THE REVOLUTIONIST GUIDE

ORIGINAL EDITION (GUIDA DEL RIVOLUZIONARIO): 1999 (ANGELUS NOVUS EDIZIONI)

TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH: 2003 (BÉRÉNICE, THE MARS 2003 NUMBER)

THE REVOLUTIONIST GUIDE

translated by Douglas J. Foran and Pietro Ferrua

Every revival (new, neo-, post-, trans-, re-, etc.), even the one connected to the most valid revolutionary moments of the past, is reaction and impotence. And impotence is the mother of crime and madness.
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There is no river where the water is as scarce as the ink that transcribes the inextinguishable meaning of this booklet.
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The revolutionist and the beautiful Phoenix are alike; if they die at night, they are reborn in the morning.
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All power is ephemeral: what remains are ideas.
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Do not consider only the short-term impact of your actions. The repercussions of whatever you do must be valid for at least forty years.
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Times change, and so do the methods for producing a revolution. Revolutionists do not have precursors, but only role models to respect.
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Revolution is the only truth. Everything else is fiction.
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There are four capital virtues practiced by a revolutionist. Patience is one of them. The fourth is infINIte patience.
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Revolutionists are scientists. Their education is extensive.
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Revolution is a gesture of love for life and for the world.
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There are three phases of revolution: negation (revolt), theorization, application (REVOLUTION).
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Revolution is Ethics that precedes Aesthetics.
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The revolutionist is always ready for the Grand Voyage.
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Revolutionist are young. They remain young. They are prosperous. They remain prosperous. Revolutionists are attractive. They remain attractive.
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Clothing does not make the revolutionist. Clothing makes the post-revolutionist.
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The revolutionist is always ready to begin again.
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Revolutionists who stop to consolidate their power are consumed by the bourgeois machinery and, in time, they are destined to be defeated.
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Revolution is a dynamic act and, as such, it is continuous.
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To be able to conduct one revolution, you need at least to know how to plan a second one.
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If you love your career you gaze at your own wall. If you love revolution, you gaze at the horizon.
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The difference between presumption and ambition is like the difference between Achilles’ heel and a flight above archipelagoes.
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You must stop believing if your beliefs are not daily choices, as is the choice to love.
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The miserable impact of thinking about only short-term activities prevent us from considering the relationship between the age of the Earth, mankind, and human life.
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Revolutionists are thinkers who do not limit themselves to thinking.
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Revolutionists possess a sense of destiny. The person who has this sense also possesses a sense of history.
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Revolutionists do not change society. It is society that goes towards them. Revolutionists are those who understood, before others did, where the times are leading us. They try to accelerate the course of time so that many latent energies are not lost in the sadness of night, in that solitude by which many people think they are surrounded. Revolutions also provide insight to society on how to understand deeply what we comprehend only superficially.
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It is futile to assign shape to life and to creation, as all the theoreticians have tried to do up to now: life is infINIte and infINItesimal.
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If Autumn can fascinate people, if Summer can bewilder us, Spring is the true mental season of creation.
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Whatever the temperature of your feet, it is Spring. You are reborn.
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We will pass backwards through Autumn again, as if it were our Springtime.
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Today’s revolutionist produces tomorrow’s poet.
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Let us not boast about our awareness; the shore is near.
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Revolutionists have faith in human intelligence and a patient confidence in the adversary’s stupidity.
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Time, equilibrium and speed are valid not only for the fencer but also for the revolutionist.
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Revolution. Singular noun. Very singular.
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First, revolution is for the people, then it is of the people.
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An Italian cabinet member once said that power debilitates the person who doesn’t have it. Those who don’t have power really don’t know what power is; they only talk about it and write about it. Those who want to possess power must first have knowledge. Power, possession and knowledge greatly surpass mankind’s capacity for categorizing known entities. This is the power of the revolutionist; the other kind is the power that revolution should abolish at all costs. History - while either rejoicing or weeping - favors the revolutionist.
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Rudeness and perversity. In the dictatorial fascist regimes, deformation is the norm, but teratology, when applied to democracy, is a much more difficult science!
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Information technology renders the reactionary even more reactionary and the revolutionist even more revolutionary.
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War among white people and/or the wealthiest nations is more publicized, discussed, shared or endured than war among poor people. This is another form of racism. No one laments or remembers the victims of wars between poor people; if you think you can interpret this, go ahead.
