Re: Strategy and violence

[Fiocco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Fiocco Laura)]

 (Monty, Bruce, Steve)

On 3-02-1997 Monty posted a long message answering to Massimo, and at the
end he wrote


>And that returns us to the political problem: how do we help develop and
>expand "life" so as
>to both attack capitalism and help develop an alternative? I like how Laura
>posed this issue (I
>think I understand her at least in large part) in her post to aut-op-sy of Jan
>29, where she asks
>what makes a strugle communist and replies: "it is a communist struggle when
>the main goal
>of any fight is to produce the collective subject (WE: where -ME- can feel the
>powerness and
>loveness of BEEING together).
>
>
>"If we start from here, to enlarge the field of solidarity means to enlarge
>the collective
>subject. But this process is not just a quantitative enlargement, it is a
>de-location
>(dislocazione) of the field of stuggle to a higher level." etc.
>
>
>But, we also need to talk about not only how this is to come about, but what
>this this actually
>is. In our strategy piece we suggest that the criterion to use is whether the
>struggle, strategy,
>etc. (as best we can understand) is moving in an anti-capitalist direction.
>Laura poses perhaps
>the 'positive' side of that, building the collective we -- expanding humanity
>we might even
>say. I think this posing she offers deserves more discussion, and hope it does
>not become
>sidetracked in the "catholic" issue.
>
>Thanks for your patience and work, Massimo, and any others who read this.
>Monty


Let us start from this "enunciato":
"In our strategy piece we suggest that the criterion to use is whether the
struggle, strategy, etc. (as best we can understand) is moving in an
anti-capitalist direction".
It is exacly what I was dealing with, reading 60/70 italian political
experience.
What is it an anti-capitalist direction?
Two different ways of thinking it: 1) going somewere with any means; 2)
being somebody else for creating alternative (from capitalism) paths.
The path (possible different paths: experimented in process) is not given,
it is produced by the collective subject, that define itself in the
process.

My thesys is that anti-capitalist struggle is a process of liberation from
capitalist rules of the game. (The rules of the game are given by the
re-production of proletarisation). Struggles can starts on any material
need, but from then on,ie once the movement has started, the aim MUST
change: what is important is to enlarge the movement to create the
subject-in-process (the institutionalisation of trade unions and leftiest
parties rapresented a means of stopping this possible event). The
subject-in-process divelopes its own "path" to go on. The process of
liberation goes on "stop and go" but also so it produces effects: ie it
creates possible "directions".

Here we comes to the waepons.

Bruce, last month, arised the problem of violence. It is a big problem, but
I think that we can find a theoretical solution if the point at stake is to
divelope the collective subject.
In general, we could say something like that: any action is violence when
it is immediately or can be tranformed into weakening the possibility of
producing (here and now) a new beeing. Moreover, weapons of self-defence
are different from those we need to build up a "path" to the future
(Vietnam is a clear example, and Chiapas shows to the world that guns, also
if they are needed for self-defence, are less powerfull than internet to
create the space into which to build something).

But I think that there is something more to say about the idea of violence
in class struggle. There are somebody that thinks that class struggle means
violence or does not distiguish class stuggle from violence.
Let me take an example from my experience.
If you remember sometimes ago I criticized Steve way of reconstructing the
60/70 movement in Italy as if it were made by groups/parties instead of by
persons and groups/collettivi (comerades acting together where they were).
One of the form of the struggle he showed was self-reduction of telephon,
electricity, bus, bills...and commodities. Let us take this last one. It
was a mass individual practice: I (anybody: a student, a worker's wife, a
teacher, a worker) entered into a supermarket to buy something and payed
only a part of it (Dario Fo made a beatyfull performance of it in one of
his plays). Individually we hided the commodities we did not want to pay,
for not being stopped at the door as "thieves". But none of us *thought* we
were "steeling": to take goods without paying them was no more a *sin*
(free from normalisation -Foucault).

This practice went on for years, growing. And then something happened that
changed everything: a part of autonomia - in few places (Padova, Roma...) -
started to do it in the form of a collective group facing by force the
single owner of the shop. They pretended it was more revolutionary.
Whatever they thought of it they were acting like gangs using force against
unarmed citizens. What came out it was that WE couldn't do it anymore: if
before we were getting rid of our own personal normalising rules/values on
private proprety, refusing (objectively) to axept the commodity form as a
given rule and knowing that the others did the same (political practice),
after it was no more clear what we were doing.
Here violence stopped a process.
The same with demonstrations. The roads, our own place to show our
collective powerfulness in facing capitalist injustice and state violence,
was sistematically transformed in an army field by groups that pretended
that to play wargames was revolutionary. The same with others many things.

I am sorry if what I want to say is not very clear. Try to read underneeth
my english. But maybe it can help to show why "violence" is a problem.

Ciao laura




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