Davide ‘Dax’ Cesare was a rebel, a militant anti-fascist, a proletarian, a real working class hero and a father. He spent his days driving a truck to bring home a salary and support a small daughter. His personality was marked by a passion for combat sports, the passional character of a young 26-year-old and a deep generosity. He was always in the front line against the injustices of this society: as a militant anti-fascist, he fought enthusiastically in defence of squats located in working-class neighbourhoods.
It has been 20 years since three infamous neo-fascists killed him, tearing him away from his family and his friends and comrades.
His memory remains indelibly etched in the hearts of those who knew and loved him. His greatest legacy is that impulse to rebel and continue to fight.
Neruda
CITAZIONE
16 MARCH 2003: THE BLACK NIGHT
VIA BRIOSCHI AND SAN PAOLO
In 2003, the Ticinese was a neighbourhood that, despite strong speculative transformations, maintained a historic antagonist identity. It is home to spaces such as Cox18, the Calusca bookstore, the Malfattori anarchist club, the Comitato Casa e Territorio, and the occupied houses in via Gola, Torricelli and Lagrange. In more recent times, new realities have taken root, such as R.A.S.H. Milano and O.R.So. (Officina della Resistenza Sociale), an occupied space in via Gola 16 in which the A.R.E.A. (Autorganisation Resistance And Antifascism) collective, the Comitato di Lotta per la Casa and the comrades of the Autsisters organise. On 16 March, like every Sunday evening, Dax and his friends went out together in the streets of the neighbourhood: the evening ended at Tipota in Via Brioschi, one of the places frequented by skins, punks and comrades.
Around 11pm, three neo-fascists, a father and two sons, arrive outside the club armed with knives. Dax gets in front, confronts them, does not run away. Hewas stabbed ten times: immediately hit in the throat and other vital points, he falls to the ground in a pool of blood. Next to him there is Alex, stabbed in the back, who remains on the ground and will later undergo emergency surgery on his lungs. A third comrade, Fabio, is injured. Everything takes place within seconds and, after cowardly blows, the three attackers flee.
Several police and carabinieri cars immediately arrive on the scene. The narrow streets between Via Brioschi and Via Zamenhof are obstructed by the presence of police cars, causing the ambulances to be significantly delayed as they are stuck in traffic at a distance. At the same time, several comrades and friends arrive on the place, finding a bloodshed scene. After the ambulances had left, a celere police truck arrived, descended the ward in riot gear, approached those present, who repelled them with shouts and insults.
At the emergency room of the San Paolo hospital, already manned by police and carabinieri, about twenty comrades are waiting for news. When the doctor tells them of Dax’s death, anger, grief and despair explode.
In the meantime, the presence of the police multiplies, inside and outside the hospital. The tension is extremely high. The cops immediately begin to provoke, insulting Dax (‘one less’) and the comrades present. It is now pure confrontation. No one is willing to take the provocations passively.
The riot squads, which had already been deployed for some time, quickly walk down the driveway leading to the entrance of the emergency room and brutal charges are unleashed inside and outside the building. They are long minutes of pure police violence during which the officers with batons, kicks, punches and baseball bats pounce on their comrades, smashing heads, noses, teeth, arms, beating them, pinning them to the ground and handcuffing them bleeding. While the emergency room is occupied and closed by the police, doctors and nurses mobilise to help the injured.
The responsibility for this slaughter lies not in the excesses of individual officers, but in the chain of command of the departments present. The objective of the operation is clear: to prevent possible militant responses to the fascist murder.
THE DISINFORMATION MACHINE AND THE INJUSTICE OF THE COURTS
In the days that followed, police and journalists tried to represent these events as a banal ‘brawl between hooligans’, concealing the political matrix of the incident.
Despite the presence of clear evidence, such as amateur films that captured the indiscriminate beatings and the many testimonies given by the medical staff, the trial for the events at the San Paolo ended in 2009 with the full acquittal of the police and carabinieri and the sentences of one year and eight months for two comrades accused of violence and resistance to public officials. To the criminal conviction is added a fine totalling 130,000 euro between court costs and compensation, a real pecuniary life sentence.
THE 130,000 CAMPAIGN
In 2011, the seizure of one fifth of the salary, which is still ongoing, against one of the convicted men and his children (the measure being hereditary) begins. The state decides to attack a collective struggle by hitting individuals who are part of it in their sources of livelihood. A repressive device that has been systematically reproposed in other contexts since 2003, as in the case of the Notav movement, the social struggles in Brescia, the 15 October 2011 demonstration in Rome and others.
