ڪاگارلٽسڪي
هن
battle in Genoa was not only the key event in the summer of 2001, but also
marked a watershed for the anti-corporate movement. From the outset, the Big
Eight summit in Genoa was doomed to become nothing more than a pretext for
widespread protests. It was also clear in advance that the protests would be of
unprecedented size. With only a little exaggeration, it could be said that for
around a year all of Europe’s youth had been preparing for this summit. The
powerful of the world prepare for such summits in order once again to remind the
rest of us of who is the boss on the planet. The protesters set out to transform
the celebrations of the rich and powerful into a carnival of the disobedient.
Of
all the protests that have taken place so far, the one in Genoa was the most
international. Despite the massive participation by Italians, European radical
leftists succeeded in attracting to the events tens of thousands of people from
all corners of the continent. For the first time, the demonstrators included a
contingent from Russia. These were not isolated activists, of the kind who have
taken part in all the protests since the one in Prague, but an organized group
of forty people assembled by the Movement for a Workers Party. The Russian
public still has trouble getting used to reports of mass protest actions
occurring in the “prosperous” West. Consequently, the appearance of this
detachment within the ranks of the demonstrators was one of the main news items
in the Russian media. A press conference held by young radicals who had returned
from Genoa was attended by journalists for all the leading liberal publications,
which usually ignore such occasions. The ideas of the new anti-capitalist
movement are gradually penetrating Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the movement
itself is faced with a fundamental choice.
هن
death of eighteen-year-old Carlo Giuliani [check this – reports here said be was
23] was a watershed that marked the beginning of a quite new stage in the
conflict. The carnival is over. From now on everything is deadly serious. The
ruling elites have come to recognise that the movement can neither be divided
nor tamed, that the acts of protest will not cease of their own accord, and that
they cannot simply be put up with or ignored.
Consequently, the entire force of the repressive apparatus of the state has been
mobilised to attack those who are dissatisfied. Sean Healy wrote in Green Left
Weekly that the system is using “a classical counter-insurgency strategy”
against the movement (GLW 1 Aug. 2001). This strategy will not work all the
time, but in any case the situation has become qualitatively different. The time
for discussions has ended.
هن
conflict has grown more acute, and the movement has shown that its participants
can neither be intimidated, nor fooled with promises. The tactics employed by
the ruling groups have not yielded the results expected. The Big Eight did not
get what they hoped to obtain from going to the summit. All the attention was
fastened not on the heads of state, but on the street battles. For Bush, there
was some consolation in his joint declaration with Putin on the American plans
for anti-missile defence. This declaration was issued after the conclusion of
the official summit, and seemed like a desperate attempt on the part of the
“leading state figures” to come up with something newsworthy.
It
should be said that in doing their work the representatives of the press, or at
least the Italians among them, were conscientious to a fault. Since Prague,
whenever demonstrators have complained that the press was exaggerating the scale
of the violence, the Russian media have intoned confidently that “only losers
blame the press”. This formula has served as a marvellous alibi for the press,
providing a cover for all sorts of irresponsibility, lying, and ultimately,
corruption. Unfortunately, there is an element of truth in it. Whatever the
press might be, it feeds on real events. This time, world leaders were
complaining about the press. Tony Blair argued that the journalists had been so
preoccupied with the street battles that they had shown no interest in the plans
put forward at the Big Eight summit for struggling against poverty. But how can
anyone be interested in plans if they come down to the simple formula: leave
everything as in the past, and sooner or later the situation will improve? The
World Bank, for example, simply renamed its programs of neoliberal “structural
reforms” so that they became programs of “struggle against poverty”, even though
statistics show that these very programs are one of the reasons for the spread
of impoverishment.
سڀ
the same, the events in Genoa also showed the limited nature of the protest. The
point is not that in technical terms the protesters failed to stop the summit
from going ahead, unlike the situation in Prague or Seattle. What is really
important is something else: the battle in Genoa showed what can and cannot be
achieved through street protest.
In
Seattle and Prague the demonstrators were accused of not knowing what they
wanted. This is untrue; they wanted a socially responsible economy with its
basis not in a search for profits at any price, but in concern for the
well-being of people and of the planet. They were seeking to place under
democratic control decisions whose consequences we feel every day. They wanted
to restrict the power of the corporations. But while knowing perfectly well what
they wanted, they were far from always knowing how to go about getting it. At
the base of their protest there almost always lay the hope that the authorities
would come to their senses, or at least take fright, and would themselves change
their methods and policies. Alas, with the appearance of Bush in Washington,
Berlusconi in Rome, and Putin in Moscow it is becoming clear how naive this
approach is. Perhaps they can be frightened, but not by street marches, and not
by smashing the windows of McDonalds restaurants. In any case, they will never
come to their senses. The larger the movement, the more powerful the police
ranks that will be mobilised, and the greater the escalation of the violence.
