DiEM25 Launches #StopTheDeal Campaign to shatter EU-Turkey refugee pact
Today we launched our #StopTheDeal campaign, a Europe-wide effort to help shatter the shameful EU-Turkey Agreement once and for all.
How? By helping to save a man’s life
Shabbir Iqbal
One day in December 2015, a local group of Islamic extremists attacked Shabbir’s neighbour, a Christian. The extremists wanted to confiscate the neighbour’s home to convert it into a madrasa; Shabbir came to his defence.
This simple act changed Shabbir’s life irrevocably. For coming to the aid of a Christian, the extremists labelled Shabbir a heretic; the city’s chieftains decided that he and his father should abandon the town for the sake of their safety. Several members of his family and close circle have now been murdered by the extremists. His wife and children have gone into hiding. If Shabbir returns home, the extremists will almost certainly try to kill him.
So today, after a horrific journey on which his father also perished, Shabbir lives in a state of limbo in Lesvos, Greece, where he has been for nine months. He is now at risk of being deported under the terms of the March 20, 2016 EU-Turkey Agreement. You can read Shabbir’s full story here.
DiEM25 stands behind Shabbir and the effort to #StopTheDeal
Carlos Jiménez Villarejo
But if this case is successful, it will do much more than save a man’s life: it could set a legal precedent that could shatter the EU-Turkey Agreement once and for all.
When Villarejo’s team contacted us last month to support his initiative, we immediately agreed and promised them that, as DiEM25, we would stand behind this action to save Shabbir and topple the EU-Turkey agreement.
DiEM25 co-founder, Yanis Varoufakis, spoke to Shabbir on Tuesday and personally confirmed to him DiEM25’s commitment to assist his cause.
We have asked our 30,000 members and broad volunteer network across Europe to take this action further. To make our call louder.
Our advisors, coordinators, partner organisations and friends from Dublin to Prague, from Helsinki to Lisbon, are now being summoned to join this struggle for Shabbir and against the EU-Turkey deal before the EU institutions.
Specific actions to further this cause are now being planned and will be announced on DiEM25’s #StopTheDeal site.
Sign the petition!
DiEM News from Cologne
DSC News brings us to the very west of Germany, this time to visit DSC Cologne. “It takes a long time to build a group. There are new people every time, some of them don’t come back after their first meeting, but others become very committed.” This is how Klemens Surmann describes his experience of the founding of the DSC in Rhineland.
It was Klemens who produced the first impulse to start this DSC in the forum on the official DiEM25 website, calling for all comrades in the area to begin having a regular get-together. People reacted quickly, but it took some time to find the right interval and the best timeslot. “Our strength here is perseverance, even if we are just two, the meeting takes place,” is how he summarizes his recipe for success.However, a core group not of two but of 15 people has now been formed and is meeting biweekly. The Facebook group for DiEM25 Rhineland now has 130 subscribers and the group is very international with a very broad age range.
At the beginning of every get-together we discuss a subject and a summary is published in the forum and on Facebook for those who could not participate.
Let’s save Europe from the dictatorship of money?
What DiEM25 actually is and whether it has the goal of being a party have been points of debate among the participants. The motivation was part of the reflection too. Do we just want to discuss things or actually do something? The first step agreed upon by the group was to define our positions and to compare them with the Manifesto. Today, the group has moved to the next stage and is now working on the so-called “policy papers”.
Klemens’ personal motivationcomes out like a shot: “to save Europe from the dictatorship of money and to say it plain and simple.” The foundation of the European Union was that of a peace community which worked well. Then the bureaucrats and monetary policy increasingly took power and worked against the interests of the people. As a result, the Union is perceived increasingly negatively.
DiEM25 speaks…
Does this sound like armchair politics? It certainly isn’t. To date, the main action in the short history of this DSC has been the cooperation with “Köln spricht” (Cologne speaks), a kind of speakers’ corner, which is very active and very successful. On peak days, there are up to 150 visitors and the DSC in Cologne regularly makes presentations and prepares written material.Cooperation and mutual support is very important for Klemens. He stays in close contact with the Ruhr regional group and is helping to found a new DSC in Bonn.
A special highlight for him was the meeting with Yanis Varoufakis at the end of October in Bonn. The small bar didn’t have space for more than 15 people. There could have easily been 50 of us. The meeting lasted over 3 hours. “Yanis made a good impression, he is very connected to the base and has feasible ideas” is his personal conclusion of the evening.
