#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #ITALY #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) Italy, Livorno, AC: Scattered reflections on Fridays For Future FROM CLIMATE STRIKE TO CONVERGENCE (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Telling the Fridays for Future climate justice movement today is complex. Firstly

for its many souls, secondly for the different forms in which it takes shape in
different parts of the country. However, it is possible to try to grasp its
evolutions and to look at the processes in progress, aware that they do not
exhaust the understanding of this galaxy but they give us substantial clues and
show us spaces for action and interstices that open up for a radical fight
against this system. ---- I was an activist for Fridays for Future for several
years, except to step aside when a generation much younger than mine took over
the reins of the now fragmented group (for several reasons, including the urgency
to migrate in search of work or to return to their hometown after finishing their
studies not being able to afford to pay a rent, a structural condition in our
precarious generation), trying to root it in schools. However, this experience
was very formative from a political point of view. I remember very well, in the
initial phase of this movement, the constant recommendation - which at times took
on tones of judgment and condemnation - by very politicized groups who took the
chair to remember that environmentalism without class struggle is gardening.

unitx to FFF coming from anti-capitalist militancy paths, so we understood these
fears well.

Yet, by questioning not our principles but our posture within this movement, or
by accepting that - strengthened by our militant past - we would not have taught
anyone anything, but we will have discussed and learned everything together, we
have seen many processes being triggered. important and radical, which were not
the result of a militant discourse assumed by a new movement, but the result of a
process that brought different visions and languages into dialogue and imagined
new practices, going to the root of the problem.

People completely new to politics forced us to rethink militant work, and they
showed us a field of possibilities that we weren't able to look at. Thus, in this
continuous exchange that is as horizontal and dialectical as possible, the slogan
"let's give a voice to science" is

become "science is fine, but this must be read within specific power
relationships". The timid stances against the great devastating works of this
country have become, over the months, firm condemnations to the energy-intensive
and predatory paradigm of the great work, leading this movement to cross the
paths of the Valsusa against TAV, the fields of Coltano against the new military
base, the streets of Ravenna against the CCS[CO2 capture and storage project,
ed.]. The appeal to reduce CO2 emissions has been welded to a struggle so that
"those who pollute pay".

All this has meant looking at climate change, identifying its effects and
responsible for it starting from what we have immediately outside our front door.
Finding spaces for concrete action and conflict through which to territorially
decline the fight for climate justice, without losing the global framework of
this fight.

But not only. This also meant looking at the ecological question as a question of
power relations, rejecting those narratives that depict nature as a peaceful
terrain and the climate crisis as a challenge that sees us all in the same boat,
flattening the tensions and asymmetries that deeply connote this field of action.

Not surprisingly, a few months after the birth of this movement in March 2019,
campaigns began against specific subjects such as large fossil companies,
logistics multinationals, fast fashion brands and others. The Enemy of the planet
campaign brought various groups of FFF in front of the gates of ENI refineries,
Block Friday led - on Black Friday - to the blocking of large logistics chains
such as Amazon and fashion chains such as Zara, just to make examples.

FFF must therefore be recognized, with all the limitations that exist and
persist, for having pointed the finger at those responsible for ecological
degradation and climate change, managing to bring this level of analysis and
conflict out of militant circuits. At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact
that this process has not taken place in the same way and with the same intensity
throughout the country and that there is no total symmetry in terms of visions
and perspectives between local groups and those who fill the squares during the
climate strikes. These elements undoubtedly make FFF a multi-speed movement,
within which, however, new horizons and new alliances are being outlined that
could change its trajectory.

Fridays for Future, climate change and the workers' question

When the ecological question began to be read as a question of power relations,
the fulcrum of environmental injustice was grasped. Access to nature and exposure
to ecological degradation are not only the same for everyone, but depend on the
stratification of oppressions linked to gender, class, origin, age and others,
which make some subjectivities more exposed than others to environmental injustice.

