archivi delle proteste globaliarchives of global protestsRADICAL DEMANDS of the people of planet earth (an open document)
RADICAL: adj. . . of or proceeding from a root . . . essential, fundamental . . . marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional
DEMAND: n . . . something claimed as due . . . a desire or need for
I
We demand what is due to us. Firstly then, who is us?
Us is the people, the human beings inhabiting this planet. We are interfaced with a machine that never says "enough". The result is a global factory.
Us is a child working in a factory in East-Asia producing shoes for Western markets. Us is a student bent over a book at night learning useless dogmas. Us is a woman patronised by a doctor. Us is a doctor working 100 hours a week because there is no money around to hire more doctors, while there are many unemployed doctors. Us is an unemployed in a big metropolis forced to compete with everybody else because "there is no work around". Us is another unemployed forced to compete with everybody else because a competitive labour market is good for the economy. Us is those people behind the statistics of the economy.
Us is a woman carrying water for miles every day because there is no water in the village, but there is electricity for the police station and there are the pipelines for the oil plants, and there are golf courses in deserts. Us is the people who need air to breathe, clear skies to dream, green fields to run in, forests to receive healthy rains, and to hide in when we feel like it. Us is a teacher who is asked to be a policeman, and grade many exams, and make students feel stupid. Us is a policeman who is supposed to be a racist and a murderer and realises that this is not a job for him. Us is an immigrant abused by the police and the customs. Us is a human being made alien, because illegal, by those in authority who believe there are no UFOs. Us is a gay being told he should be straight in order to be normal. Us is a straight been told he should update his know-how and train himself in order to be normal, and conform with the requirement of the global market and global competitition. Us is a mother going shopping in a country of the South and buying less tortillas, less vegetables and less fruit because the prices are higher so her money can go towards paying the banks of the North. Us is those who are told that debt is sacred and must be repaid. Us are those in debt because we need to consume and live in a society that uses money to get by, but concentrates money in the hands of the few. Us are the overworked because are insecure of the tomorrow. Us are those for whom there is no tomorrow. Us are the invisible, or the visibly stigmatised. Us are those who fight in the war. Us is a worker assembling batons in UK to use against the heads of workers organising strikes in Indonesia. Us is a worker on strike in Asia, in Europe, in Australia, in Africa, in the Americas. Us is a retired man and a retired woman who have been declared a burden upon society, and therefore their already small pensions have been cut still further.
Us is an indigenous man with eyes looking into the future and stories about the past. Us is an indigenous woman with eyes looking from the future into ourselves. Us is a child who lives in the present and in the future.
Us are the fragmented, the classified, the ones allocated within a hierarchy, the ones pitted against each other so that the global factory can turn and turn without end, without anybody stopping it, in an endless, meaningless motion. Us are the fragmented, isolated, atomised individuals, divided across races, sex, occupations, jobs, status, nationality, colour, sexual preferences, who by virtue of their differences are made to believe that there is no hope, that murder will continue, that starvation will continue, that rape will continue, that torture will continue, that silence will continue, that censorship will continue.
Today we say that us is the people, all the rest is a tedious residual called power.
Us is the people, the human beings inhabiting the planet. The people are interfaced with a machine that never says "enough". The result is that we, the people, now say "enough!, let's unplug ourselves from the machine and shut the global factory down". We're now starting to do things our way. It will take some time, but we have started.
Meanwhile, we empower ourselves of the things taken away from us, and demand what it is due to us.
II
We demand what is due to us. Secondly then, what do we demand?
We demand what is due to us. We demand what is ours. All that we have is life. We therefore demand our life back. Life is stolen from us in a million ways.
Life is stolen from us when we are forced to overwork; when we are underpaid; when we are not paid at all for our work; when we don't work and therefore we don't get paid; when we are sacked from a job; when we are hired into a new one; when the bank takes our home and our land; when we don't have a home or land; when we can't broadcast a radio program because there is a law against it; when the land we had squatted is taken away from us, even if the owner has so much of it; when we are told that our human needs cannot be met because of the inhuman needs of competition; when we die of diarrhoea because women's nipples have been declared obsolete technology by a food company that has promoted powder milk in areas with dirty water; when our water is made dirty with the excrement of soldiers in the military camp or of the multinational plant which has settled upstream; when the media reports the horror stories while respectfully interviewing the perpetuators; when a logging company decides that the only use of a forest is to produce timber and the people living in the forest for centuries have been declared illegal; when there seems no escape from poverty; when escape from poverty means dullness in front of the TV.
We don't demand the possible, because what is possible for power doesn't let us live with dignity. We don't demand the impossible, because nothing is impossible for those who dream, and power cannot give us dreams. Dreams are ours only. We therefore demand what is real and virtual, what is and could be, what is and is not yet.
We demand what power says it cannot afford. We demand what power says it cannot concede. We demand what power will have to afford and have to concede. We have heard enough of its lies. We cannot compromise on our lives.
There are many demands, because there are many of us. There will be more demands to come. Demands require a general rule: power fragments us, therefore our demands will build bridges among us.
Bridges are strong when the river banks are strong. Power weakens river banks one at a time. Thus the bridge collapses. We want all the river banks to get strong, all of us to be strong.
For these reasons, we demand the following:
1. Continuous and systematic reduction of working time for those of us who have a job.
In each day, each year, each decade of our work, we the people employed in the global factory produce more and more wealth. Most of this wealth is used against us to colonise our bodies and minds. Or, it is used to create instruments of destruction. Or simply to produce more and more next day, next year, next decade, while most of us in the world will not get any benefit and our natural environment is destroyed.
We look back at history, and discover that our ancestors fought terrible battles to carve out day time for themselves. Our ancestors fought heroic battles to free their lives from the unnecessary work imposed upon them by the market, by the power of money, by the power of competitive ideology.
We declare these powers inhuman.
In the last few decades we have been forced to work more in the midst of incredible technological wonders that could reduce our work load and share the benefit with all.
We say "enough!" We question the machine which never says "enough". We question power's ideology of growth for growth's sake.
We demand a continuous and systematic reduction of working time for those of us who are employed in the global factory at a given wage.
It is not a demand to reduce unemployment and increase employment, because nobody can trust what power will do when we win the right to work less. Also, it is not a demand for a 30, 35 or 38 hours working week. No, since social productivity increases, the demand is for a continuous and systematic reduction in the working week, every week, every year, every decade. It is a way for us, the people, to introduce a basic principle of liberation from meaningless and unnecessary work.
This demand has at its first objective the abolition of the horror of horrors. The reduction of meaningless and unnecessary working time as a principle of human liberation implies that we denounce and demand the abolition of life time stolen from our children. No to forced child labour. No to slave labour.
2. Social wage (taking the form of guaranteed income for everybody and public spending in health, education, infrastructures to minimise invisible work).
Many of us work in the global factory but are not called employed. The work that many of us are doing is therefore invisible. Yet, in the last two decades neoliberal strategies have been targeting this invisible work, and have made it more burdensome.
Who'll take care of that child if the kindergarten has been shut? Who'll take care of that old man if the hospital won't keep him in observation because no more beds are available? Who'll walk for miles to fetch the water for the entire family if no water is available in the village? The invisible work of women, in the metropolises and in the fields, North and South has always been high, and now is growing with the growth of cuts in social spending in many different forms everywhere in the globe. The invisible work of women is growing with the growth of women's poverty, marginalization, and humiliation by patronising bureaucrats that power decided should have a say over their lives.
There are other invisible workers. The unemployed of many countries must perform the most tedious, unfulfilling, and utterly unnecessary work: to incessantly look for jobs. If they don't do that they are stigmatised and humiliated, their small dole withdrawn where they had one, their lives checked, scanned, and judged upon by patronising bureaucrats. This endless search for jobs has become an end in itself; to keep our minds occupied, to prevent some of us thinking about alternative ways we could all live; to make us compete with each other, which keeps everybody's wage down and make everybody's working harder.
The beast of power feeds on our unnecessary sweat and reciprocal animosity.
There are other invisible workers. Neoliberal strategies restructured the ugly large factories that up to the 1970s pulled together workers who learned to fight together. To cope with these struggles, power fragmented us and spread us around, casualized us, eliminated income security obtained in the past and made the access to income temporary through temporary work. Power calls this "flexibility". We call it flexible exploitation. Temporary and casualized workers are invisible. Temporary and casualized workers have no rights, have little wages, are dismissed any time the market machine says so. Power believes temporary, casualized and poor workers, by virtue of being so much fragmented, dispersed, and isolated, cannot get together and organise.
There are other invisible workers. Power has a name for our brain, our imagination, our dreams, our aspirations. Power calls these moving forces of life "human capital". In so doing, power insults our humanity, by equating it to dead things, instruments of production, inputs, raw materials. Yet, power treats us like all this in schools and universities around the world. It does so by confining imagination and dreams to what is sellable. It redraws imagination and dreams through teaching us discipline and competition, through exams and deadlines. Human capital, is human and is capital. Of humanity it retains imagination and dreams. As capital it deploys the chains over imagination and dreams. It can do so by enforcing poverty on the many of us who are students. Power believes poor students combined with strict deadlines and boring syllabuses will not have time to think for themselves.
There are other invisible workers. Power tells the small farmers, the truck drivers, the petty traders and most of the poor self-employed that they are free, that they are their own boss. Yet power's right hand, the global market, intervenes like a factory foreman to remind them that what power's mouth says is a lie. They are not free, they are not their own boss. They are thrown into ruin or they will soon be if they stop running, if they stop competing, if they stop moonlighting, if they stop putting their prices down, if they don't take on another debt, if they stop repaying that other debt, if they refuse to become the enforcers of their own poverty. Few may escape from this destiny: they are the mirror of a false happiness that keeps all the rest running.
For these and other invisible workers the demand for a reduction in the working week is meaningless. Other ways must be found to reduce tedious and unnecessary work and increase access to the huge amount of social wealth already created and produced every year.
For this reason we demand that all of us receive a guaranteed income which is sufficient to meet basic needs. In this way we want to reduce the conditions of blackmail imposed on many of us by the market. We demand a guaranteed wage that allows us to refuse low paid work and fulfil our basic needs in a dignified way. We demand a guaranteed wage that pays the invisible work of women and allows them to reduce it, as well as to empower themselves vis-a-vis despotic men holding the purse. We demand a guaranteed wage that pays the invisible work of students and allow them to have less pressure and more time to think for themselves, and to imagine different ways of being. We demand a guaranteed wage that reduces the useless work of the unemployed called job-hunting, thus putting a stop upon market pressures to reduce everybody's wage, thus allowing them to reject the stigma of the excluded, and empowering them to take whatever life path they choose.
For this reason we demand the reversal of neoliberal policies aimed at the privatisation of health, with a corresponding increase in both the price we have to pay and in the burden for those of us, especially women, who are asked to do unpaid caring work in the homes. This demand is therefore to reverse this strategy, recognising health as something to which everyone is entitled free of charge and as something about which everyone (including supporters of alternative medicine) is entitled to have a say on and, consequently, empowered by society to do so.
For this reason we demand the reversal of neoliberal policies in education. These policies are aimed at gearing the production and the communication of knowledge to the restricted aim of efficiency and competitiveness. We declare instead knowledge an essential element of human metabolism, and therefore we demand it must be free of charge for any individual, freely created, freely communicated. This is the only way it can be put at the service of humanity, its needs and aspirations, and not at the service of power. We are against the factory of knowledge. We also demand the recognition of education as something which everyone (including supporters of non-market geared education) is entitled to have a say on and, consequently, empowered by society to do so.
For this reason we demand the immediate repeal of structural adjustment policies and the implementation of social spending in infrastructures controlled by grassroots communities. This is aimed at the minimisation of invisible work every where in the world.
3. All inclusive rights and right of free mobility.
Power destroys the bridges that people create. Power is afraid of bridges among the diverse. Power tolerates diversity only to the extent diversity is packaged and sold as a commodity in gift shops and museums around the world. Therefore, power tolerates diversity only to the extent conformity takes its place.
The basic principles:
a) Power uses diversity in order to divide and classify, to establish who has the right and who has not, to arrange humanity along a ladder to keep us apart. Power uses "rights" to destroy bridges that people create among themselves.
b) Power shivers in front of people's mobility, yet power moves around with no control in the form of capital. Capital move to destroy bridges. Bridges among the diverse are necessary conditions of anything that can be considered a people's "victory". Any people's victory gained from our struggle is always followed by power's attempt to reverse it. Capital moves to destroy bridges.
Illustrations of the basic principles:
a) An hypothetical victory of guaranteed income in any area of the world will be followed by power's attempt to define who is entitled to it, who is the citizen. A victory on the health and education front will be followed by power's attempt to define who has free access and who has not. An advance for humanity would be turned into a further instrument of division. Power destroys bridges that people create.
b) Higher wages and better conditions of work and life in the First World mean that capital will attempt to use more immigrant labour for worse and low paid jobs. Or it will move out of the first world and go in those areas of the South, and, after having dispossessed farmers and turned fishing communities in industrial estates, it can "create jobs" and pay lower wages. When people struggle in areas of the South, capital moves and go deeper South, expropriate other farmers, turns sacred indigenous land into mines and export processing zones.