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The question is not to decide between weapons and pacifism, but between blood and shit.
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Liberty, equality, fraternity. Or, revolution.
Liberty, equality, peace. Or, revolution.
Justice and poetry. Or, revolution.
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The countries in which the working class votes for conservative candidates are always countries of missed opportunities.
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In Italy, the people who are less reactionary seem to be the people who came after 1968. How pathetic!
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The phases of revolution are analogous to the phases of alchemy: first nigredo (putrefaction), then albedo (purification), to arrive at the completion of rubedo (revolution).
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A drum roll this evening reminds me that time is inexorable.
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Disobedience to crime masked by the laws of powers (such as war) must be organized, collective and systematic.
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In general, there are very few revolutionists among poets, painters and artists. Revolution can be generated only from those few poets who are sometimes penless.
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The great majority of university professors include powerless people who believe in power. They are small, presumptuous corporals.
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Books are like drugs: they make the fool even more foolish.
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The rich fool is a presumptuous fool. The postgraduate fool is a fool with many complexes.
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My dancing can be called “shoulder dancing” (like in Ethiopia). Her dancing can be called “breast dancing”. When we dance, we should dance until we’re exhausted.
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Don't make revolutionists insult you. The fantasy and truth of their insults are stronger than yours.
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How beautiful it is to be outside when it's raINIng inside!
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Every political revolution involves a revolution of language, and vice versa.
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Important people make important errors. Unimportant people say very silly things. They are never equals, even in this inverse relationship. The former cannot be measured in terms of the latter.
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No revolutionist's guide is an invitation to a tea and crumpets party.
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The Red One entered between the soft breasts and saw the undulating music. He had lost the ocean and the crystal wind. He opened his enormous arms and imprisoned her, opening an abyss of profound passion. The curvature of her breasts exhaled a misty perfume, exited in the form of a kite, and condensed in the voice of an unheard song.
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If your revolution happens, you will be the first target. And this is good.
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"Je ne crois pas que la révolution soit fINIe" (I don't think that the revolution is over) - Robespierre, and approved by Bertozzi.
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Travel is the continuous component of every work.
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When in the world there is injustice, when people are lethargic, it is time for revolution.
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When, after the fall of ideologies, everything is silent or armies fight against each other or when there is abuse of power or when partisanship prevails or when cowardice reigns or when repetition occurs or when useless blood is shed in vain or when the mass-media suffers logorrhea or when all of these happen together...it is time for revolution.
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You will find on your path cowards who are ready to sell themselves out, ready to serve a leader who is supposedly better: don't push them completely off your path; they will help you identify other cowards.
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You will find on your path little bureaucrats who are either skinny or fat, miserable or perspiring, who will show their derrières like peacocks in order to affirm their modest power as paper-pushers. They are worthless. Besides, we don’t need to fight bureaucracy because it has made no contribution to society since it began. It can be only regenerated and revolutionized. And we must change the person who will be in charge of it.
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Revolution requires the sensitivity of many and the capacity of few.
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Camaraderie (comradeship), games, laughter, etc. are important, but let's not confuse picnicking and singing solidarity songs with the true revolutionary spirit.
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The Bronx, Harlem, do not represent capitalism.
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If you are against racism, you will be against racism even after being robbed, insulted, or mugged by a black person (or by any similar person).
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Others do not confuse kindness with weakness, and this is wrong. The revolutionist, however, should not confuse compassion with generosity: this would be a sign of weakness.
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What we need is a thread linking law with justice.
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Poetry and justice.
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The stupidity of my generation and of daily international events are laying the groundwork for this Guide more than I am.
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Neither rank nor title have meaning for those who risk their lives together.
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The true democratic spirit does not need protection.
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If you use a group for personal requests, you employ power. And those who follow you are servants.
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The many forms of facism owe their existence to servants and the powerless.
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The creator is a warrior with and without a sword.
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When there are no true students, there are no true professors.