Let’s help each other
Are you a DiEM25 member but not active yet because there’s no DSC close to you? Hopefully this story inspires you to start one. If not YOU, who else? Count on our help, just ask for it at [email protected]
Movie night in Berlin: Debt is the money of the rich
In the heart of Neukölln-Berlin, in B-Lage, DiEM25 Berlin presented the film “Who is Saving Whom? – The crisis as business model at the expense of democracy and social security”.
Although the screening room was crowded and stuffed with 80 visitors, the mostly young audience attentively watched the documentary until the end. The 2015 documentary clearly shows who is responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 and how multi-billion rescue packages almost magically converted bank debts into public debt. The consequences for civil society are massive and these are presented through impressive pictures and testimonies in the film.
The film also suggests alternatives. Iceland choose a completely different way out of the crisis: the citizens took their fate into their own hands, demanded new elections and a thorough revision of the banking crisis – with success. There was no rescue of international capital, but a democratic redistribution from the top-to-bottom. Even the bank executives did not get away with it.
At the event, the film was follwoed by Ragnar Hjalmarsson providing more nuanced information on the Icelandic case, drawing on his experience as employee of the IMF Resident Representative Office in Reykjavik from 2008 to 2013. Spanish/Icelandic artist couple Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson contributed further to an intriguing discussion.
During the discussion, it became clear that very special circumstances contributed to Iceland’s unique path. Nevertheless, Iceland remains an encouraging example of how a broad social movement could free a country from the dictatorship of the financial sector and help it move towards real democracy.
In the film, the German politician Oskar Lafontaine is quoted as follows: “If one knows that debt is the money of the rich, then one would have to get the idea that if I want to lower the debt, I will reduce rich people’s money. I’ve never heard that this may have been discussed in that way in parliaments. Instead of taking money from the rich, they dive into the wallet of the pensioners and the workers who earn very little. This is an incredible fact.“
DiEM25 is working right now on a policy paper for Europe’s new economy, which will be presented end of February in Paris.
Carpe DiEM25
An extensive call to all riders of Europe
By Deliverance Project
Contact: ridertorino@gmail.com
We are Riders at Foodora in Turin. We are workers in the world of home deliveries. We are the backbone of the company we are working every day: Foodora, start up “leader” of a maximum expansion in the sector but forces its workers to settle just for a crumb. The Oct. 8 began our mobilization against contracts that promise simple earnings but actually are downloading all the risk of doing business on the workers. Contracts that provide for a salary only focused on piece work (payment for each delivery made) without any guarantee on the number of deliveries per shift, without any protection during illness, without time off and above all without the slightest value of time – our time – made available by the company. Co.co.co (Coordinated and continuing collaboration) contracts that frame us as self-employed workers, in a context where there is no place for autonomy, where autonomy clashes with the algorithms of an app that scans pace and amount of work, in a climate of exasperated competitiveness.
We hear managers talking about an alternative to inactivity, flexibility, a coordination that breaks down hierarchies using the app and technology, FOR US, FOR THOSE WHO WORK, THIS IS JUST TRANSLATED INTO ABSOLUTE INSECURITY, THIS IS WHAT WE CALL DIGITAL EXPLOITATION.
Incontestable directives, steady blackmail and exemplar punishments are the real made of unfulfilled promises, a start-up that creates a wall in front of the demands of its workers, rejecting all forms of productive dialogue. A start-up, like so many others, who refuses to recognize our work the dignity it deserves, that dignity without which work becomes mere exploitation. The urgensies which we hurled, go beyond our individual experience; they are affecting both young and old, students, temporary workers and unemployed tired to deal every day with a world of work from the food delivery to the call center and to the broader field of logistics, which are suffocating an entire generation. A generation deprived of its own future by the imposition of conditions of work that with the exploitation of the gray areas of the law and a very high unemployment rate, reject and trample on those rights won by workers with decades of struggle and sacrifice. It is time to say enough! It is time to give back to work and to workers the dignity they deserve. To require together what belongs to us. It’s time not to be complicits. Dynamic support, critical consumption and dignity for workers are the key words not to be defenceless spectators of a future that goes to hell. Defenceless spectators of a future that slowly they are stealing us.
