The following is the text of the speech by comrade Cristina Tonsig of the FAI from the stage at the Anarchist May Day in Carrara. ---- It is a great emotion for me to be here speaking on behalf of the FAI. I want to begin by remembering a comrade who recently passed away, Claudio Strambi: a militant anarchist in the Italian Anarchist Federation, active in the union with a commitment that always saw him at the forefront, in keeping with the spirit of our organization, never hegemonic or self-referential, always driven by profound humanity. He always engaged in open dialogue, committed to building unified paths, free from minority logics and at the same time without losing sight of the anarchist perspective, often encountering state repression. Those who have comrades never die. And it is right to think of him here, in Carrara, carrying on the same practice of freedom that was his life.
It was in Carrara, in September 1945, that anarchists from across Italy gathered and founded the FAI, heir to the Italian Anarchist Union of 1919-20 and the experiences of the Spanish Civil War, exile, anti-fascism, and armed resistance.
Eighty years later, in October 2025, we returned to Carrara for a conference at the Teatro Animosi, in memory of Italino Rossi. We spoke with scholars and activists about antimilitarism, anarcha-feminism, ecology, intersectionality, territorial struggles, and self-management.
Eighty years of struggle for a world of free and equal women, ever present in the squares, neighborhoods, social spaces, and our offices-which are a shared heritage-but also, and above all, in struggles, from environmental ones to those against firing ranges, in strikes, and in demonstrations. Because our anarchism has solid and ancient roots, but it is continually enriched, fueled by the desire to build a new society, and to do so while maintaining coherence between means and ends.
Resignation is not our thing. We are convinced that things can be different, and therefore we must act accordingly, building non-state political spaces, multiplying experiences of self-management and social networks that can disrupt the machinery of oppression and exploitation, to build a new society.
First of all, we must face a war that has always been a daily occurrence: the war that capital wages against those who work. Today, the world of work has become a field of increasingly brutal exploitation, where precariousness is a systematic strategy of domination.
As is tradition, close to May 1st, even the government wakes up and once again talks about tax breaks for hiring or fair wages. It announces ridiculous measures that should benefit workers, and at the same time, for example, it traps the logistics industry and its strikes in the bottlenecks of essential public services, hitting one of the most combative sectors. We know full well that laws and regulations serve only to manage poverty and exploitation, not to abolish them. Only class struggle can restore dignity to the working class, only grassroots organization of the exploited, only direct action can lead to the reconquest of lost rights and the acquisition of new ones. We don't want state handouts, but a dignified wage and a decent life. Because poverty cannot be governed: it must be fought.
Meanwhile, while they talk to us about growth, recovery, and competitiveness, people continue to die on construction sites, in warehouses, in factories, in fields, and on the streets. Workplace deaths are not fatalities, they are not tragic accidents: they are the direct product of a system that skimps on safety, accelerates work rates, externalizes risks, and treats bodies as expendable.
Meschi's struggles remind us that the dignity of work cannot be begged for, it is won through organization and conflict. Against precarious employment, against poverty wages, against the normalization of death at work, the FAI's response remains the same: solidarity, organization, anarcho-syndicalism, strikes, conflict, direct action.
Work in arms factories deserves a separate discussion. We must convince workers in the sector to demand the conversion of these factories to civilian use, and not to accept their ailing company's conversion, as is often the case, to war production. We don't want arms factories. We must refuse to produce death in order to earn a living.
Even the education sector today raises very important issues requiring action. Too often we see tanks in elementary school playgrounds. In high schools, work-based learning (formerly alternating work) takes students to military bases, war shipyards, and weapons factories. Universities enter into agreements with the Leonardo Med-Or Foundation and with defense industries.
To a school conceived in this way, we respond with Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, who founded the Escuela Moderna in Barcelona in 1901, a self-managed educational experience for independent and free lives for boys and girls: not obedient cogs in a rotten system, but free thinkers, defying all conventions and prejudices.
The militarization of schools and society did not arise out of nowhere. It has a lineage of state violence that we must always keep in mind. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Genoa. It was July 2001, and the G8 of the world's eight richest nations was held. Over 200,000 people, including anarchists, took to the streets to say no to that world order. The response was the one we know: Carlo Giuliani, the Mexican butchery of the Diaz school; and then Bolzaneto, the torture barracks. That violence was not an exception. It was the model. And that same model is replicated, refined, legalized. And here we are today. The Security Decree, definitively approved, represents the most organic attempt to criminalize social conflict this country has seen in decades. We can say that the government celebrated the special laws of 1926 by normalizing them, one hundred years later, the very day before April 25th, and this affront cries out for vengeance.
The security decrees certainly do not protect those who live in daily danger, those who are exploited, those without documents, much less the inmate forgotten in a high-security unit. They protect power from those who challenge it. Thus, security decrees transform dissent into a threat, demonstration into a potential crime, and political identity into presumed danger.
We laughed when Donald Trump organized an international anti-Antifa summit, but we shouldn't laugh, because a dangerous project is underway.
The same logic is already at work in Europe. In Hungary, anti-fascism is considered a threat to national security. In Germany, investigations into "subversive association" are being built: the "Budapest Complex" is just one example. In Italy, the ground is being prepared with legislative proposals to equate anti-fascism with terrorism.
