A-Infos (en) Italy, FAS Sicilia Libertaria: The missed ransom (20) - The "cathedrals" that create the desert (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The South is seething with initiatives and struggles, suffering violent 
repression (such as on 9 April 1969 in Battipaglia, the revolt against 
the closure of some factories quelled at the cost of 2 deaths and 200 
injuries), but the perception of a specific Southern issue is waning, 
drowned in the criticism that the 1968 groups make of all the 
political-ideological paraphernalia of the reformist left. There is 
revolution on the agenda, and we march in enthusiasm and confusion. Only 
after 1970 did lines of intervention begin to emerge aimed at making a 
revolutionary project plausible within which the South was seen as a 
territory useful for triggering the anti-capitalist explosion. But it 
remains a South following in the footsteps of a North which is in turn 
driven by the working class, subordinated to the prevailing workerist 
avant-gardism. This results in choices such as sending militants to the 
South to agitate at the industrial hubs, considered the advanced points 
of the revolution in the South; Lotta Continua, Vanguardia Operaia or 
Potere Operaio continue to propose the worker-peasant/underclass 
dichotomy, and only a few exceptions (such as some M-L groups) address 
the peasants directly.

If the South and Sicily, with the constant rebelliousness of their 
populations, represent a potential push for revolution, there is a lack 
of reflection on the socio-cultural characteristics of southern Italy 
that can be used in specific paths of social redemption and liberation.

The most important contributions come from southern intellectuals, such 
as the Calabrian Nicola Zitara (1) who since the mid-sixties with the 
magazine "Quaderni Calabresi" (later "Quaderni del Mezzogiorno e delle 
Isole") and with some fundamental texts, rereads the process of Italian 
unity as the birth of colonialism; or the duo Capecelatro and Carlo (2), 
who with the successful 1971 text Against the 'Southern Question' tackle 
and dismantle the Gramscian and liberal framework that had characterized 
the social-communist and statist policies on the South, providing new 
elements to reread the process of national unity as the 
institutionalization of southern underdevelopment as a function of the 
development of the North. While maintaining a Marxist-workerist 
approach, the two authors break down years and years of ragged southernisms.

Even in Sicily, and always from that laboratory that is the Belice, 
Lorenzo Barbera, now far from Danilo Dolci, with the Economic and Social 
Research Center for the South started the magazine "Meridione, Città e 
Campagna" in 1973 which offers analyzes for a southern path to social 
change. From the libertarian point of view, the publication in Catania, 
starting from 1975, of the magazine "Anarchismo" is important, which 
from the first issues addresses the salient issues of Sicilian 
underdevelopment and the national liberation struggle. With a slight 
hint of pride, we also note the release, starting from January 1977, of 
"Sicilia libertarian".

In the earthquake areas, the great battle of the young people of Belice 
against the military conscription will certainly leave its mark. "Young 
people are needed for reconstruction", they shout, and their victory 
will lay the foundations for the civil service in subsequent years.

But the most striking fact is certainly the revolt in Reggio Calabria 
which broke out between July 1970 and February 1971. The casus belli is 
given by the government's decision to make Catanzaro the capital of the 
new Region, but, as always, the protest brings together the malaise, 
disillusions, humiliations and underdevelopment of the population, which 
finally find an operational outlet. The unions and the left do not 
understand this, accusing the riot of parochialism and placing it on a 
silver tray in the hands of the neo-fascist right. Only the anarchists 
from Reggio and Lotta Continua see the complexity of the event, read the 
potential for conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and 
attempt, from the barricades of the Sbarre district, to keep both the 
fascists and the State away. Two months after the outbreak of the 
revolt, the Minister of the Interior Franco Restivo reported the first 
data to Parliament: "From 14 July to 23 September 13 bomb attacks were 
carried out, there were 33 road blocks, 14 railway blockades, 3 port 
blockades and airport; there were 6 attacks on the prefecture and 4 on 
the police headquarters". The government sends army tanks to Reggio to 
quell the revolt. (3)

Bonanno writes (4) in the n. 1 of "Anarchism": "we must not forget that 
"the southern question" is essentially a peasant question, even today in 
the era of the most advanced technology, the main problem to be solved 
for the south is the agrarian problem. And this is even more true for 
Sicily."

The Italian Communist Party, after the failures of the agrarian reform 
strategy and the consequences in terms of emigration, depopulation, 
impoverishment of the peasant masses (in the decade 1959-1969 the 
peasant population of the South decreased by 2,636,000 units), is 
concerned about contain its persistent spontaneity by trying to channel 
it into agricultural transformation processes within the strict laws of 
the market.

