artificial happiness of capital. Many of them
will realise that the misery of one part of society
poisons the appearance of wellbeing of the rest,
and turns freedom (within the barbed wire
fences) into a virtual prison.

State precautions
Over the past few years the industrial project has
also been modified by the fusion of State controls
14
and methods linked with the political interest in
controlling consensus.

Looking at things from the technical side, one

can see how the organisation of production is
being transformed. Production no longer has to
take place in one single location, (the factory),
but is more and more spread over a whole
territory, even at considerable distances. This
allows industrial projects to develop that take
account of a better, more balanced distribution of
productive centres within a territory, eradicating
some of the aspects of social disorder that have
existed in the past such as ghetto areas and
industrial super-concentrations, areas of high
pollution and systematic destruction of the eco-
systems. Capital is now looking forward to an
ecological future, opening its arms to the great
hotchpotch of environmentalists and becoming
a champion of the safeguarding of natural
resources, so making the construction of cities of
the future with a “human face”, socialist or not,
seem possible.

The real motivation driving the capitalist

project towards distant lands resembling the 15
utopias of yesteryear, is very simple and in
 no way philanthropic: it is the need to reduce
class discontent to a minimum, smoothing the
edges off any effective confrontation through a
sugarcoated progressive development based on
blind faith in the technology of the future.

It is obvious that the most attractive proposals

will be made to the included, to try as far as
possible to avoid defections, which will be the real
thorn in the side of tomorrow’s capitalists. The
individual subjects, if they come from within the
sphere of the production process, who turn their
goals in a revolutionary direction, will have real
weapons to put at the disposal of the revolution
against the rule of exploitation.

So far the utopian hope of governing the world

through “good” technology has shown itself to
be impossible, because it has never taken into
account the problem of the physical dimension
to be assigned to the ghetto of the excluded. They
could be recycled into the garden-project in an
ungenerous mixture of happiness and sacrifice,
but only up to a point.
16
Tension and repeated explosions of rage will put
the fanciful utopia of the exploiters into serious
difficulty.

The end of irrational competition

It has long been evident. Competition and
monopolism were threatening to draw the
productive structures into a series of recurrent
“crises”. Crises of production in most cases. For the
old capitalist mentality it was essential to achieve
so-called “economies of scale”, and this was only
possible by working with ever larger volumes of
production in order to spread the fixed costs as
far as possible. This led to a standardisation of
production: the accumulation of productive units
in particular locations, distributed haphazardly
with a colonising logic (for example the classical
Sicilian “cathedrals in the desert”: isolated
industrial areas, petrol refineries, etc. that were to
serve as points of aggregation); the uniformity of
products; the division of capital and labour, etc.

The first adjustments to this came about through 17

 massive State intervention. The State’s presence
has opened up various opportunities. It is no
longer a passive spectator, simply capital’s
“cashier”, but has become an active operator,
“banker” and entrepreneur.

In essence, these adjustments have meant the

diminution of use value, and an increase in the
production of exchange value in the interests of
maintaining social peace.

In bringing to an end its most competitive

period, capital has found a partial solution to its
problems. The State has lent a hand with the aim
of completely transforming economic production
into the production of social peace. This utopian
project is clearly unreachable. Sooner or later the
machine will shatter.

The new productive process—which has

often been defined post-industrial—makes
low production costs possible even for small
quantities of goods; can obtain considerable
modifications in production with only modest
18 capital injections; makes hitherto unseen changes
to products possible. This opens up undreamt
of horizons of “freedom” to the middle classes,
to the productive cadres, and within the golden
isolation of the managerial classes. But this is
rather like the freedom of the castle for those
Teutonic knights of the Nazi kind. Encircled by
the mansion walls, armed to the teeth, only the
peace of the graveyard reigns within.

None of the makers of the ideologies of post-

industrial capitalism have asked themselves what
to do about the danger that will come from the
other side of the walls.

The riots of the future will become ever more

bloody and terrible. Even more so when we know
how to transform them into mass insurrections.

Consciousness and ghettoisation

It will not be unemployment as such to negatively
define those to be excluded from the castle of
Teutonic knights, but principally the lack of real
access to information. 19
 The new model of production will of necessity
reduce the availability of information. This is
only partly due to the computerisation of society.
It is one of the basic conditions of the new
domination and as such has been developing for
at least twenty years, finding its climax in a mass
schooling that is already devoid of any concrete
operative content.

Just as the coming of machines caused a

reduction in the capacity for self-determination
during the industrial revolution, trooping the
mass of workers into factories, destroying peasant
culture and giving capital a work force who
were practically incapable of “understanding”
the contents of the new mechanised world that
was beginning to loom up; so now the computer
revolution, grafted to the process of adjustment
of capitalist contradictions by the State, is about
to deliver the factory proletariat into the hands
of a new kind of machinery that is armed with
a language that will be comprehensible to only
a privileged few. The remainder will be chased
back and obliged to share the sort of the ghetto.
20
The old knowledge, even that filtered from the
intellectuals through the deforming mirror of
ideology, will be coded in a machine language
and rendered compatible with the new needs.
This will be one of the historic occasions for
discovering, among other things, the scarcity
of real content in the ideological gibberish that
has been administered to us over the past two
centuries.

