Following the turbulent autumn discussed in the February issue of Courant Alternatif, the government offensive, which merely fulfills the wishes of employers to eradicate what remains of the 1970s and regain control of all sectors of society, continues step by step. After the incident at the Askatasuna social center in Turin (1), evacuated by the police, there will be the referendum on judicial reform on March 22nd and 23rd. But first, let's revisit a recurring issue that has been omnipresent for 20 years, a hallmark of the employers' reconquista: the restriction of the right to strike.
Right to strike.
Except perhaps to experience la dolce vita in Rome or relax in a gondola in Venice, the French bourgeoisie isn't in the habit of looking longingly towards the other side of the Alps. It's too chaotic in a country where they assassinated Aldo Moro and where bosses are beaten down. Yet, there is one Italian model that makes them dream: the regulation of the right to strike. From BFM to Le Point, from CNews to Capital, to L'Opinion or Le Figaro, all these media outlets that are used to whining about "the poor commuters who bear the brunt of the work stoppages by these damned strikers" are posing the question on their front pages: Right to strike: should we take inspiration from Italy? Obviously, the answer is contained in the question!
So what is this model? After the Years of Lead, social conflict is decreasing. The bourgeoisie is determined to take back the few advantages it had been forced to grant in the 1970s and to make no further concessions (2). By signing sectoral contracts (3) with employers, unions can no longer justify, in the eyes of workers, mobilizations in the form of simple days of action, category by category, aimed at signing a "good" contract which is known to prove disastrous for employees in a period where the slightest advantage granted is offset by measures to increase productivity, imposed mobility, and staff reductions.
A law was then enacted to regulate the right to strike in order to ensure minimum service in a vast list of "essential" sectors. The unions adhered to a "code of self-discipline" which involved accepting mandatory notice and certain prohibitions for the rest of the year.
The problem was that the long-standing crisis of confidence among some employees towards the three "major" unions had led to the emergence of local committees (Cobas), operating outside the confederations. Although a minority, they still managed to maintain a degree of social conflict and, not being signatories to collective agreements, they could occasionally paralyze certain sectors such as logistics, transportation, public services, or education.
This reality irritates employers and leads them to embark on a long and patient march towards a right to strike so restricted that it would no longer be necessary to prohibit it.
In 1998, new rules mandated a "cooling-off" period for conflicts before a strike notice could be filed, including a mandatory conciliation phase. If a union does not represent 50% of employees, it must wait a minimum of 10 days after the end of a strike before filing a new notice, which effectively prevents rolling strikes.
Regarding "essential" public services, a new law further restricting the right to strike was passed by Parliament (with a center-left majority) in April 2000, coinciding with Italy's hosting of the World Cup. "Essential public services" are defined as "human rights, including the right to life, health, liberty and security, freedom of movement, social assistance and welfare, education, and freedom of communication," thus broadening the concept of public service to include professions such as lawyers, doctors, and taxi drivers. Strikes are prohibited during the Christmas and Easter holidays and during the summer holiday travel period. If this proves insufficient, the government can order requisitions if it deems that a strike risks causing "serious and imminent harm" to users. For example, by limiting work stoppages to four hours per day, as was ordered during the strikes last autumn! A supervisory body is responsible for ensuring compliance with this law, which nevertheless has not succeeded in breaking the momentum of independent unions.
In other words, a strike is only legal when it doesn't inconvenience anyone. This is also a way of dividing the working class between public sector employees (wrongly equated with "privileged" civil servants) and traditional workers, who have become mere users whose right to rest is deprived by strikers in order to reproduce their labor power. The three major trade union confederations, CGIL, CISL, and UIL, approved the Parliament's vote. During the movements that shook Italy last autumn in solidarity with Gaza, against the militarization of the state budget and austerity measures - see CA of February 2026 (4) - the question of the right to strike was a constant underlying issue. Some strikes were called with little or no notice, including by the CGIL, relying on a little-known article of the 1990 law which states that the provisions on non-notification "do not apply in cases of work stoppage to defend constitutional order, or to protest against serious events detrimental to worker safety." These conditions were met, they argued, because Italy was violating constitutional limits on peace and cooperation with countries that do not respect human rights, and because the Italians aboard the Sumud Global Flotilla were workers. But the supervisor still deemed these strikes illegitimate.
