Ma noi ci saremo
Ma noi ci saremo
[but we’ll be here]
“The International Chamber of Commerce recognizes how societies are changing, with citizens speaking up and expressing their deep-felt concerns. However, in some respects, the emergence of activist pressure groups risks weakening the effectiveness of public rules, legitimate institutions and democratic processes. These activist organizations should place emphasis on legitimizing themselves, improving their internal democracy, transparency and accountability. They should assume full responsibility for the consequences of their activities. Where this does not take place, rules establishing their rights and responsibilities should be considered. Business is accustomed to working with trade unions, consumer organizations and other representative groups that are responsible, credible, transparent and accountable and consequently command respect. What we question is the proliferation of activist groups that do not accept these self-disciplinary criteria”.
-From The Geneva Business Declaration, adopted in September 1998 by the leaders of 450 multinationals as part of the Geneva Business Dialogue.
Those that are against the G8 aren’t fighting against authorities democratically elected in their countries; they are fighting against the western world, the philosophy of the free world, the spirit of enterprise.
-S. Berlusconi, Le Monde, Sunday – Monday 22-23 July 2001.
Theses (like a nursery rhyme)
1. The political subject of demokracy is the population: a conglomerate of ethically heterogeneous bodies to be managed and administered.
2. The citizen, the atom comprising this population, is neither the honest person nor the criminal, neither poor nor rich, and has no class, no sex, no odor — but the citizen does have rights (among which the right to vote, which ensures the continuation of the system that produced him), a variable purchasing power, and desires.
3. Demokracy listens to its citizens’ desires because it cannot do otherwise. From the moment that it manages them rather than commanding them, it needs consensus like fish need water. And the citizens cannot do without it either, because they themselves are demokracy’s primary product. Aside from the few rare expressions of violent antagonism, which are permanently being beaten back, PEOPLE just fine-tune that consensus so as to bring about the convergence of all singular desires at a few precise points.
4. As long as capitalism survives, this convergence is to a large extent ensured by consumption and everything that universally preserves it (work, police, family, money-mediated relations, etc.).
5. When the citizen begins to “exist,” to desire outside the advertising gimmicks, to throw the inevitabilities of his everyday life out of order, to look too insistently or with too charity-unrelated a sympathy at the non-citizens, he becomes a “potentially dangerous subject,” someone who’s almost not a citizen anymore, someone who’d be better off just watching TV. And it’s not irrelevant that some of us are now starting to see the whole “social contract” story as little more than a fable told to put the good little children of demokracies to sleep. Starting to understand that our “rights” are just threats to keep us from leaving our pitiful orthopedic conformity. Starting to see that we are alone and under surveillance, and that our “freedoms” are little more than the toys that PEOPLE let us play with to distract us while the managers busily optimize, count out, and reallocate the number of the dead and the sick over the coming years.
6. The good citizen does not exist, and the bad citizen is a potential criminal. The only possible horizon for the “citizen” ideology is thus that of surveillance, and the only guarantee of its perpetuation is the prison system. Hence the equation: citizen = cop.
7. In the final analysis, cops hold the monopoly on legitimate violence. And in exchange for that they tolerate the humiliation of being reduced to obedience, because by obeying they can beat and oppress others, in brief: they can uncork their bottled-up resentment, the resentment of slaves. Citizens are those who delegate their own violence to cops, but in return get only multiple slaveries (the rights to consume, work, have fun, and hang around under the watchful eye of punitive law), intended to hold them in their proper place and kindly make them stay in their rooms while “others” act arbitrarily and in total impunity. In other words, a citizen is a cop in plain clothes, an unarmed cop of the cybernetic Empire, who thinks he has rights but is just fooling himself.
8. The “others” are those who aren’t bothered about the bullshit PEOPLE call the “Law,” who easily get around it with a slight, annoyed gesture whenever it gets in their way, and change it at their leisure as needed for their profit and hegemony — which, moreover, is the only consistent position within a capitalist society. The most profitable cooperation is thus, of course, that of the mafias, the Statesmen, the capitalists, and the police; it’s also the most natural. Meanwhile, PEOPLE will continue paying to have social-demokratic and pacifist lullabies sung to the citizens so that they won’t cry too much between one nightmare and the next. And that will continue on until the violence knocks at their own door, until someone sets fire to their bank, their car, their gas stations, their advertising-programmed dreams that never come true. And then the lullaby will change: “Don’t worry, it’s just the police infiltrating the demonstrators, or vice-versa; they’re just nuts, it’s whatever, it doesn’t mean anything. But geez, it sure is horrible, look at all that blood; it ain’t tomato sauce this time — not too pretty, is it? Well look out, because we’ll do the same to you if you don’t go to sleep, see? See? You ain’t seen shit; go on, go beddy-bye!”
