FROM EQUALS TO EQUALS
Against identitarian authoritarianism
We are some anarchist comrades who took part in the “Sabotiamo la guerra” assembly1. With this writing, we want to speak out on a troubling episode that occurred at our assembly, (not the only one of this kind, but the most serious) but above all on a forma mentis and an ideology that now make such episodes systematic. If we present ourselves in such a circumscribed manner, it is because “Sabotiamo la guerra” is precisely an assembly made from time to time by those who participate in it, and we cannot speak on behalf of all its many past, present, and future participants. Having said that, let us begin to explain ourselves.
On 11, 12, and 13 October 2024, the “three-day” discussion “Sfidare la vertigine” (defy vertigo), organized by our assembly and dedicated precisely to some of the vertiginous but inescapable questions posed by the present (starting with those related to the war, which constitutes no more and no less than the historical horizon), was to take place at squat “Villa Occupata” in Milan. The “three days” was postponed sine die, indeed canceled, due to the opposition of some (we emphasize: some) frequenters of the Villa, who accused a comrade participating in this path of rape, and the assembly itself of supporting him. It would have been simpler and more convenient for us to ignore this episode and carry on, as we have done on other occasions when similar attempts have been made to thwart our initiatives due to the presence of this comrade on our path. Instead, our consciences told us to express ourselves. Being aware of the dynamics that led to this serious accusation, and having good reason to consider it groundless, it seems to us a real injustice that these rumors continue to circulate without anyone saying anything. An injustice to our comrade and then to our assembly. Reasoning about it together, we realized that it was impossible to address the issue without going into the ideological, ethical, and mindset assumptions behind this episode, while doing so is something we already felt regardless. While the accusation against the comrade is indeed a very serious one, unfortunately, it is not an isolated incident. It has become common practice – in “antagonist” circles as well as in vast sectors of society – to accuse this or that individual, this or that group of infamous blames (from time to time related to the sexual sphere or to relations between genders, or even to generic “dynamics of power”) without taking responsibility for giving reasons, nor giving anyone – be it the person concerned or others – the opportunity to discuss the consistency of the accusations made, or even to independently evaluate how to deal with them if they turn out to be well-founded. In addition to this, it seems to us that a certain mentality and ideology (which we will call “identitarian” here for reasons that will become clear when reading on) has for years been producing a series of dynamics that go far beyond the sphere of sexuality and interpersonal relations, and to which, at least on our part, we have waited far too long to attempt a critique (however, better late than never). These reflections led to the creation of this text, which is intended to be an act of denunciation and a contribution to the debate that extends far beyond the affair from which it arose. If this type of issue is tearing more and more worlds apart and leading in ours even to forms of desolidarization towards entire realities heavily affected by repression, then the ideologies behind them have, in our opinion, even deeper and profoundly harmful/nefarious consequences. Hence the need to look at all this in perspective as well.
On the accusation itself, we do not intend to enter here. Certain facts, as say “delicate” (and also potentially sensitive from a criminal point of view), must be addressed in appropriate spaces and at appropriate times; at least not to provide cops and pundits with material on which to speculate. We limit ourselves to saying that if we considered our comrade to be a rapist, we would not organize ourselves with him. It is also implied – but it is worth making it explicit – that both we as authors of this paper, and also the directly accused comrade, are willing to confront each other face to face with anyone who’d like to do so. On the other hand, we have much to say about the ways in which such accusations are increasingly being made, the mentality behind them, and the consequences they bring about.
Granted that even for us, when a person reports that he or she has been subjected to violence, one has to listen, this cannot become an alibi for not discussing the facts for what they are (or, more modestly, for how they appear to us poor mortals), nor for affixing a stigma of infamy on anyone without even giving him or her a chance to respond. We stubbornly continue to think that anyone who makes heavy accusations against someone – whether of having committed sexual violence, having stolen money from a collective fund, or being an informer-should take responsibility for what they say, backing it up with clear and circumstantial arguments, and within appropriate spaces and moments. The fact that this moment of confrontation has been missed yet again seems to us to be the result of a mentality that has substituted condition for fact, and victimhood for thought. Since the problem is not trivial, we must approach it, and we have to take it a bit further.
