12. April in Rom: "The 12A, the clashes, the real country"

non un passo indietro roma 12.04.2014

The movements that scheduled their meeting in Rome, hailing from different paths of struggle and various parts of Italy, led the first spring demonstration attacking the Renzi government. A demonstration of 30.000 people crossed the city and aimed to the ministries responsible for the welfare cuts policies and the threatened, further attack to basic job safeguards for precarious labour in our country, fearlessly implementing behaviours completely matching the common feelings of the majority of the Italian people.

 

 

A march started under the good omen of the Anonymous' tango down against the website of Matteo Renzi; and whose significant numbers will not stop us, not even for an istant, from pursuing a daily and territorially diffused struggle - the most important one - for a real penetration in the country's social fabric; a penetration that the movements for housing rights, against environmental hazards and the great works, and for re-appropriation of metropolitan spaces and time are representing month after month - in a slow, but finally tangible way.

 

The evidence of a widespread availability of the youth to mobilize and take the street, as even the many buses which came to the capitol this morning proved, cannot exempt us from restating how the search for evaluative milestones and, if possible, of mass attack on the institutions, must not - nor should they do - give way to any temptation of putting deadlines. But the fact that we urge to emphasize is the continuity that this mobilization produces both on the social and the political factor: Rome, we know that by now, is not the city that has to remain "intact", the place in which any national gathering has to parade through in an orderly manner and the wishes of the acting police commissioners have to be, willingly or reluctantly, respected anymore.

 

Once again the movements (and the Roman ones above all) were able to point out to the exploited and dispossessed ones in their city and in this country that it is possible to put words into actions, to move from the bar rants on to the project; and that the project of who wants change is always a project of attack. An attack that cannot but to be addressed against the institutional and political centre represented by the government. An attack that, precisely being a political one, cannot but to deepen its being impervious to any possible negotiation.

 

A "fancyful" attack this time, according to some journalist. An "assault", that one against the Labour ministry (preceded by the throwing of objects and displays of rage against other ministries as well), that was prevented and controlled without accidents by the police, they say to us (of course, by omitting the usual episodes of frenzy against defenceless people and against anyone who fell to the ground: we take the chance here to express our complete solidarity to all the wounded and arrested people).

 

We know that: we are not able to smite an enormous dispositif of well-armed agents and invade the palaces. Notwithstanding this, if this is always the future aim to which every attempt of ours yearns for, to break the police bans is the only concrete and immediate practice able to recompose social subjects on the level of mobilization in contemporary metropolitan space; and to do that not in a moaning spirit, maybe useful to legitimize a new list for the European elections nor to please the clumsy quasi-unionist delusions of who only plans to increase his own membership cards [*], but towards the message that the dispossessed part of the country is able to act and come together to act. The subjectivity is coming and in the making, and not even street power relations are to be conceived as unchangeable and eternal. A lot has still to be done on the grounds of self-defense and street organization, but the path has been pointed out.

 

The mainstream media system was able to wrap even this time, after all, its preset truths from a day earlier, carbon-copied from the previous demonstration: the condemnation of the street violence and the abstruse discourse on the little organized groups which hijack the marches. A broken record that, ranging from Rai3 to Rete4 and from La7 to SkyTg24 [**], delivers an as always ridiculous and bogus representation; there are no "groups" which organize themselves: it is the movements which know how to organize themselves! And they will be doing that, we hope, even better and even more as time goes by. The rebels with the Anonymous masks, helmets, paper bombs and maybe even molotov cocktails are very likable, after all, if they are catched on cameras as they attack ministries and police in Ukraine or Argentine; they are quite likable even if they act in Turkey, less if they appear in Brazil or in Greece; but for that hypocrite hotchpotch that conceal itself today under the noble label of "journalists" (with the exception of anyone working for independent newspapers and platforms) the one thing which has no right to happen is that those same practices glorified in Kiev or in Buenos Aires turn themselves, in mutually different forms and backgrounds, into a genuine Italian rage.

 

A so blatant play of lies and interested turnarounds, we believe, to be less and less able to persuade readers and TV watchers that often are prone to build their own narrative of the events - even with the help of the web, and thanks to the choice of clear political targets from our side. Press lies and turnarounds fabricated along with the police that, by handling the great protest events as apocalyptic harbingers, by ordering the search of the demonstrators' buses and their blockade to create tension, by putting pressure on shopkeepers in order to have them closing their business on the demonstration day, try to present the siege to the palaces as if it was a siege to the city. On the same wavelenght of the policemen stand some pathetic characters as Marino, the mayor of Rome; who - instead of being worried about the debt that his institution keeps piling up at the expense of all the Roman citizens - lapses into comments on violence and "damages to the city" that show his complete cultural - and therefore real - continuity with the old mayor Alemanno (in case anyone had any doubts, and actually someone - even in Rome - always risks to have some).

 

We know that violence is not the attempt of assaulting a ministry but rather it is the assault of the ministries on our social interests, on our hopes of liberation and change, on our concrete lives. Everything that the existing social relations define, defended and imposed by the whole institutional apparatus, is healthy only when it is antagonist. Everything else are empty words and hypocrite rants that, since a long time ago, we are unavailable to listen to.

 

Infoaut

 

[*] A reference to a tendency displayed by some grassroots trade unions, presently more interested in showing a great number of members in order to tackle mainstream unions than in carrying out qualitative politics of labour and social antagonism in order to further empower struggles and the #12A demonstration

 

[**] A series of state (Rai 3, an historically centre-left-leaning public TV) and private media outlets (Rete 4 - Berlusconi's - La7, and SkyTG24)

 

Video von Infoaut zum 12. April:

 

http://youtu.be/uKUPtrjpWfI