From the docks of Genoa to Palestine
‘Blocking everything’ to rediscover the power of the masses
by Camilla Donzelli
In late August, the port of Genoa became the epicenter of a mass mobilization that brought together workers, activists, and ordinary citizens under one slogan: “Blocchiamo tutto” — “Let’s block everything.”
Before a crowd of over forty thousand people waving Palestinian flags and cheering the departure of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Riccardo Rudino, a dockworker and member of the Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali (CALP), took the microphone. His words would resonate for days:
“If we lose contact with our ships and our comrades for even twenty minutes, we will shut down Europe. Together with our union, USB, with the dockworkers, and with the entire city of Genoa, not a single nail will leave this region. We will launch an international strike. We will block the streets, we will block the schools, we will block everything. This cargo, from the people and for the people, must reach those who truly need it.”
This late-summer scene didn’t materialize out of thin air. Rather, it’s part of a long history of self-organization deeply rooted in the port city’s tradition of solidarity and anti-militarist struggle. To fully understand it, we must go back to the origins of CALP,
a collective that has successfully woven together working class’ memory, union practices, and internationalism.
CALP Genoa was founded at the end of 2011, shortly after the mass demonstration in Rome inspired by the Indignados movement. As spokesperson José Nivoi explained to Miccia Mag, the group carries on the legacy of the workers’ councils present in the city during the 1960s and 1970s. CALP initially emerged as a grassroots initiative within CGIL, Italy’s largest trade union, at a time when the organization had already lost much of its representational power and had begun to drift toward mere institutional partnership.
“CALP was created mainly to keep dockworkers in constant dialogue,” Nivoi explained. “We found it odd that within the union we couldn’t openly discuss political issues — even though they had a direct impact on workers’ lives. Taking part in the shutdown of neo-fascist headquarters like CasaPound and Forza Nuova, where CGIL refused to take a position, laid the groundwork for what became a kind of internal boycott.”
When the group’s militant approach clashed with CGIL’s inertia, CALP collectively decided to leave. It then joined the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), continuing its activities with a distinctly anti-fascist and anti-capitalist spirit.
From the docks to the network: geographies of a growing movement
Striking has been part of CALP’s strategy since the very beginning. In 2019, the collective decided to down tools on the docks, successfully halting the loading of several containers filled with weapons bound for the war in Yemen.
What followed was a massive police operation involving repeated raids and an investigation for criminal association that was only closed in 2023. This heavy-handed response from the authorities served as confirmation for CALP members that they were on the right path.
“For two years, those charges allowed the police to surveil and search us at will,” Nivoi recalled. “They wanted to intimidate us, to wear us down. But we told ourselves: if they’re reacting like this, it’s because we’ve hit a nerve.”
Nivoi’s words reveal a crucial truth: the state’s repressive reaction shows that these actions are perceived as a direct threat to the system’s functioning.
It means they struck at something deeper than ethics or symbolism — something economic. They disrupted the logistics that keep profits flowing.
In her book Cannibal Capitalism, feminist scholar Nancy Fraser argues that there is a deep, structural interdependence between the expropriation of Indigenous peoples in the so-called global peripheries and the exploitation of the working class in metropolitan centers. In an economic system based on endless growth, those who hold financial power have a vested interest in minimizing production costs. Subjugating entire populations and territories makes this possible: expropriation provides, on one side, nearly free economic inputs such as energy and raw materials; on the other, it allows essential goods — food, clothing, basic commodities — to enter the market at low prices, keeping wages down as well. The confiscation of resources and capacities from subjugated peoples thus makes the exploitation of “free” workers more profitable.
This co-dependent division between the expropriated and the exploited mirrors the global color line, carrying with it structural injustices such as racial oppression, imperialism, and genocide. Understanding this mechanism means, first of all, recognizing how the capitalist architecture binds us all together — making us collectively responsible.
But it also means acknowledging that disrupting military supply chains is not a mere moral gesture: it’s a direct attack on the war economies that allow this oppressive and unequal system to thrive and reproduce itself.
Since the machinery of profit depends on logistical corridors and transnational relations, the most effective form of sabotage must employ material levers that operate in the same manner: coordinated strikes, targeted blockades, and networks of solidarity that disrupt the “normality” of wartime supply flows.
The dockworkers have understood this very well.
As Nivoi recalled, CALP’s first mobilizations in support of the Palestinian people date back to 2021, when workers blocked a shipment of missiles thanks to coordination with the dockworkers of Livorno and Naples. “But support for the Palestinian cause within the labor movement has only grown stronger since then,” he added.
It’s no coincidence that the urgent call issued in October 2023 by the Palestinian trade union network Workers in Palestine resonated loud and clear across the ports of continental Europe and the wider Mediterranean.
In December 2024, the Swedish Dockworkers Union voted to boycott all military shipments to and from Israel. In the months that followed, similar blockades spread to unions and collectives in Morocco, France, Italy, Spain, and Greece.
