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Other meetings. The problem is how to define a social base for the discourse on peace, and how to identify the subjects who can (and wish to) align themselves with this project. How is it possible to proceed otherwise in this night of grey cats? The discussion begins from a series of basic observations: the south is already within the north, with millions of unemployed. And then: within the north, we are seeing the establishment of new social and racial aggregations; the multinational European worker. In England, the Jamaicans and West Indians; in France, the Maghrebi; in Germany, the Turk – are they only shooting stars in the current class composition? Perhaps so – but they indicate a direction in analysis, and an entirely anthropological mode in their definition. Culture, sensibility, historical and moral elements (and also religious) of class composition. A new elasticity of class composition is born precisely from the irreversibility of the elements and of the elementary subjects that form it. And then there are the aspects which are, in the most absolute way, characteristic of our world: the abstraction of labour power, its dynamic nature, the explosion of invention-power as the substance of value. Science, permanent education and training, communication as the substance of value. This great Vergleichung which is in the process of developing. Lyotard confronts the problem in his latest book (see the excerpts reprinted in Change International). This is a strong theme. But how are we to relate all these analytic elements to a problematic of subjectivity? Here is the basic sticking point. No longer, certainly, on the oppositions between society and state – no, the antagonism no longer represents itself simply at this level; on the contrary, it traverses also many of the pathways of the state as producer. Nor is the separation of society from state any longer possible. But, having said this, what is the dialectic between the possibility of, and the reality of, the recomposition which is being determined at this level? Peace, the breaking of the perversion of the international treaties and of the state-based policies that are founded on them, the opening of a dialogue and of cooperation between the great invention-power of the north and the proletarian energies of the south, the constructions of conditions for European independence to this end, and so on – all the debate and all the possible richness of projects is blocked by the impossibility of grasping, here and now, the mechanisms of subjective recomposition. The repression which has devastated Europe during the crisis also bears this heavy responsibility: that of having broken the continuity of the processes of emergence and of subjective reconstruction. And, today, anybody who has an interest in social transformation must address the effort of rebuilding things on this terrain, which has been stripped of its greenery and burned by chemical bombs. But is it inevitable that our research should be blocked by these obstacles? Not at all. Because peace on the one hand, and on the other hand the construction of the political conditions of liberation, cannot wait. I know that the times of political re-founding are long – but we have to begin to traverse them. Probably we are at a good point – the possibility is based on the universality of the movements of rebellion we have lived, on the materiality of the conditions we have posed. Certainly, at the level of real subsumption, the definition of antagonism as subjectivity is a problem which is almost unresolvable – but this is the problem … Hic Rhodus, hic salta! It is at that level of the shifting – on that general equilibrium of the repression of life, over-determined by the extremity of the desire for nuclear destruction – that we have to concentrate all our efforts of intelligence. Loading that abstract dimension with a maximum of physicality. I am working a lot. I am tired. But finally it seems to me that the fact of my freedom is beginning to produce new ideas and a political concentration on the necessary revolutionary transition. However, my urgency is being dissipated over timescales that are too long. I worry about this. I shout at myself – remembering the comrades who are still in prison – There is no choice, we have to do this! Hic Rhodus, hic salta. (Paris – 27 October)
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A long discussion with Morgan. He is on a high. He poses the problem of creating a link with Italy. He describes the first steps of recomposition that can be glimpsed in the social – in the big banlieues of the metropolis. He gives an evaluation of the peace movement which is not entirely negative. He insists on the necessity of creating a network of information which is continuous and effective. My only objections have to do with the absolute priority of connecting with an international network. I talk to him about possible contacts with the German Greens and with the Socialist International. We have to match the project to our means – it is clear that the intervention cannot happen as regards Italy, except at the level at which we have already pursued the debate, in our documents ‘A generation in prison’ and ‘Do you remember revolution?’ The relative scale of things is difficult to grasp. The problem is one of political cadres and direction, and only in these terms can it be posed. He tells me that he agrees. He outlines for me the work that has been done in France for the consolidation of the project – at the highest level. But he adds that it is urgent. Certainly, I believe so too – but our forces must be up to it. We shall be intervening in a perverse environment. The obstacles that our action will face are terrible. We have to fight against an action of the state which uses the means of repression in order to delegitimate us as a political cadre. This is done through the pentiti and the henchmen of that state.