It’s time to take a stand on it and initiate a reflection that allows to put aside the rhetoric of false opportunities which are flaunted with slogans, a reflection that permits giving the right name to things. Because “piece work” is exploitation even if you no longer work in the mine, but on the streets of the city riding your bike. It is exploitation even if to yell orders is the notification of an app and not the voice of a corporal. Our goal is to reflect, discuss and self-organize ourselves together to give voice to the real needs of those who every day live on their skin the real contradictions of a world of work which always holds less account of those who work. So that from a reflection could born a solidarity among workers, essential to impose from the bottom-up dismantled protections piece by piece over the past 20 years.
And you where you stand? What is your position on Foodora? Tell us! And ask yourself if you want to be an accomplice of those who, with false promises and advertising slogans, stakes a claim on a future that belongs to us.
November, 2016
Riders from Turin
The Deliverance Project is an operating system to relate the various struggles of the new job 2.0 and to support reflection and self-organization against precariousness and exploitation of labor. Join us!
DiEM25 vs Front National
DiEM25’s Lorenzo Marsili takes on Front National’s Marion Le Pen on Italian TV.
Here’s one reason to set your alarm early tomorrow: DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective member Lorenzo Marsili will face off against Front National’s Marion Le Pen in a live-streamed debate.
The hour-long confrontation will start at 8am CET on La7’s Omnibus News show.
Marion Le Pen, is a young French MP who is seen as the rising star of the country’s extreme right. She is the granddaughter of Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of party’s current president Marine Le Pen, and recently embraced Donald Trump’s election victory by answering “yes” to an offer from his team to work together.
“The Front National and the far-right across Europe and beyond responds to the crisis of the old order with an even older tactic: scapegoating,” said Lorenzo ahead of the encounter. “They blame the economic and democratic bankruptcy of our system on those who suffer the most, channelling the fear, anger and pain caused by the crisis on refugees and migrants.”
“We refuse to choose between establishment and fascism. We believe there is a third space, one that responds to misanthropy with solidarity, to disintegration with unity, to racism with human rights, to neoliberalism with equality.”
We’re bracing for a heated exchange. Tune in if you can, and let us know you’re up watching using the #DiEM25vsFN hashtag!
The power of the movements facing Trump
By Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra
It is much too early to say to what extent President Trump will enact his campaign promises as government policy and, indeed, how much he will actually be able to do in office. But every day since his election demonstrations have sprung up throughout the United States to express outrage, apprehension and dismay.
Moreover, there is no doubt that once in office Trump and his administration will continually do and say things that will inspire protest. For at least the next four years people in the US will rally and march against his government, regularly and in large numbers. Protesting against threats to the environment will undoubtedly be urgent, as will be the generalized atmosphere of violence against people of color, women, LGBTQ populations, migrants, Muslims, workers of various sorts, the poor — and the list goes on.
One of the potential pitfalls for social movements, however, is that activism goes no further than protest. Protest, of course, can bring a city to a halt, can block temporarily the action of the government, and can even play the crucial role of opening up spaces for political alternatives. But on its own, protest is never enough to create lasting social transformation.
The significance of the Trump presidency and, moreover, the keys to developing protest against it become clearer, we think, when posed in a global context. Before coming back to the questions for social movements, then, let us frame some of the basic aspects of the global context into which Trump’s government will enter.
THE MANY FACES OF THE GLOBAL RIGHT
Although Trump is certainly an idiosyncratic figure, he is really one of many “populist” right-wing leaders that have emerged on the global stage against the backdrop of the economic crisis, including Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, General Al Sisi in Egypt, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Michel Temer in Brazil, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, and perhaps soon Norbert Hofer in Austria and Marine Le Pen in France.
This is a heterogeneous group, obviously — and even the label “populism” we use as shorthand here deserves greater critical scrutiny. But these right-wing figures do share several characteristics. All of them promise a combination of neoliberalism and nationalism as the solution to economic and social malaise. Most of them also manage to mobilize for the right a widespread hatred for the entire political class and contempt for the political establishment — a sentiment that at other times has been mobilized effectively by the left, for instance in 2001 in Argentina and 2011 in Spain.
Many of these right-wing leaders and political forces also add some traditional characteristics of fascism, such as the threat of the mass expulsion of migrants, racial purity as a condition of legitimate belonging to the nation, the suspension of normal legal procedures to imprison and repress political opponents, attacks on the independent press, and creating an atmosphere of terror for LGBTQ populations, people of color, women and others.
