(Social peace)

The State is weak

The decision of the supervisory court in Rome’s made public on 19 December confirming the detention of the anarchist Alfredo Cospito under 41 bis is in fact a death sentence in view of the comrade’s decision not to break the hunger strike to the bitter end that he began on 20 October. The State is flexing its muscles and preparing for the showdown. Its motto could be summed up as kill one to arrest one hundred, aiming at the liquidation of the anarchist movement, at least that of our generation. What it is actually giving is proof of is its weakness. We have been telling ourselves for two months that this is not the time for analysis and reflection, that the situation is urgent, that action must be taken. Yet, if it is true that for anarchism theory is never separate from practice as they are inextricably intertwined, then perhaps this is precisely the time not to stop and reflect, but to reason while continuing to act.
In a nutshell. We believe that the Italian State has made a big mistake by deciding to apply 41 bis to an imprisoned anarchist for the first time. This mistake has led to the occurrence of the largest mobilisation of denunciation and struggle, concrete and international, against the 41 bis since this infamous regime of annihilation and torture was inaugurated in 1992. This movement is not led by sincere democrats, but is driven in its propulsive essence by the individual action of an indomitable comrade, who is risking his own life in this struggle, and by the many actions and initiatives, individual and collective, of an anarchist movement that has been able to regain its anger and vitality.
In the face of all this, paradoxically, today the State might consider that – since the mistake has now been made and it will have to be paid for – killing Alfredo Cospito could be the least painful option.

The alternative would be defeat and having to take a major step backwards, not least because the international anarchist movement does not, for its part, promise to take steps backwards in exchange for the life of a comrade. Anarchism is not bartering (nor could it ever), a kind of disarmament in exchange for Alfredo’s declassification. Thus the State has no guarantee that the anarchists will stop. On the contrary, it fears they will be invigorated by a victory against 41 bis.
It is a risky bet. And Alfredo’s life today rolls on the dice of these vile gamblers.

Anarchists in 41 bis: genesis of a political-military

Breakthrough attempt It is spring 2022. The country is supported by the government of Unità Nazionale [National Unity] led by what many believe is the most influential man of the European political and economic elites: Mario Draghi. Social peace is suffocating. On the other hand, there is war, real war, on Europe’s doorstep. The Draghi government, particularly its centre-left component, is a fervent supporter of NATO policy. By far one of the most warmongering governments in the alliance. This causes enormous sacrifices for the population. Draghi knows this well and he knows equally well that social peace is a fragile marriage that can collapse at any moment. Draghi knows this well precisely because, as head of the European Central Bank, he is one of those responsible for the social butchery in Greece.

Anarchists can be precisely that fuse that deflagrates the situation: they are the only ones who, in fact, have never disarmed the reasons for the offensive, hence the significance of a combination of criticism and practice that by its very nature is profoundly social and never merely political. This is because – as we often like to repeat – we place ourselves directly within the conflict, exploited among exploited, oppressed among oppressed, without confronting it or directing it from the outside. However, the anarchists appear at that moment, in the eyes of the rulers, extremely weak and divided. It should be remembered that the 41 bis is by far the most political aspect of the entire judicial mechanism, so much so that it is the minister of justice who signs the internment decrees, which is not the case for any other ordinance or sentence of any order or degree.
We are in times of war and so a military-type metaphor may come in handy. The State in those months attempted a breakthrough in depth, the attack against the anarchist movement was to serve as a bridgehead for an overall crackdown against those who persisted in believing in the possibility of revolutionary transformation and, more generally, against antagonism and social opposition. These were the months in which the Piacenza public prosecutor’s office, to give the most striking example, went so far as to arrest six trade unionists, accusing them of extortion because they were demanding wage increases from the boss. If against the antagonist movement severe lashing is enough, against the anarchists the aim is liquidation, exemplary punishment; the State does not just want to win, it wants to win big. Within a few weeks comes the sentencing of Juan Sorroche to 28 years for the explosive attack against the League headquarters in Villorba, in the province of Treviso, on 12 August 2018, comes the transfer of Alfredo Cospito into 41 bis and arrives, in cassation, once again against Alfredo and against Anna Beniamino, the requalification of ‘massacre against public safety’ into ‘massacre against the security of the State’ of one of the charges (concerning the double explosive attack against the Carabinieri Cadet Barracks of Fossano, in the province of Cuneo, of 2nd June 2006) for which they have already been convicted, at first instance and on appeal, in the Scripta Manent trial. If you ask someone in the street what a massacre is, they will surely answer the murder of many people. In reality this is not the case, in Italy you can be convicted of massacre even if there are no dead or injured people.
Article 285 of the penal code is the most serious in the Italian penal code in absolute. It should be carved in stone, to eternal infamy, the words of a passage in the motivations of the court of cassation’s ruling of 6 July.

