Campaign against poison in the whole Lombardy (Italy)

ATTACK WITHOUT LIMITS

“…For now we have used the enemy’s instruments against it. We have fed civilization with the poison it produces…”, Nicola and Alfredo Cell — F.A.I./F.R.I.

CHOICES OF ATTACK

Safety is a recurrent theme in today’s industrialized society, which safe it cannot feel in that it spreads and reverses hatred, violence and poison over itself daily. By periodically establishing the tolerability levels of the cancers that it itself develops, it is attempting to accustom people to accepting them. So ‘fine dust’ is allowed to pile up to within a certain threshold, torture in prison should be limited to denying prisoners any kind of reading inside the most punitive prison units, water is potable only if it contains a given amount of heavy metals… So what is ‘sure’ is just the constant poisoning we are subjected to, it is power alone that establishes the recommended daily dose.

We decided to highlight how unmanageable these limits are today. We overcame those that could tie down anarchist action long time ago, turning it into a mere cumbersome repetition of violent slogans and innocuous practices, as we savoured the beauty of discovering and reinventing new means of attack each time. The limits we are facing today are instead those that establish the safety of an alimentary product.

If the average consumer feels protected by the controls the very fabricants of noxious substances apply, with this action we are making clear the impracticability of a mechanism of self-control in industries such as food, chemicals, agriculture, engineering (which are coming to resemble each other more and more), where it’s not true that the consumers’ health comes before profit, but occurs precisely to the detriment of their health in an endless circle of poison-antidote-poison.

Currently any food product intended for human consumption is accompanied with a maximum residue of herbicides that it may contain ‘according to law’. We decided to increase the amount of these residues that can normally be found on the shelves of all the supermarkets, concealed in products that are passed off as safe.

Starting from the week between May and June, while most people are getting ready to elect those who will make decisions about their lives, we are gradually replacing some of the products in the supermarkets with ‘ours’ with higher maximum residue limits. So far we have only replaced the number of products that can be seen in the photos attached. We intend to finish our stocking by the end of June, the final deadline we have decided for this action.

Each week we will add an injection of poison to the water-poison solution that we replace. We will do this because we only tamper with substances that the food industry uses as it likes, starting with only a small amount of poison because, unlike the white coats, we don’t know what effects it might have. So, we’re interested in being effective, not in playing word games. This is our first test. Its continuation and exacerbation will depend on to what extent economic and ‘social’ interests come into conflict.

Our operation will cover the whole of the Lombardy region, making a fool of various distribution chains that have been visited, studied and chosen for the best outcome of this campaign against poisoning. What we are aiming for is clearly withdrawal from the market of the products we have used, in the period of time decided by us, but we also want to throw the contradictions that the whole of society is based on in everyone’s face, even of those who try to look the other way. For we know that a coat of green paint won’t be enough to clean up a world now addicted to its own noxiousness, because allowing oneself to be poisoned little by little is equivalent to dying day after day.

We shall begin with a technical description of our operation: the poison used is Monsanto’s Roundup, a bottle of liquid concentrated per 560 square metres. Our kit: a syringe, a funnel, a 1.5-litre bottle of water, tweezers, a screwdriver, a fine-tipped paintbrush, glue. The products poisoned: Misura soya biscuits, Suzi wan soya sauce, Kikkoman soya sauce, Save soya sauce (in the ‘traditional’ and ‘Japanese style’ versions).

Obviously we try to give the investigating cops as few clues as possible, which is why some of the attached photos have been retouched (we are not professional photographers and we had to make up for a lack of technical knowledge, as well as distractions during ‘posing’). The batches and other product codes have been covered or erased in order to prevent targeted batches being withdrawn while leaving others on sale.

We began by adding an injection of Roundup to the bottle of water, but as we said this is only the early stage solution. We took care to avoid any possible damage to the product packaging and we found a perfect way to violate their fake food safety for each of them. We took a syringeful of sauce out of all the sauces and added an injection of the solution. As for the biscuits we injected a syringe of Roundup solution into the bag and shook it. Eyebrow tweezers helped us open both types of Save sauce. We inserted one end into the back of the opening of the cap, then a screwdriver allowed us to take off the cap with its seal intact. To close them again we just had to push down on the cap. As for the Kikkoman sauces it sufficed to unscrew the cap along with the plastic film, take off the anti-drip cap and do the same in reverse after the substitution. The procedure for the Suzi wan sauce was also pretty simple. Pulling the cap hard along with the seals and pressing everything back to redo the package was quick and clean. As for the Misura biscuits, we began at the bottom of the package by slightly opening the heated seal, just enough to pass our needle through, then repackaged them with paintbrush and glue.

