Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  The isolation of the prison struggle within the prison walls

  3. The centrality of the problem of the prisons (and of the 3,000 political prisoners) cannot be instrumentalized – as happened in the campaign over D’Urso – and subordinated to the construction of the ‘OCC’, let alone to the victory of one political line over others. This line of approach is destructive in all its aspects. It presents moments of such an instrumental coinvolvement as to appear to be in contradiction with the minimal principles of revolutionary ethics. Anyone who instrumentalizes the mass struggle and the proletariat’s desire for freedom in this way is not much different, in their ethics, from the opposite ethics presented by pentitismo. Combatant immediatism, in prison, joins desperation to instrumentalization. Its watchword is ‘let Sampson die together with all the Philistines’, or ‘après moi le déluge’. It is quite another thing to articulate politically, within the masses, the sacrosanct watchwords of ‘no to the culture of life imprisonment’, ‘no to prison segregation’, ‘no to annihilation’. Prison – and prison for political prisoners at this particular moment – is a central problem, and of such social and historical dimensions that it cannot be, I’m not saying solved, but even discussed outside of a mass political line, and struggles, and general political solutions. This is certainly not the moment to introduce juridical questions (depenalization, amnesty): this is something that we can begin to address only once there has been a resumption of a mass political campaign. But the negotiations on the question of prison are central only in theory, as long as that question remains isolated, as long as it does not become part of all the campaigns of the movement, as long as it is not intrinsic to all the struggles. We do not need ‘solidarity committees’; what we need is rather to carry the discussion of the prison question into all the situations of struggle. The fact that the struggle on prisons is confined to the prison and identified with the combatant line of the ‘OCC’ has only one result: from power, reactions in the manner of Attica and Stammheim; from proletarian prisoners, a vertical and unresolvable rupture. To avoid both these outcomes is a duty for all the comrades, but above all it is the task of the political struggle for liberation. To succeed in articulating the mass problem of liberation across the entire fabric of political confrontation is today the only method of securing the centrality of the problem of the prisons (in effective terms, and not rhetorically) and of restoring a perspective of hope. And not only for the people in prison: because in fact these 3,000 vanguards thrown into prison, the consolidation of the practice of mass police arrests, and the infamy of juridical innovations (from the repressive laws to the use of pentiti) constitute, at a wider level, a continuous threat to the struggles and needs of the masses.

  Rebuilding the conditions of political struggle

  But perhaps I need to express more forcefully the points outlined here. Not because I, together with other comrades, am a protagonist in the 7 April case, but for reasons that I shall explain below, it is my belief that we need to focus our attention on the events of the spring of ’79. What has really happened between then and now? This: the political struggle inside the movement has been crushed by a stupid and insane initiative from the magistracy and from power. The wealth of political alternatives has been removed; as a result of the destruction of the whole political fabric, the Red Brigades have been left in the position of representing the movement globally, and this played into the hands of the state, with its decision to enact a simulacrum of civil war. To what end? And what have been the effects? Two years of reciprocal killings and the introduction of barbarism into political debate have shown what the aim had been: to bring about a state of emergency which, while showing the necessity, the opportuneness and the possibility of destroying terrorism, at the same time destroyed the guarantees of democracy, the spaces of struggle, the decade-long continuity of the proletarian struggle. Has power succeeded in achieving this? Today we can reply that it has not. There is still resistance – albeit often in the form of absenteeism, estrangement, lack of involvement. And today new struggles, which carry with them the freshness of the new generations, are exploding everywhere and breaking up the spurious coherence of the big trade union and party-political corporations. But we (and they) must recognize that the price paid in the past two years has been enormous. Were it not for the total elimination of any critical dialectics in the movement, many lives would have been saved. The insanity of the campaigns of annihilation, the absurdity of the reciprocal killings could very probably have been avoided. The delirious circle of repression and reprisal, of terrorism and repression, could have been interrupted. Today we have to say, with maximum clarity, that the problem of terrorism can be solved only politically – politically both by and within the movement – and that therefore we have to rebuild the conditions of political struggle. Nobody is so deluded as to think that he can wipe out the 7 April case and, with it, two years in the history of repression. Nobody imagines that he can cancel out the materiality of these years and the new problems they have opened. What is clear is that we have to interrupt the murderous process which has brought us all to this point. Is there anybody out there who still thinks that they are going to win? The millenarianism of the theoreticians of catastrophe does not interest us. As for the labour movement, is it not also coming to terms with the defeat that has come about through the flattening of politics and the simultaneous terroristic crushing of the movement? But similar questions could be posed also in regard to other productive and intellectual strata: nobody has anything to gain from the prolongation of this situation.

