Like every year we met at the plaque commemorating Ilio Baroni, anarchist
partisan. ---- Thanks to a beautiful spring day we stopped for a long timebetween Corso Giulio Cesare and Corso Novara. The marble that recalls ourcompanion Ilio is above what was once the abutment of a bridge under which floweda canal that served the industries of the area. Once the factories were closed,the canal was filled in: only an old brick wall remains to remember the strugglesof the workers' barrier. ---- The afternoon passes between interventions, wine,torcetti, chatter and the anarchist songbook, anti-fascist partisan interpretedby Alba, guitar and solo voice.Today more than ever to find ourselves in that corner of the suburbs, whereBaroni fell fighting, is not a mere exercise in memory, but an opportunity toweave the threads of the struggles, because the witness left by those who are nolonger there is now in our hands .Ilio Baroni, a Tuscan worker who emigrated to Turin in the 1920s, was commanderof the VII Sap delle Ferriere brigade.The SAPs sabotaged production, clandestinely distributed anti-fascist leafletsand prepared for insurrection. Ilio, battle name "il Moro", is the protagonist ofguerrilla actions.On 25 April in Turin the city was paralyzed by the general strike, theinsurrection broke out, the city soon became a battlefield.Baroni and his friends attack the Dora station and earn a success. A request forhelp arrives from Grandi Motori. The Moor does not hesitate to help hiscompanions in the midst of a furious battle, and falls under fire. It's April 26th.Ilio Baroni will not be able to see the moment for which he fought so hard allhis life...But fascism did not die in that distant April...Between exploitation, precarious and dangerous jobs, deaths at sea, racist laws,soldiers on the streets, war, democracy increasingly resembles fascism. The heirsof the dictatorship are in government today and, day after day, multiply therepressive grip on the poor, on political * and social * opponentsThe people of Barriera have different faces and stories but the same condition ofexploitation and oppression as those who fought fascism because they wanted asociety without state or masters.In 1917, in the midst of World War II, the strike against war and hunger turnedinto an insurrection: every corner of the Barrier became a barricade. To counterthe charges on horseback, electrified barricades were inaugurated. In PiazzaCrispi there was a modern school, where anarchist workers studied to master theknowledge reserved for gentlemen, to learn to self-manage the society of free andequals they had in their heads and in their hands.During Fascism, despite the harsh repression, one of the three clandestineanarchist groups in Turin was active in Barriera. During the years of theResistance, the Barrier was the scene of very hard struggles, first in thefactory, then in the streets.They defended the factories from destruction, because the memory of the 1920s wasalive in them, of the occupation of the factories, of the armed struggle to oustthe bosses forever.The end of fascism did not bring the life for which so many had fought and died.But the thread of struggles did not break. In the 1960s and 1970s, the face ofthe barrier changed: workers from the South and the Veneto arrived alongside theTurinese and Piedmontese peasants who had settled in the city.Living together was not easy. It was the common struggles that broke down thewall of mistrust and even racism between the Piedmontese workers and the latestarrivals. In the factory, everyone's enemy was always the boss and those whoserved him, in the working-class suburbs the struggles for housing, transport,schools, health care were the front on which the Barrier community was rebuilt, acommunity that became inclusive, in solidarity among equals.Then came the eighties. And little by little everything changed. Work, here as inthe rest of the country, has become increasingly precarious, dangerous andfragmented. The class struggle continues, but it has been the bosses who have wonit so far.Finding a front of common struggle with the immigrants who arrived from Africa,China, South America, Eastern countries is not always easy, even if for someyears something has been starting to move.Today life in the Barriera is increasingly difficult.The price of gas and electricity has doubled, many people are being evicted orhave their homes up for auction. There is no money for rent and bills and healthprotection is now a luxury commodity that few can afford.The war in Ukraine is making the lives of the poor even more precarious, amidinflation and increased military spending.In the northern suburbs of Turin, in Aurora and Barriera, where most of theimmigrants living in the city are concentrated, military control is becoming moresuffocating day by day. Entire areas of the neighborhood are placed under siege,with continuous roundups of people without documents or who live thanks to aninformal economy.Treating social issues in terms of public order is a clear choice of themunicipal administration-The government of the city and that of the district bet on the war between poorItalians and poor immigrants, to have a free hand in the processes ofexclusionary redevelopment underway in the northern suburbs of the city.Processes that, as anarchists rooted in the neighborhood for over forty years, wetry to jam with initiatives of information, struggle, sociality in the spaces putunder siege by the police, in those threatened with eviction or eviction.Memory is not a rhetorical exercise, but sap that expands between yesterday's andtoday's struggles.For decades they have embalmed the Resistance by reducing it to a mere nationalliberation struggle, to erase its subversive, internationalist drive against thestate and the bosses.Today we would all like to enlist in the imperialist war between Russia andUkraine. We're not here. We are not enlisting either with NATO or with Russia. Wereject patriotic rhetoric as an element of legitimization of states and theirexpansionary claims. Antimilitarism, internationalism, revolutionary defeatismhave been central to the struggles of the workers' movement since its origins.Exploitation and oppression strike equally at all latitudes, the conflict against"one's" masters and against "one's" rulers is the best way to oppose stateviolence and the savagery of capitalism everywhere.We stand by the people who die under bombs in Ukraine, we stand by those inRussia who suffer imprisonment and repression for opposing the war in Ukraine.We are against the war economy here and everywhere.We are on the side of those who, everywhere, desert the war between states, whichcontend for imperial domination over territories, resources, the lives of women,men and children *.We are against war and those who arm it, starting with the arms giant Leonardo,who does good business with everyone and is about to build the aerospace city inTurin.We are deserters of every war, partisans against every state.The comrades who fought in the streets of Barriera, who defended the factoriesfrom destruction, had in their hands the dream of ending oppression and poverty.They were the ones like Ilio Baroni, a worker at the ironworks, who fell fightingfor anarchy.https://www.anarresinfo.org/torino-25-aprile-disertori-di-tutte-le-guerre-partigiani-contro-tutti-gli-stati/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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