[This article is part of ZNetwork.org‘s series, Activist Diaries.]

The metabolic fault-line is open. Just bang the hammer. And capitalism will collapse. 

I live in one of the most contaminated areas on the planet, caused by human arrogance. The western Veneto, the region of Venice. A high-income sacrifice zone (HISZ). Different from classic sacrifice zones [1].

Over the last 40 years, 4000 more people have died from a single risk factor alone [2], an increase of 7% compared to other areas in northern Italy with the same background noise. I am talking about pollution. Toxic air, toxic water, toxic food.

4000 civilian deaths from a single risk factor (PFAS) alone. It is like a war. In reality, it is and we are on the front line. All the other deaths are invisible and we cannot be aware (have an account) of them. But they are many, very many, covered by capitalist omerta.

The extraordinary civilization that has thrived for centuries in these lands, for various reasons, historical, anthropological, cultural, with the advent of the last capitalism, as if it were a self-imposed degenerative disease, the Cancer of the World, is killing itself with its own hands.

Indeed, I could say that capitalism is the death of civilization as we have understood it so far. A construction that does not stand because its foundations have been badly grounded and some simple existential requirements have been forgotten.

This is not the place to reconstruct history and events, historical, conceptual, cultural. I will only recount the collapse-crumble that we – my comrades and I – are not only experiencing first-hand, but are even nurturing. From the ashes of capitalism a new civilization will be born.

And if I may venture to announce the death of such a great creature of thought and action – the capitalist system – it is because here we have seen its downfall for the first time. The first piece of the crumble. The first rift (fracture) that became a fault-line. The failure of its very possibility of rebirth.

I will accompany you through the collapses of this system, reporting on the hot fronts of our struggle, which I list here as if they were the different front lines where we put our climate troops, FFF, XR, Climate Activists of various kinds, Social Centres, Rebel Trade Unions, Radical Mountaineers, Proletarian Hikers, Parents in Revolt.

There are five fractures on which we are working to widen the fault-line: the destruction of mountains as Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics; the chemical pollution of new forever chemicals as PFAS; the great useless works such as the high-speed train line Lisbon-Kiev (TAV); intensive luxury productions such as Prosecco wine and tannery skins; the merchants of death as NATO military bases. All are interconnected and adopt the same cynical hyper neoliberal logic of destroying the territories they cross, without knowing their geography and history.

I will begin with the first fracture-front. The Dolomite-Milanese front.

The Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics

We had left each other at the Climate Camp in Venice and made an appointment for the big mobilization in Carrara at the end of 2023, saying: «mountains don’t grow back». We have to stop the immoral-foul works planned for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

Already the fact that the ‘winter’ Olympics will be held – even in name only – between Milan and Cortina, between a city without snow (120 m above sea level) and mountains where snow falls little, much less than it used to, mountains that are nonetheless beautiful, says a lot about the ‘economistic choice’ of these supposed winter games.

Milan is the capital of the Italian capitalistic economy and hyper-consumerist fashion. Cortina is the capital of the mountains seen as a luxury and exploitation of natural resources for the use and consumption of the rich, to circulate what is actually earned in Milan-style metropolises. Money must circulate, and the best place to circulate it is where the high-profit-profile tourist and real estate recycling takes place. In tourist havens (which I call Paradise Zones, as opposed to Sacrifice Zones).

It is no coincidence that the political governors of the two host regions, Lombardy and Veneto, are of the same political, identity-driven, neo-liberal, business-oriented persuasion: the Northern League. For years, the two regions, the richest in Italy in terms of money and infrastructure, but the most critical in terms of sociality and righteousness, have created unprecedented business and corruption in Italy’s history.

Veneto, my region, just to mention two world-famous case studies, was the protagonist of the biggest corruption scandal in public works [3] in the history of Europe (the Mose in Venice, costing more than EUR 6 billion, of which only EUR 1 billion in bribes) and of the biggest chemical contamination of water for human use in the western world (the PFAS contamination created by Miteni – compositions of the multinationals Mitsubishi and Enichem, suppliers of the American DuPont) [4].

