------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 2, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- WORKERS WORLD PARTY ON GENOA: SOLIDARITY WILL ENSURE VICTORY The Italian government can order an army of sanitation workers to clean up the debris after the battles in Genoa, and the leaders of the major imperialist countries of the world can order their spin doctors to employ all the tricks of media psychology to counteract the brutal images of thousands of their club- and gun-wielding police attacking demonstrators. But none of this can erase the impact of the Battle of Genoa. World capitalism is in a crisis, and Genoa showed that this crisis has moved from imperialism's outer reaches, the super- oppressed countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, to the very core of the empire of global finance. A heroic militant, Carlo Giuliani, was shot and killed by police in this demonstration. His death is a milestone. It demolishes the self-serving image of Western capitalism as democratic and tolerant of dissent. It says loud and clear that these imperialist governments, which for over a century have employed the bloodiest means of repression in order to impose their racist colonial and neocolonial rule over the rest of the world, are not pacifists at home either. When the small class of billionaires who run modern society exercise "restraint" in the class struggle, it is only because they recognize that they are enormously outnumbered and must employ guile, deception and a fine-tuned program of concessions, hand in hand with repression, for their system of exploitation to survive. Genoa was a splendid example of international solidarity and coordination. Demonstrators from countries all over the globe came to confront financial institutions that, with their promotion of "free trade" dominated by powerful imperialist monopolies, have turned the dream of development into a nightmare of ruined farmers, unemployed and super- exploited workers, bankrupt governments and small businesses, and plundered, polluted lands. Many in the Migrants' March had left their homelands to escape these intolerable conditions. This anti-globalization movement is young, militant, self- sacrificing and spreading like wildfire. Its success has been so astounding, in this dreary period after the collapse of the socialist camp when capitalist greed was being endlessly trumpeted as eternal and unassailable, that it has earned the intense hatred of the guardians of empire. Since Seattle, it has grown at every step of the way. It has become so powerful that the imperialist leaders are having doubts about the effectiveness of their meetings. They have made no secret of the lengths to which they will go to keep protesters away from the meetings of the IMF, World Bank, WTO and G-8. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in just a year and a half trying to wall off the rulers from the protesters. In response, some in the movement have come up with daring and imaginative ways to breach these walls and let the oppressors feel their hot breath. At the same time, the movement has broadened its social base. In Genoa, over 200,000 marchers representing many grassroots groups and unions made it to the protests despite harassment and intimidation. Not only were the militants brutally attacked by the police-- and there were many serious injuries in addition to the assassination of Carlo Giuliani--but bloody police sweeps were carried out against the groups responsible for mass organizing, especially the Genoa Social Forum and the Independent Media Center. Now comes phase two of the capitalist state's efforts to turn this movement back. They are trying to divide it over tactics and blame the militants for the bloody repression by the police. This is nothing new. Any survey of the history of working-class struggle shows similar skullduggery. In the U.S., when the union movement first began to make headway, a police provocation at a rally for the eight-hour day in Chicago's Haymarket Square became the excuse for a massive crackdown and the hanging of four leaders of the working class movement. The conviction and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in the 1920s was another attempt to break the workers' movement by framing up these anarchist workers for an armed robbery. These two cases became notorious in U.S. labor history as examples of police frame-ups and provocations aimed at diverting and dividing the movement. And now, at a time when the specter of capitalist ruin and mass unemployment is once again haunting the world, comes a magnificent demonstration in Genoa that is being politically attacked by every organ of the establishment. Those who take seriously the struggle for freedom of speech and against exploitation, racism, sexism, gender oppression, police brutality and the despoiling of the environment should respond in two ways. First, let us congratulate this new movement for its heroic and highly successful efforts to expose this brutal system. And second, let us defend the militants who have been willing to put their bodies on the line, while pointing the finger at the real purveyors of violence: the armed, trained and politically motivated organs of the capitalist state. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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