Regarding my convictions and trial charges and the nexus of non-systemic revolutionary struggle action practices and “my” meaning of the anarchist vision
“(…) The reality is precisely this complex thing that cannot be traced back to the results of a judicial proceeding. This will always be arbitrary and will be based not on evidence but on force, not on logic but on domination. Difficult reasoning? Maybe so, but reasoning that once done can never be forgotten” [Published with the title “Noterelle su Sacco e Vanzetti. In margine a un convegno di studi”, in “Anarchismo”, n. 63, July 1989, pp. 36-40].
Alfredo Maria Bonanno, A mano armata, Pensiero e azione, Edizioni Anarchismo
In remembrance, and a warm greeting and see you soon comrade Alfredo!
Note:
To facilitate the writing of the text, I chose to use mainly the masculine as a gender ending. Aware of the importance of rejecting and countering gender abuses (as of any kind), I trust in the reader’s understanding so that no one feels discriminated against.
Premise:
Hello to all, compañeras and to all, compañeros
I am Juan Sorroche, an anarchist prisoner arrested on May 22, 2019 and I write from the AS2 section of the Terni prison where I have been locked up for 5 years.
After my heavy sentence on January 26, 2024 in Rome in the Court of Cassation trial for the action against the Lega Nord, a party that was and is part of the government of the Italian State, a strongly racist, misogynistic and xenophobic party.
As an anarchist prisoner I would like to make clear to comrades, revolutionaries, outcasts and oppressed the connection of the causes of the struggle for which I am here in prison today as an anarchist prisoner.
In the first instance, even though the prosecutor had removed the charge of “political massacre” (285), I was sentenced to 28 years in prison plus 3 years of probation. On appeal, almost half of the sentence, I was sentenced to 14 years and 7 months. A few days ago, the Court of Cassation definitively sentenced me to 14 years and 7 months, a significant and exemplary sentence for the attack.
In the first instance, I want to say that I entered prison already having spent a cumulative period of about 8 years behind bars for my struggles in Italy, which is why I escaped into hiding in 2016 to continue living-fighting. Of these 8 years, 4 years are for the “NO TAV trial”. Subsequently, the other 4 years were different trials related to anti-prison and anti-CPR struggles, anti-fascist and anti-democratic struggles, struggles against technologies, GMOs, “environmentalists”, in which I took part, always trying to include the anti-state and anti-capitalist aspect of anarchism in Trentino as well as in different Italian situations. Including the Susa Valley, a path that I had taken in the past years in the NO TAV struggle against one of the projects of capital and the State and the devastating tentacle of the high-speed train. I was arrested, among many others, for the days of struggle and violent clashes of July 3, 2011. During the trial and during my imprisonment at the time, I claimed with a personal statement those days of struggle and the paths of opposition to the TAV and more generally the anti-state and anti-capitalist aspect. I refused the defense in the “NOTAV Trial”, positioning myself anti-juridically even trying to fight in court by refusing the trial, believing that I should not “defend” myself in that judicial theater, and for this I was sentenced to 4 years and 6 months. And I take those decisions with my head held high.
In May 2019, after 2 and a half years on the run, I was arrested together with another comrade accused of having supported my being on the run, and then the comrade was sentenced for aiding and abetting to a year and a half, a sentence that was significant and exemplary as we had not seen each other for years, and it gave us a hint of the new tenor of the trials to come.
When I was arrested, little by little, I became aware of a series of investigations and trials that see me accused of several attacks (with terrorist aims) in Italy:
– the bombs at the headquarters of the Lega Nord in Treviso for the attack of 12/08/2018, regarding the two explosive devices, one exploded and another full of nails discovered by the bomb squad in the form of a trap to carry out the components of the building and the police; these were placed in the headquarters of the Lega Nord in Treviso and were claimed with the claim:
“Let’s hit them at home!!!: (…) to specifically attack racism and exploitation. To strike at the state, capital and its perpetrators. Direct action makes it clear to us why and how. For an internationalist, rebellious, and anarchist solidarity! Solidarity with all prisoners (…). And to all the rebels locked up in the homeland prisons of the world!
Haris Hatzimihelakis Cell/Black International 1881/2018”.
– the bomb at the Surveillance Court of Trento 2014. Sentenced in the first instance to 3 years and 2 months, then acquitted on appeal, I must soon go to the Supreme Court. Claimed anonymously: in solidarity and to give voice to the prisoners who struggle with dignity in all prisons and to the anarchist comrades who were in prison isolated in AS2 in Italy and other anarchist prisoners in the world.