Through the mediation of what we can define as intersectional feminism, an ideology that came from overseas, it says more or less the following: thinking of oneself as free and equal human beings, who as such attempt to experience here and now, as much as possible, relationships of reciprocity (“what you can do, I can do, too, and vice versa”) is nothing more than an old humanistic fairy tale. Since in that permanent war we call society, we are de facto unequal – often crossed without realizing it by the dynamics of overpowering that revolve around the lines of gender, color, physical or intellectual ability, age, etc. – we need to be awake and vigilant (woke, an American slang expression for awake), catching all the violence that is constantly invisible and intervening in human relationships to restore the lost balance. On the one hand, by exercising a permanent moralization of behavior (starting with the well-known obsession with language), especially if «acted upon» by those who have (or would have) some «privilege», an extra share of social power; on the other hand, by giving more power to those who would socially have less. (It is with these “criteria” that several years ago, in the United States, some feminists proposed giving women and African Americans the right to vote twice). The background and – at the same time – the corollary of this kind of view is postmodernist philosophy. If factual truth does not exist or, at any rate, cannot be found, the only “criterion” for orienting oneself and deciding on facts, which also do not stop happening, becomes emo-partisan adherence to the point of view of those who are deemed more “oppressed”. The truthfulness of the fact is replaced by belonging to a particular subject.
While it would take a long time to produce an omnicomprehensive critique of this ideology, and we certainly cannot do it here, one of its first consequences is clear: the endless balkanization of humanity. If there is no possibility of discussion between equals because our experiences and, therefore, our points of view are unequal, the result can only be the war of all against all, punctuated by more or less precarious alliances. With a corollary: since, in the postmodern universe, there are no longer any values but only one disvalue – to affirm something with somepresumption of certainty – the winner of the confrontation is not the one who brings the most cogent argument or incontrovertible facts, but those who can best display their identity status as “victim” and who have enough academic literature (so-called «studies») behind them to be considered assuch.
While this ideology may seem ultra-libertarian to some, to us, it seems to carry an authoritarianism that is all the more dangerous the more it hides behind its supposed postmodern weakness. For while it is clear that these positions truncate any possibility of reciprocity between concrete individuals (what you can do, I can do too, so my word is as good as yours), they also bring back through the backdoor that ideology of the subject which anarchism had long since kicked out from the front door. Predicting that «the religion of humanity» would soon spawn its priests and bureaucrats, back in 1844, Stirner wrote that he sided with the proletarians but refused to «sacralize their calloused hands». Beyond any metaphor, Stirner asserts that if one wants to recognize the condition of oppression suffered by proletarians, one must avoid like the plague thinking that the proletariat is alwaysright, for the simple fact that, as a “subject”, the proletariat… does not exist (there are only concrete individuals who, by the way, are proletarians), and therefore can be neither right nor wrong. In step with the times, we should say the same thing about women and blacks, homosexuals, immigrants, and transgender people. While we acknowledge the different specific oppression suffered by individuals belonging to these categories, we fight it only where we tangibly recognize it, without ever renouncing our autonomous judgment and without giving any blank delegation to those who inscribe themselves in this or that part of persecuted humanity. Not only because we value our freedom as much as anyone else’s, and therefore we would not give even the world’s most harassed and humiliated individual what is effectively a delegation of power; but because we know very well that when it is established that someone, for whatever reason, must count for more than another, it is not “the oppressed” who benefit but their self-appointed representatives. To make our point, we have to get into the most uncomfortable part of the issue. When, in our small collectivities, more or less well-founded allegations of sexual or gender abuse are raised, those who have something to say are dogmatically reiterated that «one must listen to the female comrades». Now, already in itself, this statement contains an implicit accusation that is not necessarily justified (maybe one does listen to «the female comrades» but does not agree with what is being said); but more importantly: are all female comrades and women really to be considered? In our experience, the answer is no. Only those comrades aligned with already defined positions, that is, with the dogmas of the new global left, are considered. All other women are ignored, when not stigmatized as accomplices of their «internalized patriarchy». On closer inspection, in this new art of getting it right, what makes the difference is not so much concrete membership in an offended category, but adherence to the ideology that sanctifies them. Demanding “listening” (i.e., in reality, a rigid and schematic alignment) is the new sensibilist and politically correct Church… other than «the female comrades», the «non-whites», or the «non-standard bodies»!
