A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #46 - Their order is war (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Ceuta and the European fortress --- While capital, weapons, and armies 
can crisscross the planet, people are denied the right to cross borders. 
--- The Ceuta crisis of the summer of 2026 demonstrated once again that 
Europe views migrants as bodies to be rejected, monitored, or used in 
negotiations between governments.
The information disseminated during the crisis was confusing and 
contradictory. This very uncertainty should have prompted caution. 
Instead, the European right immediately spoke of an invasion.

Behind those crossings were poverty, unemployment, inequality, and a 
colonial border separating closely related territories with enormous 
differences in wages and rights.

Ceuta and Melilla are remnants of the European colonial presence in 
Africa. But colonialism disappears from public discourse just when it 
would be crucial to understanding the crisis.

Europe mourns its dead while simultaneously perfecting the system that 
produces them: externalizing borders, reaching agreements with 
governments tasked with stopping departures, repatriations, and 
surveillance.

Traffickers thrive because there are no safe routes. The more repression 
increases, the higher the price of crossing.

Italy and the emergency propaganda

The Italian government has turned the Ceuta crisis into a propaganda 
tool, introducing controls on connections from Spain despite the absence 
of significant movements towards Italy.

It's the right's playbook: transform every migratory movement into a 
national emergency, fuel the perception of siege, and present the 
suspension of rights as common sense.

This policy is reactionary because it constructs a false opposition 
between Italian and migrant workers.

It hides the responsibilities of businesses, governments and rentier 
companies behind the ghost of invasion.

When a worker can't find a home, a young person can't find stable work, 
or a family waits months for a medical appointment, the government talks 
about borders and national identity.

The migrant becomes the scapegoat of a system that the right does not 
want to change.

Nationalism transforms anger against capital into hostility towards 
other exploited people.

Europe of weapons

The European Union has now made rearmament the cornerstone of its 
economic and industrial policy.

The Readiness 2030 programme , initially called ReArm Europe , opens up 
the possibility of mobilising up to 800 billion euros for defence.

One hundred and fifty billion will come through SAFE, the European loan 
facility for joint military procurement. Another six hundred and fifty 
billion can be mobilized by allowing states to increase their debt to 
finance weapons, munitions, drones, missiles, and strategic infrastructure.

For years, the European Union imposed budgetary discipline and austerity 
when it came to healthcare, education, pensions, and wages. Today, the 
same constraints are being lifted for the military industry.

Public debt, deemed irresponsible when it is used to build hospitals or 
hire teachers, becomes acceptable when it finances weapons systems.

We do not invest to preserve life, but to increase the capacity to cause 
death.

Europe is not building an alternative to NATO. It wants to become a more 
armed pillar of the Western order and, at the same time, strengthen its 
own defense industry capable of competing in the global market.

The promise of a social Europe is being replaced by a Europe of weapons.

From two to five percent

At the NATO Summit in The Hague in June 2025, Italy and its other allies 
committed to allocating 5 percent of their GDP to defense and broader 
security by 2035.

3.5 percent will finance military needs. A further 1.5 percent may 
include strategic infrastructure, networks, civil preparedness, 
innovation, and the defense industry.

In Italy, five points of GDP would mean, at current values, over one 
hundred billion euros a year.

Not everything will appear as military spending. Railways, ports, 
digital networks, energy systems, research, and civil defense could be 
included in NATO planning.

Militarization will become less visible and more pervasive.

A railway could be presented as a civilian infrastructure and 
simultaneously designed for troop transport. A university project could 
be defined as innovation while developing military technologies.

The war economy will penetrate civilian budgets and daily life.

The increase in Italian spending

According to NATO estimates published in July 2026, Italian defense 
spending proper will increase from 33.4 billion euros in 2024 to 48.3 
billion in 2026.

Almost fifteen billion more in two years.

The share of GDP will rise from 1.52 to 2.10 percent. Calculated at 
constant prices, military spending has more than doubled compared to 2014.

This isn't a minor adjustment. It's a realignment of the state's priorities.

When it comes to wages, healthcare, schools, housing, or land 
protection, the government claims that resources are scarce. When NATO 
sets new goals, money is immediately found.

It's a political and class choice.

Austerity isn't going away: it's being repurposed. Public spending on 
weapons is growing, while budgetary discipline continues to weigh on 
wages, pensions, and services.

It is the socialization of the costs of war and the privatization of the 
profits.

Pordenone and the military supply chains

Military reconversion becomes concrete in the territories.

On July 29, 2026, Confindustria Alto Adriatico organized a meeting in 
Pordenone to present the "Connext Filiere National Project", aimed at 
companies interested in defense, aerospace and dual-use technologies .

Behind words like innovation, industrial opportunities, and 
technological development lies a precise choice: to include the 
territory in the new war economy.

At the top of the supply chains are large groups like Leonardo, 
Fincantieri, and Avio Aero. Around them are organized networks of small 
and medium-sized businesses, universities, research centers, and 
training programs.

Public money finances investments, supports research, and trains the 
workforce. Profits remain private.

The rhetoric of dual use serves to present technologies that are 
financed and developed within the defense sector as neutral.

