Massimo De Angelis
(originally in Italian on Comune-info)
In the days following the Israeli attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla, millions of people took to the streets in Italy and around the world — not only to show solidarity with Gaza, but to say no to indifference, complicity, and resignation. In Italy in particular, the movement saw two generalized strikes (which, unlike general strikes, did not only involve waged workers on formal employment contracts) and countless other demonstrations and initiatives. Millions of people in more than 100 cities turned their indignation into action. But what is most striking is not the quantity, but the quality of this collective spirit. A multitude made up of children, teachers, the elderly, families, workers, lesbians, migrants — and add all the types of identity differences you want — they were there, unless they were in some bar complaining that “it’s useless anyway” or “I don’t care about Palestine.” Even prisoners went on strike!
The mass demonstrations for Palestine and the Global Sumud Flotilla have opened a breach in the normality of a world that makes genocide a disarming daily spectacle. It is a movement that undoubtedly stems from an ethical impulse — understood not as a set of moral precepts, but as an immanent force of life that reacts to injustice and manifests a conatus aimed at subverting the repugnant hierarchy of values that makes genocide possible. But ethics becomes politics when the breath of bodies becomes common, overturning old boundaries and collectively recognizing the difference that makes the difference — the red line that separates us from genocidal power. As that beautiful sign displayed in Rome said: “We thought we were liberating Palestine, but instead Palestine is liberating us.”
What was expressed in these squares was a vital pulse, a breath of life, as Enrico Euli called it: the reaffirmation of life against death, of collective action against the anesthesia of power. Suddenly, we found ourselves no longer disenchanted, no longer cynical, nor resigned. This explosion shows an oscillation between two feelings that many of us share to a greater or lesser extent: on the one hand, the awareness of our powerlessness in the face of the monster of war, of global techno-fascism, of the ecological and moral catastrophe in which we are immersed; on the other, the irresistible urge to react, to take to the streets, to say no — even knowing that the battle seems lost. This ambivalence is not a weakness, but the real condition of action today. It is the terrain on which the relationship — the intertwining — of ethics and politics is played out.
Within this vibration, ethics and politics, practice and value, the local and the global are intertwined: a new field of possibilities that we have called sumud — perseverance, rootedness, breath. Because when death becomes a system and peace an arms industry, every gesture of life that overflows is already political. Every boat that sets sail, every march that crosses the city, every keffiyeh around the neck says the same thing: not in my name. A disobedience that crosses the sea to break the siege, unmask the sloth of Western governments, and bring aid to a population condemned to starvation. Relational and use values rearticulated in the face of a system that tends to impose the exclusive domination of exchange value and imperial command.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi described the mobilization as an “ethical revolt,” and it is — but not in the moralistic sense of the term. The ethics we are talking about here is not a code, it is a field of forces: the emergence and manifestation of other criteria of value, other measures of the possible, within social cooperation. And this other is the result of bodies putting themselves on the line. Lea Melandri grasped this well: the squares have brought back to the center what for centuries has been considered “off topic” — bodies, intimate life, human experience. As in 1968, the “unexpected subjects” — women, young people, ordinary people — have returned to the scene, bringing with them a sense of shared responsibility. At a time when institutional politics appears dull, political awareness is reborn in presence: in hands, footsteps, voices, and glances.
Amador Fernández-Savater says it clearly: the Flotilla “is not a humanitarian initiative, but an act of political disobedience.” It is justice regaining its sword, not through violence, but through the strength of bodies in motion. Humanitarian language separates care from politics; the Flotilla brings them back together. Bringing bread and medicine, in this context, means challenging the logic of war. It is a crack in domination, an act of courage. And many of us recognized ourselves in this act of courage.
Talking about ethics, after all, means talking about value praxis: ethics is not somewhere else in life, but the way in which, through social cooperation and the daily bonds that intertwine us with multiple productive circuits, we produce and reproduce not only goods but also values, relationships, and meanings.
Capitalism, however, hierarchizes these processes, placing exchange value — and the profits and command logics that accompany it — at the top, subordinating use and relational values to it.
