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Magdeburg – Violent racists want to profit from murder

How the AfD is trying to exploit a Murderous Attack by one of their own Supporters


28/12/2024

The Magdeburg attack happened while I was visiting family in the UK. Watching the first reports on the BBC was a surreal experience. “Experts” were wheeled on to assure us that although the perpetrator, Taleb A., had a long history of making Islamophobic and pro-AfD posts on social media, we shouldn’t jump to any conclusions. One could have wished for such circumspection in the BBC’s largely uncritical coverage of Israeli war crimes.

Holger Münch, of the federal criminal police, also advised people to wait and see: “He has anti-Islamic views; of course he’s also been involved with extreme-right platforms and given interviews. But drawing a conclusion between what he says and what he’s done… it’s not yet possible to conclude it’s politically motivated.”

This was not the reaction to Halle and Hanau. In 2019, after a right wing gunman attacked a synagogue and a doner shop on Yom Kippur, the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published an article with a subtitle: “The Jewish community in Germany is under double attack, from the far right and from radical Islam.”

One year later, after another far right German went on a shooting spree, killing 9 non-White people, police concentrated on harassing the victims’ friends and family. Keea Malin Kauhanen notes a live broadcast 2½ hours after the attack “in which a reporter shared his speculations regarding the perpetrator and motives for the attack. Terms like ‘organized crime’ and ‘protection money’ were used speculatively and related to the owners of the bars and kiosk in which the terror attacks took place.”

For the German press, politicians and media, the default reaction to public murder is to jump to one conclusion: blame the Muslims. This is not just a German phenomenon. Following the Christchurch mosque shootings of 2019, B. Moore concluded: “In over 200,000 articles on 11 different attacks, Islamist extremists were labelled terrorists 78.4% of the time, whereas far-right extremists were only identified as terrorists 23.6% of the time.” 

A Saudi Fascist?

Responding to Magdeburg on German news channel n-tv, “terrorism expert” Peter Naumann opined that “in 25 years, I have never seen such a perpetrator profile”. We should remind ourselves that profiles used by criminologists do not reflect facts but widely held prejudices. Taleb A. did not fit into the straitjacket into which the media wanted to place him.

Two things appear to have perplexed reporters. Firstly, although Taleb A. had lived and worked in Germany for nearly 20 years, he was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. Secondly, the attack was at a Christmas market, like previous attacks in Berlin in 2016 and Strasbourg in 2018. Was this not proof that he was an Islamist? 

Let’s take these objections one at a time. Firstly, it is simply wrong to believe that all fascist organisations merely comprise of white men. The Grey Wolves in Turkey and RSS in India provide examples of home grown fascism.

Closer to home, although European fascists believe in oppressing minorities, they also contain some minority members. In late 1937, 5 of the 21 Chief Rabbis in Italy were members of Mussolini’s Fascist party. Ernst Röhm, head of Hitler’s SA until 1934 was openly gay. Alice Weidel, AfD’s candidate for Chancellor in the coming elections, is a lesbian. These people have to live their own contradictions, but their existence is no less surprising than that of a Saudi Fascist.

Some online commentators have said that the fact that Taleb A. attacked a Christmas market (as opposed to what? An Eid market?) shows that he cannot be an Islamophobe. Why attack Christians? Taleb A. answered this question last August in a tweet saying: “I assure you that if Germany wants a war, we will fight it. If Germany wants to kill us, we will slaughter them, die, or go to prison with pride.” According to his warped logic, Germans who do not resist the so-called “Islamisation” of Europe are legitimate targets.

Increase in violent attacks

From historical attacks on refugee homes like Solingen and Mölln, to Hanau and Halle, the far right is far from averse to murderous violence. Just before Christmas, actual Nazis tried to march through the relatively left wing district of Friedrichshain. When they were stopped by counter-demonstrations of up to 10,000 people, they took violent revenge on an SPD stall. The Nazi threat is real and growing. 