The 130mila campaign has gathered solidarity all over Italy: for over twelve years, benefits and initiatives have followed one another, enabling comrades to be punctually compensated for what has been taken away from them by the state.
At San Paolo exactly as at Diaz: massacre, lies, condemnations.
Ours is a truth written in blood, which no legal reconstruction of convenience will ever be able to erase.
MEMORY IS A COLLECTIVE GEAR
On the twentieth anniversary of the Black Night in Milan, the memory of Dax and the clashes at the San Paolo hospital will be expressed through four days of remembrance and struggle capable of encompassing different themes and making the new generations protagonists.
The significance of this remembrance lies in building a deep awareness of how fascist squadrism operates, what police brutality is and how the judiciary is able to cover it up and legitimise it. Finally, to know the role of the media in the distortion of the truth, in the omission of the political matrix from the incident and in the criminalisation of Dax and his comrades.
Our truth and our story have been written from below, through the testimonies and documentation collected over the years and disseminated through communiqués, exhibitions, dossiers, a book and videos that have made the facts of the Black Night known throughout Italy and beyond.
In this work we never wanted to take a victimising tone, but one of vindication. We have claimed the political identity of Dax, who was killed because he was an anti-fascist and anti-capitalist militant.
In Latin America we say ‘No lo enterramos, lo sembramos’: we did not bury him, we sowed him.
From this seed have sprung projects, relations, events, analyses and practices that project themselves into the future by rooting themselves in the past, recognising themselves as part of a greater history of struggle that delineates the continuity between historical antifascism and the present.
This year Dax’s memory joins the remembrance of Fausto and Iaio, killed by fascists on 18 March 1978, marking a continuity between these figures within the history of Milan. A living history in which we recognise our own roots, our political identity, a history that reminds us where we come from and orients us towards the future. ‘In the night the stars guide us’ are the words chosen for the days of March 2023 because these comrades continue to illuminate the road of struggle.
After twenty years, the memory finds a new meaning thanks to the younger generations who, although they did not personally experience the events, have taken on the responsibility of being part of this collective gear, pursuing the same dream as Dax, with the same courage and enthusiasm. Young people who today are his comrades.
Fascismo
The years following the Black Night saw an escalation of physical attacks and fires on social spaces that continued for several years in Milan and Italy. Most of these attacks go unpunished, while there is a repressive crackdown on the Milanese anti-fascist movement, with denunciations, arrests and lengthy detentions.
After this phase, the fascists’ strategy changed, aiming to increase their agility through the creation of associations that were not immediately recognisable, dedicated to voluntary work or sport. This ‘social camouflage’ allowed groups, such as Lealtà Azione, to gain increasingly widespread legitimisation and political cover from parties, including Lega Nord and Fratelli d’Italia. By being included in their electoral lists, Nazi-fascist militants managed to get elected in local administrations. This is evidenced by the election with the Lega party of Stefano Pavesi, an exponent of Lealtà e Azione in the council of zone 8 in Milan.
The Meloni government aggravates this process of political cover-up. Among the highest offices of state are Ignazio La Russa, President of the Senate, who in the 1970s led the Fronte della Gioventù, a youth organisation of the Italian Social Movement, and Lorenzo Fontana, President of the Chamber of Deputies, a Lega member known for his homophobic, ultra-Catholic and anti-abortion statements.
The government immediately hit the most marginalised people by abolishing the Citizenship Income, instead showing generosity with the wealthier classes. It raged against migrants and NGOs; it passed the infamous ‘anti-rape’ law and the decree on hostile life imprisonment.
Italy has emerged from two pandemic years that ushered in a ‘permanent state of emergency’. We have inherited an even more fragmented reality in which the collective dimension has been lost and individual loneliness has been amplified. In this landscape, the discourses of the comrades appeal to people’s bellies: attacks against the right to abortion, security campaigns calling for more police in the streets, construction of the public enemy against whom to pour out social malaise, be it the immigrant, the poor, the ‘different’.
Racism permeates substantial layers of society, resulting in acts of violence whose protagonists are not always members of organised right-wing groups, but who translate its worst instances. The latest in order of time is the case of the murder of Alika Ogorchukwu perpetrated in Civitanova last August, or that of Youns El Boussettaoui murdered in Voghera in July 2021 by the Leghist councillor Massimo Adriatici, who was then sentenced to trial for culpable excess in self-defence.
