"Our programe is very old: to live without dead time. We will of course publicize it through scandal. There's no other worthy means for such a programe. Our existence itself is already a scandal."
We talk a lot about violence in the inner cities and suburbs. However we don't think they are the only places where things happen. It's just that many people like us live there, and often ourselves as well. We don't just talk about violence: it is our element, our everyday fate. Violence is first of all the conditions we are forced to live in, that of the people who defend these conditions, and more rarely, alas, that which we smack back in their faces. We don't know all our enemies but we know what they stand for. All our allies aren't our associates. Sometimes they are. We aren't in touch with all our allies. The unemployed who fight poverty are our allies as much as the workers rebelling against work and escaping the control of the trade-unions. We do not think we hold universal truths but communicate them. Universal truths are those you communicate- not those you hold. To those who wonder whether we are assemblyist or councilist we answer that what matters to us is the way people establish and organise dialogue. We care about clandestinity but that doesn't make us terrorists; the old mole digging away, as it used to be said. Nowadays people asserting revolutionary demands are seen as dreamers. But man is made of the same matter as his dreams. We are revolutionary. Os Cangaceiros means: "Everything is possible", "We are at war", "Nothing is true, everything can be dared". We are many considering society's overwhelming atomisation. We have many allies all over the world.
Our programe is very old: to live without dead time. We will of course publicize it through scandal. There's no other worthy means for such a programe. Our existence itself is already a scandal. We are not, of course, indispensable; nevertheless, we've had to be so on several occasions. In the social war no-one can be dispensed with. We are also very wary: experience proves one is never too wary. Mistrust judges the trust you can grant others. We are not really part of what can be called the "world of work'1 , though this is where we come from. But when real struggles take place there, they also fight the world of work and attack what constrains the poor to work: the necessity for money.
Of course our magazine has a derisory diffusion compared to our enormous ambitions. But we count on our readers' strength of spirit to compensate for this, and this doesn't counter our ambitions. The diffusion of such a journal has obviously nothing in common with the massive and daily distribution of the presses' lies. If it is quantitatively limited, it addresses itself to people which whom the dialogue can exist, not to a mass of spectators. Best to have a few smart and determined persons on our side than a shapeless mass. It helps the enormous ambitions. We are against any hierarchy and our association is egalitarian in the sense that everybody must be able to make decisions. We aren't embarassed to refer to intellectuals like Marx and Hegel: in those days one could be an intellectual without being an intellectual whore. Now that's finished, even impossible. Moreover they were not just intellectuals because they acted upon the world. We see the possibility of regular contacts with other groups on this fundamental condition: the supercession of all forms of agitation/propaganda into activity. What we criticise in politics is the State.
The question is to inject new blood into these times, and to have the means to do so. When we went and met striking miners in GB, we were asked a number of times this obvious question: "What force do you really constitute?, what can you do with the information we give you?" We have to be able to answer such questions clearly, especially because a regroupment like ours isn't easy for everyone to understand. We've been asked in Poland: "Who are you?, what is your movement?". We must know how to make clear the universal character of our existence. Our interest in the revolts of people like us reaches beyond the interest of the isolated, often powerless, poor in the world. Yet it must be made clear that we speak solely about what concerns us. We don't want to assist others' struggles. We only want to meet them and join in the fun. Most of the rebellious workers we happen to meet are still influenced by the militant state of mind remaining from the old workers' movement. At the moment we can only count on meetings with people taken individually although we sometimes go through the channel of organised groups which still have illusions about trade-unonism, and where we can meet workers in re-volt. We don't care about the activism of these groups but we know people there who, like us, refuse work.
The young kids in the cities, more used to meeting isolated people or local gangs are always a bit surprised to see a formed group when they meet us. On the other hand, struggling workers are more used to seeing people acting as members of official organisations and are surprised to see individuals acting only on their own behalf when they meet us. In GB and in Spain many workers in revolt have been puzzled at this group of organised "unemployed for life' people with international information and contacts, having certain resources, and existing independantly of any trade-union or political apparatus. Finally, people are intrigued by our mere existence.
Anyway, the only serious risk we run is that of dying poor.
- 1"Le monde du travail" (the world of work) is a French expression refering to all problems and aspects of work: labour market, employment/unemployment, conditions work etc.(TN)
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