Date: Fri, 07 Mar 1997 15:53:11 +0100
From: Hobo <hobo-AT-iol.it>
Subject: Re: Strategy and violence


At 13.42 07/03/97 +0100, laura wrote:
>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. 

this is a basic point, but it doesn't solve any question, as the problem
shifts on the matter ''who decide what is weakness and what is strength''.
somebody can think that an enlarged coalition on minimal objectives is the
right way to get strength and others think this is a weakining and that, at
the opposite, the hardening of a struggle is the only way to get more power.
who is using violence? who is the subject who decides, when this subject is
still in-process?

>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).

i don't think zapatistas would agree. i don't think that communication can
be powerful than guns or viceversa, they are just *different* and their
efficiency shows better when they are used in parallel.

>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

let me call this as an anarco-romantic vision. it was surely a diffused
practice, even if not as massive as you say, but it was started from
*organized* groups in an *organized* form. later it became also an
''individual practice'' penetrating into the same culture of the
proletarians, but losing, under certain aspects, its characteristic of mass
action done to claim the right of access to the wealth and to affirm the
real counter-power of the people.

>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

gangs? here in padova *hundreds* of armed people surrounded and occupied an
entire neighbourhood permitting all the people to expropriate from the shops
the things that they had the right to take back. and you call it a gang
action? it was a visible way of affirming a direct power on the territory
and to transform individual behaviors in a mass social practice with a very
high potential charge to enlarge the conflict to higher objectives.
we didn't want only to be tolerated as little thieves, as you can remember
we just wanted a revolution. we thought it was possible.

ciao Hobo

-------------------------
collettivo infodiret(t)e
ECN - Padova
e-mail: hobo-AT-ecn.org
http://www.ecn.org/pad/



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