Original statement here

The question aims not to be a provocation, or a threat. We do not want to send any book to the stake, or to limit anyone’s freedom of expression – even though, as someone said, we should rather seek freedom from the expression (of the mainstream press) nowadays.

 

Once upon a time we had the organic intellectual, a person almost always coming from the middle-class and who started working for the “working class party”, in the attempt to betray his social origins. Today’s post-modern culture didn’t appreciate this model of intellectual figure; nevertheless it highlighted the issues of the use, the function and possible counter-use of culture, understanding and knowledge as weapons of social and political clash. While the aim wasn’t bad, the result was no good – “the Party” preferred to abandon the revolutionary vision, to meet the emergent middle-classes. These ones were considered as to their function of stabilizers of post-world war democracy. Once they were simple knowledge passers, but today they turned into the courted object. And anybody knows how much intellectuals love to be publicly flattered and recognized. This way we passed from a culture/knowledge serving revolutions, to a Culture given to the working class as a prize for the good job done.

 

From the desertion of any hope of rupture in the intellectual class’s theoretical practice, workerism and the cultural movement in 1968 tried to redefine the militant intellectuality, purposing it as “organic to the class”. The massification of education and the explosion (both numerical and political) of mass university during the 1970s spread the virus of political knowledge within society – that is the way knowledge immediately turns into power. Maybe this is also the reason why universities became the home for clashes, and territories the appeasers aimed to win back. Even the élites belonging to the counterpart noticed it, and in a famous report the Trilateral Commission established the destruction of public university as a strategic goal. It didn’t help to supply tame workforce no more, since it has turned into the reign of reproduction and organization of social antagonism. (The student movements that came after, something weaker and with variable consciousness, always kept on fighting this totalitarian idea of university and Education as environments dedicated to the mere productivity of human capital).

 

The tremendous defeat during the 1980s just crushed this amount of knowledge with the help of jail, the addiction to heroin and consumerist hedonism. Knowledge could live as long as the movement lived. The “golden horde”[1] and the good relations between partisan knowledge and mass movement were won, and so the intellectuals could go back to the position in society the class movement had criticized. But how does the status or role of the intellectual survive from the 1980s until today? We could state they survived just as a wrapper and a substitute of the values of the historical Left; especially playing a role which is pretty far away from social reality. From the 1980s on we are watching the sad show of an arrogant Right boasting its ignorance – but still able to profit – and a Left commiserating itself and boasting its moral superiority, yet unable to understand the society and increasingly far away from the lower classes. Did the left-wing intellectuals realize, meanwhile, that their party (in any of its metamorphoses) is ruled by manager-politicians, only able to obey to the new neoliberal faith? Probably they didn’t, since they were too busy taking care of that minority separatism allowing them to represent themselves as guardians of Culture and Orthodoxy, and to defend their status. (In regard to this, we do not want to turn down the relevance of critical thinking and knowledge, yet these are increasingly produced by subjects which are barely recognized or marginalized by the Academy, and often operate outside this country). On the other side we have the knowledge we produce with our struggles (when there are any), and this is the most important and strategic one for those who work for the change. It is related to the intellectuality living inside the social fabric, and sometimes reacts and crashes with the mainstream-recognized-and-appreciated-zombies.

 

Let’s state it again: if there is a positive thing the Five Stars Movement has stirred up in this phase, it is the ungovernability of the country for the purposes of austerity and (a not secondary, unswallowable fact for many comrades lacking realism) the involvement in politics of men and women which the militant milieux were not able to reach: is this all that negative? We make it clear again (getting bored) that we do not mean to stand as defenders, or even supporters of the Five Stars – that, on the opposite, will have to be taken head-on on different issues: immigration (unacceptable proposals), labour policies (that are still to be defined, given the confusion between often conflicting statements and proposals) and education policies (ranging from public school funding to an intensified penetration of the Corporations in the University). Still, there are the proposals on basic income, limitation of unnecessary great works, de-funding of military expenses… In any case, we do believe that the future conduct of this political-electoral bandwagon is unwritten, and that the ambiguity and the contradictions that fill it up could develop in many directions, or explode into as many shards.

 

To be even clearer and dispel any misunderstanding, the collective subject which is writing here never let itself being enticed by institutional temptations, efforts of representation, “re-appropriation of administrative linkages”, long marches into the institutions and similar pleasantries. Our connection with the institutions has always been “mediated” by truncheons and tribunals. Thus, it makes us laugh that those acting differently ever since, now think to cross their T’s, dot their I’s and nitpick us, the No TAV movement or Alberto Perino [2] because he would have staged an electoral rally. Just to help remember, Alberto Perino  (a former CISL [3] bank clerks’ trade unionist) on 4th of July 2011 told at a press conference, endorsed by a whole movement and a valley, “we are all black bloc!”; a year ago he was with us occupying an highway and getting hardly beaten by truncheons. Who pretends to nitpick him is the same that, since a decade, chases the black bloc deeming them agents provocateurs within demonstrations (even when absent). We have never seen some of these comrades (some, not all of them) in Susa Valley, perhaps because – besides it being distant – you don’t gain a seat of power over there but only charges, in the end…

 

Coming back to the present day intellectuals, such a broad and generous category to include eternal idiots like Jovanotti and unfulfilled cops like Saviano, their terror of seeing things changing too quickly (with the consequent loss of their status) isterically pushes them to engage with the old and good practice of “civic responsibility” – which is periodically requested by the bourgeois framework to the men of learning. Keeping in mind what we said earlier, we are obstinately going to evaluate the existing framework in a materialist way and consider certain phenomena less for what they claim to be and more for the effects they do produce. Right now the 5-Star victory is throwing into a panic the political, trade union, media and cultural cliques of the country…and that makes us happy!

 

Still we are well aware that more intense and radical transformations of the existing will necessarily have to take other routes and deal with completely different frameworks: packed squares, subjectivity building, counter-organization. We carry on this long and ambitious program, well aware that no parliamentary shortcut or other mediation is there to solve our problems (to be intended as: those of the entirety of the exploited). Thus, we keep on struggling for ungovernability, conscious that no new government will neither be possible nor desirable without the prior achievement of the minimum goal of the revolutionary movements in the last decade: Que se vayan todos!