Social commitment

The militancy and urticaria
by Maria Matteo

Even Maria Matteo was young. And here she recalls her first steps in the field of political activism (a word that she never liked and now no longer uses). Personal memories for a collective reflection.

 

When, as has become customary for many years, I asked Paolo if he had any suggestions for this month's article, instead of the usual "do the fuck you want", was suggested to me to take care "of the sense of militancy today" . According to Paolo, this is a thing "of my comfort zone. " At first glance it seemed to me a little 'sock idea, and especially not in my comfort zone. Then I decided to try. The propose a reflection on the meaning of militancy today refers to an accurate time, one in which there was talk of a crisis of militancy, the small medieval lives of so many of us who were the eighties. It is coming off a kind of genealogy, political but not limited to theme it, of this approach.

The challenge to be anarchists

I was reminded of my fourteen years. The school "Baretti"via Santhià in Barriera of Milan was a box of asbestos and aluminum, but again it all wrecked. He was always talking about some kids who came to school with knives, but I never knew if it was truth or myth. I was a good girl, shy as a clam and curious of everything. One day the caretakers did strike and to protest, scattered the rubbish everywhere. You could not stay in the classroom, and so, wonder of wonders, we boys would go up and down. For the first time in my life I sat on a step instead of a chair. Debating, exchanging ideas. The janitors and janitors did speeches! Those of the broom and mop, those in the blue apron, were suddenly changed. That thing, I already knew, was politics.
That day I caught a disease that never passed. When my mother saw it outlined to me a bleak future, full of trouble and danger. Needless to say she was right, but needless to say that instead to dissuade me she convinced me even more.
In the two years that followed, step by step, I found my way. They were easy years, years that politics were everywhere, not even wanting to dribbling. By the time I learned that even those who arrive in the most difficult years, where the disease takes it hard then it doesn't pass.
The direct participation, being there when you decide your future and that of all, the idea of freedom that you bet collective idea of liberty that disassembles the hierarchies, which defeats the bestial exploitation, which I saw my bent grandfather and my grandmother, my father and my mother and many others around, were among the ingredients of choice, little by little, I would have drawn life.
But of course there was something else, there's always been after. There was the desire to understand, the intellectual challenge that being an anarchist puts each of us. The challenge to experiment and to experience libertarian social and political relationships, who can now anticipate our future, who can create the conditions for the blaze that broke the disorder state and capitalist know then to get real anarchy.
Not too long after, but someone said that a generation had passed, there was the diaspora. Many, convinced that revolution was like the scratch cards, who invented a few years later, because they had not won once, came home, cut their beards, they made a couple of children to whom they told of the mythical era now over.
Sad. Even more sad than those who remained to mourn. How beautiful my factory, my neighborhood, so far as strong, as was the young youth, how beautiful it was to ice at the "Porta Cinque" with thermos and tanks to heat the dawn. Pathetic, boring, unbearable. This was the time that people stood in circles to discuss the military that was the point, just with the history of leaflets here and there because you do not need much, just stop with the posters, that no one reads them. And then the stomach ache infinite mental discussions on the ebb, the defeat, the Marxist micro-groups that were arguing from morning till night if this was a villain, a dissociated, a companion who is wrong.
All that stuff made me a rash and then, just think about it, even now.

The area of Social anarchism

Among the anarchists who had reflected on the imaginary social transformation which referred to an idea, to date, the educationalists thesis, innervated by a self-management tension.
The crisis of militancy fades in irremediable outdated ideas of the anarchist movement, the need to re-build a genealogy axiological plane as the political aspects. The revolutionary rupture, by some considered unnecessary and very harmful to others considered essential, he spent however overshadowed by the need for a revolutionary process that develops through a progressive cultural change.
It was, and remained, an adventure of magazines, books and brochures. Probably could not be otherwise, because, for the protagonists of that path, this has not been exhausted reasons. The theoretical weakness of that argument, lies in its libertarian defer to an area, outside the existing anarchist movement, experimenting with the process of social transformation, it has increasingly limited horizons, although for a time was capable of triggering a lively and interesting debate.
On the crisis of militancy there were anarchists who built a theory of denial, rejecting the very idea of the spread of ideas, the very idea of revolution because the revolution, voracious monster, promises you tomorrow and will eats today. Thus, dada and punk parable, a future without this took its place within the movement. From militant to life. One thing, in hindsight, very charming but more invasive. Today can now eat your days as can tomorrow, when the experiment runs out, when the State knocks on your door and presents an account very salty.
There are also those who theorize the rupture without trial, understood as a form of mediation, of surrendering the need for radical anarchist, believing that the break, destroying the existing one, put immediately in the field the possibility of a free society and self-managed. The residual inherently avant-garde of this approach is demonstrated both by its progressive exhaustion and subsequent emergence from within the same area, a renewed attention to social issues. Curiously, more recent approaches, the elegy of the revolutionary rupture, the song of the debris give way to a sort of ragnarok - anomic recent riots - which is lost after in the indetermination. There is no trace of the idea of the crisis of militancy, but fades in a very remote future of the revolution.
The area of social anarchism, the FAI, but not limited to the FAI, while suffering the inevitable blows of a crisis, as well as the public sphere, upon that individual has maintained a political and social activism, which enabled it to cross the sticky swamp of the eighties. Undesirable legacy of those years was the widespread attitude of thinking of yourself not so much as a minority because the minority is, how much area as a minority, destined to witness more than an active role on the political and social scene. A community rather than a political entity. Social Anarchism, although to its credit a strong reflection on the issues of social transformation, it was not always up to the challenges at the turn of the last years of the century and the beginning of the next one, have put the social movements of the opposition. Probably at the root is the avoidance of the topic of politics, too often relegated to the sphere of state, the lack of attention to the development of non-state public sphere, which also found broad expression in the anti-globalization movements, environmentalists, self-management planning. Yet. Although still not a rash has passed me, all I think about the crisis of militancy, all thoughts, practices, the choices that they gave rise, today, several years after the crucial point of the eighties, the years that I represented the transition from youth to early adulthood, seems to me that we have delivered a vital area of reflection and experimentation, despite the difficulties, despite the exhaustion of some routes, despite the harshness of comparisons, which sometimes have ensued.

Material order and symbolic order

The move away from the existential horizon of the perspective, that many thought near, of a social transformation in the sense of equality and freedom, if it has taken away the hopes and passions of many, there has, however, faced us with the necessity to think and apply the approach. An approach that is able to invest our own lives, who knows how to build today to be able to self-manage the future, who can remain in constant tension with the existing conflict not to be reabsorbed, chewed and spat out by a today that throws everything on the market .
An approach to the living knowledge that accelerates the breakdown of the symbolic order breaking material, such as the shattering of the order material from a forward thrust to the emergence of a different social imaginary.
The horizon of the revolution is far away, but it permeates our lives.
By the way ... The word militant has always made me come the hives even when it theorized the crisis. For the root inherently militant and aura of duty imposed, not chosen freely. I've always used it very little, now I do not use it anymore.