Eastern Germany was already tense and dangerous following the AfD’s recent electoral gains. The aftermath of the Magdeburg attack has made things worse. Salam, a local counselling centre for the prevention of violence and radicalisation reports “an extremely hostile mood” in the city, where Muslims were insulted as “terrorists”, “criminals” and a “pack”. Migrant organisation Lamsa says that many migrants have been hunted through the city.

Bild Zeitung reported that 24 hours after the Magdeburg attack “around 700 masked and aggressive right wing extremists and hooligans gathered and marched through Magdeburg city centre.” They shouted slogans like “anyone who doesn’t love Germany should leave Germany”, “Migration kills” and “We must take back our cities, our villages and our homeland”.

These attacks cannot be reduced to just the work of a few skinhead hooligans. All recent polls have the AfD looking likely to come second in February’s general election. Every AfD electoral success makes the street racists feel that they are not isolated, and every violent attack strengthens the fascists in parliament.

AfD try to profit

In 2016, Taleb A. tweeted: “the AfD and I are fighting the same enemy, in order to protect Germany.” This has not stopped the Nazifying party from trying to make capital from his murderous acts. While mainstream politicians were wringing their hands about how terrible things are, the far right was demonstrating in Magdeburg.

On Saturday, the day after the attack, the neo-Nazi scene attended a demonstration registered by veteran Nazi Alexander Deptolla. At this demonstration, the leader of the Heimat party (formerly the explicitly Nazi NPD) stated that the “fundamental problem” was “people who come from an alien culture and belong to an alien species.” Old NSDAP slogans like “Germany wake up!” were revived.

Two days later, it was the AfD’s turn. Speaking at their demo, Weidel said: “we finally want something to change in this country, and that we must never again mourn with a mother who has lost her son in such a senseless and brutal way.” As Weidel demanded that “we can finally live once again in security”, the 3,500-strong crowd responded with chants of “Deport, deport, deport!”

Weidel tweeted: “The state must protect its citizens through a restrictive migration policy and consistent deportations!”. The head of the AfD in Sachsen-Anhalt, Martin Reichardt, blamed “political and religious fanaticism that has its origins in another world”. Local AfD politician Hans-Thomas Tillschneider called for a “roll-back of globalised migration flows” to fight the arrival of those who are “culturally other”.

Brandenburg councillor Dominik Kaufner wrote: “millionfold migration is the problem and millionfold remigration is the solution”. The word “remigration” is a dog whistle to the AfD’s Nazi base following last year’s conference in Potsdam where AfD politicians met Identitarians to discuss deporting millions of people “with a foreign background”. Such deportations would not be possible without extreme violence.

German politicians react

Interior minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) was quick to react. Initially, she followed the accepted discourse, remarking that Taleb A. “acted like an Islamist terrorist although ideologically he was clearly an enemy of Islam.”  But then she went slightly off-message, saying it was “clear to see” the suspect held “Islamophobic” views, and that “every attempt to instrumentalise such a terrible act and to abuse the misery of the victims is repugnant.”

This continues a strategy which the SPD has taken since the government fell — of portraying the AfD as violent extremists and a danger to democracy. After the AfD announced that their own election strategy will concentrate on trying to win disillusioned SPD voters, the SPD has slightly shifted from accommodating to the AfD’s racism to mild confrontation. 

In a so-called “fairness agreement”, all parliamentary parties except the AfD and Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) agreed that “there will be on no account cooperation with parties which do not stand on the group of the free democratic constitution”. In their election programme, the SPD argues that Germany is a country of migration and that they consider diversity to be an asset.

This is good as far as it goes, but is undermined by the experience of the SPD and the Greens in government. One year ago, SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz appeared on the front cover of Der Spiegel next to the headline “We have to Deport People More Often and Faster”. SPD MPs gladly voted for the “Antisemitism Resolution” which lawyer Nadija Samour believes will “cement the use of migration law as a form of persecution”. They also recently voted to freeze asylum applications by Syrians.

