RESET (Network for Social, Ecologist, and Transfeminist Strike) Against the War

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We share the callout for an initiative launched in Italy by the newborn network RESET against the war. The network, developed in Rome, is promoting a space for discussion, exchange, and collective organization that recognizes the centrality of war and the changing conditions we face. As part of this process, a three-day event is being held in Rome on the 28-29-30 of March.

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For nearly three years now, there has been a war in Ukraine, with hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides and the destruction of ever-larger areas of the country, while for over a year, a genocide has been unfolding in Palestine, an expression of a conflict spreading to Lebanon and promising to extend throughout the entire region. The crisis in Syria and the attack on the Rojava revolution stand as proof of this. Today, Ukraine and Gaza are the two main names of a new reality in which war—whether fought, potential, latent, commercial, or technological—takes center stage in politics, far beyond the battlefields.

In this context, the concepts, languages, and organizational modes we are accustomed to seem to lose their grip on emerging power relations, the forms of exploitation, and the fault lines that run through social production and reproduction. Everything changes and transforms, taking on different contours and producing different effects. We are beyond the “repetition as farce” but within a historical reality that defines the change of an era. In the phase we are living through, we observe a solid alliance between nationalist and chauvinist options; options that, while invoking fascism through their hereditary, symbolic, and political proposals, fit into a new articulation between the State and global capitalism.

In this new framework, the political-cultural paradigm produced by war directly involves us. War imposes fronts and alignments. The logic of friend/enemy infiltrates even movements, reducing experiences and possibilities. At our latitudes, for the time being, we are not called to enlist in arms but to make a sacrifice, an obedient acceptance of the present for the good of the West, the Nation, and profit. All this, despite wages being stagnant for more than thirty years, social spending already reduced to the bone by years of austerity, yet always ready to be further plundered, along with the rights and freedoms of all.

Militarism today redefines society on multiple levels, fueling authoritarianism and racism, reinforcing hierarchies, cementing patriarchy and control over bodies, and diverting resources from collective welfare to military expenses. Thus, daily life is represented by the brutal daily violence of gender-based violence, the exclusion and subordination faced by women, trans* people, and those living on the margins, the perpetuation of masculine and feminine stereotypes, and the slogan “God, Fatherland, and Family.” While the climate and ecological emergency is right before our eyes, the transition has become a field of competition for capital interests, compatible with the resurgence of highly polluting industries and entirely detached from any notion of justice or opposition to environmental destruction, which exacerbates inequalities. We are immersed in the voracity with which capital consumes and plunders the planet, its resources, and all living beings. The governing familism attacks, beyond bodies and rights, the labor of women, making it increasingly precarious, especially targeting migrant and racialized women. The class struggle, waged ruthlessly against living labor, now rests on the war to impose choices and silence opposition.

With this text, we want to break the embarrassment that has haunted movements’ initiatives in recent years. We are aware that this embarrassment is not the result of subjective or group limitations, and we do not have magical recipes to offer. Therefore, we propose to open a space for discussion, exchange, and collective organization that recognizes the centrality of war and the changing conditions we face. We are also aware that this is not an ‘Italian’ issue: not only is every local and territorial dimension now transformed by logics and processes that are transnational, but, looking more broadly, it is clear that the ways we have been used to doing movements are only sporadically able to give voice to the possibility of opposing war and its effects.

In recent months, we have tried to animate a non-proprietary and horizontal public space where a convergence could be built, primarily around content. In these months, different realities, social spaces, student collectives, individual subjects, and grassroots unions, have met and confronted each other, attempting to navigate through significant moments of struggle that characterized the autumn. We have come together and recognized ourselves in a process that we imagine as continuous, never taking it for granted. We must imagine and create relationships—productive and human—that do not simply reverse the current perspective but break with it, choosing radically new horizons to navigate towards. Horizons that challenge the logics of domination and exploitation to open spaces for real transformation. It is no longer enough to resist: we need to completely halt this dynamic.

This is why we have decided to give a name to this space: ReSET (Network for Social, Ecologist, and Transfeminist Strike) against the war.

A complex name, just like the phase we are going through, and one we do not want to fear. A name we do not imagine as carved in stone but as one that helps us better face the path we have all embarked on together. We would like it to be an invitation to put aside old frameworks, divisions, and alliances, and to imagine new strategies together in the dramatic context we are living in. Provisionality, in this case, is not the result of the uncertainty of the eternal present but a hope for a new future. We choose these words not by chance because we are well aware of the precariousness and exploitation that has forced us to live in the continuous “presentization” and made it impossible for us to envision alternatives.

We want to search for common languages, develop hypotheses, and break out of the limits and fences of our usual paths, from unproductive divisions, and from alliances with a narrow perspective. RESET, then: not to erase the present but to liberate invention and build what does not yet exist. RESET wants to be an immediate programmatic declaration of opposition to war and the model of government and command that stems from it. RESET places at the center the practice of social and general strikes, ecologist and transfeminist, as a practice of struggle and organization.

We have continued with a shared project that today we propose to the entire Roman metropolis and beyond: let’s build a national appointment together. We imagine a collective and political residency, a shared space where we can meet, confront, and act together. An opportunity to sow ideas, practices, and visions, collectively taking care of what will emerge.

We therefore propose that we meet the last weekend of March (28, 29, 30) to give life to a collective moment where we can discuss content and themes starting from: war, practices, communication, organization.

We have repeatedly emphasized that convergence is an unavoidable necessity. We shared it on October 12 at the national assembly promoted by GKN titled “Do we need a General Assembly for Climate and Social Justice?”; we have lived it in the waves that fill the squares every year for Non Una di Meno; we touched it with our own hands during the climate pride and the general strike on October 29; we saw it in the broad front that was activated against Bill 1660 and in the global mobilizations that have opposed the ongoing genocide in Palestine. However, the central question we want to address is how this intersectional convergence of feminist struggles, environmentalism, and labor must spread its wings to organize and oppose the war regime with the appropriate strength.

We need to get back on the road. Together. Now.

RESET – Network for Social, Ecologist, and Transfeminist Strike Against the War

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