Full list of texts

Prison has come out of the shadows into the limelight, as not a day passes without some allusion to ‘solving the problem’ of the State’s overflowing dungeons. Advances in surveillance technology are offering alternative models of isolation and control that could see a large number of the latters’ potentially explosive inmates defused and—opportunely tagged or microchipped—sent back to the urban ghettos of capital from whence they came. The main obstacle, bolstered by some retrograde attempts to gain votes through a sworn intractability concerning the ‘enemy within’, is power’s need for mass consensus from those it had led to believe that the State’s protection racket and promise of long custodial sentences were the ultimate social guarantee. The dilemma has given space to a whole range of social cops in an ongoing battle that the sycophantic media have not missed the opportunity to illuminate. The occult world of prison never fails to provide good headlines for those in search of a frisson, ‘enlightened discussion’ or fodder for animated pub talk (the latter often concluding with a call for the reinstatement of the death penalty).

When reading the following pages it would be well to put everything that we already know about technology aside. Indeed, what knowledge or hypothesis passed off as certainty makes up the scientific aspect of technology? Not much.

What is anarchy? An idea that helps guide this desire. Anarchy means: no rulers. No domination. No one is a master and no one is a slave. But we live in a world of domination. The overwhelming force of the state, the all-pervading power of the market, the ever-present oppressions of species, gender, race, class, religion, down to the petty hierarchies and degradations of our everyday lives and personal relationships, the social norms of status, submission, isolation dug deep into our bodies. In totality: a system of shit.

This booklet is a modest contribution to understanding the recent revolts in France. Needless to say, it is not sociological or, in a nobler sense, theoretical insight. Revolts can only be understood by those who have the same needs as the rebels, that is to say by those who feel they are part of the revolt. After a brief chronology, in fact, the pages that follow pose the question of how the events of November in France concern all of us, and also try to give a possible answer.

The obstacles encountered by Emma in her thirty years of anarchist propaganda as well as the polemics she maintained still exist in the revolutionary movement today, and concern no small part of the struggles for women’s liberation.

No one can understand what is happening in the land of Palestine, not even those who have followed the sanguinary vicissitudes of the peoples who have lived down there for so long. They face each other with hatred and suspicion, not just men and women, children and old people, but the very dust of the roads and the mud that covers them on rainy days, the asphyxiating heat and the stench of the sultriness.