Radical youth can take over the streets, but they cannot shake the power of the
authorities in this way. One of the most popular ideologues of the movement,
Walden Bello, has written that the events in Seattle and Prague have provoked a
“crisis of legitimacy” of the institutions of the world ruling class. This is
true, but the rule of the financial oligarchy and the transnational corporations
remains, and it will not be shaken by demonstrations. The participants in the
protest actions talk of replacing rule by a centralized corporate elite with an
economy of democratic participation. But this is impossible unless people
involve themselves in full-scale political struggle.
جي طرف
win democratic changes, what is needed is not just a struggle with the
authorities, but also a struggle for power. We reject the centralised
bureaucratic order of the modern state and corporations, but smashing this order
is impossible without a political struggle.
پوء
the demonstrations in Goteborg, one of the Swedish newspapers wrote that in
Europe, a whole generation
had grown up that did not believe in the possibility of parliamentarism. This is
absolutely correct. Against a background of triumphant cries about the victory
over communist totalitarianism, the degeneration of Western democracy during the
1990s was visible to the naked eye. Since all the leading parties were in
practice not even factions of the ruling class, but simply competing teams vying
for the right to implement the policies of the financial oligarchy, and since
power was held by a transnational bureaucratic elite that was not answerable
even to the bourgeois class as a whole, it was extremely hard to speak of
democracy in the normal sense of the word. This, however, indicates precisely
the need for a struggle to revive democratic institutions. Not in order to
reproduce the old culture of parliamentarism with all its defects, but in order
to go beyond its limits, to take an indispensable step toward democratic
participation. On this level, the Nader campaign in the US and the Socialist
Alliance in Britain have been important steps for the movement, despite all the
problems faced by these efforts and their limited character, especially in the
case of Nader. In Russia, the Movement for a Workers Party has the potential to
play an analogous role.
آئون آهيان
not calling for the struggle to be transferred from the streets to the field of
electoral rivalry. Such a move would be suicidal. What is needed is for the
struggle that was born on the streets to expand both in breadth and in depth.
Our main field of battle must not be in elections, but in the factories. After
Quebec, corporate chiefs openly acknowledged that while they were not especially
afraid of street protests, they were very concerned that the spirit of the
streets might penetrate the workplaces. We need to bring about precisely such a
development of events.
History has shown that workplace strikes are always more effective than street
demonstrations, and that street actions are frequently more effective than
motions moved in parliament – not to speak of the fact that it is impossible to
buy off and corrupt thousands of activists, while with parliamentarians this
happens quite often. A revolution begins, however, when the “streets” start to
resonate with the “factories”. In these circumstances leftists, even when acting
in the parliamentary arena, become spokespeople for the broader movement, since
the voice of the streets starts to ring out from the parliamentary rostrum.
Finally, another observation: since Genoa, no-one wants any longer to play host
to an international summit. The next one is to be in Canada, but most of that
country’s large cities have let it be known that they are not anxious to have
the honour bestowed on them. From now on, summits will take place in small towns
surrounded by barbed wire. Meanwhile, a wave of statements by Russian
journalists and politicians has swept across the television screens and
newspaper pages, urging that future gatherings of international elites should
take place in Russia. Such “outrages” as the one in Genoa would never happen in
Russia, bosses and “intellectuals” of all stripes proudly repeated on
television. North Korea would be good for summits, even better in fact, but it
was not respectable enough. Russia, though, would be just right. While it was
something in the fashion of a democracy, if need be the authorities would open
fire without hesitation. And unlike in Italy, there would not be any
investigations. If in Western Europe increasing use is being made of “Russian”
methods, in Russia all this is even more acceptable. What is allowable for
Jupiter is naturally permitted to an ox. In Russia, the idea of organised
protest is still considered exotic. No foreign agitators will be let in – the
border is under lock and key. And not only is solidarity with Africa or Latin
America out of the question for the Russian population, but recent years have
shown that people in Russia are not even in a fit state to defend their own
interests. Before a summit in Moscow, a small purge will be all that is needed
to provide a complete guarantee; after all, the Russian state has experience in
this field. The high-ranking guests will be delighted. Bush, after all, has
already lauded Putin for progress in the field of human rights. This praise
should be regarded as a sort of advance payment.
Elites are often punished for their self-assurance, and who knows whether this
will happen in the present case. The Russian leadership is now contrasting a
stable, controlled Russia to the chaotic West. The country’s leaders were doing
the same a hundred years ago. Not long before the first Russian revolution.