Not like the other parties

A recent AfD post on X (formerly Twitter) said: “the AfD stands for the interests of the broad public, not for elites and lobbyists. A real people’s party, which fights for you. Time for change. Therefore vote AfD on the 23rd of February.” The idea of a people’s fight against the establishment is one that has been recently pushed by right wing demagogues from Victor Orban to Donald Trump, who recently welcomed guests from the AfD.

Most worrying is the gradual take over of the AfD by Björn Höcke and other former members of Der Fluegel (The Wing). Höcke has been convicted and fined for deliberately using banned Nazi terminology. Another court ruling in 2019 found that calling Höcke a Nazi is legitimate as it has a verifiable, factual basis. He is still one of the most powerful members of the AfD, leading the party faction in the Thüringen parliament, where they recently topped the polls, with 32.8% of the total.

In March 2020, Thomas Haldenwang, chief of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said that Der Fluegel violated “characteristic features of the free democratic basic order, human dignity, democracy and the rule of law”. Haldenwang explicitly referred to Höcke as a right wing extremist. The next month, Der Fluegel was officially dissolved, following a request by the AfD leadership. Yet in 2021, the Tagesschau called it “stronger than ever”.  

Weidel is scarcely more liberal. The Guardian recently noted that she “has recently been attempting to rebrand the party’s image in a Marine Le Pen-like fashion.” For some, this is reassuring. Le Pen does not say the quiet things out loud like her antisemitic firebrand father Jean Marie. But this does not mean that she has moved one millimetre from his fascist ideology.

A recent report found that at least fifteen deputies from Le Pen’s National Rally party have been part of a racist Facebook group for the last 7 years. Posts in the group include: “Go back to your coconut tree, bamboula” or “You call that a human being? Even my dog ​​behaves better. They are really harmful, these Blacks.” RN also maintains close but discrete links with the identitarian organisation Génération Identitaire.

Stop the AfD Party Conference on January 11

The AfD’s instrumentalisation of hatred and murder makes it more necessary than ever to close them down. Höcke, like Le Pen, is trying to build an organisation which is both electorally attractive and has a physical presence on the streets, as we witnessed in Magdeburg this week. Because of its fascist nature, we must physically confront the AfD, and separate people who vote out of desperation from the hardcore Nazis.

On January 11th, the AfD is holding its party conference in Riesa, where they hope to celebrate possible gains in the coming election. They will not be unopposed — Aufstehen Gegen Rassismus, Widersetzen, and other anti-fascist campaigns have called blockades against the Riesa conference. Buses will also be travelling from Berlin, and 1,500 anti-Nazi students have already promised to be on them. If we want to avoid more violence like that in Magdeburg, as many people as possible should join them.

The Critic who stood up for Madwomen

Obituary: Sandra M Gilbert (December 27, 1936 – November 10, 2024)


27/12/2024

Sandra M Gilbert died last month. Gilbert was best known as the co-author (with Susan Gubar) of the pioneering book The Madwoman in the Attic, which caused literary scholars to rethink how women were portrayed in 19th Century literature. Recovering academic Richard Bradbury looks back at  how Gilbert helped reshape how we look at the novel.  

When I started to study literature at a British university in 1975 the three core courses were modern(ist) English literature, the European epic and Medieval English literature. During that year not a single set book had been written by a woman. That this is now unimaginable is as a result of years of work – teaching, researching, writing – on the part of students and academics. That work has reshaped the understanding of literature both in universities and – probably more importantly – beyond.

Sandra Gilbert’s work, most often in collaboration with Susan Gubar, played an essential part in that transformation. As I was starting my studies they were beginning work on a book that would, in time, transform many departments of literature. That change took two forms: first, a new contextualisation of nineteenth century ‘classic’ texts and, second, the introduction of other texts as a way of reimagining those ‘classics’.

Let’s look briefly at the way that worked. My first example is their most famous. Jane Eyre. The title of their book – The Madwoman in the Attic – shifted the readers’ attention away from the march of Jane from rebellious child to “Reader, I married him” via a challenging relationship with Rochester. Shifted our attention, as it were, from the marriage failure in the chapel in the grounds of Thornhill to the obscure spaces at the top of the house. Now, Jane’s previously reliable and transparent voice became marked by prejudice as she sees the first Mrs Rochester as a crazed beast. Gilbert and Gubar fix on this moment to reveal the previously smooth surface of the novel as pitted by the acid of history.