The referendum on justice
On March 22 and 23, 2026, Italian voters will be called upon to confirm or reject the "Nordio reform," which would amend seven articles of the Constitution concerning the organization of the judicial system and appears to be a cornerstone of the Meloni government's program.
The Italian government considers judges and prosecutors to be too militant. They are "red judges," as former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, himself facing numerous charges, proclaimed in the 2000s!
The reform consists of abolishing a single Superior Council of the Judiciary (CSM), whose function was to appoint judges, assign them cases, and, if necessary, impose sanctions. Composed until now of judges elected by their peers and lay legal experts elected by Parliament, this system was supposed to guarantee the "independence of the judiciary," which was undoubtedly still too great in the eyes of Italy's "brothers."
The single High Council of the Judiciary (CSM) would be replaced by two separate bodies: one for judges, another for prosecutors. These bodies would still be composed of judges and laypeople, but chosen by lot-from among their peers for the former, and from a list drawn up by Parliament (i.e., the parliamentary majority, the government) for the latter. A High Disciplinary Court would also be created, in which judges would be represented, but whose majority could be appointed by the government. This clearly represents a firmer takeover of the judicial system by the State and its government, definitively shattering the myth of an independent judiciary. This, of course, is done in the name of greater efficiency in a bureaucratic nightmare, the burden of which falls on the user (yet again!). This argument resonates favorably with groups supporting a left-wing "yes" vote, led by the Socialist Party and even some members of the Democratic Party (PD) (5).
Unlike the two previous referendums (6), known as repeal referendums, which required a minimum 50% voter turnout for the result to be valid, the March referendum, known as the confirmation referendum, does not require a minimum turnout. In the previous referendums called for by the left, the governing parties that supported the "no" vote simply called for abstention, resulting in only 14% voter participation and the rejection of the proposal to reinstate abolished social benefits. This time, the law will be ratified unless the "no" vote prevails. But as we have seen, the real issue for us lies elsewhere: how can each mobilization on a specific issue contribute to the emergence and then the strengthening of a force for social transformation?
This question has become even more pressing following the solidarity movement with Askatasuna.
The Freedom Affair
On December 18, 2025, in Turin, police sealed off the occupied house "Askatasuna," an emblematic site in the history of alternative social centers which, for thirty years, had been a point of reference for the Italian autonomous movement, especially during the height of the No TAV movement (Val Susa) and more recently in support of the people of Gaza.
Already on August 21, 2025, one of Italy's most famous social centers, Leoncavallo in Milan, established in 1975, was evacuated by law enforcement in an effort to eliminate "no-go zones."
Alternative social centers are a distinctive feature of Italy's extra-parliamentary political landscape. They flourished throughout the country in the mid-1970s and continue to this day. Initially squatted spaces, they host a wide range of activities: concerts, political meetings, fundraising events for various struggles, soup kitchens, literacy classes-the list goes on. A city like Rome has several dozen, while others like Bologna and Turin have more than ten. Often, a particular tendency within the worker autonomy movement is dominant, but nevertheless, all tendencies intersect, debate, and clash. They also serve as training grounds for new generations entering the struggle, who come to the centers to meet, discuss, and strengthen themselves through contact with the multifaceted nature of the counterculture. Born from the high intensity of social conflict in the 1970s, they have persisted to this day, undergoing of course the slow decline of this conflict, but perpetuating a culture of rupture with the capitalism of the dark years.
