Kagarlitsky

The

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.

The

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.

The

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.

All

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.

To

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.

After

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.

I am

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.