A leaftet given out in Milan and in Venice the days after 21 of July
They wanted it to fail.. But on Saturday 21 July, the government of Berlusconi and the other governmnents of the West found themselves in a city inundated by a sea of demonstrators. It was a clear victory fot the "anti-globalisation" movement. However, it was not (and will not be) enough by itself to make the powers of the Earth accept the movement’s claims. This was confirmed by the hot-headed blitz of Saturday night and the farcical decisions taken by the murderers during the course of the Summit. It is for this reason that we feel called upon to draw up a pitiless account of what happened – in order to highlight how to go on in a way that will allow us to win once and for all.
Because an officer or a Minister broke the democratic rules? Certainly not. It was simply the implementation of the need of the great capitalist powers to suffocate this "anti-globalisation" movement at birth. They are afraid. Because of its increasingly mass character. Its international nature. Its young age. The initial presence within it of factory workers. The wealth of the themes raised by the protest. The irreducible opposition between its aspirations and expectations, and the interests of the capitalist social system and its G8 political representatives. Berlusconi was right when he said that whoever is against G8 is in fact against the Western model of the market and the system founded on profit. It is true. It is enough to look at the response of the gangsters with their blood-covered hands to the claims concerning debts, AIDS and the environment. Didn’t they ridicule them? Didn’t they continue unperturbed along their chosen path?
It is time that the participants in the movement, the proletariat and the young finally acknowledge this irreducible antagonism. And – after the physical intimidation – reject the other intimidation set in motion by Western governments against the demonstrators in Genoa and before:: limiting themselves to the (impossible) objective of eliminating the crimes of globalisation without putting "everything" in doubt – i.e., the capitalist social system as a whole. It is an objective that is as impossible as putting a lion on a vegetarian diet. And it is this impossibility that gives rise to the attempts to repress the "anti-globalisation" movement. Which was certainly not inaugurated by Berlusconi. He was preceded by the Democrat Clinton in Seattle, Italy’s "centre-left" government in Naples, and a social-democratic pistol shot in Goteborg.
Saturday’s blitz was not an episode unworthy of a democratic country. It is what democracy has to do (and legitimately from its own point of view!) in order to defend the interests of its Pole Star – profits – against a movement that is objectively marching against it. A deviation from the rules of democracy? But this is what democracy is all about. Democracy has an iron fist against anyone who rebels against the needs of the market, whether they are in Yugoslavia, Iraq or inside the metropoli. The murderous government of Berlusconi simply turned internally the machine that the murderous government of D’Alema had oiled so well against the Yugoslavian peoples.
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Who are the Black Bloc? Agents provocateurs? No. They represent a young social sector whose precarious employment and future make them believe that the only way to oppose a system that they – rightly – see as being hostile to all human needs is to strike it physically in some of its material structures (banks, shops, etc..), and that they can do so by keeping themselves isolated from the process of political maturation of the mass of the young and exploited. But this is a kind of ideological and practical short-circuit. While rejecting capitalism, they are incapable of seeing what it really is, how it can really be defeated and by whom: i.e. the universe of the exploited organised as a political party. We internationalist communists do not recognise ourselves in their deeds not because they are violent, but because they are mere pinpricks – fundamentally desperate gestures that do not help and may even hinder the development of an increasingly radical and mass struggle against globalisation and capitalism. They are gestures that exhaust and placate the anger of thousands of young people in ultimately impotent actions, dry up this potential reservoir of anti-capitalist struggle, and allow the media to debase the proletarian revolution by reducing it to "nihilist destruction". However, unlike the whisperings of certain leaders of the "anti-globalisation" movement, we are far from saying that these groups are accomplices of the police (the fact that they, like other sectors of the movement, have been infiltrated is something obvious and consistent with the task that democracy has assigned to its forces of "order"). We say that it is actually the moderate policy of "humanising capitalism" adopted by the leaders of the left and the GSF itself that is driving a growing number of young people in this direction. Having by now closed its local branches and bombed Yugoslavia, what has the Democratic Left party got to offer the anger of youths such as Carlo and their thirst for justice? Or an Agnoletto who, until the day before yesterday, praised the intellectual capacities and openness to dialogue of the National Alliance’s Minister Matteoli? Or a Bertinotti who continues to pursue the path of dialogue with the "government left" and invokes non-violence in the face of a capitalist social system founded on intrinsically violent economic relationships that it defends with all of the organised violence of its security services?
Instead of isolating them and sacrificing them to the bestial violence of the State’s repressive agencies, it would be more appropriate to direct these groups of angry young men, which are destined to become even more numerous (and be joined in force by immigrants...), towards a pathway of struggle that is capable of going beyond the symbols of capitalist private property and reaching the heart of capitalism itself.. We will be able to do this only provided that the rest of the "anti-global" movement stops surrendering to the blackmail of the world’s dictators and pleading for their benevolence and humanity, and instead advances along the road towards the extension and radicalisation of the struggle, placing the demonstrators’ individual violent gestures and expressions of anger in the context of a quarterless battle against capitalism that, rather than single branches, will destroy the entire Bank of Capitalism as a social system! |
It is therefore not enough to shout out this or that claim, or to ask for an end to this or that misdeed. However many people do it. It is not enough unless this mobilisation is transformed into an organised force capable of prevailing against the organised force of a democracy used by the multinationals and stock exchange sharks to defend their systematic pillaging of nature and working humanity. Albeit still at its pallid but promising beginnings, the objective and subjective significance of the antagonistic battle taking shape on the horizon will leave no room for "democratic reasonableness" – for the bourgeoisie or us.
