Diary of an Escape

by Antonio Negri

  Folio 75

  Today I was at Rebibbia, with the comrades of G12, and then in the women’s wing. When I walk into prisons, the measure of continuity between inside and outside is completely a given for me. But inside I experience that desire to break this continuum of repression and of acts of bad faith that you don’t feel on the outside. The intelligence of the comrades, in their struggle against this prison system, reaches out to the society as a whole. Outside, in society, however, the signs of struggle and ethical reconstruction are only subterranean. Love for the comrades and emotion submerge my capacity for clear thinking when I meet them, but their intelligence and their attention are so strong that those elements of rupture with the meaninglessness of the institution and of society jump out with startling clarity.

  Today I came to see them with no particular problems to discuss – only the tedium of prison in August. I hope I gave them a bit of a break. We talk of this and that. There are people being held in solitary confinement – Aeneas, for instance. I go to see him. He is angry over a strange tale of things that were lost and then found again during prison searches. Silly stuff – it is August. I promise to come back tomorrow and look into it. I hope I can. With Fiora and her comrades we talk about how to develop the political campaign for freeing the prisoners, and against the special laws. Finally they gave their support to it, with all the committedness and vivacity which these women can put into concrete matters. They are beautiful in their summer clothes. Here, in this unbearable heat of the early afternoon, life is fresh and cool – here is a sign of a higher humanity. Actually, if the truth be told, I came here to cheer myself up. And perhaps to consolidate for good the decision to preserve my freedom. These comrades are telling me: ‘Go, leave, you have done what you could.’ ‘Not yet,’ I reply – I have to push forward to the very end. ‘Be careful – don’t let yourself be taken again.’ And I reply: ‘No, I won’t let myself be taken again.’ But … I don’t tell them how difficult it is to regain a grip on life, on your body, your freedom, your soul – in a world where the institution surrounds you with death and a smell of cancer. Can’t you smell it? I don’t tell them that I have a very strong impulse – a life impulse – to return to prison. They would laugh at me and would not be amused. But if I stay on the outside, as is my duty, will I ever succeed in reproducing a high political function and in responding to the calls for freedom – the freedom of you, men and women comrades in prison? There are no shortcuts – it is difficult … maybe too difficult. I have to do it. I have to rebuild hope and produce signs. It is difficult. I have to do it. I have to try. Thank you, comrades. (Rome – 22 August)

  Folio 76

  I’m going crazy during these days. In the Montecitorio palazzo, wandering round this huge empty building, I have the impression of being the only person here. If I wanted to destroy it I could. But maybe this place is so worn-out as a symbol of power that, even if you set fire to it, it would not shed much light on the scene. The fact is that this building is a heap of dung. Damp shit doesn’t burn. This is its strength – the fact that it doesn’t actually burst into flames – the fact that people leave it to its own devices – the way in which it reproduces itself in its own fetid sweat. The only people present in these deserted rooms, in these pointless antechambers, are the journalists. They are the flies on the dung heap, untiring and always there. Either you get yourself paid by the journalists or you pay them. I would prefer the second solution, but unfortunately I am forced into the first. The relationship with them is a relationship of falsity. Their only pleasure is stirring shit. A wretched corporation! Gelli, who has just escaped from prison in Geneva – amazing coincidence! – understood them perfectly, and they were there to allow themselves to be bought. With Valiani and all those of the P1 lodge at the head of the queue. The selection of journalists in the old days used to go via the ‘Intelligence Service’; in the ’50s, they were chosen through the CIA. The younger generation, poor things, don’t even have that good fortune. P2 and vulgarity on every hand. On the edges of the dung heap there are small pools of rampant putrescence – I imagine Scalfari, Cavallari and Montanelli here in their natural habitat. I wander around the rooms of Montecitorio, among half-asleep parliamentary staff and these scum-of-the-earth journalists. I manage to find one or two old friends who are not away on holiday, and I bring them in to survey the rubble. My decision to choose freedom is now irreversible. I tell this to my friends, in the hope that they might offer an alternative proposition. I am very calm, and I think that this society has to be revolutionized and this Parliament destroyed. (Rome – 23 August)

