Taranto, a "laboratory city," where environmental disasters, military
occupation, and health care-in short, "power"-has succeeded in itsgreatest aspirations: dividing a people, starving them, and sowing death
in the name of profit. It might be said that all this happens almost
everywhere; it's well known that dividing a people has always served to
perpetuate its rule without any popular resistance. But here, it's
different: power has managed to go further. Through a multi-pronged
operation, it has managed to impact the conscience of our people,
causing disappointment, disaffection, habituation, and the abandonment
of any form of struggle, building and fostering prevailing individualism.
Struggles usually create collective consciousness, love for one's
territory, organization, and collective memory, even when they aren't
victorious.
The State, in its "City State," has managed to go further: it has
succeeded in spectacularizing dissent.
Since the largest popular uprising in 2012, in which a multitude raised
the issue of health and employment in an angry and joyful struggle, the
state has prepared, as it has in the past, to laboratory-build devices
that will fascinate the people (individuals willing to sell their charm
in order to satisfy state logic and personal interests) and to amplify
the hypertrophy of the egos of doctors, chemists, artists, lawyers,
professors, fixers, and new professional politicians unwilling to admit
the betrayals of their political parties.
To the people and for the people, incomprehensible words that generate
confusion: AIA (Integrated Environmental Authorization), PIC (Capital
Investment Plan), VIS (Health Impact Assessment), Article 15, program
agreement, regasification ship, decarbonization, pre-reduced, electric
furnaces, compensation, motivated dissent that will perhaps turn into
unmotivated assent. But the people have already condemned them; they
know about them, they just didn't vote! And while acknowledging the
validity of scientific data produced in the past, the public is no
longer willing to pursue ILVA on legal grounds, which only serves to
prolong the process and stoke anger, allowing the company to continue
producing deaths for the people of Taranto, debts we will all have to
pay, and profits for the owners.
The city community no longer needs to know the peaks of each substance
emitted. Suffice it to recall that in 2012, the Taranto Public
Prosecutor's Office estimated more than 11,000 deaths in seven years
linked to ILVA emissions and a lung cancer incidence rate of more than
50% above the regional average in the working-class Tamburi
neighborhood, near the ILVA plant. Arsenic, lead, and dioxin were
detected in soil and homes at up to 20 times the legal limits: in 50
years, red dust has covered streets, schools, and even gravestones in
the cemetery. The people of Taranto know that every family has been
affected by a loss, by an illness caused by pollution; the fishermen
know that the sea is no longer the same; the doctors know-without
needing INAIL data, perhaps even a conservative estimate, given that
INAIL is the state and not the local workers' representative-that
illnesses are on the rise and are causing death, and that treatment has
become a privilege for the few; the lawyers know that reimbursements,
even if they were granted, will not help to ease the pain of an entire
community.
And now, even the people know that self-pity is no longer helpful.
Those who should have done so have refused to face the health-work
blackmail for all these years because they were complicit in a culture
of subservience to the military and political hierarchies of this country.
With the Puglia region increasingly playing a leading role in the
rearmament and militarization process sponsored by the Meloni
government, ILVA could also play its part and receive funds earmarked
for rearmament, as it is considered a strategic military asset.
In the same Taranto area, a few kilometers from ILVA, another
contaminating company operates, with equally polluting emissions and an
equally active role in the militarization process: ENI. Indeed, ENI
itself is present in Palestinian territory for gas exploitation and
maintains economic relations with Israel, responsible for the Gaza genocide.
In the same process, government funds are earmarked for the expansion of
the military bases in Taranto and Brindisi to allow large Italian and
European aircraft carriers to reach the docks of the city's historic
centers.
ILVA will therefore continue to operate as long as it suits military
interests (e.g., NATO) and "state capitalism."
And the people of Taranto are no longer satisfied with the buck-passing
between the national government, the regional government, and the
municipality, which only serves to generate confusion, but has a
specific objective, desired and shared by all: Keeping the ILVA machine
afloat, prolonging the process to continue sowing pollution and death.
An initial attempt to neutralize the struggle was made with the
appointment as Environment Councilor of an environmental activist from
the Europa Verde list (on the Alleanza Verdi Sinistra list, to be clear,
the same list as President Vendola, who was intercepted in the 2016
"Ambiente Svenduto" investigation into the environmental disaster caused
by the ILVA steelworks in Taranto). This was soon challenged by citizens
protesting against the planned landfill in Taranto's working-class Paolo
VI neighborhood.
The small talk promised in opaque press conferences-far removed from the
citizens' needs-and the farcical resignation of the newly elected Mayor
due to "political unfitness," which he withdrew shortly thereafter, seem
intended to transform the legitimate popular protest into a public order
problem and advance the militarization of a territory in the name of
security.
The same idea of security is constantly used to expel the population
from the historic city center, aiming to make it merely an attractive
showcase for developers and new adventurers.
Transforming non-voting into anger, building a collective path to
reconstitute the class, beyond the old logic of self-celebration and
personalism: this is the task of those who have always resisted, of
those who love the people, of those who continue to live in this land
and in their community.
Therefore, launching a tenacious and continuous self-organized and
antimilitarist struggle, aiming in the near future for a social strike
with a blockade of the city and the factory, will serve to defend our
lives and the freedom of all.
Cosimo Cassetta
https://umanitanova.org/taranto-ilva-e-non-solo/
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