Of course, we are aware that sexual violence, in its various forms, does not always correspond only to the common imagination of mere physical assault; that violence large and small also exists in our environment; that women (but one could broaden the spectrum to many other oppressed categories) have found and find often great difficulty, resistance, and boycotts when they denounce them; while we are in favor of collectively addressing abuse and violence and, if necessary, even chorally applying sanctions toward those who committed them. It seems legitimate to us, for example, that a collective should not accept someone in a certain space or even from an entire territory if their presence makes them intolerable to a seriously offended person; or that a collective should refuse to organize itself (for a certain period, until a decisive clarification or even forever) with someone whose behavior has broken or lost the trust of its comrades. What we do demand, though, is that all and sundry – tutte e tutti – have an equal say in the matter; that accusations need to be put to the test of facts, insofar as a given situation permits (it would be atrocious, for example, to demand that those who have suffered violence reenact it in full; but between that and a blank proxy of trust, one can practically always find other possibilities); and that the accused should be given the opportunity to defend oneself, even by denying the fact, when it is thought or claimed one did not commit it. If these simple instances, recognized by humanity of every time, and in its time wrestled with struggles from the absolute state, may have somewhat the appearance of “bourgeois law”, reflect on the fact that the opposite criteria take us back no more and no less than to inquisitorial law, in which the only way to acquittal was admission of guilt (today, in tune with the times, «of responsibility»). It will be said that facts of this kind are particularly difficult to resolve because – in addition to calling into question subtle interpersonal dynamics – they usually take place in private and intimate settings, where no one else sees. This is very true. But come to think of it, the overwhelming majority of human events that give rise to discussion take place under the shelter of the gazes of others, or under a few gazes that easily contradict each other, having perhaps caught only clues regarding the consummation of an act (think, for example, of a situation in which money has gone missing, and only a certain person has been seen in the vicinity: someone says they saw her at a certain time or in a certain attitude, another at another, but no one saw her stealing); scabrous gestures that take place in a public square, or in front of ten witnesses who affirm more or less the same, are, since the world began, a minority, and they attract immediate general disapproval. By what criteria, then, in uncertain situations, do we decide whether someone has or has not committed something? Generally, one relies on verisimilitude, comparing the dynamics of the fact with similar ones experienced, seen, or heard at other times and situations (in a word: on past experience); which, in the presence of discordant versions, is only possible by listening and comparing several accounts. Can one make mistakes by applying this criterion? Certainly, it has been done since the dawn of time.But listening to one bell only, uncritically and out of bias, can only give some people the privilege(this one real) of lying, since it relieves them of the burden of making credible claims. Whatever, even very sensible, one might object to this (for instance, that the differences in «socialization» and experience between men and women do not allow certain nuances to be fully grasped), it does not eliminate what remains an inescapable consequence (unless one argues that members of oppressed categories cannot harbor ulterior motives, and tell themselves and others even fibs – a particularly high risk in this age of almost psychedelic subjectivism). In addition to this, will it ever be possible that, even in the case of noted facts, the almost automatic application of the same method (removal of the person, and scorched earth around those who continue to organize with them) without any assessment either of the specific gravity of the fact or of possible, and perhaps commensurate, forms of reparation?
No, this is made impossible. Because identity activists are not at all interested in finding better ways for people to live together, but only in purifying the world from everything that is not pleasing to them. No wonder that, for some time now, certain people have been moving from trying to erase specific individuals to cancel culture, and that which most conveys them: books. Indeed, there are those who have launched real campaigns against publishing houses, editions, and distributions “of movement” (either because they are edited by people accused of abuse or because they are guilty of publishing texts considered «problematic») and proscription lists against authors considered from time to time transphobic, homophobic, or sexist on the basis of the distorted interpretation of their texts, participation in initiatives organized by others “indicted”, or even for simply reviewing other people’s texts; while we know of a few comrades who have never been accused of any violence, but who are wary of showing up in certain contexts for their critical positions toward the LGBTQ+ movement, which would merit them being accused of «transphobia». While we wonder with dismay since when anarchists have been committed to defendreformists, this position is simply hallucinatory in terms of political and intellectual dishonesty. The LGBTQ+ movement is precisely a political movement that, however much it plays at representing all homosexual and transgender people, in reality represents nothing but itself. To say that those who criticize the authoritarianism of certain queer groups are homophobic or transphobic is like saying that those who criticize Black Lives Matter are thereby racist. Nothing more, in fact, than politics in the worst sense of the term.