Capital will tend to abandon everything

not immediately translatable into this new
generalised language. Traditional educative
processes will become devalued and diminish
in content, unveiling their real (and selective)
substance as merchandise.

In the place of language new canons of behaviour

will be supplied, formed from fairly precise rules,
and mainly developed from the old processes
of democratisation and assembly, which capital
has learned to control perfectly. This will be
doubly useful as it will also give the excluded the
impression that they are “participating” in public
affairs.
21
The computerised society of tomorrow could
 even have clean seas and an “almost” perfect
safeguarding of the limited resources of
the environment, but it will be a jungle of
prohibitions and rules, of nightmare in the form
of deep personal decisions about participating
in the common good. Deprived of a language of
common reference, the ghettoised will no longer
be able to read between the lines of the messages
of power, and will end up having no other outlet
than spontaneous riot, irrational and destructive,
an end in itself.

The collaboration of those members of the

included, disgusted with the artificial freedom of
capital, who become revolutionary carriers of an
albeit small part of this technology which they
have managed to snatch from capital, will not be
enough to build a bridge or supply a language on
which to base knowledge and accurate counter-
information.

The organised work of future insurrections

must solve this problem, must build—perhaps
starting from scratch—the basic terms of a
22 communication that is about to be closed off; and
which, precisely in the moment of closure, could
give life, through spontaneous and uncontrolled
reactions, to such manifestations of violence as to
make past experiences pale into insignificance.

Generalised impoverishment
One should not see the new ghetto as the shanty
town of the past, a patchwork of refuse forced
on to suffering and deprivation. The new ghetto,
codified by the rules of the new language, will
be the passive beneficiary of the technology of
the future. It will also be allowed to possess the
rudimentary manual skills required to permit the
functioning of objects which, rather than satisfy
needs, are in themselves a colossal need.

These skills will be quite sufficient for the

impoverished quality of life in the ghetto.

It will even be possible to produce objects of

considerable complexity at a reasonable cost, and
advertise them with that aura of exclusivness that
traps the purchaser, now a prey to capital’s projects. 23
 Moreover, with the new productive conditions
we will no longer have repetitions of the same
objects in series, or change and development in
technology only with considerable difficulty and
cost. Instead there will be flexible, articulated
processes that are interchangeable. It will be
possible to put the new forms of control to use
at low cost, to influence demand by guiding it
and thus create the essential conditions for the
production of social peace.

Such apparent simplification of life, both for

included and excluded, such technological
“freedom” has led sociologists and economists—
as the good people they have always been—to
let go and sketch the outlines of an interclassist
society capable of living “well” without re-
awakening the monsters of the class struggle,
communism or anarchy.

The decline of interest in the unions and the

removal of any reformist significance they
might have had in the past—having become
mere transmission belts for the bosses’ orders—
24 has come to be seen as the proof of the end of
the class struggle and the coming of the post-
industrial society. This does not make sense for
a variety of reasons that we shall see further on.
Trade unionism of any kind has lost its reformist
significance, not because the class struggle is over,
but because the conditions of the clash have
changed profoundly.

Basically, we are faced with the continuation of

contradictions which are greater than ever and
remain unresolved.

Two phases
To be schematic, two phases can be identified.

In the industrial period capitalist competition and

production based on manufacturing, prevailed.
The most significant economic sector was the
secondary one (manufacturing), which used the
energy produced as the transformative resource,
and financial capital as the strategic resource.
The technology of this period was essentially
mechanical and the producer who stood out 25
 most was the worker. The methodology used in
the projects was empirical, based on experiment,
while the organisation of the productive process
as a whole was based on unlimited growth.

In the post-industrial period that we are

approaching, but have not completely entered,
the State prevails over capitalist competition and
imposes its systems of maintaining consensus
and production, with the essential aim of
promoting social peace. The elaboration of data
and the transformation of services will take the
place of the technical mode of manufacturing.
The predominant economic sectors become the
tertiary (services), the quaternary (specialised
finance), the quinary (research, leisure, education,
public administration). The main transformative
resource is information, which is composed
of a complex system of transmission of data,
while the strategic resource is provided by the
knowledge that is slowly taking the place of
financial capital. Technology is abandoning its
mechanical component and focussing itself on its
intellectual one. The typical element employed
26 by this new technology is no longer the worker
but the technician, the professional, the scientist.
The method used in the project is based on
abstract theory, not experiment as it once was,
while the organisation of the productive process
is based on the coding of theoretical knowledge.

The sunset of the worker’s leading

role
Directing our attention to the productive
industrial phase, marxism considered the
contribution of the working class to be
fundamental to the revolutionary solution
of social contradictions. This resulted in the
strategies of the workers’ movement being greatly
conditioned by the objective of conquering
power.

Hegelian ambiguity, nourished by Marx, lay at

the heart of this reasoning: that the dialectical
opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie
could be exacerbated by reinforcing the
proletariat indirectly through the reinforcement 27
of capital and the State. So each victory by
 repression was seen as the anti-chamber of the
future victory of the proletariat. The whole
was set in a progressive vision—typically of the
enlightenment—of the possibility of building
the “spirit” in a world of matter.

With a few undoubtedly interesting

modifications, this old conception of the class
struggle still persists today, at least in some of the
nightmarish dreams that arise occasionally from
the old projects of glory and conquest. A serious
analysis has never been made of this purely
imaginary conception.

