[Italy] We won’t be complicit. We will be deserters (Spoleto, March 2024)

Responding to a parliamentary question, War Minister Guido Crosetto confirmed that the factory of Terrestrial Military Ammunition (SMMT) in Baiano di Spoleto could soon produce the new missiles and ammunition to be sent to Ukraine to support the ongoing war. The Defense Industries Agency (AID) indeed proposed three of its production sites –Spoleto, Capua and Fontana Liri – for the European Union’s tender, which provides a grant of 500 million euros to produce new armaments to be sent to Kiev.

Although it is still only a candidacy, the deal is given as very likely by the local newspapers, also by virtue of the fact that the Spoleto plant would be underutilized with respect to its “productive” (but perhaps we should say destructive) capacities.

The minister is already a representative of the arms industry lobby as president of the Italian Industries Federation Companies of Aerospace, Defence and Security (AIAD), i.e. a branch of Confindustria that brings together war entrepreneurs, and he continues to promise multi-billion profits for his cronies. He also perhaps believes that in the run-up to the regional elections and with a few promises of jobs he could tame the people of Spoleto, who are angry about the downsizing of the hospital.

If states and capitalist power blocs compete for control of world hegemony, we the exploited have nothing to do with their wars. The bombs produced in Spoleto will massacre the forcibly conscripted soldiers, also prolonging the massacre of the Ukrainian civilian population. But war affects us all.

While the Warlords are doing gold business (a few weeks ago we learned that Leonardo saw its market capitalization grow by 82% in 2023) we are all paying the consequences with the increase in the cost of living, first of all with energy products, the intensification of exploitation in the name of productivity, the direct expression of which is clearly visible in the continuous increase in deaths and injuries at work. Finally, we see the effects of this with the ongoing repressive spiral: the truncheons against students or strike pickets, the investigations against the anarchist press and the increasing intolerance towards dissenting opinions, up to the transfer of Alfredo Cospito to 41 bis, are the very representation of the war policies that our rulers put in place for fighting on the home front.

It is possible to oppose all this: the dockworkers of many cities who refused to supply military equipment and the direct actions that were able to concretely put a spoke in the wheels of the war machine and its accomplices are proof of this.

No complicity with the manufacturers of death!
Neither in Spoleto nor anywhere else: let’s boycott, undermine, sabotage the war industry!
The enemy is not the exploited on the other side of the front, but the politician, the manufacturer, the banker who gets richer with our blood!

Anarchists in Spoleto
t.me/circoloanarchicolafaglia

English translation: The Friends of the Class War / Gli Amici della Guerra di Classe
https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/italy-we-wont-be-complicit-we-will-be-deserters-spoleto-march-2024/