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Described as ‘mad’, ‘terrorists’, ‘adventurists’, or at best authors of ‘gestures of a worrying desperation’, the Angry Brigade were condemned without any attempt to analyse their actions or to understand what they signified in the general context of the class struggle in course. The means used to justify this were simple: by defining the actions of the Angry Brigade as ‘terrorist’, and equating this with ‘individualist’, the movement organisations—whose tendency is to see the relationship between individual and mass as something in contrast—neatly excluded them from their concerns.

The appeal trial in Rome in which anarchists were accused of belonging to a clandestine armed organisation has concluded with higher sentences than those meted out on the previous occasion. That was in the logic of things. In my case I was sentenced to six years, i.e. an increase of two and a half years for a robbery in Rome which, needless to say, I know nothing about. If on the one hand the fact that there was no sentence for ‘armed organisation’ or ‘terrorism’ — to use the terms of the law — can be considered a defeat for the dogged zeal of general prosecutor Marini, the above-mentioned personage has every reason to feel pleased concerning the diatribes that this trial has led to within the anarchist movement.

Why on earth did these dear children shoot Montanelli in the legs? Wouldn’t it have been better to have shot him in the mouth? Of course it would. But it would also have been heavier. More vindictive and sombre. To lame a beast like that can have a deeper, more meaningful side to it that goes beyond revenge, beyond punishing him for his responsibility—fascist journalist and bosses’ lackey that he is.

The years covered by this pamphlet mark an important period for the whole of the movement against capital. It was at this time that the antagonist movement in Italy finally shed all its taboos concerning destruction, violence and the use of arms against the class enemy.

One part of this society has every interest in continuing to rule, the other in it all collapsing as soon as possible. Deciding which side one is on is the first step. But resignation, the basis of agreement between the parts (improvers of the existent and its false critics) is everywhere, even in our own lives — the authentic place of the social war — in our desires and resoluteness, just as in our little daily submissions. With all this it is necessary to draw daggers, to finally draw daggers with life.

An armed revolutionary organization is an indispensable instrument in the struggle against oppression. This is beyond doubt. The problem arises with regard to the limits and structures that this organization must give itself in recognizing itself as a means and not as an end.

Why take the trouble to criticize the theses of Empire, when reality has so generously seen to it? Certainly not because it is a successful book, talked about in universities and on television. Discussions of opinion don’t interest us. We criticize the ideas of Negri (and Hardt) because they are a practical force, since they represent the most lucid version of the program of the left-wing of capital today and influence a movement — the “disobbedienti” — capable of supporting such a program. “Disobedient” politics, in fact, represents an excellent terrain of experimentation for the democracy of the future.

I am convinced that a revolutionary challenge to the current social order must necessarily be a challenge to the last ten thousand years of institutional development that have created it. In short, revolutionary critique must aim at civilization itself. But what precisely does this mean?

A glimpse into the elsewhere of an upturning so great that it is unimaginable, where certainties are swept away in an instant and life itself takes on a fragile intensity. These accounts contain a grain of everything it is possible to foresee of the ultimate fight for freedom and other aspects that could never have been dreamt in our worst nightmares. They inform, inspire but also warn: we need to recognise the enemies of freedom and self organisation in the paths we tread, blinded by our iconography of the enemy which is also standing right next to us and calls us comrade, albeit hissed through clenched teeth.

Books, conferences, videos, T-shirts, stickers, marches, committees and benefits abound, showing the many expressions of what has been defined as ‘the international of hope’. Yet no critique has been published on ‘insurgent Chiapas’ and the Zapatista National Liberation Army from the subversive point of view. Many anarchists have also given their contribution, without a word of criticism. Why is this?