In a time where the system is in full attack, with globalization being the spearhead, Genoa is reflecting an initiative by those revolting to escalate the conflict.

They are the ones who determined its level, because they didn’t surrender to the dilemmas the state had clearly raised after Gothenborg -to choose between compliance and neutralization- and because they didn’t accept the degenerative way of negotiating with the institutions, which was propagandized by the left of the regime.

Contrary to the -defeated- perception that claims totalitarian control has prevailed and presents the regime as the only catalyst in history, able to digest or even corrode whatever contests it, Genoa puts the debate on globalization in its real context: It’s not exclusively about a one-way drawn by those who rule, it’s about the continuous, ceaseless fight between them and those who refuse to subject to the consequences of their politics.

Thus, the polemics are not focused on the negotiation and the improvement of the terms in which the globalization of the markets and of social control will be completed; It is focused on the terms set by the ones who revolt: the globalization of freedom and solidarity, of a stateless and classless society.

Largely, the content of globalization is not lightened by the analyses written from its apologists, but from the barricades in Seattle and Prague, in Argentina and Bolivia, in Gothenborg and Genoa...

History hasn’t finished, as long as it is not identified in a deterministic manner with the volition of the bosses, but shaped from the social and class war against them.

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The attack launched by those in revolt against the guards of the global bosses and in a city colonized by the structures of capitalism and state authority, has set on fire every pretext of social consent to their projects. It smashed every virtual reality about democracy and justice the rulers are referring to, each time they need to legitimize their sanguinary substance. It destroyed the hollow structure of social pacification which they advertise in order to disguise their fascism and it revealed the rage existing against the fierce exploitation and oppression all over the world.

The state responded with showing its real face, the one of brutal force and repression.

In the barricades of Genoa they murdered Carlo Giuliani.

They murdered because they didn’t manage to impose their terms, that demand societies to play the role of the victim, of a prey abandoned to them. They killed in order to extort a retreat back to the “safe” death of submission.

It is in our knowledge that in the struggle for life and freedom, both life and freedom are jeopardized. The matter was never how to whitewash and cover the murderous nature of the State and Capital, but to struggle for their destruction. The matter was never how to remain harmless for a regime based on death.

Carlo Giuliani was murdered while fighting against those who commit murder every day, either by using the weapons of their militarized apparatus or through the conditions of starvation and pollution, imposed by the interests of profit. And the answer for the dead is not to abort the struggle in which they died, but to continue fighting. This is the only way to commemorate them.

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By escalating the struggle against globalization, Genoa also signifies the defeat of reformism; the failure of the conceptions that refer to some “human face” of capitalism and have aspirations to improve it. Reformism was defeated because it was dangling between a system which in fact does not negotiate anything and a radical tide which is not intending to be manipulated.

The organizations and political parties of the institutional left that formed the Genoa Social Forum and undertook the planning of the mobilizations, are accountable to the movement, because they attempted to bind it in agreements with the governmental and police authorities, which are now responsible for the murder of Giuliani, the tortures and the arrests of hundreds of demonstrators. Because they tried to promote inside the movement the division dictated by the state, between the “good” and the “evil” demonstrators, and because they tried to facilitate the isolation and repression of radical militants.

They are also accountable to the regime because they have tragically failed to do all that.

They proved that not only they have not any leadership in the movement, but hardly they represent even their own members, and thus they are far from being considered as reliable mediators. Besides, their only utility for the regime itself is to have them offering unilateral guarantees of compliance with the law, and their role is automatically undermined within conditions of social war.

In Genoa, the autonomous and uncontrollable potential of revolt has rendered them marginal. This is the reason why afterwards they resorted to the usual lies about agent-provocateurs, accusing the Black Bloc militants of being cops or fascists. This propaganda is due to three main reasons:

The first one is that after the events they had to become even more servile and helpful to the authorities, in order to retrieve their lost credit. The second one has to do with imposing a sort of discipline to their organizations’ members, because many of them had either participated in the events or had been influenced by them. And finally they did it in order to imply that militant actions are not in the capability of simple people who choose to fight, but attainable only for well-paid and trained robo-cops.

In the same direction there were also the views that condemned revolt for causing repression or even hosting repression. Of course, if we expand this viewpoint we should never do anything, concluding that finally social revolution is not for the benefit of society but for the benefit of the state (!).

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In fact, the international Black Bloc which was formed by Anarchists and Autonoms, has been significant and influential for reasons that are beyond its militancy and decisiveness.

