Do not say that we are few
Statement from the Italian FAI
To our sisters and brothers of FAI/ International Revolutionary Front, a contribution to discussing communication, organization and armed struggle at the dawn of a new epoch.
Don’t say we there are only a few of us
And that the challenge is too big for us
Would you say that two or three patches of clouds
Are little thing in a corner of a summer sky?
In a moment they spread everywhere…
Lightening then flashes, thunders crashes
And rain falls all over.
Don’t say there are only a few of us
Just say that we are.
Lee Kwang Su
By this piece of writing we, the comrades of ‘FAI/Craft Cooperative Fire And Similar (occasionally spectacular)/International Revolutionary Front’ and of ‘FAI/20th July Brigade/International Revolutionary Front’ claim the parcel bombs of March 2011, which caused lieutenant Alessandro Albamonte of Folgore [division of the Italian army] to be seriously injured; the parcel bomb that slightly injured two employees of Swissnuclear; and the parcel bomb sent to the Koridallos prison, in solidarity with our sisters and brothers of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire/FAI/International Revolutionary Front. This piece of writing comes after a meeting called by the comrades of ‘FAI/Sisters in Arms of the Mauricio Morales Nucleus/International Revolutionary Front’.
Recently, in the major cities facing the coasts of the Mediterranean sea streets are animated by more and more passionate protests and demos by the oppressed who are no longer keen to suffer the oppression of dominion: from Greece to Tunisia, from Spain to Libya, the fuse continues to burn. We met in one of these streets and decided to deepen the debate on what is going on the environment of the insurrectionist anarchism. A dissenting voice was heard in the general optimism of the comrades who see diverse and new hotbeds of struggle emerging in a vital international and informal context. The voice was that of a comrade of the ‘Sisters in Arms of the Mauricio Morales Nucleus’ who pointed out in anger how the communiqués claiming the above mentioned actions had been censured. They were 12 claims addressed by ordinary post to various realities of the anarchist movement in Italian language. None of them was published so that a vital communication for the international growth of the informal debate was impeded. Today we know that this censorship is just the desperate reaction of an old anarchism infected with the bureaucracy of meetings and with the obsession of the struggle in society, which partial struggles have transformed into stupidity. A new insurrectionalism is being born from the ashes of the old and glorious individualist anarchism. As our sisters had written in their claim never arrived: ‘for the first time in history an informal organization, a federation of informal groups on a worldly level, becomes flesh by bleeding and making bleed’. The informal organization is no longer abstract fantasy, a soliloquy in the mouth of a bunch of comrades more or less cultivated, more or less sincere. In these last years, in different parts of the world the new nihilists stirred worries to the States and fear and hostility to the official part of the anarchist movement. The new anarchism will make its strength out of destructive imagination, and it will reinforce its coherence in the action.
Many things have happened since we launched the proposal for an ‘Informal Anarchist Federation’. Today, thanks to the sisters and brothers of the ‘Conspiracy of Cells of Fire’, who have re-launched it, the ‘FAI/International Revolutionary Front’, the ‘FAI/Global Network’, the ‘International Network of Action and Solidarity’, the ‘Federacion Anarquista Informal-Red Global have become reality with their one thousand names. A reality that needs to grow up especially now through the instrument of informal organization on a worldly level and thanks to a federation of action groups. Dozens and dozens of cells, nuclei, movements, individual comrades, united by a clear and strong horizontal and widespread pact of mutual support, wage war to the existent in a chaotic and destructive way.
In Greece:
-Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire7FAI7International Revolutionary Front
-International Revolutionary Front/Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire/Revolutionary Groups for the spreading of terror nucleus of vandals.
