Showing posts with label pitchfork protests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pitchfork protests. Show all posts

Sunday 22 December 2013

Fascist Infiltrators.


        A threat protest groups must always be alive to is that they can be infiltrated by the far-right, and this seems to be the case in the Italian “Pitchfork Protests”. There are reports that groups sympathetic to Greece's fascist party, Golden Dawn, have become involved in the “Pitchfork Protests”.

   Last week students demonstrated in Turin, Italy's main unions rallied outside parliament, and protesters marched in Venice and Ancona. An Italian neo-fascist fringe group also scaled the front of the European Commission's Rome headquarters and tore down the EU flag.
    Ten people including the deputy president of Casapound, far-right activists who aid the poor and venerate former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, were arrested and charged with theft, resisting authority and unauthorised protest, police said.
Read the full report HERE:
Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk


Monday 16 December 2013

The Pitchfork Protests.



       Italy, another country where the people's anger, which has been seething below the surface, is now beginning to boil over. There have been protests in Turin in the north of the country to Sicily in the south and they are spreading. This is a growing revolt against the state and its corruption, against austerity for the many, while the few bask in luxury, it is the same complaint as in every other capitalist country on the planet. Though our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media aren't exactly shouting about the swelling anger.

Students clash with police during a protest against the local government in downtown Turin on December 14, 2013. (AFP Photo / Marco Bertorello)

      These protests in Italy are grouped under what has become known as the “pitchfork” protests and they claim no affiliation to any political party. They are manual workers, low paid, unemployed and students, and are not confined to the big towns and cities but across the whole country. It is a combination of protests, marches, sit-ins and other direct action. There are large groups involved in these protests in Turin, Milan, Florence and Palermo with large protests planned for next week. This week it spread to Rome, with students clashing with police outside a university being used by government ministers as a conference centre. One of the banners read, "Our university isn't a catwalk for those who peddle austerity,". On Tuesday last, Beppe Grillo, head of Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement urged police to join protesters. 

 
   
    Italy, like the rest of the capitalist world, has been hit by “austerity”, it is also a country with 12% unemployment, which rises to above 41% for the young under 25's. Low wages and increasing poverty are driving these protests, Is Italy reaching the “enough is enough” stage? According to Danilo Calvani, a farmer and one of the protestors, “There are millions of us and we are growing by the hour___”

A protester throws a stone during a protest in downtown Turin December 9, 2013. REUTERS/Stringer

    How much longer can the various capitalist states keep the lid on the boiling pot of anger? We know they will bring out the usual brute force, telling the people, “It's for your own good” and “Law and order must be preserved”. What that translates into is that they are prepared to viciously crush the will of the people to protect their own wealth and power. They are not interested in the least in change for the benefit of the many, that's not what capitalism is about. 

 

 Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk