Category Archives: Analysis and Editorials

March of discontent: lessons in work struggles

Posted on March 30, 2013 | Leave a comment
sciopero-22

March 22 2013: let’s dump the bosses
Logistics workers strike
Block the goods, generalise the struggle, united we win!

The working class is awakening, and the mobilisations of the last few days among the logistics sector workers in Emilia Romagna are the first signs.  Recently, we have seen two different images of work struggles: the Peugeot workers in Paris clashing with the police on one hand; and the sad, resigned-looking picket organised by Fiom outside a Fiat establishment in Italy, on the other hand. Both are fighting for their jobs, but the differences are clearly visible and stimulate many diverse reflections. The French workers’ determination in defense of their rights and dignity has spread to the Italian logistics sector workers’ mobilisation on March 22, and manifested in their determination to defeat the enemy. Workers of different backgrounds and origins, Italians and migrants, have united against the exploitation carried on by the “cooperatives” (employment agencies) owners and the main cooperative, the Coop. Continue reading →

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Posted in Analysis and Editorials, Work Struggles

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On the state of movements: let’s open the debate

Posted on November 17, 2012 | 1 Comment

Some American and European comrades have asked me, Why didn’t you have an Occupy movement in Italy? Why is the NO TAV movement the only expression of social struggle? The NO TAV, despite their strong success, despite their original expression of post-modernity class war, lack the characteristics of the Occupy movements: an extension of social change, the power to remove old hierarchies, and, above all, a shared and “common” political dynamic open to radical political upheavals.

But here’s another paradox: what sense does this question have now? The Occupy movements seem already dead. The Arab springs have mostly been crashed by military coups and civil wars, or have ended up producing Islamic regimes that seem to forecast the repression of freedoms and political practices only just discovered – the continuation of the status quo under a different name, possibly even worse than the old theological-political dictatorships. In Europe, movements have been suffocated by the unhealthy atmosphere brought over by the economic crisis, while in the States they are just about to be swallowed by the political structures that nowadays dominate the electoral deadlines. Continue reading →

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Posted in Analysis and Editorials, Social Mobilisations & Community Organising

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Genoa 2001: 11 years minus a month

Posted on June 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

Translation of a painfully beautiful article written by fellow blogger psikosomatica. The original in Italian can be found on her blog. Thanks psikosomatica for writing this. Memory must be saved…

11 years minus a month

When I came back from the G8 in Genoa 11 years ago, I immediately put my thoughts down on paper to send to an older, ill comrade who’d asked me to give an account. It was a cold, chronological, distant – nearly absent – reportage. I was trying to separate my emotional side from the analytical one. I kept doing this for a long time. Nowadays I still keep clear of analysis and pedantic tones. I realise, now that the 10×100 campaign has begun, that in those days I buried a part of myself; I realise that the detachment in those 10 pages I wrote then was a way to distance and protect myself, to be able to sleep at night without suddenly hearing the sound of helicopters, without dreaming of police raids in my room. In the event it was useless anyway, as I ended up touring Italy with my comrades who’d been arrested for talks about Bolzaneto, and I can’t forget any of the things that happened to them. They can’t either, obviously. Just as I can’t forget that it was only a matter of 15 minutes that morning that saved me from being arrested as well. All I have to thank is an instinctual, sudden decision, taken on the basis that if something was going to happen it’d been better to be among a crowd of 300,000 rather than one of few hundreds. What I wrote back then is now lost, not by my will, but I don’t think I’ll make any attempts at finding it again. Continue reading →

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Posted in Analysis and Editorials, Repression, Prison & Police Brutality

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