The End of Illusions

A specter returns to roam through Europe. After endless years of a social peace composed of exploitation, alienation, misery and suffering, the rage of the oppressed returns at last to the streets to serve the death sentence to a social organization incompatible with humankind and the planet. On July 20 and 21, in Genoa, the contestation against the G8 has suddenly led to a practical critique of capitalism and the state for tens of thousands of demonstrators. The stubborn and generalized conflicts with the forces of order, the devastation and the burning of so many banks and of a few commissioner’s offices, the attack on the prison of Marassi, the looting of supermarkets, spontaneous explosions of conflict never soothed.

The determination with which the insurgents of Genoa confronted the police forces, going beyond the narrow limits of civil disobedience and democratic protest, unmasked in actions the directed illusions with which the political rackets have sought to disengage all possible radicality and autonomy. The claim that what was a moment of mass resistance was a degeneration provoked by a few “professionals” of disorder who came from who knows where and were infiltrated or actually directed by the cops seems ridiculous and disgusting. The rebellion of Genoa made the political maneuvers of all those who tried to use them appear ridiculous. This is why they compete with the police in slandering it and calling for repression.

As always, in the face of the radicalization of the conflict and the breaking of consensus, the ruling class and its state react in the only possible way: with violence. The murder of Carlo Giuliani, the butchery and torture perpetrated in Genoa are yet a further demonstration of how useless it is to take the trouble of demanding rights and democratic guarantees that the state calmly gets rid of as soon as they are no longer sufficient for guaranteeing order and disguising class exploitation. The game gets harsh... The democratic and reformist illusions collapse miserably. The insurgents of the will to live don’t mourn for them.

Capitalist society only knows how to produce misery, isolation, ecological disaster, epidemics, war, hunger, suffering.

But a new world is taking shape on the ashes of the economy.

Forward comrades!

The historical moment is serious; the social war paws the ground and the class enemy pursues. Let’s avoid the snares of hierarchy, bureaucratization and the specialization of roles, but without abandoning ourselves to the irrelevance of a concept of rebellion without strategy. Because the revolutionary perspective must know how to overcome the cage of spectacular rot imposed by power, in order to impose widespread conflict everywhere in daily life where reification smothers life. And more than ever before, this conflict needs to undertake voyages of autonomous organization and of the reappropriation of the historical awareness that has been denied to us, in a war without quarter against separation and authority.

For the abolition of classes and the state.
For libertarian communism.
Long live social revolution!