April 25 and May 1 are days to celebrate and celebrate? What liberation
can we celebrate when the situation we are experiencing screams at us
every day that there is war around the corner for everyone, that we must
rearm, that we must obey, prepare the survival kit for 72 hours and dig
a hole underground as they do in Poland or Switzerland with the
restoration of the old anti-atomic shelters already present in homes?
When horrendous massacres are taking place before our eyes in Palestine,
Sudan, Congo, Ukraine and elsewhere in general indifference?
What liberation can we ever remember when laws are passed specifically
designed to strike down dissent in any form it manifests itself, when
imprisonment and the criminalization of non-compliant behavior have now
become the only horizon of governments, when the mega-penitentiary in El
Salvador wanted by the emerging autocrat, Nayib Bukele, represents the
dream of many rulers and in Albania the umpteenth outrage is committed
with the Gjader concentration camp?
What May Day can we ever celebrate when the offensive against the world
of workers is at its peak, in this historical phase, with the attack on
working conditions, with murders and the intensification of
exploitation, the erosion of wages, the denial of the very possibility
of demonstrating?
The class war has been in full swing everywhere for years now, with the
declared objective of greater wealth for 'those above' at the expense of
'those below'. Today this war finds new life in the relaunch of
nationalism in the context of the inter-imperialist redesign of the
zones of influence. The crisis of that ill-fated neoliberal
globalization - so fought by the movements at the turn of the millennium
(let us remember Carlo Giuliani) - has given breath to the new national
protagonists that from the United States to China, Russia, India are
jostling to secure greater slices of economic power. The fear of a world
conflict, which is being spread liberally in this context, intends to
justify rearmament policies and force the popular classes to suffer
significant cuts in favor of armaments - in social services, health,
schools - and to put on their helmets. The European Union is not
extraneous to all this, indeed it is trying to recover lost ground to
make its voice heard in the imperialist chorus. We have already written
about this in a previous issue of UN, what can be added is that if a
country like Greece, which has suffered a terrifying operation of
plundering of its resources by the EU that has led to an indefinite
number of deaths due to health deficiencies and food deficits, gets to
plan an expenditure of 25 billion for the modernization of its armed
forces; if a country like Germany, playing with numbers in parliament,
gets to modify its constitution to be able to spend several hundred
billion to rearm itself (we are talking about a figure between 1000 and
1500 in the next ten years) there is little to be happy about.
Between butter and cannons, there are already those who have chosen. And
when you build cannons, sooner or later you have to use them.
The gigantic game of risk underway is further fueled by the war of
tariffs, whose only victims are and will be the middle classes and the
working classes struggling with price increases, relocation of
production, increase in poverty. But the life of those below is of no
interest to those above, however few and rich they may be. The
concentration and annihilation camp is the new paradigm of our
civilization, where the ruling classes are willing to do anything to
maintain their power. The images that reach us from the USA of men who,
after being rounded up and put in chains, are expelled, or those of
migrants forced into the limbo that are the Italian and Albanian CPRs,
are combined with those of the detention camps in Gaza and the West
Bank, of the Sudanese tent cities, where an increasingly desperate
humanity is looking for an increasingly impossible way out. Never before
has the power of industrial, technological, digital, spatial, robotic
civilization, with its thousand possibilities for development and for
solving the various problems inherent in the human condition, been so
distant and antagonistic to the needs, even if basic, of the
populations. The constant flaunting of the values of Western
civilization seeks to hide the underlying fact, which beyond the
formulas adopted, democratic or autocratic, is always the interest, that
is, the prevalence of the domination of the few over the many.
Laws and constitutions are always the product of the power relations in
play and thinking of using them for our liberation is a mere illusion,
especially now when everything is going against us. Reversing the
balance of power therefore becomes an imperative to get the ball back in
play.
