Beyond Right and Wrong...
For Anarchy

“I don’t believe in rights. Life, which is all a manifestation of incoherent forces, unknown and unknowable, rejects the human artificiality of the right. Rights were born when life was taken away from us. Indeed, originally, humanity had no rights. It lived and that was everything. Today, instead, there are thousands of rights; one could accurately say that everything which we have lost we call a right. I know that I live and that I desire to live. It is most difficult to put this desire into action. I am surrounded by a humanity that wants what everyone else wants. My isolated affirmation is a most serious crime. Laws and morals, in competition, intimidate and persuade me. The “blonde rabbi” [I.e., Christ or Christian values.-translator] has triumphed. One prays, one implores, one curses, but one does not dare. Cowardice, caressed by Christianity, creates morality, and this justifies baseness and begets renunciation. […] “Society, on the other hand, modest and clean in appearance, but horribly infected with gangrene throughout its body, makes me vomit, fills me with horror and loathing, kills me.” How I envy the great Bonnot! “Il me faut vivre ma vie!”[1] / “It is necessary that I live my life”” Bruno Filippi

(An Italian anarcho-nihilist who was charged with several armed attacks and was killed by a bomb he carried, on September 7^th, 1919, when trying to place it at the “Nobles Club”, headquarters of the wealthiest Italian businessmen)

The most important and nicest things are spoken in the simplest way. Today, though, the reality of our lives is far from simple. So, we often note that the more complicated the words (and boring, at the same time) that “specialists” of political delivery and the “revolutionary” rhetoric alchemists use, the more uninvited their oversimplifications are. The theorist “rebels” construe the world through the tyranny of their “obvious truths”. Their whole rhetorical calcification and their wooden words, that lulls to sleep through their undeviating dogmatism, comes to transfer “social revolution” to an oversimplified version of the eternal fight between the “good” people and the “bad” state, between the “right” and the “wrong” fairytale.

But if things were that simple, why hasn’t this fairytale, for centuries, come to an end, with the triumph of the “good” and for all of us to “live happily ever after”?

Especially today, when power is not centralist and abstracted to the king’s throne, but, it is spread inside the transparent social factory, both our anarchist words and our actions ought to deepen more and tear up the “religious” missals and the aphorisms of the “good” and “bad” and “right” and “wrong” which lack depth.

Power is not just unfair, bad and malicious, and it is not something which by being ‘denounced’, even violently, will withdraw for the rebels’ rights to be recognised.

Power is a social relationship, a social hierarchical organization model, a way of life management.

In addition to its directorates and its officials, it owns its own preachers, its mentors, its advisers, its jesters, its armed defendants of course, its loyal followers, even its inside objectors – usurpers…

It’s not just a “bad oligarchic elite” it is an intricate system of relations that defines our everyday lives.

We know, of course, that if you cut the snake’s head, the rest of the body, after a few convulsions, stops… Power, however, has proven to be more like a Hydra.

This is why, while our armed targeting gathers its firepower on the heads of the managers of power and their uniformed mercenaries, our words seek to blow up the social relationships that give rise to power. Let’s keep in mind that the phrase “no one is indispensable” goes for power as well. If we don’t hit both the heart of the beast (armed attacks against the officials of the power) and the veins of the social machine (criticism and rejection of the submissive mindset), then, maybe, soon, after every attack of ours, we will hear “the king is dead, long live the new king”. Because unless slaves, even when they revolt, deeply renounce the mindset of submission, they will soon wish to crown their new king, next to the corpse of the former.

This is why the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, FAI/IRF and the “political” groups in affinity, that form the stripe of black anarchy, both in the proclamations following our attacks, and in our texts, use heretic, provocative words, that do not comply with the traditions of the revolutionary automatism of the dipole “good – bad”, “fair – unfair”… We always have the sledgehammer of rudeness available, in order to shatter the window of the good and innocent society and highlight its guilty silence and frustrating passivity.

Of course, through our criticism we do not aim to build the crystal tower of the “revolutionary” self-admiration. This is why we detest the conceit and the arrogance that we sometimes find in our circles, by people who are alternative artists of nothing, not anarchists of praxis.

Our aim is to disassemble the stereotypes and the prevailing morality that poison our lives, through the small and large representations of informal power (family, school, work, relationships).

Our way is a challenge and not a political politeness that caresses the ears of the repressed ones audience, most of whom don’t even bother to read a proclamation. An inconvenient truth is more inelegant but it is also more liberating than a pleasant lie…

So, it’s not enough to talk about the “rights” of the repressed ones, the proletarians, the “people”…

First of all, the “fair” and the “unfair” is a moral subjectivity of the impression of reality. There’s no such thing as an objective scale that defines what’s right and what’s wrong.