There is only more or less unanimous agreement

that workers have been displaced from their
central position. First, timidly, in the sense of
a move out of the factory into the whole social
terrain. Then, more decisively, in the sense of
a progressive substitution of the secondary
manufacturing sector by the tertiary services
sector.

28
The sunset of some of the anarchists’
illusions
Anarchists have also had illusions and these have
also faded. Strictly speaking, while these illusions
were never about the central role of workers,
they often saw the world of work as being of
fundamental importance, giving precedence to
industry over the primary (agricultural) sector.
It was anarcho-syndicalism that fuelled these
illusions.

Even in recent times there has been much

enthusiasm for the CNT’s rise from the ashes,
particularly from those who seem to be the
most radical entrepreneurs of the new “roads” of
reformist anarchism today.

The main concept of this worker centrality

(different from that of the marxists, but less so
than is commonly believed), was the shadow of
the Party.

For a long time the anarchist movement has 29

acted as an organisation of synthesis, that is, like
 a party.

Not the whole of the anarchist movement, but

certainly its organised forms.

Let us take the Italian FAI (Federazione

anarchica italiana) for example. To this day it
is an organisation of synthesis. It is based on a
program, its periodical Congresses are the central
focus for its activity, and it looks to reality outside
from the point of view of a “connecting” centre,
i.e., as being the synthesis between the reality
outside the movement (revolutionary reality),
and that within the specific anarchist movement.

Of course, some comrades would object that

these remarks are too general, but they cannot
deny that the mentality that sustains the relation
of synthesis that a specific anarchist organisation
establishes with the reality outside the movement,
is one that is very close to the “party” mentality.

Good intentions are not enough.

30 Well, this mentality has faded. Not only among
younger comrades who want an open and
informal relationship with the revolutionary
movement, but, more important, it has faded in
social reality itself.

If industrial conditions of production made

the syndicalist struggle reasonable, as it did the
marxist methods and those of the libertarian
organisations of synthesis, today, in a post-
industrial perspective, in a reality that has
changed profoundly, the only possible strategy
for anarchists is an informal one. By this we mean
groups of comrades who come together with
precise objectives, on the basis of affinity, and
contribute to creating mass structures that set
themselves intermediate aims, while constructing
the minimal conditions for transforming
situations of simple riot into those of insurrection.

The party of marxism is dead. That of the

anarchists too. When I read criticisms such as
those made recently by the social ecologists
who speak of the death of anarchism, I realise
it is a question of language, as well as of lack of
ability to examine problems inside the anarchist
movement, a limitation, moreover, that is pointed 31
out by these comrades themselves. What is dead
 for them—and also for me—is the anarchism
that thought it could be the organisational point
of reference for the next revolution, that saw itself
as a structure of synthesis aimed at generating
the multiple forms of human creativity directed
at breaking up State structures of consensus and
repression. What is dead is the static anarchism of
the traditional organisations, based on claiming
better conditions, and having quantitative goals.
The idea that social revolution is something that
must necessarily result from our struggles has
proved to be unfounded. It might, but then again
it might not.

Determinism is dead, and the blind law of cause

and effect with it. The revolutionary means we
employ, including insurrection, do not necessarily
lead to social revolution. The casual model so
dear to the positivists of the last century does not
in reality exist.

The revolution becomes possible precisely for

that reason.

32
Speed and multiplicity
The reduction of time in data-transmission
means the acceleration of programmed decision-
making. If this time is reduced to zero (as happens
in electronic “real time”), programmed decisions
are not only accelerated but are also transformed.
They become something different.

By modifying projects, elements of productive

investments are also modified, transferring
themselves from traditional capital (mainly
financial) to the capital of the future (mainly
intellectual).

The management of the different is one of the

fundamental elements of reality.

By perfecting the relationship between

politics and economy, putting an end to the
contradictions produced by competition, by
organising consensus and, more importantly, by
programming all this in a perspective of real time,
the power structure cuts off a large part of society:
the part of the excluded. 33
 The greatly increased speed of productive
operations will more than anything else give rise
to a cultural and linguistic modification. Here lies
the greatest danger for the ghettoised.

End of reformism, end of the party

The party is based on the reformist hypothesis.
This requires a community of language, if not of
interest. That happened with parties and also with
trade unions. Community of language translated
itself into a fictitious class opposition that was
characterised by a request for improvements on
the one hand, and resistance to conceding them
on the other.

To ask for something requires a language “in

common” with whoever has what we are asking
for.

Now the global repressive project is aimed at

breaking up this community. Not with the walls
34
of special prisons, ghettoes, satellite cities or
big industrial centres; but, on the contrary, by
decentralising production, improving services,
applying ecological principles to production,
all with the most absolute segregation of the
excluded.

And this segregation will be obtained by

progressively depriving them of the language
that they possessed in common with the rest of
society.

There will be nothing left to ask.

