For many years, under the most varied pretexts, governments of different colors have introduced laws to limit the possibility of strike, struggle, demonstration.
The Meloni government is determined to continue this operation by making both a qualitative and quantitative leap compared to previous governments through the Draft law 1660, which on September 10 passes the Chambers for discussion and approval.
With this “truncheon-law” the government wants to “settle accounts” with all the realities and experiences of struggle in progress and create the legal instruments necessary to nip in the bud the future, inevitable social conflicts. The increasingly marked tendency to war on the external front requires a pacified social context on the internal front, and all the state apparatuses “work” on this.
The 1660 Draft law, by introducing new crimes and new aggravating penalties, affects both demonstrations against wars, starting with those against the genocide in Gaza, and those against the construction of new military settlements; the workers’ pickets; the protests against the “major works”, the ecological catastrophe, energy speculation; the forms of struggle that these movements equip themselves with to increase their effectiveness such as road and railway blockades; the occupations of vacant houses. And it contains very harsh rules against any form of protest and resistance, even passive, in prisons and detention centers for immigrants without residence permits, even against the protests of family members and supporters in support of them.
Draft law 1660 also punishes the “terrorism of the word”, i.e. the possession of writings that praise the struggle – since, scratch scratch, behind the recourse to the category “terrorism”, used on purpose to create fear, there is nothing but class struggle and social and ecological struggles.
The Draft law 1660, while criminalizing all forms of dissent, provides for total impunity for the police, who will be further protected in the increasingly frequent cases of “abuse in uniform” and will be able to carry weapons even off duty: maximum restriction of the freedom to fight for all on the one hand, maximum expansion of the power to repress, to beat and punish for the “forces of order”, protected from any responsibility for their behavior.
This Draft law is part of the more general reactionary program of the Meloni government (“God, homeland, family”) and is functional to the war economy, the arms race and towards a new global war; it is written under the dictation of the Italian, European, NATO military commands, and in line with the restriction of political freedoms that is taking shape in all the countries of the old continent: it is signed together, not surprisingly, by the three ministers of the interior, “defense” and “justice” (Piantedosi, Crosetto, Nordio).
A liberticidal, slave-owning, police-state law that must absolutely be stopped!
We want to join forces to reject this political design, and affirm that we will consider ourselves free to continue fighting.
This Draft law must be stopped: but it will certainly not be the parliamentary oppositions that will stop it, those who in past years have passed the Minniti decrees and the Salvini decrees; those who fanatically support the war between NATO and Russia in Ukraine; those who have not lifted a finger against the genocide in Palestine because they have always sided in favor of the colonial and racist oppression of Zionism against the Palestinian masses.
Only the revival of proletarian, social, ecological struggles, and against the wars in progress, only a great united movement against this bill in the workplace, schools and squares, will be able to prevent the approval of the law and, if it is approved, oppose its application and act as a barrier to employer and state repression: it is in this perspective that our assemblies have started a dialogue between movements and experiences that in past years have been almost always mutually ignored even though they all fall, in one form or another, under the blows of the judiciary, police and carabinieri.
For this reason, after the two assemblies of July 21st and August 4th, and the assembly called by the SI Cobas on July 28th, we have put on the agenda the establishment of a permanent coordination between the movements, collectives, organizations, trade unions, political organizations, individual activists who share the objective of a united mobilization against the Draft law 1660 and the militarist and warmongering design that it expresses, with the invitation to set up local nodes of this Network to promote widespread initiatives of struggle and awareness.
This coordination is called Free to Fight Network – Let’s Stop the Draft law 1660 together, precisely because at stake is the very possibility of mobilizing against the ongoing wars, against the exploitation of labor, the plundering of nature, building and energy speculation, state racism that discriminates against immigrant populations, attacks on women’s acquired rights, the possibility of resisting and fighting for the inmates in the CPRs and prisons, where every day people die of violence, torture and despair.
The Network is open to welcoming those who share its objectives, with only three (but essential) discriminating factors: to be for the total rejection of the Draft law, which cannot be reformed or amended; to be unequivocally against the ongoing wars and the war economy, from which the bill was born; to commit its forces to the development of a united mobilization, in the autumn and beyond the autumn, with the use of all the necessary means of struggle, including those that the bill wants to prohibit at all costs.
The real challenge that awaits us is to reach with our propaganda and agitation a much wider area of society than the one usually involved in protests and struggles, made up of workers, unemployed, students and ordinary people who perhaps sense the dangers we denounce, but have not yet moved.
The path of struggle that the domestic and international situation presents to us as necessary will not be short, but for now we begin to fix the first steps:
1) On Sunday 8 September in Rome a seminar in mixed mode, in presence and online, in which the former magistrate Livio Pepino, the lawyers Marina Prosperi and Eugenio Losco, and the Repression Observatory, after an overview of the whole series of “security decrees” and the logic that connects them, will section the Draft law 1660 to allow the largest possible number of activists to take possession of all the essential aspects of it.
2) Construction in as many cities as possible of coordinations to organize territorial, “sectoral”, thematic initiatives, with the foresight to avoid as much as possible overlaps between the deadlines and the mobilizations against the Draft law 1660, among which to date we indicate:
– the demonstration against war, NATO, sending weapons and military spending, convened for September 21 in Florence by the NATO NO Command Committee neither in Florence nor elsewhere;
– the assembly convened by the SI Cobas in Bologna on 29 September to organize, with grassroots unionism, a national strike against the Draft law – to which the SGB and sectors of the CUB have already declared themselves available;
3) National demonstration in Rome against the Meloni government before the final approval of the Law, in which all the territorial, “sectoral”, thematic initiatives converge.
4) Appeal to all grassroots and combative trade unionism because a united general strike against the Draft law is indicated in a short time (before the national demonstration and in connection with it), with a confrontation, in September, between all the realities concerned.
Memberships (in alphabetical order)
Assemblea in solidarietà con la resistenza palestinese, Trento – Associazione Libertade, Sardegna – Blocchi precari metropolitani, Roma – Brescia anticapitalista – Cagliari Social Forum – Casa del popolo, Teramo – 22 comitati sardi contro la speculazione energetica – Comitato 23 settembre – Comitato No TAV di Trento – Comitato permanente contro le guerre e il razzismo, Marghera – Coordinamento dei Comitati di lotta di Roma e Viterbo – CPA Firenze – CUB Pisa – CUB Rail – “Dobbiamo vivere” / Lavoratori disoccupati e precari, Torino – GPI / Giovani Palestinesi d’Italia – International Migration Alliance / sez. Italia – Laboratorio politico Iskra – Liberare tutt*, coordinamento contro la repressione e il carcere – Madri contro la repressione – Movimento di lotta per il lavoro 7 novembre, Napoli – Movimento NO TAV – Osservatorio Repressione – Panetteria occupata, Milano – SI Cobas – SBM / sindacato di base multicategoriale, Trento – Verona per la Palestina – Tendenza internazionalista rivoluzionaria – UDAP / Unione Democratica Arabo-Palestinese – Ultima generazione – USB sociale Sardegna