--------- Оригинално съобщение --------
От: Alex Foti <alex.foti[at]gmail.com>
До: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net <nettime-l[at]bbs.thing.net>
Тема: <nettime> ACT 4 RADICAL EUROPE
Дата: 15.01.07 16:59
> ACT 4 RADICAL EUROPE (A4RE, "ayforee")
> manifesto for a transnational political association acting for social
> and ecological justice
>
> WAR IS RAGING, DYSTOPIA IS LOOMING
>
> The early 21st century is dark and barbaric, as war, inequality,
> irrationality, xenophobia, and ecological collapse spread unchecked
> over the planet, and over our troubled region of the world, Europe,
> governed by the EU and the nation-states, i.e. by the present
> (dis)Union of Euro and non-Euro states, of old and new member
> countries.
>
> Bushism and political islamism have reshaped world politics; India and
> China have reshaped the global economy. South America has broken free
> of the Monroe Doctrine, but political Europe is in shambles: the
> French-Dutch no has left it shaken and hollow at its center, while
> rising social conflict and disillusion are questioning its viability
> as a political entity. Today, the European space is traversed by
> powerful capital and migration flows (the former set free by the
> Single Market, the latter differentially discriminated and persecuted
> as Schengen dictates), which are conservatively managed by a
> neoliberal technocracy that has feeble, if not negative, democratic
> legitimacy.
>
> The old Spinelli-inspired and Monnet-initiated federalist project of
> catholic/socialist orientation has become a spent force in the 21st
> century. A new European cosmopolitanism of radical-democratic
> (rad-dem) orientation must take its place, with horizontal federalism,
> social action, green politics, and gay rights at its core. Otherwise,
> the nation-state will rear its ugly head: strong-armed nationalists
> and right-wing populists already are a serious threat in many
> countries of Europe.
>
> On the other hand, neither the socialdemocratic, nor the communist or
> the ecologist parties of the Left have been able to provide democratic
> answers to the gigantic challenges posed by economic polarization and
> geopolitical instability, the full spread of networking and
> digitalization technologies, the rise of biotech with its ethical and
> societal consequences, and last but foremost, accelerating climate
> change and environmental damage.
>
>
> SOCIAL STATES OF EUROPE
>
> The spectres of pauperization and exclusion are haunting the people of
> Europe. Over the last twenty years, precarity and inequality have
> broken the Christian/Social Democratic compromise of the postwar
> period on which modern Europe was founded =96 namely, rising incomes for
> employees and rising power for their unions, in exchange for
> acceptance of the capitalist system =96 and have left in its wake the
> rise of immense corporate and private wealth, next to escalating
> exclusion and social angst. Acting for radical Europe means first of
> all mobilizing decisively against social inequality, labor
> precarization, and the arrogance of the elites and their privileges,
> as millions have recently done in France and Denmark.
>
> In Europe today, the central struggle against neoliberalism is the
> fight against precarity. The conflict of students, and service and
> knowledge workers against precarious working and social conditions is
> politically explosive. It bespeaks of another Europe, with fundamental
> social rights at its core. Income security and cultural autonomy are
> to become crucial foundations for a new European welfare system. This
> is our interpretation of flexicurity, in marked contrast with the
> workfarist proposals that abound in the Green Paper on labor
> flexibility and social security recently issued by the European
> Commission. To counter the minimal social Europe favored by liberals,
> we need to spread freedom of thought and action, promote cultural
> subversion and social conflict, so to give rise to the radically
> democratic Europe that national oligarchies steadfastly refuse.
>
> Faced with social ebullience and cultural effervescence, national
> governments hysterically limit the freedom of expression online and on
> the streets, in a climate of state-induced fear and paranoia inviting
> ever more draconian regimes of law and order. To fight this
> reactionary tendency, libertarian principles in information and
> communication have to be constantly asserted online and offline, and
> the freedom of movement and protest constantly practiced and defended
> against securitarian aggressions.
