Negative Heroes: Luther Blissett and the refusal to work

Comrade Luther was well aware that his daily life was both a means and an outcome of the struggle. Sold by the music and word merchant Elton John to a pre-Berlusconian Milan, he immediately assumed the role of a producer of immaterial symbolic power, overturning the sense of his every gesture and highlighting his rebellion against the system. Only the blindness of a young fan led me to hate him, then, for those badly-treated footballs, or for that misplaced trap against Roma, after a pass that had almost stopped in front of him. In reality, he was a saboteur, he revealed himself to 80,000 consumer-producers as a wooden wedge [used to stop assembly lines by militant workers in the 1970s], a sabot stuck into the production line by a worker: and he prefiguered, at the same time, the later role of computer viruses within a society based on control and communication. Blissett refused to be integrated; he understood that capital is a parasite that sucks away our humanity. The game of football was made up of interaction, communication, intelligence and knowledge, and he understood that this system was part of a valorization of goods.

He decided, therefore, to refuse to be an interface in this system. He decided to stop communicating, to be a living short-circuit. So he started to move around the field at random, appearing not to care about the game. In reality, he was very careful to avoid all communication with his fellow players. He was also able to understand the future. He saw his colleagues as potential agents of capital: in fact, at that time, players like Baresi and Tassotti were emerging, who would be the backbone of that producer of triumphant images which Milan would soon become.

Moreover, he refused to trust the more progressive sectors of the dressing room; he refused to go along with the long kicks of goalkeeper Terraneo, which tempted him into taking part in the game. Thus, at Milanello [Milan's training ground] he stopped talking altogether.

He became invisible, he could not be represented as part of a social system: he was a drifting mine ready to explode every Sunday in unexpected ways, with strange gestures which broke the cold normality of the football-system. This true revolutionary aimed at complete self-valorization, creating a niche of liberty founded on the systematic removal of wealth from the cycle of added-values.

We don't know where he is any longer, but I like to imagine him in a place without time, a dynamic space situated somewhere between Brixton and the Caribbean wehre people are still able to construct networks of knowledge and relationships. Perhaps only the reggae rhythms of Jamaica will set the tempo of life in the interstice in which we lay down the bases of the revolution.

Luther, the black bomber, one of us.