Power and the capitalistic management of it, along with the armed enforcement of their truth, they have their own think tanks, their own arguments, their own culture, their own civilization, their own suggestions of a way of life. Power does not dominate only supported by the power of its arms’ barrels, but also by its persuasion and its propaganda.

This is why anyone who makes the mistake to talk about the “rights” of the many, will have to be careful because the interpretation of the “right” as a quantitative measurement unit, will not… prove them right. The right of the many is often the right of the viewers, the consumers, the voters’… The anarchist struggle is not about counting participation, nor does it have to do with the majority’s right. It is something much bigger than the conflict between the “right” and “wrong”… It is a constant war between different values, a war that bisects society in two parts. One part is the world of anarchy and the other part is the world of power and organized tedium.

In this conflict, several people, who are excluded from the privileges of power, poor and oppressed, stand shoulder to shoulder with their elite rulers’ interests. The mass is usually fond of the mediocre, the immobility of habit, the rigidity of prudence and afraid of the new, the radical, the unknown of insurrection.

The bureaucratic sector inside the official anarchism and its communist components use the rhetoric of the “common good” and the “justness of the oppressed ones”, thinking there is a conscious proletarian class, which will turn into the basic ingredient of a “social revolution”, as long as it has its ears caressed.

We, for our part, want to set the conditions for the creation of a confrontational anarchist affinity between groups, cells and individuals, which are willing to transfer the experience of rupture with the existent immediately, here and now.

This way, a dangerous enemy in the heart of the beast can be formed, aiming at the diffusion of anarchy.

For this to happen, we have to make the conflict with authority permanent, to create a short circuit in the neurons of the system, to exploit and expand the contradictions of society, to provoke social peace, to qualitatively deepen anarchist thought and aggressively upgrade anarchist action, to challenge law and order. To overcome the moral denunciation of the injustices of authority and to prepare the war against it by promoting the new anarchist urban guerrilla.

Here follows the strategic matter between the moral impeachment of the system and the continuous attack. The biggest part of the anarchist milieu in Greece is usually navigating through the maelstrom of events resulting from short circuits of authority. Occasional demonstrations and sometimes conflicts in an anti-war demonstration, student marches, strikes.

The recent three-year “drought” of social mobilizations caused the “drought” of violent clashes in the streets of the metropolis.

The people didn’t take the streets and anarchists were insufficient in creating their own autonomous collective violent actions. This is the result of a conscious and subconscious (because of a habit) strategy, which presents anarchists as the violent reflex of “the sense of justice” of the masses. There is, namely, a certain timidity for the anarchist attack to be organized and expressed autonomously without moral coverage from the masses. In fact, of course, there is no moral cover in large social protests either, as the mass of protesters is a diverse crowd, from which, some believe in peaceful protest, others are professional walkers and members of unions and parties, others are angry and want to clash, others operate as internal repression, others are not members of some group… The issue is that the strategy of social counter-violence as a moral justification – response of the oppressed, is not defined by us, at a time when authority can set alternative questions and the answers of the masses can come, not as a rupture, but as consent to them.

So, by waiting for the next social explosion, the next rally, the next big march, we abandon our ideas and actions to luck. But even when the social tension takes place, in order for us to get lost in the riots, we look like stowaways who jump in the last car of the train, a train that others drive on different tracks from ours. Even if we derail the train it will soon return on its rails.

Obviously, in no case do we advocate our absence from the field of metropolitan riots whose context we do not define (student rallies, anti-war mobilizations, large marches), in the name of a supposed anarchist purity. Within these mobilizations we can organize attacks against cops, burn banks, destroy cameras, expropriate shops, break the peace in the metropolis.

All these are intense and pleasant moments that, however, when not accompanied by a wider anarchist plan, end up staying isolated moments and beautiful memories, that just wait for the next march to be repeated. They lose the overall perspective and the potential to sharpen the attack and to make the tension in our lives permanent. This is the result of not only the lack of operational planning, but mainly of overall perception.

The notion of moral vindication of social counter-violence solely in response to systemic anomalies (violence of cops, racist attitudes, employers’ “arbitrariness”, harsh laws etc) incorporates the denouncement of the system (even with violent forms) and prevents the passage from the defensive counter-violence, to the aggressive continuous challenge of anarchist urban guerrilla.

We, on our part, want to articulate and organize a proposal of continuous attack, a complete anarchist plan, an insurrection that does not stop when the masses withdraw from their protests, but continues to feed from its fires, to grow big and to be diffused…

We feel like the hands of our clock have stopped in the moment of attack. We do not now need neither a cause, nor the moral justification. We know that the ugliness of this world is only repealed when one acts.

Our proposal is to create an informal network of anarchist cells that will promote the continuous attack against authority and society.

Many anarchists fear the word “organization” in the way Christians fear the devil.