>
> The persecution of immigrants and refugees at the gates of and within
> Europe is a burning shame for all self-respecting democrats:
> transnational solidarity and transethnic alliances with migrants are
> moral duties for European radicals fighting for an enlarged idea of
> Europe, which cannot but include also the people once subjected to
> rapacious European imperial rule.
>
> Queer activism is rising in Europe and the rest of the world, but
> trans/gender rights are under unprecedented threat by reactionary
> religious establishments everywhere. In spite of the achievements of
> modern feminism, women are still intimidated, abused and killed in
> native and immigrant families alike, and discriminated in the public
> sphere and at the workplace. Gender equality and the fight against
> homophobia must become top priorities for European radical movements.
>
> Today, Europe's multiethnic youth is economically discriminated and
> increasingly alienated. The European younger generation is caught
> between unemployment and precarity, and unable to attain basic social
> goods (home, higher education, welfare etc). Gerontocracy of the
> elites and consequent privileges for the rentier classes are killing
> Europe's future by unfairly burdening European young families and
> excluding the creative class from economic and political decisions.
>
> Corporations not only resort to large-scale outsourcing and
> offshoring, as financial markets dictate, but more crucially, they
> seek to exploit the cognitive and relational skills of people, as they
> enclose the natural and social commons. Today's economy makes
> individual life increasingly dependent on the market, which in turns
> aggravates social fragmentation and ecological alienation. European
> radicalism must challenge the new hierarchies created by European
> capitalism and finally break its inegalitarian spell, by fostering
> biopolitical creativity and social insurgency. We must fight for new
> conceptions of welfare and for new concepts of the common. It is time
> for the precarious multitude to shift power away from the elites and
> remake the social landscape of Europe.
>
> Financial and corporate power is still formidable in Europe, and
> tenaciously defended by monetarist Trichet and freemarketeer Barroso,
> but has lost the aura of credibility and indeed invincibility it had
> in the 1990s, thanks to the manifold pressures of the global justice
> movement. The global movement for social and environmental justice
> which developed in Europe with the huge protests
> at Prague, Goteborg, Genoa, peaked on Feb 15, 2003 with the truly
> giant demonstrations against the invasion of Irak in Europe's major
> cities, but has been declining since, although new radical movements
> seem to have taken the relay over the course of 2006.
>
> The emergence of a transnational mayday network against the
> precarization of youth and persecution of migrants has been a partial
> exception to the decline of Europe's movement against corporate and
> financial globalization. Disseminated in Europe's major cities, the
> movement against precarity represents one of the most potent attempts
> to renew the ideals and tactics of political and social dissent in the
> EU.
>
> THE IDEA OF RADICAL EUROPE
>
> In an age of intellectual obscurantism and global dimming, we want to
> go back to the radical spirit of the Enlightenment and the
> revolutionary birth of democracy. In Europe, through the centuries,
> the very idea of political philosophy and thus the form the state
> should take has been decisively shaped and altered by collective
> action and social conflict. Our idea of radical Europe takes
> inspiration from the great moments in Europe's history of democratic
> mobilization and social liberation, which we summarize here.
>
> First of all, the democratic and radical currents, such as the
> Levellers and the Diggers, of the English Revolution, and especially
> of the French Revolution, such as the Jacobins and the Sans-Culottes;
> later, the secret societies that were sworn enemies of the Holy
> Alliance; the Chartist movement pushing for universal suffrage and the
> rise of trade unionism; revolutionary 1848 and the idea of a
> non-dynastic Young Europe; 1871 and the communards' brave experiment
> with a self-governing urban democracy of elected officials; the
> 1890-1920 period, which saw great hopes and major defeats for the
> radical democratic left in a Continent torn by general strikes, rocked
> by the women's suffrage movement, sucked dry by the ghastly trenches
> of nationalist war, and finally torn by bolshevist revolutions and
> reactionary counter-revolutions; the socialist Second International
> and revolutionary syndicalism held the scene before the Great War,
> replaced after 1917 by the more sectarian communist Third
> International and revolutionary Leninism (which soon turned into
> totalitarian Stalinism); 1936 was the year of the social and electoral
> victory of the French Popular Front and of Franco's aggression against
> the republican, socialist and anarchist Spanish Popular Front; it was
> also the time when European and international fascism first unleashed
> genocidal war in Europe and Asia: only a global popular front could
> manage to finally defeat nazis and fascists in 1945, after immense
> suffering and through civil wars of liberation. From the ashes of
> fascist defeat and the horrors of total war, the political idea of
> Europe first emerged out of European resistance movements, whose ideas
> where distilled in the Ventotene Manifesto for a federal and peaceful
> Europe.