Affinity and election. Demokracy is based on the idea that politics is the realm of logos, hence the proliferation of debates and the fetishism of discussion as a way of resolving conflicts – in an era when no one knows how to talk or listen anymore. Demokracy thus ignores the fact that the obvious assumptions about politics are never of a logical nature, but always of an ethical nature. The essence of all community is not discursive but elective. The continued existence of “elections” within demokracy is merely an expedient decoy: elections can only be a reciprocal movement, and certainly not the movement of choice in favor of those who are offering themselves for election. In this sense, electoral practices are not elective practices, because whoever’s elected never chooses his electors, has good reason to scorn them, and only listens to them during his campaign in order to better shut them up when he’s in a position to manage them.
Everyone’s alone together. What do a Berlin housewife, a Bologne electrician, the Helsinki punks, the Seattle schoolkids, and the Mestre autonomists have in common? Obviously absolutely nothing except the physical presence of all of them at the Prague counter-summit. They made themselves known over the ‘net; they met up thanks to the “network” based on their having a common enemy (the IMF, the World Bank, the present management of the global economy, etc.). For one day they protested in separate processions against the parodic epiphany of the exploiter elite, and critiqued the global commodity from the other side of the world, only to go back home the next day and submit to the local commodity. They physically encountered one another for one day, and at best they’ll write emails to each other now for the rest of their lives. Hence each of them will remain tightly, tranquilly wrapped in the chains of power, like fish on hooks, and will protest against a global injustice that they know nothing about except for whatever they get from reading newspaper reports. No one of course will get any ideas about protesting the corner newspaper salesman or the new leftist mayor; tomorrow they might be sitting next to us on an occupied train, speeding towards a new destination of global contestation.
As for the hopeless everyday fabricated by the big decisions made at these summits, no one talks about it. Politics is something they make, and something that we either put up with or put up resistance to. Wrong: in order for them to make their politics, they have to have already walked straight over our dead bodies. It’s absurd to protest that it hurts when they tread on us; we have to stand up, here and now, because at every moment they are organizing our deprivation of a future. That’s what the “uncontrolled” ones say.
Only bodies can be governed. The management of bodies – of their health and their illness, their mobility and their sedentariness, their inventorying or their clandestinity – is the sole aim of the “global government.”
Money, work, transportation, healthcare, housing, ID papers – these are just apparatuses, devices used by governments to control bodies.
Culture, spectacle, repression – these are but supplementary means of controlling the “souls” in bodies. Since there is such thing as soulless bodies but no such thing as bodiless souls, cultural conditioning in the final analysis targets bodies as well. It’s because of my “killability” and nothing else that I am conditionable. When power shows its real face, it doesn’t take aim at my soul; it strikes my body, because it is as a body that I am exposed, that I can be murdered or imprisoned. The rights of man are the parade, now a planetary one, intended to make us forget this obvious fact; to make us forget that the prohibition on violence is a contingent cultural factor necessary for the perpetuation of a particular regime of power and oppression that suits certain people and not others.
The monopoly on violence. To persuade the citizens that to defend themselves on their own is inhuman and bestial, that violence is an abomination to be permanently repressed until you become disgusted with yourself if needed – since “violence,” after all, is as much a part of human life as oxygen – has always been the dream of governments. Demokracy has quite nearly realized that dream, while still occasionally reserving for itself the absurd privilege of calling men to kill and get killed in its wars.
Mobilization, not movement. In Prague, in order to make the merely physical convergence of incompatible forms-of-life possible, it was necessary to oil up not a war machine but an organizational machine. Though some of them were “armed” (with wooden sticks and plastic shields, or more simply with gas masks so as not to suffocate in the middle of all the tear gas), the majority of people in Seattle as well as in Prague said they were inspired by the romantic dream of innocent masses, unarmed and in the right, up against a few corrupt power mongers armed to the teeth. The reappropriation of violence that intervened all the same and which made the front page of all the newspapers was reported with astonishment, and unanimously condemned. That’s called dissociation, and it’s the primary toxic effect of citizen ideology. It proves quite quickly to be lethal.
In the wolf’s mouth. But if people refuse violence, why gather precisely where the apparatus of security proclaims itself to be unassailable and only “forcing” it is possible?
Prague was a “success,” we are told, because the iron jaws of power only clamped shut the second day, and not the first. Anyone who was impudent or careless enough to go for a stroll in the city with a non-conforming look about them the day after the protest had to pay a high price for taking it all so lightly.