  Who can destroy terrorism?

  Terrorism has to be defeated. This, however, is possible only through political means, which nobody possesses through traditional delegation, even if he claims them from the point of view of political representation or of his institutional functions. The only way to defeat terrorism is by intervening in the mechanisms of its reproduction and by being politically legitimated to do so. And we are only legitimated in this sense when we speak from within the class movement, in its interests, and through the plurality of its organizations, within the specificity of its culture. There are many comrades – particularly comrades who are now in prison – who want to move in this direction. Is there a possibility of success? Who knows? What is certain is that the traditional workers’ movement, and the other forces – mainly cultural and religious – who are moving towards a political resolution of the problem of terrorism (but is it not the problem of the movement itself?), will not succeed unless they are able to break with a discourse which, even when it is not running into the sands with pious calls for the abolition of the death penalty, nevertheless ends up being impotent when (as has happened) it tries to deal with the problem at the level of civil rights [garantismo] (in the period of discussions about reforming the constitution) – unless it lets itself be dazzled by the revelations of some pentito or other. And so things go on, and the situation gets worse, and the simulacrum of civil war becomes a monster which lives and destroys, not only human lives but also the possibilities of struggle.

  A terrain of communist hope

  It is for all these reasons that:

  (a) I reject the accusation that dissociation from the Red Brigades and the ‘OCC’ is an individual operation. It is not, because it expresses fundamental needs of the movement and the necessity of doing politics and of living within the mass movement. Everything always begins in individual terms. Or at least this is the way we have always done things during the past fifteen years.

  (b) I reject the accusation that explicit dissociation from terrorism is a minimal operation. Far from it. It represents the beginning of a political project which has the task of representing, once again, the cultural and social identity of the movement. These are its perspectives: to make a record of the history of the struggles, with the intention of giving it both a political representation and an operative representation. Breaking definitively with terrorism and with all the militaristic deviations of the
movement – on the basis of a strong critique, which, historically, has already occurred at mass level (albeit until now only in spontaneous form).

  (c) I reject the accusation that this dissociation, this project and this struggle are ambiguous. For communists, doing politics has never meant accrediting the present state of things. The problem is quite other: it is one of not getting fetishistic about the critique of arms, and of not diverting social struggles onto a horizon which, in place of liberation, substitutes the hysteria of its simulacrum, which often becomes crudely identified with a (highly ambiguous) conception of the seizure of power.

  Reopening a terrain of communist hope today means taking the path of dissociation and turning that dissociation into a programme for the victory of the mass struggle, in the plurality of its organizations and needs, and in the wealth of its desires.

  Folio 44

  So the trial has been postponed until next Tuesday. Three days of rest. Oh the pain of this trial, this weariness transformed into a sore. (Speaking of which, Mrs Thatcher has won – a big victory – confirmation of a Europe-wide shift to the Right, which is solid and enduring.)

