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What type of struggle? Pacifist, non-violent or something else? This is another argument assailing the movement, and one that the mass media is doing everything it can to make it the discriminant factor upon which the movement is called to make a declaration. We have no difficulty in declaring our point of view.

We begin with the premise that none of us wants violence for its own sake. As Engels said: if it were possible to make the transition to communism peacefully on the basis of the free and willing withdrawal of the forces of capital, communists would be the first to be happy. But this raises the real question: capitalism doe not recognise "democratic" rules and even less the concept of non-violence, which is constitutionally extraneous to it; on the contrary, it exclusively recognises its own power, which it has no intention to renounce because "public opinion" does not approve. Its motto is "power against power" (given that its social and political philosophy is that of homo homini lupus), and increasingly acute social antagonisms it is itself responsible for leads to the increasingly paroxysmal use of such power.

It is enough to remember the world bloodshed of the twentieth century (the fruit of inter-imperialist battle for the division of the world market -by means of war, naturally), the terrible sequence of "inter-ethnic" or "local" wars artfully kindled by the usurous states dominating the Earth, the human and environmental devastation inflicted on rebel peoples using every kind of arm (in Libya, Korea, the Congo, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Palestine…), the frightening stockpiling of atomic weapons over the last decades (andtheir cynical use against the Japanese people) and the latest murderous discovery of depleted uranium, to realise how dis-gusting it is to hear the G8 assassins pay lip service to their role as the international defenders of "peace" and "non-violence", and their "right" to protect themselves from the "blindly violent aspirations" of any objectors.

The only "international right" that capitalism knows is that of the "free circulation" of the capital and profits guaranteed by its gunboats: the international right of plunder. This is the right that it is now exercising in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere, and which it is preparing to exercise against the "competition" of China and Russia, and against any other part of the world that does not bow down before the dominion of its Western power centres. Globalised capitalism has not only spread tears and famine throughout the world, but also blood -although some of the members of even our movement seem not to have noticed or unwilling to respond (perhaps because the affected countries are not "truly democratic" and therefore do not have the "right" to respond, and so the destined massacre of millions of exploited people "does not concern us"…).

But if global capitalism and its state and super-state machinery (with America in the lead) has in its hands the most organised system of violence that has ever been constructed by an exploiting class for use against the oppressed, and if it does not have the minimum scruple in using it when it serves, how can we even begin to imagine how to stop it? Communists have the single response of opposing force with force and violence with violence by means of the socialist revolution of the exploited against capital.

This does not mean that we, here and now, propose the principle and method of individual violent actions against this or that "symbol" of power. We are not interested in attacking symbols (although we refuse to condemn them when they occur); we are interested in eradicating what feeds them. We are not here to make symbolic demonstrations of strength but to unite and broaden our front, clarify its aims and build up our forces independently of and in opposition to those of capital. We are not seeking a fight in a situation that would be unfavourable for us: we do not intend to "bear witness" to our existence, but to reinforce our class army. Let us be clear: we have no intention of being intimidated by our adversary or drawing back in the face of it in the case that it advances its apparatus of repression, but always in an increasingly organised and collective manner, from the skirmishes of today to the decisive battles of tomorrow.

Our primary current aim is to reinforce our front. As Marx said: the real result of class struggles in the absence of any immediate bid for power is to increase the unity and compactness of the class front as the best precaution for the future awaiting us.

This naturally has nothing to do with "pacifism", nor does it mean that the movement should reject "symbolic demonstrations" as being extraneous to its own presumed "non-violent pacifism". It is one thing to set oneself a strategy and tactics for the struggle, but something else to deny the very principles on which it should be created. As long ago as Seattle, some of the participants indignantly dissociated themselves from the individual acts of "violence" of one sector of the movement (a small or ultra-small minority) in the name of "principled" non-violence. But what non-violence? The non-violence of the capital we find against us? Or that of a movement that intends to use no other arms than the "manifestation of its free opinions" from here to eternity? We communists unreservedly share what Mumia Abu Jamal wrote in this regard:

"Much can be said about the ill-treated anarchists who shook the centre of the city by attacking the Capital’s splendid buildings. The press [and also a part of the movement -note] seized the opportunity to call them "delinquents" or "hooligans" involved in "violence". But what is obviously missing from the press dispatches is that those youngsters were attacking property and not other people. At the same time, the State used its police to attack people, who were kicked, gassed, beaten and imprisoned. I wonder which is the more serious form of "violence"? But, in the world projected by the corporate media, State violence is not real violence. Therefore, only the individuals who are not integrated in the State can be really violent [back translated from an Italian translation]".

The same thing could be written about what happened in Göteborg. The violence that we reject on principle is that of capital and capitalist states. All that we can say or wish in relation to the violence of "individuals" who set themselves against it is that this should be separated from the "individuality" of its exaggeratedly "individual" manifestation and integrated in a collective social strategy and force that will express a greater and more decisive liberatory violence than any single "individual gesture".

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