So, why only gather under the most blinding floodlights of the spectacle, where the slightest real gesture will immediately be reproduced and amplified in a world-wide broadcast, until it becomes unreal and un-reproducible for anyone that wasn’t there at the event? Isn’t that separation of the space-time of the struggle from the space-time of life part of what we’re fighting against?
Let’s be clear: we are not against the riotous joy of Prague or Seattle. We are just against their uniqueness as epic sagas, which prevents us from repeating them everyday at home.
Where you’re supposed to be. An aspect of repression that’s rarely questioned and nevertheless is at the basis of all authoritarian logic is the idea that everyone has his place. Knowing how to stay in your place, both in space and in the hierarchies, is what guarantees you your security; and whoever isn’t in his place has certainly spent time looking for it… It’s taken for granted when you learn about society in school: the poor and exploited are supposed to liberate themselves, and the rich are supposed to guard and keep their privileges for themselves. And thus left out in all that is the dynamic character of the relations of domination, which makes the majority of the exploited fail to rebel and instead only work to make their lives similar to those of their bosses, carefully leading an existence that’s just as counter-revolutionary as that of their bosses smoking their cigars in their leather armchairs. To adapt to the place of a boss or a slave now reinforces domination in the exact same way, since today being an employee or an employer shows an identical refusal of conflict in all its forms. No place in this society is revolutionary in itself anymore. The common person occupies the place of the placeless, and it’s the only one anyone can revolt from.
That people physically move about serves as a powerful excuse for the police; if people get arrested they obviously must not have been in their proper place. But in such conditions, why not revolt right there in your place? Why, instead of protesting that we are treated like foreigners everywhere – which is precisely the Bloom condition – why don’t we protest that our country and our neighborhoods are foreign to us and ours, that “our place” is not really our place, since we don’t want such places, allocated to us so impersonally as they are? For only then will the chorus “our homeland is the whole world” will have some meaning again.
Barnum. After a kid who’d thrown some stones at the cops got shot twice in the back at Goteborg, Tony Blair said that we shouldn’t let ourselves be swayed by the “traveling anarchist circus.” And he was right, in a way; there’s getting to be so much despair and unjust cruelty at the circus that soon no one will want to go buy tickets anymore.
The image of the kid stumbling away from the goggle-eyed cop that had just fired two shots into his kidney and liver, a kind of cinematic freeze-frame of the riot, has all the qualities of some B-movie. We’re hardly all emotional about it, but we can surely believe it happened. We certainly wouldn’t like to die like that, in front of a camera under the dumbfounded spectators’ parasitic gaze. The end of heroes here is no longer just a phrase; it’s a definite feeling. The commodity of revolt sells well on TV and in tabloid form, as long as it’s well choreographed. You just gotta organize it right.
And the anti-globalization folks’ whole production, Indymedia and whatnot? There’s not even any rhythm to their action scenes.
Anyway, when the cops fire, power grabs the remote control.
And what if the next summit were in Qatar?
GAME OVER.
Dangerous Hooligans. Time goes by, and counter-summits change pace and rhythm. We got back from Genoa; the victim of Goteborg can walk again — he’s lost ten kilos, but Carlo Giuliani will never move again. He lost his life – the police took it, as if they were taking suspect material in one of their search and seizure raids.
The most obvious thing that came to light in Genoa was neither the uncontrollable nature of the imperial police (the Italian Minister of the Interior declared the day after the massacre which took place the night of July 21st that he wasn’t aware of the operation), nor the fact that the confrontation has gone to the next level (it’s become murderous), but the definitive decline of the good old social-democratic joke. While the media the world over took pains to define as “criminal” these actions, which involved the destruction of automobiles, banks, commodities – in brief, things – and the appropriation of violence by a phantomlike “Black Bloc,” the Berlusconi government was innocently starting to crack a mischievous smile of dictatorship.
