Introduction

By 8 a.m. on Friday, the 8th of August, dockworkers had seized control of key access points to the port of Genova, initiating a blockade of Italy’s largest port. Trade unions, youth organisations, and party representatives marched along the docks, chanting “Bloccare le armi non è reato” — “Blocking weapons is not a crime.” On the frontlines was Genova’s Collettivo Autonomo di Lavoratori Portuali (Autonomous Collective of Dockworkers, CALP): an antifascist, anticapitalist, and internationalist collective standing as a unified front within an increasingly fragmented Italian working class. “War on war”, they write on the day of the blockade, “We won’t back down one inch”.¹

Over the last year, ports across the Mediterranean have emerged as crucial sites for the political composition of labour—strategic nodes for the working class to organise itself into a unified political force. From Athens to Barcelona, dockworkers have effectively carried out coordinated direct action in solidarity with the people of Palestine, Sudan and beyond. These interventions represent more than a series of exceptional disruptions; they are expressions of a broader recomposition of port labour and its revolutionary potential.

In the tradition of Italian workerism (operaismo), the political composition of labour, embodied by organisations like the CALP, must be understood and catalysed through workers inquiry—a method that takes the technical and social contradictions of the labour process as the foundation for the collective political agency of the working class. It was with this in mind that I sat down with José, the CALP’s founder and spokesperson, a week after the August 8 blockade, to unpack the action and the conditions that enabled it.

The CALP: A Political Composition of Dockwork in the Port of Genova

While class struggle has deep roots in the port of Genova, it has historically been constrained by fragmentation and weak organisational leadership. Although unionisation at the port exceeds the national average by over 70%, these figures alone tell an incomplete story. Major unions, constrained by a bureaucratic approach that prioritises negotiation with employers over grassroots organising, have often been blamed for reinforcing divisions within the working class. José explained: “While the port may appear to function as a single entity, within it there are 13 companies, all disconnected from one another. The CGIL ² has never allowed for plenary discussions to take place within the port.” In the absence of an organisational structure capable of coordinating collective action, the CALP was established as a means to “tackle questions of labour and politics in the same manner—as part of the same fight.”

On October 20, 2011, the CALP came together with the mandate to unite dockworkers into a coherent and strategic political bloc. The collective was formed in the wake of widespread popular upheaval against the national and international financial elite. Responding to an international call from Spain’s Indignados movement, hundreds of thousands of workers and students from across Italy flooded the streets of Rome to denounce the austerity measures imposed by the Berlusconi government. The collective was formed during the bus ride that carried 105 Genovese activists home, as a powerful reclamation of labour power in the 21st century.

Since its inception, the CALP has rooted its praxis in an internationalist ethos, understanding the port as a nexus of the global working class. For José, working class solidarity begins with a simple question: “What am I feeding with my labour?” At the port, what may appear a routine international transaction may in reality be a critical representation of a broader diversion of public spending away from local social services to international military operations. “We say, ‘raise wages and lower arms’”, he explained, “because these are two sides of the same coin. This is what internationalism means to us: class struggle and anti-militarism as two sides of the same coin—because we understand that the weapons we load with our labour may one day be pointed at us.” For the CALP, this principle is enacted through the exercise of direct, material control over the flow of goods through the port of Genova.

On May 20, 2019, as a result of a coordinated international effort, the CALP discovered that a shipment of generators by Bahri Yanbu—a Saudi shipping company directly implicated in the war in Yemen and in Turkey’s attacks on Kurdish resistance forces in Rojava—was intended for military use. In immediate response, the collective mobilised hundreds of workers to blockade the ship’s main docking point. While the vessel eventually entered the port, the action effectively prevented the generators from being loaded. The regional strike that followed made it impossible to complete the operation at other ports in Liguria, marking a major victory for transnational labour mobilisation against the war economy. Most importantly, the action granted the CALP the leverage to negotiate an agreement with the Genovese port authorities: no weapons destined for a state at war were to pass through the port.

“Just days before the August 8 action,” José recalled, “we received photos from comrades in La Spezia showing tanks—produced by Leonardo and transported by Bahri. They weren’t scheduled to dock in Genova, but when we saw a similar ship approaching, we mobilised immediately.” The CALP called an emergency meeting with port authorities, in suspicion of a potential violation of their 2019 agreement, but they were assured that the cargo was harmless and unrelated to the La Spezia shipment. “The thing is,” José continued, “by now we knew not to trust them. We had already sent a squad of comrades to inspect the cargo ourselves. And what do you know? Right in the middle of that meeting, the photos started coming in: rows of tanks and explosives, the very same ones they’d warned us about in La Spezia.” By the next morning, the CALP had called a strike and mobilised for direct action at the terminal: “We closed off the gates; we shut down their economy.”

