THE PREEMPTIVE CLASS WARFARE OF THE ITALIAN STATE
The arrests that took place in the early morning of Tuesday, July 19, on a warrant from the Piacenza prosecutor’s office are indicative of the repressive climate in Italy and the authoritarian turn underway. Four SI Cobas trade unionists were placed under house arrest for the long cycle of struggles that inflamed logistics from 2014 to 2021. Along with them, two USB unionists were also placed under house arrest and two others are the recipients of other precautionary measures. Prosecutor Grazia Pradella’s charges are of criminal conspiracy, private violence, resisting a public official, sabotage, and interruption of a public service, finalized by extortionist intent in order to obtain better wage conditions for workers.
We do not believe that we should be outraged, as is happening in these hours, by this repressive operation, but rather point out that it is an open manifestation, a true confession, of the mentality of the bourgeoisie in this historical period: for the gentlemen of GLS, Amazon, FedEx-TNT, as well as from the arrogant statements that are being uttered every day by the leaders of Confindustria, everything must be granted, everything must be permissible for them. Even putting up a tough fight for a wage increase becomes extortion. The whole loot belongs to them by right, one must not dare to ask, one must not struggle. The charge of extortion is thus not a scandal, if anything, a sign of the times.
This repressive operation stands in open complicity with the murders of Abd El Salam, which occurred, moreover, in Piacenza itself in 2016, and Adil Belakhdim, who was murdered last year in the province of Novara. In both cases, the murders occurred during a strike picket, the same pickets that have been attacked repeatedly in recent years by police charges and assaults by corporate henchmen. Therefore, judicially attacking self-defense practices means acting basically in concert with the picketers and murderers.
This investigation is an expression of the ongoing repressive screwing in recent years. A sharper manifestation of this screwing is what is happening against the anarchist movement, where in the last few months alone we have had the 28-year sentence for Juan Sorroche, accused of two devices against a League headquarters in the province of Treviso, the transfer of Alfredo Cospito to 41 bis, and the conviction of Alfredo himself and Anna Beniamino for political massacre with the concrete risk of a sentence that can go up to life imprisonment.
We believe that these aspects – the anti-anarchist repressive specificity and the general repressive climate – should be held together, because they are part of the same counterinsurgency strategy that explicitly aims at the removal of those components that, in different ways and forms, may represent an element of fermentation of anger or maturation of a revolutionary consciousness. All this is taking place in an increasingly impoverished economic environment, after two years of militaristic management of the pandemic, during a proxy war between Russia and NATO and the ensuing energy and inflationary crisis.
What is underway is a veritable preemptive class war by the state against its opponents. A war that aims to sterilize, anticipating its precipitation, the social deflagration. It is time for us to start fighting the class war as well, with a response equal to the ongoing attack. At all levels: from the struggle in the places of exploitation, where we need to think of structures of self-defense and retaliation to protect ourselves from the aggressions of cops and henchmen, to the revolutionary struggle, whose practices we must defend even more today and place ourselves in continuity with them.
Anarchists in Spoleto
July 20, 2022
e-mail: circolaccioanarchico@inventati.org
telegram: t.me/circolaccioanarchicospoleto