The violence of the police has given rise to a great deal of thunder from the Genova Social Forum (GSF) and newspapers such as "il manifesto", but it was really nothing exceptional - just the still hesitant beginnings of something we can expect to get worse in the future.
It was nothing exceptional becase the violence unleashed by State forces is no novelty in Italy (or elsewhere). Scelba’s flying squads, May 1960 and the year 1968 saw tens of dozens of deaths. Things calmed down somewhat with the fading of the social struggle and the re-entry of individual protests into the mainstream of the system, which was favoured not only (and not so much) by the violence of the State, but also (and more) by the leadership of the workers’ movement and the renegades of the "contestation" – from Sofri and his like, to the unspeakable Capuozzo, who organised the "revolutionary violence" of lotta continua [continuous struggle] in Udine, but has since adopted the reactionary position of a "fair and efficient" bourgeois order. The Ulivo [Olive Tree alliance] is a perfect expression of this: the heirs of Scelba’s truncheon wielders and executioners now sit comfortably side by side with those who, in the cycle of past struggles, used "their" dead to gain access to the common management of bourgeois "democratic power"..
We are now coming out of this "quiet" period ("quiet" for the white proletariat of the metropoli and only for them....) and entering a new and very different phase of the battle. Due to the crumbling of the edifice of capitalism, whose systemic crisis is inexorably advancing well beyond what is shown by the economic indices. And the crisis of legitimacy that is beginning to corrode the élites in power. The forces of the State are well aware of the fact and are "legitimately" (from their point of view) beginning to play their part. And we must play ours! Not the one that Berlusconi’s government is seeking to impose on us: "You can express your dissent so that we know the real danger hanging over our heads, but only if you respect (the "fair" and "joint") values of the market and democracy (i.e. the bourgeois dictatorship". That is, in such a way that your protest remains impotent against the violence of the State and keeps its distance from (or is even directed against) the "baddies" of the "anti-globalisation" movement – thus ensuring its fragmentation and dissolution.
Agnoletto and Casarin have already taken the first steps along this sinister path. The first has said that the Black Bloc is "against" the GSF, possibly conspiring (!) with irresponsible or "deviant" sectors of the forces of order, and that it should not only be isolated, but also physically repelled (something that he does not call for in the case of the democratic State, to which he simply raises his hands in order to demonstrate the sense of "our contestation"!!!). The second spews out that "violent demonstrators" are "useful idiots" (and, as a proven professional in the field of idiocy, he should know!). The DS [Democratic Left], the organisers of the blockade inherited by Berlusconi, went even further. "Do not demonstrate". And then, perhaps because this was still too little: "Yes, demonstrate along the lines of the Pope’s indications concerning the humanisation of capitalism (!), but refer to public powers (from the Summit’s leaders to their guardians in arms) against whoever intends to break through the fence". The accusation of "objective collusion" between the GSF and the irreducibles has real sense insofar as the former proved to be unequal to the task of acting as a supplementary guard dog by absorbing and diverting the protest, and thus contributing directly to the repression of anything "exceeding" the pre-established limits.
Unless they want to go backwards and commit suicide, the mass of the participants in the "anti-global" movement must come to terms with their illusion that it is possible to establish a dialogue with the economic and political institutions of money and profit, and reject the whiningly servile line proposed from the top. They must provide a real response to the need for organisation felt by the demonstrators in Genoa who found themselves unarmed before the charges of the police – unarmed particularly in political terms because of their attitude of trust towards democratic institutions and their butchers.
Anything but upraised hands! The aspiration of founding a different world can only be achieved by countering the (physical and political) intimidation and strength of bourgeois power with the force and organisation of the exploited. The initial expression of the need to take sides and keep together must be transformed into a mobilisation that is no longer active only when there is an international Summit meetings, but every day at work, at school and in the local neighbourhood – everywhere there is the daily manifestation of one of the thousand faces of globalised oppression and the effects of a social system founded on competition and profit. The already demonstrated readines for mobilisation must be organised and directed towards one or other of the currently open individual struggles. One paradigm example is that of the engineering workers who – having been present in relatively substantial numbers, particularly the younger workers – can feel encouraged to move on to rejecting the dictates of globalisation and making themselves the backbone of a renewed general mobilisation against the precariousness and exploitation of wage labourers throughout the world (be they young or not so young, Italians or immigrants). A mobilisation that needs to be united with the resumption of the struggle of the exploited in other countries and the downtrodden peoples in the Southern world, beginning with the heroic resistance of the Palestinians.
Our enemies did not disappear when the Great (terrorists) fled to the mountains. They are ubiquitous and permanently present, which means that the "anti-globalisation" movement also be ready to struggle continuously and everywhere, extend its front to the workers and "common people" who are beginning to look at them with sympathy, organise itself in such a way as to create a defence against the systematic and scientifically organised violence of the bourgeois State, and radicalise its political line in accordance with the task it has evoked: the final struggle against imperialist capitalism, the struggle for a world different from this world of misery, a world that can be no other than that of communism.
Without any sense of ultimatum, we say that, unless the sentiment of non-violence that is so widespread among its supporters is oriented in this drection, the "anti-global" movement is destined to become a violent servant of the State against what will become growing numbers of "transgressors" within and beyond our national borders. In the final analysis, it will end up acting against itself and its raison d’être.
