Building unity and solidarity for the libertarian alternative

The neo-liberal myth of unstoppable development linked to the spread of the market has evaporated, leaving a painful trail of contracted markets, only apparently resolvable through a sharpening of competition and international social dumping.

Thus, while capitalism is re-designing its geography, it finds apparent unity in shifting the responsibility (thanks to globalization) for its financial crisis onto the real economies of individual States and entire continents.

Because capitalism has always taken advantage of crises in order to regenerate itself, and re-work the strength ratios of the classes to its advantage.

In particular, throughout the West the working class is being forced to pay the price of a crisis it did not create, to accept worsening living and working conditions, a transition period of economic and social instability that profoundly modifies our living conditions in the name of competition with geographic areas that are rapidly growing and have lower social costs.

It is an attack on the entire structure of society, on the rights and certainties won by workers over decades of struggles in periods of expansion, an attack on the very presence of the organized workers’ movement.

This attack has the dual objective of lowering costs — by draining considerable resources from direct, indirect and deferred wages, resources that are needed to finance the crisis — and of returning the working class to a state of further submission to the interests of companies and the market.

Workers are being forced into vicious competition with each other in order to keep their jobs, which are increasingly precarious and less remunerative. At the same time, sticks of all sorts are put between the spokes of any sort of collective response through the drastic reduction of the trade unions’ ability to act and the exclusion from bargaining processes of any union which does not toe the government/employer line.

This is being accompanied with substantial restrictions in democracy in all European countries, in part thanks to the reduced political role of States, that are becoming the mere enactors of supranational economic directives consisting of policies for the reduction of public expenditure — services, basically — in favour of financial and private-sector policies for balancing the books and managing the territory and its resources.

Here too, there is an attempt to convince the workers that acting in order to reduce the cost of public services and to reduce the numbers who have access to them, can result in savings for the individual, whereas in reality it results in collective impoverishment, with reductions in indirect wages and increases in taxes. Then there is also the consequent reduction in freedom for political participation, reduced to a system of personality cults or a way to obtain jobs that bring power.

On the social level, the impoverishment thus generated automatically feeds insecurity, which only serves to sharpen divisions, encouraging people to seek out individual responses in order to survive; it also leads to a degradation of the territory and social relations, with the exclusion of anyone that does not fit in with the logic of production and consumption.

But the unity and solidarity that are disappearing from the workplace, from the ranks of the trade unions, from the struggles in the neighbourhoods, from demonstrations and strikes, can be recuperated, reactivated and reintroduced into circulation, but only through slow, careful work by revolutionary activists in each situation that requires their presence, their political intelligence and their capacity to unite and not divide and to develop solidarity and not competition.

In this context, the role of Anarchist Communists, every day and everywhere we are present, is to continue to spread libertarian, self-managing and anti-hierarchical practices and relationships as a method, to gradually build alternative ideas and objectives to capitalism and States as our platform, and to build solidarity and shared projects, also on an international level.

Supporting those areas of the trade unions and those social struggles which are still able to stand up for themselves and demanding the redistribution of wealth instead of the socialization of losses means building a class alternative here and now.

Supporting the struggles to defend the rights that have already been acquired and widen their application to those currently excluded, fighting the various forms of criminalizing poverty that lie at the root of the increasing racism that is around us, defending our common goods by demanding ever more advanced united objectives means building an alternative here and now to the desertification and commercialization of the territory.

Building networks and coordinations which can federate those organizations and associations who fight for the same goal or who resist against the same danger (be it neo-fascism, racism, patriarchy, homophobia or pollution, privatization, imperialist wars, etc.), collective bodies that can develop shared political, cultural and economic objectives in order to promote the struggles on the ground that can lead to a more participatory and therefore more just society, without falling back into the trap of delegating our powers... all this means building the libertarian alternative.