Brussels, June 14th – Freedom Not War

The open appeal of the Marche Self-managed Social Centers – Italian East Coast for the ‘Welfare Not Warfare’ Demonstration”

FREEDOM, NOT WAR
Against the war that conscripts cities, lives, territories
Practising the autonomy of struggles and movements

Even if we live in areas far from the bombs, war is everywhere.
War recruits our lives, our resources and our cities.
War expropriates goods and wealth, diverting them from social needs to the coffers of arms manufacturers, fossil fuel lobbies and big tech companies.
War manipulates culture and information for its own propaganda purposes.
War kills and destroys, but it also transforms and imposes its own economy, changing the world based on the survival and expansion strategies of capital and markets.

This war is global and constitutive: it does not help to resolve a localised crisis, but rather to reshape the broader mechanisms of power and control over resources.
The entire framework of international institutions, which are credited with being responsible for conflict mediation and the protection of fundamental individual and collective rights, has been reduced to rubble: the rhetoric of the United Nations and the concept of legal civilisation died with the genocide of the Palestinian people. Even the internal institutions of individual countries within an Occident that has always portrayed itself as the cradle of “democracy” are changing rapidly.
New laws have reintroduced opinion crimes and drastically reduced spaces for criticism, while police powers and penal measures have constantly increased with the aim of striking ever more deeply and pervasively at any form of insubordination.

These are not merely “authoritarian twists” enacted by right-wing governments: they are part of a much deeper and more comprehensive process involving so-called “progressive governments” and the political choices of the institutional left. The criminal policies of the European Union and the European Commission highlight the shared political responsibility for war, rearmament and the genocide of the Palestinians.
Appeals to the UN and international law, as well as electoral propaganda from those seeking government seats, are now empty words that fail to grasp the reality of the situation.

Instead, fully grasping the historical reality we are living through is necessary in order to effectively organise our response. The mobilisations against the genocide of the Palestinian people have demonstrated the strength of grassroots struggles that grow in autonomy.
Opposing war today means opposing a certain worldview.
Resisting war means fighting for an alternative idea of the world.
Against the changes that war brings, we must juxtapose not the past, but the audacity of the future we desire. Symbolic acts and positions of principle are not enough; concrete actions are needed.

We can oppose war and, at the same time, start building a different future.
War strategies mirror those of the fossil fuel industry: war has totally obscured the climate crisis, and fossil fuel lobbies have reinstated their centrality, power and scope for action.
Fossil fuel chains run through our territories, occupying and ravaging them. However, they are also within the reach of our actions. Opposing enlistment in war means prioritising mobilisations and actions against fossil fuel chains. This reaffirms the urgency of phasing out fossil fuels through decentralised energy models that are compatible with the environment and manageable from below.

The production and marketing of weapons also takes place in our territories and ports.
For this reason, they are within our reach and must become a primary target of our struggle.
These are strategies that social movements have already identified, and we must enhance them by improving our organisational and coordination capacities.
The European Commission and the political forces that support it must be delegitimised.
They must be held accountable for their criminal policies and the enormous theft of resources that they call rearmament — not in luxurious institutional halls, but in the streets.
Movements must reoccupy the European space; to do so, they must become firmly established in the individual countries that compose it.
However, for movements to be truly rooted and to develop realistic plans for the future, they must first be autonomous and self-organised. They must be free from the political and institutional tactics that constantly undermine their progress by trying to homogenise them, make them compatible and turn them into a reservoir of votes for the next election.

We must oppose the constitutive war with the constitutive autonomy of movements.
To the war that transforms, we must juxtapose liberating struggles.
We must give a new meaning to antifascism, which unites practices and movements across Europe, because the fascism of this era of great transformations does not stem from the authoritarian policies of some right-wing government. Rather, it stems from the totalitarian vision of the world that seeks to impose itself through war. This vision is supported by governments, regardless of their political colour, because the differences that remain marginal and ineffective in the ongoing global processes are irrelevant to them. If we want to prevent our bodies from being conscripted into this war, we must also prevent our territories, cities, thoughts and organisational forms from being conscripted.
There is no more effective instrument against all conscription than the autonomy of struggles and movements.

We will be at the demonstration in Brussels on 14 June.
At a time like this, spaces for expression that emerge at the European and international levels are important and must be acted upon.
We will be there with comrades who share our views on the content of this document, and who understand its “feeling”.
We will be there because the fight against war, rearmament and fossil fuels requires action, research, experimentation and audacity. Being there means giving voice to an idea, sharing stories and trying to build new references together.

Against war, against genocide, against the complicity of European Commission.
Siamo tutte antifasciste, siamo tutti antifascisti! (We are all antifascists!)