Others misunderstand and confuse the meaning of organization with bureaucratic fossils of Marxist centralized organizations, central committees, hierarchies, simple members, constipated rules, obligatory moral guidelines, statutes and enlightened vanguardism… Others prefer the alternative ways, sureness, adventurism and safety of an anarchist lifestyle, rather than an organized anarchy and a dangerous internal enemy that attacks without looking for pretexts as the causes are more than enough…
Some will hastily become indignant, saying that organization kills spontaneity, individuality and desires…

Let’s say, however, what we mean by “anarchist organization”… Anarchist organization is the living mental and physical coordination of a group of comrades, in order to carry out a certain plan. The more complete that plan is, the more comprehensive is the relationship of the group’s comrades, while the commitment and consistency have as a measure, the power of desires to achieve the plan and not the discipline of a military duty. Each comrade is unique and independent within the group and through the collective life and action of the cell, discovers and releases more of themselves. There is no membership card, but only the individual desire to take part in something genuinely collective.

Of course, organization is not an end in itself, it is the means to get where we want. This means that an anarchist organization, an anarchist cell, must keep its procedure under constant review, to develop its relations, to upgrade its actions, to sharpen its theory, so that it comes closer to the purpose of its formation.

It is only logical that within an anarchist group come up tensions, contradictions, anger and even potential departures. This is because every human relationship is confrontational, sometimes at the level of evolution and sometimes at the level of rupture.

The sure thing is that the existence of informal anarchist organizations and direct action cells fuels anarchist violence against authority.

Every anarchist group is a living outbreak of war against the system. Through discussion, friction and composition within a group of comrades, anarchist action evolves, the threat of an organized internal enemy becomes permanent, the means of attack are upgraded, thought gets sharpened and the plan of the destruction of authority and the social machine is promoted.

We know no team can develop those associations of strength in order to decapitate the beast of authority and its products by itself. Nevertheless, even so, the comrades of the group, through their action, free themselves from the conventions of a world that wants us to be spectators of our lives. But if we want to maximize our action, satisfying more and more our desires, we can try to create informal coordinations of individuals, groups and affinity cells which promote the anarchist urban guerrilla. The creation of such a coordination is not subject, in any case, to the crucible of the quantitative centralism, which crushes the autonomy of each one of us. We are not interested in creating a central super-structure which will cause the creation of central committees and informal hierarchies. We are simply talking about coordinating groups and people looking towards the same direction. We are talking about the coordination of desires that become more dangerous when they are communicated and shared by accomplices.

The basic agreement within such an organization is the desire not to be in a moment of truce with the enemy. Without, therefore, waiting for a favorable wind of social change to act, we decide to arm ourselves and turn our lives into a confrontational reality now. So we do not limit ourselves to the anniversal symbolism (this does not mean that we are absent from the days of wrath and vengeance in memory of our dead), we do not expect fixed appointments, waiting for the state to get out of line causing the people to demonstrate, nor are we satisfied by opportunistic street fights with cops, in order to pretend that we’ve executed our “duty” to the struggle.

This does not make us arrogant to devalue everything from the balcony of an ideological purity. On the contrary, it makes us more prepared to throw ourselves in those battles that we will choose, even in intermediate social struggles, which we think are of interest (i.e. student occupations) without being disoriented by the circumstances.

The compass of organized expression points steadily towards the the intensification of the attack and the diffusion of our theory. The words “anarcho-nihilism”, “black anarchy”, “anarchist terrorism” are truly dangerous, when tested in the heat of battle.

The constant challenging of the enemy through autonomous guerrilla strikes (using the fan of the diversity of means, but with the constant desire of upgrading to armed guerrilla) and organized aggressive intervention to intermediate social struggles are part of the anarchist war. We say again, that the effectiveness of the strategy will not be measured by the figures of participation.

We want to create the possibilities of acting with people who feel stifled in the social cages imposed on them by authority and want to rebel… Our joy is great in any such new meeting with new comrades who bear the sign of complicity. No matter their numbers… What is important is that the effort is worth it…

“I am not led by the will of the masses. Nor do I mourn for the sorrows of the people. I never accepted the fate of the slave that was prepared for me, I didn’t speak their language, nor imitated their look. I refused to be with the many. My demons never sleep… I always long for the unsatisfied. And when they set fire to the foundations of society, they don’t daydream on the ashes. They are seeking wildly for the next scarecrow of authority to surrender it to the stake. They do not get comfortable, nor do they rest, they want war with everything that haunts our lives.
They say that whoever loves debris, also loves statues. My demons live in the debris because nobody can hide there. The material of which each of us is made, is revealed there. You will find me among them, where the battle is raging”…

Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – FAI/IRF

August 2015

[1] From the known “defense” of the French illegalist Jules Bonnot.