To the defence lawyers, who objected that Article 285 was not used even for mafia massacres and fascist massacres (real ones), the court replied that ‘in those cases the objections concerned events in which, in the presence of human victims, the dogmatic distinction between common massacre and political massacre loses its meaning’ (p. 63). To put it another way, when there are dead people it is not important to apply Article 285, because life imprisonment comes anyway, but with anarchists, for a less bloody crime, you have to punish them with the most serious crime. Otherwise how do we arrive at life imprisonment?

A passage, this, which not only consigns to perpetual infamy and sullies for ever the name of the person who wrote it – Luciano Imperiali, president of the court – but which is indicative of what was brewing: huge components of the State, at all levels, from the minister of justice to the heads of the supreme Italian judicial body, were ‘conspiring’ to achieve the political slaughter of anarchism. This was the Italian State’s presumptuous gamble. So many personages put themselves on the line, staining their bourgeois honour to achieve the result.

Going a step too far: the biggest mobilisation of all time against 41 bis

Sticking with the war metaphor. The State is attempting a full-scale breakthrough, a repressive acceleration such as has not been seen in quite some time. It desires a bridgehead where new troops can pour in and thus spread out. As in any war, the breakthrough in depth presents enormous dangers: in particular, the difficulty of defending the advanced position that has been gained. A massacre without casualties, is not easy to defend. A life imprisonment without dead, is not easy to justify. Just as it is not easy to explain why the 41 bis, created to fight mafiosi, then extended in general silence to the comrades of the Red Brigades for the construction of the Combatant Communist Party arrested in 2003, is now also to be used for anarchists.

The State does not know how to defend this position. And the incredible thing is that it doesn’t. It does not defend itself, it does not explain itself. In two months of hunger strike, not a single columnist, not a single intellectual, has “put their face on it” to write an article, do an interview, put himself on the line to say that yes, it is right that an imprisoned anarchist should be transferred to 41 bis and remain there for life.

They are in a hurry to kill Alfredo and they do not publicly state the reasons for it. They are gambling, but they don’t have the cards. This behaviour continued throughout the first two months of the hunger strike, until the publication (as mentioned, on 19 December) of the order of the Rome surveillance court for the 1 December hearing on the appeal against the transfer to 41 bis, when in some newspapers the first headlines appeared ‘timidly’ that, in a stunted manner, attempted to support the measure. But it is very little.

Anarchism is really something wonderful and always presents us with great confirmations. Never as in the case of Alfredo Cospito does individual action and mass action appear intertwined, indistinguishable; because it is an individual, Alfredo, who makes the difference. Alfredo has decided that a life without any contact, a life without dialogue with his comrades, is not worth living. In the Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel describes an imaginary struggle for life and death between two individuals. One of the two is afraid of death and submits to the other, thus civilisation is born. The servant chooses life and renounces freedom. Alfredo has proved that he is not a servant, he is proving that he does not want to live in the civilisation of servants and, above all, that freedom is worth more than his own life.
On 20 October, the comrade went on hunger strike. The occasion is a hearing at the Sassari surveillance court concerning a seizure of correspondence. We did not read his statement, perhaps we will never read it, seized like everything from the 41 bis. Whoever is locked up in 41 bis does not have the right to speak, not a word of his must leave those walls. Not even what could have been the last words of his life, not even the statement where he announces a hunger strike until death.