The dumb excluded

In an era that could still be defined industrial,
consensus was based on the possibility of
participating in the benefits of production.
In an era where capital’s capacity to change is
practically infinite, the capital/State duo will
require a language of its own, separate from that
of the excluded in order to best achieve its new
perspective. 35
 The inaccessibility of the dominant language
will become a far more effective means of
segregation than the traditional confines of the
ghetto. The increasing difficulty in attaining
the dominant language will gradually make it
become absolutely “other”. From that moment it
will disappear from the desires of the excluded
and remain ignored by them. From that moment
on the included will be “other” for the excluded
and vice versa.

This process of exclusion is essential to the

repressive project. Fundamental concepts of the
past, such as solidarity, communism, revolution,
anarchy, based their validity on the common
recognition of the concept of equality. But for
the inhabitants of the castle of Teutonic knights
the excluded will not be men, but simply things,
objects to be bought or sold in the same way as
the slaves were for our predecessors.

We do not feel equality towards the dog, because

it limits itself to barking, it does not “speak” our
language. We can be fond of it, but necessarily
36 feel it to be “other”, and we do not spare much
thought for its kind, at least not at the level of
all dogs, preferring to attach ourselves to the dog
that provides us with its obedience, affection, or
its fierceness towards our enemies.

A similar process will take place in relation to

all those who do not share our language. Here
we must not confuse language with “tongue”.
Our progressive and revolutionary tradition has
taught us that all men are equal over and above
differences of mother tongue. We are speaking
here of a possible repressive development that
would deprive the excluded of the very possibility
of communicating with the included. 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. They,
in turn, 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 code of 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 37
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 to tell us anything
comprehensible.

Cut off from the language of the included, the

excluded will also be cut off from their new
technology. Perhaps they will live in a better, more
desirable world, with less danger of apocalyptic
conflicts, and eventually, less economically
caused tension. But there will be an increase in
irrational tension.

From the most peripheral areas of the planet,

where in spite of “real time” the project of
exploitation will always meet obstacles of an
ethnic or geographical nature, to the more
central areas where class divisions are more rigid,
economically based conflict will give way to
conflictuality of an irrational nature.

In their projects of control the included are

aiming at general consensus by reducing the
38 economic difficulties of the excluded. They
could supply them with a prefabricated language
to allow a partial and sclerotised use of some of
the dominant technology. They could also allow
them a better quality of life. But they will not be
able to prevent the outbursts of irrational violence
that arise from feeling useless, from boredom and
from the deadly atmosphere of the ghetto.

For example in Britain, always a step ahead in

the development of capital’s repressive projects,
it is already possible to see the beginning of this
tendency. The State certainly does not guarantee
survival, there is an incredible amount of poverty
and unemployment, but the riots that regularly
break out there are started by young people—
especially West Indian—who know they are
definitively cut off from a world that is already
strange to them, from which they can borrow a
few objects or ways of doing things, but where
they are already beginning to feel “other”.

From irrational riot to conscious

insurrection 39
 The mass movements that make such an
impression on some of our comrades today
because of their danger and—in their opinion—
uselessness, are signs of the direction that the
struggles of tomorrow will take.

Even now many young people are no longer

able to evaluate the situation in which they
find themselves. Deprived of that minimum of
culture that school once provided, bombarded by
messages containing aimless gratuitous violence,
they are pushed in a thousand ways towards
impetuous, irrational and spontaneous rebellion,
and deprived of the “political” objectives that past
generations believed they could see with such
clarity.

The “sites” and expressions of these collective

explosions vary a great deal. The occasions also.
In each case, however, they can be traced to an
intolerance of the society of death managed by
the capital/State partnership.

It is pointless to fear those manifestations because

40 of the traditional ideas we have of revolutionary
action within mass movements.
It is not a question of being afraid but of passing
to action right away before it is too late.

A great deal of material is now available on

techniques of conscious insurrection—to which
I myself have made a contribution—from which
comrades may realise the superficiality and
inconclusiveness of certain preconceived ideas
that tend to confuse instead of clarify.

Briefly, we reaffirm that the insurrectionary

method can only be applied by informal
anarchist organisations. These must be capable of
establishing, and participating in the functioning
of, base structures (mass organisms) whose clear
aim is to attack and destroy the objectives set
by power, by applying the principles of self-
management, permanent struggle and direct
action.

Spoken contribution to anarchist

conference held in Milan on October 41
13 1985, on the theme “Anarchism
 and insurrectional project”
In organising a conference like this there’s a
strange contradiction between its formal aspect—
such a beautiful hall (though that’s a matter of
taste), finding ourselves like this, with me up
here and so many comrades down there, some
I know well, others less so—and the substantial
aspect of discussing a problem, or rather a project,
that foresees the destruction of all this. It’s like
someone wanting to do two things at once.

This is the contradiction of life itself. We are

obliged to use the instruments of the ruling class
for a project that is subversive and destructive.
We are facing a real situation that is quite terrible,
and in our heads we have a project of dreams.

Anarchists have many projects. They are usually

very creative, but at the centre of this creativity
lies a destructive project that isn’t just a dream, a
nightmarish dream, but is something based upon,
and verified in, the social process around us.
42 In reality we must presume that this society,
lacerated and divided by oppositions and
contradictions, is moving, if not exactly towards
one final destructive explosion, at least towards a
series of small destructive eruptions.

