Italy

Under the slogan “Let’s Block Everything,” hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of more than 80 Italian cities to protest against the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the war economy

On Monday, September 22, the USB (Unione Sindacale di Base) trade union called a general strike, joined by the rank-and-file unions Adl Cobas, Cobas, Cub and Sgb. The initiative involved workers from the ports, transport, healthcare, logistics, and a wide range of public and private enterprises, as well as self-employed workers, and of course large numbers of young students, university students and teachers – who in recent months had already been among the main participants in demonstrations in support of Palestine – to such an extent that several media outlets reported a total of hundreds of thousands of participants who took to the streets in more than 80 Italian cities.

“Let’s Block Everything” was the slogan of the dockworkers in Genoa, who refused (in fact, already since 2019) to load weapons and ammunition from the United States, Northern Europe, and Italy itself onto ships bound for Israel, but also for Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. The Genoese example was followed by dockworkers in Ravenna, Livorno, Salerno, La Spezia, and Trieste. In June of last year, for instance, in Ravenna two containers full of ammunition, transported by truck from Austria, were loaded onto a ship bound for Israel without any official authorization, thereby endangering the lives of the dockworkers, who had not been informed about the dangerous cargo. A similar situation was about to occur in Marseille, but French dockworkers intervened and blocked a shipment of ammunition onto the ship Contship Era, destined for Israel and scheduled to call at Genoa and Salerno before reaching the port of Haifa.

These initiatives, clearly of a proletarian nature, demonstrate that the proletariat stands against war and, even more so, against the extermination of the civilian population of Gaza. Their aim is to put pressure on the central government to intervene against the war and the extermination of defenseless people. Yet the Meloni government, like the governments before it, follows its own path – saving and defending business, maintaining good relations with any other government regardless of whether its hands are stained with innocent blood – all in the name of protecting and expanding its own economic and political interests. Inevitably, in the absence of class unions that would lead proletarian struggles with goals, means and methods far more incisive against the interests of the arms industry and against the political-administrative cover that these enterprises always manage to secure at every stage necessary to achieve their maximum profits, these initiatives are doomed to have only a very superficial impact, even though they bear witness to a spontaneous impulse on the part of the proletarians to mobilize against a war that is displaying all its horrors on an entire defenseless population. This impulse, however, is systematically channeled onto the terrain of democracy, so reverently upheld by all current trade union organizations and, of course, by all the so-called “left-wing” parties, which continue to mock the electorate by repeating the hackneyed and illusory slogan of “two peoples, two states” – something that in the eighty years since the founding of the State of Israel no world power has ever actually wanted or allowed, despite all official declarations.

The pro-Palestinian street demonstrations, especially student ones, that took place over the past two years expressed deep concern about the conflict in which Palestinian guerrilla organizations once again clashed with the Israeli army, which has always had the intrinsic attitude of viewing the entire Palestinian population as “terrorists” or “supporters of antisemitic terrorism.” This attitude did not change even after the attack carried out by Hamas fighters on October 7, 2023, against Jewish settlements on the border with Gaza, which left more than 1,200 dead and led to the abduction of more than 200 hostages taken into Gaza as a bargaining tool for the exchange of Palestinians imprisoned for years in Israeli jails. This Hamas attack, which caught the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) off guard, as they did not expect such an organized and large-scale strike, immediately turned into an opportunity that Israel seized: already on October 8 it was able to move its armed forces toward Gaza with the aim not only of striking hard against Hamas militants and bringing the hostages back home, but also of subjecting the entire population of Gaza to unprecedented repression. It soon became clear – and the Netanyahu government gradually revealed it – that the aim of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip was not only to bring the hostages back and crush Hamas militants, but also to decimate the entire population of the Strip so that it could be seized and annexed to Israel, thereby definitively thwarting any, even remote, ambitions for an independent Palestinian state.

