This is what democracy looks like! Prospects for the rising European movement
“There is talk of Europe’s future, and the need to harmonize banks, insurance companies, markets, businesses, police: consensus, consensus and more consensus. But in becoming a people, doesn’t Europe prepare us for new future in construction, perhaps a new ’68? “G. Deleuze
The victory of Blockupy Frankfurt
The phase of the crisis we are experiencing is characterized, in Europe, by a total redefinition of the forms of capitalist command. By now many, not only in the movements, have realized that what we are looking at the final divorce between capitalism and democracy, at the inability of capital to govern this stage without affecting social and political rights.
In recent years many movements have highlighted this situation, from the Spanish acampadas to the “occupy movement, from the Arab spring to the tragic outcome of the crisis in Greece, whose citizens where first denied the possibility to vote a referendum on austerity measures, to then move on to Merkel’s and other European leaders direct threat during the pre-electoral talks.
It is however necessary to take a further step, to assume that the chains of capitalist command have not only lost all of their ability to represent society, but they are becoming more centralized, rearranging in the shape of the Troika and of the letters of the ECB and in this manner assuming a notable consistency. If the control becomes more centralized, we must ask ourselves the question of how we can build a general opposition on a ground that is immediately European. This must not be misunderstood: metropolitan and territorial conflict and grassroots answers to the crisis remain essential, as does the opposition to the key legislative steps that are developing at the national level, starting from the infamous Fornero reform. But only a re-composition of social opposition at a European level can place us in a position to face the capitalistic attack in action. It thus seems clear to us that a first victory of the appointment of Blockupy Frankfurt has been to show the ability to identify the enemy, the counterparty, the ECB: the only European institutions that is actually exercising an executive power, that starting from Draghi’s and Trichet’s letters has created the present disaster.
The defense of the ECB, by massive deployment of polizei …
It is no coincidence that in Frankfurt we assisted one of the largest police preventive police operations in European history, handled without sensational measures such as the suspension of Schengen or the creation of a red zone as we have seen many times at work during the phase of the G8 protests . In Frankfurt, in fact, there has been no gathering to protest against an event, an exceptional step in redefining governance. The reason we went to Frankfurt, was to begin to confront the place appointed to host the concrete Government of the European Union, and because it is truly “technical” , that is to say managed by the technocracy of financial markets, to try and stop it’s work. Not much has been said about all this, but this goal has indeed been achieved: starting from the first day of blockupy all the offices of were closed, and all the working posts were moved to an emergency location.
The difficulties that Merkel is already facing have been pushed further towards crisis by Blockupy Frankfurt and the disproportionate police reaction has been widely denounced by the German public opinion.
In Frankfurt, the disproportionate deployment of police has done nothing but show all fear of the Cdu,in a phase in which, of course, from more prospects and not only by the movements, its ability to handle the debt crisis in unilateral terms is being seriously doubted.
As we said, in Germany the exaggerated deployment of police forces hit the headlines, and what about in Italy? With the exception of a good episode of the Servizio Pubblico, which started with a direct broadcast from Frankfurt, no program, newspaper, online paper or mainstream news program has shown anything of what happened in those days.
This is perhaps an obvious consideration, but the responsibility of the media and of the Repubblica party, the main hub which orders, evaluates and distributes information in our country is never stressed enough. Particularly disturbing and worthy of contempt was an editorial Scalfari released immediately after the march of the 30,000 who won the right to demonstrate in a militarized financial city, that praised Mario Draghi as the new great reformer, and invested the ECB of the central role of driving Europe’s political future. This, apart from highlighting the dramatic political bloc represented by the “liberal left”, also indicates the need to open a debate on new forms of information, on their centrality and the need for them to be extended, something we can learn from the Spanish movement.
The Europe we want
Faced with this disaster that Europe is expressing, Blockupy Frankfurt chose Europe as a battlefield. In the present moment this fact is not obvious: facing the crisis some may suggest a return to a national horizon, that sees the light from a just refusal of this European Union, or others who says that, as part of a global movement, a European re-composition is not sufficient and that immediately we should imagine a transnational form of organization.
From our point of view, we want to emphasize how an element of re-composition of the European social opposition is essential, not because Europe is the continent hit hardest by the crisis, but because it is the main point of application of global capital force in the this phase of the crisis, and the land of conquest for all its factions. The crisis is global and global is the development of oppositions to it, it is not a coincidence it is also investing U.S. and Canada, but today more than ever, the Italian movement must see Europe as a field of organization, even if its horizon looks out immediately to the whole world .
It is a Europe of differences, and it is no coincidence that the German Blockupy movement has focused on solidarity as a key word. In fact, while in southern Europe, in Greece, in Spain, in Italy, the neo-liberal attacks is concentrating its attacks pushing to further precariousness, lowering wages, taking private debt and privatization further, it is obvious how in Germany, the country whose outcome from the crisis was successfull, things are different. With German wages growing, there can be no alternative to an international solidarity aimed to acknowledge how Germany grows, because Greece collapses, and Italy and Spain are in trouble.
But if there is a common lead, if one may speak of a social composition that is immediately European, this must be searched for in our generation. Indeed, where the workers and the employees are affected are in southern Europe, while the German wages increases, our generation shares the same attack, even though perpetrated in a very different shapes. Of course, the young precarious people in Germany have a standard of living that is better than ours, with a possibility of access to income and welfare that we can only dream of in Southern Europe, and yet they share our same horizon of downgrading, that there is still unfolding, but that still addresses the future: our whole European generation will be characterized by a decline in life expectancy compared to the previous generations.
On the other hand, our generation, at least the students and intellectual or creative works, has actually grown in the mechanism of European integration. We are the ones who have been Erasmus students in Paris, the waiters in London, apprentices in Berlin. The cosmopolitan European cities live and feed on this young transnational composition, exploited and without security, which is at the center of the mechanisms of contemporary enhancement and production, and it is through this that a new field of organizational will unfold and deepen in Europe, starting from the meeting in Madrid, launched in Frankfurt for next September, and from an autumn of conflict to generalize and coordinate at European level.
To the so-called democracy of monetary union and its vertical vectors, the one we have seen defending itself with 13,000 agents and preventive measures in Frankfurt, we are ready to oppose a movement of millions of European citizens, who reject the blackmail of the debt and reclaim a new Union based on access to welfare, to income, and to the commons, starting from now. A new democracy characterized by insurgence and multitude against the dictatorship of global finance.
Source: email at blockupy mail list