Capitalist exploitation of the territory continues inexorably to affect our cities and towns; speculative environmental and infrastructural exploitation continues all along the neuronal network and also in the surrounding areas.
The housing emergency, environmental degradation and the destruction of the countryside as a result of the action of privatized companies and business cartels, militarism, the plunder of the soil and public resources, all contribute to the profound changes that are taking place in the relationship between our pace of life and the use of the territory, between the financial autonomy of workers, citizens and inhabitants and the opportunity to gain access to collective goods and services that are increasingly being pr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) We are witnessing the preparations for a clear and determined attack on the freedom and self-determination of the women who live in this country, an attack which is aimed at several fronts but which has the sole objective of reducing the public voice and presence of women.
One of the prime areas where women’s freedom is worse threatened is in regard to sexuality, with the ongoing demonization of free and responsible sexuality with regard to contraceptives and to the use of Law 194 of 1978 concerning voluntary abortions.
Always foremost in the minds of the Right and the Catholic church, this attack on women’s freedom to responsibly and autonomously manage their relationships and their sexuality is now at the center of a mad rus... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 1. The appearance of a “normal” country
Following the approval of the 2007 Budget the center-left government appears to be more stable and therefore better able to overcome certain internal contradictions and face the coming challenges:
pension reform and the success of its plans to put workers’ severance pay into funds;
labor contract reform;
flexibility as a cure for precarity;
assimilation and regularization of the new Eastern European immigrant workforce and “model” temporary detention centers (CPTs) for migrants;
completion of “European” infrastructural work (TAV, various corridors, etc.);
new national energy plan (gas/regasification, etc.);
confirmati... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On 23 August 2008, on the occasion of the 81st anniversary of the killing of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici will be participating in a vigil organized by the Associazione Sacco & Vanzetti together with Amnesty International, Nessuno Tocchi Caino and the World Coalition Against The Death Penalty.
The vigil is dedicated to Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh, an Afghan journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy, and will be held in Piazza Papa Giovanni Paolo II in Torremaggiore (Apulia, Italy) from 8.30pm on 22 August until 1.00am on 23 August. On that date, 81 years ago, Nicola Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti died in the electric chair in Charleston at 12.19 and 12.26am respectively, after a show trial which wa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici (Federation of Anarchist Communists) completes its 25th year of existence, making it the longest-lived anarchist communist political organization in Italy ever.
With the experiment that was the Organizzazione Rivoluzionaria Anarchica (ORA), following the abandonment of all hope of moving the Federazione Anarchica Italiana (FAI) towards firmly class-struggle positions, efforts were made to set up a political organization of anarchist communists back in the mid-1970s at a time when there were several hundred activists and militants who had emerged from the class struggle in the period of 1968–1977. However, it was only in the first half of the 1980s that the conditions were right for the most det... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The 2007 Budget has the hands of the European Union around its neck.
Lowering the GDP/deficit ratio to below 3% as priority and reducing the debt (both already foreseen in the government’s Budgetary Economic Program) — this is what the government hopes to achieve by cutting public expenditure and finding new resources. And instead of redistributing the wealth, this work of frenzied accountancy rakes in billions of Euro by getting the money from the usual places — from our wages, our severance pay, and from the pensions of workers of all kinds.
The advantages for the State
The State’s technocrats need to be presentable in the eyes of Brussels and to continue along the road of a State “withdrawal” from... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It doesn’t need to stand for elections, be they national, regional or European, itself. It knows it will win anyway. From elections, it expects the State and local government system to be put at its disposal. From coalitions it expects the electorate to be divided by the various programs and parties on geographical, language, religious, ethical bases (even ideological if necessary), as long as citizens’ class interests are hidden from view.
It is content for even its worst enemies, the self-proclaimed anti-capitalist parties, to stand at elections so they can help demonstrate its strength and their electoral inconsistency. And as usual, they fall for the trick.
It wins with Obama and Sarkozy, with Berlusconi and Zapatero, with... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) (...) We have seen how the anarchist communist tendency descends directly from Bakuninist, pro-organization and communist thought, and how it has constantly had to stand up to the anti-organizational theories that have periodically appeared throughout the history of anarchism (and social democracy, too).
