through europe

November 24, 2010. A date to remember. A few months after the Greek riots, a few weeks after the French wave of general strikes, Britain, Italy and Portugal synchronized their unrest against the new measures of austerity enforced by their respective governments. While British students descended in mass on the streets, their Italian equivalents attacked the palace of the Senate, before moving to occupy the Coliseum. At the same time, in Portugal, the unions called for a general strike that managed to paralyze the entire country, with peaks of 80% adhesion among the workers of several industries.

 Una crisis económica: ese es el “momento de la verdad” según todas las teorías críticas heredadas del siglo XX. Y sin embargo, ¿qué pasa? No mucho, o bien un giro derechista, o bien algo que por ahora no vemos con las lentes que tenemos... Yo creo que para ser creíble un lugar de elaboración colectiva y de pensamiento tiene primero que medirse con este no-saber lo que está pasando. Quien no desee pensar, sino entregar su energía activista a otra ilusión (supuestamente) movilizadora ya encontrará otros espacios...

Another day of direct action, another day of semantic stretching. Kids run inside the Tory’s HQ, break the windows, or maybe they stop a coal power station, or they enact a political performance in a socially sensitive place. All legitimate and often noble means of protesting, but, still, their classification under the label of ‘direct action’ seems to me to be a misguided attempt to stretch the meaning of this expression.

For years European intellectuals like Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, among many others, have stressed the refrain: “We need to develop an ability of common political decision at the level of the Union.” 

The euro version of the Neoliberal Dogma, namely the Maastricht monetarist engine has been producing effects on social life: reduction of wages, cuts of social spending, but the only seemed to be a Big Leap in the creation of the political Union.

Quel che sta succedendo in Frrancia è estremamente importante, per tutti. Dal movimento ampio, radicale e determinato che si sta sviluppando ormai da giugno (che ha portato in piazza milioni di persone per quattro volte in pochi mesi) potrebbe venire la prima risposta vincente contro la dittatura finanziaria che si è costituita in Europa a partire dalla crisi greca e dal diktat del direttorio Trichet-Merkel-Sarkozy che punta a imporre misure unificate di attacco contro il salario e contro la società, in nome della competitività.