We are sorry, but behind so much (and growing) accusatory and persecutory fury, which is ruining the lives of more and more comrades based on increasingly “bold” and imaginative accusations, we fail to see only a sincere will to oppose sexism and bullying, or to accommodate instances that have been silenced for too long. We also see there an assumption of the culture of punishment that in other fields is called justicialism: punishing the unfortunate person on duty (whether actually “guilty” or “innocent”) to set an example for everyone else. We also see in it an eagerness for power and control. But most of all, we see in it, more generally, an authoritarian and reactionary poison that, from U.S. universities and other laboratories of power, has slowly penetrated into anarchism and that seriously threatens to extinguish it from inside (while repression continues to beat hard from the outside), overturning its principles while claiming to radicalize them. If there is one concept shared by all anarchists, it is that authority does not limit the tendency of humans to overpower one another but aggravates it and makes it more structural. That being said, the abolition of authority and thus freedom is not the panacea that will free oppressed humanity from all evils, but «the way open to every improvement» (Malatesta): a turning point and a beginning, but precisely for this reason necessary. No matter how much it gives itself libertarian and ultra-radical airs, the post-modernist and identity-oriented left reasons in exactly the opposite way. There is no way out of the present misery, only an eternal struggle between subjectivities (which feel) oppressed within a ramified and omnipresent network of micro-powers, which can only find some peace in a kind of negative reciprocity: instead of a principle that proclaims, “I do what I want to the extent that you can do what you want”, a creed that more or less goes , “I won’t do what I want as long as you don’t do what you want”. In short, an endless series of prohibitions. One can see this very well in certain universities occupied by younger generations, where on the walls, instead of incendiary leaflets, one increasingly finds intimations not to do this or that, together with directions to the care team if one does not feel safe enough. An essentially Hobbesian model: if individuals, having become wolves after centuries of “white hetero-patriarchy”, sink into the war of all against all, then artefacts must be invented to curb them: the eternal justification of the police. While anarchists have always advocated destroying the present society in order to allow individuals to evolve, but freeing them as they are, the identity-driven left claims to change society by changing its habits and customs, with the pretension of proceeding from the individual to social relations instead of vice versa. Pure reactionary crap, worthy of the Church Fathers or 16th-century Calvinist Geneva.
With the principle of reciprocity gone, the very basis of class self-organization, and the class struggle itself, is lost. From this point of view, it is significant that among the various «privileges» pointed out by the identitarians, education is never mentioned, which nevertheless traces a very deep furrow between classes, and not only in terms of access to work. Years ago, a comrade, who had been in female prison for many years, told us how much “being educated” made a difference in prison, both in terms of knowing one’s legal “rights” and in the ability to assert oneself in front of the authorities. When one considers their university background, and the adoption of their precepts made by people who attend or have attended university, can this absence amidst studies devoted to all kinds of conditions and harassment really appear accidental? (With this, we hope we are not unwittingly giving the suggestion to open a new persecutory vein, or pushing someone to abandon their studies in a Franciscan way: cultural means are very much needed! and, like other means, they should not be abolished, but made available to the struggles and to our class). Even when certain ideologies end up reaching the more or less proletarian youth by entering “movement” areas, they are in fact typically promoted and assumed by the middle class and in particular by its cognitive variant, the one that does not want to change the world but to make it more civilized. This leads to the avoidance of the issue of education, which often goes hand in hand with disdain for that proletariat (especially the white proletariat, grotesquely considered «privileged»), which is unable or unwilling to adopt the language and categories of the left-wing “cognitariat”, who perceive and present themselves as the authentic model of the respectable global citizen. If this substantial indifference in class matters should suggest to us how much identity theorists really care about the damned and exploited on earth, it is no wonder that they do not realize (do they really not notice?) how much their ideology ends up on the one hand undermining the very possibilities of organizing among the exploited, and on the other hand reinforcing the bosses’ securitarianism. How can one organize together, when one adopts a schizophrenic vision that considers one’s comrades as both comrades, indeed, and potential (not even so much) enemies, marked by the original sin of one’s own more or less «privileges» of birth? When personal qualities – commitment, candor, trustworthiness, courage in its various forms, the ability to reason and argue, consistency with what one proclaims – are disqualified to mere means of overdetermination? When can no common decision be taken without the ghost of «overdetermination» being evoked? If one stops considering equality as a boundary concept (the space that allows the expression of differences, and in which some inequalities also necessarily emerge), the result can only be paralysis, and a generalized misery in which differences, namely what makes the richness of any collectivity, are annihilated in the name of an abstract and disciplining egalitarianism (while those prevailing are, Orwellianly, those who claim to be «more equal than others»).