Studies will emerge in the coming months (and years) that explain in detail the success of Trump’s campaign strategies and the motives of his supporters — how much was driven by racial resentment, how much by the economic fears of “the losers of globalization” and an industrial working class in decline, how much by a fabricated social panic, and so forth. These are undeniably important questions, but we simply want to signal that Trump’s election, seen from a global perspective, is not the exception but squarely in line with a significant (and terrifying) trend.
TRUMP’S VERSION OF U.S. GLOBAL HEGEMONY
The fact that Trump’s election fits so clearly in this emerging aspect of the current global order is obscured by his own rhetoric of separation and countering the forces of globalization — but this too is part of the same right-wing global trend. Trump’s declared strategy for addressing the epochal crisis of US hegemony in the world seems to indicate a withdrawal, and his version of “making America great again” seems to stand at the opposite end of the spectrum from George W. Bush’s strategy of military unilateralism, which sought and failed to maintain or recreate a hegemonic role. (Even when Trump has shown spasms of militarist bluster, declaring he would bomb this or that enemy, it is not with the aim of recreating a hegemonic position.)
Trump’s election might thus be read as a concession by the right to the loss of US global hegemony, declaring itself satisfied instead with an “America first” ideology. But really the US protectionism and isolationism of today bears little resemblance to that of the beginning of the twentieth century, in the period when the US aspired toward an ascendant position in international hierarchies. We suspect, in fact, that despite Trump’s campaign proclamations, US foreign policy will not withdraw but continue to deploy some combination of soft power and militarism.
The comparison to Brexit might be helpful in this regard — not because Britain will really retreat from Europe but, to the contrary, insofar as it will seek new, more favorable terms for maintaining a foot in the European market, managing the flow of migrants, and continuing to underwrite the dominant financial role of the City — objectives, of course, that will subject to difficult negotiations, especially with Germany. (And it remains to be seen how Trump’s election will change this scenario.)
We can say simply that in both the UK and the US, when nationalism and neoliberalism are combined at the core of a right-wing populism, there is inevitably a kind of horse trading between the two, and we suspect that neoliberalism will always eventually get the upper hand — such that nationalist isolationism will have to bend to its interests. The question of how and with what success the Trump government will seek to “make American great again” while navigating a new or different hegemonic role in the globe is another question that will only become clear in the years to come.
COALITIONAL STRATEGIES
By emphasizing how much Trump fits within a dominant global pattern we do not intend to minimize the tragedy, as if to say to those in the US: look, it’s not so bad, others have suffered this too. No, if anything these correspondences make the disaster worse. And Trump’s election has greatly emboldened similar developments elsewhere. Rather, we are primarily interested in reading the Trump election in the global context, for what it means for social movements in the coming years. Two axes of articulation that must be developed by social movements already seem clear, and neither of them is new.
First, wide coalitional ties among diverse movements are necessary. This is not to say that movements should unite under some central leadership or even subscribe to the same agenda. No, return to centralized party structures that dictate a unitary line of struggle is today neither desirable nor feasible — and, indeed, the party-form itself has to be profoundly transformed and renewed if left parties are to play a positive role in such coalitional politics. (The extent to which the Bernie Sanders campaign was an attempt in that direction and what that experience means going forward is an important topic for investigation.)
Instead of unity and centralization, what is realistic, instead, is a process of knitting together horizontal relationships and alliances made visible by intersectional analysis. A multitude begins to emerge and gain the capacity to act together with the accumulation and re-enforcement of these horizontal, coalitional ties. One can find numerous hints in the culture of today’s US movements of the kinds of composition that develop from intersectional consciousness and coalitional practice: at the Standing Rock pipeline, acting against climate change and defending indigenous rights have become inextricably linked; campaigns to raise the minimum wage have crossed the boundaries of migrant communities and intersected with struggles against racism; powerful segments of the Black Lives Matter protests and, even more clearly, the platform of the Movement for Black Lives pose gender, sexuality and economic justice as essential for racial justice; and many elements of the 2011 Occupy movement attempted to make race a central component of the protests over social inequality — with some success, most notably at Oakland.
