Learning from Genoa
THE NATURE OF Italy’s right-wing government under the
tycoon prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been exposed under the spotlight
of the world’s media. A new generation of Italians will have been shocked and
angered by the extent of police provocation and brutality that has been
revealed. They have seen what the Berlusconi-controlled media has tried to hide
– widespread police infiltration into a demonstration, their provocation of
violence, and brutality on a par with that of Latin American dictatorships. They
will have had a warning of how riddled the state forces still are with adherents
of the ideology of fascism.
But they will also have seen how a show of strength from
ordinary people on the streets can shake governments, nationally and
internationally. Big lessons are to be drawn from the experience.
All sides of the conflict have been forced to take stock and
consider major changes in their approach to future summits. Following on from
their cancellation of a meeting with business people in Barcelona, the World
Bank and IMF have decided to shorten their next meeting in Washington at the end
of September. The meeting of the WTO in November will probably go ahead, located
as it is in the almost inaccessible Qatar. (This is in spite of warnings by the
WTO president that it may prove impossible to come up with better results than
its last meeting in Seattle!) Next year’s G8 summit, it has already been
announced, will have to be scaled down. The host government of Canada, under
Jean Chrétien, has chosen a remote venue in the Rocky Mountains, hoping to
avoid a repeat of the clashes in Quebec earlier this year, let alone of the
Genoa debacle.
A row has also broken out over whether September’s UN food
conference should go ahead in Rome. In the wake of Genoa, Berlusconi tried to
offload responsibility for the violence onto his predecessors in the Olive Tree
government. They had chosen the unsuitable venue, drawn up all the security
arrangements and appointed those police chiefs he has subsequently scape-goated
for allowing things to get so out of control. Now he is coming under fire for
suggesting that the UN food conference should be moved out of Italy to somewhere
in Africa. The right say he is giving in to ‘hooligan-protesters’ and the
left say he is cutting across the right of protesters to make their voice heard.
This reflects the huge polarisation in Italian society that has emerged over the
handling of the G8 Summit and the protests against it.
International Riot Squad?
GOVERNMENTS IN EUROPE are also reviewing their policing
tactics for such events, floating the idea of some kind of international
anti-riot force. Trying to put German police onto the streets of Paris or French
riot police into Vienna could prove somewhat problematic but it is clear that
much consultation and collaboration is already going on between different
national police forces.
In the run-up to the week of protest in Genoa, when hundreds
of Greek, Spanish, German, Austrian and British demonstrators were turned back
at the Italian borders, activists in Germany were visited by police and warned
not to go to Italy. A train from London was banned by the French authorities
from going through France - a decision only reversed at the insistence of French
rail union members. It is also ironic, given the shooting dead of 23 year-old
Carlo Giuliani in Genoa, that Italian police were heard, before the summit,
criticising the Gothenburg forces for using live ammunition during the protests
in June this year!
Since Gothenburg, and even more so since Genoa, the
organisers of counter-summits and international marches against globalisation
have also put their own tactics under scrutiny. The debate has opened up
inevitable contradictions within a movement which has so far made a virtue of
diversity. When the battle gets heated, those not prepared to challenge the
system begin to get cold feet and denounce ‘anarchists’ and ‘hooligans’
for shipwrecking their project. Susan George, one of the leading thinkers of the
movement, talked in these terms after Gothenburg, though softened her position
somewhat after witnessing the police carnage in Genoa.
Naomi Klein, another prominent anti-globaliser, was not
present. "Hooligans have come along and hijacked the whole thing!",
she complained. A number of organisations withdrew from the Saturday protest,
including ‘Drop the Debt’, CAFOD (a Catholic aid agency) and also the
one-time Italian Communist Party, the Democratic Left (DS).
The writer and ‘anti-capitalist’, Walden Bello, chaired
the massive Sunday press conference at which a call was made for demonstrations
throughout Italy in protest at the police attacks of the previous days. But no
one there, apart from a member of the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI),
even representatives of Rifondazione Communista (PRC) or the unions, made a call
for general strike action to demand the resignation of all those responsible.
A clear call should have gone out not only for protests on
Tuesday, 24 July but for a general strike of at least 24 hours. There was no
excuse for what happened to Carlo Giuliani. He was shot by a young conscript who
panicked. Firstly, raw conscripts should not be put into those situations
and should have the right to refuse. Secondly, there should be no live
ammunition issued to state forces involved in ‘crowd control’. Ordinary
police personnel and conscripts should be allowed to have their own trade unions
and the right to refuse to be used against workers and youth on demonstrations.
The call should also be pursued for the removal of all
commanders, police provocateurs and infiltrators involved in the Genoa operation
along with the demand for the interior minister, Claudio Scajola, to resign. All
known fascists should be driven out of the police and army.
Coherent lead
ON THESE ISSUES as well on that of how to protect future
demonstrations of this nature, a movement without coherent leadership will
founder. Genuine representatives of the working class and committed fighters
against capitalism would link the international movements of protests with the
struggle against the bosses and their system at home and utilise the tested
methods of the class struggle. Only a handful of active trade unionists in Italy
made a call for a general strike on 20 July. A call by the big trade union
federations could have ensured the demonstrations were even bigger and more
militant.
They could have organised effective stewarding against the
police and agreed with all other groups involved in the demonstrations on a
policy for dealing with infiltration from outside and with the excesses of those
in the movement who see violence as an end in itself. An organising body which
truly reflects the anger against capitalism that exists in the hearts of young
people and workers worldwide, would direct that anger into a political struggle
to end the rule of capital. This is something that even bodies like the Social
Forums which come together in the course of the anti-capitalist movement are
incapable of doing.
Socialists have to draw all the conclusions of the events in
Genoa and build an effective movement of resistance to capitalism. As members of
the CWI have been constantly hammering home, another world is possible – as
all anti-globalisers say – but only on the basis of a struggle to replace
capitalism with socialism.
‘They are eight – we are six billion’ was the theme
expressed by the Genoa Social Forum – on their programmes, T-shirts, pens,
notepads and every other piece of promotional material they put out. This has to
be translated into class terms however, for the mass mobilisation of the working
class and other exploited strata against the class enemy, the ruling capitalist
minority.
Capitalism is sliding into another world economic crisis.
Hot on the heels of the anti-capitalist protests will come the movements of
workers in country after country. We have seen it in Argentina and we will see
it throughout Asia again as the crisis deepens. We will see it in Europe, the
United States, Latin America, Africa and Australia. Conclusions must be drawn
and they must be drawn quickly.
Now is the time to build new parties of the working class
and to strengthen the cadre forces of Marxist revolutionaries within them. The
forces now protecting the capitalist state can be torn apart and immobilised as
the class struggle gathers pace and a conscious appeal is made to the ranks to
come over to the side of the working and poor people. History has shown in the
course of revolutionary movements that this is entirely possible. History is on
our side and today’s developing opportunities must be seized to make a
socialist world a real and tangible prospect.
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