Preventive class war of the Italian State

The arrests that took place in the early morning of Tuesday, 19 July on a warrant from the Piacenza public prosecutor’s office are indicative of the repressive climate in Italy and the authoritarian turn in course. Four SI Cobas trade unionists were placed under house arrest for the long cycle of struggles that inflamed logistics from 2014 to 2021. Together with them, two USB trade unionists were also placed under house arrest and two others are the recipients of other precautionary measures. The prosecutor Grazia Pradella’s accusations are of conspiracy, assault, resisting a public official, sabotage and interruption of a public service aimed at extortion in order to obtain better wage conditions for workers.

We do not think we should be shocked by this repressive operation, as is happening at the moment, but rather that we should emphasise that it is an open manifestation, a true confession, of the mentality of the bourgeoisie in this historical period: for the gentlemen of GLS, Amazon, FedEx-TNT, as well as from the arrogant statements that are uttered every day by the leaders of Confindustria, everything must be allowed, everything must be permissible for them. Even putting up a tough fight for a wage increase becomes extortion. The whole loot belongs to them by right, one must not dare ask, one must not fight. The accusation of extortion is therefore not a scandal, but rather a sign of the times.

This repressive operation is in open complicity with the murders of Abd El Salam, moreover precisely in Piacenza in 2016, and of Adil Belakhdim, killed last year in the province of Novara. In both cases the murders took place during a strike picket, the same pickets that have repeatedly been attacked by police charges and assaults by company thugs in recent years. Therefore, judicially attacking self-defence practices means essentially acting in concert with the attackers and the murderers.

This investigation is an expression of the repressive turn of events that has been going on in recent years. The clearest manifestation of this is what is happening against the anarchist movement, where only in recent months we have had the sentencing to 28 years for Juan Sorroche, accused of two incendiary devices against a northern League premises in the province of Treviso, the transfer of Alfredo Cospito to 41 bis and the condemning of the same Alfredo and Anna Beniamino for political massacre with the real risk of a sentence that could go as far as life imprisonment.

We believe that these aspects – the repressive anti-anarchist specificity and the general repressive climate – should be considered together, because they are part of the same counter-insurgency strategy that aims explicitly at the removal of those components that, in different ways and forms, may represent an element of fermentation of anger or the maturation of a revolutionary consciousness. All this is happening in an increasingly impoverished economic context, after two years of militaristic management of the pandemic, during a war by proxy between Russia and NATO and the consequent energy and inflationary crisis.

What is underway is a real preventive class war by the State against its opponents. A war that aims to sterilise the social deflagration, anticipating its precipitation. It is time we also started fighting the class war with a response appropriate to the current attack. At every level: from the struggle in the places of exploitation, where we need to think of self-defence and reprisal structures to protect ourselves from the assaults of cops and henchmen, to the revolutionary struggle, whose practices we must defend and stand in continuity with all the more so at the present time.

Anarchists in Spoleto
20 July 2022

e-mail: circolaccioanarchico@inventati.org
telegram: t.me/circolaccioanarchicospoleto

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