The land binds the

Insight by Francesco Piobbichi, social worker, and Sara Manisera, FADA Collective

Devastate, Profit, and Abandon. This is the current formula of profit-driven domination that pervades and colonizes our territories. From the Strait of Messina project between Sicily and Calabria, through the high-speed Salerno-Reggio Calabria rail link, the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) and the Snam Apennine pipeline, the regasification plants in Vado Ligure and Ravenna, the mega “biomethane” plants, the ski slopes of Cortina, to the Valsusa, power takes on the same forms: those who decide what to do, invest in, and manage do so based on the material interests of a narrow, elite segment of the population, disregarding the needs of the territories and their inhabitants, be they people, animal species, or plants.

The funds from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), allocated to major infrastructure projects and the so-called energy transition, are an example of this: top-down projects, often linked to companies with holdings and corporate offices in Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, or other states with favorable tax regimes that are not focused on achieving a fair energy transition, but rather on speculating and deriving enormous profits from it. Mountains are fenced off, pipelines are buried, mega plants or ski slopes are built, and gas pipelines are installed, destroying territories, ecosystems, forests, and communities, always for the profit of a few elites.

However, we cannot address the issue of domination without considering the role of the state today, its concrete form of power, as a direct and indirect actor serving capitalist value extraction processes. At the same time, we must learn to observe the state’s movement within society, analyzing its colonialist and extractive modalities, as well as its interactions with communities and territories, especially those on the margins.

After the brief post-war period, the state today assumes a very different form from that of the past century, showing its true face: violence along its borders, progressive rearmament, and the imposition of large-scale projects. The Strait of Messina bridge or the Tav are like a law: technically it doesn’t matter whether it is appropriate or not, whether it is needed or not, or whether it serves a general interest. Its realization is decided by the balance of power and the interests of the dominant classes.

If there were truly a democratic, participatory, territorial discussion process, not bound by the bureaucracy’s rules and procedures that entrench decisions in a model where the dominant classes have extensive decision-making power, we might start bringing other priorities and needs to the center of public debate; starting with ensuring the safety of the Apennines from a hydrogeological and climatic perspective; strengthening a decentralized and local public healthcare system; maintaining and building new water infrastructure to ensure the right to water amid a climate crisis that is drying out our territories; and then caring for the land to produce healthy food through regenerative, sustainable agriculture that is fair to workers and the environment, with horizontal and local distribution methods.

But such a process has not yet occurred, nor is it likely to.

So, what to do?

Numerous eco-social resistance movements scattered across different territories struggle to address a central political issue: we cannot win any local dispute unless we build a common overarching vision capable of confronting these power relations and the steel cage within which our society has been enclosed.

In other words, we need to have a comprehensive vision and bring to the center of the debate not only common goods and their community management but especially the organization of eco-social, community, and rural resistances among territories.

The Apennines, the eco-social backbone of the country, have been abandoned and marginalized for decades. Floods, earthquakes, landslides, and fires are accelerating a fundamental trend produced by the state, which has abandoned these areas using the same method with which it cut the social state, pushing increasingly marginalized the poorest social classes and the areas deemed “sacrificable.” This process has produced and continues to produce depopulation and emigration, which, for many young people in peripheral and marginalized areas, remains the only viable alternative to underpaid and irregular work.

However, the Apennine region is dotted with tiny stories of resistance, generous attempts at civil and rural economies, mutual aid practices during emergencies, and communities that, together, try to resist depopulation. These practices are often accompanied by countless struggles against environmental devastation and speculation, against the closure of schools and hospitals, and for the restoration of roads.

From the Strait of Messina to Valsusa, Italy’s marginalized areas are dotted with this archipelago of small islands. It is an Italy increasingly left to itself, just like the peripheries of our cities. They only return to the "center" when speculative interests concentrate and end up financing the “big” companies - Snam, Eni, WeBuild, etc. - that receive public money while redistributing precariousness, low wages, and destruction of landscapes and, with them, communities. Most of the peripheries and marginalized territories, on the other hand, must manage with ever-scarcer public resources due to budget constraints, austerity, and state policies that deplete municipalities of essential services.

Therefore, it is necessary to begin linking these processes and initiating a collective and community discussion on what kind of organizational form to implement. A few decades ago, environmental movements had a remarkable insight: to bind together in a mutual aid pact.

This insight did not follow through, and this is not the space to discuss why, but perhaps it is time to restart from that path and resume the organizational journey together, considering the economic dimension of resistance, and thus building an eco-social pact among the “marginal” territories that can support popular economies and simultaneously finance struggles in a relationship of mutual support. If there is a flood, an earthquake, a multinational corporation, or the state imposing an extractive project, the network of marginal lands activates and mobilizes. But this should also happen during non-emergency times, through practices of solidarity and real economy.

Imagining an alternative is a tortuous path at this historical moment, and we don’t have the right recipe to shape the organization. However, we know that this is a felt need by many. From farmers who lack markets, to exploited laborers, to citizens-consumers who eat poisoned products, and to all those who are part of committees, associations, movements, and who carry out various local struggles.

We must envision a sort of “people’s house” in every territory, capable of building an economic dimension starting from the products of the land, with solidarity quotas allocated to struggles and essential needs.

We have been accustomed to a social state (and parties) that had the resources to allow activists to engage in politics. This story is over. Today, the state no longer offers spaces and has increased repression, targeting the most generous militants in various forms (economic, civil, criminal, etc.). In a country where precariousness is the norm, without an autonomous economic support system for resistance, political struggle can only be carried out by those who can afford it, and often those who can afford it do not share the same interests as our communities.

We are at a historical moment where major eco-social battles are regaining vitality, and we believe it is necessary to combine knowledge and practices to build resistances outside the state, considering the real places of production, which are no longer factories but lands.

And it is precisely the Apennine lands - and the high “sacrificed” lands from the central state - where knowledge, practices, relationships, organizational forms, and resistances have been sedimented for millennia, that can become eco-social laboratories of civil economies, common goods management, and hospitality. In these contexts, still not heavily anthropized, where there have been no industrial and demographic pressures, and where there is still a strong connection to the land, an alternative can and must be imagined.

Partly, these informal relations already exist, and one of them is precisely around wheat, bread, and the festival “La Terra mi tiene” on April 25 in Atena Lucana, during the Palio del Grano in Caselle in Pittari, or during the Alta Felicità festival in Valsusa.

Perhaps it is necessary to start discussing a mutual aid pact and a manifesto written by those who inhabit and live these marginal lands. “You cannot teach colonizers to love and connect to the land,” writes Iman Zainab Salem, a Palestinian photographer and part of the Archive artists’ collective. Indeed, this is true. Indigenous peoples and communities who live on the land are those who care for it, love it, and protect it. The path is already there; we just need to connect the dots of resistance.