Berlusconi and the New Fascism

Strange things were afoot in Italy. What had been known from afar as a powerful movement seemed to have disappeared from the map.

In the decades of the Cold War, Italy was a hotspot for anticapitalist struggle. Inheriting the legacy of communist resistance that fought against fascism during World War II, the next generation carried on the fight against the next totalitarianism: NATO backed capitalism. From the 70s and 80s, anarchists formed an increasingly visible part of these struggles. They also had a global impact, formulating some of the more effective antiauthoritarian critiques of the Left to emerge in this era.

From the 90s, Italian anarchists and Left organizations like Tute Bianchi played an influential role in the antiglobalization movement, and some of the earlier and more militant actions against the anti-immigration policies of Fortress Europe also occurred in Italy. When the G8 met in Genova in 2001, 200,000 people took to the street in protest, and thousands of anarchists rioted and fought with police, who arrested and injured hundreds, and killed one anarchist, 23-year-old Carlo Giuliani.

Just six years later, the anarchists were suffering under repeated waves of repression, and people outside of Italy could find little information about what was going on. Even when I was there I couldn’t make sense of the situation, but after talking with different people I began to assemble a picture in my head.

One thread in the story goes back to the 70s, when a man named Silvio Berlusconi, who had already made a fortune through shadily financed real estate development, moved into the media industry. He began acquiring television stations and news magazines, eventually coming to own about half of the market. But for Berlusconi, the media were not only a way to make money, they were also a perfect tool for re-engineering a society that was constantly threatening the country’s political and economic system. His ability to control the news was critical: however the wealthy have always controlled the media and shaped the news to reflect their own interests. Berlusconi was one of the pioneers to go further in using the media as a cultural tool. Everything from news to soap operas to commercials and infomercials were used to change the very values of society and replace a proletarian identity with a bourgeois one.

Beauty standards and peer pressure can become powerful tools for social control when they can be coordinated by a small elite and intensified through a constant bombardment of images. When those images enforce a racialized national identity, an idea of beauty that can only be achieved by buying expensive clothing, cosmetics, and surgery, a fear of dirtiness, foreignness, and poverty, an obsessive interest in the lives of celebrities, and the application of a soap opera morality to politics, most of society will become alienated from the social movements, which in turn will specialize, becoming the domain of professional Left organizations.

In the 80s Berlusconi acquired AC Milano, quickly turning the football club into European champions. This too had political as well as financial objectives, as the football club had long-running associations with fascist hooligan groups, and with its new victories it became a rallying point for national pride.

After two decades of empire building and social re-engineering, Berlusconi was ready to go into politics. In 1994 he formed Forza Italia, a new political party uniting center-right Christian Democratic parties with nationalist and fascist political parties like Lega Nord and Alleanza Nazionale, They took a majority in parliament and Berlusconi became the new prime minister. His government soon fell but in 2001 he became prime minister again.

As the other political parties mired themselves in stale controversies, Berlusconi’s party took a bold populist line, turning its leader into a hero and thus wriggling out of major corruption charges and other scandals. Berlusconi seemed only to grow in popularity after being implicated in bribery and being caught with underage prostitutes. After all, don’t all Italian men want to get rich and have lots of women?

The reenergized Italian rightwing created a strong legal base for the coming repression. Strict anti-immigration laws were passed, and “citizens’ groups” began patrolling the streets of many cities to look for people without documents. Anarchists were targeted with subversive association laws that criminalized an increasing range of political activities. The state legislated itself greater powers to use wiretaps and bugs, preventive detention and house arrest, raids and evictions.

Of course the State is not the only protagonist, and it would be wrong to see this history as the creation of one institution, one group, one man. But the Italian Left had long participated in the anti-terrorist hysteria that first had been used against urban guerrilla groups and was now targeting anarchists, and there was little opposition to the ambitious moves made by the Italian state.

The anarchists had also made ambitious moves during these years, developing a theoretical maturity and a capacity for stronger tactics of attack. Some anarchists told me that at the beginning of the decade a large part of the movement made the conscious decision to escalate the struggle, and for the first few years they carried out impressive sabotage actions with good results, but the state soon responded with a campaign of repression the movement was not able to withstand. Soon police had bugged the social centers, houses, vehicles, and even clothing of the anarchists. Many people went to prison just for joking about illegal actions or militant activity: all the police had to do was transcribe the recording, quote a selective part, and show it to a judge, who without hearing the tone or the context would issue an arrest warrant.

Dozens of social centers and houses were raided, literature, computers, and other material confiscated, and many people sent to prison or made to wait for trial in provisional liberty. One friend estimated that ten percent of the active anarchists in the country were jailed or had to go through a court process during these years.

Repression is inevitable. There is no way to avoid it. Even if we give up the struggle, we may save ourselves personally but in the absence of resistance the State will only expand its control over our lives at a faster rate. Those who say we must wait for the right moment to attack the system do not understand history, or the world we live in.

It was the Marxists who believed in accumulating forces and attacking when the time was ripe, in forming a military organization and launching a political rather than a social war. But it is only by responding to the everyday social war waged by the State that we can win.

The Italian anarchists provided an inspiring example of how the time is always now, but they also showed that without the support of society, revolutionaries will be crushed. What better way to attack capitalism than to overcome its isolation by making relationships of mutuality with other people, and building the commune? What better way to attack the State than by building popular support for sabotage and illegality?

Destruction is a creative act, as Bakunin said, but it goes beyond that. In order to succeed, the attempt to destroy the system must simultaneously be a creative force.