It is important to remember that Italy has witnessed two serious xenophobic terrorist attacks. In 2011, Gianluca Casseri, leader of Casapound Pistoia, shot dead Samb Modou and Diop Mor in Florence. On 3 February 2018, in the centre of Macerata, Luca Traini, a candidate for the Northern League, wounded six migrants with gunshots.
These incidents are part of a sequence of white supremacist attacks that has bloodied the entire World in recent years.
Responsibility for the current situation also lies with the neo-liberal policies of the PD, which has pursued the right wing on the terrain of repression (see the Minniti law on immigration and the agreements with Libya, or the incomplete abolition of the Salvini package on public order).
Our task today is therefore to fight both street and institutional fascism. Antifascism is not only the defence of democracy and the Constitution, but it means fighting against this authoritarian, liberalist and patriarchal system.
Capitalism
History teaches us that fascism has always been a tool in the service of the capitalist system, used by the ruling classes from the very beginning. Even today in Italy and Europe, extreme right-wing organisations with their racist propaganda are functional to capitalist exploitation.
The management of migratory phenomena bends to the need to create profit, counting on masses of undocumented migrant workers, exploited with black labour and reduced to starvation conditions. This process determines a mechanism of blackmail and worsening of the conditions of the most ‘guaranteed’ workers, triggering the logic of war between the poor.
In the 1920s and 1930s, faced with the advance of revolutionary forces that sought to build a fair and just world from workers’ and peasants’ demands, the bourgeoisie did not hesitate to support fascisms’ seizure of power across Europe.
Similarly in the late 1960s and 1970s, in a world divided by the Cold War, the US and other NATO governments, particularly Italy, did not hesitate to arm right-wing extremism to carry out massacres and attacks. A fascist and state terrorism whose objective was to strike the revolutionary and social protest movements that animated the strong season of struggles in those years.
Even in the present, right-wingers continue to serve capitalism. At the social level, neo-fascist organisations attempt to enter the terrain of struggles such as housing, school and work, from a nationalist and xenophobic perspective, functional to the balance of capital. Within the current crisis conjuncture, in an increasingly mestizo society, the radical right has an easy time fomenting wars between the poor, fragmenting the social fabric, in order to erect walls between ‘cultural races’ and prevent class recomposition.
IMPERIALISM AND WAR
Capitalism is a competitive system that also envisages war as a means of resolving economic disputes: there are currently more than fifty wars in the world, most of which are the result of geopolitical interests unrelated to any kind of prospect of emancipation of the subaltern classes.
The USA, with the help of European countries, has been the biggest producer of wars in the last century, and today an armed conflict has arrived in the heart of Europe, at the culmination of an attempt by NATO to expand eastwards.
A conflict in which the clash on the ground between major world powers is dictated by the desire to gain political hegemony over the area, and for which the popular classes of the countries involved are paying the price. It is necessary to express solidarity with the peoples affected by rejecting the war propaganda of the Italian media that are giving a one-sided interpretation of the conflict, removing any reference to NATO responsibility in the genesis of the war and trying to brand every voice out of the chorus as a supporter of Putin.
In this context it is necessary to express a firm dissent to the participation of the Italian government in this conflict, reiterating its opposition to the sanctions against Russia and the sending of weapons to Ukraine, forcefully demanding the exit of Italy from NATO and the closure of all US military bases on our territory, claiming a right to peace, self-determination of peoples and class struggle against the oppression of any bourgeois, capitalist and oligarchic government.
The effects of the arms race weigh almost entirely on the subaltern classes: ever-increasing military spending is one of the main culprits of the cost of living and the dismantling of the welfare state.
To be anti-fascist is to be against all wars that are the daughters of imperialism and nationalism; wars that enrich capital, paid for by the subaltern classes, the civilian population, the people made weaker, from a human, social, economic and environmental point of view. We are against the proliferation of arms production and trade. We are against NATO’s logic of power and world domination. We stand for the self-determination of peoples, alongside those who rise up and revolt against the dictatorship of profit.
Lotte sociali
While armed conflicts rage at different latitudes of the planet, we live in a systemic crisis, in which a war economy generates caravans, wage compression, precarisation. Repressive attacks on the struggles that animate cities and workplaces, forms of resistance to exploitation and privatisation (health, social housing, schools) are intensifying.