In this context, what is most paradoxical has been the settling, in recent
decades, of a conflict between the right to a healthy environment and the right
to work, especially in areas where there is a consolidated presence of
refineries, steel and chemical industries, and in general factories that have a
strong impact on the environment and the climate. Yet, the working class is the
most exposed both to environmental degradation, due to its daily interaction with
harmfulness, and to climate change, as evidenced by the various victims that have
been in Italy in the workplace due to heat waves. and the significant increase in
accidents at work related to thermal stress (4 thousand more accidents per year
in Italy according to Inail).

As if that weren't enough, the costs of "environmental" and "ecological
transition" policies are now discharged onto the shoulders of the working class.
 From the measure to raise the price of fuel to reduce CO2 emissions decreed in
France in 2018, which led to the rise of the movement of the Gilets Jaunes,
mostly of proletarian composition and coming from the suburbs and rural areas, to
the dismissal of workers GKN of Campi Bisenzio in 2021 in the name of the
transition to electric cars (a market that in Italy does not appear to be
competitive according to the company) the class dimension of these environmental
policies has emerged in all its evidence.

This has concretely opened up a new battlefield for the climate justice movement,
in Italy and around the world. The mobilization of this worker component has
reopened a latent fracture, that between life and capital, which seemed to be
dormant, fragmented into a thousand other tensions unable to connect and
intersect, or bypassed by the environment-work fracture that now seemed
unshakeable and natural.

If the struggles in the factory in the 70s in Italy speak to us of a different
story, in which the working class takes center stage in the great "ecological
spring" of those years, obtaining significant environmental improvements in the
workplace - and consequently in the external environment - and transforming the
approach of the entire National Health System starting from prevention, the
struggles that are developing today in some workplaces remind us that this
apparently crystallized conflict is actually socially constructed by capital, and
that against this dynamic we are can act.

Compared to this space of conflict that has opened, animated by workers * who
rightly do not want to pay the price of an ecological transition that turns out
to be a large accumulation of capital in a "green" key, Fridays for Future has
entered well, working on an alliance and convergence with the worker component.

This happened with the Collettivo di Fabbrica GKN of Campi Bisenzio, leading to
two connected days of mobilization on 25 and 26 March of this year, but also in
Civitavecchia, where workers and ecological movements are working together to
block the reopening of the central coal and reconvert its production according to
appropriate environmental and social standards.

 From the climate strikes that put the voice of the student component at the
center, which rhetorically asked the world what it was for them to continue
studying for a future that has been stolen from them, this young movement has
come to block distribution chains, challenge big companies both at the gates of
the refineries and under the buildings where the assemblies and shareholders are
held, denouncing the speculation on the fossils of banks such as

Intesa San Paolo or Unicredit, to occupy the streets with the workers. It is
essential to take into account this whole process when we talk about the
ecological movement and ask ourselves about it. It is necessary to take this into
account in order to understand the procedural nature of the movements. The
squares - like

that of 23 September - they tell us something, but what happens between one
square and another? What spaces for comparison are being built? What
relationships are nurtured? Could all local FFF groups be reflected in this
description? I do not believe. And of course mine is also a partial perspective,
which concerns what I have seen, experienced and helped to build.

As a militant, now external to FFF, I wonder about this space of struggle, about
how to cross it, contaminate it and let myself be contaminated, without
pretending to provide a judgment or to teach anyone anything. I think it is
important to ask us all, and take care of a field of struggle and dialogue that
has opened, which could close or expand tomorrow, intertwining with all the other
struggles that cut across the ecological question. Precisely because it concerns
the very right to breathe, to eat, to drink water, in essence to live, nature is
the most political terrain there can be.

Paola Imperatore

https://collettivoanarchico.noblogs.org/post/2022/10/10/riflessioni-sparse-su-fridays-for-future-dal-climate-strike-alla-convergenza/
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