A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: Opening - EUROPEAN AND MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS. BROKEN DREAMS TO ABSTAIN TO KEEP DREAMING - Natale Musarra - Pippo Gurrieri (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Those who go to vote on 8 and 9 June for the European elections and for 
the many municipal elections (in almost half of the Italian 
municipalities - 3717 out of 7896 -, 37 in Sicily) will find themselves 
faced with the wreckage of two modern utopias: one more large, the 
political project of United Europe; and a smaller one, the mirage of 
municipal autonomy to be achieved "within the framework of state laws". 
The shipwrecks of these two dreams are closely connected.
The Europe of the "founding fathers" (Altiero Spinelli, Simone Veil, 
Ursula Hirschmann, Robert Schumann, Jean Monnet...) no longer exists. 
That Europe banned wars, said it was supportive and inclusive, 
anti-fascist and anti-Nazi, federalist and respectful of human rights 
and the dignity of people. A single but enormous worm: it still remained 
a Europe of states and large economic groups, not that of peoples and 
workers which it also claimed to represent. Today it has definitively 
removed the mask.

Last April, the former trumps of national politics returned to 
pontificate (it is known that whoever loses the government and the 
elections in Italy is destined to direct European politics): Mario 
Draghi, with his recipes on the subject of competitiveness, and Enrico 
Letta with his report to reform the Single Market. Ultimately, these two 
"enlightened" statesmen of the new Europe both propose the same thing: 
unifying governments, finance, telecommunications, energy and defense. 
The union of the capital markets, in particular, with its accompanying 
privatizations, blood and tears, would, according to them, represent the 
cure-all for all of Europe's ills. Not only that: to finance the 
investments necessary to carry out large community projects of "energy 
independence" (to the detriment of poor countries but "rich" in precious 
materials), of "environmental sustainability" (extending the deadlines 
for the end of fossil fuels and reintroducing pesticides in 
industrialized agriculture) and "military rearmament" (new weapons 
factories, military bases and common army) a large "Union of savings and 
investments" of families and workers should intervene. Adding to the 
damage would therefore be the insult to the popular classes, forced to 
further tighten their belts to provide oxygen and liquidity to 
multinationals and speculations that the Europe of capital has been 
encouraging for decades.

It is clear that the elections in front of these political lines (which 
are already underway) are just a pure and useless formality. The latest 
story of the vote on the European Stability Pact goes in this direction; 
Italy will find itself having to cut between 10 and 12 billion a year 
until 2031, taking away resources from healthcare, education, culture, 
essential services, income from work, and certainly not from military 
spending which must be increased because NATO and the new Europe with 
the helmet ask us to do so. And what will happen to Southern Italy and 
Sicily, among the most depressed areas of the European continent? Into 
what other abyss will they be driven? Will the new illegal immigrants 
against whom the police dogs of the northern borders will be launched be 
Sicilians, Calabrians, Lucanians, Puglia, Campania and Sardinians? When 
will they come to privatize what remains of our green areas, beaches, 
archaeological and cultural heritage?

These programs instead represent the natural political and economic 
outcome of all statism: the creation of an enormous police state, 
centralized, technocratic, warmongering, nuclearized, superpower and 
"super-democracy" aimed at suffocating the slightest opposition to 
competing with democracies hegemonic totalitarians in the world, 
supported by multinationals in energy, finance, food, construction, 
automobiles, etc.

The strengthening of the statist idea also affects the last tail of the 
institutional bandwagon: the Municipalities. The government push for 
greater centralization (which makes use of artificial intelligence's 
fake algorithms for the purpose of grasping, controlling and even 
determining the real needs of populations) and the reduction of the 
sovereign powers of local communities, also divorced from that remnant 
of participation which remained with the citizens, have debased the idea 
of municipal autonomy trumpeted in Italy twenty years ago and sanctioned 
complete with constitutional reform. With the excuse of autonomy, the 
Municipalities have been emptied of resources, services, skills and 
responsibilities, in favor of overdetermined entities (Europe, State and 
Regions), far from the daily life of ordinary people, who nevertheless 
perceive the scratches, the low blows, the harmful effects of political 
strategies dictated by governments, multinationals, the banking system 
and NATO.

What autonomy is that which leaves the Municipalities only with ordinary 
maintenance, the patching of potholes, the precarious management of a 
territory eroded by aggressive natural phenomena, by depopulation, by 
the abandonment of the countryside or by the consumption of soil, 
consequently subject to flaking? of their cultural identity? while every 
decision on the great problems of the present is taken elsewhere: 
health, school, transport, work, energy, immigration, militarism, 
environmental protection, economic development, water management, the 
disposal of wastewater and waste... Municipalities cannot even oppose 
the abuse of their territory for works of so-called "public utility" or 
even considered "strategic" (roads and railways, energy-intensive 
factories and plants, gas pipelines, military bases , special industrial 
zones, etc.), which have multiplied in recent years thanks to the PNRR, 
but are often useless, counterproductive, dangerous, devastating and 
polluting. Yet paradoxically emerges in the local political classes the 
"statutory vice" of a parrot-like imitation of the authoritarian, 
hierarchical, bureaucratic, economistic logic of the central 
institutions, which they often place before the will of the communities 
they claim to represent.

On 8 and 9 June less than half of those entitled will probably go to 
vote and legitimize local and European institutions by which, in the 
vast majority, not even they feel represented. From the lowest (the 
municipal one) to the highest institutional level (the European one), 
they will vote for a further subtraction of popular sovereignty, that 
is, of the right to decide one's own destiny, to respect and enforce 
one's uniqueness and difference, to consciously reject any regurgitation 
of statism, fascism, militarism, war, closure towards those who are 
different, towards migrants, towards militant solidarity, the legal and 
violent suppression of every civil and humanitarian protest.

Let us then also escape the liberticidal ritual that is taking place 
before our eyes and the indifference that nourishes collective 
subjugation to the strong powers of politics and the economy. The 
current political and economic system deserves only broad and radical 
abstention. At the same time, every possibility of building unity among 
the exploited and oppressed must be sought beyond every frontier erected 
by capital and states. Which is not easy but among the farmers from half 
the continent who shot manure on the agents in Brussels, among the 
anti-fascists who protest from Budapest to Milan, among the opponents of 
the war who take to the streets everywhere, among the students who 
occupy the universities against the genocide in Gaza, among the 
anti-racists who contest the segregationist policies towards immigrants, 
among the workers who demand greater safety and better wages, among the 
women and the LGBTQIA+ communities who affirm their rights as human 
beings... there are more things in common than many do not divide them. 
Every effort must be directed at welding this bottom-up, 
internationalist, anti-racist, feminist, ecologist, anti-militarist 
and... abstentionist union.

Christmas Musarra - Pippo Gurrieri

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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