Forms of the European Spring: The No Tav movement

Forms of the European Spring: the No Tav movement

Within the “European spring”, the No Tav movement in Susa Valley - the struggle against the construction of the high speed railway line connected to the UE corridors - is theoretically as well empirically worthy of consideration. It has behind itself a long work of organization, experiences, mobilization that represents in the Italian as well as European panorama an important altough little known political factory of cooperating subjectivity constitution. This struggle has got as main features: direct action and self-organised spontaneous intervention, without the support of predefined  traditional structures, a crescendo of cooperation of “simple” individuals  basically left without those traditional forms of belonging typical of the old cycle of social movements. It creates its own ties in a horizontal network able to get the most of individual resistance and the skills of each, and to enhance them. It seeks decision-making mechanisms, deploys multiform activities. At the same time, it produces a body of information and searches for unity within the heterogeneity of the participants, their visions, individual backgrounds not belonging to a homogenous social group, nor with predefined common perspectives, creating relationships and producing something which until a few days before would have seemed to them incredible.

The No Tav movement has also elaborated a language and raised issues far beyond its specific mobilization: the theme of another possible model of development, production of new relations and commons, and the claim against the debt economy. All in all, it shows some features that are emerging on European scale, in particular with the M15 movement. Our analysis combines a class-composition and co-research approach with the attempt to compare the No Tav movement with the framework of the “new social movements” analysis as well with regard to the theme commons/new enclosures.