According to Nivoi, these actions were neither spontaneous nor coincidental. “For the past year and a half, we’ve been working to find a way to connect dockworkers from different organizations,” he explained. “In February, we held our first meeting in Athens, with participants from Greece, France, Germany, Turkey, Cyprus, and Morocco. What we’re trying to build is a space for dialogue to identify recurring dynamics across Mediterranean ports: attacks on labor rights, wage cuts, growing precarity, and privatization.
This platform starts with the issue of labor but inevitably leads to the question of war and, above all, to unconditional support for the Palestinian people.
The coordination between French, Greek, and Italian workers to block arms shipments between June and July was the first embryo of this international network.”
Internationalism is not an abstract idea
Internationalism stems from a material understanding: workers are always the first victims of the wars they are made to enable. As José Nivoi put it,
“The cannons I build today, the ones firing at my neighbor, could very well be the same ones firing at me tomorrow.”
In other words, war is not only an external phenomenon — it is also an internal one, waged against the working class through precarity, poverty, and repression.
For Genoa’s dockworkers, opposing the arms trade is not a symbolic act but a form of collective responsibility. “The fact that I go to work and contribute to genocide makes me complicit,” said Nivoi. This is not a matter of personal morality, but of shared political awareness — a refusal to separate one’s labor from its consequences. Here,
internationalism returns to its original meaning: not distant solidarity, but a concrete practice of non-cooperation with a war system built on the exploitation of living labor.
War, after all, does not only devastate occupied territories; it comes back to our homes in the form of inflation, precarity, and cuts to social welfare. As Nivoi explained,
“Neoliberalism in crisis uses war to fill its own granaries; public spending shifts from the civil to the military sector.” This means that every weapon produced results in fewer resources for healthcare, education, pensions, and income support.
Therefore, war is a direct issue for the working class — an economic device that transfers wealth from the bottom to the top, disguised as a geopolitical emergency.
From this understanding emerges the possibility of a common front. The connection between war and impoverishment affects not only port workers but also teachers, students, public employees, and precarious workers. “They too are starting to realize that everything is becoming too expensive,” Nivoi noted. “From higher mortgage rates to the rising price of pasta, it’s all a consequence of being at war.”
In this light, internationalism ceases to be a distant horizon and becomes a daily practice — a way to rebuild material solidarity among all who endure oppression, exploitation, and impoverishment, from Gaza to Europe’s ports.
The power of the masses
The practical question remains: how do we stop the war machine?
The system we live in is permeated by the logic of democratic pacification. Regardless of which government is in power, direct political action is systematically discouraged, if not openly repressed.
The highest form of participation permitted is voting, through which citizens delegate decision-making power to institutions and parties. In this process, conflict is defused, mediated, and displaced —
from the streets to parliamentary debates, where every minor step forward becomes a mere concession handed down from above.
To this, we must add a frayed social fabric where the desire for change is reduced to personal responsibility and individual effort. Collectivity disappears from public discourse and is replaced by the idea that progress is the achievement of a few exceptional individuals.
The glorification of the “heroic leader” — transformed into an isolated, untouchable symbol — is part of this broader process of disempowerment.
In Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis dismantles this narrative. She reminds us that neither Nelson Mandela nor Martin Luther King Jr. acted as solitary leaders:
their struggles against apartheid and racial segregation were made possible by vast, grassroots networks of militants, workers, students, and unions. The myth of the charismatic leader serves power by obscuring the collective strength that makes real transformation possible.
It is a strategy of neutralization, one that focuses attention on the individual while erasing the dense web of relationships and practices that sustain them.
The tireless, everyday work of collectives like CALP is finally bringing this buried collective dimension back to light. Through public gatherings, assemblies, and spaces for genuine dialogue, the movement born on the docks is reigniting the spark of direct political participation. Nivoi recalled one of the assemblies held in Genoa over the summer to discuss plans for transforming the port into a European military hub. For the first time in years, he said, “There were lots of ordinary people there — people with a leftist spirit.”
That “Let’s block everything” shouted by Riccardo Rudino was not a one-off slogan, but the tangible sign of a grassroots political recomposition. It’s the outcome of collective labor that has restored people’s awareness of their own power — the power to halt production, disrupt business as usual, and oppose war through action rather than appeals.
The roots of the general strike of September 22 can be found in this collective act of speaking out — a moment when awareness turned into action and action revealed the real strength of organized masses.
Images of drivers in Rome honking their horns in support as they found themselves surrounded by the marching crowd will remain an indelible symbol of what it means to become a tide. These images don’t belong to just one day of protest but to an ongoing process that must continue to grow.
As Rodrigo Nunes writes in Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, social movements are not monolithic entities but rather ecosystems where various forms of action, organization, and solidarity intertwine and regenerate one another. Considering struggle as an ecology of relations in motion means acknowledging that no collective force ever truly disappears; it transforms, evolving through time and different subjectivities to find new forms of existence.
Therefore, “Let’s block everything” is not an endpoint, but a passing of the torch. It’s up to all of us now to keep alive what has been set in motion.
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