…And if they didn’t pay, they bloody ought to! Lessons from the Battle of Rome

A disturbing trend has taken place in the aftermath of October 15th in Rome, shaped by mainstream media and multiplied by the social networks. For the first time in Italian history almost an entire country participated in the repression of violent dissent, in the segregation of spaces of alterity, using the same tools that were supposed to denounce the weakness of the turbo-capitalist system. Millions of young adults played the game of the Good Cop, at the expense of three or more decades of civil conquests. Class traitors, fucking police everywhere you turned, even and especially online, worse than in real life. What a depressing bore.

While in Madrid, London, Chicago and New York the figures stated there was an average of 4-5,000 activists assembled in the streets, the crowd in Rome outnumbered them all: more than 200,000 unemployed people, students, precarious workers, pensioners and families gathered to yell they were “Against the Crisis”, as repeated by one of most frequent slogans seen there. The master plan was to lead a peaceful, colourful rally from point A to point B, ending in a joyful assembly with chants of liberating rage. This plan was disrupted by hundreds of hooded, masked protesters who rampaged through Rome with a fury at times resembling pure urban guerrilla warfare, triggering the uncontrolled and indiscriminate reaction of police, who attacked mainly innocent and unarmed young people.
 

Shared Repression and Mass Grassing

The day after, politicians now on the opposition asked for the reintroduction of anti-terrorist laws adopted during the “years of lead" (anni di piombo) in the 1970s, to allow the police to carry out searches and arrest people without being authorised by an investigative judge. Much of the government applauded this proposal. Ironically, the only one who raised his voice in discontent was the Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. There were two concerns for those on the “peaceful side” in Rome: to discover if the “inexplicable” warfare was actually spontaneous or infiltrated by the secret service, and then to isolate the violent faction from the rest of the Movement.
Progressive newspapers focused on the faces of those who threw fire extinguishers at police. Literary magazines launched forums of enraged readers invoking the identification of rioters. Opinion-makers cheered the use of social networks in the mass grassing campaign. The libertarian immune system of Facebook and Twitter quickly collapsed under the populist pressure of anti-anarchists and anti-radicals: a vast majority deeply rooted in the Italian political anthropology.
Emblematic fragments of this up-to-date 'infector’s hunt' were: a) Interviews with anonymous anarchists who threatened the bourgeoisie. b) Pictures that seemed taken from the Sunday Courier – a 1950s weekly prudish newspaper – of a weeping Madonna shattered in the street, with lots of parallels with the anti-Christian savagery of Republican Spain in 1934. c) A photo showing a caress between a policeman and a protestor – a clear call to reform our most violent and unprepared state apparatus. d) Last but not least: a kiss between two celestial activists, with the caption: they wanted the rally to be so.
What does all this resurgence of moralising and sensationalism tell us?  First of all, it is not enough to deprive yourself of TV to feel immune to a certain level of manipulation: you must think that anyone under 30 must avoid many “progressive” websites in the same way you impose on yourself  the hope of not watching Big Brother 10. Secondly, and this looks more unsettling: anyone involved in this manipulation is well aware of being in front of a now well-fertilized soil. Years of media campaigns in which the word legality has been deprived of all human meaning, the uncritical glorification of the Trinity of Magistrates, Handcuffs & Anti-mafia Heroes have had their effect on a leftist public opinion without bench-marks or long-term political horizons. You can also read it in the comments of those who believed in getting revenge under the banner of the Righteous.