Now the first Mrs Rochester becomes a prisoner enraged by her husband’s misogyny and racism whose act of destruction as she burns the house becomes a final gesture of defiance. Now, the designations of misogyny and racism are upended.

This wasn’t, of course it wasn’t, the work of these two writers alone. The male (yes, it needs to be said even now) guardians of literature and history were being questioned, elbowed aside, by a generation of thinkers and writers. Kate Millet, Marilyn French, Elaine Showalter, Jane Marcus, Gillian Beer, and many more besides, were reclaiming the past. And in doing so began to change the present and, more tenuously, the future.

Even more obviously this small work was a part of the much larger, more important, upsurge of second wave feminism that swept through the 1970s and on into the 1980s. From our place in 2024 it is hard to look back past those achievements and the ways in which they changed the landscape of political, intellectual, social discourse; of life. Yet if we don’t do that we will be disempowered in our attempts to forestall the current political, intellectual and social assault on those changes.

Back to that book. This alteration of perspective, this way of reading aslant of the foregrounded rhetoric was also part of the wider development of reading strategies that took into account the existence of the reader as a constructive part of the text’s meanings. That plural is crucial, acknowledging as it does the many existences, the many subject positions, of readers.

There is one element of the commentary of Charlotte Brontë’s novel that I do have to take issue with; namely, the lack of reference to Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea. A novel written through much of the 1950s and 1960s in rural isolation but which exploded the understanding of the earlier novel as it gave voice to the first Mrs Rochester. Why Gilbert and Gubar leave it unmentioned is a mystery to me, but it is an obvious lack. An absence without easy excuse.

After this upending of the canon’s reception, they moved on to modernist literature, with the three volumes of the aptly-titled No Man’s Land. Again, as someone ‘educated’ in modernism in the 1970s, the revelation that there would have been – in the polemical words of Diana Souhemi – ‘no modernism without lesbianism’ – was revelatory. More accurately, the revelation that the core technique of modernism – the inaccurately named ‘stream of consciousness’ – was both developed and named by women writers, threw my very partial understanding of that writing into new territories. Places where, nearly fifty years later, I still continue to explore, read, teach, think and write. It was their work that gave me this gift.

More than that. Sandra Gilbert, with Susan Gubar, expanded this work still further when they set out to edit the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women; the traditions in English. One more time their work changed perceptions of literary tradition. Here, and perhaps even more challengingly, they argued that women’s writing was there. From the early days. My own days with the Gawain poet, with the Piers Plowman author, with Chaucer were now seen to be not so much lacking as in urgent need to the presence of the writing women who were ignored, dismissed into anonymous obscurity. Their critical work made the oh-so very obvious point, the so-easily avoided point, that women write. And that women’s writing should sit alongside the writing of men.

I have studied and taught and written about literature for nearly fifty years. The earliest years of that seem to me now a time of such partial knowledge that it seems better described as fumbling ignorance. What their work did, in a version of a contemporary anthology, was “split my world wide open”.

Not just their academic writing and work, but also in one moment Sandra Gilbert’s demonstration that academic work is not enough on its own. The commitment needs to travel out. At a time when sexual harassment of students was, if not routine, then certainly common she and a group of colleagues protested the indulgent treatment of a harasser. And then resigned their jobs when the indulgence continued. The details of that case continue to be obscure but at a time when a colleague told me quite openly that he told female students that their marks depended not just on their academic work but ….., their stand was remarkable.

And I haven’t even mentioned her poetry.

Sandra Gilbert was remarkable, in many ways, and I thank her for the changes she brought to my understanding of what has been my life work. That unimportant and yet oddly vital business of making sense of literature.