In his nightmares this is what the man in the

street imagines insurrection to be. People armed,
burning cars, buildings destroyed, babies crying,
mothers looking for lost children. The great
problem is that on this subject the thinking of
many anarchists is also not very clear. I have
often spoken to comrades about the problems of
insurrectional and revolutionary struggle, and I
realise that the same models exist in their minds.
What is often visualised are the barricades of
the eighteenth century, the Paris Commune, or
scenes from the French Revolution.

Certainly, insurrection involves this, but not

this alone. The insurrectional and revolutionary
process is this but also something more. We are
here today precisely to try to understand this a
little better. Let’s leave the external aspects of
the problem, look one another in the eye, and try
thinking about this for a few minutes. 43
 Let us get rid of the idea of insurrection as
barricades and instead see in what way the
instrument “insurrection” can be observed
in reality today, that is, in a reality which is
undergoing a rapid and profound transformation.

Today we are not in 1871, nor 1830, nor ’48. Nor

are we at the end of the eighteenth century. We
are in a situation where industrial production is
in transformation, a situation usually described
by a phrase, which for convenience we can also
use, a “post-industrial” situation.

Some comrades who have reached this analysis,

and have thought about the profound changes
taking place in the productive situation today,
have reached the conclusion that certain old
revolutionary models are no longer valid, and that
it is necessary to find new ways with which to not
only replace these models, but to substantially
deny them, and they are proposing new forms of
intervention.

Put this way, things seem more logical, fascinating

44 in fact. Why should one endorse a cheque that
expired 100 years ago? Who would ever think
that the models of revolutionary intervention of
150 or even 200 years ago, could still be valid?
Of course we are all easily impressed by new
roads and new ways of intervening in reality,
by creativity and by the new directions that the
objective situation today puts at our disposal. But
wait a moment.

We don’t intend to use literary quotations here.

But someone once said that the capacity of the
revolutionary was to grasp as much of the future
as possible with what still exists from the past.
To combine the knife of our ancestors with the
computer of the future. How does this come
about?

Not because we are nostalgic for a world where

man went to attack his enemy with a knife
between his teeth, but quite the contrary, because
we consider the revolutionary instruments of the
past to be still valid today. Not because of any
decision by a minority who takes them up and
establishes this validity demagogically without
caring what people might think; but because
the capacity of the people to find simple means 45
readily at hand, to support any explosion of
 reaction to repression, represents the traditional
strength of every popular uprising.

Let’s try to take things in order. There was

always something that did not work right with
the capitalist project. All those who have ever
had anything to do with economic or political
analysis have been forced to admit this. Capital’s
utopia contains something technically mistaken,
that is, it wants to do three things that contradict
one another: to assure the wellbeing of a minority,
exploit the majority to the limits of survival, and
prevent insurgence by the latter in the name of
their rights.

Throughout the history of capitalism various

solutions have been found, but there have been
critical moments when capital has been obliged to
find other solutions. The American crisis between
the two wars, to give a fairly recent example: a
great crisis of capitalist overproduction, a tragic
moment linked to other marginal problems that
capital had to face. How did it manage to solve
the problem? By entering the phase of mass
46 consumerism, in other words by proposing a
project of integration and participation that
led—after the experience of the second world
war—to an extension of consumerism and thus
to an increase in production.

But why did that crisis raise such serious problems

for capital? Because until recently capital could
not bring about production without recourse to
massive investment. Let us underline the word
“until recently”, when capital had to introduce
what are known as economies of scale, and invest
considerable amounts of financial capital in order
to realise necessary changes in production. If a
new type of domestic appliance or a new model
of car was required, investment was in the order
of hundreds of millions.

This situation confronted capital with the

spectre of overproduction and with the need to
co-opt more and more of the popular strata into
massive acquisition. Anyone can see that this
could not go on for ever, for sooner or later the
game had to end in social violence. In fact the
myriad of interventions by capital and State in
their attempts to co-opt turned out to be short-
lived. Many will remember how ten or fifteen 47
years ago the economists called for economic
 planning and the possibility of finding work
for everyone. That all went up in smoke. The
fact is that they were then—note the past
tense—moving towards situations of increasing
tension. The next stage proposed by capital was
to have State structures intervene in capitalist
management, that is, to transform the State from
simple armed custodian of capital’s interests into
a productive element within capitalism itself. In
other words from cashier to banker. In this way, a
considerable transformation took place, because
the contradictions of economic competition
that were beginning to show themselves to be
fatal could be overcome by the introduction of
consumerism into the strata of the proletariat.

Today we are faced with a different situation,

and I ask you to reflect on the importance of
this, comrades, because it is precisely the new
perspective that is now opening up in the face
of repression and capital’s new techniques
for maintaining consensus, that makes a new
revolutionary project possible.

48 What has changed? What is it that characterises

post industrial reality?
What I am about to describe must be understood
as a “line of development”. It is not a question
of capital suddenly deciding to engineer a
transformation from the decision making centres
of the productive process, and doing so in a very
short space of time. Such a project would be
fantastic, unreal. In fact, something like a halfway
solution is taking place.