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The vulnerable point of every cultural institution, including universities, is the “lifelong” right to judge. Teachers who examine students should be examined periodically by people outside their area. And these teachers’ responsibilities should not surpass the graduate level.
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When cats eat peppermint candies, we will not be astonished that pythons eat rats.
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Whenever the old poetical fanfare falls in love with its own words, one can publish a little eveningtime thought about the solitude of the revolutionist.
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The strong reaction around the world against any revolutionary uprising is cultural genocide.
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Art as revolution cannot regress.
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Reforms are punctured prophylactics. Men, not reforms, must do the changing.
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The valuation of the territory, the city or the region is internationalization.
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Internationalization is the only possible form of universal culture and the culture of individual tribes is the indispensable contribution.
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The creator does inhabit artistic environments; he inhabits life.
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Democracy is the personal application of rules which one believes can be applied to others.
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Criticism will truly evolve when, after morals change, it will be able to find an indivisible unity in aesthetic and ethical values.
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Criticism frequently lacks evidence.
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The so-called innocent victims of revolution are usually victims of infiltrations into the revolution. The RR - revolutionized revolution - will place these misdeeds in the abysses of the revolution's pioneering phase, but also keep these misdeeds from being forgotten.
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Someone can be a general with a guide and a corporal with a different guide. It depends upon the guide!
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We achieve insolence. Revolutionary creativity and insolence were always synonymous. But, let us: insolence without creativity is merely idiocy.
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The search for groups, sects, phony philosophical religious forms, “renewals” sustained by commercial speculations, “paradisiac societies” (where peace, “greenness” and silence are foolish), more or less violent interventions onto one's body, is frequently the result of a lack of identity which implies the need for a revolution.
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An original work appearing in a reactionary society is like a diamond on a desert island.
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Tolerance is a dangerous virtue.
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Tolerance is irritation appeased through respect.
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The subjectivization of the object, and the objectivization of the subject are the pathway to the goal, the launching pad for the last and decisive take-off.
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If you understand these two lines, then you will confirm what you already possess.
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You will see the argument turning toward itself, creating the verse that sows rose-shaped rhymes to the winds. Twenty songs will fill the plains with roses for nine centuries and will bring nine voices, sounds, pathos and stones. The gates for every year will open upon a new era, confirming the good news of the revealed sign. The veil carried by quivering wind will not pitch any longer in the harbors of sterility. Go, brave vessel, push yourself to the limits of your ingenuity!
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Art doesn't want to be functional. But its result is always functional, as in symphonies in mystical religious poems, in frescoes, in the cathedrals of the past, etc. In all times and in all places. In the contrast between artistic and political revolutions, there is deceit.
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Crises, problems. In the revolutionary field, one takes into consideration only solutions. Working hours? Mostly the quality of the work. It was sin which transformed work into condemnation, and rightly so.
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There are poets with and without dieresis. The work of the revolutionist, with dieresis, is a masterpiece of economics, architecture and science - all conjugated by pathos.
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Poets can become prophets. The revolutionist is already a prophet.
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Revolutionists open doors that nobody will be able to close again.
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For every tribe, for every language, for every people, for every nation: revolution!
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Christians and Moslems have in common disrespect for their sacred texts.
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It is not certainty that changes the world, but utopia.
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He who enjoys the success of a friend is a winner.
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Vanity is a witness of defeat.
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Revolutionary theater will happen when the mystique of representation will occur.
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Health and meditation. Your thoughts are your body. Even revolution.
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Synesthesia. Compromise is not red.
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In preconceptions there is the Mona Lisa, the Victory of Samothrace and The Bible. These can only be a choice for revolutionists.
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The powerful imagination of heirs sometimes exceeds the prophets' imagination.
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The black color of anarchy is immune to any historical falsification.
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Most politicians vote against the adversary even when he behaves well. The revolutionist is dedicated to justice even when this impies sacrifice and misunderstanding.
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The logic according to which the adversary is always wrong leads to war or to second-hand pacifism.
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Politics is frequently the art of winning without being right. We must reinvent politics and justice.
