We welcome the following motion passed at the 32nd congress of the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI) on 3-6th January 2025.
The Italian Anarchist Federation reaffirms its support for the Antimilitarist Assembly with a view to building a vast movement against war, united and independent of parties, against the warmongering policies of the governments that have succeeded each other up to this moment. Hence the importance of supporting the struggles against the militarisation of schools and universities, the struggles against installations, war production and military bases from Friuli to Sicily, from Piedmont to Tuscany, the initiatives of workers against the production and trafficking of weapons, solidarity with deserters of all wars.
The world is once again approaching nuclear catastrophe, a risk that has returned to the forefront, anticipated by so many conflicts and massacres that, if they take place on a smaller scale, never cease to shock with their tragedy. Among the many factors that have led to this dramatic situation, the growing warmongering madness of the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ ruling classes stands out, made up of increasingly wretched and unlikely characters whose charlatanism equals and sometimes surpasses their lust for power and profit, the latter increasingly based on the war industry.
On the one hand, in the so-called West, we are witnessing increasingly explicit elaborations by politicians and intellectuals from the liberal area and beyond who are drawing the potential scenarios of a new world war. For them, the so-called ‘free world’, an expression already in use in the decades that saw the world divided into two Blocs, is fighting an existential battle against the autocracies of the rest of the planet, identified with new orientalist stereotypes as the place of origin of the threats that loom over our ‘civilisation’. In this narrative, as toxic as it is Manichean, allied nations that share the values of liberal democracy such as Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, or even the so-called democratic opposition in countries such as Myanmar, are fighting the same global battle of the ‘good’ against the ‘bad’. With the same logic, even the HTS fundamentalists in Syria have been enlisted on the side of the ‘good’.
The current Italian government is fully part of this race to disaster, characterising its foreign policy in an aggressive sense. This discourse serves first of all as a pretext to pass off the increase in military spending and the production of death as something even virtuous in the name of the alleged need for ‘defense’, and to liquidate pacifism and antimilitarism as obsolete and inadequate tools to resolve the new ‘practical’ emergencies, it goes without saying according to a single narrative. In all latitudes, nationalist propaganda fuels conflicts and poisons public debate by erecting walls between the oppressed classes.
In the case of Palestine, this involves a constant downplaying of Israeli war crimes and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon to the point that even European governments have relativised the arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court against the criminal Netanyahu after having applauded the one against the criminal Putin.
As far as Ukraine is concerned, there is an evident international plan aimed at enlisting the world of the left and movements, including libertarian or self-styled ones, in the war front against the ‘tyrant’. This narrative is based on the rhetoric of national resistance to the invasion, in which the end justifies any means (including in the most extreme cases nuclear war), with the aim of splitting the pacifist and antimilitarist forces by defusing one of the instruments of struggle that in Western countries have historically been most effective: opposition to wars and military spending accompanied by objection, refusal to fight and desertion in connection with the broader social struggles.
The combative rhetoric has been abundantly deployed in the last three years by sectors that call themselves anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian, whose slogans, analyses and public documents do not differ in any way from Western and liberal war propaganda and local nationalist narratives, in the complete absence of any qualifying point in terms of class or libertarian readings of the situation. Without claiming, as per our founding principles, any monopoly on anarchism, it is clear to us that nationalist, militarist and liberal drifts of that kind do not and cannot have anything to do with our idea of anarchism and must therefore be faced like those of any other political force opposed to us: in the acknowledgement of the different positions, without any confusion or formal association between irreconcilable political programmes and projects.
On the other side of this front line, the project of a ‘multipolar’ world promoted by some governments within the BRICS+, which is nothing but a different imperialist programme, has fatally seduced remnants of Bolshevism and sectors of the left who have gone so far as to consider bloodthirsty dictators like Putin in Russia, Maduro in Venezuela and various associates as ‘comrades’ or almost. According to the same logic, there are those who legitimise religious fanatics, misogynists, homophobes and murderers of groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or the bureaucrats of corrupt more or less ‘national’ authorities, as the protagonists of an alleged resistance to Israel. While the misery and contradictions of these latest speeches are evident, we cannot but strongly reaffirm the founding principle of the coherence of means and ends, for which our antimilitarism can in no case be separated from our anti-authoritarian, anti-clerical, anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist inspiration.
In future international scenarios, it will certainly not be the installation of old reactionary tools like Donald Trump that will bring an alternative to the progressive warmongering madness of his predecessor Joe Biden and of the majority of the Western ruling class, nor even a possible military success (or non-failure) of the ‘non-Western’ world that will bring more justice or call into question capitalism, the coloniality of power and imperialism.
We must not forget the other hundred conflicts still ongoing at a global level, especially in the South of the World, including, as our comrades from Brazil and Latin America remind us, the genocidal war that has been going on for over 500 years in their parts against women, against the poor and against indigenous and Afro-descendant communities. If we recognise the still current need for anti-colonial and decolonial action, it is important to specify that this must in no way lead to new forms of nationalism, communitarianism or essentialism of civilisation. The concept of the individual remains central against any drift that leads to ethnic, racial and cultural essentialisms, even if based on the idea of ’peoples’, entities that are always characterised internally by dynamics of inequality and oppression in terms of class, gender and every possible form of discrimination and marginalisation.
Despite all the difficulties, there are important spaces of action and organisation from below in which our contribution can be decisive in building a social opposition to war and militarism. A central point of our action has been our support for the general strikes of the conflictual and grassroots unionism that in recent years have been characterised by having associated social struggles and for wages with an antimilitarist approach against wars and the war economy, consistent with our assumption that closely links an antimilitarist perspective to a class perspective.
We then need a major cultural initiative to counter the militaristic propaganda that is daily dished out, more or less explicitly, in schools and in public communication with increasingly pervasive methods, and ready to exploit places of education and training to make more effective a discourse that presents the supposedly ‘good’ face of the armed forces of the State as if they were humanitarian enterprises.
In this sense, our support for refusal to fight, for conscientious objection, for desertion, for draft evasion on all sides of the war fronts and for revolutionary defeatism remains fundamental, especially in a period in which, to mention only one of the most well-known fronts, the Russian and Ukrainian military commands themselves recognise desertion as a real problem that hinders their respective death programmes. This support develops within the framework of our internationalist commitment, especially within the International of Anarchist Federations, which must be developed by promoting new initiatives to deconstruct borders and contest any idea of nationalism and territorial sovereignty of the nation-state or any other entity that aspires to become one, replacing it with new mechanisms of international solidarity and universal sisterhood/brotherhood.
We need a dialogue, within the framework of actions carried out consistently from below and outside of parties and institutional control, with all those groups and movements that share our antimilitarist intransigence, building functional alliances on well-defined objectives and consistent with all the assumptions we have expressed in this document. Only by developing and generalising actions from below based on these assumptions will it be possible to truly renew hope in a world of freedom and equality instead of that of death, destruction and permanent war that capitalism and the state increasingly shamelessly impose on us.