This umpteenth piece in the blanket of isolation imposed by the State becomes a first weakness for the latter. It is at this juncture that one begins to write, to translate into multiple languages, that in Italy there is an anarchist comrade on hunger strike until death, but that the State is preventing him from explaining his motives. Even abroad one begins to conceive, still vaguely, what kind of hell the 41 bis is. Western news programmes hammer us every day with the crimes committed by their enemy dictatorships. They tell us of Putin’s infamies, but then we find Putin’s political opponents tweeting from prison. They tell us about the death sentences of protesters in Iran, and in doing so they touch our emotions with their last words. Now the world learns that in Italy there is a man sentenced to death whose last word has also been taken away.
The infamy of the 41 bis – the 22 hours of solitary confinement per day, the maximum socialising in four people, the hour-long interview per month with dividing glass, the censorship of correspondence, the newspapers arriving with the forbidden articles cut out, the darkened windows, the walkways where no light gets through, the ban on having photos, drawings, books – become public knowledge. At a time when governments are asking us to make ever greater sacrifices in their perpetual war on their enemy tyrants, it begins to become indefensible that revolutionaries in Italy are locked up in 41 bis.

The Italian State has got itself into quite a mess. A shadow such as has never been seen before is thickening over the anti-mafia body – and consequently, over its management structure, the National Anti-Mafia and Anti-Terrorism Directorate, directly responsible for the transfer of the comrade in 41 bis and coordinating body for the most recent repressive operations against the anarchists -, until last 20 October a heroic and untouchable institution for most, while today the walls of many Italian cities are written in large letters that ‘the anti-mafia tortures’ or that ’41 bis must be closed’. In the meantime, the executioners still close themselves in muteness. As if they are hoping to get away with killing Alfredo in general silence.
A radical mobilisation. Reformists stay at the tail end
The radical nature of what is happening should not be underestimated because it is unprecedented, at least for our generation. Alfredo’s hunger strike against 41 bis and life imprisonment without parole is not, to take an historical example, comparable to the hunger strike that some dissociated [from the armed struggle] made in the 1980s against Article 90 of the Prison Order (the forerunner of 41 bis). Cospito is not a dissociated, he is not repentant, as long as he could he continued and persevered in writing articles, contributions and interventions from prison, always upholding the importance of revolutionary action against the State and capital. This aspect in itself makes what is happening radical: the largest mobilisation in history against 41 bis has as its ‘spearhead’ a revolutionary anarchist comrade who is risking his own existence, contributing enormously to reinforcing the sense and perspective of international revolutionary solidarity.

The support for Alfredo Cospito took shape, at least for a good part of the mobilisation, not as a generic denunciation of the 41 bis as a detention regime of psycho-physical annihilation, but as specific support for the struggle of a comrade with a very specific revolutionary connotation. Of course not everyone shares, or willingly faces, the whole story of Alfredo, but it is clear that this story exists. It is a fact, clear and inescapable. Whereas, on the other hand – and this does not represent, or at any rate should not represent a problem for those in our movement who have different views – many others can affirm, as we have done, that they share with Alfredo a profound and radical sharing of the principles of anarchism, that they respect its history without ifs and buts, that they support the reasons and the value of the practices for which he was accused and condemned or that he claimed (as in the case of the wounding of the CEO Adinolfi, responsible for nuclear catastrophe).
This evidence inherent to the nature of the mobilisation has meant that for the first time, as far as our generation is concerned, we are witnessing a situation in which the reformists, the guarantors, the democrats, when they are there at all, stay at the tail end. This is so unprecedented for our eyes that we are confronted with the need to develop appropriate political and cultural tools. In the relationship with antagonist movements or instances of social criticism of certain achievements of power, we have always been accustomed to being – allow us the simplification – the ‘toughest area’ within the struggles, those often distanced from the leaders, or would-be leaders, and from the law and order services, when we are not actually outside them, sometimes despising these same struggles for their reformist or entirely recoverable connotations.

Opposed to any frontist logic, we find ourselves supporting a struggle in which there is no common front aimed at aggregating entities with a radically different conception of the clash and of the tasks of revolutionaries: as mentioned earlier, the non-revolutionary ‘components’ attentive to the ongoing struggle find themselves, by force of circumstance, forced to follow events, perhaps reserving the right to snort at the ‘truculences’ of the anarchists, but without being able to do substantially anything more. In the same way, hopelessly averse to any downward adjustment in the terrain of method, we find ourselves in a dimension in which the propulsive engine is represented by the radicality of revolutionary anarchism: hence that of the comrades on hunger strike and the actions in solidarity.
Having said that, a reformist-democratic initiative did indeed take place, with some prominent intellectuals taking a stand on Alfredo’s situation: Luigi Manconi, collector of political trails (ex-Lotta Continua, ex-Greens, ex-Democratic Party); Frank Cimini, judicial chronicle journalist; philosopher Massimo Cacciari and Donatella di Cesare; the Wu Ming, brilliant writers exponents of the world of civil disobedience; the committed cartoonist Zerocalcare. We are not particularly interested in the media discourse, but following the story of these two months through the bourgeois press may be useful here as an intelligible backstory to show how the reformists this time were at the tail end of the mobilisation.

When Alfredo, and subsequently the other comrades – first Juan Sorroche and Ivan Alocco the 25th and 27th of October, then Anna Beniamino the 7th of November –, started and went on hunger strike the ‘firepower’ of the democratic-reformist press was relegated to specialised magazines and of very low circulation. When the anarchists (even before the start of the strike, in solidarity with Alfredo imprisoned in 41 bis) began to spoil the party for the democrats and the false critics in their kermesses, then when the strike began to hold spontaneous marches, to occupy Amnesty International and the cranes, to paper the cities with murals, to carry out the most disparate initiatives in solidarity, the local press had to talk about it. Around and in the wake of the 12 November demonstration in Rome with its scuffles, the reformists gained national headlines: Cacciari wrote an article in ‘La Stampa’ and Manconi in ‘La Repubblica’. The editors of the main newspapers set themselves the editorial problem of explaining what the hell is going on, since their readers know very little about it since until a few days before there was absolute censorship on the subject. And so on, after the increasingly destructive direct actions.

The growth of the democratic campaign could only take place in the conditions of the growth of the radically revolutionary mobilisation of the anarchists and other comrades in solidarity. And, of course, in the protraction of the hunger strike and therefore in the dramatisation of Alfredo’s condition, which, however – we have recalled – is a comrade with a clear identity, and therefore difficult to instrumentalise in humanitarian terms.

It is curious how some of these figures – in particular Frank Cimini and Luigi Manconi – began to worry when the direct actions began to take on certain proportions, both in terms of the destructiveness on the material ground and in that of the mass-media relevance some of them assumed. Not only taking a distance, of which we had no doubt, but Frank Cimini going so far as to say that ‘external manifestations of solidarity risk feeding the thesis of social dangerousness and being counterproductive as has already happened in the past for other political prisoners’, while Manconi stating that he wanted to “just get to know that genius of an anarchist who considered it useful, in order to support the hunger strike of Alfredo Cospito against the 41 bis, to realise an incendiary attack against the first counsellor of the Italian embassy in Athens”, given that this action would have intimidated «created confusion and […] intimidated someone», moreover consenting «Il Giornale’s headline writer[…] to write whatfrom the moment that Massimo Cacciari and I took up the question, Cospito would have “seduced the chic drawing rooms”». Indignant after the arson attack on Susanna Schlein’s vehicles, poor Manconi also enlightens us by informing us that ‘only a politicist and bureaucratic, in essence authoritarian, conception of political struggle can explain the action in Athens’. The reformists, in other words, by giving reality a completely self-centred reading, confuse the effect with the cause and fail to see how, if they ever had any voice in this affair, it is indebted exclusively to the mobilisation undertaken by the anarchists, not the other way around.