– the bomb against the POL GAI (police academy) claimed by cell H, I report some sketches of the published claim:
“(…) as a cell H (C.A.A.) akin to the Black International and we join the call to action for a BLACK DECEMBER. We attacked one of the armed arms of the state. In this “school” cops from all over Italy and other countries are educated. This is a small signal against war. We stand in solidarity with all the people who are fighting against all states and capital. Our thoughts go out to the many comrades who have been repressed, locked up, tortured, or killed in the present and in the past. In solidarity with all the detainees who are struggling.”
This is in the context of the campaign launched by anarchist prisoners in Greece for a Black December, called international in the context of anarchist action in 2015.
A trial that I will begin shortly.
To date, I have accumulated 23 years in prison.
Actions that I agree with because for me they are part of the history of our movement of struggle in non-systemic revolutionary anarchism of action and of the struggle for freedom of all the oppressed in the world. Regardless of whether or not I am responsible for these facts. And I am determined to move forward in my anarchist life in order to live-fight within my limited possibilities as a prisoner.
– General Causes of Struggle and the Connection of Non-Systemic Revolutionary Struggle Practices –
“(…) Our ethics have nothing to do with the morals of this domination society. But we cannot let our enemies speak for us. Rather, to obstruct, crack, subvert the narrative of power, striving to overturn it into our own discourse, which never loses sight of what we hold dear.”
“Solidarity and its ghost”, “Days and nights”“It is always the present that has a transformative look at the past. The past is not immobile in a safe, it is always there at the disposal of the new generations and this was said by a great Jewish intellectual who was Walter Benjamin, it is the struggles of the present that reactivate the sparks of hope of the past, because the past, in its attempts at emancipation, equality, utopia, has remained unfinished, But that unfinished is not buried forever, it can be reactivated today. (…)”.
“The Unfinished Past and the Necessary Courage” (from a speech in the square in Trento, February 2024 in solidarity with the Palestinian people)
I believe it is necessary to take a stand and clarify the meaning of the causes of the struggle in anarchism and that have brought me here to prison to try to overturn the description of the authorities and turn it into our own discourse of struggle, given the many times that it has been interpreted and falsified by the state power with so many dogmatic roles that have placed me on me by forcing and fitting roles, hierarchies, and ideologies that were never assumed. As well as the significance of sharing the practices of action of revolutionary struggle for which I continue to be accused today, and for which I have already been sentenced to an exemplary penalty.
I have no regrets about being an individualist anarchist, on the contrary, I am proud. And this, I repeat, regardless of whether or not I am responsible for these events, I continue to share the actions of the anarchist struggle against capital and all racist, imperialist and colonialist states such as Italy, or Spain where I was born. I will give a speech on the general causes of “my” struggle in anarchism in Italy. It is also a struggle for the freedom of all the oppressed, of which I am a part. Because the anarchism of action and the anarchism of insurrectional planning is the galaxy-movement that I have been attending for 25 years. In anarchism of action we have, whether we like it or not, “politically”-socially our spaces, times and methods created over years and years with our struggle, struggle from 150 years of anarchist history, as well as its different perspectives. I have always been careful, I have “studied” as an autodidact, it was only in prison at the age of 46 that I took the title of middle school, and I must say that since I began to read, twenty years ago, over time I have understood that I did it, at the beginning, instinctively, as an instrument of awareness of the man in revolt; This is to say how important theories, books, and our newspapers are in anarchism as a tool, as tools of relationships and experimental knowledge that accompanies the perspective in order to know how to direct action.
I think it is fundamental to understand the methodologies of past experiences in anarchism and of revolutionary experiences or struggles of all times against any form of authority.
And so, apart from my natural curiosity about all things in the universe, I always try to be careful to connect the fundamental roots of our past struggle in anarchism. Which always, it must be said, has been a struggle between the outcasts of the outcasts; The lumpen is the essence of non-systemic and heretical revolutionary anarchism. I believe that the revolt and revolutionary methodologies of the past are essential to know, as our roots, in order to grow and develop in praxis today, in the present, to try to evolve them continuously for the better as well as to try again with our possibilities in libertarian anarchism, a struggle that is, always, against every authoritarian oppressor.
