Roma Città Aperta

The ongoing trend of turning workers into goods, the suspension and denial of individual and civil liberties, the ethnicization of society: migrants are bearing the brunt of this toughest of battles being waged by the State and neo-liberal economics, a battle where the stakes are the lives and rights of every one of us.

Neo-liberalism needs low-cost, disposable manpower for its production, and also in the service industries in order to dismantle the welfare system and wipe out social costs.

The State is going about this through legislation which is becoming more and more repressive and pointless, which has the obvious aim of making workers who come to Italy increasingly dependent on their employers (in a form of modern slaverly), where even their right to exist is conditioned on the market. In all of this, there is no longer space even for a formal semblance of bourgeois rights: the right of asylum - gone, the inviolable rights of the person - gone, the right to any form of representation - inapplicable. And in order to do this, they use blatantly racist propaganda which stirs up tensions between the poor, providing something for people to take out their social insecurities on.

Then there is the way they divide us and classify us along true or imaginary religious or community lines, or according to our clothes, the colour of our skin, where we come from. Rights are then made to measure according to all this. And so they take down from the shelves of history concentration camps and deportations, slavery and serfs, update them for present-day consumption, and present them as justifiable and inevitable. And the victims are a sizeable part of the population which lives in this country.

But there something else too haunting Europe: illegal immigrants and temporary workers, dissidents and asylum seekers, Italian and foreign workers, all recognize the need for common struggle against borders which are open to goods but shut to people, against infamous agreements for forced deportations and to stop new arrivals, against the murderous legislation which allows shipfuls of innocents to sink and traffickers of men and women to grow fat on the profits.

Because we know that the detention centres open the way for barracks "à la Bolzaneto", because the fragmentation of the labour market is turning us all into mere goods, because in an ethnicized society demagogues of all sorts will continue to insist on negotiating on our behalf amongst themselves and it will be to our detriment.

The reaffirmation of basic rights for all is a fundamental part of the libertarian struggle because libertarians and anarchists know that when there are limits to one person's freedoms then the freedoms of all of us are lost.

On the 4th December 2004, there will be demonstrations by men and women who share in the streets, factories, houses and struggles. And one day they will inherit them. And we will be there too.

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici
November 2004