However, the “organizational” tendency of anarchism (for the sake of simplicity, we will use this name to describe that tendency that has historically been opposed to the “anti-organizational” trend in the anarchist movement — the anarcho-communists, nihilists, Sternerist individualists, etc.) has also included another tendency alongside the anarchist communist one — the libertarian communist tendency.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
Mass organizations differ from anarchist communist political organizations in that they have different bases and purposes. They do not have that clarity regarding the final goal that the political organization can have, though they potentially have the same goal as the political organization. History demonstrates that this goal (anarchist communism) is produced by a certain type of practice and consciousness within the mass organizations. These factors are based on the two principles of social self-management in struggle and in construction, and of the egalitarian and intransigent defense of those who work for society.
These are both logical principles, so much so that they may seem automatic; but history has shown that the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 0. Preface to the English edition
The Federation of Anarchist Communists (FdCA) was founded in 1985 on the principle of the theoretical and strategic unity of its members, a principle which it still holds to and will continue to do so. This principle means that the FdCA is based on its positions which are shared by the entire federated membership.
These positions are set out in a number of original Theoretical Documents which represent the unity of the Federation and its policies. They also represent the unity of its militants, federated into a single political organization and individually and collectively responsible for the political life and the political decisions of the FdCA.
Our Theoretical Documents are divided into Theory, Bas... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I — Introduction
Our Theory examines the history of the class struggle which leads us to become Anarchist Communists. The first part of our Basic Strategy analyzes our enemies, allowing us to understand what we need to do in order to survive despite the repression which the powers that be use against us, and also to destroy any obstacle which interferes with the realization of Anarchist Communism.
We have to establish the principles behind our action. These are not abstract concepts. They originate in the conditions under which we live and work and only if they are shared by all will they unite us and not contradict our practices. Although our practice is of necessity linked to the particular, specific conditions of the time and p... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The last decade has not been an easy one. It’s been one of continual retreat in the face of continuous attacks on the part of Italian capitalism and various governments on the living conditions of the Italian working classes.
The recent legislative attack on public goods such as water and the imposition of nuclear energy with the sole aim of producing profit, mindless of the health of millions of people, came as a result of the air of superiority and impunity which pervades the ruling classes, arrogantly suee of their ability to disspiate and undo what belongs to and is guaranteed to everyone, goods which are shared and available to all, safe in the knowledge that the popular classes had been brought to their knees, grapped by their ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The neo-liberal myth of unstoppable development linked to the spread of the market has evaporated, leaving a painful trail of contracted markets, only apparently resolvable through a sharpening of competition and international social dumping.
Thus, while capitalism is re-designing its geography, it finds apparent unity in shifting the responsibility (thanks to globalization) for its financial crisis onto the real economies of individual States and entire continents.
Because capitalism has always taken advantage of crises in order to regenerate itself, and re-work the strength ratios of the classes to its advantage.
In particular, throughout the West the working class is being forced to pay the price of a crisis it did not create, to acce... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Maybe it was desperation that led the INNSE workers in Milan to climb up onto a crane in an attempt to avoid the closure of their company and the sale of its equipment. Maybe it was desperation that also drove the LAMSE workers in Melfi and the CNH workers in Imola to do the same thing, or the Alcatel workers in Battipaglia who locked themselves into their factory and surrounded themselves with tanks of petrol.
Maybe it was desperation that forced these workers to put their own lives at risk.
But what kind of misery drove 23 France Telecom employes to commit suicide when they discovered they had lost their jobs, or drove the 32-year-old man from the Chloride factory in Bologna to hang himself on 24th July 2009 because he had been made red... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) At the start of the twentieth century, the Italian anarchist movement was rediscovering its ability to appear as an organized presence thanks in part to its work among the masses and the organic links which many militants had established since the 1890s with the new workers’ and peasants’ organizations. In the 1880s, as a result of the move to the tactic of “propaganda by the deed” by the international anarchist movement in reply to government repression, the path had been cleared for a tendency which was far from the established Bakuninist line. This was the anti-organizationalist tendency, which brought to an extreme the concept of the autonomy of the group and of the individual, with the result that any remaining ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Historians recognize the privatization and consequent fencing in of common or community lands (known as the commons) in 17th-century England as one of the fundamental processes leading to the industrial revolution. As a result of its gradual fencing in, the land which the law of usage had established as being for collective use by the rural population, was transformed into private property by means of special laws, the Enclosure Bills, and was henceforth used particularly for intensive sheep farming, the wool from which was to become the raw material for the new textiles industry. The wave of poverty that followed lasted several centuries.
