An amazing Italian rebellion - Serge Quaddruppani

What remains of September 10th 2025 and the Bloquons Tout in France?

..........An Amazing Italian Rebellion

Below is a translation of a recent commentary from Lundi Matin. What has been happening in France in September 2025 has been interesting but the effect of Bloquons Tout (Block Everything) in Italy has been astounding and also astonishing considering the country is ruled by the quasi-fascist, Trump loving, Giorgia Meloni. Also the revolt is largely unknown not only in mainstream media but what's left of the 'alternative' especially in a dumb-fuk UK.

Serge Quaddruppani who wrote the following is a kind of ultra-anarcho leftist - who for want of a better description - is also something of an enlightened opportunist as novelist, journalist and translator plus a former collaborator with Gilles Dauve. Serge was born and lives in France and is now about 80 years old.........
(David Wise. Early October 2025)

(the wall slogan appears to say: " Haven't you had enough?)

We had been warned. From Jean Sarkozy ("This September 10th movement (in France) is a factual popular heresy in which the weak revel in its polyfactorial ordered self-importance") to Temps Critiques ("The horn concerts here, the pots and pans concerts there have no more influence than the concerts of fans everywhere in the entertainment stadiums"), not to mention the cohort of political scientists consulted more and more feverishly, For a month, throughout the media, experts in social movements had assured us: September 10 would be a non-event. We have to admit that they were right. Well, almost. And it is from this almost that it is important for us to start again, we who have tried to block everything, and have blocked almost nothing.

Because in this almost blockage, we have lived a little. And seen a couple of things. People leaving for work that we held up for half an hour and who sympathized with the idea of blocking everything (between 2/3 and half of the people, depending on the sources); truck drivers delighted to call their boss that they were stranded; people who had never been seen before on demostrations coming to join the action; People who had seen each other for years without talking to each other much, starting to talk to each other a lot, two accordions on the roadblocks and two trucks full of food that came to serve excellent free meals for those involved in the blockades. A perfectly organized wild crèche for blockading parents. Logging trucks - those monstrous trucks of forest extractivism - finally immobilized. And we saw that we, young and old, multi-gendered and poly-integrated, were able to organize ourselves and work well enough together to block a node of circulation of labor power and merchandise from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. We have also seen that between the 10th and the 18th of September, and afterwards, many more actions were launched.

We have also seen how the mere mention of a social movement had put the rulers in a trance, to the point of pushing a Prime Minister (Bayrou) to organize his exit from the stage and a Minister of the Interior always anxious to show himself to be more fascist than the fascists, to make people hit hard like we had never seen hit, we who have seen a lot of them, blows. We have seen that, with the exception of the 30% attached to a kind of transcendental Pétainism (the only possible meaning, today in France, of the word "fatherland"), the inhabitants governed by the French state were in favour of the idea that it had to stop.
(Field Marshall Petain ruled France during the Nazi occupation from 1940-5 after which he was jailed -TN)

In short, if there was no movement, we did perceive a ferment: in Eymoutiers, as in Paris and Rouen, we saw that there was a blocking mood in this country that was only waiting for better circumstances to express itself. To be continued. The good surprise is that this mood has not remained locked behind the French borders. The Block Everything slogan has been taken up in Italy as "Blocchiamo tutto" , with a power and scope that is out of all proportion to what has happened in France. For decades, from the movements against pension reforms, to the one against the labour law, to the so-called riots in the suburbs, to the yellow vests, Italians have countered French resistance to ultra-liberal normalization with sneering contempt, when they serve this discipline (this is the case with all rulers plus the dominant MSM) or with envy (when French rebels opposed to it). It is obviously this second category that has enthusiastically taken up the idea of blocking everything, and this, not in relation to a list of particular injustices, but against a universal injustice, the crime that will be the grave of the liberal West, even the genocide underway in Gaza. From which it appears that, contrary to what the comrades of Temps Critiques say (where we believe that there is no shortage of tifosi), the clamor of the stadiums admiring beautiful collective movements that can influence the game.
(Tifosi is an Italian expression meaning the fevered behaviour of say, Italian football fans.. TN Dave W)

On Monday, September 22, under the slogan Blocchiamo tutto, demonstrations and strikes erupted throughout Italy in solidarity with Palestine. In Naples and Rome, the central railway stations were invaded and the tracks occupied... Motorways were blocked in Rome and Milan... Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in more than 80 cities. The major newspapers, including La Repubblica, headlined four windows broken during the occupation of the Milan train station. The next day, my friend Antonio Paolacci wrote in a post:

"Rivers of people in the streets of all cities. Ports blocked, stations blocked, highways blocked. I'm just telling you this: the more they talk to you about "just four broken windows", the more obvious it is that they are afraid, afraid that we are talking about the most massive and shared action by the base in the last two decades. And please, you may well believe that this is a mistake, you may always have another opinion, you may think that it is useless, that "it will not stop the war" (you can even continue to call "war" genocide), but a few questions about why you are only told about four people breaking four things, Instead of what really concerns you, here, frankly, I would ask myself some questions."

The Dikes Have Given Way

Excerpts from the editorial of the magazine Contropiano, giornale communista on line. In Italy, on Monday, September 22, something happened that has enormous political significance, which probably marks the end of "social passivity".

A general strike called by a union like the USB – an important one, but certainly not on the scale of the two regime formations that still dominate the trade union panorama – has combined with the feeling of peaceful rebellion of millions of people who have been witnessing a genocide live on television for the past two years.

The set of associations and organizations that launched the mobilization was certainly vast, as had happened so many times, but it had never set in motion a mass of people like the one we saw yesterday.

The question that needs to be answered is terribly simple and complicated: what unites this mass? What will hold it together, make it grow, in the months and years to come? Trying to isolate the aspect of "economic conflict", typically trade unions, from the political, social and human aspects, is now becoming impossible. The reality of today's world holds together, without the possibility of separation, the "structural data" and the universe of social contradictions, or only "values".

Those who were the first to understand this were those workers who forged the slogan "Lay down your arms, raise wages" (Giù le armi, su i salari). Because never before has this slogan appeared, as it has today, we have never felt on our own skin, the chain that connects the impoverishment of those who nevertheless have a job, and the war on our doorstep.

(...)Horror, pure horror, is now the true hallmark of "Western civilization," from Washington to Tel Aviv.

To all this and many other things, this mass of people who have taken to the streets pretend to say "enough is enough!" It claims this knowing full well that the various governments and groups of governments (Europe, NATO, etc.) are completely deaf and blind.

It's a horror that logically goes beyond 'simple' class conflict, the confrontation over wages, social benefits, health, individual freedom (apart from the freedom to make money). But it also includes within it all those themes on which everyone, to a different extent, every day verifies the unbearable character of this system of accumulation. Not of "life", but of its opposite...

The empirical demonstration came – absolutely unexpectedly – from motorists stuck in traffic, openly applauding the demonstrators who were nevertheless "in the way" of them.

If this is so, as it seemed to us as we walked through the immense processions in Rome and elsewhere, we must first of all recognize that this mass of people – workers, students, pensioners, mothers, etc., is looking for a representation above all of ideas, values, culture, in the broad sense.

It is much more than "political representation" to vote for in the next election, but something more authentic, profound, sustainable, in the hope of totally changing the sewer in which we are suffocating. A vision of the world supported by organized forces that may still be in the minority, but certainly not ready to exchange values against sitting in an armchair.

Something was born. It is an atypical social bloc, compared to the distant past. But deep down, we are in other times – in times of wars and therefore revolutions – and we cannot and must not look for the "already known" to face the unknown. It is a new landscape, which requires new glasses to view it.

Working with attention and respect so that it grows, consolidates, clarifies itself around all kinds of themes is the precondition for hoping to make it reach its goal. That of a world without class or religious supremacy, and therefore without exploitation, wars and genocides.

We know that the movement has been so powerful that, despite the accumulated slanders claiming it to be in the hands of "violent people", the very Trumpist Meloni could not help but send a warship to "assist Italian nationals" aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla. We know that the dockers announced that they would blockade the ports at the first Israeli attack. Just yesterday, yet another monster demonstration in Genoa was accompanied by the blockade of a ship that was supposed to take sensitive equipment to Israel, and which had to leave empty-handed.

Italian comrades, my impression is that Contropiano's analysis hits the nail on the head, and if this is indeed the case, it is our turn to envy you. You show us the way: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better". Until it works. (Quote from Samuel Beckett's 1983 book Worstword Ho. TN, DW)

After all, we don't really have a choice. This is it, or genocidal fascism, first in the peripheries of the West (Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan...), then soon, and increasingly, right in its heart.

Serge Quadruppani (Sept 2025)