The memory of Dax must be intertwined with anti-fascism, with the social struggles in which he himself was a protagonist, with a look at the most topical issues, such as environmental and climate disputes and student mobilisations, in order to cultivate a memory that knows how to look to the future.
HOUSING
The struggle for housing is not a rearguard battle but is today more than ever a struggle to change the social and economic model; it is a class struggle understood as the possibility of collective redemption against the same capitalist system that produces misery and exploitation. Beyond the contingent battles, the challenge of this struggle, which is inextricably linked to the revolutionary transformation of society, cannot be resolved in one area alone, but must be tackled by uniting the forces and experiences that cut across the different movements, in order to have an effective impact on the relations of force.
It is up to us to treasure the teaching of those who, like Dax, have always been in the front line to claim the right to housing. He reminds us that the concept of legitimacy, based on the elementary principle that identifies the right to live as an inalienable right of each of us, must be replaced by the concept of ‘legality’, behind which lie the interests of those who manage wealth and want to reproduce this regime of privileges and exploitation. A long battle, still to be fought, awaits us.
In Milan, major events (from Expo to the Winter Olympics) and the myth of private property are accelerating obvious gentrification phenomena, with the ‘redevelopment’ of suburban neighbourhoods and the ‘regeneration’ of large disused areas, to the delight of the luxury real estate market and the large financial conglomerates. While the ‘centre-left’ administration tries to build the image of a pacified city, the expulsion of the most disadvantaged social classes to the suburbs or to the hinterland is now a consolidated phenomenon, accompanied by the creation of increasingly exclusive neighbourhoods: we live in cities that are, on the one hand, increasingly cemented and, on the other, increasingly exclusionary policies, where the constant quest for attractiveness erases the history and identity of our neighbourhoods.
In recent years we have witnessed a constant impoverishment of the population, accompanied by an exponential tightening in the mechanisms of repression of dissent. In fact, we have witnessed the spread of committees for the right to live, which have developed transversally from North to South in all the main Italian cities. A large segment of the population affected by the economic and financial crisis has sought an alternative to isolation in the collective practices of housing movements. The struggle for the allocation of social housing and the claiming of the practice of occupations of vacant houses, as well as the blocking of evictions, evictions and foreclosures through pickets, garrisons and processions have been the centre of gravity of the movements for the right to housing, which continue to affirm the centrality of social needs in public policies and indicate a perspective of transformation based on equality.
The legislative system has not been slow to adapt through a series of measures that are part of a single design, right-wing and ‘left-wing’, with the dual objective of striking any social autonomy and self-organisation from below, while leaving intact the structural framework of problems, inequalities in access to housing and the lack of effective social and housing policies.
Among these, the Piano Casa officially sanctions the selling off of public residential property (art.3), the impossibility of requesting civil registration and water, electricity and gas connections for people and families living in an occupied property (art.5). In the wake of the Piano Casa, a number of regional laws have also been issued (in the case of Lombardy, 16/2016) that increase the privatisation process and the selling off of public real estate assets, raise the requirements for access to the rankings, and tighten repressive measures to prevent occupations.
It is within this legal framework that the housing issue in Milan is managed. One of the cities with the most expensive rents in Italy, it has thousands of uninhabited or uninhabitable council houses and tens of thousands of people cut off from the allocation list. To be exact, there are 9,839 uninhabited or uninhabitable council housing units compared to 27,000 allottees on the ranking list in the Municipality of Milan alone. Here they have crystallised.
Lavoro
The pandemic has made forms of exploitation in the world of work more evident and created new ones.
Severely affected have been the categories of unprotected intermittent workers, such as entertainment workers, who have become self-organised in a path of struggle.
The sharing economy platforms have unleashed unprecedented processes of precariousness: particularly significant in this regard have been the disputes of the riders, as forms of protagonism, often self-organised, of migrant workers.
In recent years, the practice of smart working, a risky drift of a process of isolation and overlapping of life and work times, especially when imposed for the pure purpose of externalising the cost of labour on the shoulders of employees, has become established. Milan, capital of the advanced tertiary sector, has been significantly affected by these factors.
Despite this scenario, there is little social conflict in the workplace, thanks to a constant policy of downward agreements between companies and confederal trade unions and the increasing atomisation of work contexts.