This done, the first couriers resupplied the supermarkets for this initial test.

The choice of protagonists for our action was all too easy. Various technology sectors extend their interests to the food industry so as to incorporate it. The same companies that invest in technological research and aim to have genetically modified organisms (GMO) passed into the world are at the forefront of the chemical pesticide sector, also becoming actual owners of seeds and crops. Patents copyright anything at all.

Monsanto has a crucial role in this field. Born in the early 1900s it had an immediate impact on the chemicals sector during the second world war thanks to an increase in the use of DDT, which was sprayed over entire populations and passed off as panacea, concealing its real toxicity. Since then it has been engaged in a long trajectory of political intrigue, impositions and coercion through which it became one of the major economic giants in the world, to such an extent that it has attracted the attention of another giant, Bayer, which is negotiating a merger precisely at this time. The Monsanto empire ranges from chemicals to agriculture, passing through genetic engineering. It was responsible for the spreading of Orange Agent (100% dioxin) in Vietnam, the cover-up of toxicological data concerning its PCB patents, research in the nuclear field, up to our time. First in line in the race for the appropriation of every right over the existent, it was quick to take an interest in equating GMOs with normal crops.

Thanks to this sort of ‘equivalence in substance’ introduced in the 1990s in the US by one of its future directors infiltrated through the watchdog agencies, it managed to avoid testing and get the go ahead in relation to its new creations. After trading in a vast range of herbicides, through genetic engineering it managed to obtain patents on many GM plants that were resistant to its own herbicides or which were even able develop the herbicides within themselves. It is here, in this making all aspects of our lives artificial and thinking that their unscrupulous actions will be met with vile resignation, that our circle closes. Roundup is the most widely used herbicide in the world. Its active component is glyphosate, a herbicide which can now be found in most ground water. It is related to various types of cancer, kidney conditions, Parkinsons and Alzheimers by the holders of scientific truth themselves. Monsanto was granted a patent for Roundup in 2002 from which followed a series of GM crops resistant to the herbicide being introduced into the market.

Among them Roundup Ready soya (practically the species most cultivated in the world) has enslaved thousands of farmers to this multinational as they are being forced to pay concession rights in order to be able to plant. The ‘green revolution’, as the vast operation of spreading GMOs throughout the world led by the ‘humanitarian’ Rockefeller Foundation was called, has been made possible their dependency on of the ‘seeds of the bosses’ thanks to financing of farmers in difficulty. While the litres of this pesticide sprayed over the soya plantations all over the world run into millions, one more syringe shot is a drop in the ocean.

As the European Union keep on suspending judgement over the carcinogenic effects of glyphosate, we are throwing the problem back on the plate.

TO THE ACCOMPLICES, TO THE INSURGENTS

We were tired of thoughts of freedom atrophied by the political realism of the theoreticians of the revolution not here, not now and of crippled actions lacking continuity, effectiveness and communicative clarity, so we decided to take a turning point in our lives and projectualities with this first contribution to the struggle against the noxiousness of civilization and against the development of the economic strategies of dominion, in an eco-sustainable key. Our turning point came about with the kind of action that we have chosen. To a form of now consolidated attack, always and anyway effective, we have added a new poisoning of the enemy’s merchandise, drop by drop. A dripping of poison that fights against and highlights the daily global poisoning that hyper-technological, consumerist, alienated and alienating society is imposing.

This homeopathic administration of their poisons is showing up the daily reality of self-poisoning that industrialized civilization is inflicting on bodies and minds.

The turning point was also the decision to enter the seas of the debate that has been bouncing from one side of the globe to the other thanks to the actions which, from that far off 2003, have been carried out by various and different individuals and groups that adhere to the Informal Anarchist Federation and its further extension the International Revolutionary Front, as they continue to give living and stimulating perspectives to the thought-action binomial that is at the root of anarchy. Throughout the years we have read the dialogue that has been established through actions and claims: it alternates critical contributions and basic method to slogans and collections of greetings often with simplistic reductions of problematics. We are going to try to dissect some of the problems and undo a few basic knots, which for us are sources of useful discussions.

– The legal-illegal combination is created by power to the extent that it wants to raise the measure of its tolerance, based on social pressures and tensions and from its own risk assessment (we see for example the evolution of so-called anti-terrorism legislation, repression in the streets, etc.). Legality and recuperation go hand in hand, so it is we who favour certain practices, not in as far as they are illegal, but in as far as they are more effective. We simply realise that if we have to face a problem in an incisive and resolute way, the solution naturally ends up in illegality given that the legal instruments ‘offered’ to us (counter-information, raising social awareness of a problem, demonstrations and protests) do not satisfy us, nor do they interest us.

