A-Infos (en) Italy, FdCA, IL CANTIERE #37 - Between authoritarian twists and imperialist wars: let's rediscover internationalism and solidarity among the oppressed (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

When, throughout the troubled history of class conflict, has a 
government not expressed, in whole or in part, the interests of the 
bourgeois class? If this consideration is true, as we believe it to be, 
it is appropriate to take it as a reference, to avoid believing that 
governments and states are neutral instruments, or even usable tools, to 
construct a desirable overthrow of the capitalist system. The current 
government is certainly in line with the achievements of previous ones, 
given that it has striven to pursue their classist choices with greater 
alacrity. With this government, the intent to privilege the interests of 
capital, the ruling classes, and the ruling classes has entered a much 
more extensive phase, aided by the crisis, the escalating international 
situation, and the implosion of the European Union, which has seen the 
Meloni government completely subservient to US imperialism.
The latter has become more aggressive precisely because of its decline, 
imposing its non-negotiable conditions on its European allies regarding 
tariffs, energy supplies, guarantees for European investments to counter 
deindustrialization in the US, tax protection for American companies in 
Europe, and, above all, rearmament and armaments. The aim is to further 
weaken the European Union by engaging it militarily in an armed 
opposition to Russia in Ukraine and in the rearmament policies of the EU 
states, while also discouraging any Chinese penetration of the West via 
the "Silk Road."
The costs of this epochal restructuring are and will be passed on to 
workers and the most vulnerable social classes in Europe, who are seeing 
and will see their quality of life dramatically decline.
The Authoritarian Descent of Bourgeois Democracy
In the West, the clash between powers has revitalized military spending, 
and every day there is a fear of war, with the obvious aim of creating 
the conditions for it. In this context, militarism is strengthening in 
every sphere of society, starting with schools.
In such a context, the current government has certainly revealed its 
classist, reactionary, and repressive essence, with the serious 
authoritarian drift it has inflicted on bourgeois democracy. Giorgia 
Meloni's political origins, on the other hand, date back to the 
neo-fascist formation of the Italian Social Movement, heir to the 
Italian Social Republic, allied with the Nazis and present in the 
Italian Parliament since 1948. These origins are shared by a large 
number of its ministers and undersecretaries.
It should therefore come as no surprise that intolerant, violent, and 
even openly fascist roles and behaviors are resurfacing in our society. 
This does not necessarily imply the reemergence of fascism as a 
governing hypothesis. Believing to see fascism behind every 
authoritarian behavior of this government or that of other countries is 
a failure to understand the class nature of bourgeois democracy. If in 
other historical periods the bourgeoisie produced fascism from its own 
soft underbelly (in Italy and Germany, fascism actually came to power 
through elections), in a crisis like the current one, it has no need of 
the fascist party, since in countless countries and circumstances it 
still has the constitutional tools at its disposal to initiate 
authoritarian and repressive twists for its own purposes of profit and 
domination, which undoubtedly characterize the Meloni government in Italy.
The Security Decree (Legislative Decree No. 48 of April 11, 2025, 
converted into Law No. 80 of June 9, 2025) perfectly represents this 
authoritarian degeneration of bourgeois democracy. Thus, military 
spending is being increased to 5% of GDP by 2035, in accordance with the 
non-negotiable demands of the US and NATO, passively accepted by the EU 
in the interests of arms manufacturers. Resources are being recovered 
through cuts to the welfare state, particularly targeting education and 
healthcare, which directly impact the quality of life of the lower 
classes. Thus, for purely electoral purposes, tax evasion is encouraged 
through amnesties, while simultaneously lowering tax rates for the 
highest incomes. From this perspective, any individual or collective 
opposition and any form of dissent are criminalized and equated with 
issues of public order, and therefore harshly repressed.
Bourgeois Profit and Paper Rights
"Written rights, nothing but written, are mockeries of the people 
mummified in code." With these words, our Mexican anarchist comrade 
Guerrero Praxedis expressed a concept that remains relevant today over a 
century ago, in the heat of the Mexican Revolution: Constitutions, even 
the best in the world, as well as international law, remain merely 
compromises enacted on paper by the very bourgeoisies capable of 
rejecting them to defend their economic and political interests to the 
bitter end.
The bourgeoisie is naturally inclined to assert its own particular 
interests, and in crisis situations, where these interests are 
challenged by a conflict between powers that increasingly tends toward a 
global armed confrontation, there is no longer any room for negotiation 
and compromise. In the absence of a significant class conflict capable 
of curbing capitalist supremacy, the law is torn apart, rendered 
impotent, and replaced with repression.
Hence the need for a continuous and widespread anti-fascist, 
anti-militarist, and anti-war mobilization. To be effective, it must 
necessarily and immediately connect with the struggle to defend the 
living conditions of working people, linking the defense of immediate 
interests to the historical interests of the proletariat within a truly 
internationalist perspective.