The world of logistics is bucking the trend, representing a combative example in terms of demands and practices of struggle. In recent years there have been dozens of occasions of pickets where workers have fought against the fascist squadrism of Italian and multinational bosses, intervening in agreement with the police forces. Fascism and racism are nothing new for the workers in struggle. Fascism was born precisely with the assaults on pickets and demonstrations, and continues to play the same role in the hands of power.
The joint repressive and anti-worker action between state, bosses and neo-fascists has manifested itself time and again. The scab actions, carried out by workers who are probably addicted to the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the last governments and the pressure of those bosses willing to do anything to get the goods moving, went as far as the murder of SI COBAS trade unionist Adil during a national strike in Novara, outside the gates of Lidl. In that case a charge of ‘road homicide’ was brought against the perpetrator, without considering any responsibility on the part of the company pressing for an end to the blockade of the gates.
The process of self-organised unionisation now comes up against attacks from the public prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of the Interior. A repression that culminated in the summer of 2022 with the arrest of four comrades of the SI Cobas and two trade unionists of Usb, accused of criminal association in an attempt to equate trade union organisations with a criminal syndicate.
These experiences have been able to fight the racism of the institutions and the bosses by fighting for the recognition of a legal position starting from the workplace, combating discrimination, and bringing to light the harassment and abuse of caporalato on workers who are more vulnerable to blackmail because they are immigrants.
The battle of the logistics workers shows how the emancipation of the exploited is played out in the midst of strikes and class clashes. Until fifteen years ago, total arbitrariness reigned in the warehouses: the bosses could choose the number of workers according to the flexibility regime, and to ask for elementary rights, such as employment or the application of a regular employment contract, meant losing one’s job.
Today, the workers’ struggles must connect the issue of anti-fascism with that of anti-racism and internationalism, which have become a political growth ground in the logistics warehouses, where most of the members have already experienced the effects of the colonial wars waged by western democracies in Africa and the Middle East on their skin and in their home countries.
The logistics workers, who today can boast a vanguard position in relation to other sectors of industry within the country, will advance on an ever steeper terrain if we do not realise the responsibility of having to reweave the links with all the protagonists of the social struggles that have framed the current phase and capitalist structure as a point of no return, a condition impossible to reform.
SCHOOL
Following the alienating period of the Covid-19 emergency, students all over Italy have perceived the urgent need to claim spaces and times that over the years have been increasingly taken away from them, inside schools – which are less and less traversable and accessible to all and sundry – as well as in the streets and in society as a whole.
In this sense, action from below has become fundamental: the more the school is transformed into the space of private and corporate interests, the more our responses must take the form of the permanent occupation of schools, parks and gyms, self-organisation, confrontation and exchange of ideas, ideals and thoughts. Schools belong to us. A recent example is the tide of occupations that swept across Italy last year, nothing more than the tip of the iceberg of a widespread and deep generational malaise.
The occupations that have taken place since the return to face-to-face teaching until now have been of fundamental importance. In fact, they have made possible moments of sociability, confrontation and exchange, moments that constitute one of the most effective and widespread anti-fascist practices within the youth fabric, as it allows for the creation of united, solidary and cohesive communities, where those who are part of it have the opportunity to develop critical and autonomous thoughts shared within collective discourses, to recognise themselves in a free and purposeful space and to experience in an alternative way the arid and flat reality that surrounds us outside the forms of oppression that we suffer on a daily basis.
In this context, the role of male and female students must be to carry forward practices and methods that have already been experimented and internalised, but at the same time to propose new ones, in step with changing habits and needs. Creating resilient and aware communities within each school means creating a network of horizontal participation and exchange, which is able to foster the circulation of knowledge and, consequently, also the sharing of practices of struggle, political and ideological cues.
It is fundamental to develop a solid and widespread anti-fascist collective memory, and it is precisely through practices of struggle that are in a constant state of renewal and compatible with the habits of students that we are able to create moments of shared memories and experiences.