The State and repression often signal to us directly, when they condemn us in an exemplary way, indicating that those actions and in general the actions of attack with their causes of struggle remain qualitatively blunt if they are not accompanied by a projection and libertarian perspectives in the struggle side by side with the exploited and the consequent real forces that must be created.
But it is not always fighting side by side with the exploited in the traditional sense, that is, in the sense of the same space-time, it is not only grouping together and homogenizing in a united front, but also knowing how to create for oneself the struggle with our space-times, and in our space-times, and also knowing how to respect the other space-times in their different diversities of oppressed people who fight against all authoritarianism.
What we need to be aware of about the different struggles is that they are already intrinsically linked to the various anti-authoritarian struggles, they are interconnected with our common needs as oppressed, outcasts, and we must learn to look at it through other lenses that are not the same as those of this civilization. A vision of clear awareness because interconnectedness lies in the very nature of being oppressed and rejected.
But be careful, I don’t forget my contradictions and imperfections. Let’s not forget our contradictions related to our privileges as Westerners, whites, heterosexual cis males: heterosexual is not a fault in itself, but it is when it is the only way imposed by state education that imposes on children this one-way binary on us without leaving us a free choice. All of this is imposed by the family, patriarchal, Christian structure here in the West. And I believe that it is the first link in the chain of privileges and oppressions, the basis that supports hierarchical-state civilization in the West.
Just as we must not forget our different and diversified oppressions, gender, racialization, from the place where we were born and the consequent social class. And we pay close attention in the capitalist economy to the intrinsic unwaged, slave-like and authoritarian labor in the family that has been imposed for centuries on women or other individuals not aligned with the canons of society. The latter, in general, women, more if they are immigrants, lesbians, trans, as well as homosexuals etc. etc.
These should be observed, accepted, compared, and cared for as such in our different oppressions and privileges. I say they should because it is a self-criticism, to the little attention and care I have given and continue to give to it.
Therefore there is an urgent need to know how to create the non-duality of struggle, which is to know how to create by oneself struggle intrinsic to the solidarity care of sensitivity, which is courage and another type of paradigm of conceiving struggle and sensitivity and strength.
It’s what I conceptually call:
My two fundamental pillars of anarchism are the two dragons of anarchy.
Which is a figural image to simplify and try to communicate and explain very complex concepts of struggle and which are for me the inside-outside of individuality with the inside-outside of the collective in anarchist struggle.
– The first dragon has two faces and is like yin with yang.
Yin is the fundamental destruction of this backbone which is our privileges, rooted in us, diverse and diversified.
Yang is the creative aspect and must be accompanied by the continuous creation of ourselves with self-education which is the development of the individual Self, accompanying it to the anarchic Being as an opening to the cosmo-vision to the other, and to everything that surrounds us in general; We, as individuals, are an inseparable part of it.
So it’s clear awareness, it’s striving for liberation all the time. It is an internal revolution of being, and for me personally it is liberation as a practice of continuous mystical-spiritual self-education.
– The other dragon is the organization individually and collectively for the external attack on the systemic and oppressive structure and which produces the different social and material morals as a social organization and destruction of this authoritarian civilization and therefore the consequent struggle to organize for the attack on every hierarchical and authoritarian power.
These two general dragons are at the same time yin-yang and must always walk hand in hand with their organic overall path with the prospect of total liberation.
I believe that this journey with the two dragons is a constant path throughout our life of relationships of the whole and must be constantly balanced and rebalanced. It is an articulated and organic perspective, so if we isolate or remove a part of it, this part is destined to wither because it lives on an alienated life and an illusory life, since it does not receive sap from the rest of the plant, that is, from all these other fundamental factors of living-fighting.
And so I have often noticed that, in state-repression, the state clearly wants to erase the social and “political” context, cut off the sap and naturalize in the oppressed who struggle isolation and fragmentation by alienating us. Depolicizing, denaturalizing us from the natural social context of the actions, struggles, and paths of comrades, alienating us from our contexts and thus conceptually disconnecting them from the struggles of the oppressed of which we are a natural part.
And that it is right not to forget that these actions are not talk but concrete expressions of anarchist solidarity practices for all the oppressed, the last.
The state is aware that there has always been this uncontrollable possibility of contagiousness. That is why it strikes by repressing the rebels and revolutionaries in order to prevent and minimize such uncontrollable possibilities.
