(Anarchist Bulletin, no 7, September 2000)
F
OR PRAGUEFor the development of an 'opponent awe' against the modern tyranny...
For 'being wherever it happens and wherever we are to make it happen'...
For the passage from protest to revolt...
For global revolution... For Anarchy...
While globalization -the new form of imperialism, as we were writing during the war in Yugoslavia- proceeds, armed with new ‘visions’ for looting the planet through hyper-national financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO), with new instruments and mechanisms of control and repression (computer science, genetics, electronic armies), with readjusted institutions and global strategies to impose order and criminalise resistance (international ‘antiterrorist’ legislations) and also with a modernized ideological arsenal -deriving from the, otherwise sanguinary, humanitarian and democratic western civilization- which will render the death operations that are carried out more digestible... while the states and the capital launch a global attack in political, military and economical terms, the matter of an “opponent awe”, of the counter-attack by an antagonist movement which will be fighting within the new global reality, is posed more urgently than ever.
And that is because along with the emertion of a new dominant ideology about ‘human rights’, ‘the civil society’ and ‘NGOs’, about ‘peace-keeping military missions’ and ‘humanitarian wars’, about societies of consuming prosperity’, ‘development, security and modernization’, along with all that there’s also a re-appearance, this time disguised as “resistance”, of the downgraded servants of the regime: nationalists, priests, professional unionists-workers’ patriarchs etc... On one hand they appear in order to negotiate their own entrance in the new era of globalized authority, on the other, in order that they enclave the original social resistance in their rusty chains, buying off this way a position in the game of domination, as supporters of national consensus and guarantors of lawfulness. They use slogans such as ‘national unity’ or ‘national economy’, burying the class antagonism and projecting symbols of some hyper-class fake community.
This reality more and more confirms the struggles that have the characteristic of rupture with all the forms of domination, that their identity derives from the radical negation of the system and that propel its total destruction, without illusions for negotiations with institutions that expand survival in a world empty of life and freedom. And even more visible becomes the desire for the growth of this antagonistic pole within the new global scenery, for communication of the different struggles and for their potential coordination.
The insurrectional moments that marked the mobilizations in Amsterdam, London, Seattle and Washington represent an expression of such a perspective, beyond the “good” and the “evil” (the defense of the old world or its modernization), by creating events of global resonance. It is the stigma of a new threat from below, contrary to defeatism and contrary to the multi-advertised omnipotence of the new order.
Conflicts that break out with every chance, for example in the places where hyper-national economical and political mechanisms are having their meetings. Conflicts, though, that are moments of the same social war that is carried out everyday in every corner of this planet and that includes all small or big actions of resistance against the State and the capital. It is about the social war that was expressed by the aggressive actions in the streets of Athens, the night of Clinton’s visit, by the combatant occupation of UNAM in Mexico City, by the burning state buildings in the capital of Peru, by the indigenous uprising that swept the country of Ecuador...
The same war that rages in modern metropolis between the excluded proletarians and those incorporated in the system, between youth and the police, in the struggles of the movements against the restructuration projects of the bosses in the fields of education and labor. The same war that has its captured militants, political prisoners in Greece, in Turkey, in Fortress-Europe, black revolutionaries and Indian prisoners in the US.
*
In front of the next meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in September 26-28, this time in Prague, in another field for the 'developed european and american allies’s' business, there are many initiatives organized, with purposes that start from protest and reach the creation of events and the obstruction of the meeting.
The anarchists, we have every reason to be there once more...
- Because it is a chance to meet with our comrades who will come from all around the world, a chance to promote continual conditions of communication of our struggles in a level of counter-information, solidarity and experiences’ exchange, and also a chance to directly create moments of social counter-attack.
- Because we’re interested in the development of a multiform antagonistic social movement, with anti-nationalist, anti-authoriatarian and anti-capitalist character, whose internationalization, now more than ever, is essential for its quality and its effectiveness against the globalization of the bosses as much as against those who “challenge” it through a patriotic position. Because we want a movement self-organized and subversive, and more than imagining it we’re interested in acting towards this direction.
- Because the conferences of the IMF and the WB, and generally the bosses’ ceremonies, cause the discontent or the rage of thousands of people. Because IMF and WB are instruments to promote globalization and thus responsible for its devastating consequences to people and nature, as those effects are expressed in the different places of the planet, either through economical development or war catastrophe, through the waves of immigrants and refuges and the desolation of proletarians, through the conditions of exploitation and oppression that are exercised everyday and everywhere.
- Because in the scratch crowd that is gathered for the “global days of action” we can detect a variety of groups and individuals who fight with different spear-heads -such as unemployment, racism, social discriminations, ecology etc- and who by being in the streets together, practically make a step towards surpassing compromisings, entrenchments and single-issue conceptions.
We can also spot a youth that is suffocating in the margins of life of the modern metropolis, social parts that the system criminalizes so that they will be surviving safe-guarded at the outskirts of the walls built around the corporate centers. A youth that through these mobilizations expresses militantly a new form of politicization, against their absorption or crush by the modern domination, its values and the roles that imposes. A “politicization” that is being born in the ruins of the previous season of the exhausted pacifist illusions and the consumed trade-unionist claims, and thus now more sweeping in defining its targets, more global in expression, more uncontrollable in action, more fluid in organizing and with less inhibitions towards being aggressive.
- Because it’s up to the people in revolt to sharpen social antagonism through international gatherings as well, to transform a temperament of dispute into a social explosion. It’s up to the fighters themselves to reveal the vainess of self-limitations and of appealing to the “sensitivities” of a fully armed regime, it’s up to them to show that resistance against the State and the capital not only includes all the dispensable means of struggle but it also discovers new ones.
- Because as we have an answer for capitalism, the same way we have an answer for those who mediate the interests of state security within the movements: political parties and public servant organizations who hustle to manipulate and incorporate everything alive that is socially created.
Because, as it was shown by the tactics of the anarchist groups in 19th of November in Athens, as well as by the tactics of the anarchist “black bloc” in 30th of November in Seattle, there’s no better way but the practice -and of course not the invocation- of a subversive plan, in order to attack the political and economical elite and together to make your presence distinguishable and catalytic within a mishmash of stalinists, nationalists or pacifist protesters.
Because, when decisive and dynamic minorities know how to detect their targets, their friends and their enemies, then, not only they don’t fear to move among different or even hostile forces, but also, their action may define the course of the events. To ridicule the plans of repression, to incite and liberate the most radical dispositions, to transform finally the presence of thousands of people in the streets into what it should be: a favorable factor for disturbing the order of domination.
- Because we are not at all willing to solve the problems of capitalism, beautifying it through “creative” proposals. We are not interested for plastic surgeries in the democratic mask of the state coalitions’ dictatorship. Because we don’t want to live more “humanly” inside their nightmarish world, but to live without them. Because in the environment of global resistance that is formed, we find our social and class allies to transform the arrogant conferences of the bosses into festivals of revolt.
- Because the capitalists, their institutions and their symbols are not invulnerable and because it’s nice when they become the targets of our rage.
Here and everywhere... WE WILL BURN YOUR FUCKING BANKS