In my work, I call this terrain of practices through which people produce and reproduce matter and meaning together — goods, relationships, meanings — value praxis. Every society is traversed by different domains of value — relational, use, exchange, command — in constant tension. Capitalism orders them into a pyramid, but everyday life always escapes this reduction: in every gesture of solidarity, care, or disobedience, other forms of value emerge that subvert the dominant hierarchy and recompose relational and use values.
In the squares for Palestine, in the blocked ports, in the gestures of daily solidarity, these other logics of value have emerged with disruptive force: relational, vital, oriented toward life and not profit. They have been the places where the relational power of bodies has challenged command, where use and care have been opposed to the logic of exchange and war. Ethics, understood in this way, is not a private morality but a constituent force — and therefore political: the desire to reorganize life and social cooperation according to what really matters.
We live in a world that asks us every day to adapt: to work, consume, remain silent, while the system destroys the conditions of life. Yet in the same world, a counter-pulse emerges: that of those who do not give up, who feel that even a small gesture of care, a demonstration, an act of disobedience, has intrinsic value, even if it does not produce immediate results. Between disenchanted adaptation and the desire for desertion, between resignation and hope, there is a tension that we call ethics. And it is from this tension that politics can be reborn.
But any ethical force is fragile if it does not find forms of organization. The ambivalence of our time — between powerlessness and desire — cannot be overcome by indignation alone. We need continuity, we need duration; we need contexts of real cooperation, where together we can free ourselves, also materially, also gradually, from the hegemony of this power and its rules of life.
Hence the challenge: to transform ethical drive into daily practice. Not just taking to the streets, but creating worlds. Collective kitchens, mutual aid networks, independent media, agroecological and feminist experiences are already laboratories of this new politics: not representative, but constituent.
These experiences — local, concrete, rooted in territories — are not refuges, but starting points. Every time a community organizes itself to live differently, it opens a breach in the dominant order and creates the conditions for broader connection. From neighborhood practices to international solidarity networks, the possibility of another world can only be built if what arises from below manages to communicate, intertwine, and overflow.
It is in this context that Sandro Mezzadra’s appeal takes place: the movement must continue to overflow, to go beyond national borders, because only in this transversality can it challenge the disparity of forces. Overflowing is not just about spreading, but about existing and resisting on every scale: from the local to the planetary, from the symbolic to the material, from the everyday to the infrastructural. War and genocide are global processes, intertwining finance, logistics, diplomacy, and media. But they are also processes that play out in everyday life, as situated moments of those global processes. To oppose them, we need a counter-network of practices and solidarities — transnational commons that connect struggles in ports, universities, countryside, and neighborhoods around the world, opening up and linking other spaces of social cooperation.
In this sense, overflowing is a value praxis that expands social cooperation beyond all boundaries — identity, national, and thematic — by connecting the domains of value between peoples and territories, between the Mediterranean and Latin America, between environmental, labor, migrant, and liberation movements.
It does not erase differences; it harmonizes them. It generates a new planetary breath: a politics without a fixed center, rooted in the very movement of life defending itself and of social cooperation seeking to reconfigure itself on new foundations.
In the massive demonstrations for Gaza, this breath was clearly felt — not the rigid unity of a party, but the polyphony of a jam session: dissonances and improvisations seeking harmony. The rhythm of commoning was perceived: doing things together as an art and a necessity. Ethics becomes rhythm, politics becomes dance, and breath — as in jazz music — becomes collective strength.
The Flotilla, then, is not an isolated act but a sign of transition: from the humanitarian to the common, from rescue to solidarity, from gesture to transformation. Every time life asserts itself against death, a beauty is produced that is also material power. It is politics as the creation of conditions for shared life.
Today, in the face of catastrophe, the simplest and most difficult gesture remains that of continuing to breathe. But breathing alone is not enough. The squares, the boats, the networks of solidarity tell us that breathing can still become common, harmonized, persistent.
To exist today is increasingly to resist, and to resist means transforming ethics into politics, compassion into cooperation, simple survival into shared life.
As long as there is shared breath, history is not over.
And as long as life continues to overflow, hope will always find a way back to the sea.