This is how modern repression works: it doesn't immediately ban. First, it delegitimizes. Then, it isolates. Then, it strikes. Let us always remember this and denounce it when we read or hear about excesses by the forces of disorder, by individual violent officers, or by zealous police commissioners. If there are violent officers and zealous police commissioners, it's because the state allows and wants it. This decree is the state's response to a widespread social movement that refuses to give up. But we must always keep in mind that it's not us who should be afraid, it's the state that is afraid, not only of our actions or our words, but of our thoughts, our intentions, what we could do, our resistance, and our indomitable anti-fascism. We will not stop. Our response has always been the same: organization and solidarity with the oppressed and the Oppressed. They can immobilize our bodies for twelve hours or more, but they cannot stop our ideal.
I'm reminded of Emma Goldman's words: "If you are so generous with freedom that you bring it across the sea to Germany, why not keep it right here, in this country?"
The question was directed at Wilson, but it would still apply to Meloni. Italy is not a free country, nor is it a country at peace, as demonstrated by the 104 million euros spent on weapons and soldiers. How can a country with 39 military missions abroad be called peaceful? Italian soldiers are everywhere: in the Balkans, in Ukraine (EUMAM and NSATU missions), in Lebanon (UNIFIL and MIBIL missions), in Iraq (Prima Parthica mission), in the Red Sea (Operation Aspides), and in other countries. In 2025, approximately 59 active armed conflicts were recorded in the world: the highest number since the end of World War II.
Just think of Israel and Palestine. People are also dying in Sudan, the Sahel, Myanmar, and elsewhere. For us, there are no first-class and second-class peoples; they are all important. There are 59 theaters of death where the poor pay the price for interests that are not the same. They.
Every war has its instigators. Every bomb has its factory. Every factory has its shareholders. And every shareholder has its government to protect it.
But every bomb, every drone that destroys a house, is also a house not built somewhere else; every bomb and every drone that destroys a hospital is a hospital not built in another city. In short, the presence of every weapon and every soldier marks the lack of things useful to the community.
We loudly shout our "no" to all imperialist and capitalist wars, wars that, historically, have never brought success to revolutions or revolutionaries. Only the people who organize from below can give birth to a revolution.
True security comes from social justice, from cooperation between peoples, from an end to the economic plunder that fuels conflicts. Our response is always the same: internationalism to bring "peace among the oppressed and war against the oppressors." And this phrase doesn't need to be written on the dead because it's engraved on our skin. Because anarchism has no borders, it has no homeland to defend.
Since 1872, from the Anti-Authoritarian International of Saint-Imier, we have built solidarity beyond borders. In 1936, we went to fight in Spain against fascism. We were men and women who, in the columns of the revolution and in the collectives, defended not a homeland, but a concrete possibility of a free life, without masters and without generals. From Barcelona to Aragon, they taught us that freedom is built with our hands, with assemblies, with social revolution.
In the 2000s, we built solidarity with the Israeli and Palestinian anarchists who fought together against the apartheid wall. Today, we are here, with the comrades from every corner of the globe who resist. Wars must be responded to with desertion, boycott, and revolutionary defeatism. Deserting means not only helping deserters, but also unmasking propaganda, assisting railway and dock workers in their boycott actions. It means rejecting the state narrative that transforms aggression into defense, supremacy into security, war into moral necessity. There are no humanitarian wars. There are no liberating bombings. There are only women, men, people, and children who die; and those who profit from their deaths. We fight so that it is no longer people who fall, but walls; so that borders, not peoples, are erased.
We stand with those imprisoned everywhere, trying to fight and change the system, to fight and reject war. With those who bring sand, not oil, to the engine of militarism.
We are deserters from every war, partisans against every state.
We are internationalists for true brotherhood and sisterhood among peoples, and it is precisely our internationalism that brought us to Athens in April for the IFA congress, to share experiences, reflections, and actions with comrades from various geographies.
Eighty years ago, in Carrara, our comrades managed to build an anarchist organization from the chaos of war, the ashes of fascism, and the harshness of repression. They called it the Italian Anarchist Federation and brought it to life with the same determination with which Malatesta, Berneri, and Meschi had kept the flame alive in the previous decades.
Today, the world is more complex, wars more numerous, repression more sophisticated. The security decree seeks to criminalize any form of resistance. The militarization of schools seeks to train subjects, not free beings. Wars seek to convince us that there is no alternative to violence. We respond with Ferrer's words: we want to be capable of ceaseless evolution, capable of destroying and renewing.
We are not pacifists, but we fight day after day for the triumph of peace, for social justice, for the brotherhood and sisterhood of all. For peaceful coexistence between humans and nonhumans.
We must be, as Parsons said, "unfaithful and traitors to the infamies of modern capitalist society."
The march that will begin now is not folklore, it is not a demonstration in and of itself, but rather an important moment of reflection to keep in mind where we come from, where we are, and where and how we want to go.
Our response is both ancient and new: neither state nor war, neither masters nor servants, neither school nor barracks nor slave labor. Freedom, equality, mutual aid. Long live libertarian communism, long live anarchy, and happy May Day.
Cristina Tonsig
https://umanitanova.org/primo-maggio-anarchico-a-carrara/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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