Commentary
An antidote to the authoritarian poison
Faced with a crackdown on freedom of expression, a movement has taken shape that has been able to adopt the method of convergence and has kept pushing forward, showing the strength of the social ties and rich productive relations the Meloni government has put under attack.
The march against the security decree was a success that managed to avert many risks. An unwritten rule of militancy, learned by experience and etched deep into our bodies, says that when a comrade ends up on trial, under house arrest or even in jail, you must do everything possible to get them out of harm’s way.
This primary form of solidarity has long been a powerful engine for building bonds, trust and loyalty. But there are risks to this approach. A struggle focused solely on “fighting repression” can get mired in the traps and toxicity that power spreads, with the risk of producing minority communities concerned only with defense and never with going on the offensive, sometimes even slipping into paranoia under the weight of persecution.
That is not the case in the battle against the bill that became the security decree. Faced with a crackdown that introduces 14 new categories of offence and nine aggravating factors – heaping hundreds of years of prison time on the backs of the poor and those who organize and fight, including non-violently, not to remain poor – a movement has taken shape that has been able to adopt the method of convergence and has kept pushing forward, showing the strength of the social ties and rich productive relations the Meloni government has put under attack.
During these months, we have often asked ourselves why the right has mounted yet another assault on the rule of law. The answers have emerged clearly enough, one by one. First of all, there is a structural reason: post-fascism’s historic function is to put authoritarianism at the service of the absolute defense of private property and particular interests, against every collective interest and even against Constitutional principles. That mission dovetails with the propaganda campaign about “security” that has been running for years – well before the FdI crowd at Colle Oppio moved into the Prime Minister’s office.
We have now reached a decisive threshold. It would be a mistake not to see the leap in scale and the sheer ferocity driving it, but for how many years has the constant drip of security paranoia and “perceived” threats been eating into the bedrock of reality and people’s concrete problems?
The powerful ideological machine built around “security” has been aiming to shred social bonds and smuggle war-like devices into our neighborhoods – against migrants, the poor, dissidents, anyone deemed different – creating the conditions for this authoritarian distortion.
Finally, beyond the structural and cultural aspects, one cannot overlook a particular, subjective driving force: the right’s targeted vendetta against its enemies in society. In brief: this security decree is also the extreme right’s revenge against those who, imperfectly yet persistently, have not stopped building antibodies to selfishness, abuse of power and isolation.
The tens of thousands who took to the streets in Rome on Saturday, May 31, and many more who have been mobilizing across Italy, prove that a living, reactive social body still exists despite years of political crisis (at all levels, both in parties and in movements) and deep distrust of collective action. Even with all of our differences, we know we can at least try to place some trust in the people we met on the streets of Rome.
That is what old and new reactionaries fear: the construction of forms of collective protection and care from the grassroots level. Because this is the necessary condition for the birth of a new politics and the antidote to their poison.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/un-antidoto-al-veleno-securitario on 2025-06-01