-International Revolutionary Front/Terrorist Complicity Warriors of the Abyss Severino Di Giovanni Command
-International Revolutionary Front Deviant Behaviours for the Spreading of Revolutionary Terrorism /Cell of Anarchist Action
-Cell of Revolutionary Solidarity-FAI
-Anarchist Revolutionary Front/Deviant Behaviours for the Spreading of Revolutionary Terrorism/Cell of Reflective Attack
-FAI/Cell of Aggressive Conscience
-International Revolutionary Front/Conspiracy of Cells of Fire/Revolutionary Groups for the Spreading of Terror/Cell Anormal-Heretics
In Indonesia: FAI Informal Anarchist Federation, Indonesia Section
In Mexico:
The two souls of Mexican insurrectionism (FLA-FLT) and the Celulas Autonomas de Revolucion Immediata Praxedis G: Guerriero
-Federation Anarquista Informal/Acrata
-Frente de Liberacion de la Tierra (FLT)/Red Internacional de Accion Y Solidaridad Grupo Informal Anti-Civilizacion
-Frente de Liberacion de la Tierra (FLT)/Federation Anarquista Informal-Red Global
-Nucleo Insurrecto Sole-Baleno de las Cellulas Autonomas de revolucion Immediata Praxedis Guerriero/FAI
-Comando de Individuos Libres, Peligrosos, Salvajes e Incendiarios por la Peste negra/FAI/Red Global
-Ludditas contra la domesticacion de la naturalezza Salvaje/Fai/Red Global
-Celula Eco Anarquista por el ataque directo/FAI/Red Global
-Brigada de Accion Revolucionaria por la propaganda por el Hecho y la accion armada-Simon Radowisky/Fai/Red Global
In Chile:
-Frente Internacional Rivoluzionario/Comando Insurrecional Aracely Romo
-Comando 8 de dicembre Cooridnamento Internacional FAI
In Russia: ELF Russia Informal Anarchist federation (FAI)/International Network of Action and Solidarity/International Revolutionary Front
In Peru: Circulo de Accion Iconoclasta/FAI
In the Netherlands: Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire-Dutch Cell
In England: International Informal Anarchist federation/FAI
In Italy:
-FAI/Craft Cooperative Fire and Similar (occasionally spectacular)/International Revolutionary/Front
-FAI/20th July Brigade/International Revolutionary Front
-FAI/Sisters in Arms Mauricio Morales Nucleus/International Revolutionary Front
-FAI/Revolutionary Cell Lambros Fountas
-FAI/International Solidarity
-FAI/Animal Revolt
-FAI/Revolutionary Nucleus Horst Fantazzini
-FAI/Cells Against Capita Prison and its Jailers and its Cells
-FAI/Armed Cells for International Solidarity
-FAI/Anonymous Terrible Revolt (RAT)
-FAI/Metropolitan Cells
-FAI/Narodnaja Vojla
It’s 10 years now that we have been trying with perseverance to make this organisational project concrete, although within our limits. Of course our growth will not be linear and progressive, there will be ups and downs, long and short periods when everything will be silent and then it will start again stronger than ever in some country we wouldn’t imagine. Through their will and strength, each group and individual will give their contribution to action and communication by helping all the others to fix more precise targets. Repression has already struck hard in Greece. Our sisters and brothers of the ‘Cells of Fire’ continue to struggle from within the walls of prison and to contribute to this organisational assessment through their writing, in an excellent way. We are one single thing without knowing one another, in our diversities we are the hand that will break the chains.
At first revolutionary solidarity will bond us through what some anarchists stupidly define ‘fictitious movement’, as they can’t understand it is exactly in solidarity that any revolutionary project defines itself. In the course of our history we of the Italian FAI have always acted without the mediation of ‘social’ struggles, such as those against FIES or against immigration detention centres, and we have never put ourselves in an above-to below demagogic position. We have always acted as individuals without wanting to indoctrinate anybody. We destroy what destroys us, and what doesn’t kill us strengthens us. The only limits we put to our action are of ethical nature. We have made a choice with our action in this world of included and excluded.