The real plane of political consistency at the Genoa counter-summit was clearly that of the “violent ones” who alone grasped the stakes and the level of the “dialogue” taking place: the citizens marching peacefully for their rights were gassed, beaten, arrested, and generally treated like litter that needed to be swept up off the streets as fast as possible. The rioters, meanwhile, knew exactly where they were and what conditions they were operating in, and acted with relative impunity – obviously they were quickly seen as suspect from the bad faith perspective of the “citizens.” When the Italian newspapers’ headlines blared, with no irony at all, that “the police and the Black Bloc charged at the march together,” they were in a way confusedly grasping a plane of consistency which pertains to the Imaginary Party, where infiltration quickly becomes futile: a cop provocateur is always a rioter too, whereas the opposite can never be proven; that’s why the reformists left Genoa so totally defeated and bewildered. The disquiet that washes over citizens when looking at photos of plainclothes cops, disguised as protestors in the one picture and serenely lined up alongside their colleagues in uniform in another, is not unlike the shock felt by a child upon realizing that the whole time it was just dad dressed up as Santa Claus in that rudimentary costume. Faced with the necessary and constitutive criminality of police power, those who still remain duped by demokratic illusions gesticulate comically while begging to be reassured: “Tell us that the Black Bloc’s violence was just the effect of police provocation, but also tell us that the police are really good people, that they only beat the nice, well-meaning demonstrators by mistake, that they’re leaving the really mean demonstrators alone only because they’re their colleagues, and that either way they’re there to protect us.” From the citizen point of view, Genoa has to be reduced to a mere management issue, between good cops and bad cops: no way, dad couldn’t have lied to us; Santa Claus exists!
Trying to be present. The mobile terrain of non-rights, the poor but lively civil war of the riots, produces in reality another form of political presence, that of an “elsewhere” that has become embodied in a given place; that of a possibility that has suddenly been able to do without the improbable prosthesis of citizen delirium. Bodies won out on the concrete scene of politics, against the hypostasis of the mystic body of the eight powerful nations, whose ability to represent them, exist, and decide in place of them they contest. The smashing and destruction in the streets were not an invitation to the media to focus on the protest rather than on the event being protested against; the numerous attacks on journalists prove that. Rather they show the protestors’ urge to leave behind the false alternative of either accepting power as it is, or accepting the agreed-upon rules for transforming it, i.e., while preserving it.
Get out of that impasse, and it’s no longer politics up in the heavens and the citizens down on the earth but a world that’s already there, a world to be inhabited and traveled through. The reformist slogan, “another world is possible” which a lot of the anti-G8 protestors had on their T-shirts, only shows the extent of their resignation and ignorance: naturally, the issue isn’t that other worlds are possible, but that there are other worlds already, living or asleep under the weight of the imperial apparatuses, and PEOPLE are waging wars against them. A few well-placed blows would be enough to bring out their potential, their sudden presence, and a little bit of audacity is enough to find the way leading to them.
The fact that the police apparatus in Genoa — which was prepared months and months in advance, with meetings among police and international intelligence organizations, and astronomical expenditures on fences, road blockades, expelling residents from the city — was a total failure from the strictly securitarian point of view, shows us a thing or two about both its implicit function and its real function. The cops, like the journalists, devour the present – and that’s the only reason they are there. Whether it’s a time-immobilization operation (a lengthy incarceration to prolong an isolated act carried out at a precise moment) or the multiplication of a present which is not to be allowed to pass (indefinite reproduction, by image or text, of a unique and singular act), the cops and journalists chew away at the space of events, and cooperate with all the resources they have at their disposal to neutralize it.
The memories of those who in Genoa did not suffer the consequences of this ephemeral civil war in their bodies are stricken by a tragic unreality: both mediated time and repressive time diminish presence, disqualify the meaning and intensity it contains, and carry off its frozen image (the proof, the guarantee of “objectivity” for use by those who were passive and absent at the time of the events). The word image comes from the Latin imago, and originally referred to wax death masks. Whether the images from the counter-summits leave us indifferent or shock us, either way they simply participate in an apparatus for the production of confusion. What bodies taking action in the streets – and those who were just marching – should prove to us was that violent practice is the only way of regaining presence in the Empire, and that power fears exactly that. That’s how the fear of the police when confronted by the “Black Bloc,” and their incomprehensible loss of control, can be explained: it had to do with the disproportionate nature of the forces in play. As soon as bodies are more than just pale holograms of themselves, the police fire, because they have already lost control: they have proved incapable anymore of holding back the presence of another world in acts.
Anyone. The fear that recourse to a means prohibited by the demokratic apparatus, but not really so threatening for all that, the balaclava, is the fear of anonymity, of anyone-ness. Certainly, the Black Bloc does not exist: and that’s because it exists too much. Behind the headscarves, the kaffiyehs, and the balaclavas, anybody could be hiding, or whoever does not separate him or herself out from the rest publicly, but perhaps also someone that actually does.
Behind the masked faces hides the desire of every citizen to no longer be controlled.