However, lands in common use have not entirely disappeared. To date there are still parts of the terr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In Italy, there is a clear deterioration in the levels of democracy in the country, which can be seen both at institutional level and in general within society:
in the concentration of power in the executive, with the consequent authoritarian tendency to rely more and more on executive orders and deregulation;
in the decline of the legislative power of parliament, reduced to merely ratifying the government’s work and the decisions taken in the corridors of power, where there is collusion and connivance between the executive and the various economic oligarchies and the re-composition of the interests of various sectors of the Italian bourgeoisie;
in the current use of parliament against the judiciary;
in the destr... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Mikheil Saakashvili and his dexterous National Movement were brought to power in Georgia on the wave of a “rose revolution” in 2004. In these last four years, Georgia has strengthened its links with NATO and the EU, but has had to put up with a tough embargo on its goods from Russia, which props up the two secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both effectively out of Georgian control.
Saakashvili as president has not kept his promises. At least a third of the Georgian population is living below the poverty line; unemployment is officially at 16% but is actually much higher; the monthly pension is €16. Current employment legislation permits employers to fire workers without just cause. Popular discontent explo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On 28th November 1977 a young comrade, Benedetto Petrone, was killed in Bari by a fascist squad. The city reacted with a popular campaign against fascism and reintroduced the best values of the Resistance on a mass level: anti-fascist struggles as anti-capitalist struggles, against the exploitation of one by another, for a society without classes.
That movement came up with the best and most militant response to the vicious murder of comrade Petrone (only two months after the murder of Walter Rossi in Rome) through mass mobilization and direct action.
This mass response was of enormous value, as it pointed out clearly:
the need to beat fascism with mass mobilization;
that anti-fascist action must not be delegated to the State an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The theoretical documents on the USSR and China as incorrect transitional forms to communism have been canceled from our Basic Strategy. At the time these texts were written, the planned State model seemed to be quite efficient. On the one hand it was seen, by many struggle movements working within the capitalist system and by many national liberation movements in colonized countries, as a practical and ideological reference point known simply as Communism. On the other hand there were those (within the anarchist movement too) who, on the basis of the myth of an efficient, ever-present State, saw the Soviet model as a winning formula, one which could even impose its own rules on traditional capitalism. It therefore followed that the new soc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Graves. Industrial plants, building sites, farm machinery, tankers... all turned into grim graves imprisoning thousands of innocent workers. It happened with the flames at the Thyssen Krupp factory in Turin. It has happened again with the deadly gases from a tanker in Molfetta.
But for capitalism, exploited lives and ruined lives are nothing but costs. The employers’ federation’s “no” to sanctions against employers who do not invest in workplace safety (a measure that is included in the government decrees that they would have us believe are currently being passed and that would in any event have almost no effect on worker safety) smacks of contempt and the primacy of profit. Indeed, the workers are nothing but the l... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “... we seek greater perceptiveness, more responsibility, more decisiveness in order to achieve effective coordination when it is required, in order that agitation is not continually put off when possible, in order that general strikes are not always excluded when the grassroots demands them.
In a word, what we seek is greter faith in the abilities of the working class in struggle”.
(Declaration by the Anarchist Current for Union Defense, 4th Congress of the CGIL, 1956)
Following careful analysis of the current economic and political situation in Italy, of the grave crisis of overproduction which the capitalist world is going through, of its serious repercussions in the social sphere, such as the phenomenal rise in ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On Thursday 27 March the funeral of our comrade Franco Salomone was held in Savona. Many workers and comrades were in attendance: colleagues and comrades in struggle from his union, old libertarian communist comrades from Liguria and Lombardy, comrades from the Irish Workers Solidarity Movement who are currently in Italy, the Circolo FAI from Savona, the Savona branch of the USI, comrades from Lotta Comunista and, of course, the flags and comrades of the FdCA. An emotional and compact funeral cortege of around 80 people, marched through the streets of Savona, with a pause outside the offices of the local trades council where we were greeted by the CGIL flag at half mast.
