A report back from the international anti-fascist festival in Italy
Freedom were invited to attend the annual “Festival Sociale delle Culture Antifasciste”, Bologna, an initiative that started in 2009 and organised predominately by “Ex-Mercato 24″ a social centre based in Via Fourivanti, a popular working class neighbourhood in central Bologna, in the process of mass urban gentrification.
Italy was the birth place of Fascism as a political and social force, and the policies and practices of fascism, as culture and as social repression, continue to leave their mark on Italian identity and politics. As the festival’s main call-out explained: “Fascism is first and foremost, a ‘culture’, a way of being, of behaving. It is the desire to dominate people, nature, the territory. It is arrogance, the negation of every right, the repression of dissent and the negation of and contempt towards difference”. It continued “the ‘culture’ of yesterday’s fascism is alive and well. It has transformed itself, changing its organisations and delegations and continues to carry out fascism’s dirty work, up until this day. The ‘culture’ to fight against belongs to this fascism of today”.
The festival promoted antifascism on the level of a social and cultural offensive – one that seeks to communicate more than just a shared political affinity with antifascism. Culture is an area of conflict, often used as both social critic and social reinforcement of the existing economic and political hegemony. It is one area perhaps in the UK that has been recuperated within a commodified and commercial form of acceptable rebellion – leaving many die-hard anarchists like ourselves to reject it as anything but revolutionary. Our prejudices on this front were fundamentally challenged during our time at the festival.
During the conference itself, which lasted from May 28 until June 6th, there were many workshops ranging from anti-nuclear power and veganism, to the testimonials from the experiences of migrants in the south of Italy, and the campaigns against the new extreme right ideologies. The youth-based movements which formed punk in the late 1970′s, the fusion of Afro-Caribbean reggae, all the way through to urban hip hop and rave culture – with its strong anti-authority and anti-police rhetoric – draw certain parallels even for us in the UK where cultures of resistance and the music it generated were as much part of our movement as the politics were.
Our talk formed part of an international panel of speakers from Germany, Austria, Bosnia and Greece and sought to illustrate our experiences in the UK – the history of the far-right and reactionary ideologies from the National Front of the 1970′s through to the electoral success of the BNP and the formation of the English Defence League. There were many similarities of how fascist and reactionary elements have developed in previously strong and rebellious working class communities and have managed to occupy the radical space once held by the left. Though we managed to convey the uniqueness of the UK situation, in the short space of time, and through a translator, we had hoped to expand further the complexities of fighting new movements like the EDL, the issues of new forms of domination by religious dogmatism in Muslim communities, and the possibility for opening up a working class perspective on all these areas.
During the days around 200 people attended the debates, though that grew to over 1,000 people in the evenings when the concerts, theatre, bars, and excellent restaurant provided the social aspect within the festival. Here it seemed that all of Bologna came together, with children, families, old and young, crusty “punkabestias” to SHARP skins all intermingling. In one of the two bars on site, folk singers from Rome sang anarchist songs from the early 20th century, with the audience barely in their late teens singing along. The social was just as important as the politics, in fact there was no separation between the two, which made the whole event seem organic and natural.
Sadly we are at a massive disadvantage in the UK if we wish to replicate such environments. Whereas Italian culture on the whole has a concept of public, free festivals, frequenting public squares, and minimal street violence – we wondered how such a thing would have worked in the UK. Of course there are similarities like the Climate Camp in Kingsnorth where hundreds of local youths, children and families – came nightly to tour the camp and chat with the campers with no sense of antagonism or tension.
For us the major difference is we are perhaps more asocial, more individualised, and less empathetic with each other. This for me was the main message I got from my time at the festival – to build a social movement means we need to appeal to people on a social and cultural level, and we must represent ourselves on this level, meaning being open, dignified, friendly, non-judgemental. These are all traits that are no less easy coming from a deeply alienated existence, but one that should form the basis of all our political effectiveness.
