Defence is not the best attack
Open (desperate) letter to those who eat our same bread

Dear comrades,

it is to you, and only you (‘wreckers’, not consensus interceptors; avowed dreamers, not pragmatists when required – militants and opportunists please refrain) that we are turning to in these dark times, when every horizon seems to be closing in on us. To you, known over the years in Italy and around the world, or even completely unknown, the only ones who can understand our current state of mind and our words.

Many argue that those who have no hope to convey should keep quiet. Although this would explain the silence into which many of us are sliding, we don’t agree. In fact, in a way we think exactly the opposite: those who should shut up are the ones who persist in peddling enchanting narratives (from heavenly paradise as a reward for earthly resignation to communism as the ineluctable outcome of capitalist development, passing through the insurrection that comes with every citizens’ mobilisation or street riot). Especially now – with humanity well on the way to extinction, a planet on the verge of ecological collapse, a social massacre that gets worse every day, a war that brandishes nuclear weapons, voluntary servitude so generalised as to make any aspiration to even the slightest freedom ridiculous – it seems to us more urgent and essential than ever to look deeply into reality and not to skim the surface of things in order to draw comforting illusions from it. That is why this letter is desperate, because it is born of discouragement in the face of a situation that in all respects appears hopeless, with no way out.

We are not hiding it. We have gambled on the encounter between thought and action, we are besieged by opinion and representation. We have invoked the Ego and its Own, we are surrounded by the Selfie and its vanity. We have tried to spread utopia, we are submerged in realism. We have loved the most excessive and singular ideas, we are at the mercy of the most homologising and massifying propaganda. We longed for the awakening of consciousness, we find ourselves trapped in the calculus of the algorithm. We have prioritised ethics, we are swept away by politics. Poetry may have survived Auschwitz (and television?), but critical thinking has been annihilated in Silicon Valley.

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