Who is the Black Bloc? Where is the Black Bloc?

This question, appearing on most newspapers after every riot, such as the one in Rome on December 14, deserves an answer. Do you want to see what our faces look like, when they are not hidden by scarves, helmets and balaclavas?

They are the same faces that pay the rent for your scruffy flats, the faces to whom you offer unpaid internships or full time employment for £800 a month. They are the faces that pay thousands of pounds to attend your lectures. They are the faces of the kids that you slap when you catch them with some weed in their pocket. They are the faces that have to run out of the bus when the inspectors appear, as they couldn’t afford to travel otherwise.

They are the people that cook your tender sirloin stakes in your up-market restaurants, and that do so for £50 a night, cash-in-hand. They are those who make your skinny lattes at Starbucks. They are those who answer your call saying ‘118118, can I help you?’, those who buy food at Lidl because in all the other supermarkets it’s too expensive. They are those who animate your holiday camps for £450 a month, those who set up the markets where you buy your organic fruit. They are those from whom precariousness is stealing all vital energy, those who live a shitty life, but that now have decided they had enough of accepting all this.

We are part of a generation that for one day has given up poisoning its own blood with the neurosis of a life trained for precariousness, and has supported the riots. We are the future that you must listen to, the only healthy part of a society covered with metastases. Now in London, Athens and Rome something is happening  of historical importance: entire squares full of people burst in liberating shouts when police vans take fire. Our very existence is contained in those shouts: the existence of those who could not believe that elected governments would turn against their citizens and make them pay for decades of mistakes committed by the financial sector and multinational corporations; the existence of those who are now starting to believe that ‘all together/we can scare them’. Those shouts were joyous and angry, exploding from the healthy side of society, while the poisonous one was hiding inside the House of Parliament.

The Black Bloc has struck again. You’d better watch out now. Rumors say that you could meet some of them during classes, in the library, at the coffee machines, in the pub, on the beach, or maybe even on the bus.

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The original version was written in Italian by Collettivo Universitario Autonomo, 16 December 2010, Torino.
Translated and adapted by Federico Campagna, 17 December 2010, London