through europe

On Friday, at the end of the G20 meeting in Cannes, the President of the EU Commission Josè Barroso announced that “Italy has asked on its initiative to the IMF to monitor its commitment to fiscal and economic reforms.”  This monitoring process will start immediately – next week, Barroso will fly to Rome with a group of IMF inspectors – and will be repeated every three months, in order “to verify” that the Italian Minister of Economy is implementing the “reforms” effectively. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Italian government “voluntarily asked” for IMF surveillance.

A disturbing trend has taken place in the aftermath of October 15th in Rome, shaped by mainstream media and multiplied by the social networks. For the first time in Italian history almost an entire country participated in the repression of violent dissent, in the segregation of spaces of alterity, using the same tools that were supposed to denounce the weakness of the turbo-capitalist system. Millions of young adults played the game of the Good Cop, at the expense of three or more decades of civil conquests. Class traitors, fucking police everywhere you turned, even and especially online, worse than in real life. What a depressing bore.

October 15th 2011 saw a global mobilization of political protest. It took place using limited resources, in a short time-frame and with minimal involvement from institutional actors. Demonstrators staged rallies around the world on every major continent from Auckland to Tapei to Madrid and Seattle: in total there were some 951 actions in 82 countries.

In terms of global reach and the involvement of provincial cities (not just capitals) the scale of collective action was possibly without precedent, surpassing even the globally coordinated anti-war demonstrations of March 20th 2003. This staggering feat was achieved without institutional actors such as political parties and in some countries, including the UK, without the involvement of the organised labour movement.

My trip back is stuttered and indirect.  It takes a long coach ride, a short plane trip, a train ride, a flight and another flight to get back to Milan.  Each fragment represents the kind of trip which is most often considered an opportunity for a sleepy interlude to the day, nothing more: good for nothing but dozing in and out of thoughts, usually the rush of a never-ending series of professional ambitions or micro-improvements, ‘have to send that mail when I get in, have to prepare list of objectives for the trip, what am I doing here?  What can we intuit that kids might desire next?  Which mood will style move into within the next 6 months?’