NOT BORED writes: Comments on "The Relevance of Antonio Negri to the Anti-Globalization Movement"

[Ed. "NOT BORED! is an anarchist, situationist-inspired, low-budget, irregularly published, photocopied journal http://www.notbored.org/index1.html]

We here at NOT BORED! received a large number of responses to our essay
"The Relevance of Antonio Negri to the Anti-Globalization Movement," in
part because it was re-printed by a popular anarchist website as well as
posted to a couple of sites associated with the Independent Media Center, for which the
essay was originally written. Most of these responses were highly critical.
The essay was taken to task for basing all of its positions on a handful of
old and obscure situationist pamphlets, for discouraging people from
reading Negri & Hardt's book Empire, and for conflating Negri's "communism"
with the "Communism" of the Italian Communist Party, among other things.

All of these criticisms have merit; but it is also true that none of them
address the main point of our essay, which doesn't concern Antonio Negri
but his relevance to certain events that allegedly took place at the huge
protests outside the 20-23 July 2001 summit of the leaders of the so-called
G8 (Great Eight) Nations in Genoa, Italy -- in particular, the widely
reported incidences in which anarchist "Black Bloc" formations were either
infiltrated or completely faked by police provocateurs. We argued that, in
the same way Toni Negri personally suffered because in the 1970s he was
slow (for a long time he refused) to recognize the possibility that the
"revolutionaries" in the Red Brigades group had been infiltrated or even
replaced by government spies and provocateurs, those of us who are active
in the anti-globalization movement
might also suffer if we are "slow" to believe the reports of fake Black
Blocs in Genoa. If we refuse to believe these reports -- and too many
anarchists have indeed refused to believe them -- we, like Negri, might be
positioned by
unscrupulous police officers or district attorneys as the Black Bloc's
"theoreticians" or "leaders," precisely because we've spent our time
criticizing the "mistakes" of "well-intentioned" people like ourselves,
instead of denouncing the incredible lengths to which the State will go to
justify and protect itself. When you've been arrested and imprisoned on
false charges
-- as Negri was in 1979 and then again in 1997 -- it hardly matters if you
are a "communist" or a "Communist." In either case, you're still in jail,
as Negri still is.

As we noted one month after our essay on Negri's relevance was written,
unfortunately one can cite other recent instances in which a government or
one of its "secret services" has perpetrated a despicable act of violence,
blamed it on people who have already been vilified, and then used it to
justify and provide the pretext for a pre-planned attack against them. As
we noted on 3 September 2001, it has been confirmed since our essay was
written -- and by none other than the former Chief of the Genoan Police
Department, who resigned in the aftermath of the G8 protests -- that
approximately 600 neo-nazis from both Germany and Italy were in fact
allowed to enter the city and "participate" in the protests, even though
the Italian government knew full well that both the presence and the
behavior of these people would be disruptive, to say the least. But
disrupting the protests -- either by allowing the protesters to be attacked
by brutal goons or by blaming the protesters for violence perpetrated by
brutal goons -- was precisely what the police and the pro-globalization
politicians intended to do. (The ex-Chief of Police appears to have made no
reference to the allegations that some or all of these neo-nazis were
dressed like and pretended to be "black bloc" anarchists once they entered
Genoa.)

Had it not been for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the Pentagon and the
World Trade Center, we would have been content to continue to attach
similar footnotes to the original essay, if and when they were needed; we
wouldn't have
undertaken to write a second essay or comments such as these. But these
attacks -- or, rather, the nature of the United States government's
response to them -- necessitates such an undertaking.

In the aftermath of the attacks, during America's self-righteous "war on
terrorism," there is no longer an analogy one might draw between the Red
Brigades of the 1970s and the Black Bloc(s) of today: there is now a direct
connection. On 16 December 2001, the Australian news magazine The Age
reported that:

"US Attorney General John Ashcroft wrapped up a tour of European
capitals today with a pledge of closer cooperation between Italy and the
United States on intelligence sharing in the fight against terrorism.

Ashcroft held talks with Italy's Interior Minister Claudio Scajola,
at which they decided to revive a bilateral commission as a vehicle for the
heightened cooperation.