The scales of the State

What has been said, however, leads paradoxically to the dramatic outcome of these days. Assuming that this attempt to break through was a mistake for the State, assuming that a clique of ‘manettarians’ has plunged the country into these upheavals, now that we are inside the tempest, the deepest institutional apparatuses are probably putting two alternatives on the scales these days: do we do less harm if we kill him or if we save him?
Declassifying Alfredo for the State would mean taking a very important step backwards. This is not a specific mistake, what the wellmeaning would call a miscarriage of justice. If we compare the State to a living organism, we have seen numerous structures set in motion, in an organised and even organic manner. A ‘protein’ chain that goes from the previous government of National Unity with its most influential ministers (in the case of Marta Cartabia, there has often been talk of a possible first woman as president of the republic), passes from a self-sufficient and incontrovertible structure such as the anti-mafia, involves the judges of the cassation, descends all the way to the offices of numerous Italian public prosecutors (Turin for the Scripta Manent trial, then the charge of massacre, Perugia and Milan for the investigations against anarchist publications, in particular against the anarchist newspaper ‘Vetriolo’, then the insinuation charge of ‘inspiring’ or ‘orienting’ actions, etc.).
Moreover, this step backwards would take place without any guarantees. Anarchists do not promise anything to the State, they never have done so, they cannot do so by their very nature and because they have no unitary political structure. Above all, they do not want to do it. The Italian State would lose the battle without any consolation prize. Life imprisonment for Alfredo and Anna is now more difficult to obtain, after the Turin court’s decision on 5 December to go to the constitutional court, considering it of dubious legitimacy to be obliged (as the cassation claims) to give a life sentence in the absence of victims.

Finally, the State has structures of self-sufficiency, real ‘bunkers’ immune from whatever happens outside. Not even Silvio Berlusconi, when he was prime minister, managed to stop the magistrates who wanted to convict him. How can Alfredo Cospito succeed? The surveillance court of Rome, in charge of confirming 41 bis detention orders, is a body that in its history has always confirmed them all. They are people paid to reject the appeals of the lawyers of people detained in 41 bis. They never back down, they are a rejection factory and have confirmed themselves as such on this occasion too. Revolts and appeals in the newspapers, attacks and stances by politicians, they hear no one.

Nevertheless, the State, intending to kill Alfredo, chooses to play dice with the Devil. It is not known where the game will take it. The hope that moves the exponents of the hard line is that Alfredo may stop at the last moment or that, by killing him, numerous elements of evidence can be gathered against those who are mobilising so as to make a wave of arrests and (delude themselves into) closing the game with the anarchists. Kill one to arrest a hundred of them.

This is a risky bet because it is completely played out while sitting on the wrong side of the fence. It is true that it is not enough to be right to achieve success; indeed, the fact that injustice dominates on planet Earth indicates, if anything, the opposite. However, what has already been said – the vexatious and inhuman nature of the 41 bis, the massacre without victims, the life sentence without deaths, the inauguration of the 41 bis for anarchists – is so difficult to justify that the State will have no easy game in advancing towards the massacre of Alfredo and all of us. By now the Cospito affair is in the public eye, every news programme has been talking about it for several days and will continue to talk about it. While, we repeat, there is not a single sycophant of the public prosecutor’s office – not a Saviano, not a Travaglio, not a government exponent – who puts his face to explain why the death sentence of an imprisoned anarchist is just.
Signs of fatigue from the bourgeois front

On 19 December came the rejection by the Rome court that had met on 1 December for the appeal against the 41 bis transfer order. Almost three weeks to say no, that Alfredo must die. In the evening, the LA7 television news broadcast a long four-minute report on the matter. At the end of which the director himself, Enrico Mentana, takes the floor and says some very heavy things.

Before reporting, a premise on the editorial role of LA7 and the figure of Mentana. Born with the ambition of becoming the third television pole, LA7 in its 15 years of life has tried to present itself as an alternative to both the television owned by the Berlusconi family and the State television, RAI. With the takeover of publisher Urbano Cairo, LA7 became part of a large publishing block that also controlled what has always been the most authoritative newspaper of the Italian bourgeoisie, the ‘Corriere della Sera’. The LA7-Corriere block thus represents the voice of the master; a balanced, centrist, moderate, well-thinking master.

Within this framework, the news director plays an eminent role. Mentana presents the 8 p.m. news himself and does so through what very often appears to be an annoying commented presentation of the facts. After a few reports, he takes a few seconds for his unsolicited comments. Mentana plays the part that in the Greek tragedies was occupied by the chorus: the public opinion that empathises or stigmatises the hero’s vicissitudes. And what does Mentana say this time?

