MF

Some of those who were there at Genoa have become party secretaries or leaders (for example, Sinistra Ecologia Libertà, which is now Sinistra Italiana) . . . in fact I would be inclined to say that I am now not sure whether the problem is the ones who left or the ones who stayed in Italy. Sarcasm aside (though that is not entirely sarcasm), Genoa was not the last great wave of mobilizations in Italy. There was the period of 2008–2011 which was particularly active, with the student protests, the movement against water privatization, and the many mobilizations against austerity.

It is true that in the last few years there has been less capacity to produce mass mobilizations at the national level, but I am not not sure that we should see the causes of this as lying in emigration. If it is true that the emigration of politicized people produces a desertification, at the same time it is also the case that we are living through a period of weak politicization in general, accompanied by the fact that the under-thirties are consistently declining in number. In Italy we currently have a generation of under-twenty-five-year-olds who have never seen struggle. The causes are much more profound than emigration.

In any case, it is important to challenge the narrative of a pacified and dormant country. Italy is still today a country of struggle. Movements continue to aggregate and to fill the streets with protest, from the women’s movement Non Una Di Meno (Not One Less) to the students mobilized against the Altnernanza scuola-lavoro [enforced work placements for school students, of up to four hundred hours], as well as the communities struggling against large-scale development projects that are entirely useless to them (the “TAV” high-speed train in Val Susa, the “TAP” gas pipeline in the South, the incinerators, etc.), the housing struggles and struggles for migrant rights, and the thousands of local workplace struggles.

Not to mention the experiences of mutualism, solidarity, and organization that are daily being produced by the grassroots. In comparison with the past, what we are lacking is not so much struggles themselves, but rather the capacity to incorporate them into a social coalition, to bring together a dispute which is generalized across the whole country. I think that is the challenge today.