There was a time not so long ago dominated by a bloody war (in Vietnam),
by the opposition of two nuclear blocs (USA and USSR) that managed their
own areas of influence (military coups managed by the USA in South
America, Europe and Asia as well as in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay,
Argentina, Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, and managed by the USSR in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland). At that time fascism was in power
in Spain and Portugal with Franco and Salazar. Apartheid dominated in
South Africa and the Belgian, Portuguese and French colonialists
massacred the populations fighting for independence in Algeria, Angola
and Congo. It took the moral and material revolt of the youth of the
whole world to question that model of oppression and exploitation, to
start a season that, even if only for a short time (the brief summer of
libertarianism?), managed to put a spoke in the wheels of oppression and
exploitation. Since then that revolt has been progressively transformed
into an almost customary phenomenon, but it is an instrumental narrative
whose true motivations lie in the fear that a new global movement,
starting from the bottom, can overturn the current balance of power. The
same happened with the armed resistance to fascism in the period of
1943-'45, whose narrative was stripped of the class contents that
characterized the revolutionary components to transform it into a
patriotic and national popular molasses that even post-fascist Melonians
can join.
As for May Day, the situation is somewhat similar: since its institution
in July 1889 as an international day of struggle to impose a reduction
in working hours, this date has represented the proletarian will to
emancipate and liberate from wage labor with strikes, conflicts,
demonstrations, marches, clashes with police and armies. Its progressive
legalization/transformation into a banal holiday, dedicated among other
things by our church to Saint Joseph the Worker, and celebrated - with a
few important exceptions and in a few places - by harmless marches of
union bureaucrats, has meant the cancellation in our proletarian memory
of an important example of proletarian internationalism and class
conflict. This is not the case in other parts of the world, such as
Turkey, where May Day demonstrations have always been hindered by the
henchmen of power.
If today we want to talk about April 25 and May Day we must do so in the
current context, to denounce and hinder the repressive and authoritarian
climate that surrounds every form of dissent, to make the impending war
scenario clear and evident, to build a mass opposition to all war
policies and industries with all that goes with it, to revitalize class
conflict and the redistribution of social wealth.
May these two days return to being synonymous with the uncompromising
internationalist struggle, against statist and oppressive
authoritarianism and exploitative capitalism, for social justice and
freedom!
Massimo Varengo
https://umanitanova.org/25-aprile-e-1-maggio-oggi-come-allora-per-la-rivoluzione-sociale/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
can we celebrate when the situation we are experiencing screams at us
every day that there is war around the corner for everyone, that we must
rearm, that we must obey, prepare the survival kit for 72 hours and dig
a hole underground as they do in Poland or Switzerland with the
restoration of the old anti-atomic shelters already present in homes?
When horrendous massacres are taking place before our eyes in Palestine,
Sudan, Congo, Ukraine and elsewhere in general indifference?
What liberation can we ever remember when laws are passed specifically
designed to strike down dissent in any form it manifests itself, when
imprisonment and the criminalization of non-compliant behavior have now
become the only horizon of governments, when the mega-penitentiary in El
Salvador wanted by the emerging autocrat, Nayib Bukele, represents the
dream of many rulers and in Albania the umpteenth outrage is committed
with the Gjader concentration camp?
What May Day can we ever celebrate when the offensive against the world
of workers is at its peak, in this historical phase, with the attack on
working conditions, with murders and the intensification of
exploitation, the erosion of wages, the denial of the very possibility
of demonstrating?
The class war has been in full swing everywhere for years now, with the
declared objective of greater wealth for 'those above' at the expense of
'those below'. Today this war finds new life in the relaunch of
nationalism in the context of the inter-imperialist redesign of the
zones of influence. The crisis of that ill-fated neoliberal
globalization - so fought by the movements at the turn of the millennium
(let us remember Carlo Giuliani) - has given breath to the new national
protagonists that from the United States to China, Russia, India are
jostling to secure greater slices of economic power. The fear of a world
conflict, which is being spread liberally in this context, intends to
justify rearmament policies and force the popular classes to suffer
significant cuts in favor of armaments - in social services, health,
schools - and to put on their helmets. The European Union is not
extraneous to all this, indeed it is trying to recover lost ground to
make its voice heard in the imperialist chorus. We have already written
about this in a previous issue of UN, what can be added is that if a
country like Greece, which has suffered a terrifying operation of
plundering of its resources by the EU that has led to an indefinite
number of deaths due to health deficiencies and food deficits, gets to
plan an expenditure of 25 billion for the modernization of its armed
forces; if a country like Germany, playing with numbers in parliament,
gets to modify its constitution to be able to spend several hundred
billion to rearm itself (we are talking about a figure between 1000 and
1500 in the next ten years) there is little to be happy about.
