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Social crisis, stagnant wages, declining welfare. Class struggle returns to the center stage in cities as new political hubs. Wages, work, housing, income, and self-government are all part of the same struggle
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dESCRIption
The country’s economic and social condition is disastrous: wages are frozen, pensions are derisory, purchasing power is devoured by the cost-of-living crisis, poverty is endemic. Work itself is constantly called into question by the warmongering short-sightedness of politics and by the profit hunger of large multinationals. Short-time work schemes are soaring, precarity has become permanent. Finding housing is an unequal struggle against real estate rent and speculation. Access to healthcare and public services, increasingly defunded, is an endless maze.
Meanwhile, the government evicts, clears, and represses with hammer blows, tear gas, and water cannons. Not only out of ideology, but because the shrinking of democratic spaces and the authoritarian turn are today necessary for the new global kings of oligarchic capitalism to launch an attack on the material conditions of living labor and social cooperation. Despite Meloni and other right-wing governments’ propaganda, the social reality clearly emerges in cities and territories through everyday struggles for wages, welfare, housing, and the defense of jobs against industrial desertification.
The time has come to turn this truth into a base for organizing at the level of the challenge and breaking out of the crisis. Class struggle for direct wages and for indirect wages must advance together, while practices of mutualism and urban welfare platforms can prefigure alternatives to extractive platforms, wrenching the wealth we produce from the hands of the rich.
In this sense, cities become new hubs of political innovation where mobilizations and struggles converge with forms of self-government and mutualism, as well as administrative experiments aimed at winning wages, defeating real-estate rent, and promoting an ecological transition alternative to the war-driven and fossil-based one.
It is precisely for this reason that cities—and what makes them vital, social spaces and urban movements, trade-union and associative realities—are under attack by power, in an attempt to erode their territorial rootedness and the transformative potential of these political, solidaristic struggles.
Facing the war against living labor, against direct and indirect wages, we respond by exercising our right to resistance in order to strengthen class struggle, through confederated networks and platforms as a constituent practice to affirm the right to decent work, income, welfare, and rights on a European scale.