The State knows that today in Italy there are no real revolutionary material forces against an infinitely more powerful State. But it knows that the aims, ours, are ideologically right, because they try to create this uncontrollable contagious possibility. However, uncontrollable possibilities must be created by attacking and fighting at the roots of the systemic violence that has been carried out for centuries and centuries by racist-colonialist and capitalist states.
But we must also be honest with ourselves, and aware that the will, the passions of the heart, utopian ideologies are necessary and fundamental. But methodological and material creations, the preparation of the praxis of the real objective and qualitative forces, as an anarchist revolutionary minority, are fundamental, and lacking, in order to be able to give impetus to libertarian struggles, to be aware that these different aspects are inseparable from each other. And this is the need to intertwine the set of practices of struggle, leaflets, newspapers, occupations, urban and partisan guerrilla warfare, as well as to continue to refine analysis and material skills. And so it is that we must fight again and again to ensure that the imbalance is reversed by revolutionary gymnastics.
In addition, the propaganda of practice shows and warns, tells all of us oppressed that the time to act is now. And that the task of every individuality is to struggle to eradicate the very thing we have before our eyes today; the massacres, the genocides of the oppressed at the hands of capitalism and of every state that by nature is racist and imperialist and colonialist.
That is why today solidarity cannot fail to go to the resistance of the oppressed Palestinians who have been resisting Western colonialism with armed guerrilla warfare for 75 years.
Because from October 7 until today in Palestine 30,000 people have been killed under bombs and most of them civilians, many and many children slaughtered. Not to mention the 75-year-old genocide carried out by the Israeli-Zionist state. With the complicity of the capitalist colonialism of the USA and Western European states such as Italy. This is the systemic racism of the state.
Just as the continuous systemic massacres intrinsically naturalized in our eyes, as we see every day in the Mediterranean, are systemic racism of the State. Or in Libya with the great concentration camps, such as on the island of Lesbos in Greece, or in Italy, France, England, Spain, and this is because of the slave capitalist exploitation of the labor of immigrants in the countryside as well as in all the cities of the West and of the whole capitalist globalized world.
Which are the same various military corps that arrested me, that keep me prisoner, and serve to consolidate this racist state in order to keep their power as exploiters unchangeable. They want to wipe out the very high levels of social racism that existed when those revolutionary actions were carried out, as we see today in Italy and in the world, and that all states and capitalism have been fomenting for decades. Just as it is today throughout Italian society, passing it off as something that is devoid of violence, a simple opinion… States and capitalism have always wanted to gloss over these fundamental questions and foment fragmentation, isolation, alienation with the very useful tool of war and the racism that is the struggle between us poor and oppressed: divide and rule.
We Westerners will have to study all this, know it, because we are accomplices of the West with its European colonial movements, bearers of the inspiration of the concept of exterminating and eliminating indigenous people in the world, my Spanish ancestors, where I was born, know something about this, and we should be ashamed of what the Spanish State is.
That is why we must use the privileges that we have acquired through the genocide and the blood of the indigenous people exterminated over the centuries to try to fight against our Western states, forcefully, against the racist ideologies, offspring of all states and of capitalism, imperialism and all the colonial movements that have very deep roots in Western Europe and the state.
That is why yesterday as today we must fight against the ethnic cleansing of the oppressed of Palestine by fighting against our Western states, so we fight against the colonialist State of Israel which has as its ideology Zionism, which is intrinsically racist.
And therefore:
“We cannot talk today about what is happening in Israel and Palestine without talking about Zionism, and in fact it is no accident that so much effort has been put into it by Israel and its supporters, in this as in other countries, to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and so you will be silenced. Nevertheless, this is the only correct way to represent this story.”
But be careful, because this history is also a history of struggle and resistance of the oppressed Palestinians, and it must be above all ours, of the outcasts who struggle all over the world.
“Therefore it is necessary to go to the roots of the violence that arises from precise ideologies, racist ideologies, and that arises from Western nation states, from capitalism, from which also arises the Zionist ideology at the base of which is the elimination of the natives.”
That is the connection, the core, the causes of the struggle for which I am here in prison today.
The struggle for the destruction of any state, of capitalism, with its consequent wars, genocides, racisms, sexisms, patriarchy, apartheid, every prison, every cage and frontier as well as every hierarchy and authoritarianism of every color and type. That is, for Anarchy.
The specific nexus of the anarchist prisoner to try to contribute and formulate analyses and methodologies in struggle with the relationship of the causes of the general struggle.