The fact is that the horror of the war waged against a defenseless population – destroying everything that could resemble a refuge, systematically bombing displaced masses wandering from north to south and from south to north, mercilessly massacring women and children, destroying hospitals, schools and homes, devastating fields and cynically starving the entire population – entered every household through television, in a way that did not occur even with the war in Ukraine. While newspapers around the world carried front-page photos of the destruction and horrors in Gaza, and television broadcast them live, anger grew both at the inaction of governments in the face of this extermination and at the impotence of protest demonstrations, which often appeared more like processions, even when suppressed by the police. Some governments – such as those of France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Australia – once again dusted off their grandiose rhetoric about “recognition of the State of Palestine,” without ever doing anything concrete that could actually bring it into being. For example, by preventing Israel’s systematic moves to obstruct the establishment of a Palestinian state, while trade with Israel, on the contrary, continued to flourish.

The strike and the various demonstrations began at the port of Livorno and continued with blockades of universities in Rome, Turin, Bologna and Brescia. At 9 a.m. on Monday, September 22, a massive blockade started at the port of Salerno, followed by demonstrations in Bologna and the blockade of the port of Genoa, a march in Florence of thousands of people – mostly young – heading toward the local headquarters of Leonardo, the Italian multinational specializing in aerospace, defense and security, and then a large demonstration in Milan with more than 10,000 participants, held in a torrential downpour, while the demonstration in Bologna swelled to more than 50,000 people. In Pisa, thousands reached the Florence–Pisa–Livorno highway and blocked it; in Marghera, dockworkers blocked the port; in Rome, 20,000 demonstrators gathered at Termini station and shut it down, while in Turin, after 1 p.m., the demonstration occupied the tracks at Porta Nuova station. In Milan, the demonstration arrived around 1 p.m. at the square in front of Central Station after marching through the city center, with the aim of entering the station, occupying the tracks and blocking train departures and arrivals. The police, however, deployed to defend the “sacred” private property of the railways, closed the iron gates of the station entrances and by force prevented the demonstrators from carrying out their plan, blocking them and assaulting them even on the metro stairways leading into the station. Part of the demonstrators tried to break through the police lines, while several thousand remained in the square in front of the station. Violent clashes broke out, and according to reports, 60 police officers were left with bruises and injuries, and about ten demonstrators were arrested.

More than 40,000 people took part in the demonstration in Naples with the aim of blocking the railway station and entering the port and then the Bagnoli district, where President Mattarella was inaugurating the school year. In the afternoon, protests continued in many places: in Bologna there were clashes between police and demonstrators blocking the highway; in Milan, demonstrators were still besieging Central Station, while in Rome at least 100,000 people marched through Scalo San Lorenzo toward the eastern ring road; in Bologna clashes broke out on Stalingrado Street near the Cersaie trade fair, which was due to begin that same day; and again in Milan, on Vittor Pisani Street in front of Central Station, the police tried to attack the remainder of the demonstration from behind. After 4 p.m. in Marghera, the police again intervened to prevent demonstrators from entering the port, while in Catania demonstrators – despite police charges – managed to block the port, and in Palermo as many as 30,000 people marched, blocking roads and preventing access to the port. In Turin, the entrance to the Turin–Savona highway was blocked, while in Bologna police stopped tens of thousands of demonstrators heading toward the Bolognina district and arrested eight individuals; three demonstrators ended up in hospital after police charges, and two thousand people went to the police headquarters to demand the release of those detained. Meanwhile in Rome, a huge demonstration entered La Sapienza University and occupied the Faculty of Humanities, demanding the cancellation of all agreements with Israel.

Around 7 p.m. demonstrations continued in many cities – Brescia, Turin, Genoa, Bergamo and still in Milan – while in Bologna at least 4,000 people gathered at the police headquarters to demand the release of those detained (at least four of whom were to be tried in summary proceedings). After 8 p.m. in Brescia, in Piazza della Repubblica, clashes with the police broke out again, as they prevented the demonstrators – mostly young people – from reaching the station; the attempt was eventually abandoned and the day of demonstrations thus came to an end, with an agreement to gather again on September 27.

We wanted to present here some reports taken from the media, especially from Radio Onda d’Urto in Brescia, in order to document a level of participation in the protest demonstrations and in the strike that had not been seen for many years.