Of course, even “classism”, in its own way, is identitarian; however, we are dealing with a form that profoundly differs from the various identitarianisms of gender, “race”, and so forth, and which opens up entirely different possibilities. Without denying that the gender line and the color line play a role in the articulation of power relations, oppression, and exploitation (as well as in the overall economy of present-day capitalist domination), it is only the class line that opens up a universal liberation, creating that vertical rupture in which the liberations of women, homosexuals, and transsexuals, as well as “internal” and “external” (post-)colonial minorities (to name but a few), can be realized without diverging into new configurations of power and of domination. Being exploited (regardless of gender) has at least two different aspects compared to being women, black people, etc. The first is that it is a purely social condition, not related to physiological traits: one is exploited as long as there is a society based on exploitation; with the end of racism and sexism, one would stop being «socialized» as men and women, «racialized» as blacks, etc., but one would not stop being men, women, or blacks. The second aspect is that gender, skin color , sexual orientation, etc., are characteristics that – with some exceptions, of course – most individuals would not want to lose in a process of liberation, but simply wish to embody without all the discrimination, humiliation, and stereotypes associated with them -i.e., they are characteristics that are not undesirable in themselves; but no one (laborist-statist psychosis aside) would want to remain exploited. In its mere negativity, where the ultimate outlet is the self-oppression of the exploited class at themoment when it suppresses the exploiting class, only the class line realizes a non-abstract humanism (no equalization between exploited and exploiters in the name of common “humanity”, but a process that will be able to shape a different humanity), opening the space for the liberation of each and all, while striking where the system can at most retreat, but not recreate itself as a system of exploitation: a capitalism without racism, sexism, and even without gender and “racial” differences could, at least in the abstract, exist; a class society without classes, no. Transfeminism, “critical race theory”; etc., tend to apply the almost absolute antagonism of classism, which is possible because it is based on merely social alterities, to alterities embodied in beings (in philosophical parlance: ontological) and/or of which concrete individuals do not (and should not) necessarily want to dispose. The result is almost always a mess in which a certain backlash of racism surfaces, where certain individuals (male, and then in a cascade straight, white, “able-bodied”, etc.) suffer a fundamental disqualification for who they are and not for what they do, and where the same people are on the one hand recognized as oppressed and potentially complicit, and, on the other, as soon as a conflict arises, treated as “class enemies” against whom to close ranks of “one’s own”. This does not mean that conflicts of a different nature than class conflict do not exist or never have reason to be opened up, even harshly if necessary (we reiterate: we do not sacralise callous hands): what we are questioning is the way of considering and treating them, which should have its own specific characteristics. If one is unable to make these distinctions, the consequences are catastrophic. When we encounter a dispute in a factory or warehouse, we always side with the workers, and we care little about who’s telling the “truth” (we can even tell each other that the workers are talking nonsense, but that’s an inter nos, which we’ll discuss on this side of the fence, if ever). Can we say the same thing when the conflict arises between a comrade (an exploited person, a friend) and a female comrade (an exploited person, a friend)? Or, in turn, between a gay (or trans, or black) comrade and a straight (or cis, or white) one? When a leader or government makes a misstep – one that somehow draws public disapproval – it makes perfect sense to attack them, reaping every possible benefit for the advancement of the struggle, without dwelling too much on how “serious”their actions actually are. Can the same thing be said… etc.?