These existing instances are admittedly embryonic — but potent — examples of the kind of coalitional connections that must be composed from the various protest movements. Essential will be, once again in US history, to build and consolidate bridges between class politics and struggles along the color line. And, in the face of Trump’s threats of mass deportation, the legacy of the great migrants’ movement of May 2006 will have to be reactivated, linking the daily “living politics” that shape Latina/o and other “minority” communities. Eventually, to transform protest into proposition, elements of a shared agenda or framework will have to be forwarded, but the coalitional process of articulation is a step in that direction.
ALTERGLOBAL CONNECTIONS
A second axis requires movements to compose relations at an even larger scale. It has been clear for several years in Europe that the dynamics of neoliberalism along with racist right-wing forces cannot be contested effectively within the bounds of the nation-state, but only by building connections beyond the national frame. Even though the ruling order of Europe is undoubtedly neoliberal to the core, efforts to contest this by affirming national boundaries and national sovereignty are not only dangerous but also doomed to failure. Placing hopes in a renewed French sovereignty as an anti-neoliberal strategy while opposing the 2005 French referendum on the European Constitution was one example of such illusions, and those few who supported Brexit in the name of anti-neoliberalism a more extreme instance. The only progressive means to challenge the ruling order of Europe and to discover possible democratic alternatives looks beyond the national level. The Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM) is one such attempt, and there are numerous instances of transnational coalition politics at the grassroots level.
The political context of the United States, of course, is very different from that of the European Union, and the scale is much larger than individual European nation-states, but it seems to us that the same principle applies, especially when confronting a Trump presidency. This is not to say, of course, that in order to contest Trump’s anti-globalization stance one must, in specular fashion, support corporate trade pacts and the like. Not too long ago the alterglobalization movements developed extraordinarily clear and well-articulated notions of globalization from below, challenging the numerous institutions that rule over the neoliberal global order and beginning to construct alternative networks of experimentation and exchange. The memories of Chiapas, Seattle and Genoa as well as Porto Alegre and Mumbai live as a kind of secret history of our present, which has to be taken up again and renewed.
When we raise up the lessons of the alterglobalization movements, of course, we are not proposing merely another round of summit protests, from G8 meetings to those of the World Bank and the IMF. Instead today we have to filter the memories of those earlier times through the prism of the cycle of encampments and occupations that began in 2011, the movement of squares. In contrast to the nomadism of the alterglobalization movements, the encampments were sedentary and developed deep and often intensely-local engagements with the urgent issues of the metropolis. Today we need both: perspectives and practices that combine the most local concerns with broad connections and consciousness that extend well beyond the national frame.
There is nothing contradictory about these two levels. Our contention, in fact, is that today the one cannot proceed effectively without the other. Struggles against the violence and imprisonment that people of color and migrants suffer in the US are to be enriched and empowered by an expanded political consciousness that is able to see connections and form alliances with analogous processes in Brazil, Europe and elsewhere. Composing relationships with movements confronting violence against women and the erosion of abortion rights in Argentina and Poland would invigorate feminist movements in North America and Western Europe. And movements of the poor in New York and Paris would have a lot to learn from the daily practices of resistance and self-organization in Kolkata and Durban. Does this seem like too much to ask when activists in the US and each country have so much on their plates already? Global and international connections have to be regarded as an essential basis not merely an add-on when there is extra time and energy.
So, yes, every time the Trump government does or says something outrageous, go out in the streets in protest — and take your friends, and your parents, and anyone else you can find. There will be plenty of occasions. But behind the protests there must be a complex web of relations that extend both horizontally — that is, intersectionally, and in coalition across the various movements — and vertically, beyond the local and even the national to form relations and alliances with movements elsewhere. That is the only sound foundation for eventually transforming the many discrete protests into an effective and lasting project for social transformation.
Essay originally published in ROAR Magazine.
How DiEM Members Are Deciding Our Brexit Stance
DiEM25 had campaigned hard against the vote for Brexit – not to support the current state of things, but rather to better fight it from within, and conscious of the fact that a UK outside the EU would have worse labour laws and less environmental protection than a UK inside it. As DiEM25 Advisory Panel member Caroline Lucas put it:
“We know that the EU isn’t perfect – but we’re committed to working across borders to make it better. For progressives the facts are clear: Britain is fairer, safer and greener as a member of the European Union.”