Not only do we have to go beyond civil liberties arguments, to propose a new substance of political and historical evaluation; we also need to find the strength to destroy the perversion of a machine that is structurally predisposed to war and repression. This force, which must be built within the given realities of European politics – in the awareness that it is in the interests of all free people – needs to identify new social subjects in Italy with whom we can develop a debate about transformation and peace. At this point Morgan stresses the importance of deciding what our means of intervention will be. Given the blackout imposed by the media and their complete submission to power and its perverse characteristics, what means of communication are there left to us, other than the samizdat? The idea seems excellent to me. Therefore we shall soon begin to move on this terrain. We return to more immediate matters. We discuss prison, the trial, and exile. Discussing all these things with him, I find again the impassioned firmness of this eternal comrade and the sweetness of his intelligence. And also a certain deep weariness with the wretched situation in Italy. What atavistic punishment is it, that condemns us to have to endure a political class like the one we have? And what is it, this incurable sickness of the institutions? Why is there so much corruption – in people’s ideas, let alone in financial and economic affairs? Why is there so much corrupt practice in the public sphere? None of us, dear Morgan, has any desire to set ourselves up as paragons of ethical virtue – but why is it that the vileness of politics in Italy is able to continue forever, reproducing itself in this way? Nevertheless, our hopes cannot be allowed to die. Because, whatever happens, Italy and Europe – and liberty, and the idea of justice – are not dead in people’s hearts. They continue to move – and will always continue to move, this disutopia of communism and this practice of autonomy, which are the irreversible characteristics of our makeup, and are increasingly marked in the new generations. (Paris – 30 October)
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I tell stories about prison to my very sweet compagna. I see the fright in her eyes. Prisons have to be destroyed. I think again of my comrades, of the harshness of our destiny. The trial is racing ahead, according to the news that I am receiving – it is beginning to present itself (as it always has been) as an antechamber of the execution squad – but now publicly so. The judges have lost all restraint – paranoia and prejudice exploding on every hand – contempt for the trial process on their part, messianic and ferocious expectations of the pentiti. Listening to these stories, my imagination is hard at work and I can see immediately what is happening. The comrades have resumed their work. They have defined my ‘flight’ as a
‘very human mistake’ – but I don’t care. I think that their behaviour is ‘very human’ too, in that damned cage where they sit, and facing the ferocity of the court. The Guru, on the other hand, has pissed outside the pot during these days. I was expecting enmity as a possible outcome of his enormous vanity. I did not anticipate bestial behaviour. But what can you expect from a priest who sees the pentiti as human beings – and the breaking of community loyalty, the enslavement of truth to the needs of the market, as perfectly legitimate facts and operations? The Corriere della Sera has offered the Guru the front page – to insult me. It’s not worth the effort of replying to him – really not. From Italy, everyone tells me that I should ignore him, because replying would simply give him life and enable him to continue reproducing himself in this vile way. I agree, I won’t reply to him – except to remind him that he was the one responsible for getting me voted back into prison, so he had best shut up. I am angry, really angry. He is a low specimen of humanity – first because he knows that he’s playing with me like a cat plays with a mouse, and that I don’t have the opportunity to respond adequately; and second because he is encouraging the court in its persecutory behaviours, not only in relation to me, but also in relation to the comrades in prison, weakening their defences and blackmailing them; and third because he is now shouting from the housetops that he believes what the pentiti are saying and that I am guilty. Pannella is showing himself for what he is: the anti-party of the partitocracy, a man of the P1, on equal footing with Merzagora and the others. People tell me about his friendship with McNamara and the IMF – not bad for a character who claims to be an upholder of the rights of the starving. But how is it that I ever imagined that the decrepitude of the Italian institutions could somehow allow a flower to flourish? Anyway, the problem is not the Guru. May he drown in the swamp. The problem is the trial – its linearity as a showcase trial, and the non-resistibility of its violence. The problem is the pentiti and the prefiguration of our eventual sentencing in their dirty accusations. I look at my own situation and I think about the accusations that the pentiti have been throwing at me. What barbarities! I am innocent. I shout it aloud. But they do not hear me, and if I were there, in the trial, they would not want to listen to me, they would block their ears and they would laugh hysterically – true demons of injustice. I imagine the pentiti pontificating – pigs like Barbone and schizophrenics like Fioroni; worms like Ricciardi and ideologues like Ferrandi; cretins like Romito and manipulators like Casirati; monsters like Marocco and pathetic figures like Donat-Cattin … Oh my God, what a filthy house of beasts. And I imagine the tiredness, the contempt and the desperation of the comrades in that courtroom cage, having to listen to all this monstrous falsification of our history, to this insult to the truth of our struggles and of the communist project. I would like to be an exterminating angel when these fantasies grow in my mind. Then a strong jolt of consciousness brings me back to myself, and again I understand that liberation can only be a collective fact, built and rebuilt within the boundaries of a practice of transformation. But how am I going to manage to say this to the comrades? How can a correct political line replace the horrible tedium of day after day in prison and the daily injustices of repression? (Paris – 31 October)
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From inside prison it is hard to get a clear view of the world – it is like looking at things from a distance, or from high overhead: you can only make out the big aggregates. On the other hand, when you are free, your attention tends to get dispersed among the infinite articulations of reality. Sometimes this is useful; at other times it is dispersive. However, it is very good to be able to tie threads together and construct a project, passing through the many possibilities – this is what it means for people to be free. And this is what I finally feel myself to be in these days. So here I am again, alive. I look around myself, and things have a new, warm reality for me. Future, things to come – we are starting over again. Only today Ferruccio gave me an ashtray which I had for years on the desk of my office at the Institute. When he left Padova, Ferruccio brought it with him, as a memento. A strange ashtray: a printer’s plate, made of copper, a photograph of a workers’ demonstration in 1969, folded up so that it made a rectangular ashtray. Francesca R. had given it to me – she’d taken it from the print room of L’Unità. Now I look at it, and I recognize more or less nothing of the image – maybe a placard of a demonstrator in one corner is just about identifiable – maybe a clenched fist too, maybe … The cigarettes stubbed out in this ashtray have erased everything – copper, like memory, is absorbent, which means that all certainty of an image disperses. Time has passed. The old has been transmuted into nothing – at best, the ashtray bears witness only to the thousands of cigarettes I smoked, and to my weariness. For years I kept it there on my desk – Ferruccio, I thank you for having brought it away with you. But this piece of metal is no longer any use for anything. The image cannot be retrieved. But I, for my part, have a whole life ahead of me waiting to be rebuilt. With what intensity I feel that desire! A life to restore, by renewing it. I feel precisely, all over again, the complexity of freedom and of the project. I stitch together again consciousness and will. Paolo C. arrives from the USA. He brings me messages from friends. He tells me that we should reorganize ourselves politically in order to return to Italy. On what basis, I ask myself. Certainly, we have to organize a communist discourse of liberation and establish contacts with all the forces in Europe which are moving on this terrain. But, for God’s sake, we should not nurture impossible nostalgias. Any return can only be the fruit of a revival of communist struggle at the level of the needs of the present class composition. This has always been our real continuity, our style in dominating historical break-points. And now it is clear how the big themes of the new phase are taking shape – themes of liberation, peace, Europe, and north–south relations. Escape is this declaration of liberty – in positive terms. No, enough of nostalgias, once again, only functioning brains will succeed in producing community. I throw the ashtray in the bin. (Paris – 1 November)
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Sometimes I have the impression of a kind of deep disorientation. Certainly I have the will to start again – and the project of scientific and political work is gradually becoming better defined. But shall I have the strength and the control for it? Life is a system, and I ask myself whether, with one or many of the orientations changing, it is possible that all the values of my life will fail, like in some kind of meltdown. I mean those values that have governed it for all these years. My existence is somehow in suspension today. I force it towards an outcome, but I also fear a great falling apart, a great collapse of its values. I struggle against the grating of my senses, the absence of desire, the emptying out of life forces, the weakening of imagination, the disorder of initiatives – to which four years of prison have confined me. And I fear the shadow of all this on that act of re-founding that I am demanding of my consciousness. I need love, in order to mediate this transformation of life and to rediscover gentleness and sweetness. I am not tired – I am disturbed, emotional. I think that I can succeed in the undertaking of re-founding and transformation, but I absolutely need to organize it within a process which is broad and human. I am not tired, I am only enervated by the perpetual prolongation of tensions – often I feel that they are running me, rather than me dominating them. Tonight a strange excitation took me out of myself. A desperate burning desire for life and love. A delirium, a desire for creation and destruction. I don’t know what I would do if I had to return to prison – I don’t know if I would be able to survive. Now, though, I want to survive and create new life. But with method – reorganizing the decisions of liberty rationally and gently … Paola did not arrive this evening. I was waiting for her, but she was not able to shake off the police who were following her. Quite properly, she didn’t want to lead them to me. I was anxious while waiting for her … Franco and Emilio are pontificating from prison on what I should be doing, on what I should have done
, etc., etc. It is pitiless on their part, but the prison gives them the right to speak out … Today I saw the request for an authorization to proceed against me in connection with the Campanile killing. It is really unbelievable! How can one defend oneself from this pack of raving dogs …? In Il Manifesto Pilenga launches a ferocious attack on Rossana. She describes her as a chic intellectual, a Parisian, an ‘evil teacher’ – with enormous vulgarity. The article is a heap of insulting commonplaces and cultural frustrations, really scary. The Italian provinces on the attack. ‘Grunf, grunf.’ A ferocious string of insults – which come from a pentita! They tell me that the letter was published because Il Manifesto came under a lot of pressure. I can believe it. They need to defame people so as to construct the perverse legitimacy of their power. The main fact is that the dirty spirit of pentitismo, intertwining with provincial vulgarity, has run through the whole of society – above all, through Italian culture – much more deeply than we ever thought possible … The hearings are beginning in the Rosso–Tobagi trial. Finally the socialists have found a little bit of courage and dignity, which has enabled them to launch a justifiable attack on Spataro and the Milan procurator. The latter have called for Barbone to be set free. Incredible! What disgusting horse-trading …! No, enough! New life. I want new life. I want to destroy these murky presences – the ghosts of those horrible memories. In defending myself, I put a maximum of rationality into the political struggle for liberation; I have somehow dislocated, displaced my contempt for the dirty origins of making justice in Italian style and for its tremendous effectiveness in debasing the spirit. No, enough. I have to produce a maximum of impassioned intelligence and disenchanted sweetness, so that I can also overcome the ghosts of this history. Within this very powerful chiaroscuro I define the new life which is due to me and which I want to rebuild. To clear out the chambers of my memory, to form hopes … I want to have a child. A material and irreducible sign of sweetness returning into life. (Paris – 2–3 November)
Diary of an Escape Page 32