We must bear this in mind when speaking of

post-industrial reality because we don’t want—
as has already happened—some comrade to say:
wait a moment, I come from the most backward
part of Sicily where still today labourers are taken
on every Sunday by foremen who appear in the
piazza offering them work at 5000 Lire per day
(about two pounds and fifty pence). Certainly,
this happens, and worse. But the revolutionary
must bear these things in mind and at the same
time be aware of the most advanced points of
reference in the capitalist project. Because, if we
were only to take account of the most backward
situations we would not be revolutionaries, but
simply recuperators and reformists capable only
of pushing the power structure towards perfecting 49
the capitalist project.
 To return to our theme, what is it that distinguishes
post-industrial from industrial reality? Industrial
reality was obviously based on capital, on the
concept that at the centre of production there
was investment, and that that investment had to
be considerable. Today, with new programming
techniques, a change in the aim of capitalist
production is quite simple. It is merely a question
of changing computer programs.

Let’s examine this question carefully. Two robots

in an industry can take the place of 100 workers.
Once, the whole production line had to be changed
in order to alter production. The 100 workers
were not able to grasp the new productive project
instantly. Today the line is modified through one
important element alone. A simple operation in
computer programming can change the robots of
today into those of tomorrow at low cost. From
the productive point of view capital’s capacity
is no longer based on the resources of financial
capital, on investment in other words, but is
essentially based on intellectual capital, on the
enormous accumulation of productive capacity
50 that is being realised in the field of computer
science, the new development in technology that
allows such changes to take place.

Capital no longer needs to rely on the traditional

worker as an element in carrying out production.
This element becomes secondary in that
the principal factor in production becomes
intellectual capital’s capacity for change. So
capital no longer needs to make huge investments
or to store considerable stocks in order to regain
its initial outlay. It does not need to put pressure
on the market and can distribute productive units
over wide areas, so avoiding the great industrial
centres of the past. It can prevent pollution. We
will be able to have clean seas, clean air, better
distribution of resources. Think, comrades,
reflect on how much of the material that has been
supplied to the capitalists by ecologists will be
used against us in the future. What a lot of work
has been done for the benefit of capital’s future
plans. We will probably see industry spread over
whole territories without the great centres like
Gela, Syracuse, Genoa, Milan, etc. These will
cease to exist.

Computer programing in some skyscraper in 51

Milan, for example, will put production into
 effect in Melbourne, Detroit or anywhere else.
What will this make possible? On the one hand,
capital will be able to create a better world, one
that is qualitatively different, a better life. But
who for? That is the problem. Certainly not
for everybody. If capital was really capable of
achieving this qualitatively better world for
everyone, then we could all go home—we would
all be supporters of the capitalist ideology. The
fact is that it can only be realised for some, and
that this privileged strata will become more
restricted in the future than it was in the past.
The privileged of the future will find themselves
in a similar situation to the Teutonic knights of
mediaeval times, supporting an ideology aimed
at founding a minority of “equals”—of “equally”
privileged—inside the castle, surrounded by
walls and by the poor, who will obviously try
continually to get inside.

Now this group of privileged will not just be the

big capitalists, but a social strata that extends
down to the upper middle cadres. A very broad
strata, even if it is restricted when compared to
52 the great number of the exploited. However, let’s
not forget that we are speaking of a project that
exists only in tendency.

This strata can be defined as the “included”,

composed of those who will close themselves
inside this castle. Do you think they will surround
themselves with walls, barbed wire, armies, guards
or police? I don’t think so.

Because the prison walls, the ghetto, the dormitory

suburb and repression as a whole: police and
torture—all of those things that are quite visible
today, where comrades and proletarians all over
the world continue to die under torture—well,
all this could undergo considerable changes in
the next few years. It is important to realise that
five or ten years today corresponds to 100 years
not long ago. The capitalist project is travelling
at such speed that it has a geometric progression
unequalled to anything that has happened before.
The kind of change that took place between the
beginning of the 60’s and 1968 takes place in
only a few months today.

So what will the privileged try to do? They will

try to cut the excluded off from the included. Cut 53
off in what way? By cutting off communication.
 This is a central concept of the repression of
the future, a concept which, in my opinion,
should be examined as deeply as possible. To
cut off communication means two things. To
construct a reduced language that is modest and
has an absolutely elementary code to supply to
the excluded so that they can use the computer
terminals. Something extremely simple that will
keep them quiet. And to provide the included, on
the other hand, with a language of “the included”,
so that their world will go towards that utopia of
privilege and capital that is sought more or less
everywhere. This will be the real wall: the lack of
a common language. This will be the real prison
wall, one that is not easily scaled.

This problem presents various interesting aspects.

Above all there is the situation of the included
themselves. Let us not forget that in this world
of privilege there will be people who in the past
have had extensive revolutionary-ideological
experience, and they may not enjoy their situation
of privilege tomorrow, feeling themselves
asphyxiated inside the Teutonic castle. They
53 will be the first thorn in the side of the capitalist
project. The class homecomers, that is, those who
abandon their class. Who were the homecomers
of the class of yesterday? I, myself, once belonged
to the class of the privileged. I abandoned it to
become “a comrade among comrades”, from
privileged of yesterday to revolutionary of today.
But what have I brought with me? I have brought
my Humanistic culture, my ideological culture.
I can only give you words. But the homecomer
of tomorrow, the revolutionary who abandons
tomorrow’s privileged class, will bring technology
with him, because one of the characteristics
of tomorrow’s capitalist project and one of the
essential conditions for it to remain standing, will
be a distribution of knowledge that is no longer
pyramidal but horizontal. Capital will need to
distribute knowledge in a more reasonable and
equal way—but always within the class of the
included. Therefore the deserters of the future
will bring with them a considerable number of
usable elements from a revolutionary point of
view.

