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Dec 01

What we need is less poetry

Italian-American insurrectionist anarchist Luigi Gaellani. Borrowed from libcom.org http://libcom.org/history/fragment-luigi-galleanis-life

once upon a time
well-paid office holders, omnipotent bankers,
opulent financial elites and other criminal elements
of the bourgeoisie feared the very soup they slurped
from their glossy, porcelain bowls, inspecting each
silver spoonful for whateverthefuck poison looks like

once upon a time
wall street bankers feared the horse-and-buggy
parked in front of the building in the middle of the day
noticing the immigrant and non-immigrant working
men and women in large groups with worn shoes,
faded slacks and coats, broke-in paper-thin tweed caps
discussing class, the means of production, chanting in
italian: lavoratori di tutto il mondo unitevi! and
brothers, did you hear what the russians are doing?
wall street bankers fearing every subsequent september
16 since 1920; the buildings on wall street still remember
the shoddy blasts of september 16, 1920 on an early
summer afternoon in the city as the sun struggled to
break through the overcast skies and failed

once upon a time
banks, police stations and court houses—places and
instruments of state repression, would shake with
improvised, distinct, tangible and direct explosions,
gripping their guns and trembling at each falling and
changing leaf, as a work boot crushes it, traumatizing
them with the sound of a tiny, far-off explosion

once upon a time
there was a time when john pierpont morgan, jr., the
merchant of death who initiated, financed and profited
off the first world war—he and all wall street feared
more than protests and signs, a time when they feared
more than unshowered occupiers, drug-addled and
ineffective general assemblies, unsightly tents with a
pillar of weed smoke coming out the flap, fair trade
vegan cookies, yoga circles, affinity groups,
committees and sub-committees and sub-sub-
committees, drum circles and meditation collectives

once upon a time
the finance capitalist hegemonic power structure
feared radical change, feared the communists, feared
the anarchists, feared an uprising, feared for their lives,

feared us

what we need is to resurrect the insurrectionary ghosts
of luigi gaellani, ulrike meinhof, ricardo flores magon,
and bhagat singh from the buried, unmarked graves of
history

what we need is less pacifism, not more
what we need is less political parties, not more
what we need is less rhetoric, not more
what we need is less chalking, more organizing
what we need is less heroes, more heroism
what we need is less theory, more actualizing
what we need is less poetry, not more
what we need is more anger, not less
what we need is the complete realization that
what we need is the understanding of the dialectic
of attaining peace through non-peaceful liberatory
resistance by an international, flagless nation of
working and oppressed people who, in their grips,
hold the fate of their own emancipation

what we need is not to occupy wall street, but to
destroy it

–Luis Rivas