München: The Munich Volksbad Declaration

Over the last few years we have seen many changes: Managers, migrants
and social movements are on the move. Borders have shifted, unfolded,
and moved from the outside to the inside. New technologies have been
democratized; in return, they democratize society from beneath.

Although the neoliberal ideology has promised peace, wealth, and
security, peace has never been worldwide, well-being has never been for
everybody, security has always been a trompe l'oeil. From Seattle to
Genoa, creative protest and activism against the neoliberal edifice
spread in many different ways, and gained support at many levels of
society and from a broad political and social spectrum. We have fought
against the neoliberal lies for so many years that we will not shed
tears over one of the most arrogant and surrogated system humankind has
endured.

After September 11 we were constantly told that the world will never be
the same. But nothing has really changed, instead we are facing a
serious danger. The movement of movements is threatened by a return to
marginal "moral protest" in the face of an immense challenge by terror.
The openness of the movements is endangered by the emptiness of a panic
response.

Terror should not govern the social mind. Paranoia should not be
internalized. We need more freedom, not less. The religious fanatics
have declared a holy war against humanity, because they fear freedom and
friendship, and sex and love. The economic fanatics have declared their
own holy war and react with the same weapons: bombing and terror --
because they feel the smell of economic recession and fear the end of
capitalist dictatorship. The religious fanatics and the economic
fanatics are joining their efforts to make the world a hellish place
where everybody is the enemy of everybody, a place where terror
regulates all social relationships.

Power can no more control the complexity of the networked society, so
the holders of power are panicking. We should not panic with them. The
networked society is our creation and our environment. In our
environment we do not need control, we do not need security. We need
freedom and friendship.

The fanatics want to make war? Let them do that, and let them destroy
each other! But please, don't ask human beings to enter this picture.
They want us to fight their holy war; we will not. We shall transform
the global war of fanaticism into a global secession of intelligence,
creativity, and love. We shall not accept the regulations of war, and
shall organize the free circulation of innovation, ideas, and persons.
We shall develop a networked society without borders.

We are not in favor of war, we are not against war. More than ever, we
have to organize the struggles outside war, outside the organized panic.
These times are about more communication, more blended, hybrid culture,
more cities. We do not need a war economy but rather a net economy.

We call on people to gather, link up, connect. We call for social
forums, self-organization outside the craziness of extreme capitalism
and fundamentalist clones. We need more autonomy, more democracy, all
over the world. We need neither borders nor conscripted mobilization; we
need the open frontier of a common project.

Parallel to the militarisation of the global psyche, a great battle is
unfolding around the issues of intellectual property rights, patents,
labor and bio-rights, the genome as well as carbon emission in the
atmosphere. It's a battle for open sources, free software and exchange,
privacy and cryptography, for peer-to-peer networks. It's a battle for
equal rights, flexible citizenships, living wage, documents and
guaranteed income for all. Immaterial rights are meaningless without
material rights and vice versa. The battle for access for all has to be
extended to both: freedom of movement and freedom of information.

These are the new frontiers of our liberties, this is the hope to
transform the entire world, and this is what's to be done. Make world,
not war!

Franco Berardi Bifo (Bologne), Yann Moulier Boutang (Paris), Florian
Schneider (Munich), Geert Lovink (Sydney), autonome a.f.r.i.k.a. gruppe,
trabajoZero (Madrid), code flow (Sofia), Valery Rey Alzaga (Denver),
Kimi Lee (Los Angeles).

Signed by: Roberto Bui (Bologna), Aris Papatheodorou (Paris), Saskia
Sassen (Chicago), Helmut Weiss (Dortmund), Giuseppe Cocco (Rio de
Janeiro), François Matheron (Paris), Gianfranco Morosato (Verona),
Sandro Mezzadra (Genoa), Eric Alliez (Vienna), Sandro Chignola (Verona),
Jon Solomon (Taiwan), Emmanuel Videcoq (Paris), Franco Barchiesi
(Johannesburg), Alisa del Ré (Pavia), Yoshihiko Ichida (Osaka), Pascal
Houba (Brussels), Jùlio Béjar (Vigo), Brian Holmes (London), Daniel G
Andùjar (Valencia), Juan Pedro García del Campo (Madrid), Abdul-karim
Mustapha (Duke, USA), César Altamira (Buenos-Aires), Laurent Berthelot
(Nantes), Richard Barbrook (London), Christian Brutsch (Zurich), Mikhaël
Elbaz (Montreal), Charles Wolfe (Boston), Lucia Lucchesi, Gianni Cascone
(Italy), Simona Bentivogli (Italy), Franco Cascone (Italy), Annarosa
Apirani (Italy), Andrea Fumagalli (Pavia), Andrea Cusatelli, Emanuele
Pistola (Cyberzone).