>
> After the war, European economic, and then political, institutions
> started to consolidate. 1956 was the decisive starting point, since,
> by proclaiming the end of European imperialism at Suez, it accelerated
> the birth of European federalism, and, by revealing Stalin's crimes,
> in unleashed Eastern Europe's democratic anti-Soviet rebellion. In
> 1968, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Prague simultaneously rebelled, setting off
> the explosion of juvenile rebellion and identity politics in the 70s
> (hippies, students, women, gays, punks, oppressed ethnic groups and
> peoples), and ultimately defeating the cold-war, two-bloc partition of
> Europe with the 1989 democratic uprising in Berlin, prepared by the
> antinuclear movements of that decade. The Fall of the Wall eventually
> led to the implosion of
> Russian communism and its geopolitical bloc, and thus set the stage
> for the launch for the Single Currency in Western Europe and
> enlargement to the East for the whole of the EU. It also enabled
> free-market zealots to cage the political soul of Europe, as
> large-scale privatizations and spending cuts ravaged the 1990s. But in
> the early 2000s, this nefarious policy scenario is finally coming
> apart at the seams.
>
>
> WE, EUROPEAN RADICALS
>
> We are proud inheritors of the history of radical Europe and of
> Europe's global justice movements. We have absorbed Europe's
> traditions of democratic politics and critical philosophy. We are
> descendants of the secular approach to reason and nature, of all the
> strands in socialist thinking and progressive politics that have
> invariably opposed all forms of authoritarianism
> and totalitarianism. We are the children of ecological and
> post-patriarchal Europe and it is from this radical heritage that we
> want to build a shared rad-dem political culture that can make people
> experience meaning and purpose back again in their lives and environments.
>
> We declare ourselves radical Europeans. We want to fight to assert the
> fundamental human, civil, social, gender, information rights of the
> multitudes living in or coming to Europe. We will work toward a
> rebirth of the European project on principles of radical democratic
> participation: from intellectual dissent to social protest, from civil
> disobedience to labor picketing, from consumer boycott to media
> campaigning. We declare nationalism, clericalism and fundamentalism
> our foes and enemies. We denounce political neoconservatism and
> economic neoliberalism as untenable and immoral philosophies and ways
> of government.
>
> We are the generation the tore down Berlin's wall and went underground
> when Thatcher, Wojtyla and Reagan tried to restore family values. We
> are the harbingers of the Internet revolution and socioeconomic
> globalization. We are the low-wage/low-cost generation, still
> dominated by elites inherited from the cold war, who would rather turn
> Europe into a giant Switzerland, where shady dictators and mafia
> bosses can safely put their money, while immigrants, even those born
> in Europe, are excluded from citizenship.
>
> We are Europe's creative class. We are fierce enemies of private
> monopoly in technology and knowledge industries and are enraged by
> unprecedented levels of economic concentration in all sectors of the
> economy. The freedom of circulation of knowledge demands the end of
> authoritarian enforcement of copyright law, which has been
> strengthened over the last decade to protect the vested interests of
> media conglomerates. Today, intellectual property stands in the way of
> cultural freedom and economic innovation. Radical europeans demand the
> abolition of the patent system, particularly on pharmaceuticals: the
> profits of Big Pharma stand in the way of the survival of millions in
> the South of the world.
