When, throughout the troubled history of class conflict, has a
government not expressed, in whole or in part, the interests of thebourgeois class? If this consideration is true, as we believe it to be,
it is appropriate to take it as a reference, to avoid believing that
governments and states are neutral instruments, or even usable tools, to
construct a desirable overthrow of the capitalist system. The current
government is certainly in line with the achievements of previous ones,
given that it has striven to pursue their classist choices with greater
alacrity. With this government, the intent to privilege the interests of
capital, the ruling classes, and the ruling classes has entered a much
more extensive phase, aided by the crisis, the escalating international
situation, and the implosion of the European Union, which has seen the
Meloni government completely subservient to US imperialism.
The latter has become more aggressive precisely because of its decline,
imposing its non-negotiable conditions on its European allies regarding
tariffs, energy supplies, guarantees for European investments to counter
deindustrialization in the US, tax protection for American companies in
Europe, and, above all, rearmament and armaments. The aim is to further
weaken the European Union by engaging it militarily in an armed
opposition to Russia in Ukraine and in the rearmament policies of the EU
states, while also discouraging any Chinese penetration of the West via
the "Silk Road."
The costs of this epochal restructuring are and will be passed on to
workers and the most vulnerable social classes in Europe, who are seeing
and will see their quality of life dramatically decline.
The Authoritarian Descent of Bourgeois Democracy
In the West, the clash between powers has revitalized military spending,
and every day there is a fear of war, with the obvious aim of creating
the conditions for it. In this context, militarism is strengthening in
every sphere of society, starting with schools.
In such a context, the current government has certainly revealed its
classist, reactionary, and repressive essence, with the serious
authoritarian drift it has inflicted on bourgeois democracy. Giorgia
Meloni's political origins, on the other hand, date back to the
neo-fascist formation of the Italian Social Movement, heir to the
Italian Social Republic, allied with the Nazis and present in the
Italian Parliament since 1948. These origins are shared by a large
number of its ministers and undersecretaries.
It should therefore come as no surprise that intolerant, violent, and
even openly fascist roles and behaviors are resurfacing in our society.
This does not necessarily imply the reemergence of fascism as a
governing hypothesis. Believing to see fascism behind every
authoritarian behavior of this government or that of other countries is
a failure to understand the class nature of bourgeois democracy. If in
other historical periods the bourgeoisie produced fascism from its own
soft underbelly (in Italy and Germany, fascism actually came to power
through elections), in a crisis like the current one, it has no need of
the fascist party, since in countless countries and circumstances it
still has the constitutional tools at its disposal to initiate
authoritarian and repressive twists for its own purposes of profit and
domination, which undoubtedly characterize the Meloni government in Italy.
The Security Decree (Legislative Decree No. 48 of April 11, 2025,
converted into Law No. 80 of June 9, 2025) perfectly represents this
authoritarian degeneration of bourgeois democracy. Thus, military
spending is being increased to 5% of GDP by 2035, in accordance with the
non-negotiable demands of the US and NATO, passively accepted by the EU
in the interests of arms manufacturers. Resources are being recovered
through cuts to the welfare state, particularly targeting education and
healthcare, which directly impact the quality of life of the lower
classes. Thus, for purely electoral purposes, tax evasion is encouraged
through amnesties, while simultaneously lowering tax rates for the
highest incomes. From this perspective, any individual or collective
opposition and any form of dissent are criminalized and equated with
issues of public order, and therefore harshly repressed.
Bourgeois Profit and Paper Rights
"Written rights, nothing but written, are mockeries of the people
mummified in code." With these words, our Mexican anarchist comrade
Guerrero Praxedis expressed a concept that remains relevant today over a
century ago, in the heat of the Mexican Revolution: Constitutions, even
the best in the world, as well as international law, remain merely
compromises enacted on paper by the very bourgeoisies capable of
rejecting them to defend their economic and political interests to the
bitter end.
The bourgeoisie is naturally inclined to assert its own particular
interests, and in crisis situations, where these interests are
challenged by a conflict between powers that increasingly tends toward a
global armed confrontation, there is no longer any room for negotiation
and compromise. In the absence of a significant class conflict capable
of curbing capitalist supremacy, the law is torn apart, rendered
impotent, and replaced with repression.
Hence the need for a continuous and widespread anti-fascist,
anti-militarist, and anti-war mobilization. To be effective, it must
necessarily and immediately connect with the struggle to defend the
living conditions of working people, linking the defense of immediate
interests to the historical interests of the proletariat within a truly
internationalist perspective.