“To date, the war against the internal enemy has irremediably overlapped with that against the external enemy, in a single movement for the accumulation of political, economic and cultural dominance that is primarily to the disadvantage of populations and opponents.
In this context, the amalgamation of the anti-mafia and anti-terrorism judiciary (2015) has generated an overwhelming machine that feeds itself with ever new investigations and means available to surveil more and more people or make believe they do so, with the aim of installing fear and creating a vacuum around those who are most directly affected.
Against any distinction between guilty and innocent, which is the pure arbitrariness of the democratic inquisition, supporting the reasons for the revolt and the identities under attack, is a matter of collective self-defense. The increasingly harsh repressive tools that are used against certain categories of people are destined to expand. The expansion of the 41bis regime, the recent history of the repressive instrument of 270 (subversive association), the indictment of Zac for 270 quinquies (self-training), the security package, the Caivano Decree, the extension of surveillance and imprisonment at all levels, are examples of this. In this vein, self-organized unions are accused of criminal association, the struggle of the organized unemployed becomes extortion, street clashes are punished with the Camorra aggravating circumstance, publications or banners censored on charges of incitement to crime or apology for terrorism. The exemption of preventive measures and the device of “special surveillance” – historically used to punish the poor, brigands and anti-fascists – is also one of the many consequences of the fusion of anti-mafia and anti-terrorism apparatuses and of the need to equate the war paraphernalia against organized crime (media, legal, linguistic) against dissidents […].
This system is historically the expression of a deep-rooted culture of suspicion and of the tendency, since the colonization of Southern Italy, to transform the social question, ideals and struggles into judicial-criminal problems.”
– Naples, from a text released during the general strike of February 23 –
– Social surveillance and special surveillance –
And so, as perfectly analyzed above by the Neapolitan comrades, I believe that this is the case with my specific condemnation of the Lega Nord. And as well as the “new” trial that I am about to undergo for 280 (terrorist attack) in Brescia.
Therefore, these trials and convictions not only affect us as specific individuals in themselves, but above all as tactical-strategic dynamics of the Italian State, complicit in the colonial wars in general and specifically for that of Israel in this historical moment with the strategic patrol of the warship in the Red Sea and the huge sale of arms to Israel to defend it, as well as the complicity in the repression and imprisonment by order of Israel in Italy of 3 Palestinians with the use of 270. One locked up in this section of AS2 in Terni. My solidarity goes to them.
And this is where these general repressive instruments come in, with the not-so-veiled orders of the powerful machine of the National District Anti-Terrorism Anti-Mafia Directorate, with exemplary sentences in this historical moment to the internal enemy.
And specifically for the bombs at the headquarters of the Lega Nord in Treviso. With a disproportion of punishment between the facts and the crime, a sentence that is unprecedented in the last decades of the history of the anarchist movement, with the increase in repression and the change in interpretations of existing laws. As with the law of “political massacre”. Just as for the first time the massacre passed in the convictions of Anna Beniamino and Alfredo Cospito, anarchist comrades. To whom goes all my solidarity and esteem. Disproportion is an understatement.
And so it is with the new trial of the bomb against the POL GAI (police academy) with the address and orders of the not-so-veiled D.D.N.A.A. behind the Brescia magistracy. A trial that will begin shortly.
But I don’t want to dwell only on the level of technical analysis of the trial, or repression as bad luck. On the other hand, I would like to highlight the context of the struggle of this action, specifically against the POL GAI, of which I am accused. Regardless of whether or not I am responsible for these facts.
Context for this action, which is a method used in anarchism for a long time and which in this specific case was the Black December campaign launched by anarchist prisoners in Greece and with a worldwide internationalist response of anarchist action in 2015.
And that I would like to mention:
“As a leitmotif of anarchy and direct action, it was able to unite comrades from Greece, Italy, Colombia, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, the U.K., Germany, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, the U.S.A., Uruguay, Australia, Peru, Ecuador and Belgium through many multifaceted actions. Texts by fellow prisoners, counter-information, and propaganda actions, banners in prison wings, militant marches and clashes with the police, fires, bombs and vandalism against enemy targets, initiatives in squats and social centers, publications of anarchist works describing insurrectional experiences and direct action, manuals and theoretical analyses of different visions, All of them have contributed in their own unique way to a polymorphous front of informally organized struggle that internationalizes experiences and goes on the attack.”
