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A Way Forward

Fran | 06.05.2010 14:55 | Globalisation | Social Struggles | Workers' Movements | South Coast

With recent events around the globe signalling yet another kick in the gonads for capitalism (ash clouds, angry greek youths and activists, including dead workers, new york bomb attempt and millions of people marching for mayday), I felt compelled to knock up a little article for the 'movements' apetite for conversation and debate about 'where the fuck is the revolution?'

A Way Forward (or, Kicking Capitalism While It’s Down), by Francesca

A little researching on the web’ and you will come across dozens upon dozens of stories, articles and reports showing that actions against capitalism, i.e., demonstrations, protests, blockades and violence – to name a few – have real, substantial and affecting economical consequences for the states and establishments/institutions that profit off the back of the global order.

Those economical consequences often run in to the millions and millions in costs and thoroughly piss of the elites that run the world. New laws and archaic, draconian measures (ID cards, protest restrictions and trumped up charges) are then pushed through to halt us (as in Copenhagen at the joke15 last year).

For example, according to research agencies in Europe (to be taken with a pinch of salt, of course), the violence in Greece will impact – as the mainstream press headlines tell us - on tourism and growth for the ‘failing’ state.

We know that IMF involvement will leave people in Greece still worse off under the IMF/EU bully-boy strategy of throwing shit at a shit storm and add to further social unrest and serve a slice of ‘open your eyes’ pie for the rest of the EU’s slaves - I mean, inhabitants.

Burning banks and petrol bombs on the front lines do have positive side-effects for those involved in revolutionary circles and activities, although the mainstream press would like to tell us differently – usually stating that violent protestors are different, ‘self-styled’, and hold no sway with mass opinion – and so we should be mounting more violent campaigns against the tentacles of the global order.

But it doesn’t have to be violence for violence sake, as I'm sure some trolls will argue, although I will say this = Greece is not where it is today from daily picnics and placard waving...Indeed, not a single week has passed since December 2008 when a bomb of some description – be it a mollie, a burning gas canister or a fully fledged IED – hasn’t gone off or been found and deactivated – I know, because I’ve researched the Greek news every day since Alex G. Was murdered.

More often than not, it’s not just the ‘self-styled anarchists’ that are causing all the tourist scaring incidents, as the right wing have been bombing and attacking as well, causing horrific injuries on union rep’s and even, if the rumours and evidence from previous fascist attacks are true, killing a fifteen year old boy who was killed when he kicked a bomb left by fascists in Athens just a few weeks ago.

What violence gives the revolutionaries of the world is clear: a tool to fight with.

At the same time it gives the elite what they think is a tool to beat the public opinion with.

Well I say: the states don’t know what is good for the ‘public’, only the ‘public’ do. And we are the fucking ‘public’! Remember the chants of Arse Treats!

Seriously, it also gives us a pain when three bank workers are killed by suffering after a fire in Athens and also when our comrades blow themselves up by accident or are killed by police or stabbed and shot by fascists – violence is everywhere in the globe, from all ‘sides’ against all ‘sides’ – yet we cannot allow media finger pointing and propaganda to shift the passions for change in to the passions for reform, especially when more of the proletariat die within the cogs of the system, the same system that would gladly see hundreds of people die in fires if it put death to the uprising in Greece.

Reform, as we know, will not do. Neither will surrender.

We will not forget those that die, whether as victims in a burning bank, an institution that has riddled the history of time with corruption and dealing in suffering, or on the front line in Exarchia or Bogota, London or Moscow, Mexico City or Pittsburgh.

Personally, I don’t know the real – factual - details of the recent deaths in the fires in Athens, so I’ll move on, having touched on the need to not allow the deaths to derail our feelings and actions for change, even though death at a protest is always horrendous, more often than not because 'life goes on'.


*

Hundreds of millions of dollars/pounds/euros are spent, literally every year, on fighting us, the rebels, the ones who know another world is possible, a world where people are living as beings free from harassment from the state and unhindered by nationhood, borders and authority. Millions more are pumped in to policing and spying operations to hurt our campaigns and take us to court and imprison us. Further millions are spent on keeping us in prison and keeping us at bay at protests, marches and other demo’s, where the elite often hide behind fortresses built for them by paramilitary police organisations around the globe.

Every county that has hosted the elite for a big meeting has literally spent millions in doing so, on security alone, with each city or town they descend on to hold summits being taken over military style, often with new weapons never before used on ‘citizens in peace time’ (quoted from Pittsburgh police during g20 last year, re. long range acoustic device, LRAD, – which is deafening and damages hearing irreparably).

Now we are at the billions of dollars mark. We cost the system billions and they hate us for it.

The Olympics in London 2012 are already costing hundreds of millions and a significant portion of it, in relation to what is spent, say, on the FA cup or Wimbledon, is literally for security alone (wombles.org 2010).

