The Road From Genoa By Boris 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 recognize
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 mobilized 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 defense.
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 marvelous 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 mobilized, 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 centralized 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 organized 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. ##
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