Thursday 6 May 2010

From the past - Reflections after a demo at Waterloo station

I don’t want to be polemic, but this time I have to be, just a little at least.
I don’t know what is the best way of demonstrating, probably everyone chooses his own, but I can’t help thinking that the demo of last Saturday was not anarchist at all. It looked like a White Overalls demo, and according to my experience the White Overalls movement is in sharp contrast with the anarchist one. At least this is the way things stand in Italy. If we are anarchists we act in a very different way from the White Overalls.
The White Overalls claim that a leftist government is better than a right-wing one, while the anarchists claim that both kinds of government have the same goals.
The White Overalls vote for certain candidates belonging to the leftist parties and sometines they even stand for candidate as they accept the democratic bullshit of having representatives in parliament. They say ‘Another world is possible’, but at the same time they have no intention of destroying the system, they just want to reform it and try to do that from the inside of parliament. Isn’t this a strong contradiction? That’s how, before Berlusconi came to power, Luca Casarini, the leader of northern Italy White Overalls, was one of the advisors of the former welfare minister Livia Turco, the same who introduced the concentration camps for immigrants in Italy. Now we see him standing against those camps, together with the Social forum, like the second video we saw during the 'No Borders' night. But soon before Berlusconi’s government, these people just asked for an improvement of the material conditions in the immigrant camps, which had been created by their friend D’Alema’s government. Only now are they asking for their suppression.
What struck me most was the fact that more than one comrade, last Saturday, took pictures of the whole situation with a video-camera. This is one of the many things that differentiate the Social Forum from the anarchists in Italy. The anarchists don’t look for any form of show, on the contrary they think that bringing cameras on a demo is very dangerous as the cops can easily seize them and create evidence against comrades.
Another thing I find quite strange was the way of relating to the cops. Last Saturday everyone faced the cops alone, we were never all together against the police. Their was an attitude of passive resistance rather than that of attack. I’m not saying that we have to attack the cops at each demo, but we should have a common strategy against them at least. Moreover we let them film all of us, they were at a short distance from us and took their photographs easily without even a single protest on our part, as if it were a normal procedure.
Finally, I can’t understand why in the end we tried to reach an agreement with the cops, more precisely, I don’t understand what the point is in talking to them. They’re not anything other than the armed servants of political power. I think that it’s totally pointless to have any dialogue with the institutions, as the White Overalls do in Italy, and it is even worse to dialogue with the servants of power.

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