Until Friday, He Was One of Us

Even if he came from Saudi Arabia, the murderer is a radical Islam hater. Many refuse to believe this — because he is not the only person like this


24/12/2024

The terrible attack in Magdeburg appeared to be the act of an Islamist because of its target. It reminded us of the 2016 attack by Anis Amri on the Christmas market in Berlin. But since the identity of the 50 year old murderer has become known, we know that he was a fan of Geert Wilders, Elon Musk, and the AfD. He hated Angela Merkel, Muslims and Islam. His online profile on X is ideologically unambiguous. Because he believed that Germany was promoting the “Islamisation” of Europe, he wanted to punish the country and to kill as many people as possible.

With such perpetrators, you always ask yourself: how did they become radicalised? Which preacher of hatred influenced them? Who shaped them ideologically? In which circles did they move? In this case, unfortunately, you can find the relevant literature in every German book store. Radical variations of this way of thinking is available on the internet, in movements like Pegida, and in parliament with the AfD, who gained 20% of the votes in Sachsen-Anhalt [translator: the State containing Magdeburg]. Their conspiracy ideologies go from a “great exchange” of the population towards the infiltration of the country by radical Muslims — ideas which the murderer in Magdeburg clearly shares.

It would be a euphemism to bestow the title of “Islam critic” on the perpetrator, as some media are doing. We are clearly talking about a paranoid hatred of Islam. With his attack, he locates himself alongside those right wing terrorists responsible for terror attacks in 2011 in Norway, 2017 in Canadian Quebec, and 2019 in New Zealand. In the case of Breivik, these consisted of attacks against public authorities and a social democratic youth camp, in the other two cases against peaceful Mosque communities. The murderer in Hanau also acted from anti-Muslim/racist motives, when he shot nine people dead in two Shisha bars in February 2020.

Extreme Right Wingers Deny their Ideology

Because the perpetrator of Magdeburg originally comes from Saudi Arabia, and he targeted a Christmas market, many people do not want to believe that he might be a radical Islam hater. But people from mainly Muslim countries or who were themselves once Muslim can be prone to such ways of thinking. The murderer of Munich, David Sonboly, who in 2016 killed 9 largely young people because of hatred against Muslims had an Iranian background. The writer Akif Pirinçci who appeared at the anti-Muslim Pegida demonstrations and spread hatred against Muslims, comes from Turkey. There is a simple reason why former Muslims in Europe can take on extreme right wing attitudes: they receive applause and confirmation for it and that strengthens them in their delusions. A pinch of self-hatred is possibly also there.

The ideological closeness of the right wing extremists, from the AfD to Nius, from Martin Sellner to Elon Musk, to the murderer of Magdeburg is naturally uncomfortable. Some of them claim that he merely had “psychological problems” and therefore went on a “Amoklauf” [crazed action], not a terror attack. Or they deny that the perpetrator is an ex-Muslim and AfD supporter, and accuse him of simply pretending.

They speculate that the perpetrator must have always been an Islamist sleeper. They believe: once a Muslim, always a Muslim. The fact that the murderer attacked a Christmas market is enough for them to imply that he could have acted from different motives than those which he falsely claimed. The fact that he comes from Saudi Arabia is enough for them to once more denounce a “wrong migration policy”. In other words, right wing extremists are using the act of a right wing extremist to continue to disseminate their hatred.

The Murderer was a Public person

But the most important question is: why could the attack not be stopped? Because the murderer was a public person. On X alone, he had over 46,000 followers and many contacts in the international radical anti-Muslim scene. Journalists also followed him and he gave interviews to several media outlets in recent years. He was known to many authorities, his profile picture shows a machine gun, and he had announced many times that he wanted to commit a spectacular act and to use violence. There were warnings, but they remained unheard.

The authorities and his milieu underestimated his radicalisation. The question is: why? One possible albeit uncomfortable, answer to this question is that the perpetrator did not stand alone with his hatred against Muslims. His beliefs are so prevalent in Germany that he did not appear to be peculiar. He was one of us — until on Friday evening when he drove a car into a Christmas market.