The mechanical application of typical class struggle logics to conflicts of other kinds ends up killing the struggle for liberation. By being fragmented into a series of micro-conflicts, moreover easily exposed to logical short-circuits (who is more oppressed between a «non-white cis-ethero» and a «white transgender»? With whom would one side in case of disagreement?), the vertical conflict (exploited vs. exploiters, revolutionary vs. state) is engulfed by a perennial horizontal conflict. A paradigm that moreover resembles (are we the only ones to notice this?) a kind of leftist counterbalance to the war between the poor fomented over the years by right-wingers; and which, wielding safety instead of security, contributes to the same pacifying social goals (rights for all* and everywhere, freedom for no one and nowhere). The desire to be protected and secured in one’s isolation against one’s fellow human beings, increasingly perceived as dissimilar, is substituted for the urgency to free oneself together with everyone else.
Before concluding this series of considerations, we would like to clarify one point in order to avoid possible (and perhaps cunning) misunderstandings. The above criticisms cannot be applied mechanically and in toto to all identity-inspired groups: what we are interested in is taking a picture of tendencies, and it is in this sense that these considerations should be read. We do not want to attribute to all those who variously adhere to identity-postmodernist ideologies and approaches the blame for all the drifts that have crossed the antagonist movements in recent years (from adherence to securitarianism-Covid to support for a non-existent “resistance” in the war in Ukraine). While the victimhood typical of these ideologies has provided, especially abroad, a more than “generous” contribution to these drifts (see the international gathering in Saint-Imier in 20232), similar drifts have often occurred across ideologies and areas (there have been, for example, groups of varying Marxist or libertarian tendencies that have little or nothing to do with postmodern identitarianism). In Italy, especially in anarchist and libertarian circles, there has beena healthy disbandment of the opposite sign that has crossed different worlds, including some queer and transfeminist circles. We are also pleased to note, on an international level – we are thinking above all of the United States – that the attempts by the powers to create distance from Palestinian resistance by waving the spectre of “religious obscurantism” and the alleged “rape of Hamas” (a fake news that some initially took the bait for and others continue to do so) have largely gone unheeded, and that many comrades of transfeminist, intersectional tendency have sided body and soul with the oppressed Palestinians (with the blessing of Pope Judith Butler). In the face of these simple findings, certain overly Manichean analyses seem inadequate to the confused, complex, changing reality of our time, and we do not make them our own. What we want to suggest is something more subtle, having to do with the way ideas act on a social and individual level, taking individuals even where they do not want to go. When you start reasoning in a certain way, Malatesta used to say, you do not go where you want to, but where reasoning takes you. An example will clarify what we mean.
It does not exactly seem like a coincidence to us that not only the market and show business, but even the institutions, police, and military have now embraced rhetoric inspired by woke identitarianism, with valuable returns in terms of social control (militarization justified by the «defense of women» automatic life imprisonment for «feminicides», but also ever more frequent interventions by the police in schools against gender violence, «bullying», «ableism» and so on, flanked by floods of psychologists on the hunt for insecurities, discomforts, and… clients). That many (trans) feminists reply that most rapes actually take place at home and by people they know, or oppose such instrumentalization with the presence and direct self-defense of women in the streets, or the denunciation of the «patriarchal» character of the police and even of the «system» as a whole, is undoubtedly valuable, but it is also insufficient in the face of the all pervasive propaganda that reaches more and more people (and especially the very young) directly on their smartphones, and that pushes more and more categories (women, homosexuals, transsexuals, “colored” people, people with disabilities, “neurodivergents”, etc.) to feel perpetually under attack by those who would have a few more «privileges» (or with a few fewer problems). Not so many years ago, in France, anarchists who were guilty of proclaiming and practicing their intolerance against all religions were attacked with the charge of “islamophobia3” while in several territories of the United States, due to wanting to serve the interests of “minorities” by sheltering them from the snares of the “privileged”, there is a de facto return to racial segregation, with separate schools and classes for blacks only4. Would it not be the case to attempt a deeper reflection, before it is too late? Unfortunately – and here, conversely, we have to bring into play most of the realities infected by the identity disease – what is done is systematically the opposite: as soon as someone raises issues that are uncomfortable for their ideologies or for some of their allies, the identity activists – with the silent consent of their more “moderate” friends – go for the throat, pointing the finger at this or that poorly worded statement, this or that word, this or that misplaced comma (often mixing, as needed and without shame, what one writes calmly at one’s desk with what comes out of one’s mouth in the heat of an argument, or over a glass of wine); and thus avoid having to face the issues themselves. What is put in place, in effect, is a series of devices that prevent one from discussing as much asfrom thinking (without the possibility of confrontation, thinking dies in the long run).
