In a near future, not many years after a Crisis that has reduced Italy to a pre-industrial or even pre-modern condition, a middle-aged woman wanders in the half-flooded countryside between Ferrara and the river Po delta (North-Eastern Italy). She has no name, and refers to herself by antonomasias such as the Historian, the Writer, the Seer… She is seeking the places of her childhood and, perhaps even more important, she’s pursuing echoes of her native dialect. She is visited by different versions of the same dream. She meets a man called Matteo, they talk and then they experience an epiphany, an illumination: the word «Arzèstula» (ferrarese for Great Tit) evokes the very little bird it designates. Then the woman returns to the place she belongs, that is, a former motorway café at Cantagallo, south-west of Bologna, which is now home of a free community of outcasts affected by neurological disorders. At night, all together, they perform rituals that allow them to see the future. Not the future that’s behind the corner, but a future beyond that, an extremely distant future. (more…)

Italiano – Français - Español .

[The original version of this essay was published on Giap on 26 September 2011, which means several days before Steve Jobs died. The French version was published on Article XI on the eve of Jobs' death. The piece had already received a lot of attention, backlinks and comments when the news arrived. However, it obviously sky-rocketed to the status of "crucial" text as soon as the media landscape was filled with iGrief, and it kept attracting people when anonymous cultural activists "displaced" the discussion on iGrief by creating the "Steve Workers" persona. The present English translation was done collectively on a Wiki page on Mauro Vanetti's website. Many thanks to Mauro, SandorKrasna and all the guys who gave a hand. This version retains some additional mini-explanations Wu Ming 1 wrote for the French readers. We also inserted a few additional links that weren't in the original text but came up during the discussion.]
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Last week a Pennsylvanian daily newspaper, The Morning Call, published a long and detailed inquiry – entitled Inside Amazon’s Warehouse – on the appalling work conditions at Amazon warehouses in the Lehigh Valley. The article, resulting from months of interviews and direct checks, is being spread around the world and has gotten coverage from the New York Times and other mainstream media. The picture is grim:
- extreme job insecurity, a mood of perpetual blackmailing and lack of rights;
- inhuman work routine, with a pace that can be doubled overnight (from 250 to 500 units per day, with no advance notice), at an internal temperature beyond 40 Celsius that at least in one case reached 45 °C (114 °F);
- disciplinary actions against workers who slow down the pace, or simply faint (a report of the 2nd of June mention the fainting of 15 workers due to heat);
- “exemplary” immediate sacking, with the guilty escorted outside before the eyes of co-workers.
And there is more. Read the whole piece, it is worth it. The key sentence was said by a former Amazon warehouseman: “They’re kiling people mentally and physically“.

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Steve Workers. Image by We Are Müesli

Think different: billionaires are not on your side.
Stay foolish: fight capitalism.
Stay hungry: eat the rich.
- Steve Workers, 2011

For those who speak or at least can read French, «Fétichisme de la marchandise digitale et exploitation cachée: Les cas Amazon et Apple» is the translation (*) of an essay Wu Ming 1 wrote and published – with great resonance – on our Italian blog Giap a few days ago. It is also being translated into English and Spanish. We’ll make those versions available as soon as they’re ready. If you like a good work in progress, the English translation is being made by a group of people using this Wiki.

N.B. If you take a look at the Italian article, you’ll see that it also relies upon a few embedded videos. They’re respectively about:
1. Workers’ suicides at Foxconn plants in China;
2. The really depressing inauguration of the biggest Apple store in Italy;
3. An example of how people live and work in an African e-waste dump (this one is in Ghana);
4. Andrea Casaleggio’s Gaia-inspired totalitarian vision of the future
[Casaleggio is the ideologist and marketing guru of the neo-poujadiste, neither-left-nor-right, digital-fetishist movement headed by former comedian Beppe Grillo].

BTW, be patient, we’re going to relaunch this neglected blog as soon as possible!

* French translation by Serge Quadruppani.

by @jumpinshark, useful summing-up of a discussion that’s going on among Italian media activists. As a first step toward solving this embarrassing problem, a group of people has decided to start a blog half-ironically called – after a weird documentary Jean-Luc Godard made in 1969 – “Struggles in Italy” (not yet on line, they’re working on the first posts), to provide info & stories in several languages on the radical struggles taking place in Italy (against cuts, “Austerity”, racism, exploitation, privatisation of the commons, destruction of the environment and so on). We really hope these comrades will do a work for which the movement(s) will thank them, and wish them the best of luck.

Since last April, we have published 37 articles on Giap, our blog in Italian. Most of them are lengthy stuff. They often generated several hundreds of comments, and debates that went on for weeks. A discussion on Italy, financial capital, the ever-agonizing Burlesquoni government and the current economic crisis is still in full swing after more than a month.
We wrote pieces – or gave talks which were recorded and put on the blog for download – on the recent uprisings all over Europe and the Mediterranean, with particular focus on the Spanish “Indignados”.
We talked about riots, workers’ struggles in Italy and the amazing “No TAV” movement in Piedmont, North-Western Italy (which we regard as one of the most advanced experiences of self-organisation and grassroots resistance to capitalism).
We commented upon the 10th anniversary of the G8 summit in Genoa, the murder of Carlo Giuliani etc. (more…)

First time we used Storify.
N.B. Click on “Read more” to go on with the flow. It may sound like useless advice, but you’d be surprised to hear how many people fail to see those two little blue words :-)

People's History poster by Tim Simons - Taken from www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily

Here’s both the audio recording and text (PDF) of the double talk WM1 and WM2 gave at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, on April 5, 2011.
On the previous day we’d given the same talk at Duke University, Durham, NC. The UNC version is slightly different, because it took into account things emerged in the Duke Q & A.
We wish to thank, among many, Mimmo Cangiano, Roberto Dainotto and Federico Luisetti, who invited us and organised the whole thing; Laura Moure Cecchini, who put us up in her flat; the comrades of El Kilombo Intergalactico, for an eye-opening afternoon of “counter-tourism”; Michael Hardt, for being always the gentleman; Fredric Jameson, for supporting the initiative; Michal Osterweil, with whom we share precious memories of the penultimate uprising.
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This could be both stupid and interesting to someone (but we don’t know whom). It’s just an idea we had while translating the two talks we’ll give in North Carolina on April 4-5. These are the first five minutes (out of about 45) of each talk. They’re read by a certain “Alex”, ie the male voice of a text-to-speech software we happen to be tinkering with these days.