Feel-good Propaganda

I would like to make one thing clear: I personally do not have any fascination for blind, self-defeating violence, as a goal in itself – although I just cannot start a debate with those who, seeing an SUV smashed, ask me: what if that was YOURS? Oh, concreteness! These are the same people able to use abstractions very well, for example while buying an iPad, forgetting easily WHO assembled the iPad and WHERE.
And how many anti-war walks have we seen plenty of picnic-spirit, ignored if harmless and manipulated if useful? Our Feel-Good Propaganda columnists are so brave in enhancing the rebel minorities of others, to invoke a Tahir Square as long as not in our backyard, to mention magical words like ‘Puerta del Sol’ or ‘Wall Street’ without reminding readers that even in Spain or NYC the protests had an illegal pattern – nothing comparable to the picnic dream of Piazza San Giovanni – and so there were beatings and arrests.
Nor has the same Feel-Good Propaganda spoken of the Icelandic case, where an entire island turned over for days and got a new Constitution declared. And again, it’s easy to see why: opening up new areas of radicalism and autonomy would probably weaken the Italian Progressive Heroes Factory – with its renowned firms and big-selling mantras – and  would remove much of the weight of this catechism made up of Facebook “likes”, dangerous book launches and on-line petitions.
[Important parenthesis: Italy is probably the country with the most racist and violent police in Europe, with military personnel exhibiting fascist flags in their barracks. The country of secret services involved in State bombings and murders, with the most inhumane prisons in the Western world. Yet, at the right time, Italy rediscovers itself as a Normal Country, and then cringes if someone chooses not to follow the usual picnic-route at protests. The thing is, deep down, Italians always believe themselves to be Good People. Years of TV-administered Cop Culture – “Teams” of Cops protecting the meek and the humble, food-loving Investigators, down-to-earth Countryside Priests, and so on – have finally borne their fruit. Italy is obsessed with the Friendly Cop. A country where violence is nice to be exorcised, represented in arts, sometimes unleashed on the territory of others – sees the largely ignored war in Libya – thinking that it won’t really concern us. Violence is something nice to be applauded in assemblies: like permanent onanism.]

An anthropological fracture

I was in London during the riots, and I heard many people my age, brilliant unemployed laureates with a progressive background, railing for stiff punishments against the “feral” looters. I saw, more recently, the desperate cry of the young and old for Steve Jobs Martyr. And finally, I heard the lament of the outraged majority of the Righteous, after the clashes in Rome. These events cannot be mere coincidences. These are clear signs of a dramatic fracture occurring in what we keep calling, with an miserable illusion of unity, 'opposition'. There’s no such a thing as a We’re all on the side opposition in Italy and in Europe. The ‘99%’ of Indignants against the greed of the 1% might well be fragmented into a 89% who just pretends to threat the symptoms – the Crisis – instead of the Disease – Schizophrenic Capitalism. Those who fight against symptoms would never use the same tools of the fight against the Disease. To not have any illusion of “mass superpower”, and strategic coherency, we must first have clearly in mind the existence of this fracture. A fracture that expanded enormously in recent decades, has just revealed all its gravity in recent months.
The forced and cultural exclusion of radical minorities from public debate and media, together with the anthropological evolution of the Italian and European Left towards “inner control”, self-censorship, terror of one’s one desire, and the interiorized voice of consensus-authority, enlarged and softened the ground where the BCE-imposed austerity plan will be realised. Post-socialist parties in Italy and in Europe, lacking any cultural autonomy and, kept in existence by the financial capital just to perform the “dirty job” that Conservatives are now partially unable to complete, will forcibly remove any obstacle between themselves and the shaping of the most extreme neoliberal project that has ever taken shape.
On the other hand, we have radical minorities that maybe have a clearer picture of what’s going on, but cannot find a way to raise their voice in a productive and effective violence. Expelled by the “security forces” imposed by financial capitalism and consumerist idolatry in the minds and eyes of those who should fight on their side, those minorities could end up more and more isolated as the Crisis worsens. They might be able to release floods of libidinal anti-hierarchical energy, but running-amok is not a strategy. We must instead have the courage to renounce the 99% trap – and to use the minority-inside-a-minority status as a moral force. We must have the patience to explain, disclose, reorganise, regroup ourselves, and do this by starting from small groups, small critical areas, including areas abroad which are not in the 99% game. Today the problem is not only the Cop who continues to trample the helpless, but those who continue to make themselves available for Mass Repression and Shared Informing, those who keep seeing garlands of flowers over the iron chains which Rousseau was talking about, and those who discuss the shadows of Plato's cave instead  of wondering how to get out of that cave.
 

Paolo Mossetti

Rome, 18- Oct-2011