“Placing an upside down world back on its feet means revealing the violence that is hidden in daily life and confronting it for what it is, without giving in to extortion or terror, attacking the machine in order to sabotage it: it means learning to use violence, so as not to have to delegate it, so as not to be blackmailed; it means learning to recognize it or live with it.”

From the introduction

It’s a difficult task to make sense of some of the singular texts which were produced by the Italian movement during the late 70s known as Autonomia since their experience of being the high point of revolutionary struggle in the west seems so far away, but their horizons and their struggles in many ways remain close to ours and the laboratory of subversion as well as repression can provide many invaluable lessons for contemporary partisans.

This was a time when CEOs listened to the radio waiting to hear that it was someone else that day that got the bullets in his knee caps that could have just likely obliterated theirs, where when the police fired live rounds at the unruly demonstration the streets fired back, of immense multiplicitous creativity outside and against the old forms of struggle and it was also a time where thousands of comrades were in prison often held up to four years simply awaiting trial and charged with the most ambiguous crimes, crimes of association, which target collectivities rather than individual people. If we want to understand both revolution and counter-revolution we should continue to look to the area of autonomia.