WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilie Libertaria #454 - Who's afraid of the P38? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 They said that at this rate we would go back to '77, and that by dint of

joking someone would get hurt. So, when in Turin, in one of the many
squares of the "No Meloni day" organized for November 15, some (not
exactly defenseless) policemen were injured, the chorus of whining from
the usual Catoni was unleashed. ---- They, who say they know those years
well, feel they have every right to lecture the young reckless ones. It
won't be this "bunch of debauched people" who will make the future,
Tommaso Cerno bursts out without restraint, but those who at this moment
are "at home studying and those who are in America doing their master's
degrees". Others propose (Arditi on Il tempo) to stop calling students
those who are nothing but "delinquents" or "riff-raff", only to then
conclude with unctuous servility, that not them, but "the Musks serve
humanity".

In a more moderate tone, in keeping with Avvenire, Paolini pontificates:
"We should explain to those kids who replicated the gesture of the P38
(but evidently also to certain politicians) that politics is not a
continuous clash"; he then calls into question - as an anti-hero - that
"proto-Nazi" Carl Schmitt who maintained that "sovereign is he who
governs the state of exception". A strategy which, moreover, is
precisely the one that the Government and the press are carrying forward
with respect to many social processes, including student and
environmental movements, raves and migrants.

Condemning violence, calling for "civilized" and democratic ways, is
extremely bigoted and dishonest, since it is clear that anger and
violence are the reaction precisely against the betrayal of those ideals
of tolerance and democracy. What credibility can one have in preaching
non-violence at the very moment in which one actively cooperates in the
Middle Eastern carnage, just to cite the most striking example?
Delegitimizing and criminalizing protest by virtue of the lack of
respect for democratic dialectics, is equivalent to thinking that there
is no political debate outside the cold institutional perimeter, an
"aberrant" thought, evidently due to the deformation of those who no
longer know how to conceive truth outside of authority", to quote Pier
Paolo Pasolini. But rebellion - which is a political act par excellence
- is by its definition unclassifiable, disrespectful and outside the box.

Here it is not a question of approving or blaming the students, but of
understanding the reasons underlying their rebellion, addressing them
without moralizing paternalism, getting to the heart of the
contradictions they denounced.

Everyone knows that a few P38s are certainly not enough to reconstitute
Workers' Autonomy, just as waving a hammer and sickle is not enough to
reconstitute the PCI. But the vocabulary of the occasion - already ready
for use - is too convenient not to be used. So here they are again the
"bad teachers" (the fearsome Landini, Raimo & Co.) and the latent
strategy of tension.

Many people do not realize - but certainly not those politicians and
journalists who flaunt this vocabulary - that the so-called "years of
lead" saw a generation of students and workers hegemonic with respect to
society, by virtue of the fact that they fought for widely felt and
represented social issues. Their battles were recognized, approved,
supported. A situation light years away from the current one, marked by
the destructuring of Capitalism in multiple modes of production, with
the consequent fragmentation of the social body. "Political spaces and
spaces of Capital are very distant today," correctly observes Sandro
Mezzadra, who is a careful analyst of this fragmentation and the
consequent social depoliticization.

The students who raise their voices today are, no offense, without any
hope, because they do not aggregate society around them, they do not
question it nor are they questioned by it; because they pay the effects
of poor and homogenizing educational paths; because they participate,
often unknowingly, in the dynamics of neoliberal power perpetrated by
social media. But above all because, atomized as they are, they no
longer know how to be "collectives" organic to society. All things for
which, it must be said, we cannot in any way blame them.

So, who can they scare with the gesture of P38? Can this State really
make us believe that students - and their self-styled bad teachers -
cause concern for the ruling classes? Will this government, accustomed
to the truncheon, succeed in its work of passing itself off as a
defenseless victim?

And yet, within this composite scenario, in which the student struggle
no longer acts as a shock wave but rather as a micromolecular enzyme,
within an apparently dead-end condition, we can affirm that the
students, once again, are our greatest hope. Perhaps the only one. The
beauty of student protests lies in their freshness, in their ability to
be indignant, but also in a lightheartedness that the movements of '68
knew how to have and that today should be recovered.

In a world that, after the seasons of Occupy first and then of the
Indignados, has lost even the last weapon of indignation, in a political
landscape dominated by rancor and resignation, their enthusiasm and
their anger are pure revitalizing energy.

But the greatest sin would be to disperse these shoots, or let them
suffocate within logics of conflict and violence, which would do nothing
but play into the hands of the system ("trial 7 April" docet). Instead,
their pure energy is needed to reconnect the social instances,
apparently disintegrated, in a more organic framework, so as to lay the
foundations for new mass aggregations (criticism). To make people
understand that behind a defaced monument or a bloodied politician's
face there are claims that concern, deep down, both the rider and the
worker, both the migrants who live like new slaves on the estates and
the professional or the pensioner worried about making their home safe.

In short, to reconnect the disintegrated parts of Capital, we need a lot
of study, or rather, we need male and female students.

Riccardo Ricceri

http://sicilialibertaria.it
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