“This is a very very thorny issue. To the observer who, as in my case, perhaps does not have all the data at hand, it seems that there is no proportion in calling for the harshest possible prison for those who have neither killed nor wounded, for those who have committed offences that are not such as to be lumped together with those of Totò Riina and the like, this is not the case. Besides, it is in everyone’s interest not to create such a thorny case that also leads to these reactions. But there is a question of justice, and we knew that, and we are not discovering it today.”
The voice of the bourgeoisie, through the mouth of the chorifer Enrico Mentana, says at least two very heavy things. The first, of a humanitarian nature: there is no proportion between anarchists and the Mafia, between Alfredo Cospito and Totò Riina, the 41 bis for Cospito is disproportionate. It is an obvious, objective, banal statement. It confirms the fact that the State is taking a gamble by sitting on the wrong side of the fence.

Even the news editors are now saying this, and not even this time does anyone come forward to public opinion to argue the opposite. They are going to kill him and are not defending their decision. They are going to kill him and are still trying to do it in silence, they have gone completely ‘mad’ and do not see that the silence is now broken. They keep quiet, plug their ears, and give the garrote another twist. The second statement, however, is even resounding: ‘It is in everyone’s interest not to create such a thorny case that also leads to these reactions’. The comment refers to the direct actions that have taken place over the last few days, actions that the aired report had just mentioned. The Italian bourgeoisie, with this very short statement, is saying something very heavy: we are tired. The bourgeoisie does not understand why the security apparatuses have got it into this mess. We already have to deal with war, with the crisis, with expensive energy, why the hell did you unleash the anarchists on us, moreover with international repercussions? Then, why start from such a weak position to defend?
Finally, the finger-pointing at those responsible for this disaster: there is a problem with the judiciary in Italy and we are not discovering it today.

In Italy, since 1992, an unchallengeable power bloc has been established. If we were sincere democrats concerned about the fate of the country, we would call it ‘a subversive power bloc’. The logic of the anti-Mafia is a logic that is completely indifferent to the world and its solicitations. And it is constitutively so. In the paranoia of the mafia, no one can stop the anti-mafia. If the law had provided, for example, that a minister, a parliament, a commission could stop the anti-mafia, paranoid thinking might have said: who can guarantee us that that minister, that parliament, that commission is not in the hands of the mafia itself?

Today, the Italian bourgeoisie is paying the price for the turmoil caused by the movement in solidarity with the hunger strike undertaken by Alfredo Cospito. The anti-mafia, like any institution, regardless of its rhetoric of self-sufficiency, relies on popular support. Its political-military ‘bunker’ was built in that support. Today, the life of Alfredo also passes through the denunciation of anti-mafia responsibilities. That support must and can be questioned. Those who want to kill Alfredo must know that in doing so they are spreading a lair of shit on the moustaches of Falcone and Borsellino. In conclusion, a component of the State intended to condemn comrades Anna Beniamino and Alfredo Cospito aiming at sentences of up to life imprisonment and wanted to transfer Alfredo in 41 bis so that this would act, in terms of deterrence, as a warning against the anarchist movement. In the same way, that same component of the State now intends to kill Alfredo as an extreme show of strength. But this is actually a proof of weakness. In the face of Alfredo’s determination and the mobilisation in solidarity, the complex organism of the State-capital is not at all cohesive, since there are evidently conflicting drives within it, contradictions grafted onto this very affair of the hunger strike. They are on the wrong side and are unable to publicly justify the murder they have premeditated. The bridgehead that the State has tried to erect by transferring an anarchist to 41 bis for the first time is fragile. Supplies are difficult. They wanted to go too far and now they do not have the courage to retreat.

As the comrade Ivan Alocco has written, beginning a new hunger strike on December 22nd, alongside Alfredo and in solidarity with the imprisoned comrades: «Whether through the psychological torture of isolation (a form of social and intellectual death) or through the physical torture of a slow death, what they want is to annihilate one of their enemies. But Alfredo is not alone. He will never be. His courage in the face of destructive fury of the repression increases our determination. We must continue, continue, continue. Alfredo is still alive. Today as yesterday, they will not succeed in extinguishing anti-authoritarian thought and practices, in breaking the revolutionary tension.

Emmeffe
Efferre
24 December 2022

via: ilrovescio.info