  Turbulent events on the outside. Intervention by the magistrates against the Socialist Party (in Savona), and against the Christian Democrats (in the south). A strange climate. Heavy. The corporations and the parties are glaring at each other like dogs, and sometimes they bark and bite. Italian democracy is ulcerated by the state of emergency. Meanwhile there has been a television ‘blackout’ as regards the trial – obviously they’re scared of providing me with electoral propaganda. In postmodernity chaos and functionality lie under the same blanket, and when necessary they swap roles. I don’t know where to put my head – it seems to me that my head is already rolling in this apology for a Jacobin trial. Prepare the basket, my friend. I shouldn’t take things too much to heart – I try to console myself – if I don’t understand much, people on the outside understand even less. Maybe not even keeping this diary is worth the effort. It’s hard to document things that are incomprehensible. Or, putting it differently, to extract some light, even if only from afar – probably only metaphysical undertakings could succeed, by detaching themselves from the concrete, in giving it to us. But how can I put my trust in metaphysical imagination? The wound burns. The spectacle of the trial – and of the election – are certainly postmodern, being played out completely on the equivalence of the images in circulation. On the other hand, is my own individual condition something different from this spectacle in which I am caught up? During these years I have been snatched away from reality, from the continuity of a dialogue and of a collective building process. Only the collective moment gives you the possibility of understanding yourself. And, instead, here I am wandering wide of the mark, in a circuit of things that don’t make sense, and I don’t understand how this unease of mine – when it is not (as it often is) pain – and this disorientation can be overcome.

  Maybe they are only mine, internal and solitary, an inevitable effect of the misery in which I am living and of the extreme crisis I am perceiving among the comrades – what is certain, though, is that it stuns me, and that all this is also the reflection of what I have around me, of what I see on the outside, of the disorientation of a disconcerted world. In the personal libraries of my colleagues in prison there are many books on postmodernism. Does this represent an attempt at understanding and deepening – or is it a drug? The wound burns and recalls me to reality. This is the critique of postmodernity: a philosophy, a conception of the world which does not know pain – and therefore an illusion.

  And yet, I ask myself, can our humanity be changed by that whirl of signifieds which go towards non-sense? Why is the totality, required by man to understand the particular, given back to us as insignificant? How are we to reverse this situation? In other times humanity suffered similar lacerations. In the 1600s, for instance, my main field of study – that epoch of formidable inventions and fanatical pyreburnings, the Baroque. Between the Baroque and the postmodern there is not much difference – the insignificance of the former was in intensity, that of the latter in extension; the former emptied out the soul with an evanescent use of the sensible; the latter empties out the world with a totalitarian use of the image. Between baroque culture and the postmodern public I do not see a difference, except, precisely, the formal difference between intensity and extension. Non-meaning repeats itself. But my wound burns.

  And it is here that my (initially timid, and then increasingly conscious) protest lifts off. Is it purely illusory? It could be. I imagine a new and unique language for Babel – a language which permits us to reach the heavens – but this is a transcendental deception, driven towards an abstract recomposition of the divisions of the world. I imagine an ethics for Sodom – it is an illusion that risks becoming a moralistic obscenity. I imagine a simple metaphysics, able to reorient the world – but no, not even this works – do you know the boredom and indifference which would attend its teaching? In the search for the one and the universal there is little space for protest. It seems to me that, paradoxically, I nourish the desires of a small-time Balkan dictator: language, ethics, metaphysics, all dominated by my power. (At root, why should the One not be defined as a kind of power? Is that not what it is among the mystics?) No, this postmodern aspect of the trial and of the election run the risk of filling with infamy even the protest and the reflection on liberation. So what else is there for me to do, except throw pieces of my flesh, of my passion? What can I do, other than exhibit my own wound?

  There is no reflection on liberation, there is only the immediacy of the passion and the protest. Either we succeed in saying this, both in the trial and in the election, or we succeed in saying nothing. I think of a hydraulic system through which my pain might run – between prison, the trial and the outside, the world and its life. The total disenchantment of my heroism does not, I believe, remove its meaning. Only my indecency overcomes the senselessness of it all. In this forest, in this labyrinth, only the exasperation of a global witnessing can repair the insult and the wound in the soul. Postmodernity is injustice, because its perception has no place for pain. But on the basis of pain and protest we can rebuild the world. (G12 Rebibbia – 11/12/13 June)

  Folio 45

  Signor presidente, and gentlemen of the civil parties, I would say that these last three days in court have been horrible – certainly for me, and possibly also for you. Absurdity has jumped to the fore. Your professionality and your corporative duty (namely to lend credibility to the political provocation of the 7 April trial) have been placed under serious stress.