The CALP’s record of effective mobilisation rests on an acute awareness of the contradictions that enable labour to exercise leverage over capital: “We have to identify the strategic sites for class struggle by looking at how states generate profit. In the past, that meant the factory—so we targeted FIAT. Today, with globalization, profit flows through the supply chain, so the port has become the new factory. It is in this economic bottleneck that we have the power to make a difference. Even just a few of us can make a real difference.” Put differently, the port represents the logistical backbone of supply chain capitalism; to disrupt it is to strike at the very process of value extraction itself.

The CALP thus emerges as a political composition in the classic workerist sense: an autonomous, self-organised bloc of coordinated class power. Understanding how such a force coalesces demands an inquiry into both the technical composition of port labour—how capital structures, coordinates, and controls the labour process—and the social composition of its workforce: the lived experiences, shared values, and collective identities that enable workers to interpret their condition and mobilise accordingly.

Power in Precarity: The Technical Composition of Port Labour in Italy

The technical reorganisation of port labour in Italy over the last 30 years has systematically entrenched fragmentation and precarity among its workers. The privatisation of ports initiated by Law No. 84/1994 introduced a tripartite framework for dockwork, delineating three distinct categories of labour. Article 16 pertains to shipowners’ personnel, who perform cargo-handling operations under the supervision of the port authorities. Article 17, instead, establishes temporary labour agencies that supply workers to port companies during periods of increased demand, creating a flexible reserve pool of labour that can be mobilised according to fluctuations in economic activity. Finally, Article 18 covers workers employed directly by port companies, who typically have permanent contracts.

Although José is employed under Article 18 and is granted the stability and protections of permanent work, he noted that such security has become increasingly uncommon. Restructuring and automation have drastically reduced the demand for permanent dock labour, shifting reliance instead toward the flexible and contingent workforce of Article 17. This growing casualisation has deeply fractured the port workforce—a trend reflected in the widespread deunionisation of dockworkers over the past thirty years. As José observed, even among unionised workers, meaningful dialogue is often limited and objectives frequently diverge, hindering the formation of working class solidarity and shared class consciousness.

As a direct response to this organisational decomposition of the port, the CALP was formed to confront the deepening fragmentation of its workforce. As José explained, the collective was conceived as a means of cohesion for workers who lacked syndicalist leverage or the protections of Article 18 contracts. With the casualisation of dockwork, unionisation alone no longer offered sufficient grounds for organisational unity. Traditional unions struggled to represent the increasingly precarious Article 17 workforce, leaving many workers without a collective framework through which to articulate their demands and take concrete political action. The CALP bridges this divide by providing a political space that holds together divergent conditions of employment, transcending the institutional limits of trade unionism in order to recompose the collective power of port labour.

Beyond simply navigating a technical composition designed to undermine collective action, the CALP seeks to actively exploit its contradictions. In its drive for logistical efficiency, capital has condensed the chokepoints where labour can exert decisive, strategic pressure over the flow of goods. “We used to have ships of two or three thousand containers, and they’d arrive constantly, hundreds at a time. Blocking one of those ships hardly made a dent in the economy”, José explained. “Now, to cut crew costs, they load everything onto a single vessel. That means Amazon, IKEA, Volkswagen—all their cargo is on the same ship. One blockade, and you can shut down half the economy. They created this contradiction for themselves.” In subordinating labour to efficiency, the technical recomposition of the port inadvertently concentrates the vulnerability of capital.

The technical composition of port labour in Italy, in its attempt to disempower labour through casualisation, de-unionisation, and automation, lays the tactical groundwork for a political composition rooted in material, internationalist solidarity. An effective blockade no longer relies on mass participation alone, but rather on precise coordination and a deep understanding of logistical flows. The CALP masters both, mobilising small, coordinated groups of workers at critical nodes within the supply chain to ensure that fragmentation and precarity do not open the door to scabbing or disengagement. In this way, the collective transforms the logistical architecture of capital into an instrument of working-class power.