Lombardy, the region next to Veneto, was one of the greatest examples of a ‘system of favors and clienteles to divide up the proceeds of contracts’ (see reports on Expo 2015 [5]) that ended with a myriad of trials and convictions, leaving part of the city to building and cultural speculators, with dozens of works of dubious public use for the common good of the city. It is also the Region that started the privatization of public health, with impressive scandals involving the President of the Region, subjected to continuous investigations and checks by the judiciary.

Seeing the presidents of these regions – Attilio Fontana and Luca Zaia – exult over the awarding of the Olympics, while all the other contenders withdrew aware of the waste and climate costs, knowing the history of the two regions, did not reassure the activists already sensitive on the various environmental and social fronts. Right from the start, the division of major works, both sport-specific and infrastructural, showed that the same ‘spannometric’ [1] game of dividing up international funds and economicistic spin-offs was about to be repeated, only and always for the usual strong powers.

For the sake of simplicity, I will mention just two of the most striking cases on which our struggle is focusing. That of the Bobsleigh Sliding Center in Cortina and that of the speculation on the Olympic Village in Milan.

First of all, one must take into account that Milan is a long way from Cortina and also from Bormio, the other Alpine town where the races will be held. With this excuse of distances between cities hundreds of kilometers apart (I recall that in Italy you can find everything in a radius of less than 100 km: sea, lake, mountains, beautiful cities), fictitious connecting works have begun, new roads or remakes of old ones, which have little to do with the effectiveness of the connection and are just pretexts for building very expensive infrastructures in the hands of large construction companies. Not to mention the pollution from the traffic of goods (from construction and logistics) and people (athletes and spectators). 

The Olympics have therefore become a huge and colossal affair for the few at the expense of the many, a great attractor of capitalist funds and interests, even before, often above, the very high Olympic values of sport that we all recognise. If sport were still sport, and not instead the exploitation of athletes’ bodies, especially when subjected to the hyper-specialistic consumption of their own, due to the sporting regimes of recent years: consumed bodies that have become useful only to create easy imagery used to convey goods and products, designed by unscrupulous sponsors.

The Cortina Sliding Center 

In Cortina, famous for the splendid Dolomites, the home and motherland of technical mountaineering, they have wanted to build a new bobsleigh track without consulting the townspeople. They have passed the project off as the renovation of the old track, but this is not the case. The few native citizens – the city has been in the hands of the servants of luxury for decades – made it clear that a bobsleigh track could no longer be built where the old one was, which had fallen into disuse, because the climatic conditions had changed, because the first one was already wrong because of its south-east exposure, because very few athletes practice this sport, because it would no longer be used due to the very costly maintenance, due to the abnormal cost of the project, which in the space of a couple of years has gone from 61 to 128 millions euro [6], subtracted from the coffers of the mountain villages, which live with great difficulty due to the absence of health and social services.

Not only was a centuries-old larch forest being cut down. But the rights of mountain communities were trampled underfoot. We did everything to prevent this, but the passivity of the locals, after years of domination and domestication due to easy money, prevented the work from being blocked for the time being. The forest has been violently cut down, causing hundreds of centuries-old larches to fall, with the complicity of the International Olympic Committee, which has not kept its word about blocking the work and moving the races to the nearby bobsleigh tracks in Austria, a few kilometers away. The forest has fallen under police control, proceeding in a de facto illegal manner, despite environmental impact laws and the legacy of the project. An infamy and an environmental crime of enormous magnitude that the whole world must know about. Especially since the IOC declared these Olympics sustainable. Only in their principles, not in their facts. An ignoble contradiction.