Eulogies were delivered by Pippo Giudice, secretary of the Savona CGI... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The 2008–2009 school year is just beginning. It will, according to Education minister Gelmini, be the last for Italy’s public education system which significantly improved learning rates from the late 1960s to the latter half of the 1980s increasing and modernizing the various subjects and activities that students were engaged in, increasing the number of teachers, guaranteeing the right to an education for all those who used to be discriminated against by being inserted into special classes, thus getting rid of the obscene practice of selection on the basis of class that was a product of fascism. It was a school system that for some time was — consistent with the secular, pluralist and anti-racist tradition — active... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 1. The coming decade
A harsh reaction has been unleashed by States around the world against the cycle of social, labor and political struggles which have been carried on by the movements of opposition to neo-liberalism since the late 20th century, with a consequent general worsening of living conditions for millions of proletarians who are increasingly being enslaved by capitalist exploitation.
Several tendencies would seem to characterize the coming decade:
a tendency for finance to continue acting as the motor of the economy,
a tendency for the workforce to be re-organized into more intensive units of exploitation,
a tendency towards the concentration of sector monopolies which destroy social wealth and labor,
a ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Certain right-wing politicans have surprisingly launched the idea of introducing a weekly hour of Muslim religious instruction into the country’s public schools, giving rise to a debate based on nothing, given the enormous range and complexity of the changes that would be necessary in order to accord Islam with the same status currently enjoyed by Roman Catholicism.
So if these changes are so many and so complex (agreement between the State and Islam, the drawing up of a schools curriculum, the training of teachers, parliamentary legislation, and so on), then what exactly is the real aim of this move, presented as an apparent “liberalization” of the weekly hour of religion in schools?
In reality it is a move which is dei... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Before dealing with the problem of the Transitional Period, the anarchist communist political organization first needs to be clear on the various conceptions which foresee the end of the Bourgeois State as a result of the political and institutional rupture provoked by a successful proletarian revolution, not only from the point of view of terminology, but in terms of our basic strategy.
We go beyond the concepts of the “abolition of the State” or the “destruction of the State” as they imply two aspects regarding the end of the State that are based on the violent action by a group of professional politicians and the instantaneous or rapid nature of this action.
Diametrically opposed to these two concepts can be fou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The right’s class project
Over these past 5 years it has become clear that the right-wing coalition that governed Italy after 2001 was not proof of the virtuous existence of a system of alternating governments in a bourgeois democracy. It was the expression of a class project aimed at restoring capitalist, authoritarian and clerical-fascist command in this country. A devastating and socially well-rooted project which operated on four main aspects:
to allow the Italian industrial system to decay as a source of income, wages and jobs, as nothing threatened profits from surplus value and capital gains;
to marketize the entire system of protections, rights and freedoms, putting millions of Italian and immigrant workers at the... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Not too long ago it was enough for someone to be a “terrone” [1] for them to be immediately branded as a mafioso, of a violent nature and inferior to the pure race of Northern Italy. If they were found “in the wrong place” looking for work in the north or having difficulty finding somewhere to live or work, they could easily be sent back to their home towns by means of an expulsion order.
Today, many of the children and grandchildren of those “terroni” who actually managed to find work in the North have forgotten all this, thanks also to the influence of the powers that be, and are now happily taking it out on the latest arrivals, especially those from Eastern European countries, despite the fact that ma... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the tragic and bloody framework of the wars (both geopolitical wars and wars for the sake of war) for the strategic control of raw materials, which from the Middle East to Central Asia sees a clash of imperialist interests for the control of energy resourses and of the various corridors needed to bring oil, gas and water out of the area, the stakes have been raised by Putin’s (and Gazprom’s) Russia on the very eve of Putin taking over the presidency of the G8 and Gazprom placing 49% of its juicy shares on the market. It is well known that in that part of the world, the various oligarchies (governmental or not, Islamic or not), the capitalist elites and national bourgeoisies can no longer do without the close link between thei... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)