Following the referendum, which did not go as we wished, Yanis Varoufakis nevertheless insisted that the result must be respected. DiEM25 should fight for the kind of Brexit that would give the British people the maximum power to decide what future relations between their country and the EU should look like. (Detailed proposal)
DiEM25 members were then asked to present and debate their own proposals on what our common post-Brexit stance should be. A lively discussion ensued.
In the end, it became clear that there were four main options for DiEM25. These are now being translated into our 7 working languages and will then be made available as an electronic referendum in the Members Area. All verified DiEM25 members will be eligible to vote. As a transnational, horizontal movement, we employ neither delegates nor country restrictions; everyone’s vote counts exactly the same. Whichever option receives more than 50% of the votes (with a run-off if necessary) will become DiEM25’s official stance on this topic.
The Establishment Gambled and Lost
Trump’s election is the second time in a few months that a vote has left the establishment confused and scared in its wake. The first such vote was Brexit of course. Both outcomes had seemed impossible. Both were in fact own goals, politicians wishing to hurt the opponent and instead hurting themselves.
In the case of Brexit, David Cameron wanted to solidify his leadership by having the people reject leaving the EU. He inflated the UK’s pre-existing Euroscepticism, demanded concessions from Brussels, announced a referendum – and found that he could not control the wave of popular anger he had helped unleash.
In the case of Trump, we know that the Hillary Clinton campaign secretly build up Trump against other Republican Primary candidates, having identified him as one of the three candidates that the mainstream would find the most unpalatable. They did not hope to win by convincing the people of their candidate’s virtues – they were probably aware that Hillary Clinton represented everything that the American mainstream despised – so they wanted to create a situation where the alternative would be so unthinkable that every sensible voter would have to rally behind Hillary. Indeed, many leftists who disagree with Hillary on almost everything were forced to recommend “if you live in a swing state, hold your nose and vote for Hillary.” However, the American establishment was not able to control the wave of popular anger they had helped unleash.
We might even add a third case: that of Greek premier Alexis Tsipras last year holding a referendum to have the people force him to give in to the troika (hoping for a YES while ostensibly being on the side of NO). While the anger of the voters was not directed towards a catastrophic choice here, he too, along with the Greek oligarch-controlled media, every single one of which worked for YES and predicted a victory for YES, had a rude awakening after their attempt to manipulate the people for their aims. (In this case, nothing came of it because the EU mercilessly crushed the Greek democracy several days after the inconvenient vote.)
The reason all three schemes failed is partly because of a deep hurt and partly because of a deep distrust.
We hear about the hurt in almost every article written after each of these failures: the centre-right and the centre-left have allied over the past couple decades to impose Neoliberal policies which left 80% of the population worse off. The rising numbers of unemployed and working poor are the primary target audiences for new anti-establishment xenophobic nationalists that can be found not just in America and the UK but also France, the Netherlands, Germany and other European countries (a ‘Nationalist International’). However, it would be a grave mistake to say that only the poor (often conflated with the uneducated) vote for these. Politics have been so one-sidedly in favour of the 1% that even the middle class does not feel safe in its position anymore. Many of Germany’s nationalists have a middle class or former middle class background, and so did many Trump voters.
In previous years and decades, the establishment could absorb the greatest part of the votes of those who feel betrayed and left behind by their government. People switched their vote from one established party to the other. Barack Obama won as an establishment candidate promising Change. Now however, one-sided, pay-to-play politics have eroded public trust to such extent that NO kind of establishment politician is trusted to have the interests of the people at heart, only outsiders like Donald Trump might, possibly. (Strictly speaking, Donald Trump, like Boris Johnson, actually belongs to the establishment, but succeeded in passing himself off as anti-establishment. In any case he does not belong to those whom the party machines would normally tap to run for president.)
At the same time, a part of the people is catching on to the inadequacies of our political system that have allowed establishment politicians to keep passing the ball to one another despite not working for the people. Per the latest Eurobarometer survey, 43% of Europeans are not just unsatisfied with the government, they are unsatisfied with their state’s democracy. They realise that answering one multiple-choice question every four years is completely inadequate to influence politics, especially when the parties do everything they can to obscure their intentions or lie about them during the electoral campaign.
In order to re-establish trust in the political system and bring back ‘sensible’ vote outcomes, a short-term fix would be to find political candidates who will work on behalf of the 99%, candidates like Bernie Sanders. However, given the corrupting effect of money and power, we should also explore solutions that rely less on a candidate’s good will: reforms that place more power into the hands of the people to understand and control what politicians do in the years between two electoral campaigns, so that our democracies may be ruled by the people.