A drone, a sensor, or a piece of software can also have civilian 
applications. But if the funding, client, and purpose belong to the 
military sector, we're in the war economy.

Dual use thus becomes the fig leaf behind which to hide the profit 
produced by the ability to monitor and destroy.

Wages Falling, Military Profits Rising

The rearmament is taking place in a country where, between 1990 and 
2020, real wages fell by 2.9 percent.

This data depicts a balance of power. For decades, precariousness, 
privatization, contractual fragmentation, and the weakening of unions 
have shifted wealth from labor to profits and rents.

Today, a country that claims it has no resources for public contracts, 
healthcare, or education finds tens of billions for armaments and 
military supply chains.

When it comes to services, financial compatibility is invoked. When it 
comes to war, debt becomes a virtuous option.

Military Keynesianism is granted to that which destroys and denied to 
that which heals.

Universities, schools and employment blackmail

The reduction in regular funding forces universities and research 
centers to rely on private contracts. The military industry can thus 
direct laboratories, doctorates, patents, and courses of study.

Militarization proceeds through financial dependence.

The same risk affects technical and professional institutes, transformed 
into places intended to train manpower for the defense supply chain.

First, territories and services are impoverished, then military 
production is presented as the only possibility of employment.

The blackmail is clear: accept the weapons or lose your job.

However, the alternative cannot be dumped on workers. A publicly funded 
productive reconversion controlled by workers and local communities is 
needed.

The expertise employed in armaments can be applied to public transport, 
renewable energy, healthcare technologies, land conservation, and 
infrastructure maintenance.

There's no shortage of socially necessary work. What's lacking is the 
will to free production from the logic of profit and war.

There are no progressive imperialisms

In the new world disorder we are asked to choose between the United 
States and Europe or China and Russia.

It's a false alternative.

The United States defends its hegemony. China builds its own economic 
and military sphere of influence. Russia asserts military control over 
the former Soviet Union. India seeks to emerge as an independent power. 
Europe seeks to transform itself into a more competitive military hub.

None of these projects belong to the working classes.

The multipolarism of states does not coincide with the internationalism 
of peoples.

Anarchist communists are not equidistant between occupier and occupied, 
or between aggressor and attacked. But support for oppressed populations 
must not become subordination to states or authoritarian organizations.

We cannot support NATO in the name of Ukraine, Russia in the name of 
anti-Americanism, China in the name of multipolarity, Hamas in the name 
of Palestine, or Modi's nationalism in the name of the Global South.

Internationalism means political class independence from all states and 
concrete solidarity with all oppressed peoples.

Our field

Our camp is that of Chinese workers attempting to organize themselves, 
of Russian opponents of the war, of the Ukrainian population resisting 
the invasion, of secular and libertarian Palestinian organizations, and 
of Israelis rejecting the occupation.

It is the field of young Indian " cockroaches " when they transform 
humiliation into protest, of striking farmers and workers, of oppressed 
castes, of religious minorities and of women fighting patriarchy.

It is the field of migrants who challenge borders and of comrades who in 
Pordenone contested the transformation of the territory into a military hub.

It is the camp of dockers who refuse to load weapons, of students who 
reject agreements with the war industry, and of workers who demand 
retraining without losing their wages and jobs.

Internationalism must return to being a concrete organization.

What is needed is transnational union coordination, strikes against the 
war economy, campaigns in ports and factories, and material solidarity 
with class-based and libertarian organizations.

We need an anarchist communist presence capable of connecting war and 
high living costs, rearmament and social cuts, racism and exploitation, 
nationalism and repression.

Building class antimilitarism

Moral pacifism is not enough. It is not enough to declare ourselves 
against war while factories, ports, universities, and public budgets are 
organized to make it possible. Antimilitarism must become a class 
practice. We must oppose public funding of the war industry, denounce 
agreements between businesses and universities, oppose the 
transportation of weapons, and build coordination among workers, 
dockers, students, and local communities. We must demand a productive 
reconversion that guarantees wages and employment and puts industrial 
capacity at the service of social needs.

The security of the world's masters protects property, markets, and 
profits. Our security means wages, housing, healthcare, education, 
freedom, and collective control over production.

That's why we say:

No more public money for weapons.   

Wages, healthcare, schools and social services, not weapons systems.

Get the war industry out of universities, schools, and communities. 
Reconversion of production under the control of workers and communities. 
Housing, wages, and services: our war is against exploitation.

The ruling classes argue that we must arm ourselves because the world is 
dangerous, close our borders because we are under siege, and accept 
austerity because resources are limited.

The opposite is true. The world is dangerous because states arm 
themselves and compete for dominance. Borders kill because wealth and 
rights are unequally distributed. Resources seem limited only when they 
are demanded by the lower classes.

Peace is not the silence imposed by armies. It is overcoming the 
conditions that continually produce war: capitalism, imperialism, 
colonialism, patriarchy, nationalism, and state domination.

Their order is war.

Their profits are built on our sacrifices, on the destruction of the 
environment and on the lives of people.

Our task is to jam the rearmament machine, organize internationalism, 
recompose the class and transform fear into solidarity, solidarity into 
conflict and conflict into social revolution.

September 2026

https://alternativalibertaria.org/
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