This article first appeared in German in the taz. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permission.

“We strongly oppose the expulsion of our comrade Ramsis Kilani from the party”

Statement by the Network Palestine Solidarity in Die Linke Berlin


We, the Palestine solidarity network within Die Linke Berlin, strongly condemn the expulsion of our comrade Ramsis Kilani from the party, Die Linke.

As a platform within Die Linke Berlin that is committed to engaging with the issue of Palestine/Israel and campaigns for a just peace in the region and an end to the genocide, we welcome Ramsis’s announcement that he will appeal against the decision of the state arbitration committee.

The federal arbitration commission of Die Linke will now have to decide. We support Ramsis and are committed to ensuring that consistent solidarity with the Palestinian people continues to have its place in Die Linke.

Ramsis was not expelled because of one or two controversial statements, but because of his consistent solidarity with the Palestinian people and their just struggle for equal rights and democratic conditions throughout the region and because he openly condemns Germany’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza – just like us.

For over a year now, we have been taking to the streets against the genocide with our party’s banners. We organise events and raise awareness about the humanitarian and political situation in Palestine and Israel. We organise rallies and collect signatures against arms deliveries at information stands and through door knocking. At general assemblies, state and national party conferences, we argue in favour of a policy of international solidarity. We do all this as members of Die Linke and will continue to do so. We are committed to ensuring that Die Linke can be an anchor for all those who want to end the genocide and displacement in Palestine.

We will continue to stand up for a democratic, equal and self-determined coexistence for all people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and advocate for an open culture of discussion within the party. We invite all those in solidarity to join us. We look forward to meeting you!

Contact: dLB_PaSoNe@pm.me

Genuino Clandestino

A movement for food sovereignty and assembly democracy


23/12/2024

In a network of currently around 50 territorial initiatives from Palermo to Trieste, farmers, students, artisans, artists, political activists and cooks in Italy are organizing themselves in the fight for food sovereignty and self-determination. It is a fight for the free processing of peasant food, for the establishment of local, inclusive assembly democracies and participatory guarantee rules—against state and European policies in favor of the large food industry. Originating from an alliance of critics of the global marketing of agricultural and food culture and left-wing autonomous Centri Sociali (cultural centers that mostly emerged from occupations), Genuino Clandestino has been implementing anti-capitalist practice in local economic cycles since 2010, overcoming the separation of city and countryside, showing solidarity with the struggles of migrant workers and demanding land as a common good.

Genuino Clandestino is a movement of civil disobedience that seeks neither a fixed identity nor legal or institutional recognition, but rather is proudly subversive. It understands interrelationships and open communities as an ongoing political act. In their manifesto, members write as a central demand the right to freely process peasant food, which has been expropriated by a neoliberal system. The document reads, “Anyone who recognizes themselves in the principles of this manifesto can disseminate it and use it to justify their actions”. In this respect, Genuino Clandestino goes far beyond the representation of small farmers’ interests, but practices a new social model of exchange relations, responsible cooperation and activist public relations. Genuino Clandestino propogated in the cities of Bologna, Rome and Naples and then found nationwide resonance among small peasant producers, craftsmen and do-it-yourselfers, as well as other precarious workers (such as artists). The language of the network is a radical, utopian-activist one, capable of transcending generations. Their public spaces are small markets in the cities.

Giovanni Pandolfini, who has been involved with the Genuino Clandestino network since its beginnings over ten years ago, himself cultivates four hectares of land near Montespertoli in Tuscany. If he were to cultivate this small plot of land in line with market requirements, i.e., for the food industry, he would be able to grow one or two varieties of vegetables, cereals or fruit at most in order to produce enough for the market. Instead, he keeps two cows, eleven sheep (which produce 20 liters of milk a day) and grows various plants. Until 2016, he sold his produce at a monthly farmers’ market and collaborated with buying groups run by the Associazione di Solidarietà per la Campagna Italiana. He then managed to initiate a Florentine chapter of Genuino Clandestino with a few colleagues and structure it in such a way that they were able to host the first market in San Freddiano in 2017. “Thanks to Genuino Clandestino, we have succeeded in unleashing the fantasy of a possible other life,” he says today.

