from the CoRIM

After Genoa:
Throw Oil on the Fire!

Revolutionary Worker #1114, August 12, 2001, posted at http://rwor.org

Seattle, Prague, Nice, Washington, Cancun, Quebec, Gothenburg, now Genoa…. Wherever and whenever the leaders of the major imperialist powers gather, they are confronted by increasingly organised and powerful opposition to their crimes. Whereas previously they had been accustomed to organising their "new world order" in luxurious obscurity, now their every move is hounded.

Each new encounter has been marked by increasingly fierce confrontation pitting the defenders of the existing order of inequality, mass poverty and oppression against youth determined to fight for a more just world. Increasingly, too, the imperialists have shown that their rule of exploitation and plunder ultimately relies on naked, brutal and deadly force. On 20 July in Genoa, the Italian police killed Carlo Giuliani with two bullets to the head, making him the first martyr of this movement in the West.

The outrageous inequities of the imperialist system, the shocking reality of a world more and more polarised between a small but extremely wealthy and powerful gang of international marauders on the one hand and the many hundreds of millions who live in conditions of extreme poverty, widespread disease and national subjugation on the other, is leading to an emerging new wave of revolutionary struggle. This is true not only in the oppressed countries, which are bearing the biggest burden of imperialist globalisation, but even in the capitalist heartlands themselves, such as Europe and the U.S. New armies of youth are arising there who hate what their ruling classes do throughout the world and are making common cause with the downtrodden of every country. International solidarity has been a hallmark of this movement from the beginning.

This new wave of struggle in the imperialists’ own citadels is seriously frightening the enemy. The heads of the most powerful states on earth have decided that in future they can only meet in deserted, remote locations, as far as possible from the masses they claim to represent. In an effort to defeat or derail the movement, the ruling class and their faithful followers are using their whole range of tactics, from outright murder to attempts to divide the movement between so-called "moderates" and "extremists". In Genoa this tactic failed when two hundred thousand came out onto the streets to continue the struggle and upheld the memory of Carlo Giuliani who had courageously battled the police the day before.

For thousands, this movement is their first test under fire. Debates rage over how to advance through every twist and turn of the movement, how to respond to both the bullets and the bullshit of the ruling class, how to unite the people while taking the struggle to a higher level. Vigorous discussion is going on over what kind of world political and economic system is possible without exploitation. All of this is the true university of struggle.

The Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), the embryonic centre of the world’s Maoist forces, hails the emergence and intensification of the movement against globalisation and salutes the internationalism that has marked these battles. This upsurge of the youth in the West is a direct product of the workings of world capitalism and the hypocrisy of its main political representatives. As such, this movement can and must become part of the only force that can ultimately destroy the beast itself: the world proletarian revolution. RIM exists in many countries all over the world, including in Peru and Nepal where our participants, the Communist Party of Peru and the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), are waging people’s war; in Italy and the United States, where the Communist Party (Maoist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA are working for revolution in these imperialist countries; and in Turkey, Iran, Bangladesh, India, Colombia and other countries where parties of our Movement are also working to turn the victims of "globalisation" into the gravediggers of imperialism. From Seattle to Genoa, RIM has been present in the "anti-globalisation" fight through its participating parties and organisations. We can and must do more to contribute to the development of these storms in the West as part of the global hurricane that is brewing.

This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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