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The exploitation of the working class comes about in two precise ways which link together through a complex system of complicity: the first is the direct one, carried out by the national bourgeoisie. The second the indirect one, exercised by the bourgeoisie of other nations.

The following piece of work, on the anti-nuclear movement in the US and Europe, although written in 1979, is still a valid contribution to this search for clarity as a basis for struggle. Since the time it was written the anti-nuclear/peace movement has grown and multiplied mainly due to the mining of Europe with nuclear missiles. This growth has been of massive quantity, but the logic and quality remain the same as when the following was written.

From the first ‘enclosures’ of great masses of people into circumscribed spaces to the most advanced factories today, capitalism has tried to cut out portions of space to dedicate them to one specific use: the production of surplus value. Now, with the advent of the recent post-industrial development and advances in the technological process, the management of this space has changed profoundly. It has passed from partial management to a total one. In this capital has had the support of power and the State. We think that it is important to reflect on the conditions of the relationship that exists today between social space and capital.

Words. Mere Words. The pages that follow are in part transcriptions of the spoken word—‘the wonder worker that is no more’, as Emma Goldman wrote wistfully over one hundred years ago when referring to the inadequacy of the spoken word to awaken thought and shake people out of their lethargy. Here in the twenty-first century anarchists no longer talk about spoken propaganda to awaken the masses, bemoaning the absence of orators such as Johann Most or Luigi Galleani. In rare encounters organized by comrades today ‘the masses’ are noticeably absent, they don’t even enter the equation.

This pamphlet is an attempt to analyse the various mechanisms whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery and — at least in the short term — seems to succeed. It does not deal with ‘police’ and ‘jails’ as ordinarily conceived but with those internalised patterns of repression and coercion, and with those intellectual prisons in which the ‘mass individual’ is today entrapped.

A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion drags in its train the individual and social woes which for two centuries have tortured sad humanity. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny. Instead of opposing this mental aberration, the priests, the economists and the moralists have cast a sacred halo over work. Blind and finite men, they have wished to be wiser than their God; weak and contemptible men, they have presumed to rehabilitate what their God had cursed. I, who do not profess to be a Christian, an economist or a moralist, I appeal from their judgement to that of their God; from the preachings of their religious, economics or free thought ethics, to the frightful consequences of work in capitalist society.

Now that the tragic history of fascism has run the full course of its formal development, culminating in the modern democratic State, Rühle’s article becomes more readily comprehensible to us. It was written at the end of the thirties and dedicated to the contemporaneous struggle against both bolshevism and fascism. The real dominion of present day capitalism shows the authoritarian designs that have provided the platform for contemporary fascism (camouflaged by democracy), and those of contemporary bolshevism (camouflaged by the dictatorship of the proletariat) to be quite similar.

Comiso in Sicily became a prime place on the NATO nuclear armaments map, having been chosen to house 112 cruise missiles. A prosperous commercial and agricultural centre, it is characterised by poverty and unemployment, a situation that prevails among Sicilian peasants and manual workers. In contrast to what was being said by the Italian government — that the missile base would bring wellbeing and jobs to the area — some local anarchists (comrades in Ragusa and Catania) decided to give a more realistic picture based on the social and economic effects that such a base would have, along with the organisational proposal to form self-managed leagues in all the area, which would coordinate to occupy and destroy the base.

What is a CPT (the Italian for immigration detention centre)? It is a place where the Italian State locks up all immigrants (children, women and men) who do not have stay permits. It is a modern concentration camp where undesirables are confined before being deported.
Immigration detention centres exist all over fortress Europe, as the bosses establish that only certain immigrants are allowed to stay; the others, those whose face doesn’t fit and cannot be exploited as cheap labour, are locked up in prisons especially created for them and held until they are deported. They are ‘guilty’ of coming from lands where mere surviving is impossible, owing to famine and war, desertification and ecological disasters, industrial reorganisation and mass dismissal.