This outline summarizes the presentation given during the session
"Anarchism and New Movements" at the Carrara Conference (October 11-12,2025) on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the FAI - Anarchism. A
Global and Italian History 1945-2025. Illustrating the relationship
between social movements and major projects means first of all linking
the term "major projects" to the more honest concept of "major
projects." And what are major projects? Projects and achievements
(generally) characterized by: extensive temporal scope, spatial
vastness, administrative plurality, project complexity, significant
public financial commitment, and significant socio-environmental impact.
Moreover, major projects are considered, more than just infrastructure,
as accelerators of developmental modernity and the procedures that
govern civil-law decisions, stressors of the law, that is,
unconventional territorial governance mechanisms.
Large-scale projects rhyme first and foremost with major events (large
events?), with which they share several key characteristics. However,
these events are not taking place in the infrastructure sector (not to
mention the national nuclear waste repository) but rather in the sports
and exhibition sectors, playing the cards of tourist attraction and
internationalization. Beyond the scope of the stated objectives, we can
recognize other evidence that cuts across the two policies, including
the tactical nature of the haste/delay blackmail, the impossible escape
from the exceptionalist phase, and the recourse (never supported by an
ex-post assessment) to the discursive level of the economy of promise.
Another way to approach the topic takes its cue from two dashboards
published respectively by the Ministry of Infrastructure
(osservacantieri.mit.gov.it) and by the Società Infrastrutture Milano
Cortina 2026 (simico.it). The first portal summarizes the costs and
types of projects surveyed in a few "muscular" figures: 112 public works
for a total investment of EUR133 billion, of which are under special
administration: 38 railways, 32 roads, 22 state construction, 12 water,
5 ports, and 3 light rail. Perhaps more interesting is the open data,
also institutional, presented in the 2026 Winter Olympics Project Plan:
98 projects monitored for EUR3.4 billion in investments (just over half
of the entire Olympic Games), including 31 projects directly related to
the event, and 67 purely legacy projects, with construction sites
scheduled for completion (as of today) by spring 2033. Half of the
construction sites and costs are allocated to Lombardy alone, with an
imbalance between the works actually required for the Games and the
legacy of fossil fuel infrastructure, the ratio of which is more than
one to ten.
It is not my intention to delve into the intricacies of legality,
transparency, and criminality, always placed before any further, purely
political considerations. Legal, transparent, and accountable Winter
Olympics is, moreover, the motto of some critics of the Milan-Cortina
2026 ticket, who are otherwise engaged in highly valuable initiatives,
such as the Open Olympics dossiers. These are, in my opinion, fragile
and slippery keywords, criteria used to wage wars and manage pandemics.
An irreducible point of attack within this perimeter is: who decides and
with what objectives. Even better: who is excluded and who therefore
pays the socio-environmental consequences of imposed choices. These
questions are crucial to avoiding the semantic trap of "public service,"
which persistently hinges on the rhetoric that seeks to equate unlikely
bridges and gas utilities with aqueducts and subways.
Many large-scale projects are wrong because they are unnecessary,
harmful, oversized, and imposed (such as the TAV, Expo, highways, and
TAP, among others). More importantly, they aren't conceived with a
temporal perspective beyond the political trajectory of decision-makers,
and they undermine (rather than implement) other ordinary projects such
as rail, road, and energy supply, raising the economic threshold for
access to services. Social movements approach the issue first by
performing a purely cognitive task (knowing, understanding, and
interpreting) and immediately face the challenge of ennobling the
NO-which in public discourse always risks being relegated to the NIMBY
category if not accused of conservatism-as an essential step forward to
restore communities' time for understanding, speaking out, and
transformative action. Thus, secondly, comes the active phase of
counter-narrative and the communicative and practical toolkit of
protest, including breaking the blackmail of alternatives. In the case
of the Winter Olympics, countless alternatives were proposed throughout
the twentieth century: reducing the size of the Games, reducing their
temporal density, holding them in the same location, even to the zero
option of simply not holding them at all. Alternatives are such when
they call into question the project itself, not when they legitimize it
through minor adjustments that avoid answering questions about the
initiative's utility, consensus, and contemporary relevance.
Territorial struggles are the preferred terrain for protesting
large-scale projects. In this field, the shift from criticism to
resistance offers a doubly transformative opportunity. On the one hand,
the project at issue is transformed (through counter-information,
denunciation, boycotting, sabotage, etc.), and on the other, in the
possible convergence of sensibilities and political cultures, the
subjectivities participating evolve, producing and sharing knowledge,
techniques, and experiences of struggle. The entire history of the
country is a history of major works: from Fréjus in 1870 to Venaus in
2005, through the first strikes to the Simplon Tunnel in 1905.
But there are obstacles that must be kept in mind at the very least. The
specter of the dark ages, in a country with an unresolved problem with
political violence. The capture mechanisms (old and new), among which it
is worth mentioning, at a glance, the crimes of association, the fascist
legacy of the crime of devastation and looting, the growing recourse to
administrative offenses, the Security Decree, the Piantedosi Directive
against self-managed social spaces, expulsion orders, red zones, and
urban DASPOs. The variable of intergenerational time, which can
sometimes be an ally but always remains, also, an enemy.
Acceptability-this is a theme that particularly questions libertarian
elements-of the use of legal and administrative instruments in an
attempt to jam the mega-machine. The transdisciplinarity of things to
know. The belated evidence of speculative initiative, sometimes visible
only in the "terminal" phase of construction. In recent years, social
and territorial movements have also been affected by a new school of
climate activists, closer to scientific demands, to practices of civil
disobedience, to the imagining of institutional instruments (such as
reparation funds) and characterized by strong recourse to the media.
These movements have opened a debate on the forms of opposition that is
not always comfortable for those who remain firmly anchored to a
libertarian trajectory, yet certainly stimulating. Perhaps it is time
for a new pact of mutual support, and not just relief, because we
desperately need victories that instill confidence, to settle and learn,
to build legal resistance, to transform certain ineffective liturgies.
It must not be forgotten that the present we inhabit, even when it
appears unrecognizable in comparison with our needs and aspirations, is
the expression of a perpetual negotiation between dissent and the
voracity of capital, of liberticidal legality, of the interests of the
few at the expense of the many. It doesn't resemble us, but conversely,
it doesn't resemble what it would have looked like without this
transformative obstinacy.
Alberto (abo) Di Monte
bibliotecaria.noblogs.org
https://umanitanova.org/saperi-e-pratiche-tra-autogestione-e-resistenza-lotte-territoriali-e-grandi-opere/
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