  Folio 77

  It’s a Thirty Years War that we are living. A war of piracy, on the most diverse horizons, against pockets of humanity. A political world reduced to filibustering. If you ask people if we are in a state of war, nobody is prepared to admit it. Precisely as in the 1600s, when people were expecting death at any moment. Terror and restructuring of the state. Hobbes is a great mystifier: he talks of fear as if it were an ongoing reality between humans as individuals. In reality it was hanging over the heads of all humans, taken together. It was not antagonism but fate. The modern state is born from the sense of irresistible and radical change [catastrofe], from this blackmail, and not from the struggle for security and liberty. Only the state of the future – and it will not be called a state – will be born from a desire for liberty. Nobody admits to the continuous war of this century of ours. I would like to be able to explain this to the people around me. And I would also like to explain the horrible effects that it produces. Metus versus [ad] superstitionem. But nobody wants to understand. Spadolini is sending people to Lebanon – for the first time we’re seeing our children being sent to war again. In ’68 this would have been unthinkable. One day, once the Americans have been defeated along with the current bosses of Lebanon, they will all have to run away with their tails between their legs. A nice type, this Spadolini. With the idiocy of a Luigi Facta, he lives this creeping war without understanding its dimensions, its implications and its terrible evolutive potential. He runs to sell himself to the Americans, offering himself as a Gauleiter for one of the provinces of the Empire. War. I have fought against it from within the movement, hoping and struggling, so that the state of war between the classes, this war which is eternally present, should not transform itself into open war – poor Erasmus! And now, in the name of dissociation, should I accept the irresponsibility of the likes of Spadolini and the state of open war he is imposing on us? No, really no. If you reject war, you have to reject it in its entirety. Only peace provides the conditions for revolution. With the slyness of shopkeepers, they are hard at work, so that their presence in Lebanon simultaneously is and is not – it must not be seen, but it must be seen by the great chancelleries. They have absorbed Cavour’s diplomatic wiles from their high-school textbooks. The Crimean War, Lebanon as Crimea. And do they really think themselves to be so clever? Spadolini. He hopes to have pulled it off with the P2, just as he hopes he’s pulled it off in Lebanon – pulling out before disaster strikes. This is exactly what they said about Mussolini when he attacked France – and who would have thought that he’d be forced to send our troops barefoot to Greece and Russia? Bocca has always accused me of ambiguity. But he should look around him – at the dense ambiguity of his friends and bosses, at the way in which intellectual uncertainty shades into cold opportunism – that the people of Cuneo are stubborn is proverbial, but not that they are short-sighted. Peace is the prime precondition for revolution. So we should fight for peace. The Germans – Greens and non-Greens alike – have played a strong hand in my election – conference documents, a very strong stance against the 7 April trial, etc. Important to tighten this relationship, which has always been strong. This is fundamental. In large part these Greens are comrades and old friends – people with whom you can talk of hope. Strengthen the relationship. Lift yourself out of the suffocation of Italian politics and break the chains of the current peace movement and the trac
es of Stalinism in it. Here, in Italy, not in Germany. Rediscover peace as the precondition for revolution. Puncture Spadolini so that he deflates. I am amazed by one thing only: surely they cannot be sincere in what they are doing. These gentlemen must have at least a moment of intimacy with the boy they go to bed with: how will they manage to tell him that he’s being sent off to war? (Montescudaio – 24 August)

  Folio 78

  Today I was in Capalbio. I met Ettore G. An amazing person. When you see this generosity and this liberating intelligence fully deployed you get a nostalgia for democracy, for what it once was in the hopes of thousands of people. The fascists tortured him in Palazzo Giusti, and then in Vicenza he was tortured (fortunately not physically this time) by all the reactionaries of the first Years of Lead of the Italian Republic, in the McCarthyite 1950s. He is a man of European culture and spiritual openness: it was as a European that he watched the developments of ’68 and the regeneration of hopes of freedom and justice in its aftermath. In his children, and in the friends of his children, and in the movement, he loved the reclaiming of that justice and liberty that had been so downtrodden. Here, for the first time, I am proud that I too have been called an ‘evil teacher’ [un ‘cattivo maestro’], and I am aware of how far I fall short in the presence of this real ‘evil teacher’. If what Ettore G. expresses is anti-fascism, then I am radically anti-fascist – I rediscover myself as such, even in the face of a Republic which hypocritically assigns that title to itself. He is a man, this Ettore. I don’t know why, but Brecht’s Finland dialogues come to mind … That’s where I would see Ettore located, eternally in flight from a nightmare that repeats itself – torture and exploitation – and always lucid, like Brecht’s worker. The Constitutional Court does not deserve him. It took critical thought to dig this soil. Once the furrows have been opened, they do not close again – this earth which has been opened up remains fresh, and is black and dense and moist, like everything it creates. The seeds are deep sown. We cannot change. Ettore G. brings back to me the Venetian environment of my childhood. He suffered it as a grown man. Together, in our different ways, we have transformed it. He is a demonstration of how it is possible to win, despite the repression – not because he had professional, scientific or political success – no, this is only a piece of blackmail of his, which the political class had to endure – but because he had the strength to be a seminal influence and to stake his life on the boundary between resistance and revolution. This positive relationship is the only one in which I recognize ethical essence. But what does it matter if I recognize it, when he gives you this metaphysical hand with a moral simplicity and an intellectual sweetness that are worthy of the horizons of Capalbio? In the afternoon, in that splendid landscape (I shall be very nostalgic for it when I am far away from Italy – maybe for a long time: everyone is telling me ‘Make your escape’ and ‘Don’t let them get you again’) … in the afternoon Alberto A. arrives, together with other old friends. A powerfully emotional moment. Here’s another ‘evil teacher’ – or maybe just a ‘bad friend’. Joking. We discover the meaning of Geschichte [history] when you are dazzled by the Historie [tale] you have lived. This is a knot of problems – meeting with Alberto again – and probably with Mario T. – a knot which only the entirety of history, and the great variables of the spirit, will eventually be able to unpack. Happy genealogies of dramatic stories. And then? The end has not come yet. With Alberto we do the round of the towers of Capalbio. It’s like a reunion of the Beatles. With great humour and great attention. A sweet sensation, of understanding each other even before words are spoken. And it is a great music. Don’t let them get you again! Maybe it is precisely in this situation of almost institutional encounters that I sense, not a nostalgia, but a desire for revolution to run through people’s consciousness. I am crazy, as is known. And yet I see this naïve sense of freedom in the gaze of tactful people and in the kisses of distant friends. The furrows, once opened, do not close up again. This soil that we have ploughed has lines which, even in their separateness, join together at infinity. Today has been a delightfully sunny day and I am no longer scared. (Capalbio – 15 August)