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The difference between party and movement is that the latter aims - beyond all sectarianism - at the liberation of mankind.
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Contemplation leads to meditative knowledge, action leads to dynamic knowledge. Both lead to active contemplation. When active contemplation is reached, most philosophies, differences and imitative games between the East and the West will crumble.
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Active contemplation implies a resistance against avidity, hate and folly.
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Alchemy was the first experiment of active mysticism. It will be realized through alchINI.
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God. Polysemic proper noun, without a last name, femINIne or masculine, possible and impossible.
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There are several foundations upon which society is based, favored by speculation and revolution, such as regulation of property, the driving force of Eros, hunger and others that are apparently distant from each other. To prevent mankind from using these forces to impede him from reaching heaven with its tower, a demon labeled these forces. These labels, quickly revealing a diabolical impotence, became lethal. Truth and lies in an infINItesimal line that unites two contradictions.
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The main work of messiahs, gurus, puritans, fanatics, politicians, and zealous keepers of the order consists of affixing labels.
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To look for the esteem of other people is a form of vanity, the corruption of the revolutionary spirit.
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Virtue, joy, dishonesty are contagious. The second, however, is less imitable.
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The farther the target, the more you have to raise your weapon.
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He who has struggled the most to advocate an idea is the father of that idea and, most of the time, also its first popularizer.
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Nothing is lasting in this world but the law of succession in which one must insert every revolutionary conception.
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Poetry, science and joy. And Justice. There is time to be born and time to die, time to lose time and time for revolution.
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Flattery is based on two forms of weakness: the weakness of the flatterer and of the flattered.
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Poverty is neither virtue nor freedom.
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He who thinks he has hit bottom is not a pessimist, but an optimist.
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I saw dolphins flying over plumed serpents and peacocks swimming in the liquid magma and zoomorphic scriptures filigreeing my boots when someone sent to me a white pareo from Africa to undertake my trip.
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I had only one major temptation while writing this guide: To throw out all my books.
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Why, if am a fighter, should I refuse the perfumed scent of periwinkle and amuse myself before and during the battle?
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It’s not worth fighting for work, but for the workers.
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We should give to the poor but condemn poverty.
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Give the workman his pay before he takes off his work clothes.
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And the men were punished with the confusion of languages, then they were punished by sending ignorant governors to them.
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He who thinks other people are better than they really are does not always continue on the road to generosity, but on the road to disdain.
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Novelty always triggers a reaction because it is unexpected and does not generate unanimous consent.
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Revolutionists are unexpected and they anticipate events.
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In the avant-garde there are warriors, in imitation and repetition there are beggars. Being a warrior does not mean being a warmonger; its meaning was defined by the history of our civilizations. Therefore, by “beggar” we mean the poor of values, the coward. The warrior walks with his head high; the beggar walks with a crooked neck!
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In creative activities, clear words are reserved for “intellectually challenged” people; a sentence or an expression that has only one meaning is really a still-life painting.
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The revolutionist has the beauty of the eternal gaze.
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Man’s genius - his highest creativity - does not express itself through artistic creation. Man reaches the highest form of refinement, manifests the most tenacious will, the most versatile ingenuity in complicating his own life, every day he studies with rare and indescribable abilities the most un-human ways his own suffering: constant wars, prevarications, destruction of the environment, struggles that are racial, social and even religious - to give biggest example - the smallest being rivalries, incomprehensions, retributions in the narrowest social nuclei as families, the workplace, stadia, the country. Here, man expresses his highest degree of genius, of creativity... to the point of complicating his own life. The so-called artistic creation only comes after. Is it the famous struggle between good and evil? Not at all. It is because in evil he succeeds in reaching a wider area of liberty and, therefore, of purer creativity. Society must give back to man the possibility of expressing himself in a new conception of the world, of life, of art, liberated from the convictions and the limitations of the past so he can express the best aspects of his nature.
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We will be as unified as the wind and, in the evening, as A. R. and the freedom as the eyes and the light as Lev Davidovic and the revolution as the scale and the height. There is no bedsheet that can stop me, there is no race that can separate us you are my sword my clock my scale my hat my peace my weight-loss program. My love is a pyroclastic flow that burns in every cathedral and every forest for christs and guerrillas in every plaza full of agitation.
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The revolution wants to be surpassed, after the revolution.