WM2 – How to tell a revolution from something else

WM1 – We are all February of 1917

Duke University, Durham, NC
Monday, April 4
5:00 pm
Franklin Humanities Institute Garage, Smith Warehouse
This event is also sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Program in Literature, the Marxism and Society Program, and the UNC Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Tuesday, April 5
11:00 am
UNC Global Education Center, room 3024 (more…)

We’ve been neglecting this blog for too long (over a month has passed since the last post). It’s just that our main blog, Giap, requires a lot of work and takes pretty much all the time we’re able to devote to work on the web. Moreover, we’re writing the new collective novel on the French Revolution (with an eye on what’s happening in North Africa); Wu Ming 1 is translating this book here (1,000 pages to be delivered on September 15th!) and doing research for a project on Africa, mountaneering and fascism; Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 4 are teaching a course at the University of Pesaro; Wu Ming 5 is on national tour with his Oi! band Nabat (click on the name to see them performing live). And we’ve got little children to boot! In plain words, we’re juggling our way through life while riding a metaphorical bicycle like the one you can see in the pic, and translating stuff from Italian is out of question these days. This is unfortunate, for we’ve written a lot of pieces which, once slightly readapted, could be of some interest to non-Italians.
The difficulties we’re experiencing with all these projects are even preventing us from doing the usual book tour to promote our latest book, Anatra all’arancia meccanica [Clockwork Orange Duck], a collection of the short stories we wrote from 2000 to 2010. We’re very fond of this book, it’s a look back upon ten years of activities, but if we hit the road now, we wouldn’t be able to write :-(
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A Khaled Said y a todos los insurrectos en Nordáfrica y en Oriente Medio
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[WM1:] Intentaré poner al día a nuestros lectores acerca de lo que ha sucedido en la última semana en el frente del “rogo de libri” [quema de libros] véneto, y sobre como esta movilización se ha cruzado con otras luchas, en particular, la huelga general de los trabajadores de la industria metalmecánica.
Respecto a la batalla que llevamos adelante desde hace ya dos semanas, hay algo que podemos decir ahora mismo: hemos ganado el primer asalto. Pero procedamos con orden.

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In the last two weeks we’ve been campaigning hard against right-wing officials trying to ban books and authors in Veneto (North-East Italy). Alongside many writers and readers, we’ve been helping to coordinate a rich, manifold counter-informative operation which has taught us (and is still teaching us) many lessons. We already scored some important goals, as we managed to stop some hateful initiatives dead in their tracks. Unfortunately, we’ve been so engulfed in the campaign that we haven’t had time to keep you anglophones reasonably up-to-date with what was going on. If you look at this post’s comment section, you’ll find some useful texts and pingbacks. We even held a public meeting and made a demonstration “in the belly of the Beast”, ie in Preganziol, province of Treviso, the den of the hideous Northern League. A brief, partial report on what happened can be found here.
Anyway, we can’t omit to post stuff specifically related to our work as writers.
Thus, here’s the first batch of news of 2011. (more…)

[Translated into Spanish by Nadie Enparticular. Original text here. We're looking for people who can translate into English and other languages.]
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¿Quién es la mujer que declara que nuestros libros son “deseducativos”, pontifica sobre la “necesidad de buenos ejemplos, no de malos maestros” y pide a los directores de las escuelas de la Región Véneto que destierren cientos de títulos y –sobre todo– a sus autores? ¿Quién es ella? Fuera del Véneto, solo se sabe que es la consejera regional de Instrucción y Formación, y que es del PdL [Partito della Libertà]. Pero aparte de esto, que es el envoltorio, ¿quién es Elena Donazzan?
Bueno, para dar un ejemplo, es la que está dentro del círculo:

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- Atualisaçoes nos comentarios -

[Pedimos aos leitores para reagirem. E eles já o fazem! Todas as sugestões que demos ao final deste artigo estão sendo postas em prática entusiasticamente, melhoradas e compartilhadas por uma multidão de pessoas que estão horrorizadas pelo que está acontecendo na região de Veneza. Editores estão produzindo declarações e lançando comunicados oficiais, a mídia nacional está começando a cobrir o assunto, a Associação Nacional de Bibliotecários (AIB) condenou enfaticamente a proposta e convidou os leitores a relatar qualquer tentativa de censurar e banir livros. Contudo, isso ainda não é suficiente. Precisamos que as pessoas de fora do país saibam o que está acontecendo, há o fedor da prática nazista de queima de livros na Itália, e o caso do fugitivo “ex-terrorista” Cesare Battisti (agora no Brasil) não é mais que uma desculpa para a repressão. O período de declínio de um regime pode ser muito longo, e é seu período mais perigoso, à medida que os lacaios ficam cada vez mais desesperados e recorrem a todos os tipos de atos absurdos de modo a manter suas garras sobre a sociedade.]
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As melhores palavras, dadas as circunstâncias, foram encontradas por nosso colega Serge Quadruppani. Aqui estão, traduzidas do francês: (more…)