In the first few days of September it seemed clear that we were heading for a hot autumn in Italy. After Genoa itself, there were the huge demonstrations at the end of July against state repression. The Italian anti-globalisation movement was constantly in the newspaper headlines of the newspapers for the whole of August.
In the first days of September, it was apparent that all the ingredients were present for the beginnings of a strong social movement organising itself. This embryonic movement obviously had the capability of putting the Berlusconi government in difficulties.
In every town, and also small villages, Social Forums were created, mirroring the Genoa Social Forum which had grown up in the run up to the international demonstration in July.
These formations grouped together various community organisations and centres, unions, and political organisations, as well as a large number of people not involved in any organisation.
The initial meetings showed what great potential there was, with more than 1,000 people attending each of the Rome, Naples, and Milan meetings.
At the same time, the Genoa Social Forum (GSF), for its part, meeting on September 9-10, decided to initiate a process of creating an Italian Social Forum.
This was not simply to be made up of the national organisations which co-ordinated the Genoa demonstrations, but also involving the various local Forums, and thus the construction of a broader and broader movement.
In this context, the events of September 11 in the United States and the dynamic of Nato towards war came as a real shock. The movement was immediately able to react to the international crisis and place these issues at the centre of its thinking and of its mobilisations, both rejecting terrorism and opposing war.
The movement thus represented an alternative to the anti-Islamic and racist crusade, of which Berlusconi has made himself the spokesperson, but which has not met any real opposition from the moderate left.
The "anti-globalisers" have been able to keep open spaces for the democratic expression of social conflict demonstrating in various towns from September 20 onwards. Several thousand people marched in Rome Bologna and Turin and then 30,000 took part in a major mobilisation against the NATO summit in Naples on September 27.
Rifondazione Communista has been fully involved in this course of mobilisations. Its national demonstration last Saturday which obviously itself became an anti-war demonstration, drew 50,000 people.
The whole agenda of the movement, therefore, has been upset by the events of September 11. It is obviously not straightforward to move from a critique of neo-liberal globalisation to opposition to war and to the imperialist offensive.
This shift requires a leap of elaboration and analysis on the part of a large section of those forces who have been the actors who at the forefront of the mobilisations of the last period. From this point of view the national assembly of the movement, which has been called in Florence on 20-21 October, will be an important moment in testing the movement’s capability for resistance and riposte.
At the same time the coming weeks present rich possibilities for the further development of mobilisations.
On the one hand the traditional march for peace from Perugia to Assisi on October 14 this year will see a new protagonist in the anti-globalisation movement which represents the possibility of broadening it out to involve a significant pacifist element.
Pacifism has remained a strong sentiment in Italian society since the Kosovo war.
On the other hand there is the concrete possibility of a convergence with social struggles against the employers’ policies, backed up by the budget presented by the right-wing government.
The crucial factor from this point of view is that an industry-wide engineering strike has been called on November 9, while there is a national demonstration against the Word Trade Organisation organised by the GSF the following day.
The strike has been called by the FIOM union which is part of the Genoa Social Forum and was an important actor in the Genoa demonstration.
Now the challenge is for the antiglobalisation movement and Fiom to identify concrete forms of co-ordination and interaction of the two mobilisations, and common points of in their respective platforms.
If demands ranging from opposition to the war to opposition to neoliberal policies of both the WTO and of Confindustria (the Italian employers’ confederation) can become part of both mobilisations the movement will have crossed another frontier – by no means an unimportant one.