Matteo Belloni | Gruppo Autonomo Portuali (GAP) of Livorno (Italy)
Greetings to everyone and to all our comrades here; I’m Matteo from the Livorno Autonomous Port Workers’ Group. We’re here today first and foremost as port workers—we come from the docks, we come from the concrete and the daily toil; and so, precisely because we are workers who know the work of production engine, we want to start with a concept that is fundamental to us: we are workers, and we are not accomplices.
Historically, ports have always been hubs for goods, but today, unfortunately, the bosses and governments have turned them into corridors of death. In the face of this, ours is a clear class-based rejection. We will not put our labor, our time, and our effort at the service of the war machine.
We have put this refusal into action on the ground; we have put it into practice day after day, particularly between September and October 2025, as part of the series of demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people—we launched a full-scale campaign of clashes and blockades in the port of Livorno. We began by occupying Molo Italia, holding our ground on the docks for about 4-5 consecutive days, and from there we succeeded in blocking the arrival of an American warship.
We did not stop there; immediately afterward, we established a permanent protest camp at Varcozzara that lasted for about 15 days, thereby transforming those areas into a gathering place for discussion and solidarity for the entire city.
At the height of these mobilizations against the government, against the rearmament, and against the militarization of our territories, we dealt another blow: a work stoppage—a total blockade of a ship belonging to the Israeli company Zim—not because it was carrying weapons, but to directly target the profits of the Zionist state, which is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. In these struggles, we want to make it clear that we were not alone.
The city’s class solidarity, the support, and the activist groups in the area were decisive, because without them, the dockworkers alone could not have defeated the other side. Internationalism, as we understand it, lives in the concreteness of our choices. When, for example, Simone, our comrade from the collective, decided to board the Global Sumud Flotilla for its latest expedition and try to break that illegal blockade off the coast of Gaza, he did so to bring out to the open sea the very same solidarity we strive to practice on the docks.
For us, this is a single thread that links our daily lives in the workplace to the resistance of all peoples facing oppression on the ground. Clearly, the state responded with force. For example, when we tried to block Montemobile to stop the munitions headed for the U.S. base at Camp Derby, the police cleared us out using coercive methods. This teaches us a clear political lesson: when the Euro-Atlantic and Israeli machinery of death is set in motion, Western governments drop their masks, militarize territories, and seek to repress dissent.
We must be clear here, comrades: in our view, this drive toward war is not a coincidence but a structural necessity of this capitalist system in which we live—a system driven by the imperialism of Western states, led by the United States, which is bleeding the working class dry to fuel its profits. We are experiencing devastating inflation; the high cost of living is crushing us.
And while they are cutting public healthcare, education, and transportation, they are investing billions in rearmament and weapons—and this, in our view, is the true underlying injustice: they are taking wealth away from those who produce it and diverting it toward destruction. Discontent is everywhere—in factories, schools, and hospitals—and today, more than ever, it is fueling a genuine class struggle that arises from the grassroots, which is the only force capable of dismantling this capitalist society.
We must strive to unite our anger over the high cost of living with the struggle against war, because the truth is that when we strike together against the war economy, those in power are frightened; on the contrary, fragmentation, in our view, is a textbook example of how to sabotage the class struggle. We feel compelled to clearly identify who is orchestrating this sabotage: namely, the confederal and collaborationist union leaderships, together with an institutional left that is completely non-existent and subservient to power.
In our view, they are the true enemies of the people, because they systematically divide the timeline, imposing phased strikes-one week the students, the next week the dockworkers, and the week after that yet another group. This mechanism does not serve the struggle; it serves only to disperse anger, empty the streets, and sever the social bond between workers and the student movement.
We must and will dismantle these complicit mechanisms; we reject the defeatism of those who say nothing can be done, because something practical has emerged from that cycle of clashes in our communities. For this reason, together with the Comitato No Base—No Base Committee—and other local and regional groups, we have launched HUB, which is nothing more than essentially a periodic counter-information bulletin.
We see this as a practical tool for mapping out trafficking and militarization, organizing grassroots dissent, and breaking this isolation. Today, for example, the port authority wants to grant the docks of Livorno to Tras—the Tras company—to test military submersibles.
In practice, they want to permanently transform our port into a military outpost, and as GAP, we operate as a labor union—which is very different from a political party—meaning we reject partisan loyalties and the narrow interests of union bureaucracies that, in our view, stifle workers’ anger. Our priority is workers’ control over the workplace, because if ports around the world coordinate and act together, the warlords will be stopped.
Historically, this has always been the case, and this video is therefore intended to serve as a solid bridge to your assembly. We offer our experience on the ground and are fully committed to building networks at the European level, overcoming this isolation, and working together to prepare for an autumn of genuine, fierce, class-based struggles. We are therefore ready to fight alongside anyone who refuses to bow down to the militarization of our territories and to genocide.
So, in the hope of building an international workers’ resistance together, we send our warmest regards to each and every one of you and wish you all the best in the struggle. Thank you.