>
> The right of copying and sharing must be guaranteed for all
> individuals acting without a profit motive. Similarly, filesharing and
> p2p networks must be freed from police harassment and persecution.
> With the excuse of global terrorism, freedom of communication on the
> Net is being drastically curtailed by increased state monitoring and
> surveillance. Just as we denounce state intrusion over the Web, we
> oppose the systematic use of camera surveillance, which does nothing
> to prevent crime, but violates our privacy and makes all of us
> potential suspects.
>
> Since the 1990s, we have been uncompromising anticorporate activists
> mounting all kinds of actions and campaigns to fight social
> discrimination and environmental destruction. We strenuously oppose
> and denounce the economic interests that are accomplices in the
> reactionary and ecocidal turn the world has taken. But capitalism is
> not an unchanging social relation; in our view, history is progressive
> or regressive according to the periodically shifting balance of social
> and ideological forces among capital and labor, state and society. The
> magnitude of the historical challenge before us --staving off
> environmental and social disaster-- is such, and the risk of malignant
> social mutations and political bifurcations is so great, that we need
> not only to further the social and political demands of the
> creative/service class of which we are expression, but also to engage
> the progressive sectors of the European middle classes.
>
> We are not a political party and we are not a union, although some of
> our members could run for office or be union delegates. We intend to
> be a Pan-European association giving expression to a demoradical
> social and political movement. We want to go beyond the limits of
> anarchist spontaneity and communist nostalgia. Horizontalism and
> egalitarianism are not sectarian totems, but ideals than need to be
> transformed into common practice and legal protection. On the other
> hand, queer, ecologist, cyber subjectivities need to find a larger
> social and political horizon to truly challenge established state and
> corporate power. We will not be above putting pressure on all
> progressives, socialists, environmentalists in the European Parliament
> to advance socially and ecologically radical solutions to the current
> European impasse. But our social action and political advocacy will be
> fiercely independent, based as they will be on non-violent direct
> action and autonomous intellectual elaboration. Most of all, we will
> be free of any reverence (rather, full of irreverence) with respect to
> any parties or unions, churches or lobbies.
>
> Against the liberal-democratic, or worse national-democratic, policies
> for Europe that promote inequality and subservience to US militarism,
> we propose a new radical horizon for Europe capable of creating a new
> political culture and social landscape. We proclaim ourselves wobbly
> and queer, peace-loving, tree-hugging and computer-savvy,
> democratically active radicals of Europe.
>
>
>
> WHAT'S NEEDED TO BUILD RADICAL EUROPE:
> A sociopolitical organization that uses all possible resources+tactics
> to enforce political and cultural liberty, social and ecological
> justice across Europe!
>
> OUR BASIC AIMS
>
> To create a peer-to-peer radical and ecological democracy in Europe.
> To put the energy of wind and sun, and the collective power of
> knowledge at the service of expanding social activation and economic
> transformation.
> To affirm the secular, feminist, solidaristic identity of Europe.
> To open the borders of Europe to all cultures and peoples.
> To promote stronger European political integration and horizontal
> federalism and regionalism around these values.
> To seek transnational partnerships and cooperate in global
> mobilizations with like-minded radical democratic movements in the
> rest of the world.
>
> To promote a new global trade system, in alliance with the progressive
> forces in South America and India.
> To get Europe out of NATO, so that it can project its international
> weight for just peace and international justice, such as the
> protection of people from genocide.
> To protest against all human rights violations, and promote solidarity
> with democratic movements facing repression worldwide.
> To expand the role for public health, public education, public space.
> To protect immigrants from persecution and discrimination.
> To secure a European basic income as the keystone a truly European
> welfare system.
> To set a European minimum wage, uphold unionization rights and the
> right to strike, as the only re-equalizing forces on the European
> labor market today.
>
> To ensure freedom of expression and communication and protect the free
> exchange of information, knowledge, culture online and offline.
> To ensure neurochemical freedom against state intrusion and obtain the
> legalization of THC.