The general discontent, provoked by years of precarious, exhausting and poorly paid work, by uncertainty about the future, by an ever-spreading impoverishment in the face of the constant rise of capitalist profits – today even more than in the past thanks to the arms business – together with the continuous reduction of social benefits and the growing, skillfully disguised taxation of wages and the cost of living, had to find an outlet: it was therefore a way to show the ruling power that there exists an anger at a generally unbearable situation. The fact that demonstrations by young people, students and families strengthened the presence of striking workers in the streets is a sign of a widespread unwillingness to continue enduring such conditions, which could lead to a new wave of protests similar to those that appeared in the 1970s. Today, it is the rank-and-file unions that represent the type of organization to which the most combative layers of the proletariat turn in order to give strength to their strike actions, while the traditional unions still manage – thanks to their obstinate class-collaborationism with the bourgeois ruling class – to carry out their dirty work of dividing and paralyzing workers’ struggles.

The proletarian and popular masses expected that the government in Rome would take some serious and concrete initiative to demonstrate that it was not complicit in the extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza; nor, of course, was the voice of Pope Leo XIV absent, with his litanies about peace which, both in Ukraine and in Gaza, instead of drawing nearer, is moving ever farther away. The latest decision at the EU headquarters – to embark on rearmament under the pretext of a possible “invasion” by Russia and to comply with the demand of powerful America to raise the military spending of each NATO member state to 5% of GDP – nonetheless spreads an atmosphere of impending war. This tore part of the proletariat out of a state of numbed lethargy and from the very real sense of the impotence of parliamentary debates and of the verbal and media skirmishes between government and opposition, and pushed it into the streets to show its unwillingness to continue enduring this situation, its dissatisfaction, and its humanity – something that government and opposition deputies alike, cynical babblers as they are, prove capable of exploiting solely for the benefit of their own political class privileges. Under the pretext that we live in a civilized and democratic country, any initiative, any activity, any aim is diverted into the labyrinth of parliamentary politics, as if it could resolve the social problems that in reality depend directly on the capitalist economy, on its functioning, and on the interests that the entire political class seeks to defend, while ever broader layers of the masses sink into poverty and destitution.

Parliament has long since ceased to be merely a talking shop, as Lenin and Trotsky said, and has become an instrument for the exclusive defense of the privileges of the parliamentary political caste, deceptively presented as the only place where it is possible – thanks to shifting electoral majorities – to maintain or change the “political decisions” adopted there. The reality is that all the fundamental decisions concerning social life are taken outside the parliamentary halls, in secret rooms where representatives of economic, social, political, cultural, and religious powers intrigue, conspire, conclude agreements, pacts and alliances, exchange favors, sometimes hardening and elsewhere softening their positions. And it is certain that among all these decisions there is always one that concerns the control of society, the domination of the proletarian masses. We saw an example of this reality during the period of Covid-19, and we now see it again with the threat of an approaching war that could also touch Italy.

The proletariat is the only social class that holds in its hands a potentially enormous power: the ability to halt production, transport, communications, trade, and public services – including education and healthcare – and not just for an hour or a few hours, “piecemeal” at the end of a shift, now in one factory and then in another, but in a more general way, until the very end, without prior notice, organizing itself to endure over time and to win the solidarity of proletarians from different economic sectors. In this way its class action can truly influence the situation and the policies of the government.

Capital lives and prospers thanks to the daily exploitation of the proletarian masses, their intensive exploitation, and, above all, thanks to the competition among workers; capital lives and prospers thanks to class collaboration, for which trade-union organizations and “workers’” parties are recruited in exchange for economic and social advantages and privileges. And this is the greatest obstacle the proletariat encounters on its path to emancipation from the condition of being mere labor power – that is, a commodity that, once worn out or no longer useful for business, is simply discarded as worthless refuse, difficult to recycle.

Striking against rearmament and against war is a political act of extraordinary importance, and it is certain that the initiators of this strike sought to distinguish themselves from the usual and powerless demonstrations, processions, by elevating the strike into a symbol of general opposition – not only in the face of intolerable living and working conditions, but also as an expression of solidarity with a people condemned to extermination by a state such as Israel, which normally enjoys the trust and support of all Western democracies, beginning with the United States and ending, of course, with Italy as well.

