The insurrection of the living
Building collective dissent to respond to the strategy of terror and social isolation.
by Martina Maccianti
We are living in times when fear is used as a form of governance that disciplines gestures, words, and bodies. It manifests as an internalized reflex when we ask ourselves whether it is worth exposing ourselves, whether it is wise to speak, whether saying “we” is still possible without paying a price. It is an orderly kind of fear that disguises itself as reasonableness and, precisely for this reason, becomes more effective than any direct threat. We find ourselves within a deliberate strategy of systematically constructing intimidation. It is a system that acts upon perception and therefore aims not only to repress but to sharply shape collective sensibility. A strategy that runs through politics, the media, and everyday life, and that is grounded in the management of emotions.
Today, the right wing is its most conscious and central interpreter, because it governs not only through laws or force, but also through manipulation.
It turns fear into a shared language, a lens through which to read the world. It teaches us to distrust, to suspect, to withdraw. It convinces us that the other is a danger, that complexity is a threat, that solidarity is a risk.
And this is neither an isolated phenomenon nor a recent invention. The history of disciplinary societies (that is, those institutions analyzed by Foucault, such as the prison, the school, the factory, or the army, in which the individual is observed, regimented, and made functional according to the logic of productivity) demonstrates this, because power has never relied solely on violence, but rather on the fear of suffering it. From the fear of the internal enemy during the Cold War to the fear of the migrant, the poor, or the different in the present, the logic remains the same:
to identify a body to be feared in order to consolidate order.
Fear is the raw material of authoritarian consent,
the emotional currency with which obedience is bought.
We see it in neighborhoods where solidarity is mistaken for disorder, in schools and universities where critical presence is treated as a threat, in public squares where surveillance has become, along with violence, the tool for managing dissent. Every public space that organizes itself is perceived as an anomaly to be contained or a provocation to be punished.
In this way, power manages to invert responsibilities and narratives, turning those who resist into the guilty and those who exercise violence into defenders of order. Within this spectrum, fear - thus constructed - does not merely serve to repress; it serves to isolate
to make every act of dissent appear as a solitary gesture rather than a shared practice, thereby enacting a tangible isolation that is the most perfect form of implicit obedience.
Our response, then, can only be collective -
not out of some form of heroism, but out of necessity. To resist the strategy of terror does not merely mean to react; it means not ceasing to build connections, even when everything around us pushes toward fragmentation; do not allow fear to become the only possible language. We must understand that our strength lies in our ability to move through fear as a united front.
The question now is how to transform that fear into action,
into organized anger, into solidarity.
The strategy of terror no longer manifests solely through overt brutality; it seeps in by saturating discourse, ridiculing - as we saw with Trump’s video in response to the No Kings protests - delegitimizing, and rendering every gesture, every word, every presence potentially suspicious (a minor but illustrative example is the way Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister, describes a national strike as a ploy to create a “long weekend”). It is a subtle war that digs into habits, into small movements, into daily decisions about whom to meet, what to say, and how to navigate public and digital spaces. It is not a direct attack on the body, but a constant intrusion into perception, attempting to mark the boundaries of what is possible and to shrink the field of the imaginable.
It is a silent yet extremely real war, and learning to recognize it helps build a collective clarity, a shared perception of risk:
in doing so, fear ceases to discipline and becomes knowledge. To read power means not to be subjected to it and finally to see the invisible map of imposed constraints and limits, understanding how to navigate within and against them.
It is necessary to create infrastructures of continuity, spaces for reflection that live in the rhythm of relationships, not tied solely to emergencies or the urgency of moments of crisis.
This continuity manifests in open libraries, in social centers that resist the precariousness of their spaces, in study groups that persist despite material difficulties. Every collective that manages to consolidate routines of dialogue and reflection takes ground away from the strategy of terror, rendering the logic of fragmentation and isolation ineffective. In times of precarity, stability itself becomes a form of resistance, an invisible barrier against those who try to break connections and confine life within controllable spaces. These things are easier to write about than to establish while simply trying to keep one’s life afloat, of course, but we must understand that without them, our personal lives can only become more precarious and isolated.
The right knows well the power of fear, which is why it seeks to colonize the imagination, limit possibilities and futures, and convince us that no alternative exists. Yet we must be clear that freedom does not arise from laws or decrees; it arises from the ability to imagine and conceive of different worlds that do not yet exist but that we can begin to build.
Here lies our advantage: in knowing how to protect imagination and turn it into a political act, a common good to defend against those who wish to imprison it.
Imagining different worlds does not only mean thinking about the future in the abstract; it means experimenting with practices today, prototyping alternative ways of living. A significant example of this political tension can be found in the Comité Invisible, an anonymous collective that emerged in France in the context of the 2005 banlieue uprisings. In Italy, the main texts of the Committee were collected by NOT/Nero in 2019 in a single volume, The Coming Insurrection, To Our Friends, and Now, which succeeded in articulating one of the most radical critiques of contemporary society. Their work offers a lens through which to observe the contradictions of the present and imagine the necessary ruptures. For the Comité, insurrection is not a singular event or an act of spontaneous rebellion, but a collective process of awakening and transformation: the starting point for dismantling old structures and making space for new forms of life. What drives their reflection is the idea of an authentic life, unconditioned by the logics of profit, productivity, and state control. Their critique targets a society they perceive as profoundly alienating, where human relationships are mediated by oppressive institutions and where the sense of community has been eroded by commodification. The underlying thread is clear and simple: only by breaking with these logics is it possible to build a different world, based on genuine relationships and solidarity.
It is not a matter of reforming the system, but of abandoning it, creating spaces of resistance and self-management that can serve as a model for an existence that is radically different.
The Comité calls for the construction of autonomous communities, collective living spaces that operate outside capitalist and state logics, where people can experiment with alternative ways of life. The strength of their message lies in the ability to protect and claim imagination as a political act, in the challenge of rethinking one’s own existence and role in society, in a striving toward utopia - not understood as an unreachable ideal place, but as a constant stimulus to imagine and build change. Social laboratories, cohabitation experiments, mutual aid networks, popular education - these actions make the impossible visible and transform imagination into a real capacity to create. To resist fear also means becoming architects of possible worlds, designing spaces and relationships that elude the system.
We are alive, and that alone is enough to be dangerous.
Every gesture that affirms life against fear becomes insubordination. Martyrs or glory are not needed; what is needed is continuity, enduring presences, and bodies that hold together. To stay alive means to inhabit the present as a place of possibility, transforming mere survival into persistence. For power can threaten, surveil, and isolate, but it can never comprehend what binds those who have decided not to give in.
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