We see billions per year spent on protecting capitalism, policing the states that contribute the most to the global order, the G8, G12, G77, etc, and as a result we also suffer in health and culture and that costs us our lives and communities.
It is in these countries that the fight must get more violent, more confrontational and more ferocious. We have to chase the elitists down until one day it’s us and them, face to face. If they don’t move, they will die if necessary.

Returning to current issues, their bills will mount, their ‘austerity measures’ will continue, and eventually states will start to 'collapse', one by one - Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal, we are told, will go first.

Whether that is true I do not know, yet it seems uncanny that after sixteen months of unrest in Greece – with four general strikes in that time and countless mobilizations against the state and protest after protest, on top of assassinations and bombings of capitalist and US corporate targets – we now have the massive elite barony systems, the EU and the IMF (two of the worst offenders), dangling big cash on a stick to help ‘save’ the Greeks.
The stick is obviously double edged, luring Greek rulers, a couple of whom are already in the gang, in to the wider IMF plan and the workers and inhabitants of Greece well and truly in-bed-with-the-mob, so to speak.

Where have we heard the IMF line before?
Their beloved, stereotyped hand out and needy ‘third world’ perhaps? In Indonesia, or Africa or Thailand have we heard this shit from the IMF? And have we not also seen murdered students who dared to protest?
Yes, of course.
In South America have we not heard these same lines from the IMF? And have we not seen police shooting protesters dead because they opposed the measures?
Of course.

So our violence, which is rooted in our stress and suffering under the weight of the system, and now the suffering increases because more workers have yet died as we struggle to free all beings and nature from the grip of the global elites, is the most justifiable rage that has ever occurred since homo sapiens sapiens became the ‘dominant hunting species’, albeit by enslaving most other species in its wake, on this chaotic-and- beautiful-but-under-fire planet.

Naturally, this is my opinion, yet I know I am not alone in this and I don’t want people to believe that I am self-centred, as if my views are the best and no others matter = I care for the future and for our freedom and that is the truth.

I have been charged and trailed for my beliefs with NO JURY, under anti-terror laws that are nothing less than pre-emptive legal strikes against our younger comrades’ and their younger comrades’ future struggles (I was acquitted, although in the future our friends won’t be as lucky).

I don’t have to pretend or lie about what I want for my future. I am often labelled ‘extreme’. Well, that is appropriate, being that the planet and its ‘dominant hunting species’ is now in an extreme position of ‘fucked-upness’. I am therefore not the exception. I am the millions, not the few.

I also take in to account as many views and varied political and cultural beliefs and actions as I can as I write and think and act (I have children for fucks sake, a boy and a girl; I don’t want civil strife just for a joke!).

The truth remains: our violence must get bigger and grander, no, not grandiose and glorified, or apologetic or guided by any other motive than the struggle for freedom, but bigger as in mathematically more, more protests, more direct targeting of the tentacles of the global order, their banks, their police and armies and their buildings. Almost without needing to say it, we seek that the workers are not in at the time, literally, although for various obvious or unexplainable and sometimes unstoppable reasons, they die because of their shifts and rota’s: their wages have lead them, as they lead us, to their death, all of us going there in the end with global elitist capitalism as our cattle prod.

Unfortunately, most of us walk blindly towards it.

Fran

Comments

Hide the following 2 comments

no violence

06.05.2010 15:42


We cannot "win" through violence

Instead we will overcome through the fact that we believe in love and peace whilst they believe in hate and war.




pacifist


Struggle

06.05.2010 19:26

To pacifist

I am sure that your comment to a thoughtful and provoking article was genuine, however, it shows a lack of knowledge and understanding about how, historically, change has been achieved and how it will be achieved now and in the future.

The phrase 'when the last politician has been hung with the guts of the last capitalist' provides a focus for and an expression of justified anger. In reality, throughout history, a range of necessary actions have been taken that you would most probably consider to be violent.

When the Luddites smashed machinery and sent threatening letters to the bosses this was justified but look what happened when the violence of the state was used to crush this uprising of people defending the little they had.

During the late nineteenth century famine was used as a form of social control in India to protect the commercial interest of the British Empire and the upper classes who ran it (see 'Late Victorian Holocausts' by Mike Davis). I am sure that you can think of similar examples from the 20th and 21st centuries.

The reality is that states, and the military and corporate interests that sustain them, have used, and always will, use violence on an unimaginable scale. Capitalism may preach the free market but it relies upon the states to do its dirty work. Both capitalists and governments must be attacked in the most effective way where most progress is made to reduce, and eventually destroy their power. This also applies to the decision makers in governements and corporations.

We cannot wait for such individuals to undergo some revelation so that they start making decisions that help the oppressed and marginalised majority throughout the world. These individuals will not come to a realisation of the need to protect the global commons,

Struggle, that will at times be violent, is a necessity of mutual aid and co-operative evolution to create a better and sustainable world.

1649

1649