– We are rebels, insurgents not insurrectionalists. We rebel every day, filing away our own, individual chains. We have no masses to educate, to foment for ‘the coming insurrection’. We are not preparing any ground by trying to ‘unite the specific movement and the people, guerrilla and insurrectional perspectives’. We are not seeking roles of leaders or vanguards, present or future. After all, today’s revolutionary leaders will be the hangmen of tomorrow’s rebels as soon as they put their arses on a bench. That is why we hate politics, which through mediation turn gangrenous the free dialectical flow between thought and action. We have neither the time nor the desire to build a long-term revolutionary process. It isn’t the sun of the future that dazzles us but the lightening in the clear sky of an act of revolt, chosen, meditated, planned and above all urgently necessary against the ever more rapid advance of the machinery of dominion.

– We adhere to the F.A.I. in critical continuity, critically because we do not comprehend the risk of transforming a free network – in time and space – into a platform. To propose an ‘informal platform of polymorphous anarchist action’ with structures and infrastructures means to cage a beast that must by its very nature stay wild. Action is multiform, multifaceted and iridescent like life, but multiformity cannot become an easy slogan to conceal the defects of the action itself like a bank of fog. We are in the streets, in anarchist bookshops, at events, concerts, in squats every day; but if we were to relate all this to the real attack on power that we feel is urgent and necessary, we would be deceiving ourselves. It would mean levelling anarchy and raising what is, or at this point should be, anarchist ‘daily life’ to a means in itself.

– We don’t want to compensate for the practical organizational lacks of single individuals with ‘structures’ or worse ‘infrastructures’; mere union does not mean strength, quite the opposite, structures sclerotize action. On the contrary, we believe that the old hypothesis of a network of comrades who, without knowing one another, become dialoguers through actions, as the first text that launched informal projectuality proposes: technical/theoretical/practical growth through the developing of the actions. ‘To reconcile organization and theoretical/practical debate with the anonymity of groups/single individuals is possible by means of a dialogue diffused through the actions, which, besides giving their specific destructive discourse, also carry other messages (through the adopted methods and means, the goal being communication), independently of the material damage.’

– Spontaneism is not synonymous with informality and even less does informality mean disorganization and superficiality. Actions are planned spontaneously from the idea of one or more insurgent minds, they consolidate through critique and analysis and go on to solve tactical and logistical problems, to then bloom like poisonous flowers in the fields of dormant societ– Informality doesn’t mean meeting with ‘other political affinity groups’ so as to coordinate the struggles, but informality is the antidote to political delegating. It is the method that makes relations between individuals qualitatively better, avoiding interweaving ‘political’ relations for the sake of quantitative growth. Informality is open but not transversal.

– We adhere to the International Revolutionary Front in critique and continuity. In critique because we are not an ‘armed organization’ nor do we want to become one; nor do we feel the need to point it out in relation to the disarming and the reformist critiques of the mainstream. On the contrary we are proud to be part of the chaotic front of comrades at war on society, face to face with the enemy, arms in hand. Coming back to the text from which the Informal Anarchist Federation was born: ‘Moreover whoever is part of the Informal Anarchist Federation is a militant of it in all respects only in the specific moment of the action and its preparation; it doesn’t invest the comrade’s entire lives and projectuality, which leads to putting any armed-struggle specialism out of the way once and for all.’

– We are individualists not collectivists. The drive at the basis of our action is individual. We create free and unstable associations of individuals in order to make the action more effective. Collective struggle claims lead to delegating, seed of politics, and to reformism. Stable organizations of synthesis crystallize the container instead of strengthening the contents: they give professional politicians a springboard and the slothful an alternative and the shield of numbers (even if small).

We don’t underestimate the fundamental importance of dialectics among comrades, be they inside or outside prison; for this reason we are thankful for the writings of the comrades in prison (Nikos Romanos, Alfredo Cospito, Nicola Gai, the imprisoned comrades of the CCF…) for the stimuli they offered our brains and practices, and the written claims of the comrades who adhere to F.A.I. (CCF urban guerrilla cell, Kapibara Group, Fireworks committee for an extraordinary year…), which albeit different and often contradictory have helped us dissolve doubts and pushed us to concretise our action. The great challenge in these times is both mad and necessary.

Mad that scattered handfuls of dreamers are trying to fight dominion, necessary that they do it.

Danaus plexippus nucleus — INFORMAL ANARCHIST FEDERATION / INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY FRONT

First week of June 2016

Till next time