Good evening, thank you to the comrades who organized this initiative and allowed me to speak. There's a lot to say, so I'll try to be as brief as possible. For those unfamiliar with us, we formed the Livorno Antimilitarist Coordination Group four years ago and immediately began a campaign against military missions abroad. Our vision is to build a united, autonomous, and mass antimilitarist movement. ---- We are stubbornly united. Those who had the opportunity and desire to participate in the demonstration we held on November 4th saw that all the organizations that participated in organizing the demonstration had the opportunity to participate and contribute to the initiative. Autonomous because it is made up of activists of various political orientations and idealistic inspirations, and everyone has their space and the opportunity to contribute. Massive because the experience of these past weeks has shown us that only if we manage to be in the streets, to mobilize the masses, can we achieve results.
The struggles of recent weeks have taught us important lessons. The first lesson, in my opinion, is the renewed prominence of the working class, in the workplace and especially on issues less tied to personal interests. While it's true that militarism also affects our immediate living conditions, what motivated the demonstrations of September and October was a rejection of war as such and a spirit of internationalist solidarity. From a certain perspective, these were demonstrations that we can define as selfless.
This is an important moment for reflection, also to understand how those demonstrations came about, the deeper meaning of the blockades. The blockade, beyond its immediate cause, means reclaiming a leading role within production, it means questioning the production of weapons, it means questioning the transportation of weapons, it means questioning the transmission of knowledge that institutions seek to orient along militaristic lines. What does this mean? It means that the working class, the workers who produce everything, can decide what to produce, how to produce, and this is the central element of social change. If we can develop this consciousness of producers, we can pave the way for expropriation and the abolition of the society based on private property, which is the only solution to the crises we are struggling with.
Regardless of future scenarios, the Livorno Antimilitarist Coordination hopes that December 12th, a very important date, will be a further step in this direction. However, we must realize that the budget the government is proposing is a transitional budget. The real budget will come later. The government has already reserved EUR15 billion from the Rearm Europe plan. In April, there will be a meeting in Brussels to assess whether Italy, having emerged from the infringement proceedings, will be able to access this money. In June, the traditional NATO summit will take place in Brussels, where further military spending will be decided. That will be the moment when the real budget will be released, when it will truly be taken into account.
It's one of the moments. Because the other moment will be when the war in Ukraine ends. Because when the war in Ukraine ends, Italy, for example, will have to budget the EUR30 billion it has given to Ukraine. As of October 15 of this year, between direct contributions and contributions through European institutions, Italy had given EUR30 billion to Ukraine.
This money will never be returned. Because before the war, Ukraine had a gross domestic product of 130 billion. And it has no means of repaying all this money, the money it received from Italy, the money it received from the European Union, the money it received from the rest of Europe, the money it received from the United States, the money it received from the rest of the world.
And someone will have to pay for it. And it will be us. And this doesn't just concern Italy, but the entire European Union.
The European Commission has prepared a budget for the period from 2028 to 2034. This budget stipulates that of the EUR1.3 trillion budgeted, EUR400 billion will be unallocated, meaning it will be entirely at the Commission's disposal. How did they achieve this? By reducing appropriations for the common agricultural policy and cohesion funds, which are also intended to address social issues.
Why is the European Commission doing these things? The European Commission is able to do these things because it creates an emergency situation. With the emergency created by Covid, it was able to launch the Next Generation EU financing program, which essentially allowed it to launch a kind of Eurobond. It doesn't yet have the final formal approval, but that's the gist of it.
The same thing happens with war. Under the guise of a war emergency, the European Commission will use this money for rearmament. Furthermore, it has launched a program called the European Democratic Shield, which provides EUR9 billion in funding to media outlets, mass media, and civil society organizations, which will propagate the European Union's political proposals. So they will propagate war, propagate rearmament, propagate centralization, propagate all these good things. We have the ability to stop them.
We have the opportunity, for example, to ensure that the anniversary of the war in Ukraine, the beginning of Russia's aggression against Ukraine, becomes a further opportunity for struggle, by holding European governments accountable and stopping them from needlessly squandering the money they take from us on massacres. This is a huge commitment, but one we can take on. And I hope we can take it on in a united manner.
Because behind all this is leverage. There are many factors, but above all, the fact that governments are afraid the truth will be known, just as they were afraid the truth about vaccines would be known, they are afraid the truth about the war in Ukraine would be known, about the money they're wasting. December 12th is an important day, I was saying, because December 12th shows us that we have the ability to expose the lies the institutions tell us.
On December 12, 1969, bombs exploded in Milan and Rome. Sixteen people died at the Banca dell'Agricoltura. Giuseppe Pinelli was thrown from the fourth floor of the Milan Police Headquarters.
It was the greatest attack on workers' power in the factories and the greatest attempt to criminalize the anarchist movement. But it was foiled, foiled because there was a mass commitment, built slowly, thoroughly, to expose the frame-up with clarity, debate, discussion, collaboration, and mutual engagement, not with violence. We managed to overcome the violence of others, the violence they use against us.
Here, I hope that we will be able to build a vast, united and autonomous mass movement against militarism and against war.
*The Livorno Antimilitarist Coordination, established in 2021, has the primary objective of demystifying the role of militarism in society and launching a campaign to stop the Italian state's military intervention abroad. Alternativa Libertaria participates in the coordination's activities with its members and supporters. This speech was proposed by Tiziano Antonelli, on behalf of the Livorno Antimilitarist Coordination, at the assembly promoted by the CGIL on December 9, 2025, in Livorno.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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Link: (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #41 - For a united, autonomous, and mass antimilitarist movement - Tiziano Antonelli - Livorno Antimilitarist Coordination* (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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