And the excluded? Will they continue to keep

quiet? In fact, what will they be able to ask for
once communication has been cut off? To ask 55
for something, it is necessary to know what to
 ask for. I cannot have an idea based on suffering
and the lack of something of whose existence I
know nothing, which means absolutely nothing
to me and which does not stimulate my desires.
The severing of a common language will make
the reformism of yesterday—the piecemeal
demand for better conditions and the reduction
of repression and exploitation—completely
outdated. Reformism was based on the common
language that existed between exploited and
exploiter. If the languages are different, nothing
more can be asked for. Nothing interests me about
something I do not understand, which I know
nothing about. So, the realisation of the capitalist
project of the future of this post-industrial project
as it is commonly imagined—will essentially be
based on keeping the exploited quiet. It will give
them a code of behaviour based on very simple
elements so as to allow them to use the telephone,
television, computer terminals, and all the other
objects that will satisfy the basic, primary, tertiary
and other needs of the excluded and at the same
time ensure that they are kept under control. This
will be a painless rather than a bloody procedure.
56 Torture will come to an end. No more bloodstains
on the wall. That will stop—up to a certain point,
of course. There will be situations where it will
continue. But, in general, a cloak of silence will
fall over the excluded.

However, there is one flaw in all this. Rebellion

in man is not tied to need alone, to being aware
of the lack of something and struggling against
it. If you think about it this is a concept from the
Enlightenment, which was later developed by
English philosophical ideology—Bentham and
co.—who spoke from a Utilitarian perspective.
For the past 150 years our ideological propaganda
has been based on these rational foundations,
asking why it is that we lack something, and why
it is right that we should have something because
we are all equal; but, comrades, what they are
going to cut along with language is the concept
of equality, humanity, fraternity. The included
of tomorrow will not feel himself humanly and
fraternally similar to the excluded but will see him
as something other. The excluded of tomorrow
will be outside the Teutonic castle and will not
see the included as his possible post revolutionary
brother of tomorrow. They will be two different
things. In the same way that today I consider my 57
dog “different” because it does not “speak” to me
 but barks. Of course I love my dog, I like him, he
is useful to me, he guards me, is friendly, wags his
tail; but I cannot imagine struggling for equality
between the human and the canine races. All
that is far beyond my imagination, is other.
Tragically, this separation of languages could also
be possible in the future. And, indeed, what will
be supplied to the excluded, what will make up
that limited code, if not what is already becoming
visible: sounds, images, colours. Nothing of that
traditional code that was based on the word, on
analysis and common language. Bear in mind that
this traditional code was the foundation upon
which the illuminist and progressive analysis
of the transformation of reality was made, an
analysis which still today constitutes the basis of
revolutionary ideology, whether authoritarian or
anarchist (there is no difference as far as the point
of departure is concerned). We anarchists are still
tied to the progressive concept of being able to
bring about change with words. But if capital
cuts out the word, things will be very different.
We all have experience of the fact that many
young people today do not read at all. They can
58 be reached through music and images (television,
cinema, comics). But these techniques, as those
more competent than myself could explain,
have one notable possibility—in the hands of
power—which is to reach the irrational feelings
that exist inside all of us. In other words, the
value of rationality as a means of persuasion and
in developing self-awareness that could lead us
to attack the class enemy will decline, I don’t say
completely, but significantly.

So, on what basis will the excluded act? (Because,

of course, they will continue to act). They will act
on strong irrational impulses.

Comrades, I urge you to think about certain

phenomena that are already happening today,
especially in Great Britain, a country which from
the capitalist point of view has always been the
vanguard and still holds that position today. The
phenomena of spontaneous, irrational riots.

At this point we must fully understand the

difference between riot and insurrection,
something that many comrades do not do. A riot
is a movement of people which contains strong
irrational characteristics. It could start for any 59
reason at all: because some bloke in the street
 gets arrested, because the police kill someone in
a raid, or even because of a fight between football
fans. There is no point in being afraid of this
phenomenon. Do you know why we are afraid?
Because we are the carriers of the ideology of
progress and illuminism. Because we believe the
certainties we hold are capable of guaranteeing
that we are right, and that these people are
irrational—even fascist—provocateurs, people
whom it is necessary to keep silent at all costs.

Things are quite different. In the future there will

be more and more of these situations of subversive
riots that are irrational and unmotivated. I feel
fear spreading among comrades in the face of this
reality, a desire to go back to methods based on
the values of the past and the rational capacity
to clarify. But I don’t believe it will be possible
to carry on using such methods for very long.
Certainly we will continue to bring out our
papers, our books, our written analyses, but those
with the linguistic means to read and understand
them will be fewer in number.

60 What is causing this situation? A series of realities

that are potentially insurrectional or objectively
anything but insurrectional. And what should our
task be? To continue arguing with the methods of
the past? Or to try moving these spontaneous riot
situations in an effective insurrectional direction
capable of attacking not just the included, who
remain with in their Teutonic castle, but also the
actual mechanism that is cutting out language. In
future we shall have to work towards instruments
in a revolutionary and insurrectional vein that
can be read by the excluded.

