Switzerland: Communiqué by ecoanarchist prisoner Luca ‘Billy’ Bernasconi about his participation in prison protests against the World Economic Forum (

Feb. 18, 2012 Contra Info

Prison separates us physically from the struggles. It isolates us from our loved ones and from the daily complicity of our paths of struggle, denying us our own desires. However it doesn’t manage to take them away from our head, nor the fight from our spirit. On the contrary, the rage and hate we feel against these walls and our jailers roots them further on into our soul, into our flesh.

The thought becomes even more impelling than on the outside: ‘what can I do?’ Therefore, when opportunities to take part in outside mobilizations from the inside of these walls arise, it’s lived as something much more than symbolic. It’s a moment I seize and make fundamentally mine, deep inside where no guard, no cop, no one else whose intention is to abuse their power, should ever be allowed to lay neither hand nor eye. There, inside us, where nothing is symbolic but everything is tension.

Leaders of different sorts of dominion (politicians and contractors, of the media and spiritual means) will meet this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos. There they will confront each other with various subjects in order to trace new models that will anchor even deeper their own privileges and allow them to get richer. Among those subjects, one that stands out is the one relative to ‘the new technological social models’ and, more precisely, ‘to the next wave of technological innovations, especially in the sciences of life, in nanotechnology, in the artificial intelligence’.

It is well known that times of crisis are very propitious periods for the elite in power to force passages that previously were impracticable, thereby introducing changes that allow the system to consolidate even better its power over everyone’s life. Crises are, in fact, what the system needs to renovate in itself and the world around it.

These days, a problem that they make us perceive with exhausting continuity is not much about the climate change (that for some is a deception, while big companies, despite putting on a greener dress, don’t care more about the planet than considering it an instrument to exploit in order to secure their business) but rather about the necessity of finding innovations in order to perpetuate this shitty society; by eliminating or delaying its most visible negative aspects such as ecological unbalances with its consequences in the changing of the climate, or the proliferation of diseases that stigmatize our health.

A turning point has thus arrived for them, in which they come up with an act of renewal that will guarantee the perpetuation of the current system of exploitation besides the imbalances and iniquities that have been accumulated all these years, especially since the latter postwar. The goal is not to solve them, because to really solve the unbalances produced, it would be necessary to question the system itself in its basic operation. In a much more simple and cunning manner they jump with both feet over it, transferring the production of harmfulness to new, more complicated and submerged levels that cannot as easily be connected directly to the system we depend on and its fundamental dynamics of production.

In this sense, nanotechnologies and biotechnologies have several very promising aspects, and the same goes for every aspect or productive sector of the techno-industrial system we live in. They’ll talk about them in Davos because at WEF ‘big’ industrialists and worldwide contractors can meet ‘big’ scientists and hi-tech pioneers from whom they get inspired, then later share a drink with some ‘big’ sponsors in order to convince them to invest and subsequently chat with some governmental authority (or nongovernmental, the roles often get blurred) in order to illustrate to them the goodness of the coming developments and researches. The moment in Davos is a privileged one. This is where the owners of this world and their accomplices (scientists and media) get inspired towards new shared (between them) strategies for their enrichment, the defense of their privileges and of their domination, naturally confirming the tendency of the last years to a sense of social and environmental responsibility (a façade).

Actually, concerning nanotechnologies, one of the key issues during the sessions in Davos will regard exactly how to ‘understand every single danger before unpredictable consequences will impact the public support for nanoscientific research in a negative way’.

It’s clear, isn’t it? Their concern is not the harmfulness that they enclose, but for people to keep on believing their promotion as a miracle of science; and to not even cross people’s minds to refuse them, as already happened (and continues to happen) with biotechnologies in the dietary field, since their development could be determining for the renovation of the system in act, and give it a more respectable facade, which, consequently, would make it more dominant. And this happens thanks to this crisis.

In order to participate in the outside struggles from within, during the WEF week, from 20th till 29th of January, I will abstain from prison food and work, which is compulsory here. This refusal is also intended to be an answer to Silvia’s recent isolation in the psychiatric section of the women’s prison in Hindelbank, as well as to the decision of the prison authorities not to grant visits of friends and comrades without a dividing glass, and in support of Marco Camenisch, whose hearing concerning the decision regarding his release on parole will take place in the next months (May 2012).

I take the opportunity to return hugs of complicity and solidarity to the comrades detained in Greece, Chile (forza Tortuga!), Mexico, Russia, Belarus, Germany, Spain, the US, UK and anywhere in the world; to the comrades of Fuoriluogo in Bologna on trial, to the people from Florence and to the antifascists from Cuneo, to the rebels arrested or charged in Val di Susa (Susa Valley) and to everyone fighting inside and outside infamous walls.

From a concentration camp for re-socialization
Regensdorf, January 15th, 2012