Italy: police arrest Social Forum leaders
Workers power Global, Milan: 17 November 2002

In Cosenza at dawn on 17 November the Italian police raided the dwellings of 20 or so Social Forum activists, arresting them all, including Franco Caruso, leader of the Naples Social Forum. The militants have been accused of subversive acts tending towards "the overturn of the economic order of the state", association with the black bloc, instigation to violence in Naples and Genoa last year, and the use of e-mails and internet to plan all of the above.

The accusations are, of course, absolutely ludicrous, as was the decision to effect the arrests in such a theatrical manner, one, that is, befitting armed mafia hoods. Not a lot of political acumen is required to know what the repressive forces of the state are up to once again. Anyone who thought that the massive anti-capitalist demonstration in Florence on 9 November showed, amongst other things, that the Italian police had learned a lesson from the Genoa days, has just had a rude awakening.

This act of police brutality is a response to that demonstration. The one million people who marched militantly but peacefully through the streets of Florence are being warned that they are being viewed as subversives, and that dawn raids and jail await anyone who thinks that there is in fact an alternative to "the economic order of the state".

The police have it in for Franco Caruso, a champion of the poor and oppressed in Naples, and in particular of the immigrant community who suffer police harassment, violence and racism. They hate him because he exposes their every rotten move and does so using a method of logical but militant reasoning which sends their philistine cop brains into a spin. They can't answer him with words, so they plan their cowardly raids backed up by a campaign of lies and insinuation.

Amongst the other absurd claims, Caruso and his friends are accused of being in possession of spiked clubs "without a licence", an accusation which they flatly deny. This accusation is being made by the same criminal Italian police which planted two molotov cocktails in the Diaz school in Genoa to justify their fascist-type attack on innocent protesters on 21 July 2001.

It is being made by the same "organisation for delinquency" (a term the Italian state has historically used against socialist organisations) which put on public display a number of "weapons" (necklaces and belts) which they claimed demonstrators had used in that march but which those same demonstrators recognized as having been taken from them by police during a previous (peaceful) protest.

So ready were these twenty or so people to overthrow the existing order on their own, that they have been allowed to walk free for over a year and a half while the magistrates trumped up their phoney case against them. So guilty were they of trashing Genoa, that the Genoa magistrates, who have opened any number of files against police and demonstrators, have never asked for the arrest of Caruso.

These members of the Naples Social Forum are also accused of discussing with the Black Bloc. But of course, discussing with the Black Block is what we should all be doing, especially since, after Genoa, the Black Bloc was open to discussion and made a self-criticism. The Black Bloc is right to point out that violence originates with the state and that the state has to be dealt with violently, but it is wrong to take the state on in the manner that it does, exposing undefended demonstrators to police retaliation and paternalistically assuming that others don't understand things as they do and that they need to learn the hard way.

But bourgeois democracy allows for this and similar issues to be discussed on the very chat lines which were being spied upon by Italian police villains. Revolutionary literature of all types can be found in even the most bourgeois of Italian bookshops (which demand at least a 20 per cent slice).

That most bourgeois of institutions, the university, sends reminders to revolutionary organizations when they don't receive the latest issue of their subversive publications. And, strictly speaking, one's constitutional right to diffuse revolutionary literature and to chant or display the slogan "the bourgeois state cannot be reformed but must be overthrown" must be defended by the police.

These considerations make the arrest of these militants all the more "odd". One accusation is that they threw vegetables at policemen during the demonstration in Naples last year, an undeniably true (and perfectly laudable) act which, however, is difficult to tie in with "subversive acts tending towards the overthrow of the economic order of the state". Yet things like this are what the accusations actually boil down to.

This latest offensive by the Italian state is a declaration of war against the global anti-capitalist movement as a whole, and clearly in favour of the impending imperialist aggression against the Iraqi people.

One other thing is also certain: the repression of the anti-capitalist movement is far from over. And not even the most "peace loving" members of ATTAC can now deny it: the Italian police openly admits that IT is the repressive defender of an economic order which in turn IT identifies as inseparable from the state. We can at least thank the otherwise not too bright Italian police for clarifying that fundamental tenet of Marxist theory!

Readers will be pleased to learn that the detainees have been visited by left-wing politicians and that they are, for the moment at least, physically and psychologically fine. But militants everywhere should picket their local Italian embassy, and bombard it with faxes and e-mails. Messages and slogans could include: "Free the Cosenza 22". "Liberty for Franco Caruso, champion of the Naples poor and oppressed". "We're all subversives". "Down with the criminal Italian police". "Down with the Italian state lie machine and the criminal economic order it defends".

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