> To assert gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights, such as the
> right to display queer pride and spread non-heterosexual culture, and
> not be discriminated in any sphere of life, including the right to
> marry and adopt children.
> To reassert the rights of all unmarried couples to family life and
> social benefits.
>
> To work toward greener, kid-friendly, bike-oriented, car-hostile
> cities, by adopting alternatives to fossil fuels in heating,
> transportation, energy production.
> To plant trees and re-grow forests in the urbanized lands of Europe.
> To end factory farming, unsustainable fishing and intensive
> agriculture in Europe, and promote organic agriculture through a
> complete reversal of the tenets of the Common Agricultural Policy,
> whose funds need to be diverted to finance European welfare measures.
> To promote informed and democratic discussion around science and
> technology, in order to build a strong demoradical position on
> bioethics and other scientific issues affecting society.
> To reduce carbon emissions by half, so to drastically decrease the
> fossil energy content of consumption and wealth and limit global
> warming, which is the only viable way to survive as a cosmopolitan,
> digital civilization on a planet with limited land and water
> resources, fast-heating atmosphere and oceans, and rapid biodiversity
> loss.
>
> To give the European Commission a new role: that of European
> Government, expression of the European Parliament, accountable to and
> petitionable by the European Public.
> To promote pan-European referenda on constitutional issues, EU
> directives and legislation.
> To reform the European Court, so that it can be directly addressed in
> lieu of national justice in case of the violation of European
> fundamental rights.
> To levy a European corporate tax and a European carbon tax.
> To return to keynesian, expansionary fiscal and monetary policies,
> thus abrogating the Stability Pact and its provisions.
> To drastically reform European monetary policy =96 the euro is rightly
> unpopular: it has cut the purchasing power of the majority, and has
> further worsened European income distribution =96 by changing the
> statutes and policies of the European Central Bank, and by promoting
> the diffusion of alternative local currencies, which can fund
> localized basic income and wealth creation, through interest-free
> loans facilitating the emergence of sustainable regional economies.
>
>
> A POSSIBLE ARCHITECTURE FOR ACT 4 RADICAL EUROPE (A4RE)
>
> To achieve these aims, Act 4 Radical Europe (A4RE) is a federal,
> transnational, umbrella organization operating at the urban and
> European levels, taking the form of a card-carrying, fee-charging
> European association composed of four autonomous but networked
> departments, coordinated by electronically electable and removable
> delegates to be drawn from the association's constituency. New depts
> can be added at will, mirroring new radical issues and subjects
> emerging in European society. Any city in Europe and the Mediterranean
> can join A4RE: it will be considered a subhub, if features any or some
> of the following 4 departments, and a hub if it hosts them all. Hubs
> and subhubs contribute federal delegates and resources to A4RE for its
> actions of political and social pressures at the European level, while
> networking autonomously on metropolitan and
> transnational projects of their choosing.
>
> These could be A4RE's initial four deparments/subnetworks:
>
> THE PRECARIOUS SYNDICATE "the syndicate": a social advocacy and
media
> subvertising group assisting temp workers and part-timers, pink
> collars and networkers, in their struggles against governments and
> corporations. Also provides legal counseling and political lobbying
> against precarity at the Union and state levels.
>
> EUROPEAN FUNDAMENTALS "the fundamentals": a civic and legal
advocacy
> group defending, before the courts and public opinion, the right to
> protest and civil disobedience, the rights of first-generation
> Europeans and migrants, queer and women's rights, the cyber rights of
> free speech on
> the Web and the cell phone.
>
> ECOACTIVE CONSPIRACY "the conspiracy": a network of direct
action
> collectives practicing urban ecology, permaculture, barefoot
> economics, guerrilla gardening, environmental hacks and protests, and
> the like.
>
> FUCK YOUR THINK TANK: a hub of intellectual discussion and social
> science research around demoradical europe: movements, subcultures,
> conflicts, policies, borders, cartographies and realities of power,
> geopolitics, transnational alliances, creative+service class, and
> other politically relevant issues and questions.
>
>
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