It is no coincidence that, after a decade of agricultural modernization 
in one of the most advanced areas of the island, the coastal strip of 
Ragusa, through the impetuous development of greenhouse farming, the 
problems of this sector come to a head: professional diseases of farmers 
( not recognised) due to the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers 
and temperature changes; crisis of overproduction; self-exploitation and 
exploitation of labor from the provinces of Enna and Caltanissetta 
(before the arrival of the Tunisians); competition from the local 
agrarian bourgeoisie and imports from North Africa; debt and dependence 
on banks. And the mafia dives into the deal! In the process of 
industrialization of the countryside we find the same dynamics as in the 
industrial centres, with the difference that at least here an industry 
arises, but the economic boom will in a short time be to the full 
advantage of the bourgeoisie.

Industrialization closes off the island's role as a transit area, does 
not sediment collateral activities, on the contrary it tends to 
desertify the pre-existing ones; the drilling plans and the African 
methane pipeline make it an energy hub which in the following years 
accentuates its function as a national defecation center. In recent 
years there has been a strong government temptation to set up a nuclear 
power plant in Sicily. However, the island's infrastructural gap is 
growing rather than decreasing, and the poles represent the modern face 
of underdevelopment, they classify farmers, laborers and artisans 
attracted by the mirage of a permanent job, but they fuel a new 
clientelism that strengthens the consensus and control of the 
traditional governing parties and the church, but also the left and the 
trade unions, complicit in a division made up of exchanges between 
favors and control and firefighting activities. A system that offers 
enormous space to a mafia involved in the procurement, subcontracting 
and related industries, starting from road transport, which is almost 
entirely its prerogative.

But the uprooting of entire populations from small rural centers cannot 
be absorbed by new job opportunities, and turns into emigration. The 
industry remains the fruit of an assisted economy, always on the brink 
of crisis, with threats of layoffs (1600 workers, metalworkers, 
construction workers and service workers in the Gela ANIC sector in June 
1977 alone, while thousands are on redundancy pay), subject to 
international fluctuations in oil prices, a source of blackmail; the 
workers, subjugated by the inter-classist and collaborationist ideology, 
are fighting for new public funding and strengthening the framework of 
subalternity.

While cases of neonatal malformations and occupational diseases explode 
in what is now called the "death belt" (silicosis, leukemia, TB, attacks 
on the nervous system, etc.), accidents are continuous: on 14 July 1977, 
the explosion at the refinery ANIC of Gela with 3 deaths, one in another 
explosion at SINCAT (Montedison) in Priolo in October '79; in November 
an explosion at the Montedison in Priolo with another 3 deaths, in the 
same month another at the ANIC in Gela. Thus the struggles escalated, 
road and railway blockades also culminated in arrests and complaints in 
the summer of '77 to ISAB, Montedison and other industries in the 
Syracuse area; but the conflict of this objectively privileged working 
class remains tainted by being internal to a colonial underdevelopment 
economy, while all around the peasant fabric disintegrates, dragging 
small and medium-sized businesses into the abyss, fishing and the salt 
pans die, also affected from pollution, and construction emerges as the 
driving force of an assault economy where precariousness, insecurity, 
the looting of the territory and the political-mafia attack on the 
cities reign.

On 24 April 1979 the demolition of Marina di Melilli was completed, the 
territory of which is part of the expansion plans of the petrochemical 
industry. Its thousand inhabitants, protagonists of a tenacious 
resistance with road and railway blockades, massive abstentions in the 
elections, finally give in and are dispersed in neighboring countries: 
the destructive logic of capital triumphs, despite the system showing 
glaring cracks. (5)

All that remains is public employment, the one perhaps most polluted by 
patronage practices. In the South-East triangle, between the 
petrochemical plants of Gela and Priolo-Melilli, beneficiaries of 
billions in investments, 300,000 jobs in the agricultural sector 
disappeared at the end of the Seventies. The perverse logic is 
represented by the millions of tons per year of the most advanced 
agricultural products, citrus groves, ending up under the tracks of the 
bulldozers of AIMA, the Company for Intervention in the Agricultural 
Market, in order to control prices .

Pippo Gurrieri

continues

Nicola Zitara's books The external proletariat, Jaca Book, Milan 1972 
and The unification of Italy, birth of a colony, Jaca Book, Milan 1976 
should be noted.

Edmondo M. Capecelatro - Antonio Carlo, Against the "southern question", 
Savelli, Rome 1971

Rino Malinconico, The Italian Sixty-eight and the Southern Question, in 
Southern Lessons. The South today and the South yesterday. Themes and 
paths, Left, Rome, 2023, pages. 93-118.

The text is found in Alfredo M. Bonanno, Sicily: underdevelopment and 
national liberation struggle, Sicilia Punto L, Ragusa 1982, p.18 et seq.

Papé Trippìli, "Industrialization or looting? Marina di Melilli, 
polluted, razed by bulldozers", in libertarian Sicily n. 9, June 1979.

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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