In this difficult and alarming phase, it is essential and urgent to 
understand what is happening, in order to realize that overcoming the 
capitalist system and the horrors it produces is not only possible but 
also timely and urgent. However, it is essential to avoid pursuing forms 
of opposition that, in their spontaneous manifestation, risk being 
reduced to self-referentiality and propaganda, as can happen in mass and 
class movements.

"The end is nothing, the movement is everything."
It is certainly true that mass movements arise spontaneously from 
widespread, concrete, and immediate needs and, like the need for peace, 
are expressed by heterogeneous social strata. However, if the objective 
pursued is detached from the prospect of overcoming war as an inevitable 
tendency of the capitalist system, mass movements risk becoming 
flattened by a drift that has developed in the historical evolution of 
class struggle: "the end is nothing, the movement is everything." The 
political and trade union forces that have interpreted this have been 
unable to make any dent in capitalism and imperialism, but have been 
reduced to supporting their effects, their aims, their wars, and all 
their horrors.
This is not a critique of the current mobilizations against the war and 
genocide underway in Gaza by the Israeli government and army, which we 
should consider alongside Russia's aggression against Ukraine and the 
more than fifty other conflicts bloodily affecting the planet. But it is 
necessary to accept the basic fact that these are all wars fought by 
proxy within the context of the conflict between the major imperialist 
powers for control of the world market. Building a strong mass movement 
is an essential and therefore not to be underestimated step in 
countering the spread of wars and the economic and political interests 
and structures that produce and sustain them. From this perspective, 
every individual and collective contribution is useful in demonstrating 
and broadening outrage and protest: from fasts, to minutes of silence, 
to sit-ins and demonstrations, to port blockades, to general strikes 
against the war, and to the powerful and unprecedented mobilization of 
the Global Sumud Flotilla. A mass movement operates under the pressure 
of individual and collective forces that certainly cannot be reduced to 
the role of a political organization-an inevitably minority entity-but 
which must nevertheless assume the ability to identify the limits of the 
social spheres in which it articulates its active presence in the 
reality of conflict, avoiding any divisive practice that consists in 
underestimating immediate objectives and refraining from administering 
"lessons in revolution" to those who pursue different positions.
Let us rediscover internationalism and solidarity among oppressed 
classes around the world.
Consistent with the brightest internationalist periods of the anarchist 
communist movement since its inception, we have always taken a concrete 
stand against war, avoiding the campist tendencies that, yesterday as 
today, push people to take sides in imperialist conflicts. It's one 
thing to recognize the right to resist the Israeli invasion of the Gaza 
Strip, but it's another to politically recognize or take as a point of 
reference reactionary bourgeoisies that, like Hamas, exploit civilian 
populations for their classist and power-seeking purposes and are ready 
to bloodily repress any call for liberation.
There are no good (or "less bad") bourgeoisies or imperialisms to side 
with. This is a false choice that anarchist communists, internationalist 
revolutionaries, have always rejected and never made. We didn't do it in 
1871 at the time of the Paris Commune, where the Parisian proletariat 
rose up against the bourgeois government that fled before the Prussian 
armies surrounding the capital. We didn't do it in the First Imperialist 
World War, even when some authoritative figures of international 
anarchism sided with the imperialism of the Entente, aligning themselves 
with the social democracies that sided with their respective 
imperialisms. We didn't do it in Russia during the civil war of 1918-21, 
where the insurrectionary movement of the Ukrainian peasant and worker 
proletariat, led by the anarchist comrade Nestor Makhno, defeated the 
White armies on the battlefield, allowing the defeated Red Army to 
reorganize and win the war. We did not do it in Spain during the war and 
revolution of 1936-39, nor in Italy during the Resistance, when we 
opposed the bourgeois and Stalinist tendencies of the Patriotic War. And 
we do not do it today in Ukraine, Palestine, or anywhere else. We 
reiterate and continue to embrace the luminous message of the German 
internationalists during the First World War:
"For each individual, the main enemy is the bourgeoisie of his own country."
Internationalism, which must unite the subaltern classes in the defense 
of their interests, cannot be continually enunciated; it must be updated 
to the characteristics of the current phase and concretely expressed in 
strategy, operational tactics, and organizational practice. For this 
reason, it is necessary to continue the work of training a broad 
anarchist communist militant movement, capable of taking root within the 
working class to orient it toward unity, the defense of its living 
conditions, and the pursuit of its historical interests of liberation 
from capitalist domination.

Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA

https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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