2026-02-01_G Roggero on the intermediary

“The intermediary is the most important and most uncomfortable role: in most periods you are on your own. It doesn’t allow you to shelter in the recognition of a community, either that of the day-to-day militant or that of intellectual abstraction, both of which are products of defeatism and an acceptance of the status quo. It is the location of those who don’t limit themselves to taking note of things as they happen, but continually attempt to anticipate them, those who problematize and call into question what there already is, who attempt to grasp what it could become, who destroy their individual ambition to construct collective ends. The intermediary is therefore the strategic, fundamental, decisive militant—when there are struggles, and even more so when there are none.”

• G Roggero, Italian Operaismo