From a social and environmental point of view, the Olympics are becoming a serious danger for the future, like the UNESCO label for the Dolomites, which at the end of the day has also become nothing more than a flywheel to attract international funds and millions of superficial tourists: touristification and assault on nature, nothing more, nothing less. The tourists and the Olympics ‘pass by’ (like hordes of New Barbarians), leaving the territories devastated.

The Olympic Village in Milan

In Milan – where nature has already been wiped out by violent hyper-urbanization since the time of Berlusconi, the father of zero-cost Italian business – things are no better. Neighborhoods once neglected and used by the poor classes have been gentrified under the pretext of building the Olympic Village. Evictions, expropriations, downward bargaining, in order to build a village that after the Olympics is supposed to become a student residence only for rich students attending Milan’s elite universities. The cost of a single room will be around 1,000 euros a month. More than twice the Italian average. Truly a colossal bargain since it will have 1700 places and will be the largest student residence in Italy [7].

In the face of this umpteenth capitalist barbarism that is killing itself, the people, the territories, the Civilisation, a united front has risen up, stretching from Venice to Milan, to Turin, and also creating connections with the Paris committees (already active for the 2030 edition in the French Alps). From the Climate Camp in Venice to the alternative CIO in Milan, young guys and less young, old and new subjectivities, such as XR, FFF or the Social Centres of the Northeast, Alpine Clubs, and popular sports groups, all of Northern Italy is uniting to oppose these Olympics derailed from their original values.

We have chosen to break the narration of hypocritical Olympic Pax, now more than ever given that war is being waged in the territories of Palestine and the disputed lands of the Black Sea, and the Paris Olympics are being attended by belligerent countries, fuelled by nations hypocritical in their supply of weapons to all sides. Two of them upon all, given where I am writing from and to, are the USA and Italy. We should be ashamed to talk about the Olympics and to belong to nations that supply instruments of death on a daily basis.

Our slogan is ‘our life is not a game’. Strategic objective is first and foremost to counter the false narratives and to exonerate-overthrow the authorities (deprive of authority) who are building the Sliding Center, Olympic Village and other useless works. We can’t tell you the next steps yet, but the first unitary appointment against the ‘late-climatic’ Olympics will be in Milan with the UTOPIADI on 24 /27 October.

Follow us on C.I.O.2026 and on Laboratorio Politico di Ecologia.

Alberto Peruffo da Montecchio, thinker, activist and mountaineer, coordinator of many struggles in Italy, was also the creator of the international action at the time of the Beijing Olympics that saw hundreds of mountains and buildings coloured with the red colour of shame and rebellion against human rights abuses in Tibet, particularly during the ascent of Everest. He is the author for ZMagazine of Capitalism must be stopped, not reformed.

Notes

1. High-income Sacrifice Zone (HISZ – Zona di Sacrificio ad Alte Reddito, ZSAR) is a new concept of «the last breath of the capitalist universe» elaborated for Laboratorio Politico Ecologia by Alberto Peruffo. 
2. All-cause, cardiovascular disease and cancer mortality in the population of a large Italian area contaminated by perfuoroalkyl and polyfuoroalkyl substances (1980–2018), Biggeri et al. Environmental Health (2024).
3. https://eddyburg.it/archivio/mose-il-piu-grande-scandalo-europeo-si-conclude-con-4-condanne/ 
4. https://pfas.land/2021/11/23/23-novembre-2021-lettera-allonu-restrizioni-bando-pfas-echa-gli-alimenti-sottratti-la-prevenzione-negata-il-fattore-di-rischio-ambientale-autonomo/ 
5. https://www.ilpost.it/2014/05/09/inchiesta-tangenti-expo-2015-lombardia/ 
6. https://altreconomia.it/a-cortina-si-consuma-una-farsa-la-pista-di-bob-non-servira-per-le-olimpiadi/ 
7. https://www.fanpage.it/milano/quasi-mille-euro-per-una-stanza-singola-nello-studentato-del-villaggio-olimpico-a-milano-cosi-la-citta-e-esclusiva/ 

---