Yet a political strike of such magnitude, if it is not based on a real revival of the class struggle of the proletariat – that is, a struggle that is not episodic and that places at its center demands aimed exclusively at the defense of proletarian class interests, outside parliamentary games at the national, regional, or municipal level, and against any cross-class collaboration – is doomed, at best, to remain merely a symbolic action that in reality changes nothing at all.

The strength of the bourgeois ruling class lies not only in the fact that it owns all the means of production and, above all, all the national wealth that is created – thereby excluding the proletariat from any resource other than its labor power – but also in the inability of the proletarian class to recognize itself as an independent class, wholly antagonistic to any other social class and, above all, to the bourgeois capitalist class, which is precisely the consequence of the policy of class collaboration.

This policy degrades the specific interests of the proletariat by suffocating them in the interests of the bourgeoisie and capitalism, which inevitably take on the character of a “higher,” national interest, even though in reality they are solely the interests of capitalism – that is, of the bourgeois economy.

For the proletariat – if its struggle is to have real meaning with respect to its class interests – it must free itself from the bonds and chains that tie it to enterprise-based economics, to the national economy, to the homeland that protects everything but the lives of proletarians, and that is always ready to impose sacrifices on them in order to increase the competitiveness of national goods and to prevail over foreign competition – even to the point of demanding that they sacrifice their very lives: from deaths, maimings, and illnesses caused by labor to the deaths and massacres of bourgeois and imperialist wars.

The proletariat will not break with the policy of class collaboration and fight solely for itself suddenly, out of the blue. It will reach this point by beginning, here and there, to tear apart and break this accursed bond; at times it will make certain steps forward, then halt and retreat, and afterwards take up the struggle again, this time with means and methods of a truly class character, accumulating experience and finally organizing its forces exclusively on the terrain of class. This will still require time, attempts, defeats, and disappointments, but for the class interests of the proletariat to assert themselves even within the proletariat itself, it is necessary that the economic and social crisis into which capitalism is inevitably heading should shake to the foundations the economic and social structure upon which the political power of the bourgeoisie rests.

Only then will humanitarian initiatives, such as the maritime initiative Global Sumud Flotilla, the Italian aid organization Emergency, or Doctors Without Borders, take on a completely different meaning: instead of appealing to the compassion of the bourgeois classes who govern murderous, warlike, and oppressive states – and thereby, albeit unintentionally, reinforcing their murderous, warlike, and oppressive power – they will place themselves at the service of the proletarian class struggle and its revolution, whose main objective is the destruction of the bourgeois state as such – whether democratic or authoritarian, dictatorial or fascist – and its replacement by an exclusively proletarian state organism, whose primary task is to transform the market and capitalist economy into a socialized economy and at the same time to extend the anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolution to all countries of the world.

Today these goals may appear illusory, utopian, unrealizable, so that those who already wish to do something for the hungry, the impoverished, the oppressed, and the survivors of wars and devastation seem to have no alternative but to pour the energy of their individual will into efforts to lend a hand, to provide support to populations stricken by misfortune… and thus to soothe their own conscience in the hope that this “misfortune” will not also befall them. Man is a social being, and therefore the tendency to help those in need is part of this sociability, of this humanity. Yet man is also the only being who – ever since societies divided into classes have existed – kills his fellow humans not out of the necessity of survival, but out of purely material interest, for supremacy, for power, in defense of private property and his own business.

Only a classless society, that is, Marxist communism, will be the society in which man once again becomes a wholly social being, as in primitive communism – enriched, however, by the experience and by the labor and productive capacities developed during the existence of class-divided societies, capacities which those very societies, and especially capitalist society, systematically stifled and diverted toward private and individual ends.

The path the proletariat will have to travel is strewn with difficulties, traps, obstacles, illusions, defeats, and disappointments, but also with stimulating and strengthening experiences; it is, after all, the path marked out by the very history of humanity: the social being will triumph over the bloodthirsty and individualistic being. The struggle will be immensely hard – the hardest that human society has ever known – but it will be the struggle that closes the long era of human prehistory and opens the true history of humanity.

September, 23d 2025

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