So, this is the air of the Church that we have been forced to breathe for too long and of which we
are tired. This is what we denounce, regardless of the occasion that prompted this complaint. The problem, for us, is not so much that this series of ideological devices has generated a great deal of disagreement in our circles (if not always pointless or unfounded, almost always poorly managed); but above all that, by dealing lethal blows to critical thinking, it has triggered a genuine process of ethical, cognitive, and spiritual degradation. What kind of moral and intellectual environment can be created when we stop reasoning about facts, leaving free rein to an unbridled subjectivism, simultaneously imprisoned in watertight categories, which ends up peddling insane dogmas (insane like all dogmas, whose essence is that they must be believed even while remaining incomprehensible) such as «violence is what a person perceives as such» (and «violence» can be replaced at will with «overdetermination», «power», etc.)? Interiority without exteriority, Hegel said, is empty. Without the encounter-clash with reality as its moment of verification, and therefore without presupposing its existence and the possibility of investigating it, subjectivity becomes nothing more than a perpetual whirlwind of sensations, emotions, perceptions (and paranoia). If in this historical phase individuals, in general, are increasingly being produced as worldless individuals by rampant ultra-subjectivism (and the computerized dematerialization of reality); and if any ideological setting acts as a filter, determining which human types will tend to approach or distance themselves from certain environments, it is inevitable that, where woke paranoia dominates, precisely the most inconsistent, incoherent, and tendentially resentful types will increasingly approach and become closer to the “movements”. Those who are disinclined to reason and very prone to complaining; those who don’t like making serious efforts to identify and fight Power (the real one), and who are very fond of the cheap struggle against the “power” spread everywhere… but especially close to them; those who seek a group that will take care of their mood swings, rather than challenging every community and thus enriching those they freely choose with the originality of their own tensions and ideas; those who don’t want to be unique individuals, and therefore irreducible to any category, but, precisely, subjects.
In this race to annihilate reality, and simultaneously thinking individuality, where authoritarianism finds a cozy home and where the scraps of reaction are reborn in a new form, an episode like the one in Milan, and like others that have occurred at our assembly in its year and a half of existence (but which ended more happily), saddens us but does not surprise us. Authority and authoritarianism always diminish human beings and make interpersonal relationships increasingly ugly. It is therefore not surprising that, at this midnight of the century, all doors are wide open to little Torquemadas and unprincipled opportunists, and closed in the face of those who persist in speaking clearly about a present far more tragic than serious.
In the midst of so much returning reactionary crap, we go forward, with our principles firmly in our fists.
Italian peninsula, Spring 2025
Cinque piccoli indiani fuori dalla riserva [Five little indians off the reserve]
1 “Sabotage the war”assembly
2 For a look at what happened on that occasion, see the text Grosso guaio a St Imier on the blog of the radio programme “la nave dei folli”, on this page: https://lanavedeifolli.noblogs.org/files/2023/09/Grosso-a-guaio-a-St-Imier.pdf
3 For instance, https://danslabrume.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/24/anti-anti-racialisme/
4 Cfr. Yascha Mounk, La trappola identitaria, Feltrinelli, Milano 2024
PDF: From equals to equals. Against identitarian authoritarianism
[Received via e-mail and published at https://lanemesi.noblogs.org/post/2025/08/15/from-equals-to-equals-against-identitarian-authoritarianism/]
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IT: Da pari a pari. Contro l’autoritarismo identitario
EN: From equals to equals. Against identitarian authoritarianism
DE: Auf Augenhöhe. Gegen den identitären Autoritarismus