In practical terms, for him and the other now almost 50 activists in the Florentine network, this means more work and work that connects. Meetings are convened twice a month to discuss political and organizational issues (markets, solidarity actions, discussions, etc.) and technical and practical issues (seeds, prices, water, soil, mutual support). The producers meet twice a week at the public markets, on Fridays from 3 pm in Piazza Tasso in San Freddiano and on Mondays in Gavinana – including subsequent cleaning of the squares. There are also numerous other meetings on the farms with customers, colleagues and interested parties to exchange ideas and assess product quality together. They continue to activate a network of solidary relationships and exchange. With their presence at the markets, they not only generate income, but also carry out political work between the city and the countryside.  The network in Florence, named after the farmer Jerome Laronze who was shot dead by a police officer in France in 2017, organizes demonstrations in the city center, collaborates with striking workers and autonomous trade unions, with Fridays for Future and, among others, with Mondeggi Bene Comune, a collective that occupied a farm that was up for sale and now manages it communally. Free scuole contadine (farmers’ schools) are organized here and the farmers’ radio station Wombat is run by the colective. While the Genuino Clandestino markets in Florence have so far successfully asserted themselves in a social environment of solidarity, new initiatives face more difficulty. in Pistoia, the municipality refused the network a public space in the city center. They instead gather on Saturdays in the outskirts next to an ARCI (network of self-managed former worker’s recreational facilities), offering vegetables, cereals, flour, fruit, bread, honey and home-baked goods.

Since the 1960s, the Italian state has been the sole guarantor of food health. At the same time, in 1964 the feudal mezzadria system of land management that prevailed in many parts of the country was banned. It allowed small farmers with 5 to 15 hectares of land to remain independent if they gave the large landowner half of their yield. With the end of mezzadria, many farmers had to leave the land. In the last 20 years, two million farms have been abandoned in Italy. The land has been sold to large-scale entrepreneurs or to investors who do not work the land at all, but can still pocket the EU’s land subsidies

(Incidentally, the Catholic Church is still the largest landowner in Italy to this day). In Tuscany there were still 52,146 farms in 2010, ten years later there were only 20,540. Farmers with less than 10 hectares of land were the most likely to give their property up. The abandonment of small-scale land cultivation has immense consequences for the ecosystem in the form of land degredation and wildfires. From 2010 to 2020, the olive harvest fell by 15.7 % and the chestnut harvest by 75 %. The meadows on the mountains have become overgrown by 50%. 60% of farmland is now cultivated by 10% of farms.

In traditional agriculture, the processing of rural raw materials, i.e. the transformation of milk into cheese, grapes into wine, grain into bread, the fermentation of meat and vegetables, was an essential part of self-sufficiency. But this value-added production was ended, expropriated, with the introduction of the state monopoly on food quality. Farmers now only supply basic products at the lowest cost. Those who do not meet the standards of the food industry are not allowed to offer food outside the private sector. Biodiversity and the ecological transformation of agriculture are not possible without the reappropriation of farmers’ food sovereignty, concludes Giovanni Pandolfini. Genuino Clandestino is an alliance that aims to reshape the use of urban and rural spaces on the basis of practices such as self-organization, solidarity, cooperation and care for the land.

Instead of national and EU standards, Genuino Clandestino practices autocertificazione participata, a participatory self-certification. To this end, producers and co-producers (i.e. consumers) meet again and again and guarantee the quality of what is offered on the markets by exchanging knowledge, mutual education and assistance. The participation guarantee is a transparent self-regulation that generates community, actively involves people in the food and distribution chain and creates trust. Anyone who participates in the Genuino Clandestino markets must take part in these assemblies. This process is not legally recognized. It is legitimized by collective agreement and solidarity. How many people are now active in the network? Giovanni Pandolfini answers: “We could be 500 or 5,000 or 50,000, but we will always be a thorn in the side of the system.”