In this difficult and alarming phase, it is essential and urgent to
understand what is happening, in order to realize that overcoming the
capitalist system and the horrors it produces is not only possible but
also timely and urgent. However, it is essential to avoid pursuing forms
of opposition that, in their spontaneous manifestation, risk being
reduced to self-referentiality and propaganda, as can happen in mass and
class movements.
"The end is nothing, the movement is everything."
It is certainly true that mass movements arise spontaneously from
widespread, concrete, and immediate needs and, like the need for peace,
are expressed by heterogeneous social strata. However, if the objective
pursued is detached from the prospect of overcoming war as an inevitable
tendency of the capitalist system, mass movements risk becoming
flattened by a drift that has developed in the historical evolution of
class struggle: "the end is nothing, the movement is everything." The
political and trade union forces that have interpreted this have been
unable to make any dent in capitalism and imperialism, but have been
reduced to supporting their effects, their aims, their wars, and all
their horrors.
This is not a critique of the current mobilizations against the war and
genocide underway in Gaza by the Israeli government and army, which we
should consider alongside Russia's aggression against Ukraine and the
more than fifty other conflicts bloodily affecting the planet. But it is
necessary to accept the basic fact that these are all wars fought by
proxy within the context of the conflict between the major imperialist
powers for control of the world market. Building a strong mass movement
is an essential and therefore not to be underestimated step in
countering the spread of wars and the economic and political interests
and structures that produce and sustain them. From this perspective,
every individual and collective contribution is useful in demonstrating
and broadening outrage and protest: from fasts, to minutes of silence,
to sit-ins and demonstrations, to port blockades, to general strikes
against the war, and to the powerful and unprecedented mobilization of
the Global Sumud Flotilla. A mass movement operates under the pressure
of individual and collective forces that certainly cannot be reduced to
the role of a political organization-an inevitably minority entity-but
which must nevertheless assume the ability to identify the limits of the
social spheres in which it articulates its active presence in the
reality of conflict, avoiding any divisive practice that consists in
underestimating immediate objectives and refraining from administering
"lessons in revolution" to those who pursue different positions.
Let us rediscover internationalism and solidarity among oppressed
classes around the world.
Consistent with the brightest internationalist periods of the anarchist
communist movement since its inception, we have always taken a concrete
stand against war, avoiding the campist tendencies that, yesterday as
today, push people to take sides in imperialist conflicts. It's one
thing to recognize the right to resist the Israeli invasion of the Gaza
Strip, but it's another to politically recognize or take as a point of
reference reactionary bourgeoisies that, like Hamas, exploit civilian
populations for their classist and power-seeking purposes and are ready
to bloodily repress any call for liberation.
There are no good (or "less bad") bourgeoisies or imperialisms to side
with. This is a false choice that anarchist communists, internationalist
revolutionaries, have always rejected and never made. We didn't do it in
1871 at the time of the Paris Commune, where the Parisian proletariat
rose up against the bourgeois government that fled before the Prussian
armies surrounding the capital. We didn't do it in the First Imperialist
World War, even when some authoritative figures of international
anarchism sided with the imperialism of the Entente, aligning themselves
with the social democracies that sided with their respective
imperialisms. We didn't do it in Russia during the civil war of 1918-21,
where the insurrectionary movement of the Ukrainian peasant and worker
proletariat, led by the anarchist comrade Nestor Makhno, defeated the
White armies on the battlefield, allowing the defeated Red Army to
reorganize and win the war. We did not do it in Spain during the war and
revolution of 1936-39, nor in Italy during the Resistance, when we
opposed the bourgeois and Stalinist tendencies of the Patriotic War. And
we do not do it today in Ukraine, Palestine, or anywhere else. We
reiterate and continue to embrace the luminous message of the German
internationalists during the First World War:
"For each individual, the main enemy is the bourgeoisie of his own country."
Internationalism, which must unite the subaltern classes in the defense
of their interests, cannot be continually enunciated; it must be updated
to the characteristics of the current phase and concretely expressed in
strategy, operational tactics, and organizational practice. For this
reason, it is necessary to continue the work of training a broad
anarchist communist militant movement, capable of taking root within the
working class to orient it toward unity, the defense of its living
conditions, and the pursuit of its historical interests of liberation
from capitalist domination.
Alternativa Libertaria/FdCA
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/
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