  Everyone has been defending their own positions, nobody has been attacking. I have not succeeded in attacking the paltriness of your allegations, and you have not succeeded in rendering them credible. At this point we are all caught up in the falsity of the situation. We are moving on shifting sands, those of a bellicose cruelty, which today we all regard with suspicion. You persist in repeating a set of allegations that has fallen apart, attempting to revive it in new forms. But here absurdity rules. You are not charging me with stealing peanuts, but with a series of murders. The way in which you are conducting these proceedings is shameful. It is obvious that you do not believe in them. But not believing in them does not change reality: murders are the kind of crimes of which you have to find me guilty in order to render credible the only thing of which you are convinced – namely that I am an irreducible subversive. I cannot risk lending credibility to these killings with which you are charging me, and which I did not commit, by mounting a passionate defence – in other words by accepting the rules of the game, so to speak. An absurd and slippery reality, and the trial is going nowhere. We are in the shit. What do you intend to do? How have we ended up in this blind alley? Why are we all so cowardly? Signor presidente, the fact is that I could easily break your ban on discussions of politics – all I need to do would be to talk politics. To push the court proceedings to their limit, to present, within the absurdity of
the political trial, the facts of the case as they concern me, bringing together the political and the criminal. But what would be the point of my explaining how the movement functioned, in its infinite articulations and its indefinite possibilities? Your job is to prevent history from being reconstructed. The materials of lived experience can feature as an ensemble and as a unity only under the form of the accusation. A claiming of that history is impossible. Signor presidente, it seems that this claiming of history is what most frightens you and the court. In other words the possibility that in this trial there might emerge the only clean thing that can exist – a history. I am speaking precisely of that: historia rerum gestarum, Geschichte, and so on. Relax. That claim, that history, are rendered impossible by the very nature of the machine. However, I am trying to be subtle and convincing. In short, I am asking you this: why this blockage of awareness? What good does it serve? You are judging a general picture – insurrection – with a vulgar attention to which the general picture does not align itself. The real frightens you. The claiming of that history terrifies you. Why? It would not change anything at the level of the trial itself. Our sentences are laid down in advance. If you happen to fail in your task, the machine will easily make up for the loss. So why this blockage? Why this reproduction of historical confusion as the condition of your repressive resolve? I don’t want to play this game – but neither have I managed to break it. I am ashamed to admit it, after all the high-profile arguments about defence and about claiming of the movement. Gentlemen of the court, the fact is that you have succeeded in putting yourselves in line with a set of totalitarian accusations. What you have decided is the Gulag – the Gulag for me and my comrades. Your acceptance of these accusations consists in flattening out everything, in bringing into some kind of a present dreamworld a past that was historically complex and full of life. You are attempting to squash into a single prosecution the lives of thousands and thousands of comrades. What I can’t get over, and what is destroying me, is the dreamworld condition of the accusations and of the argumentation in court. I find no way of resisting them. I find myself bogged down in them. I am suffocating. But truth has to win. Despite the force and violence with which you organize the abstract void of the prosecution case, it does not have much space – the impossibility of your translating it into concrete evidence becomes immediately apparent. And all this drives me to rebellion. I have to control myself on this witness stand. But not to the point of not expressing to you my concept. This is not a trial, it is a fraud, a charade. But you are unable to accept the truth. And yet I say it, and I repeat it again. I have killed nobody. I confront in myself this fact of being accused as guilty of murder. I confront the real swelling up, my upsurge of anger, as a kind of immediate allergic response. I consider the appalling nature of this monstrous condition. But I do not tremble even for a moment, not one single moment. The heaviness of the accusation barely touches me. I find myself unable to reply to you, gentlemen. I cannot reply. All I can do is tell the truth. But listen to this: this trial is a phantasm of iniquity. Stop it! It is running rampant through our country, bent on destruction! (G12 Rebibbia – 14–16 June)