Italy: an assessment of the ‘block everything’ movement

One month after the explosive demonstrations and general strike of 3-4 October, it is necessary to take stock of the situation.

Firstly, since 4 October there has been no new expansion, but rather a decline in the protests. There is certainly an objective element to this. The ceasefire in Gaza – which condemns the Palestinian population to further oppression, and has already been violated hundreds of times by Israel – has, for the moment, removed the explosive element of the protests against genocide.

That said, if we look at the bigger picture, the truce is fragile and the international situation is more unstable than ever: a US attack on Venezuela is expected in the coming days, and insurrectionary explosions are occurring in one country after another. Potentially explosive factors will increase rather than decrease in the coming months.

But there is a deeper element: the mobilisations for Palestine were an outlet for exasperation accumulated over years and years of crisis, which certainly cannot be resolved with a patched-up truce. This anger continues to exist and will seek other points of rupture.

The problem of leadership

If there had been adequate leadership, the movement at the beginning of autumn could already have developed into an open offensive against the Meloni government and the bosses, fighting to regain everything that has been taken away from the working class and its children over decades.

However, the call for this confrontation was missing. In particular, the leadership of the CGIL, which was dragged into calling the strike on 3 October by the spontaneous mobilisation, used its role not to relaunch the movement on a higher level, but to reduce it to the dimensions of the CGIL’s modest political horizon.

The national demonstration on 25 October was an expression of this. On the one hand, it involved more than 100,000 people, showing the strength of an organised section of the working class. Layers that had been little affected by the mobilisations of previous months, especially in the private and industrial sectors, also took to the streets. This organised force cannot fail to worry the government. In fact, it betrayed a certain nervousness by openly attacking CGIL secretary-general Maurizio Landini and the CGIL.

On the other hand, however, there was little sign of the spontaneous and disruptive character of previous demonstrations, which is what made this autumn a political turning point.

At the same time, the parliamentary opposition has abandoned its street protests and is back to reassuring us that everything will be resolved at the ballot box, first in the regional elections and then in the national elections... provided we have the patience to wait until 2027.

There is no going back

A superficial observer might think that we are simply returning to the days before the Palestine movement. But that would be a very false conclusion. Millions of people have seen the real force that can be unleashed by mass struggle, and the possibilities it contains. This will have lasting consequences on consciousness and on events to come. The absence of adequate leadership may change the pace of the process and make it less linear, but it cannot stop it. At some point, new explosions, even on a higher level, are inevitable. In this sense, what we have seen is only a preview of future struggles.

The point, then, is to work to build what has been missing. Today, there is no need to exhaust ourselves in a marathon of small street demonstrations, but rather to discuss and organise to build a leadership worthy of the clash that lies ahead of us, that can give the movement a correct programme and methods.

One area where this is evident is the workers’ confrontation with the government and the bosses. Over the last six years, Italian workers have lost 10 percent of their purchasing power. This impoverishment is compounded by cuts to essential services. Contracts are being signed with increases that barely cover a third of inflation, as has happened in the healthcare sector. The government's budget continues this trend.

While the CISL and UIL trade unions are following the government's lead, the CGIL General Assembly will, in all likelihood, call a general strike. This raises a question: should this strike have the ritualistic characteristics of those of previous years, or should it instead take on the momentum of 3 October? 

But this is only possible on the basis of a programme that is up to the task, one that demonstrates the will to open a real struggle and see it through to the end. It would involve demanding a general wage increase that immediately recovers the purchasing power lost to inflation; the reintroduction of the wage scale; cuts in military spending and a doubling of funds for education and health; the placing of the war industry under workers' control and its conversion to socially beneficial purposes; companies in crisis to be nationalised without compensation and placed under workers' control; refusal to pay the public debt and the nationalisation of the banking system with compensation only for small savers. 

Issues such as these, and the methods by which to conduct the struggle most effectively, must be discussed and decided by workers in the workplace. It is necessary to put an end to the bureaucratic approach whereby workers cannot decide anything. Only the workers’ active leadership can generate the strength necessary to defeat the other side.

The second, crucial factor is the process of the politicisation of the youth. The autumn movement brought with it a general resumption of debate and mobilisation by the youth, particularly in schools. The wave of school occupations and mobilisations – short but widely participated in – was the visible surface of a broader molecular process, which will be further expressed in the upcoming mobilisation on 14 November. Here, too, we are only at the beginning.

The key thing is to arm ourselves politically. We must discuss how we can take this general battle forward, starting from international examples, the lessons of past movements and an assessment of this autumn's movement, in order to establish a genuinely revolutionary programme.

We see a similar horizon all over the world. Young people see most clearly the rotten nature of the system and are quickest to conclude that it is necessary to fight to overthrow it. The dam has broken, but much still remains to be torn down. The weeks behind us contain concentrated lessons that must be studied in order to arm ourselves for the battles ahead.