A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #15-26 - Anarchist May Day in Carrara (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The following is the text of the speech by comrade Cristina Tonsig of 
the FAI from the stage at the Anarchist May Day in Carrara. ---- It is a 
great emotion for me to be here speaking on behalf of the FAI. I want to 
begin by remembering a comrade who recently passed away, Claudio 
Strambi: a militant anarchist in the Italian Anarchist Federation, 
active in the union with a commitment that always saw him at the 
forefront, in keeping with the spirit of our organization, never 
hegemonic or self-referential, always driven by profound humanity. He 
always engaged in open dialogue, committed to building unified paths, 
free from minority logics and at the same time without losing sight of 
the anarchist perspective, often encountering state repression. Those 
who have comrades never die. And it is right to think of him here, in 
Carrara, carrying on the same practice of freedom that was his life.

It was in Carrara, in September 1945, that anarchists from across Italy 
gathered and founded the FAI, heir to the Italian Anarchist Union of 
1919-20 and the experiences of the Spanish Civil War, exile, 
anti-fascism, and armed resistance.

Eighty years later, in October 2025, we returned to Carrara for a 
conference at the Teatro Animosi, in memory of Italino Rossi. We spoke 
with scholars and activists about antimilitarism, anarcha-feminism, 
ecology, intersectionality, territorial struggles, and self-management.

Eighty years of struggle for a world of free and equal women, ever 
present in the squares, neighborhoods, social spaces, and our 
offices-which are a shared heritage-but also, and above all, in 
struggles, from environmental ones to those against firing ranges, in 
strikes, and in demonstrations. Because our anarchism has solid and 
ancient roots, but it is continually enriched, fueled by the desire to 
build a new society, and to do so while maintaining coherence between 
means and ends.

Resignation is not our thing. We are convinced that things can be 
different, and therefore we must act accordingly, building non-state 
political spaces, multiplying experiences of self-management and social 
networks that can disrupt the machinery of oppression and exploitation, 
to build a new society.

First of all, we must face a war that has always been a daily 
occurrence: the war that capital wages against those who work. Today, 
the world of work has become a field of increasingly brutal 
exploitation, where precariousness is a systematic strategy of domination.

As is tradition, close to May 1st, even the government wakes up and once 
again talks about tax breaks for hiring or fair wages. It announces 
ridiculous measures that should benefit workers, and at the same time, 
for example, it traps the logistics industry and its strikes in the 
bottlenecks of essential public services, hitting one of the most 
combative sectors. We know full well that laws and regulations serve 
only to manage poverty and exploitation, not to abolish them. Only class 
struggle can restore dignity to the working class, only grassroots 
organization of the exploited, only direct action can lead to the 
reconquest of lost rights and the acquisition of new ones. We don't want 
state handouts, but a dignified wage and a decent life. Because poverty 
cannot be governed: it must be fought.

Meanwhile, while they talk to us about growth, recovery, and 
competitiveness, people continue to die on construction sites, in 
warehouses, in factories, in fields, and on the streets. Workplace 
deaths are not fatalities, they are not tragic accidents: they are the 
direct product of a system that skimps on safety, accelerates work 
rates, externalizes risks, and treats bodies as expendable.

Meschi's struggles remind us that the dignity of work cannot be begged 
for, it is won through organization and conflict. Against precarious 
employment, against poverty wages, against the normalization of death at 
work, the FAI's response remains the same: solidarity, organization, 
anarcho-syndicalism, strikes, conflict, direct action.

Work in arms factories deserves a separate discussion. We must convince 
workers in the sector to demand the conversion of these factories to 
civilian use, and not to accept their ailing company's conversion, as is 
often the case, to war production. We don't want arms factories. We must 
refuse to produce death in order to earn a living.

Even the education sector today raises very important issues requiring 
action. Too often we see tanks in elementary school playgrounds. In high 
schools, work-based learning (formerly alternating work) takes students 
to military bases, war shipyards, and weapons factories. Universities 
enter into agreements with the Leonardo Med-Or Foundation and with 
defense industries.

To a school conceived in this way, we respond with Francisco Ferrer y 
Guardia, who founded the Escuela Moderna in Barcelona in 1901, a 
self-managed educational experience for independent and free lives for 
boys and girls: not obedient cogs in a rotten system, but free thinkers, 
defying all conventions and prejudices.

The militarization of schools and society did not arise out of nowhere. 
It has a lineage of state violence that we must always keep in mind. 
This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Genoa. It was July 2001, 
and the G8 of the world's eight richest nations was held. Over 200,000 
people, including anarchists, took to the streets to say no to that 
world order. The response was the one we know: Carlo Giuliani, the 
Mexican butchery of the Diaz school; and then Bolzaneto, the torture 
barracks. That violence was not an exception. It was the model. And that 
same model is replicated, refined, legalized. And here we are today. The 
Security Decree, definitively approved, represents the most organic 
attempt to criminalize social conflict this country has seen in decades. 
We can say that the government celebrated the special laws of 1926 by 
normalizing them, one hundred years later, the very day before April 
25th, and this affront cries out for vengeance.

The security decrees certainly do not protect those who live in daily 
danger, those who are exploited, those without documents, much less the 
inmate forgotten in a high-security unit. They protect power from those 
who challenge it. Thus, security decrees transform dissent into a 
threat, demonstration into a potential crime, and political identity 
into presumed danger.

We laughed when Donald Trump organized an international anti-Antifa 
summit, but we shouldn't laugh, because a dangerous project is underway.

The same logic is already at work in Europe. In Hungary, anti-fascism is 
considered a threat to national security. In Germany, investigations 
into "subversive association" are being built: the "Budapest Complex" is 
just one example. In Italy, the ground is being prepared with 
legislative proposals to equate anti-fascism with terrorism.

