When words mingle with the passion to deepen our understanding of reality they become indispensable weapons for the self-organisation of the struggle against all that oppresses us. They don’t remain on paper – or the screen – but penetrate rebel hearts and spirits, giving courage and decision – for if many of us don’t act against what offends our dignity it is often not courage that is lacking, but that we simply don’t know where to start. We need to liberate reality from the fictitious dimension created by the media into one that is tangible and exposed to attack. In order to carry this out we require knowledge of the enemy in all its forms, including those that lie concealed within us, crouching, waiting to pounce to push us back into the fold of consensus or manageable dissent. Reading certain texts becomes an encounter, tensions we feel burning inside us become clearer, making it easier to assimilate them in order to act. We also need analysis – of the economy, the ‘new’ technologies. Without our own ideas, analysis and projectuality we are nothing, mere abstractions building castles in the air. Attack and the theory of attack, which is the same thing for anarchists, are an essential element of the struggle, without which it would exist in name alone. We therefore also need a critique of anarchist methods: of the fixed anarchist organisations of synthesis, syndicalism or federations that rely on numbers, as being limiting and anachronistic in terms of this attack. At the same time we need a critique of fixed clandestine organisations and ‘attack on the heart of the State’ that was prevalent in the seventies, and a valorisation of small groups based on affinity, acting directly to transform reality without any sense of sacrifice but for their own immediate joy and freedom, in the context of the freedom of all. Anarchism is not an historical concept or a political theory, it is a way of conceiving life, ‘a stake we must play day after day’, and we do not consider history the foundation – or ‘making history’ the aim – of our action. Nevertheless anarchists have a rich and passionate past, or rather heritage, which only becomes ours when encountered through our own confrontation with authority and domination. Far from the tedium of scholastic tomes, the lives of past comrades, their ideas, their methods and their actions, their struggle and its consequences (often imprisonment and even death), are alive and have a significance for us today as we try to struggle against the conditions of post-industrial capital. For that reason we have also published and will continue to publish texts by or about anarchists and rebels of the past who still have much to say today when encountered through a dimension of an exchange of ideas and experience between reader and writer. So Elephant Editions is simply a collection of texts, a contribution to the great cauldron of dreams, ideas and experimentation for those who have decided to make their desires reality, now, without delay.
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