Nikos Romanos, “Attack therefore I am”
And this is in fact the real context that has been a contribution of living and qualitative anarchist action. Beyond what the magistracy of Brescia will say, which only wants to decontextualize and depoliticize this set of legal and illegal actions of struggle and which have no hierarchical importance for those who contributed to the call of Black December and that the action at the POL GAI of Brescia is not part of it.
Just as they want to decontextualize and depoliticize my anarchism given the many times that the judiciary has interpreted and falsified in the various investigations and judicial venues, such as the “new” investigation and the Brescia trial, with the many dogmatic roles that they have placed on me, because, first, I am not an anarcho-insurrectionist, as they continually parrot, and I reject this figure and this concept because it is imposed by the different prosecutors in different trials as part of a category to be generalized and unified at will to better direct the investigations of the judiciary and the D.D.N.A.A. I am an individualist anarchist, and it is certainly not going to be the prosecutors who will categorize me in a label stigmatized for their own gain.
And so, they have done the same and interpreted at will regarding the different issues of the aperiodic “Beznachalie” that they have taken as evidence, they do the same continuously, interpreting and distorting the texts.
Among other things, a public aperiodic, and not clandestine, occult or shady, as they want to pass off to create an environment of suspicion, and which among other things I have always proudly claimed as part of my ideas and as a means of free propaganda and self-produced by me. And as I wrote publicly in the aperiodical, n.9, sharing with my head held high the method and the campaign of Black December in 2016.
A call that is still a valid method-tool, a qualitative method, and that is part of the entire anarchist movement of action.
It is a method of articulation of all those in the anarchist movement who share it. not a label or an acronym, as the judiciary and the D.D.N.A.A. want to pass by blaming me for roles and dogmatic hierarchies that have never been shared.
These reflections always start from self-criticism. With this I want to state clearly and firmly what I think and am convinced of, but honestly I am not interested in stating my own reasons.
However, I believe that in initiating discussions, proposals and calls, specific or general and which should lead to multifaceted actions, these are discussions, proposals and calls that are lively, and it is important to discuss them among the comrades. Therefore we should be reminded that all comrades who recognize each other are on the same side, therefore not enemies; otherwise, what’s the point of arguing or doing things together?
I believe that when it has been decided to make discussions, proposals and calls it would be very appropriate and advisable to tell us clearly what we want to achieve from these discussions, proposals and calls, and the reasons why we are taking on the informally articulated in anarchism of action. I also believe that in order to start discussions and proposals, it would be necessary to be clear in perspective, which simply means thinking first about the different problems that we can find, or many other things that could be useful, or what actions we do not agree on.
Or because: “if the comrades were to be defended only within the limits of the international anarchist movement, basing propaganda only on the motivations of the anarchists and accepting only those foreign forces that declared themselves willing to remain within the limits of those motivations” (A. M. B).
I believe that this should be done first for the sake of logic and many other unnecessary problems would be avoided. Then I believe that, apart from what A.M.B. emphasizes, that for me it may be good in general, for anarchist comrades and in particular if you do not agree with the actions or the proactiveness of the actions that led to the imprisonment of the comrades. However, if one shares politically the struggles and actions of which they are accused, I believe that we should remember the causes of why the comrades are in prison; of course, if one agrees. In addition, I believe that it is we anarchists who must have our compass and our anarchist projects of praxis firmly in place, and the straight rudder of direct action and rupture against all authority, and not let ourselves be carried away by the various waves. Having this clear, it is obvious that the reformists will act as reformists and the world of the press and entertainment will make a sensationalist show and probably obscuring us spectacularly, even when we are on all the TV in the world; That’s spectacle, it’s fiction, it’s illusion. But should we anarchists be interested in this? Not if we are clear and proceed with our anarchist and revolutionary project, because the real forces are quite different. Otherwise, how do we think we are in a broad revolt or an insurrection and revolution?
And so it would be appropriate to ask ourselves and question ourselves on these proposals, but first among comrades:
“If anarchists do everything they can to broaden their propaganda, to involve the people, to make themselves heard by as many people as possible, how can they then, when the opportunity presents itself, not accept the collaboration of political and intellectual forces that know very well where they want to go?
How to get out of the dilemma? In a simple way, always starting from the thesis that for us the technical fact is secondary, and that if comrades are accused, imprisoned and on certain occasions, even executed, this happens only because they are anarchists, regardless of the objective fact that constitutes an element of procedural debate but that we as revolutionaries are only marginally interested in. We can never lose this point as a central element of the defense political campaign” (A. M. B).