Its most effective contribution was the fact that it managed to liquefy the prearranged bounds of the mobilizations, which had been set by the agreement between the GSF and the police. This way the Bloc sabotaged from the beginning manipulation and control and thus released a wider potential.

It is true that the Black Bloc has very easily subverted the program which claimed every move had to be limited within the context of “civil disobedience” and peaceful demonstration; a program with no reason to be respected, as it was neither compatible with the historicity of such mobilizations nor a result of some collective procedure. More on the contrary it was the product of substituting both. For this reason that program was found unacceptable not only by the anarchists but also by large numbers of demonstrators, who had no initiative in forming it and deserted it when the first chance occurred.

So it is not true that the Bloc alone is responsible for the extent of the events in Genoa, in which it participated along with thousands of others. Nevertheless, the Bloc was the part that has set off the general situation because it was the only conscious, collective and as much as possible organized move, prepared for revolt and willing to spread it.

This move would inevitably unfold in the ruins of the “official organizers’” program, because it was a move antagonistic and not supplemental to their rationale. It was chosen to subvert this program totally and not just demand a segregated conflict-zone inside its margins. And that was because the Bloc had no intention to cede and exhaust its fighting spirit to a hostile context, as long as the Bloc is not the military chapter of alien towards it politics. On the contrary it is one expression of a specific anti-state, anticapitalist, antinationalist and subversive perspective of struggle; likewise, this perspective is an important component in the movement against globalization and there was no reason to ignore its energetic influence.

In these terms, the Bloc took a position which was hostile towards the state repression and towards the “guidance” of the movement, but never did it take a position against the base of the movement, regardless of the methods each one chooses in order to resist. It was made clear that the “internal” confrontation is not between the “violent” and the “non-violent”, but between those who fight against the legal state violence and those who have selected to discuss with its perpetrators, accepting the terms this violence sets.

The primary characteristics of the Bloc, emerging from the composition of the people consisting it, their experiences of struggle and a collective space of discussion they created, concern three essential points:

- its intentions were clear and unnegotiable towards the summit, its watchdogs and the symbols of capital and state authority. It was a part determined to riot in the streets of a city which was in bondage by the army of the global bosses.

- its words were distinguishable from the expressions of the political parties and the NGOs, who question the modern power model in the name of restoring or establishing another one.

- its action was to interfere with the other parts of the demonstrations and not to be segregated (note: this concerns a political approach and not whether the bloc would march separately or not). The Bloc had chosen to act within the mobilizations and, to all intents, it was scattered inside them. The Bloc has promoted from the inside the passing from protest to revolt, it rendered its critique practical towards the limits and the hesitations of the broader movement, and has acted so as to somewhat these limits be surpassed.

At last, these characteristics were only elementary in relation to the desires of many comrades. They were also the result of confrontation between different estimations, about the way anarchists should intervene and their inter-action with the wider movement.

So, besides the outshining events, we should recognize that they were largely depended on improvisation, spontaneity and on the general experiential aptitude of anarchists to move inside situations of social disorder as if they were at home... On the other hand, we could expect a much better outcome, mainly concerning the future prospect of the struggle, if there was a more organized presence, including both an open space for autonomous political & social expression, and the operational part of our moves.

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Genoa has shown that a sweeping tide of global revolt is not suppressed by repression and not controlled by the regime and its shades. On the contrary, it is persistently growing along with the aggravation of exploitation and oppression, as long as the reasons who create it exist, rendering this tide an inevitable threat for domination.

If in Genoa the stake was whether the movement would tend to incorporation or radicalization, then the answer in the streets was pretty clear.

Now it’s up to those who carry an antiauthoritarian and subversive conception of the struggle to deepen their words, to broaden their social interference and develop situations and structures of self-organization, antagonistic to mediation and exempt of the fragmentary attitude of the antiauthoritarian milieus.

Facing an enemy which is being organized to criminalize and eradicate resistance, it’s up to the revolutionaries to create permanent conditions of communication, coordination and internationalist solidarity, so as to counter the escalation or repression and to promote the escalation of the struggle.

In a time where the New World Order is experiencing strikes from many different sides and arms itself with the intention to draw whole communities in the swirl of its insecurity, it’s up to us to continue demonstrating that it continues to be the real enemy. It is up to us to reverse the arguments which support that the oppressed people should join their bosses.

It is up to us to transfer the battle of Genoa to all levels, in all the places and moments that domination is operating with its political, economical, military and ideological weapons. Until the next time that there will be the presuppositions for such an international encounter, the struggle against globalization continues in all the fronts it is revealing itself: from the dictatorship of the markets and of social control, to its current militarized imposition through the “war against terrorism”...