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Publisher’s Note:

Liberty is not improvised. It is a daily exercise! Therefore, a Guide of the Revolutionist: Bertozzi has a confirmed militancy in this area. In Paris, on January 1980, indeed, he founded InfINItesimal Novatrix International, later called INIsm.
In these few lines we cannot pinpoint for those who are not yet aware of this expansive movement, its goals, its accomplishments. We will say only, paraphrasing Bertozzi, that:
® Expanded mostly in Europe and America, INIsm has proposed a new aesthetic in all fields of visual, written and sound creations. The use of new calligraphical, alphabetical and semiotic (frequently with the help of the International Phonetic Alphabet) writings assumes a value of creation and not imitation, of knowledge and not photographable realities. These signs, called “INIas”, are intended to be an orchestration of feelings and thoughts, the multiple and global vision that life offers us. A genesis of the infINItesimal and a fusion with the infINIte: «as in Physics (writes Bertozzi), fission of atoms occurred, INIsts have worked toward the fission of the elements that constitute a word». Written, musical, sculptural, pictorial, architectural, and all the words already established by history and others in the process of being established after INIsm;
@ The founding of INIsm marked the third phase of the avant-garde: in talking about avant-gardes, indeed, we must differentiate them according to periods of time. Generally, in the INIst movement, we try to avoid divisions and labels but, in the case of “avant-garde”, the name (even if it is disputed) has remained, changing, however, its status, its intentions. Therefore, after a “pre-phase”, known as the precursors which we can locate from 1873 to 1909 (divided in two, the first, 1873-1896, of the “cursed poets”, and the second, 1897-1908, of the schools, as Apollinaire defines them), we have: the correctly designated first phase from 1909 to 1918 (foundation of Futurism and affirmation of Dada), a period we can name the revolt (of the negation for the negation); the second phase from 1919 (birth of Surrealism) to 1979, a period of revolution (profound modification of the status quo) subdivided in two, 1919-1939, 1940-1979 (the second period, of disorientation and reification of the avant-garde, however, is characterized, in certain moments, by the will of change); finally, the third phase of the avant-garde, from 1980 (birth of INIsm) to today, the so-called RR, revolutionized revolution (that would equal the avant-garde of the avant-garde) distinguished by the resolute opposition to the fall of ideologies in the world or, if one prefers, the last bastion of ideology;
© At the end of the 1900s, therefore, youth saw itself in this revolutionized revolution, and many groups of artists filed their documents in order to have access to that dimension at first more desired than foreseen, situating themselves as a preparatory movement INItiator of the Third Millennium (anyway, in the past, every end-of-century was able to be assimilated to the following century: the discovery of America, the French Revolution, “cursed poets”, are some examples).

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The Revolutionist Guide* […] expands the scope of INIsm which was already extensive: it has been stated already that, born mostly as an aesthetic revolution, it also can be considered as a philosophy, a vision of the world, an ethical application, unless such designations dimINIsh the complexity of INIsm […].
A.G.[Antonio Gasbarrini, 1999]

* In the thoughts/aphorisms or, more precisely, in the instructions of this Guide by Bertozzi, we can rarely find words mentioned by earlier publications (particularly his manifestos or his theatrical work, La Signora Proteo, or elsewhere); these words are here in italic without any other reference symbol. We take this opportunity to express our solidarity with Bertozzi and with the INIsts: we reject those pseudo-publishers who own the copyrights to Bertozzi’s and other INIsts’ intellectual property but who slow down - for financial reasons - the dissemination of INIsts’ works. Delaying the spread of artistic creations results in grave moral consequences.