Then, at the same time, we must have our autonomy in anarchism, so that we do not subordinate our perceptions to a centralized structuring. By taking on the proposals and calls, as a method and therefore also as space-time, this is how we support everything that is the development of individual initiatives and of different collectives and groups, so that the individual and collective creativity of the comrades can grow in an inventive and informal way. That being the case, one is not subject to any will of a political tendency. It is the attempt to create bases, as comrades, with a healthy coexistence between the diversities of anarchism of action and to try to have a deepening between different perspectives in anarchism. By striving and acknowledging the sincere contribution of all the different visions of struggle. That should be the goal for me.
To the comrades I say that it is a method of articulation that would have the intention of creating relations of struggle in order to be able to reproduce methodological tools thoughtfully and constantly and assiduously follow the struggles. And don’t abandon paths and situations to which huge revenges are promised in words, and I say in words from experience because then these promises, revenges, and paths almost all fall on deaf ears after the moment of momentary excitement, and when a certain period of time passes, then unfortunately other promises and momentary “fashionable” calls and excitement arrive. And the previous path falls into absolute silence with its promises and revenges. And be careful, because I’m making a self-criticism. And then continuously, here and there, the struggles of the emergency moment, without any real continuity.
I believe that it would suffice to include those that have begun and connect them with a thread to the general causes of the struggle and to the struggles of necessity that come new at the moment, so as to avoid a waste of energy and also for perspective and continuity. As it happens, for example, with the deafening silence for a few months to date regarding the path and the issue of Alfredo’s downgrading from 41bis, against 41bis and the abolition of life imprisonment, because there is another new emergency. And be careful, I am not saying that these new emergencies should not be followed, or that it is not right to engage, quite the contrary. However… I believe that we should carefully seek the appropriate methodological tools, such as the methods used in the aforementioned struggles, so that these characteristics can emerge when we decide in all autonomous action campaigns. And it would be good if it were no longer based on the emergencies of prisoners’ hunger strikes, but on the struggles and issues that have arisen and been collectively decided to use these methods. In this way there would be the opportunity to develop them following our rhythms and not of the emergency and therefore of the circumstances and the rhythm that the State gives us, and thus try to intensify the conflict with a common thread and a perspective.
For me, this is trying in practice to launch concrete perspectives of action that are open and multifaceted for all anarchists of action and the oppressed who want to struggle, to try to articulate and organize informally with other anarchists and non-anarchists.
I believe that by leaving the space open to multiform actions and to all those different anarchist individualities that should prevent them from becoming the “private property” of any specific anarchist tendency, or an exclusive specific anarchist practice of this tendency or that. Instead of what they should become, methodologies and tools for all comrades who want to transform anarchism of action into a real opposition against the system.
And these methods were used in Alfredo’s strike. For L’Aquila, to close the AS2 section or for the call of Black December. This methodological tool was in fact a communication link between different local anarchist and internationalist practices. This is what should be analyzed and reused… all practices: analyse-try-know-reuse given their qualities and usefulness. And, in addition, it has also been possible to extend it to non-anarchist components. And that, from my point of view, is a good thing.
So for me it’s wanting to create these methodological relational tools. And in practice, in these struggles mentioned above, there has been, in each one differently, the creative coexistence of comrades of different origins and ideological conceptions, and thus in fact the dialectical overcoming of tendencies. Such as overcoming the bogging down of theory alone and the sclerotic traffic jam of constantly chasing the emergency. But, comrades, we must try to overcome and create different and inverse dynamics to the “culture” and the environment that exists in anarchism, such as the rooting of ghettos and various ideological parishes with the rarefied environment, because in this way nothing positive comes out. That is my will. And I believe that it should be the will of the comrades who wish to fight in anarchism of action as a non-systemic anarchist and revolutionary minority and who do not want to cement themselves into dogmatism, and try to change and create a new paradigm from the grassroots.
Just as I believe it is important to change our approach to the destruction of the distinction between legal and illegal as a hierarchical conception of what we do or what others do. So as not to go with hindsight to judge or claim with the copyright of the anarchist tendency this or that form of action. It is therefore the practical realization of a nascent perception so that the hierarchies of the means of struggle can be eliminated, but through praxis, action, in the diversity of anarchism. So that every individuality can be in diversity, part of the totality of anarchism of action. And not the continuation of the polarization of anarchism of action.