School and society cannot be understood as separate entities, but rather as two realities that contaminate each other. Students must fight for an anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian school, free from all forms of prevarication and abuse. In doing so, however, it is crucial not to forget that the hierarchical structures within schools are the result of a system that exists outside schools: the alternating school-work system is in this the most intuitive and obvious example of the increasingly intrusive intrusion of privatisation within schools. Measures such as this are used to normalise the exploitation of students, but above all to discriminate in class between high school students and technical and vocational school students: while high school students take part in cultural initiatives inherent to the educational programme, technical and vocational schools often send their students to work long hours in warehouses and offices, often outside school hours, concluding contracts and agreements in which students remain totally powerless and in the dark. And as if that were not enough, in order to be admitted to the baccalaureate, students must have a minimum of 90 hours of alternance in high schools, 150 in technical institutes, and 210 in professional institutes. An exploitation passed off as a training course that cost the lives, in less than a year, of three students: Lorenzo, Giuseppe and Giuliano.
As anti-fascists and anti-fascists we fight for schools to free and accessible to all, but this will not be possible until fascism is eradicated from its deepest roots in society as a whole.
Ambiente
The choice to organise COP 27 in a country with an authoritarian regime like Egypt, which bases its regime’s survival on the massive exploitation of fossil fuels, is emblematic of the political management of the ecological crisis. On the one hand, it underlines the hypocrisy of the proposals with which the neoliberal system and the empty rhetoric of its ruling class reproduce the logic of capital and profit in the framework of green renewal; on the other hand, it makes it clear how much the systemic restructuring of capitalism from a smart and eco-sustainable perspective needs exclusivity and military control. We know for a fact that the COP mechanism, as an emanation of the UN, cannot be the solution to reverse the process of ecological devastation underway to the detriment of the planet.
In the meantime, energy multinationals and financial groups have exponentially increased gas and energy prices by declaring it impossible to get gas at the pre-war cost. A company like Eni has continued and continues to buy Russian gas at a locked-in price (on the basis of multi-year agreements) but reselling it to citizens and businesses at the very high costs we know so well. This speculation took place with the blessing of the Draghi and Meloni governments. The game of extra profits pleases the shareholders and investment funds of the banks, while the subordinated classes pay the consequences, because, in addition to higher energy bills, the rise in energy prices increases the cost of production of raw materials, transport, and consequently the prices of basic necessities. Cargo and climate crisis feed off each other, just as the perennial state of emergency feeds the austerity manoeuvres of governments of all colours in indifference to ‘environmental protection’. Responsibility, in each case, is shifted to the individual actors at the bottom of society, in the false belief that ‘small individual gestures’ can revolutionise the world. However, increases (such as petrol prices or ATM tickets) are paid twice by ordinary people: in bills and with the rising cost of living.
In this context, the Italian state and large private investors do not stop their chase to grab the last remaining patches of land, or to ‘reconvert’ those already in use through clever greenwashing operations. One example is the regasifier located off the coast of Piombino, which, planned without an environmental impact assessment, will be used to process liquid gas from the areas affected by GIS (special intervention group) activities in the nearby Coltano military base. We must also remember the new government’s choice, with the amendment to the Aiuti-ter decree, to proceed with drilling for gas extraction, now considered a ‘green’ resource by the European Union.
There is nothing ‘normal’ in the melting of the Marmolada glacier, in the floods in the Marche region, in the tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by the industrial production of superfluous goods, in intensive livestock farming, in the construction of great useless works (such as those instrumental in the realisation of Milan-Cortina 2026) and in wild cementing. These phenomena have nothing ‘natural’ about them, because they are the direct consequence of the violence with which those in power consume ecosystems on a daily basis. The answers then lie not in the market and infinite growth, but in a radical change in modes of production, in the collective need to alternatively inhabit territories outside of extractivist dynamics.
Thanks to feminist theories, we know that the environment and our bodies influence each other. Yet we see that this environment is not the same for everyone: some are reserved environmental privileges to which others are not entitled. We need access to clean air and water, nutritious food, the chance to take care of our own and others’ health: every environmental issue is a reproductive issue, and vice versa.
What they call ‘regeneration’ is not possible where incinerators, landfills and intoxicating factories deprive those who inhabit contaminated areas with their bodies of the chance to breathe.
We want to reiterate loudly that we do not think of the environment as a space in which to place ourselves, as a place to get to, nor as a collection of resources. The environment for us is not a container, nor is it a setting. We have learnt to recognise the environment as an interweaving of ecosystems, social spaces, nature and culture, human and non-human. ‘Our’ environment is the space we inhabit in the midst of political decisions, economic manoeuvres and the depletion of biodiversity.
This is why, today more than ever, it is necessary to frame the ecological and climate struggle in an anti-fascist and anti-capitalist perspective.
