The Genoa G8 summit is taking on all of the characteristics of its predecessors: the "anti-globalisation" movement will be faced by the serried ranks of the great capitalist powers (with the Italy of Berlusconi in the lead) and their increasing dependence on physical intimidation. They are already girding their loins and promise that anyone who disagrees with their order will be subject to police-like controls on land and sea or in the air, and we can expect a series of arrests and blackened eyes, if not more: there is a lesson to be learned from the fact that even the socal democratic police of Göteborg did not hesitate to open fire against the young demonstrators…
At the same time, they offer the movement a false dialogue in relation to a pre-defined and insoluble issue: how can the super-exploiters and super-exploited come together to give the globalisation of capital a human face? This is a "dialogue" that can only refer to certain limitations or deviations of the system, but never the system itself. In brief, a "dialogue" that is nothing more than an other form of political and idealistic intimidation aimed at convincing the "people of Seattle" that the members of the G8 are working in the right direction and should be left in peace to do so.
Together with class militants throughout the world, we refuse to accept this intimidation aimed at hindering our struggle and depriving it of meaning. We likewise reject, on principle, any demand by these war lords and leaders of institutionalised violence that we swear upon the cross of pacifism and non-violence, which would be nothing more than more than the supine acceptance of the dictatorship of profit.
We have done everything we can to ensure the broadest, strongest, most organised and militant mass participation at Genoa. And we intend to raise openly inside this struuggle and inside the "people of Seattle", the crucial questions concerning the strategy and tactics to follow in the far fron easy battle against global capital. Including the question that the G8 would like to prohibit us from even naming: the social form – communism – that is the alternative to capitalism, and the social force called upon to bring it – the entire universe of the exploited, the worldwide proletariat organised as a class.
If we do not want to be reduced to begging purely cosmetic retouches to the ugliness of market society, if we do not want to be derided by our enemies becasue we have nothing organic to oppose their so "well-structured" capitalism, we cannot avoid the fundamental questions underlying the anti-capitalist struggle.
Whether we like it or not, what is at stake in the skirmishes of today is, in the final analysis, nothing less than the maximum. The lords of the G8 are fully aware that they are facing the reaction of people who have sharpened all of their arms in readiness for the days of struggle in Genoa; it is time to be able to say the same about at least the most serious of their opponents – those that are not devoured by the impotent haste of here-and-now, and not content with simply a slight irritant to the G8 and capita-lism, but aspire to laying it upon its back once and for all.
This text is addressed to them.