MASS STRUGGLES, REPRESSION AND ANARCHISM

Over the last 3 years, the capitalistic tendencies who are seeking to increase and concentrate all the economic and political-military power - both on an international and State level - have muscled in on those other tendencies who instead are trying to create a multilateral power system, based on a style of statist neo-reformism which could assure greater profits for capitalism together with a lower welfare protection.

Imperialist wars, financial crises, deregulation of the institutional and legislative framework for the protection of the weaker classes, the destruction of the fabric of solidarity of the world of salaried labour and attacks on the environment and on health are all directly or indirectly affecting the people, who are finding it ever more difficult to organize and express any form of dissent, objection or struggle by which they could try to change the current situation. A situation which is the result of the economic, political and military choices made by the powers-that-be, who govern in the name of laws they themselves produce, designed to enable them ... to govern.

The drastic reduction and erosion of any possibility for debate and negotiation, or its transformation into fake negotiating tables whose only purpose is to preserve capitalism, has revealed the grim face of militaristic capitalism and the pathetic refusal of its neo-reformist tendencies to safeguard even the minimum interests of the subordinate classes.

This is the backdrop to the development of a large composite, international opposition movement which has played a leading role in vast popular mobilizations which are significant due to their size, their obvious potential for self-organization and self-management and their ability to contrast on the streets with the repressive violence of the State.

In Italy, these last three years have marked the definitive breakdown of the social setup which dates from the last decade of the 20th century, but which proved inadequate in the face of the present conflict. On the one hand, the plunge in the buying power of wages (-9.3% for manual workers, -11.1% for office workers, -27% for pensioners), on the other hand the failure of incomes policy. On the one hand, the bosses' arrogance in company planning (laws on mobility and dismissals/redundancies) and in the renewal of labour contracts (laws providing for wage increases on the level of figures for planned inflation which are lower than official inflation figures, not to mention the figures for real inflation!!), on the other hand the failure of the policy of partnership between unions and governments. On the one hand, the continual restrictions on labour rights (the changes to Article 18 of the Workers' Statute, Law 30/2003, the anti-strike Law 83/2000, separate labour contracts without consultation), on the other hand the crisis in the representativity model imposed by the self-proclaimed majority unions.

The inevitable and consequent radicalization of conflict in the world of labour has enabled the working class to re-discover its long-lost (but not forgotten) autonomy both in struggle and in organization - from Fiat employees to temporary workers, from industrial workers to transport workers. With the destruction of the policy of partnership, we see a rise in importance once more of power relations, the capacity for struggle and for the defence of the workers' specific interests, freed from the neo-corporativist cage. Though the battle for wages in certain sectors remains hard and difficult, the question regarding the right to strike is once again open is struggling free of the straightjacket imposed on it by anti-strike laws and union self-regulation.

The interconnection of labour struggles with social struggles (for the rights of migrants, for the protection of the environment, for peace and against prohibitionism) has come about in a social scenario which has been expertly manipulated throught the disgraceful use of the term terrorist applied to anyone who dares oppose the supreme designs of the executive.

There has been no phase of the clash of the classes over the last three years which has not seen the social movements subjected to repressive treatment, in the full blaze of media publicity - hundreds of searches, arrests, stops, injuries, with a noticeable increase in intensity from Genova 2001 and the strikes of 2002 on.

By now, there is no part of Italy where investigators do not have an open file on political or radical union militants. Every area and tendency has members under investigation, from the anti-war movement to the anti-globalization movement, from environmental groups to anti-prison groups. Police preventiive measure in the name of "national security", repression of demonstrations in the name of "national security", the criminalization of dissent and of self-managed struggles - these are the elements of a strategy whose aim is to intimidate mass movements which are potentialy able to act on the contradictions of capitalism to the extent of becoming a danger above all for the very existence of capitalist domination.

Given that capitalism today can no longer make do with less visible, more "structural" forms of repression (disciplinary sanctions, uncontrolled mobility, dismissals, wage reductions, widespread temporarization of labour, etc.) which directly hit the class in the crucial point of the contradiction between capital and labour, it therefore uses the State as a repressive armed extension of itself with al its laws, police apparata, places of imprisonment in order to select and strike, individually and separately, any transgressors of their laws. They use the threat of illegality to discourage mobilizations, those declared "guilty" are given full media treatment so as to provide an example of what can happen to those who fight. And it is at the very moment that there is a break in the struggles that the repression intensifies and there is an arbitrary spread in the net which is laid out to catch supposed subversive groups and terrorists, thereby locking up an ever-growing number of people and extending the circle to include their acquaintances.

When the social climate hots up and forms of mass self-management start to appear, it is then that, now as in the past, it is the anarchists and libertarians who are the worst hit and who appear most frequently in the investigators' lists, not to mention the traditional journalistic/judicial charges of anarchist plots (witness the equation of "parcel bombs = anarchist movement").

Anarchists are targetted because their stands against capitalism, authoritarianism, militarism and prisons are immediately obvious and result in their repression at the hands of the State apparatus. We know that the love of anarchists for freedom and self-management attracts the noose of the organs of control and government.

We are conscious that our action within the social movements and our continued agitation for the class struggle and its autonomy, disturbs the mechanisms of consensus of a capitalism that is ever darker and exploits more and more. We recognize that what we want, what we do, our theory and our needs are radically opposed to anything which is based on the State and on Capital.

We become the object of preventive, repeated repression, of limitations on our freedom. In this way, it becomes easier to target us and set up provocations and instrumentalization (such as the recent case of tampered bottles of mineral water, attributed to anarchists). But above all, we become a disturbance and annoyance to the State and to authority of all types when anarchists place themselves firmly within the realm of mass struggles and refuse the adventurism and vanguardism of individual clashes with the State and armed terrorist struggle. When anarchism legitimizes itself as a self-managed social and political component of mass struggles, in visible, public mass organizations and with faces uncovered, when it presents itself as an authentic interpretation of the autonomous drives of social self-organization, that is the time when anarchists become cumbersome and dispensible.

But it is in these circumstances that anarchism can best express its organizational abilities, where it can best devote its resources to provide the yeast for the social struggles, in the belief that the organisms of struggle have no passive need for exemplary gestures, social detonators or stirrers of conscience, but rather of horizontal, anti-authoritarian, mass organization. And of the federated political organization of anarchists.

Continuing with our existing struggles, continuing our presence within the organisms of struggle, may not be enough to avoid repression. It therefore becomes necessary to create structures of solidarity and legal defence which can gather the gretest possible support. It becomes necessary to examine the old structures of the anarchist movement (for example the National Committee for Political Victims) which could be used side by side with the specific defence committees which are formed around the country.

Freedom is a social fact which needs the help of everyone in order to be won and has no need for prisoners or warders but for the action and the thoughts of organized and federated conscious individuals.

FREEDOM FOR ALL !

NO TO THE CRIMINALIZATION OF THE SOCIAL STRUGGLES !

CLASS UNITY AGAINST REPRESSION !

FEDERAZIONE DEI COMUNISTI ANARCHICI
31st December 2003