The riots in Genoa were intense without being epic, powerful without being heroic, and the police, who cannot conceive that “violence” might exist without organization, pathetically sought out the rumored “boss” of the no-less rumored “Black Bloc,” thus adding up to one wish and two non-existences. Those who PEOPLE labeled as Black Blockers in Genoa were not all wearing black – PEOPLE even said that they were in black on the first day and not on the second, that they were dressed and masked in black in the moments of confrontation and not in the other marches, etc. The color black is itself a non-color, the sum of all other colors, the ordinary color par excellence. Whoever was found to be in possession of black clothes was a suspect individual during the days of the counter-summit; if someone’s hiding their face, and thus has become anyone, indiscernible in the mass, they must have something to hide. In fact, anyone could have been in the Black Bloc, hence cops and neo-nazis could have been in it too, since in a zone of non-control there are simply no more subjects, which renders totally moot the question “who did what?” It hardly matters whether from the perspective of Control the zones of opacity to be imperfections to iron out, or holes deliberately pierced in the continuous fabric of surveillance: control does not see the event; it only sees subjects and the supposed consequences of their actions. But in the anonymous space of a riot, there is only the event of the riot, which regulates according to its own rhythm the psycho-somatic continuum of the bodies involved en masse. A riot is not a space for exchange, nor speech, nor necessarily even for action; it is a space of presence, where bodies merge and subjects disappear into collusion with the Imaginary Party. The only truth that Power’s will to knowledge will be able to extract from all this is the following: there is no intelligence of events except within them and at the moment they take place — all testimony misrepresents it, and all exteriority deforms it. Whoever wasn’t present doesn’t understand. Whoever was present has nothing to explain, because the space of anonymous rioting is a spread out space which cannot be interpreted, which sets itself up and erases itself against the subject, and thus against itself as a subject. All the declarations of what the Black Bloc’s “intentions” were are thus reduced to nullity. The Black Bloc is not a subject, and so it can do anything and the opposite; any fifteen persons with totally different credos can easily dress in black (or white) and claim actions in the name of the Black Bloc or the Tute Bianche. The difference is that in the second case, there were bodies with names and a purpose that replaced the multitudes, saying “we’re the tute bianche,” and distinguished themselves from everything that had escaped them by hoping to confine the power of anyone-ness within a politically profitable representation. But they lost that bet before they even made it, because it’s the same bet the police made, and which moreover was invoked by Casarini, to try to help PEOPLE throw some light on this zone of opacity, forgetting how twenty years ago in Italy somebody wanted to dry up the sea to take out all the fish and failed, because, as little children are told, “the sea has no end.”
NO JUSTICE / NO PEACE / FUCK THE POLICE!
PARABELLUM
Yesterday we experienced a great day for democracy; every single segment of the march was basically charged at and assaulted, beaten, and shot at like rabbits by the forces of the State – democratically, of course, without distinction to sex, race, religion, political ideas, etc. – all the way until the execution on Piazza Alimonda. [the murder of Carlo Giuliani]
Those who over the last few months worked to reduce the Genoa manifestation to an innocent, inoffensive promenade for the media’s cameras just like last year’s, found themselves quite disoriented and could do nothing but condemn the events, calling for calm and for people to leave the streets, at the very moment when the streets were once again filled with the ancient song of revolt.
The Agnolettos, the Francescatos, the Casarinis, and the Farinas should be expelled from the movement because of the seriousness of their behavior and the declarations they made yesterday.
Contrary to what these stool-pigeons and their shepherd Bertinotti all say, the riots were not provoked by a few hundred elements foreign to the manifestation; they were a moment of large scale, determined involvement, thanks to which the arrogance of the State forces was successfully contained, and a large variety of concrete manifestations of death (above all the banks) and numerous commodity abominations were uprooted from the streets of Genoa.
In these events, pacifist ideology appeared for what it is: a lethal weakness. Why did the forces of order not dare to fire live ammunition in July 1960, in spite of all the violence, but yesterday they went ahead and did it? Because at the time they knew that they would have had to face a response suitable to meet the weight of such an offensive.
What happened yesterday cast a stark light on the borderline between the misty peaks of the Genoa Social Forum’s demo-contractual ideology, the Tute Bianche & Co., and the earthly nature of social relations, where issues are never about form but about force. Louis “The Prisoner” Blanqui is still right, today as a hundred fifty years ago: “he who has iron, has bread.”
We salute the Black Bloc and all the anonymous comrades who fought courageously.
A universal community of struggle emerged from yesterday’s street rioting, which comprises the profound meaning of the action of men when they rise up against their domination by State and Capital.
Yes to the real movement, and to all behaviors that break with passivity.
We are even more resolute today than we were yesterday!
-a few individuals who support the human community.
Genoa, July 21st, 2001.