This is how modern repression works: it doesn't immediately ban. First, 
it delegitimizes. Then, it isolates. Then, it strikes. Let us always 
remember this and denounce it when we read or hear about excesses by the 
forces of disorder, by individual violent officers, or by zealous police 
commissioners. If there are violent officers and zealous police 
commissioners, it's because the state allows and wants it. This decree 
is the state's response to a widespread social movement that refuses to 
give up. But we must always keep in mind that it's not us who should be 
afraid, it's the state that is afraid, not only of our actions or our 
words, but of our thoughts, our intentions, what we could do, our 
resistance, and our indomitable anti-fascism. We will not stop. Our 
response has always been the same: organization and solidarity with the 
oppressed and the Oppressed. They can immobilize our bodies for twelve 
hours or more, but they cannot stop our ideal.

I'm reminded of Emma Goldman's words: "If you are so generous with 
freedom that you bring it across the sea to Germany, why not keep it 
right here, in this country?"

The question was directed at Wilson, but it would still apply to Meloni. 
Italy is not a free country, nor is it a country at peace, as 
demonstrated by the 104 million euros spent on weapons and soldiers. How 
can a country with 39 military missions abroad be called peaceful? 
Italian soldiers are everywhere: in the Balkans, in Ukraine (EUMAM and 
NSATU missions), in Lebanon (UNIFIL and MIBIL missions), in Iraq (Prima 
Parthica mission), in the Red Sea (Operation Aspides), and in other 
countries. In 2025, approximately 59 active armed conflicts were 
recorded in the world: the highest number since the end of World War II.

Just think of Israel and Palestine. People are also dying in Sudan, the 
Sahel, Myanmar, and elsewhere. For us, there are no first-class and 
second-class peoples; they are all important. There are 59 theaters of 
death where the poor pay the price for interests that are not the same. 
They.

Every war has its instigators. Every bomb has its factory. Every factory 
has its shareholders. And every shareholder has its government to 
protect it.

But every bomb, every drone that destroys a house, is also a house not 
built somewhere else; every bomb and every drone that destroys a 
hospital is a hospital not built in another city. In short, the presence 
of every weapon and every soldier marks the lack of things useful to the 
community.

We loudly shout our "no" to all imperialist and capitalist wars, wars 
that, historically, have never brought success to revolutions or 
revolutionaries. Only the people who organize from below can give birth 
to a revolution.

True security comes from social justice, from cooperation between 
peoples, from an end to the economic plunder that fuels conflicts. Our 
response is always the same: internationalism to bring "peace among the 
oppressed and war against the oppressors." And this phrase doesn't need 
to be written on the dead because it's engraved on our skin. Because 
anarchism has no borders, it has no homeland to defend.

Since 1872, from the Anti-Authoritarian International of Saint-Imier, we 
have built solidarity beyond borders. In 1936, we went to fight in Spain 
against fascism. We were men and women who, in the columns of the 
revolution and in the collectives, defended not a homeland, but a 
concrete possibility of a free life, without masters and without 
generals. From Barcelona to Aragon, they taught us that freedom is built 
with our hands, with assemblies, with social revolution.

In the 2000s, we built solidarity with the Israeli and Palestinian 
anarchists who fought together against the apartheid wall. Today, we are 
here, with the comrades from every corner of the globe who resist. Wars 
must be responded to with desertion, boycott, and revolutionary 
defeatism. Deserting means not only helping deserters, but also 
unmasking propaganda, assisting railway and dock workers in their 
boycott actions. It means rejecting the state narrative that transforms 
aggression into defense, supremacy into security, war into moral 
necessity. There are no humanitarian wars. There are no liberating 
bombings. There are only women, men, people, and children who die; and 
those who profit from their deaths. We fight so that it is no longer 
people who fall, but walls; so that borders, not peoples, are erased.

We stand with those imprisoned everywhere, trying to fight and change 
the system, to fight and reject war. With those who bring sand, not oil, 
to the engine of militarism.

We are deserters from every war, partisans against every state.

We are internationalists for true brotherhood and sisterhood among 
peoples, and it is precisely our internationalism that brought us to 
Athens in April for the IFA congress, to share experiences, reflections, 
and actions with comrades from various geographies.

Eighty years ago, in Carrara, our comrades managed to build an anarchist 
organization from the chaos of war, the ashes of fascism, and the 
harshness of repression. They called it the Italian Anarchist Federation 
and brought it to life with the same determination with which Malatesta, 
Berneri, and Meschi had kept the flame alive in the previous decades.

Today, the world is more complex, wars more numerous, repression more 
sophisticated. The security decree seeks to criminalize any form of 
resistance. The militarization of schools seeks to train subjects, not 
free beings. Wars seek to convince us that there is no alternative to 
violence. We respond with Ferrer's words: we want to be capable of 
ceaseless evolution, capable of destroying and renewing.

We are not pacifists, but we fight day after day for the triumph of 
peace, for social justice, for the brotherhood and sisterhood of all. 
For peaceful coexistence between humans and nonhumans.

We must be, as Parsons said, "unfaithful and traitors to the infamies of 
modern capitalist society."

The march that will begin now is not folklore, it is not a demonstration 
in and of itself, but rather an important moment of reflection to keep 
in mind where we come from, where we are, and where and how we want to go.

Our response is both ancient and new: neither state nor war, neither 
masters nor servants, neither school nor barracks nor slave labor. 
Freedom, equality, mutual aid. Long live libertarian communism, long 
live anarchy, and happy May Day.

Cristina Tonsig

https://umanitanova.org/primo-maggio-anarchico-a-carrara/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en