Comrades!
Alleghiamo qui di seguito un volantino che gira per Lisbona e che condividiamo pienamente
Comrades!
Eleven years ago we decided for a radical shift in our living. We needed space, and time for experimentation: that space and that time that we couldn’t get hold of while living in the city, being constrained at a partial extent from the needs of modern age metropolitan life.
One thought that continuously arise in our mind is that the idea of changing things from the inside does not work. A change in life, stepping out the worn-out tracks to create new paths of liberation is needed. This changing in life can only be obtained by nesting together different paths, different ideas, different projects, different aims, which all share common grounds of liberty. To be able to live differently we must cover up the primary needs which we nowadays demand to a market, the same market we abolish in our dreams.
Producing and consuming by our own means: either those be generation of electricity, or food, construction of a house, or repairing our tools, limiting our requests to the market to a substantial extent.
This implies learning, practice, and relations: a globalized market means that our relations must spread like ever before, or we will not succeed in confronting with such a monster.
We need to develop means for keeping in touch without having to ask to companies to link our signals in the air; we need to rediscover the importance of long distance radio communication; we need to learn to connect computers on a network which hasn’t nothing to do with the internet; we need to deal with modern age electronic surveillance… we need to be very careful about any instrument that we use, knowing that instruments are never neutral.
Specialization of labor has brought up a very scattered vision of life. What we need most is the reconnection of all these fragments, in order to bear in mind a “unified” vision of the whole, even if simplified. We must attempt in grasping our life as a whole, and not as a fraction… In this, what is of vital importance is learning the meaning of the word “our”. There is nowadays no assumption of human community. Modern capital age supports only the use of “I”, or “they”. We have to rediscover the importance of being part of a community, or we’re out.
In italian, comrade is translated as “compagno”, the person with whom you share your bread. Sharing bread can be a starting point for sharing ideas; but vice versa is not always possible. Our experience is that sharing ideas alone does not lead to anywhere. Too many books, for too little practice. Ideas, which are really easy to develop, have taken the place of activities, much more difficult to keep coherent. In the general laziness, we’re lead to think that having ideas in mind is enough. We tried also the opposite assumption: sharing activities, without fully sharing ideas (even if, a la carte, all of us were libertarian minded): it did not work either. Activities and ideas must go side by side.
Ten years have passed since we left the city. Things have changed, but alas ! not in a evolving direction. The times and spaces for confrontation are getting fewer and fewer day by day… and people living in the city show the same carelessness for what happens beyond the asphalt roads. The general idea of the metropolitan dweller is that cities are the center of all, and that’s the place where to be in order not to miss out on anything. Unluckily for anarchist dwellers, this idea is shared with state, NATO and capital.
As it has always been in history, when things get worse people will need places where to organize (… if there will be something left to organize…) and that will not be cities for sure. How will all these comrades survive without having set any base out of the cities and the market?
By meditation? Or maybe they’ve read some book about surviving in the wildlife. Which wildlife???
sade e anarquia!