The first phase of the trial against 25 comrades, who on the 19th, 20th and 21st July 2001 took part in the protests against the G8 in Genoa, is drawing to a close. By asking for an overall sentence of 225 years, the Italian state aims at formulating a historical and political judgement on those days, making some of us, scapegoats picked at random, pay the price of the terror those protests managed to strike into the powerful of the Earth. However, in the current political phase, the repressive institutions also aim at conveying a precise signal to the potential conflicting subjects, present and future, and to the movements which, through their opposition to the big public works, their fight against the precariousness of the employment and their defence and conquest of social spaces, have been gaining ground in the last few years.

In 2001 the G8, as the summit of oppression, war, environmental devastation, and racism, has catalyzed several different and heterogeneous struggles. The decisions taken at Palazzo Ducale during those days have affected the living conditions of all women and men, and have dictated the guidelines for the expropriation of the dignity, freedom, intelligence and labour of those who, anywhere in the world, have no options but to sell their own labour force, suffer the scarcity of the necessary livelihood, endure the effects of famines and financial speculations, and be the victims of wars, racial violence and class oppression.

Against this, hundreds of thousands of us, from every part of the world, invaded a militarized Genoa and brought there both revolt and social and political protagonism. We carried out thousands of different forms of protest and action, and we reached, with our message of rebellion and hope, the eyes and ears of millions of people. Everywhere in the world, these people understood and shared our cry and our slogans, recognized their own very rage in the clashes and the demonstrations, saw once more their point proven, that the refusal of the oppression of man on man, and of man on woman can cross every distance and every border. In the images of the protest, which were spread in every corner of the globe, a silent and threatening global political alliance took shape.

This is why the officers of the armed repression unleashed against us the most brutal violence and the vilest ferocity, thus making of Genoa the stage of an experience which has left its ugly mark on the memories of everyone. Women and men beaten and trampled in the streets by the police and the military corps — the carabinieri and the guardia di finanza –, mass arrests, chases and gunshots. While the streets were drenched with blood, in the barracks at Bolzaneto the fascist tortures performed by then men in uniform were only a prelude to the preordained massacre of the Diaz school.

In the following days, many preferred to distance themselves from and divide the movement, starting with the different sensitivities and fight practices, juxtaposing in an abstract way demands and behaviours which had had a common goal. Several political entities who had been demonstrating in the streets during those days are now engaged in the management of war choices, promulgate repressive and racist decrees, embrace employment politics which negatively affect the young and the precarious workers. We are those who, not only today but also then, were profoundly diffident of those parties and politicians who nursed the ambition of exploiting the movement and whose goals were clearly different from the urge of building up the antagonism surfacing in the great sieges to the international summits.

After those memorable and terrible days, almost all have done their best in order to ward off the recurrence of forms of true and widespread political juxtaposition: the mobilizations against the global wars held in the years 2000 have showed a clear lack of assertiveness, and in Italy only the notav movement has reopened — in the material practice of an effective, de facto antagonism — the space for a shared planning capable of interpreting the contemporary forms of political otherness and their new European dimension.

On the 17 th November we will again be in Genoa, in order to demand a stop of the judiciary persecution against our 25 comrades currently undergoing trial. We will not demonstrate in order to remember or remind, but to claim, with our heads high, our responsibility and awareness. We are those of the street-by-street fights, of the mass resistance to public officers, of the direct action, of the capillary insubordination. Barricades, fires, attacks to the concrete symbols of the capitalist modes of production and accumulation which were carried out in Genoa belong to a much greater history which, having started in Seattle and Prague, would reach Paris, Copenhagen and Rostock, in an unpredictable and spectral pattern which disappears and reappears, with variations and differences, like a forefinger pointing at the future. All our revolutionary projects are concentrated there, there do all the terrors of our enemies conspire.

We have shouted, acted and travelled well beyond Genoa. We have been in the liberation gestures of the peoples under attack in the age of the global war, in the transformations taking shape in Asia and Latin America, in the faraway struggles of the African Continent. Today, with its sentences, the Italian state is rushing to file something which can neither be filed nor stopped, nor warded off. The idea is that, with such penalties, the image of a movement which has devastated and sacked will be criminalized. But from the Susa Valley to Vicenza a resistance rises up which will always dare to retort: “Who devastates? Who sacks? Capitalism is the devastator!”. It is this resistance they would like to make us ashamed of, the deliberate and active resistance which makes the memory of Carlo Giuliani dear to our hearts, the resistance which, again and again, will always turn against his murderers, be they in double-breasted jackets or in uniform.

The hundreds of thousands who, in those days, have marched, protested, sung and dared to resist and fight back have transformed Genoa into a promise, into something which still has to be built: the opening of new spaces for the movement and for the urban social conflict in Europe and the world, for the end of an old and reactionary power and model of accumulation, for a chance for the new to be planned by everybody, women and men. To demonstrate in Genoa means to promise, in our turn, to revitalize both the mobilization and the criticism, and to remind those who chased us that the ghosts of the crises of the institutional forms of representation and the appearance of new paths of social opposition  cannot be killed.

Your violence did not stop us, and neither will your trials: you have not hurt us enough to prevent us — anywhere — from thinking, from deciding, from coming back.

 

DEMONSTRATION IN GENOA

17th NOVEMBER, 2007

H 15:00 RAILWAY STATION PIAZZA PRINCIPE

THE ANTAGONIST AREA (ITALY)

 

Translation: Athens Indymedia