Embodied Solidarity: The Social Composition of Genovese Dockworkers

José, like many of his comrades, grew up in Molassana, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Genova shaped by the city’s rapid industrial expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The neighborhood, composed primarily of dockworkers and their families, has historically been a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), whose influence remains palpable in its social and political fabric. In the post–World War II period, particularly during the industrial boom of the 1950s to 1970s, the party and its affiliated organisations established public housing, cultural circles, recreational clubs, and labour associations intended to cultivate a cohesive working-class culture. While this environment undoubtedly nurtured the political conscience and collective identity of the CALP, the PCI’s project remained a top–down electoral enterprise, with its cultural and material gains mediated through the structures of party and state. The strength of the CALP lay in reactivating the solidarities the PCI fostered, while refusing the hierarchical logic through which they had been institutionalised.

The neighborhood’s class consciousness is deeply inflected with anti-imperialist sentiment, rooted in a tangible experience of Italy’s internal core-periphery dynamics. Molassana’s population consists largely of internal migrants from the South and the islands who had been systematically displaced by the same economic forces that fuelled the North’s industrial ascent. Many were forcibly relocated to match the increasing demand for labour in the North, while others fled the economic collapse induced by the extractivism, dispossession and exploitation that served Northern capital. In this sense, Molassana materialises the geography of unequal exchange that characterises the Italian working class, where southern lives are reassembled into the industrial landscape of the North. This historical experience of displacement and marginalisation within the Genovese port workforce cultivates a form of class consciousness that inherently links capital and empire—a solidarity directly reflected in CALP’s staunchly internationalist orientation.

Today, this consciousness stands in tension with the political dominance of the far-right in Italy. Where contemporary nationalist politics cast migrants as threats to social cohesion, the CALP’s internationalism insists on solidarity as a material and political imperative. “When you look at what the Lega ³ did”, José explained, “they read the historical moment and framed it to their advantage. In this historical moment, we can regain some control over the narrative.” The CALP reframes migration and displacement not as sites of division, but as the very basis for collective struggle against both domestic and global elites.

The transnational class consciousness of Genova’s dockworkers finds its sharpest expression in moments of global crisis, such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza. “I’m Sardinian, my father was Sardinian,” José recalled. “We were kicked out of our own land. When we speak of Palestine, I feel it on my skin.” Since the beginning of Israel’s assault, class politics have reemerged with renewed force, catalyzing collective action on the docks. “Over the past two years, I’ve been receiving more messages than ever from people wanting to get involved in activism,” José explained. “What’s happening in Gaza is so monstrous, and so thrown in your face, that it forces you to take a stand—or you’re complicit. People are hungry for political alternatives. Suddenly, a communist political organisation doesn’t seem radical—it seems necessary. There’s no longer any shame in saying you’re a communist.” It is often said that it will not be the world to liberate Palestine, but Palestine to liberate the world—nowhere is this more evident than in the port of Genova. This historical moment exposes, with brutal clarity, the violence inherent to the transnational flow of capital. The CALP translates this clarity into coordinated class struggle.

The social composition of Genova’s dockworkers manifests as a deeply embodied, transnational class consciousness. Forged in neighborhoods like Molassana, shaped by a collective memory of displacement, and sharpened through a steadfast opposition to imperialism, this consciousness forms the foundation for moments of political composition. In moments of acute crisis, such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza, organisations like the CALP can channel heightened awareness and material urgency into coordinated action, directly challenging the flows of capital that sustain imperial violence.

Conclusion

The recent wave of mobilisations across Mediterranean ports signals a transformative moment of political composition, as dockworkers organise themselves into a coordinated and autonomous force. Formations like the CALP demonstrate that labour, even under conditions designed to disempower it, can exert real leverage over the transnational flows of capital, disrupting its most violent and exploitative circuits. These actions constitute a strategic reclamation of working-class power in the 21st century.

Periods of acute crisis—marked by escalating militarism, austerity, and precarity—expose the structural contradictions of capital, opening spaces for decisive intervention. In these moments, the role of political compositions like the CALP is to act swiftly and strategically, exploiting these contradictions before capital can restabilise its logic. This requires an attentive integration of technical knowledge of labour processes with the cultivation of social cohesion and collective consciousness among workers, translating heightened awareness and material urgency into coordinated action.

In confronting the increasingly transnational character of capital, the CALP exemplifies the enduring necessity of internationalism in contemporary class struggle. By connecting struggles across borders, both in theory and in practice, isolated interventions are transformed into a unified force capable of challenging the global political economy. Ultimately, the internationalist solidarity embodied at the port of Genova serves as a vivid reminder that organised labour remains a decisive agent of political and social transformation.