Actions took place in at least 75 municipalities under the slogan ‘Blocchiamo tutto’ – ‘Let’s Block Everything’ – shutting down schools, disrupting trains, and obstructing roads and ports. The largest crowds gathered in the major cities – 100,000 in Rome alone, according to organisers, where protesters occupied the main railway station before marching through the streets. The strike was called by several grassroots unions who demanded that the government end commercial and military cooperation with Israel. In parliament, Riccardo Ricciardi of the Five Star Movement described the demonstrations as an attempt to ‘restore Italy’s honour’. Ministers of the ruling Fratelli d’Italia, meanwhile, expressed support for the security services who have used pepper spray, tear gas and water cannon on the crowds. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni – in New York for the UN General Assembly – condemned the disorder at the central station in Milan. Her government has been among Israel’s staunchest European supporters, though there are signs that popular pressure is having an effect, even if largely symbolic.

The nationwide walkout follows action taken by workers in Genoa, one of Europe’s busiest ports, in solidarity with the Global Sumud Flotilla, the civilian convoy of boats which set sail from several Mediterranean ports last month, aiming to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The Ligurian dock workers have threatened to prevent the departure of container ships heading to Israel, in support of the flotilla, which has suffered a series of drone attacks. Meloni dispatched naval vessels this week in response – a number of Italian citizens, including politicians, are on board – though she also described their mission as ‘gratuitous, dangerous and irresponsible’, and urged the activists to hand over their cargo in Cyprus.

‘If we lose contact with the boats, even for twenty minutes, we’ll shut down all of Europe’, declared Riccardo Rudino, a representative of Genoa’s Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective (CALP), addressing a crowd of 40,000 people on a Saturday evening in late August in front of the port gates. At the end of July, the Genoa-based humanitarian association Music for Peace became involved in organising the local fleet which would be part of the flotilla; the CALP was among the first organisations to join them, followed by trade unions and local community groups. The ensuing mobilisation – in the August heat – exceeded all expectations. The organisers called on the city to help, asking for 40 tonnes of food to be donated to the four vessels leaving Genoa. Three hundred tonnes arrived, far more than could be carried, and some 40,000 people – in a city of 560,000 – joined the procession: the biggest demonstration since the G8 summit here in 2001. In the Piazza De Ferrari, Mayor Silvia Salis spoke of Genoa’s history of anti-fascist resistance; a representative of the Roman Curia said that the city has shown that it believes that ‘another world is possible’.

‘When we said we would block everything, we weren’t just talking. That’s what we’ll do’, Rudino tells me, when we meeet a few days after the march. ‘Every year, 13 or 14 thousand containers of various goods leave the port of Genoa for Israel. But if they stop the flotilla, not even a nail will leave here.’ Genoa’s dock workers have been mobilising against the war in Gaza since it began in October 2023, in response to an appeal from Palestinian trade unions to block arms supplies to Israel. The most recent confrontation occurred in July this year, when workers managed to prevent the docking of the Cosco Shipping Pisces, which was carrying containers of matériel from Singapore bound for Israel. The cargo ship had already been turned away by workers in Piraeus; it was the Greek dock workers’ union who alerted their Italian colleagues.

‘For us, blocking ports is nothing new’, Rudino explains – nor are coordinated actions among Europe’s dock workers. In 2019, employees at the port in Le Havre in northern France refused to load French-made cannons onto the Bahri Yanbu, headed for Saudia Arabia. Fearing that the weapons could be diverted by land to Genoa, where the Saudi cargo ship was reported to be arriving, French activists raised the alarm with the Italian Disarmament Network, and Genoa’s Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective responded. The Caesar howitzers did not arrive but the Saudi ship was due to be loaded with electric generators produced by the Italian company Teknel. These had been declared for civilian use but checks revealed that the vessel was authorised to export arms, and its cargo might have been destined for the Saudi National Guard, then engaged in a war in Yemen. Invoking a 1990 Italian law prohibiting the supply of weapons to nations at war, Genoa’s dock workers refused to load the generators; in the end, Teknel gave up on the shipment and the Bahri Yanbu left the port without it (the generators eventually made it to Saudia Arabia via Venice). It was this case that prompted workers at the Ligurian port to consolidate relationships with dock workers across Europe, forging an anti-war network to track and disrupt the global arms trade.

