Gianfranco Sanguinetti

1948 – 2025

From Autonomies
October 8, 2025

The theory of the revolution certainly does not depend on the sole area of properly scientific ideas, and still less on the construction of a speculative achievement, or on the aesthetic of that fiery manner of speech that contemplates itself in its own lyrical glimmers and finds that it’s already getting too hot to take. This theory only has an effective existence through its practical victory: here, “great thoughts must be followed up by great deeds; they must be like sunlight, which produces what it lights up.” Revolutionary theory is the domain of danger and uncertainty: it is forbidden to people who want the narcotic certainties of ideology, including even the official certitude of being the unswerving enemies of all ideology. The revolution that it concerns is a form of human relations. Revolutionary theory is part of social existence. It is a conflict between the universal interests concerning the totality of social practice, and only thus does it differ from other conflicts. Its laws are the laws of conflict, war is its path, and its deeds are more comparable to an art than to a scientific research or an inventory of good intentions. The theory of the revolution is judged by the sole criterion that its knowing must become a power.

Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The real split in the International : theses on the Situationist International and its time (1972)

All States have always been terroristic, but they are more violently so during their births and when they face the imminence of their deaths. And those today who, either due to despair or because they are victims of the propaganda that the regime creates in favor of terrorism as the best example [Latin in original] of subversion, and who thus contemplate artificial terrorism with an uncritical admiration (and even try to practice it on occasion), do not know that they are only competing with the State on its own terrain and that, on this terrain, not only is the State stronger, but it will always have the last word. Everything that does not destroy the spectacle reinforces it, and the incredible reinforcement of all the governmental powers of control that has taken place thanks to the pretext of [fighting again] spectacular terrorism has already been used against the entire Italian proletarian movement, which is the most advanced and most radical in Europe today.