But the far right, which is in charge of the country, doesn't see it that way. A project spearheaded by the Turin city council (a Democratic Party, therefore "left-wing") was intended to legalize squatting by recognizing the building as "common property." However, citing numerous "incidents" in the street and the number of activists prosecuted, the council blocked the project by turning the municipal majority against it.
Targeting community centers has become a propaganda and symbolic tactic used to embody radical change, to talk about order and security rather than the economic and social situation. This is especially true since the scale of the pro-Palestinian movement is revitalizing community centers that were struggling to maintain their role as a counterweight to power and to resist all attempts at integration through institutional recognition. "It is clear that the government wants to strike at the pro-Palestinian movement and attack social struggles," the Askatasuna collective reacted in a statement shortly after the center's closure.
The day after the police intervention, solidarity was evident throughout the city. A call went out for a general assembly, which brought together several hundred people on January 17th and decided on a major national demonstration for the 31st: "The eviction of Askatasuna was a show of force, a kind of exemplary punishment for those who had dared to block the train stations and ports, for those who had gone on strike and seen its effectiveness, for all those who thought: together, we are stronger. It meant striking a city, Turin, a symbol of resistance but also of a serious industrial and economic crisis," reads a text from the workers' autonomy movement.
The demonstration was unexpectedly large (30,000 to 40,000). Towards the end, thousands of protesters broke away from the main march to clash with the police in front of Askatasuna headquarters. There were injuries on both sides, a vehicle was set on fire, and the images that went viral showed a policeman being struck with a hammer. "An attack against the state" (one would like to believe it!) declared the Carabinieri commander-in-chief. The Minister of the Interior stated that "we are facing a strategy aimed at escalating the confrontation with institutions and which, through unrest and violence, seeks to consolidate the anarcho-antagonist movement and galvanize its adherents."
Indeed, there was cause for concern... or perhaps rejoicing.
Among the protesters, and particularly the most aggressive ones who attacked the police, was a large proportion of very young working-class people who had not participated in the social center saga. Their story is one of revolt against the massacres in Gaza, which they recognize as their own revolt against the world they endure, and not as a substitution for a vanished class, as was the case in the past with Third-Worldism.
In conclusion, I believe we must consider each of the strikes and demonstrations currently shaking Italy not as the starting point for a convergence of struggles and a possible political realignment, but as the tentative culmination of a shared rejection of this world, which each group interprets according to its own history and social context. The current movement originates from the grassroots and is not the product of any partisan strategy; the question is whether the self-organization that has prevailed in many initiatives will be dynamic enough to revive a hegemonic, autonomous, and anti-capitalist political and cultural sphere.
JPD
Notes
1. Freedom in Basque. A key word of the liberation movement in the Basque Country (including ETA: Euskadi ta askatasuna, Basque and freedom), it has become an embodiment of social resistance far beyond the borders of the Basque Country.
2. A process of regaining control that culminated in the Jobs Act, passed in December 2014 under the Renzi government (Democratic Party supported by the Italian Socialist Party, PSI), which further liberalized the labor market.
3. Most often for a period of three years.
4. In the sidebar on Italian trade unionism, we stated that the CUB was the most important of the smaller unions. A reader pointed out that, in fact, it is the USB that has the most influence and that took the initiative in the pro-Gaza mobilizations, while the others followed. And this despite the fact that we have more sympathy for the first than for the second, which has Stalinist-Maoist roots and remains affiliated with the WFTU, from which the French CGT has withdrawn.
5. The Democratic Party (PD) emerged in 2007 from the historic compromise between remnants of the self-dissolved Communist Party and the "left wing" of the Christian Democrats. Allied with a part of the center-right, it participated in the 2013 government and suffered a resounding electoral defeat in 2018. It returned the following year in a national unity government with the Five Star Movement, until the 2022 elections that brought Meloni to power. For an overview of Italian political history during this
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article1360
6-9/6/2025
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4664
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Link: (en) France, OCL CA #358 - Italy - Resistance to the Employers' "Reconquista" (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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