  Folio 79

  I am a Marxist. And I remain a Marxist. I ask myself, recalling prison, what it was, if not my trust in revolution, that gave me the strength to carry on working. A re-reading of that strong theoretical hope, of that optimism of the intellect which is Marx. Marx beyond Marx. Spinoza and the logical certitude of possible revolution. And the calm passion of this vision, which went right through the experience of prison. Lessen the anger against injustice by means of the analysis of its structural causes, and through this build a higher level of hate against exploitation and domination. Many people tell me that, like Marx, I too am a corpse – but I don’t see humour in their eyes, only fear. The advantage of my hatred is that it is articulated on, and mediated by, hope. Between yesterday and today we have travelled from Montescudaio to Venice, calmly, by car. From one paradise to another. We were talking about all this with the children and with Paola, in different registers – different registers, but the same theme. Big complex family games. (Incidentally, the children are telling me: ‘Don’t let yourself get caught again.’) Marxism: it is the only practice that turns theory into a weapon. So, now, if I leave, what is going to happen to the comrades in prison? In reality, nothing worse than what was going to happen anyway. Whereas my careful long-term work, a work strongly charged with Marxism, is the only serious thing I can give them. Maybe yesterday and today, in the car and in Venice, I allowed myself to give way too much to affection. Despite that, I don’t think that I need to modify those conclusions I have arrived at already in prison, and which I am now simply reconfirming, with the pleasure that the concrete gives to me. There is a revolutionary society which lives within this shit of developed capitalism. Marx has brought us to this limit, which for him was hypothetical, but for us is real. This is why I am a Marxist. Certainly not in the traditional manner. I didn’t need to wait for Solzhenytsin or Glucksmann to discover about Gulags – I knew about them from ’56. But what does this have to do with Marx, we asked ourselves back then. And what does this have to do with Marx and Lenin is what I continue to ask myself today. When it comes to intellectual geneses, Calogero and his ilk are quite enough for me. Here I live the duality of revolutionary society with the same intensity with which I perceived it in the 1950s. I am irritated by the dialectical opportunism of the older Marx. I prefer the theory of antagonism of this rejuvenated Marx. Rejuvenated by what now amounts to long-standing struggles for communism by the whole of the proletariat. We are living an enormous victory in the world. The world has been reshaped by the desire for communism. What has happened is enormous. We have to complete the mission of victory that has been assigned to us. Having come out of prison, I begin to touch and feel this irreducible reality. It is there. Why should we be ashamed of telling it to ourselves, and of telling it to incredulous others? The horizon stretches out as I talk about all this quietly with my children, and the thing seems natural – what we are experiencing is a Spinozan substantialization of hope. I do not know what is going to happen. I know only one thing: exploitation is unacceptable, and it has become natural to reject it – a new natural law has been born. Existence is the source of revolution. We have been forced into retreat, but only in order to attack more strongly. And with greater force. The problem of revolution is the present of our lives. As I write I have the lagoon before my eyes – this Venice lagoon is a consolidated history of capitalist revolution. Now it is rotting. Whereas the cool hydraulics of our spirit creates new generations of fish – and of men. We are waiting for a radical change which has already happened. (Venice – 26–27 August)