PDF: Os Cangaceiros: A Crime Called Freedom– by Wolfi Landstreicher (2006)
“At the dawn of Industrialism, factories were modeled after prisons. In its twilight, prisons are now modeled after factories.”
We speak a lot about the violence on the outskirts of the cities. However, there is no need to think that this is the only place that anything is going on. It’s just that many people who share our conditions live there, as we do ourselves at times. We speak of nothing but violence. It is our element, and we could even say, our daily destiny. Violence is first of all the conditions that are imposed on us. Then there is the violence of the police who defend these conditions. And, unfortunately more rarely, there is the violence that we throw back in their faces.
We don’t know all of our enemies, but we know what they defend. Our allies are not all obliged to be our accomplices, but at times it happens that some of them are. We do not have relations with all of our allies. The unemployed who fight against poverty are our allies, as are the workers who rebel against work and escape the control of the unions. We don’t think that we possess a universal truth, but we intend to communicate what we think. Universal truths are the ones that are communicated, not the ones that are possessed. We tell those who ask if we are assemblyists or councilists that we are interested in knowing how people establish and organize dialogue.
We are not “terrorists” because we support underground activity: it was once said that the old mole digs. In our times, people who affirm revolutionary demands pass for dreamers. But the human being is made of the same material that his dreams are made from.
We are revolutionaries. “Os Cangaceiros” means “Everything is possible”, “We are at war”, “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”. There are many of us relative to the reigning atomization, and we have allies everywhere.
Our program is very old: to live without dead time. We propose to make it known through scandal; there are no other means worthy of such a program. Our existence itself is already a scandal. We are clearly not indispensable, but on many occasions we have had to be so. In social war, no one can be exonerated. We are also very suspicious — experience shows that one is never sufficiently so. Distrust is never enough. Distrust is judged by the trust that is placed apart from what we call “the world of work”, since we have escaped from this very world. But when struggles deserving of the name take place, they are against the world of work and unleash a rage against that which forces the poor to work, the need for money.
We explain the fact that there are no other groups like us in Europe at this time with this thought: we are simply the first. Of course, our writings have a negligible distribution when compared with our enormous ambitions. But we count on the strength of spirit of our readers to pose a remedy for this, and this does not call our ambition into question. The distribution of our writings obviously has nothing to do with the massive, daily distribution of lies in the press. If few people read our writings, they are addressed to potential correspondents, not to a mass of spectators. Better to have selected and combative people with us than amorphous masses. This favors our enormous ambitions.
We are against all hierarchy and consider our association egalitarian insofar as everyone is capable of making decisions within it. The fact that we make reference to intellectuals like Marx and Hegel doesn’t bother us: in their time one could be an intellectual without being an intellectual whore; now this isn’t possible anymore. Furthermore, they were not just intellectuals in that they had an effect on reality. We consider it possible to have continuous contact with other groups on this basic condition: that it goes beyond every form of agitation-propaganda in the way it goes into action. What we criticize in politics is the state.