Genoa’s longshoremen – known as camalli – have a distinguished history of self-organisation and political activity. The first modern cooperative of port workers in the city was founded in 1889, at the time of the emergence of workers’ mutual aid societies; in the early 1900s, a series of strikes succeeded in ending an unjust system of day labour. After the Second World War the Compagnia unica lavoratori merci varie (CULMV) was established, charged with the training and protection of dock workers. Crucially, the Compagnia was given exclusive control over hiring and contracts: shipping companies could not employ their own workers directly – on what were likely to be more precarious and badly paid terms – but had to draw from members of the CULMV.

Although an association to manage employment rather than a trade union proper, the Compagnia has long been a key institution in broader political organising and consciousness-raising. In the post-war period, its leaders and members mostly belonged to the CGIL, the majority-Communist trade union, and voted en masse for the Italian Communist Party. As well as improving their own working conditions, the camalli have played a leading role in national resistance movements. In June 1960, they joined the occupation of the squares to prevent the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (ancestor of Meloni’s party, with various metamorphoses along the way) from holding its congress in Genoa. The uprising, which saw violent clashes with the police, led to the fall of Tambroni’s right-wing coalition government. Genoa’s port workers also have a venerable history of international solidarity. In 1973 they sent a ship loaded with food and goods to support the Democratic Republic of Vietnam – a feat that remains legendary in the city. They also blocked cargo ships supplying American troops in Indochina and Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, and boycotted apartheid South Africa.

As in many other industries, technological and social change has transformed the nature of work at ports in recent decades, shifting the balance of power. The rise of container shipping revolutionised the logistics of international trade and mechanisation at the docks has reduced the amount of work – in the 1970s, there were 8,000 port workers in Genoa; twenty years later, there were just 1,000. In the 1990s, a wave of privatisation swept through Italy, and the Ligurian docks were opened up to private companies to whom the port authorities – now acting as a kind of public landlord – would lease terminals. The new regulations allowed these companies – ‘terminal operators’, as the jargon has it – to recruit their own employees, endangering the status of the Compagnia, though the latter clung on to its role as a supplier of labour: during peaks in activity, private companies can only draw on CULMV members.

Today, the port of Genoa has about 3,400 employees, of whom 2,300 are dockers involved in loading and unloading cargo (of these, about half are associated with CULMV). Employment is stable and relatively protected; CULMV guarantees private companies flexibility and thus prevents the spread of temporary and poorly paid work, rampant in other sectors. ‘We have handheld devices and computers, but in the end, the work is still loading and unloading ships’, explains Riccardo Rudino: ‘In a port of this size, human labour continues to count.’ ‘In the city, dock workers are still viewed with great respect’, Riccardo Degl’Innocenti, an independent researcher working on the history of the docks, told me.

The Autonomous Port Workers’ Collective are highly conscious of the organisational and strategic power they retain, especially given the global import of their work (the Weapon Watch, a research centre based in Genoa, describes ports as ‘the heart of the global military-industrial system’); and they are proud of their history of collective struggle. ‘Like our fathers and grandfathers, we do not want to be complicit in arms trafficking’, Rudino tells me; he uses the word ‘trafficking’, he explains, because such trade violates Italian and international regulations, not to mention principles of humanity and solidarity.

Over the weekend, dock workers from across Europe and beyond – Marseilles, Athens, Tangier – are gathering in Genoa for the first international meeting of the newly formed Coordinamento Internazionale dei Portuali (International Port Workers’ Alliance). Convened by Italy’s USB union, and featuring delegates from various European, North African and Middle Eastern dockers’ unions, the two-day assembly aims to coordinate the effort to prevent weapons exports to Israel and strategize a response to the drone attacks on the flotilla. Dock workers are among the volunteers on board. One evening earlier this month, during a crowded public meeting organised by CALP and the USB at the Genoa Port Authority Workers’ club to plan this week’s general strike, contact was made via video link with one of the ships en route to Gaza. ‘Hello everyone’: a smiling, tired-looking young man was projected onto a large screen. ‘Hello Jose’, replied dozens of voices, amid applause. Jose Nivoi is a port worker and member of the CALP. ‘Morale is high. Knowing that you are following us helps’, he told the crowd. A worker at the port of Livorno declared into the microphone: ‘We are mobilising not only out of solidarity with the tormented Palestinian people, but also out of the anger we are harbouring’. Another worker added: may this be ‘the beginning of a hot autumn’.

Marina Forti