Genoa is a turning point for the
movement against globalized capitalism. The tactics and overall
style of our very loose coalition of forces have reached their
limits after huge sucesses, and now if we really want to stop the
capitalist take-over and produce a social revolution, we must find a
new political relation to the inevitable presence of violence.
In London on June 18th, 1999, someone
taped up a poster of a target - a crossed-out target actually, a protest
against the recent violence of the Kosovo war - onto the display window
of a Mercedes dealership. Crossed-out or not, the target guided one of
the blows that shattered the window. Nearby, the glass portals of the
huge LIFFE building (London International Financial Futures and Options
Exchange) were also smashed - a direct attack on what is arguably a
nerve center of globalized finance capitalism.
From the start, the movement against corporate globalization has thrived
on the ambiguous relations between political-economic critique,
non-violent carnival, and urban guerrilla actions involving battles with
the cops and destruction of private property. The ability to bring these
things together at strategically targeted places and times has lent the
movement its startling, seemingly inexplicable strength and agency, its
force of attraction and its sense of a multivalent threat to the
dominant order. But that dynamic suddenly changed directions, in
Goteborg and above all in Genoa. Through the use of undercover agents,
provocation and the cynically good timing of their charges, the police
were able to turn the street-fighting and destruction of private
property into an excuse to attack the movement as a whole, in a
calculated attempt to destroy not only its agency on the ground, but
also its credibility in the public eye. In Genoa, at the height of what
is now clearly a mass movement - able to bring 200,000 people of all
kinds onto the streets - suddenly WE became the target, both of violence
and of a deliberate defamation campaign.
Of course the cops themselves are unfathomably stupid, in Genoa as they
were in Prague, and police acting without any political direction
carried out a bloody and totally unjustifiable raid on the headquarters
of the Genoa Social Forum/Indymedia on Saturday night after the demos
were over, savagely beating people up, smashing equipment and
confiscating computers from the legal and medical teams without proper
warrants - a blunder which will cost the Berlusconi government dearly.
Demonstrations are planned in at least 30 Italian cities today (June 24)
and the center-left opposition, which actually organized the G8 in Genoa
before the recent arrival of Berlusconi, is now calling for the
resignation of the Interior minister Scajola.
It is no accident that this is all coming to a head in Italy, where one
of the key members of the Genoa Social forum - the splinter political
party Rifondazione Communista - also withdrew its support from the
center-left coalition in the recent elections, denouncing the false
alternative offered by the pseudo-left but at the same time indirectly
helping Berlusconi into power. The idea is to break a useless consensus,
whereby the left sits in governments at the cost of ceasing to have a
left politics. The participation of working-class Rifondazione, but also
of elements of the center-left, of the religious drop-the-debt campaign
and of pacifist ecological and fair-trade networks like Reta Lilliput,
in an unpredictably violent anti-globalization demonstration has finally
placed the new forms of capitalist domination at the center of a
full-scale national debate - showing that the price of breaking the
ruling consensus is a small-scale civil war.
There is a before and an after Genoa. The death of Carlo Guiliani, an
essentially innocent young man caught up in a political firestorm, marks
this turning point. The value and the extreme danger of mass movements
in our intensely alienated cities leaps out into daylight, precisely in
the country where the strategy of leftist political violence was tried
and failed in the seventies. From this point forth everyone must be much
more clear about the kinds of coalitions, voluntary or not, that they
engage in. I want to be precise here. In Genoa, there was a clear target
for the destruction: banks and corporate headquarters. At least some of
the street fighters were acting politically, in their way. But dozens of
private cars also became burning barricades while many more were damaged,
and far too many small shops were also trashed (by police provocateurs
or not, we may never know for sure). All that looked very bad in the
media. And anyone honest has to admit that the generalized violence
originated not only from the agent-provocateurs and not only from the
consciously anticapitalist anarchists who have been part of the movement
from the start, but also from disaffected youth, apolitical gangs,
Basques and other nationalists, and even a few Nazi skins looking for a
good time. Relatively small groups are enough to draw whole crowds into
the clash, especially in a country like Italy where that's just what the
police are looking for. Can the violence be kept on target, when the
movement against capitalist globalization rises to the mass scale that
it must reach to become politically effective?
"According to authoritative American sources there were 5 thousand
violent demonstrators in the Black Bloc," said Interior minister
Scajola in parliament on July 23, dramatically upping the count from the
three to four hundred serious window-smashers that most people saw
during the demonstrations. The hard line from Bush, Blair and Berlusconi
is clear: criminalize the movement, paint over critique into terrorism
and aimless rioting. This is what Berlusconi finally means when he says
"fiction is better than reality." And it's a tactic that can
work, that has already worked in the past. The only answer is to
politicize the movement much further, to give it a powerfully dissenting
voice within a public debate that has been reduced since 1989 to
substantive consensus between left and right. That's the strategy that
the Genoa Social Forum has brought into play. I think it requires that
the violence of Genoa, Goteborg and the movement as a whole must not be
denounced or explained away, but recognized for what it is: the
harbinger of a far wider and more intense conflict to come, if the
exploitative and destructively alienating tendencies of capitalist
globalization are not reversed. But to make that claim, politically, in
the parliamentary and media arenas, also means backing it up with a more
deliberate and legible relation to the violence on the ground during the
demonstrations. And that in turn means walking a tightrope, between the
chaos of urban warfare in which we become the target, and the more
insidious slide back into a gentle consensus that just stretches a veil
over the deadly contradictions of globalized capitalism.
The more coherent and serious organizations know this very well, but
they can neither control nor do without the mass movement on which they
depend. The civil-society associations are getting scared. The cops, the
hard-line neoliberals and the apolitical gangs will clearly not change
their tactics. A lot depends on the people in between: the genuine
anarchists, the Tute Bianche style direct actionists, and the average
person in the demo who sees red and picks up a stone. It's time for
everyone, not to pull back from the movement - not after the vast
success of the Genoa demonstrations - but to think a lot more about what
their targets really are, and exactly how to reach them. The ambition to
block the summits is attaining its limits, and the tremendously
productive balance between critique, carnival and illegal action has
come to a point of extreme fragility. The political debates in Italy,
the social movements that are likely to ensue there this fall, and the
diffuse, worldwide protest against the unreachable WTO meeting in Qatar
this November may help set into motion a new language and a new strategy
- which we urgently need before the next inevitable mass protest on the
dangerous European streets.
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