I like this methodological tool because, in addition to being useful and qualitative, in practice it has characteristics of openness and inclusion, it is not for an exclusive tendency of anarchy, whether new or old, on the contrary, it leaves open to those who have chosen to take on the complex of these calls and proposals so that everyone can act according to the conditions they want and in the ways that each individuality and collectivity chooses to do so. This is informality to me. They seem to me to be the basis of the horizontality of anarchism. And that is not synonymous with not having lively discussions or not criticizing constructively, and even strong criticism. We must also be aware that we cannot homogenize everything, we must also choose with whom, why and how: “because a movement, even a revolutionary one, has its own need for development, certain differences of opinion, certain legitimate reserves, which cannot be put aside all at once” (A.M.B.).
And we know how to do this method, as we have experienced in several specific struggles, or general ones as was Alfredo’s call. For L’Aquila to close the section of AS2 and Dicembre Nero.
Despite the diversity of contexts and specific objectives, it is the same method that was used in Greece, of a handful of prisoners supported by an assembly of comrades that led to the abolition of special prisons, the downsizing of the law against “misrepresentation” during demonstrations and the law on DNA. Not exactly chicken feed. Yet some comrades did not fail to point out the limitations, and that they still exist today in this method. I believe that we need to refine the method, not the limits. And to get out of chasing the usual emergency, and to know how to reproduce different methodological tools thoughtfully.
I believe that it is still a good methodological direction to articulate ourselves, and we have done so more than once pragmatically in a creative coexistence of comrades with different origins and ideological positions and with different conceptions in anarchism of praxis. And the result, positive or negative, whether you like it or not, is the result of all those anarchists who wanted to fight together in diversity to create this. But be careful, these are the real forces that we have been able to create and deploy, no more and no less. And I believe that it is from these that we should start again, analyzing them, refining them, and finally reproducing them methodologically in order to increase them qualitatively.
As a prisoner:
“In the endless hours of the dead and desolate dimension of prison, we often try to analyze those data concerning external realities, despite the few stimuli that reach us. The observation, analysis, use and monitoring of events that take place in a parallel space-time dimension is a condition that should not be treated in a circumscribed way but rather with constant efforts to connect with comrades outside the walls who carry out their struggles against authority.”
Nikos Romanos, “Attack therefore I am”
That is why, as an anarchist prisoner, with my limitations I continue to struggle-live with thought and action. Being aware that these analyses and observations of mine are always filtered through the keyhole of the prison cell and can easily be misled by the limits imposed by the isolation of the prison.
But that doesn’t mean we stop trying to do analysis or striving to connect with our comrades and the different struggles. However, without a continuity of reciprocal exchange, of deepening between the outside-inside and the inside-outside, the debates that are relational in fact stagnate and the comrades remain outside the paths and discussions, and the bonds and connections with the inside-outside and outside-inside comrades fail to contribute and formulate methodologies. I believe that these methodological tools of connection with comrades are necessary.
Solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners imprisoned at the hands of Israel’s warmongering states and Italy’s complicity.
Solidarity with the resistance of the oppressed Palestinians who have been resisting Israeli and Western colonialism with armed guerrilla warfare for 75 years.
Solidarity with those who fight against racism, colonialism, apartheid, the war that starts here.
Solidarity with anti-fascists in Hungary.
Solidarity with my comrades who were put on trial for the Brennero.
Solidarity with our comrades Monica Caballero, Francisco Solar and Marcelo Villarroel.
Solidarity to Juan Aliste, Joaquin Garcia and Juan Flores.
Solidarity with the comrades imprisoned in Chile, Greece, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, revolutionary solidarity!
Solidarity with Mapuche prisoners!
Declassification of Alfredo Cospito from 41bis
Solidarity for Alfredo and Anna.
Against 41bis that annihilates the prisoners locked up.
International solidarity with the prisoners of the social struggle throughout the world.
“We must fight and fight so that the imbalance is stamped out”
for the propagation of revolutionary solidarity practices!
And, whatever path we are taking, always with the heart and for anarchy!
18/03/2024
Terni Prison, AS2
Juan Sorroche
[Received by email and posted in https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2024/04/07/juan-sorroche-riflessione-sul-contesto-generale-delle-cause-della-lotta/]