We are not interested in a society divided in classes, we don’t want any dictatorship of a class over another, we want anarchy! Millions of microcosms where each individual can experiment themselves freely. Something very similar to what we experiment through action every day by elaborating the best way of organizing ourselves without renouncing our individual freedom. It is exciting to grow in this organisational experience along with sisters and brothers we’ve never seen and probably will never see. It is exciting that individuals who don’t know one another come to the same conclusions in a given moment in history. We don’t know how the FAI/International Revolutionary Front will evolve, possibilities are enormous and cannot be foreseen. It could extinguish all of a sudden or grow exponentially. Our growth will be mainly qualitative, a growth deriving exactly from the unimaginable potentialities of the informal organization. It will take long before the FAI/International Revolutionary Front gives the best of itself, before the informal organization creates real problems to the status quo. The anarchist war of resistance started more than a century ago. With its glorious moments: the Paris Commune, the epoch of the propaganda by the deeds, the epoch of the big revolutions; and with its less glorious moments: unionism, non violence, libertarian municipalism, everything we call compromise. Our trajectory will be long and characterized by a continuous communication through action.
Communication is the cornerstone of all our informal structure but it is also its weak point. Until a year ago our communiqués-actions could be read in the front pages of all major Italian newspapers, this helped us to communicate. Today power realizes the danger of this communication (it was inevitable) and it censors not the action but the communiqué, the message. We decided to make recourse to electronic mail in order to fasten the spreading of this piece of writing and to reach as many realities of the anarchist movement as possible. Our choice is also due to the scarcity of publications in Italian language that are willing to give space to the new that is happening in the anarchist movement on an international level. We think an action must be claimed and explained in order for it to be replicated. Otherwise power would pollute it and distort its meaning by making it sterile: we know this very well as we have experienced it many times. A destructive action remains a very beautiful thing anyway, even if it is not claimed. And one can do it even only for the simple pleasure to do it. It’s always good to do something right. But for us this is not enough, we want this system to collapse. The more an action is reproducible, the bigger its real destructive potentiality; the more the rebels understand that concrete resistance exists the more they will be pushed into action. In the past and still today someone of us happened to individually take part to unclaimed actions along with comrades who obviously didn’t belong to FAI/International Revolutionary Front. In so doing we provided technical data that could save the very precious life of the comrades and sometimes we also learned new techniques. We of the Italian FAI continue to run all the roads that can lead to the revolutionary path. Clashes in piazzas, popular struggles, more circumscribed projects of radical struggle… all contribute to enhancing our practices of attack. It is ten years we have been acting undisturbed. Power strikes everywhere with more and more unbelievable repressive operations, but none of us has been hit so far. We are really sorry for the comrades who are being arrested and investigated, but it is better that the real culprits stay free so that they can strike over and over again. Perhaps some of us will fall but new groups will come out. In that case we hope we will be able to act like the sisters and brothers of the ‘Cells of Fire’, who continue with courage and coherence their struggle inside the walls of a prison, which will blow up one day, we are sure. Critique must be active and alive. Critique and self-critique must save us from being self-referential as this would surely lead us to the fictitious, towards the nothing.
As we said in the past, it is better that affinity groups don’t know one another so as to fight repression more effectively. But sometimes we happen to recognized comrades of us in the movement, which bring about risks but also immediate perspectives, such as gaining more technical abilities, more chances to get hold of weapons and explosives, more chances to support comrades compelled to live as clandestine. We read ‘The sun will rise again’ of ‘Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire’ very carefully, and we came to the conclusion that the three key points of the informal agreement of the second generation of the ‘cells of fire’ can become the key points of the ‘FAI/International Revolutionary Front’. These three points mirror our main characteristics. The first: destructive direct action as an indispensable and essential element. Such action can take the form of throwing a molotov as well as committing murder, without any hierarchy of importance, each group or individual will decide as they best like, in the respect for their own revolutionary ethics, which will certainly always exclude hitting at random.
In our view, this point will have to give rise to a new nihilist and anarchist guerrilla, thousands and thousands of fires against capital everywhere. The second very important point is that never are we to become spokespersons or representatives of anybody. We represent ourselves only, women and men in a perennial struggle against the existent, political power, technological power, the power of capital risking to erase life on this planet. We obviously have no hope in any social class imposing its ‘dictatorship’ over another class, which always ends up with the dictatorship of the ‘representatives’ of that given class. We express no solidarity towards those who are subdued, who are exploited but who don’t move a finger so that they also contribute to our oppression. What characterizes us most is the refusal of proxies and of ‘representation’. Our revolt is individual and it is this that makes our anarchism revolutionary and nihilist through the organisational instrument of the informal organization.
