Revolutionary Worker, No. 1113, August 5, 2001 posted at http://rwor.org
Youth from across Europe came into the streets of Genoa full of daring and determination to oppose and disrupt the G8 imperialist bloodsuckers. Amidst smoke and gas, against police clubs and guns, they stood up with rocks and molotov cocktails in hand.
In the street battles against thousands of Robo-cop riot police, Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old living in Genoa, was murdered in cold blood by the Italian national police--the carabinieri. What was Carlo’s crime? He joined up with other anti-globalization resisters who refuse to believe that one billion people living on a dollar a day is the "best of all possible worlds." Resisters who won’t accept a world where all the modern means of production--which offer an unprecedented potential for eliminating poverty and hunger--are perverted into the means for a lopsided accumulation of wealth and the insane destruction of human life and the environment. Resisters who want a different future than one of polluted seas, ruined ecosystems, deadly global warming and the wrenching human tragedies of infant mortality and child labor--a future of more sweatshops, shantytowns, and other expanding crimes of capitalism.
Carlo and the fighters of Genoa refused to accept the lies and bribes of the system about "free trade" and the wonders of the "free market"; they have seen that globalization under this system only expands the misery of billions for the benefit of a few rich and powerful. They put their lives on the line to denounce the horrors of this system and fight for a different future--like tens of thousands of other youth have done from Seattle to Quebec to Papua New Guinea to Gothenberg. He was martyred by a police bullet. He could have been any one of us.
The Revolutionary Worker condemns the cowardly murder of Carlo Guiliani by the Italian police, and we condemn the capitalist system that arms, trains, directs and unleashes these brutal enforcers. Carlo fell in a just and righteous cause, and his death won’t be forgotten or forgiven by the people. He and the other resisters of Genoa are connected by a thousand threads to the lives and deaths of fighters throughout the world--from the Turkish jails to the streets of the West Bank, from the courageous revolutionary fighters of Nepal and Peru to the masses battling structural adjustment in Bolivia, Mexico and India, from the landless peasants of Brazil to the street fighters against police murder in Cincinnati and Los Angeles. His death is another reason for revolution.
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In the new millennium every human exchange is being commercialized--to ensure that maximum profit is extracted. Scientific inventions--from computer technology to modern biology--are turned into new ways of extracting wealth, of delivering bombs and making weapons, of patenting life and putting it at the service of money. The capitalists not long ago hailed their system as triumphant and eternal, "the end of history." With the new wave of worldwide protest, as one author has said, we must be seeing "the end of the end of history"!
Now, wherever the corporate empire builders and heads of state go, they face a firestorm of opposition. WTO, IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Union, World Economic Forum, G8, Summit of the Americas--whatever forms the imperialists and capitalists take up as they plot and act to rob the people, they are confronted. They are hounded even in the heartland of the imperialist beast--and this is an excellent thing. Every time they set loose their brutal armies of cops against the protesters in the streets, they face fierce mass resistance--and turn more people against their system.
In the wake of the battles in Genoa, the murder of Carlo and the vicious beatings of broad ranks of protesters, there is intense debate in the anti-globalization movement. In many ways this is a profound moment of decision. Millions are asking deep questions. What kind of system are we up against? How do we fight it? What will it take to end the injustices?
Genoa makes clear the reality behind the mask of bourgeois democracy: It’s democracy for the rich and powerful, the capitalist class, which rules by armed dictatorship against the masses of people. In countries like Italy (or the U.S.), the bourgeoisie may disguise its dictatorship--but they quickly reveal themselves as bloody-jawed beasts when they feel it necessary to protect their interests. The system has demonstrated this lesson time and time again--from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the massacres in Vietnam, the starvation of millions in Iraq, and the assassinations of the Black Panthers in the U.S.
After the police shooting of Carlo Giuliani, some of the imperialist heads of state tried to sound a note of "concern." President Chirac of France, for example, said that "one hundred thousand people don’t get upset unless there is a problem in their hearts and minds." Such "concern" does not arise out of real feelings for the anti-globalization protesters and the issues they are raising. Those like Chirac are worried about the interests of their class--and competition with other imperialists, even while they collude against the people of the world.
These imperialists can’t fundamentally change the murderous nature of their globalization drive--because their whole system can only survive by exploiting human labor ever more ruthlessly, on a world scale, in order to expand profits. The people involved in the anti-globalization movement have many different views on what is the source of the problem and what is the solution. But their actions at Genoa and other imperialist summits objectively call out the fundamental crimes of this system--and that’s why the rulers are lashing out so viciously at the anti-globalization resisters.
The sharp and intensifying battles against capitalist globalization raise the question: how do we actually defeat the corporate and government forces of world imperialism who cause so much harm to humanity? We Marxist-Leninist-Maoists believe that those who hold this planet in their grasp will only be swept away by the most intense forms of struggle--by revolution.
Capitalism claims the only future is its globalization and its rule. But the planet is full of people who have no future under this system, whose only future lies in globalizing revolution. Their hope--our common hope--lies in wrenching the world from the grip of those who exploit the labor of others. It lies in making revolution--proletarian revolution--in every country, and taking the first historic steps toward a liberated global society, where the masses of people work in common for the common good of all. It is to this end that the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, and the participating parties and organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM) are dedicated.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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