Saving the environment means taking it out of the greed hands of bosses and capitalists, out of the exclusionary and fascist hands of police control, fighting for the collapse of all political and economic imperialism. At the same time it means fighting for rights, because there is no climate justice without social justice!
Antifascismo sociale
Anti-fascism is more than a specific struggle: it is an all-round struggle against the ‘capitalist’ existing.
It is therefore necessary to review both the theoretical and practical side of anti-fascism, aware of the partiality of militant practices alone and at the same time of the incompleteness of an exclusively cultural attitude.
A social anti-fascist discourse must be able to carry out a daily exercise in deconstructing patriarchy.
Transfeminism and the intersectional posture, understood as the continuous intertwining of oppressions (racial, gender, class) help us in trying to free ourselves from those patriarchal residues that pollute our experiences. These practices should create a value base that unhinges sexist, authoritarian and hegemonic modes, induced by the dominant culture in the capitalist system.
Opposing an eviction, resisting an eviction, blocking a warship outside a port, supporting pickets of workers in struggle, fighting against gender-based violence or fighting for public and accessible health care, are today practices of conflict, of resistance, concrete practices of social anti-fascism. So are those modes of autonomous and communitarian territorial organisation that promote an anti-fascist way of life: from gyms to popular after-school centres, from clinics to radio stations and self-managed spaces.
To the isolation, individualism and atomisation that disintegrate the social fabric, exacerbated by the pandemic, we must be able to oppose a becoming community, to bring the self back to feeling part of a we, to be able to satisfy the natural need for belonging and security through forms of self-organisation, enabling neighbourhood inhabitants to overcome fear and loneliness. Where capital has intervened to destroy everyday relationships, leaving us isolated and divided in the face of our problems and needs, we need to develop a collective response, a social network that knows how to become a community through solidarity, mutualism, self-organisation and self-governance so that we can regain control of our lives, feel safe and secure, free and liberated.
Sharing, solidarity, mutual support are the values on the basis of which, for years, gyms and popular kitchens, free film festivals, solidarity buying groups and food outlets, counterculture festivals, popular workshops and carpentries, clinics and social spaces have been built: all with self-organisation from below, independent of any state body.
Social antifascism constitutes an instrument for organising common life. It represents for us one of the possible practices of overthrowing the status quo. A tool for building a power, anti-fascist communities capable of uniting to fight injustice.
Anti-fascism as a whole thus becomes a container for other apparently different social demands. With this in mind, it is essential to start with an approach that addresses the needs of the territories, so that a non-fascist way of life takes root in the communities that inhabit them, in which intolerant ideas cannot find fertile ground.
To build resilient communities that know how to oppose fascism in all the forms it takes today, in an attempt to direct upwards those conflicts that derive from social malaise and that all too often are instead hurled at the most marginalised subjects.
In order to act a social anti-fascism, it is necessary to implement a set of practices to build resilient communities, ethically, politically, relationally and culturally set up as essentially anti-fascist; a tool to fight a multiform, widespread and populist fascism. An anti-fascism capable of fighting not only on a cultural or militant level, but on the ground of political mobilisation and the rooting of its discourses in the territories.
20.01.2023
At the time of the publication of this political document, anarchist comrade Alfredo Cospito, imprisoned in the 41 bis torture section of the Bancali prison in Sassari, has been on hunger strike for over 90 days in his fight against 41 bis and life imprisonment. It should be noted that this annihilating and annihilating prison regime also houses three communist comrades (Nadia Lioce, Roberto Morandi, Marco Mezzasalma) along with over 700 other people. The repression widens its plots and never stops striking: from 41bis to the crime of devastation and looting, passing through the resistance to the various demonstrations and arriving at the investigations for criminal associations to prosecute social struggles.
To date, many other comrades are in prison, it is important to remember those who with their lives, their struggles and their practices have crossed the city of Milan and are now imprisoned, in jail or inside a flat, or are waiting for decisions of various courts and the filing of sentences: our solidarity goes to Vince, Casper, Dayvid and Maurizio.
Alfredo’s fight against prison and against one of its cruellest devices of annihilation of the individual, is part of the practices of resistance to the authoritarianism of the state.
In affirming anti-fascist and anti-capitalist values, we cannot fail to sympathise with his struggle, denouncing how the deafening silence of the state apparatuses amounts to a death sentence.
Assembly towards 16 March 2023