The third point: international revolutionary solidarity. The comrades who join this informal agreement will have to launch campaigns of struggle, which will be taken over by other groups of the ‘FAI/International Revolutionary Front’, according to their methods and timing. Three simple and direct points, which in our view mark a step forward in our informal organization, by widening the founding FAI document ‘Who we are: open letter to the anti-authoritarian and anarchist movement’ in its ‘anti-social’ and ‘nihilist’ vision. Everything concerning the ‘FAI/International Revolutionary Front’ is in chaotic and constant evolution, starting from its many names and definitions. This is just the beginning, the ‘Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire’ is the motor of this explosion of revolutionary vitality. It is the propulsive motor of an informal federation, which is growing and which has already surpassed the borders of nations, which we anarchists wish to abolish. Any organisational piece of writing, analysis and critique that come out of the FAI/International Revolutionary Front will never be the definite one. Our informal federation is in constant evolution. The comrades of the International Revolutionary Front scattered in the world already contribute to the analysis and growth of this project by setting fire here and there. Our imprisoned sisters and brothers are our biggest strength, their analysis opens our eyes, our anger and hatred for their arrest give us strength.
After all, our Informal Federation is a constant and never-ending organisational assessment not in preparation of a far away world revolution, which we don’t know when and if will happen, but with a view to the quality of our existence itself, which today, here and now, fully realizes itself in the armed struggle against power. We of the Italian FAI propose the sign of the ‘Conspiracy of Cells of Fire’ as a flag of this struggle, the 5 arrows of different length and aiming at different directions hitting at power united. This indicates the myriad of groups and individuals of the International Revolutionary Front/FAI who hit without respite with various grades of intensity but united by a pact of mutual support. The arrows are topped with a black star with an A inside, the symbol of our anarchism; and above the star the name of the group of the International Revolutionary Front claiming the action. We opted for this symbology because the history of the ‘Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire’ has found its way into our heart of rebels. All this, of course, if the Greek comrades agree. In a period of world crisis on all levels, to create an informal anarchist structure means to stop waiting for events to happen and to go towards revolution. In Arab countries regimes are collapsing to give space to other regimes, democratic ones this time. The world super-powers can easily influence the events, Europe is on the verge of collapse, we must not stay still or linked to old organisational schemes which have already given the worst of themselves in the past. To create an Informal Anarchist Federation means to bear actively on the struggles of the excluded all over the world, it means to bear actively on the struggle that nature undertakes every day against criminal human ‘technology’.
To bear directly on all this through concrete attacks widespread all over the territory. These attacks have never been missing but if they are united by an international informal network based on mutual support they become more visible and virulent, and their spreading and subversive potentiality are multiplied. As we have already said we don’t believe we have the truth in our pocket, but we are convinced that in certain moments in history ideas impose themselves by themselves. Today the moment has come to give a concrete contribution, which perhaps will make the difference. Ours is a beautiful challenge, the most beautiful challenge a revolutionary anarchist can ever launch: to throw one’s heart beyond the obstacles and see what happens. We of the FAI/Craft Cooperative Fire and Similar (occasionally spectacular)/International Revolutionary Front and of the FAI/20th July Brigade/International Revolutionary Front join the campaign of solidarity that the comrades of the FAI/Sisters in Arms Mauricio Morales Nucleus have started with the parcel bomb sent to the Koridallos prison. Once a year we will hit in solidarity with our sisters and brothers of the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire until they are free again. The dozens and dozens of years in prison they were sentenced to will turn into a tragic boomerang for the Greek State. Year after year the interests of this State will be hit in Italy, each time stronger than the previous time. We invite the other groups and individuals of the FAI/International Revolutionary Front scattered in the world to do the same.
LONG LIVE THE CONSPIRACY OF THE CELLS OF FIRE — LONG LIVE THE FAI/INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY FRONT
FAI/Craft Cooperative of Fire and Similar (occasionally spectacular)/International Revolutionary Front
FAI/20th July Brigade/International Revolutionary Front