Between butter and cannons, there are already those who have chosen. And
when you build cannons, sooner or later you have to use them.
The gigantic game of risk underway is further fueled by the war of
tariffs, whose only victims are and will be the middle classes and the
working classes struggling with price increases, relocation of
production, increase in poverty. But the life of those below is of no
interest to those above, however few and rich they may be. The
concentration and annihilation camp is the new paradigm of our
civilization, where the ruling classes are willing to do anything to
maintain their power. The images that reach us from the USA of men who,
after being rounded up and put in chains, are expelled, or those of
migrants forced into the limbo that are the Italian and Albanian CPRs,
are combined with those of the detention camps in Gaza and the West
Bank, of the Sudanese tent cities, where an increasingly desperate
humanity is looking for an increasingly impossible way out. Never before
has the power of industrial, technological, digital, spatial, robotic
civilization, with its thousand possibilities for development and for
solving the various problems inherent in the human condition, been so
distant and antagonistic to the needs, even if basic, of the
populations. The constant flaunting of the values of Western
civilization seeks to hide the underlying fact, which beyond the
formulas adopted, democratic or autocratic, is always the interest, that
is, the prevalence of the domination of the few over the many.
Laws and constitutions are always the product of the power relations in
play and thinking of using them for our liberation is a mere illusion,
especially now when everything is going against us. Reversing the
balance of power therefore becomes an imperative to get the ball back in
play.
There was a time not so long ago dominated by a bloody war (in Vietnam),
by the opposition of two nuclear blocs (USA and USSR) that managed their
own areas of influence (military coups managed by the USA in South
America, Europe and Asia as well as in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay,
Argentina, Greece, Turkey, Indonesia, and managed by the USSR in
Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland). At that time fascism was in power
in Spain and Portugal with Franco and Salazar. Apartheid dominated in
South Africa and the Belgian, Portuguese and French colonialists
massacred the populations fighting for independence in Algeria, Angola
and Congo. It took the moral and material revolt of the youth of the
whole world to question that model of oppression and exploitation, to
start a season that, even if only for a short time (the brief summer of
libertarianism?), managed to put a spoke in the wheels of oppression and
exploitation. Since then that revolt has been progressively transformed
into an almost customary phenomenon, but it is an instrumental narrative
whose true motivations lie in the fear that a new global movement,
starting from the bottom, can overturn the current balance of power. The
same happened with the armed resistance to fascism in the period of
1943-'45, whose narrative was stripped of the class contents that
characterized the revolutionary components to transform it into a
patriotic and national popular molasses that even post-fascist Melonians
can join.
As for May Day, the situation is somewhat similar: since its institution
in July 1889 as an international day of struggle to impose a reduction
in working hours, this date has represented the proletarian will to
emancipate and liberate from wage labor with strikes, conflicts,
demonstrations, marches, clashes with police and armies. Its progressive
legalization/transformation into a banal holiday, dedicated among other
things by our church to Saint Joseph the Worker, and celebrated - with a
few important exceptions and in a few places - by harmless marches of
union bureaucrats, has meant the cancellation in our proletarian memory
of an important example of proletarian internationalism and class
conflict. This is not the case in other parts of the world, such as
Turkey, where May Day demonstrations have always been hindered by the
henchmen of power.
If today we want to talk about April 25 and May Day we must do so in the
current context, to denounce and hinder the repressive and authoritarian
climate that surrounds every form of dissent, to make the impending war
scenario clear and evident, to build a mass opposition to all war
policies and industries with all that goes with it, to revitalize class
conflict and the redistribution of social wealth.
May these two days return to being synonymous with the uncompromising
internationalist struggle, against statist and oppressive
authoritarianism and exploitative capitalism, for social justice and
freedom!
Massimo Varengo
https://umanitanova.org/25-aprile-e-1-maggio-oggi-come-allora-per-la-rivoluzione-sociale/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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