National Workerism and Racial Warfare
Let’s try to understand what is happening. As they did in 1933, the workers have revenged against those who have long been duping them: the politicians of the “democratic” reformist left.
A slavist who has never paid taxes, a serial raper, has emerged as the President of the United States. His voters are those workers who have been betrayed by the left in the US and in Europe. This ‘left’ should be thrown in the dustbin: they have opened the way to Fascism by choosing to serve financial capitalism and by implementing neoliberal “reforms”.
Let’s call them by some names: Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Massimo D’Alema and Matteo Renzi, Giorgio Napolitano, François Hollande, Manuel Valls and Sigmar Gabriel. Because of their cynicism and their cowardice they have delivered people into the hands of the corporations and the governments of our lives. Inso doing, they have opened the door to the fascism that is now spreading and to the global civil war that now seems unstoppable.
In the United Kingdom and in Poland, in Hungary and in Russia, and now in the United States, National-Workerism is the winner. The white worker class, humiliated over the last thirty years, deceived by endless reformist promises, impoverished by financial aggression, has now elected the Ku Klux Klan to the White House.
As the left has taken away from the hands of the workers the democratic weapons of self-defence, here comes the racist version of the class warfare.
Wall Street has managed to vanquish Bernie Sanders, and now the Ku Klux Klan has defeated Wall Street.
The next ten years will be difficult and we must be aware of this. The crumble of capitalist globalisation is the beginning of a war which puts much of modern civilisation in danger.
A few days ago ZeroHedge, the online journal of the intellectual supporters of Trump, published an article that perfectly synthesises what is happening and anticipates what is coming.
“The zombie economy is moribund, the productive people have been pillaged, and the bread and circus act is running on fumes. The American welfare/warfare state is crumbling. The ruling elite are desperate. They don’t want their Ponzi scheme to end, but they always fail. It’s a confidence game, and the game is over. The economic crisis is foreseeable to anyone with their eyes open. This empire will crumble and fall, just as others before throughout history….
This is a country truly divided, much along the lines of the first Civil War. The divisions aren’t just along political party lines, but race, education, geography, gender, age, class, religion and ability to think critically.
…The election of either candidate is likely to trigger events leading to Civil War II.
It’s the demoralized, disillusioned, angry working middle class who have been pillaged by the ruling class through taxes, outsourcing their jobs, and Federal Reserve created inflation. With real median household income languishing at 1989 levels, it’s those in the middle who have lost the most. The 0% interest rates have punished senior citizens and middle class savers, while $3 trillion of QE benefited financial industry millionaires. The next financial collapse, which is baked into the cake, initiated by the policies designed to benefit the .1%, will push class warfare into the streets….”
Trump has won because he represents a weapon in the hands of impoverished workers, and because the left has delivered them into the hands of financial capital weaponless. Unfortunately this weapon will soon be turned against the workers themselves, and will lead them towards racial warfare.
“huge disparity in voting preference between white, married, rural, religious households and the urban, black, fatherless households, along with the white single non-religious households. The Black Lives Matter movement represents the first cohort, while the social justice warriors represent the second cohort.” (ZeroHedge).
The threat of racial warfare is totally explicit in Trump’s stance. Socially defeated white workers identify themselves as the race of the winners.
“Whites are also tired of the left wing politically correct phraseology which changes an illegal immigrant into an undocumented immigrant. If you came here illegally, you broke the law, and you’re a criminal. Deportation is the consequence of your crime. Opening our borders to an influx of illegal South American immigrants, potential Syrian terrorists, and others who don’t believe in our values is a recipe for disaster.” (ZeroHedge).
In the wake of the American elections I spent a few days in Moscow, talking with fellow artists. While we were talking in a art gallery, outside, in the streets of Moscow, people were marching and chanting. For the coming anniversary of the Soviet Revolution? No, for the erection of a statue to Vladimir the Wise, the christianiser of the Mother Russia. Women and children dressed as soldiers march and exalt the murderers of the past: Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, the killer of communists and jews.
The white race in arms is preparing a ghastly finish for the ghastly history of modern colonialism. Will we escape this finish that seems to be already written in the books of the Armageddon that financial capitalism has prepared, and to which the reformist left has paved the way?