The US official was completing a tour which included meetings with
his counterparts in London, Berlin and Madrid on developing cooperation on
extraditing terrorist suspects arrested since the September 11 attacks on
America [...]

Ashcroft is keen to establish a clear modus operandi with European
countries because between them they hold dozens of suspects linked to
terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network, blamed for the
September 11 attacks.

Washington is determined to bring bin Laden and his associates to
justice [...]

He [Ashcroft] said Scajola 'clearly understands and recognises that
terrorism is international and that the threat to liberty and freedom, and
order, and government is international'.

The US official said Washington could learn from Italy, which 'has
known of terrorism in ways that the United States has never experienced' -
an apparent reference to bombings by left-wing extremist groups like the
Red Brigades in the 1970s and 1980s.

Scajola, who is responsible for Italy's anti-terrorist police [and
for the actions of the carabinieri in Genoa during the G8 Summit], said:
'Italy stands side by side, shoulder to shoulder with the US, in the spirit
of solidarity with the US people'."

Unlike the writer of this story, we're not sure Ashcroft was in fact
referring to the Red Brigades when he spoke of terrorist attacks "that the
United States has never experienced." As a matter of fact, there were
groups like the Red
Brigades or, rather, there were left-wing extremist groups (the Weather
Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army, among them) that conducted
bombing campaigns in the 1970s that were intended to terrorize the American
government. Perhaps Ashcroft intended instead to refer to such uniquely
Italian manifestations of terrorism as the 1981 assassination of Pope John
Paul or the 1993 bombing of the Uffizi Art Gallery (commonly attributed to
the Mafia). Both
events are truly without parallel in American history. . . . More than
likely, Ashcroft was referring to the "terrorism" of the anti-globalization
protesters at the G8 Summit in Genoa, which was "so severe" that the
carabinieri had no choice but to kill one of the protesters, a 20-year-old
man named Carlos Giuliani. While there have been several large and violent
anti-globalization protests in the United States, none of them has resulted
in a fatality. And so it's possible that our reporter has Ashcroft
referring to the Red Brigades when the Attorney General was actually
referring to violent anti-globalization protesters.

The significant thing about this "mistake" is the fact that it may not be a
mistake at all: it might be a helpful hint from either the reporter or
his/her editor as to what's more likely to rally public opinion against the
anti-globalization movement. The public won't believe there's a connection
between the anti-globalization movement and Al Qaeda, that is, unless you
insert the fiction of the Red Brigades between them. You've got to compare
Al Qaedea to the Red Brigades (not as they really were, but as they've been
portrayed), and then compare the Red Brigades with the anti-globalization
movement, before you can make a connection between the anti-globalization
movement and Al Qaeda. Otherwise, the lie is too transparent to work.

And so, once again, it is clear to us that the anti-globalization movement
must re-familiarize itself with the Red Brigades and, by extension, with
the sad case of Antonio Negri. The movement must learn that Negri, whatever
the merits of his
books, made a crucial and foreseeable mistake about the Red Brigades back
in the 1970s, and that contemporary anti-globaliztion protesters are at
risk of making the same sort of mistake today where fake Black Blocs are
concerned. To
avoid Negri's fate, we must not assume that "unusual" or "suspicious" Black
Bloc formations are made up of well-intentioned comrades who are weak on
revolutionary theory, inexperienced or prone to making mistakes; we must
not attack the integrity or credibility of those who bring back reports of
Black Blocs that have behaved as if they were made up of police officers or
neo-nazi thugs; and we must commit ourselves to investigating such reports
and then, if and when we are satisfied that they are accurate, to
publicizing their contents.

But there's more to it than just that. The anti-globalization movement must
be prepared to turn the Red Brigades "trick" back on the people who would
play it. That is to say, the anti-globalization movement must be prepared
to say (must have the facts to back up the assertions) that, just like the
operatives in Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, the members of the Red
Brigades were once on very close terms with the CIA, and that the CIA used
both groups as weapons in its "cold war" against global communism.

NOT BORED!

17 December 2001

http://www.notbored.org/negri.html
notbored@panix.com"