Let us speak clearly. We cannot accomplish the

immense task of building an alternative school
capable of supplying rational instruments to
people no longer able to use them. We cannot,
that is, replace the work that was once done
by the opposition when what it required was a
common language. Now that the owners and
dispensers of the capacity to rationalise have
cut communication, we cannot construct an
alternative. That would be identical to many
illusions of the past. We can simply use the same
instruments (images, sounds, etc.) in such a way
as to transmit concepts capable of contributing to
turning situations of riot into insurrection. This 61
is work that we can do, that we must begin today.
 This is the way we intend insurrection.

Contrary to what many comrades imagine—

that we belong to the eighteenth century and
are obsolete—I believe that we are truly capable
of establishing this slender air-bridge between
the tools of the past and the dimensions of the
future. Certainly it will not be easy to build. The
first enemy to be defeated, that within ourselves,
comes from our aversion to situations that
scare us, attitudes we do not understand, and
discourses that are incomprehensible to an old
rationalist like myself.

Yet it is necessary to make an effort. Many

comrades have called for an attack in the
footsteps of the Luddites 150 years ago. Certainly
it is always a great thing to attack, but Luddism
has seen its day. The Luddites had a common
language with those who owned the machines.
There was a common language between the
owners of the first factories and the proletariat
who refused and resisted inside them. One side
ate and the other did not, but apart from this by no
62 means negligible difference, they had a common
language. Reality today is tragically different.
And it will become increasingly different in
the future. It will therefore be necessary to
develop conditions so that these riots do not find
themselves unprepared. Because, comrades, let us
be clear about this, it is not true that we can only
prepare ourselves psychologically; go through
spiritual exercises, then present ourselves in real
situations with our flags. That is impossible. The
proletariat, or whatever you want to call them,
the excluded who are rioting, will push us away as
peculiar and suspect external visitors. Suspicious.
What on earth can we have in common with
those acting anonymously against the absolute
uselessness of their own lives and not because
of need and scarcity? With those who react even
though they have colour TV at home, video,
telephone and many other consumer objects; who
are able to eat, yet still react? What can we say to
them? Perhaps what the anarchist organisations
of synthesis said in the last century? Malatesta’s
insurrectionalist discourse? This is what is
obsolete. That kind of insurrectional argument is
obsolete. We must therefore find a different way,
very quickly.
63
And a different way has first of all to be found
 within ourselves, through an effort to overcome
the old habits inside us and our incapacity to
understand the new. Be certain that Power
understands this perfectly and is educating the
new generations to accept submission through a
series of subliminal messages. But this submission
is an illusion.

When riots break out we should not be there as

visitors to a spectacular event, and because in any
case, we are anarchists and the event fills us with
satisfaction. We must be there as the realisers of a
project that has been examined and gone into in
detail be forehand.

What can this project be? That of organising with

the excluded, no longer on an ideological basis,
no longer through reasoning exclusively based
on the old concepts of the class struggle, but on
the basis of something immediate and capable of
connecting with reality, with different realities.
There must be areas in your own situations
where tensions are being generated. Contact with
these situations, if it continues on an ideological
64 basis, will end up having you pushed out.
Contact must be on a different basis, organised
but different. This cannot be done by any large
organisation with its traditionally illuministic or
romantic claim to serve as a point of reference
and synthesis in a host of different situations;
it can only be done by an organisation that is
agile, flexible and able to adapt. An informal
organisation of anarchist comrades—a specific
organisation composed of comrades having an
anarchist class consciousness, but who recognise
the limits of the old models and propose
different, more flexible models instead. They
must touch reality, develop a clear analysis and
make it known, perhaps using the instruments of
the future, not just the instruments of the past.
Let us remember that the difference between the
instruments of the future and those of the past
does not lie in putting a few extra photographs
in our papers. It is not simply a matter of giving
a different, more humorous or less pedantic edge
to our writing, but of truly understanding what
the instruments of the future are, of studying
and going into them, because it is this that will
make it possible to construct the insurrectional
instruments of the future, to put alongside the
knife that our predecessors carried between their 65
teeth. In this way the air-bridge we mentioned
 earlier can be built.

Informal organisation, therefore, that establishes

a simple discourse presented without grand
objectives, and without claiming, as many do, that
every intervention must lead to social revolution,
otherwise what sort of anarchists would we be?
Be sure comrades, that social revolution is not
just around the corner, that the road has many
corners, and is very long. Agile interventions,
therefore, even with limited objectives, capable
of striking in anticipation the same objectives
that are established by the excluded. An
organisation that is capable of being “inside”
the reality of the subversive riot at the moment
it happens to transform it into an objectively
insurrectional reality by indicating objectives,
means and constructive conclusions. This is the
insurrectional task. Other roads are impassable
today.

Certainly, it is still possible to go along the road

of the organisation of synthesis, of propaganda,
anarchist educationism and debate—as we are
66 doing just now of course—because, as we said,
this is a question of a project in tendency, of
attempting to understand something about a
capitalist project that is in development. But, as
anarchist revolutionaries, we are obliged to bear
this line of development in mind, and prepare
ourselves from this moment on to transform
irrational situations of riot into an insurrectional
and revolutionary reality.

67
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