ITALY: Mobilizing for the common: some lessons from Italy

by Jerome Roos on April 14, 2014

Saturday’s protest in Rome [12 April] was the latest in a series of actions around a common project. What can organizers elsewhere learn from Italy’s movements?

Tens of thousands of protesters marched on Rome this Saturday to denounce the austerity measures and economic reforms of Matteo Renzi’s new government and to restate their call for income, housing and dignity for all. Dozens were injured as clashes broke out towards the end of the march and police violently charged forward into the crowds, indiscriminately beating protesters and trampling over those who got caught in the way. What the police could not trample, however, was the resolve of the movements to step up their resistance in the wake of last October’s sollevazione generale (“general uprising”), which brought a hundred thousand people into the streets of Rome.

ITALY: When the enemy speaks blunt: a short note on last No TAV arrests

It came as no huge shock to us the police operation against four comrades – three males and one female – who were arrested on the 9th of December 2013, charged with the allegation of attacking the TAV [Treno ad Alta Velocità, High-Speed Railway] work site in Chiomonte, Valsusa, on the night of may 13th 2013.

THE ANARCHIST REVOLUTION

Errico Malatesta was an Italian anarchist. He spent much of his life exiled from Italy and in total spent more than ten years in prison. Malatesta wrote and edited a number of radical newspapers and was also a friend of Mikhail Bakunin. (Wikipedia)

By Errico Malatesta (December 14, 1853 – July 22, 1932)

The revolution is the creation of new living institutions, new groupings, new social relationships; it is the destruction of privileges and monopolies; it is the new spirit of justice, of brotherhood, of freedom which must renew the whole of social life, raise the moral level and the material conditions of the masses by calling on them to provide, through their direct and conscientious action, for their own futures. Revolution is the organization of all public services by those who work in them in their own interest as well as the public’s; Revolution is the destruction of all coercive ties; it is the autonomy of groups, of communes, of regions; Revolution is the free federation brought about by desire for brotherhood, by individual and collective interests, by the needs of production and defense; Revolution is the constitution of innumerable free groupings based on ideas, wishes, and tastes of all kinds that exist among the people; Revolution is the forming and disbanding of thousands of representative, district, communal, regional, national bodies which, without having any legislative power, serve to make known and to coordinate the desires and interests of people near and far and which act through information, advice and example. Revolution is freedom proved in the crucible of facts—and lasts so long as freedom lasts, that is until others, taking advantage of the weariness that overtakes the masses, of the inevitable disappointments that follow exaggerated hopes, of the probable errors and human faults, succeed in constituting a power, which supported by an army of conscripts or mercenaries, lays down the law, arrests the movement at the point it has reached, and then begins the reaction.

ITALY: The siege of Palazzo Chigi: from the top of the police wagon

Today a new step after the October 19 Porta Pia camp was made by the Italian movement. A new siege was called beneath the capitol’s power seats – namely the State-Regions roundtable, that was meant to work out a national housing policy decree – at a time in which rampant speculation and evictions gravely undermine the basic housing rights of the citizens.

ITALY: Interview with Individualist anarchist prisoners from the blog Culmine

August 22, 2013 by actforfreedom

 From Aversión –Publicación Anarquista-issue 8, May 2013.

 Translated from Italian by act for freedom now/B.pd

1 – Aversión: In recent years, for reasons we won’t analyse here, which mainly concern the direction the system is taking, but which affect our ways of relating with one another, blogs and websites have been taking on the task that our publications used to fulfil in the past. In your opinion, how does this affect the struggle and its perception?

ITALY: Report of the June 27 Assembly on Prisons, Repressions and Struggles of Prisoners

14.08.2013

The meeting started with some considerations of a general nature on the prison as a social relation and the articulation of the area of the  facility, then we have focused in particular on the expiry of 20 days mobilization proposed by the “Coordination of Detainees” for the month of September. The analysis and proposals concern to this specific appointment allowed to touch several of the points proposed in the text of the call of the meeting, relating them with a real opportunity.

ITALY: RadioAzione – Considerations #5 (Making excuses and covering one’s arse: How not to be committed to anarchy)

11.08.2013  by Radio Azione translated by Act for Freedom Now

Still today in the Italian anarchist movement some say that times are not mature for the beginning of an even more intense attack on the State-Capital because people are scared and not yet ready to accept violent revolutionary practices. People scared, people not accepting, people not yet ready…  These are the consequences of the last 15 years when anarchists have decided to join forces with other components of non libertarian movements, which only try to rebuild the existent with them occupying the seats of the current rulers. These are the consequences of the work of those who, at the time, thought it right to be present within promiscuous movements so as to spread their ideas among a deaf herd. These are the usual excuses of those who don’t want to risk or get directly involved for anarchist ideas. But times are right, even if we wanted to accept these pretexts: an economic crisis that has gripped an entire country, or almost all of it, into misery; people who live on a thin thread between life and suicide because they can’t even find some food to put on their table; people strangled by taxes and Equitalia, Gerit and many other debt collection agencies; people strangled by banks…

ITALY: NO TAV movement again under attack

Please, sign the following statement, circulate it widely and send it back to silvia.federici@hofstra.edu

Once signed, we intend to send it to a radical Italian paper, Il Manifesto, and to the websites of the No TAV Movement. Please, if you help collecting signatures, make sure they all are sent back to me. We are aiming to send a first two hundred -at least- by Friday. Thanks! Silvia Federici.

For twenty years in mountains of North West Italy, not far from Torino, a powerful movement has grown that has resisted the Italian government’s plan to build a high velocity railroad, which in addition to being very costly and economically useless would certainly destroy the mountain environment. Over and over, the NO TAV movement, now well-known throughout Europe, has come under attack by the police and the army, besides being the object of a smear campaign by politicians of almost every political stripe. However, so strong has been the determination of the people of Val di Susa and their many supporters to resist this assault on their land and their lives that so far no real construction has taken place and all that the companies in charge of the project have achieved has been to surround thousands of acres of land, belonging to the local population, with barbed wires and cops.

ITALY: Evitions of independent university spaces in Milan and Bologna

ExCuem bookshop eviction in Milan

201/05/10 by Struggles in Italy

Ex Cuem was founded by a group of students at the University Statale di Milano. They reopened the CUEM, an independent 40 year-old bookshop that went bankrupt in October 2011 due to debt and false accounting, closing its 150m2 premises. CUEM’s closure created a monopoly for the sole remaining university bookshop, CUSL, well-known for its connection with the right-wing political and Catholic movement Comunione e Liberazione.

ITALY: No TAV Movement

02/01/2013 · by encounterathens

No TAV  is a social movement set in the Susa Valley, near the city of Turin, in the North-West of Italy. This valley is the main gateway to Italy (Milan and Turin) from Paris. Since the beginning of the 90′s, a movement has developed against the construction of a new High Speed Railway ((Treno Alta Velocità) line that would cross the valley in order to link the city of Turin with the city of Lyon. This line is part of the Trans European Network (TEN), a European project of High Speed trains network divided into 11 “corridors” (the one concerning the valley is number 5, linking Lisbon to Kiev – at least hypothetically, since Portugal recently backed out from the project and other countries on its route are in a deep financial crisis).