Capital moves and destroys bridges. Power can succeed in its strategy to the extent people are not allowed to move, to the extent immigrant are made illegal and called, like aliens, non-human. Power forces people to move and yet is afraid of people moving.
The people's strategy.
We aim at preventing power's manouvring. People's strategy is inclusive, not exclusive. We therefore demand:
1. Free mobility across the globe to all.
2 The principle of guaranteed income must be based on a territorial concept of citizenship: that is, whoever happens to be in the territory where this right is won he or she gets it, independently of their nationality or legal status! This criterion is fundamental if we want to avoid the use of guaranteed income as a tool to recreate a wage hierarchy between those who have access and those who don't have access to it and if we want to fight social exclusion.
As our demand for reduction in working time lead to the demand for guaranteed income to meet the needs of those of us who are non-employed and unwaged workers, so the demand for citizen's income lead to the demand of territorial rights (with no nationality discrimination) in order to meet the needs of immigrants, etc. and avoid further fragmentation along a new, wider, hierarchy.
This territorial rights also applies to other social functions such as health and education.
3 To the scare mongers who then will waive the flag of "what will we do with the consequent invasion of immigrants" we can reply in two ways:
first, with the reminder that no human being is illegal;
second, with the invitation to join us in the struggle for the abolition of the debt of the South which we demand together with the closure of IMF and World Bank, and the immediate financing of policies similar in spirit of those proposed above.
3. Food and energy.
a)
People are still dying of hunger, they lie down and die next to warehouse filled with food, they die while the export accountants sum up the gains obtained in precious foreign currency, they die while they are asked to produce packaged crops for export. The people don't need the package. The people don't eat precious foreign currency and are suspicious about its ability to bring them food and freedom. The elderly tell stories of starvation in the midst of plenty that goes back hundreds years. The people would rather see that all the people have the power to feed themselves.
We therefore demand the progressive abolition of the monopoly of great corporations on world agriculture through the redistribution of land to landless peasantry who will autonomously decide the use of them, we demand the reduction of cash-crop strategies and the priority to food self-sufficiency.
As immediate measure, we demand clear publicity of the genetically engineered food products (like soy-beans and corn) and its derivatives. We also demand the constitution of and maximum publicity to register of the horrors aginst humanity and nature of the world's agri-business industry. For example, a detailed list of corporations using genetic engineering (like Monsanto), or promoting powder milk responsible of the death of thousands of children in the South (as Nestle) or other such horrors.
We demand that in any school, place of work, neighbourhood, churche, prison, library and any other place of aggregation, such a register be available.
b)
The people wants autonomy and freedom. Much of this autonomy and freedom depends on the ability to move, on the ability to create, on the ability to communicate, on the ability to produce. Much of this ability is today accompanied by pollution and destruction, fragmentation, isolation, exploitation. Much of our attempts to build a new world and to move within it depends on our ability to access a source of energy, independently from the power of great corporations or any other body external to the people themselves.
We therefore demand the progressive abolition of the monopoly of big corporations on the production and distribution of energy, which is wasteful, polluting, smelly, dangerous, murderous, the object of war and of the killing of millions, and constraints the lives of all of us. We demand maximum development of renewable and self-manageable sources of energy. We demand political prices for easy access by everybody to these sources of renewable and self-manageable energy.
As immediate measure, we also demand the constitution of and maximum publicity to a register of the horrors against humanity and against nature of the world's energy industry. For example exposure of anti-human rights and polluting activities of corporations colluding with dictatorial regimes such as Shell in Nigeria and BP in Columbia.
We demand that in any school, place of work, neighbourhood, church, prison, library and any other place of aggregation, such a register be available.
4. Direct access to the means of production and communication.
Whatever our struggles succeed in obtaining, power will try to take it away from us. We have already encountered this danger before, and spelled out some of our counter-strategies. But the danger is even more insidious. Power uses the market as objective presence outside our control, a presence that conditions any of our activities.
We must learn to govern ourselves, we must learn to become master of our destiny. We must learn to ignore the alien force of money and the market with new social practices. We must develop practices based on the patient construction of social nexus not mediated by money, weaving relation among different local productions and alternative communication. We are already doing so.
Also in this case we cannot have many illusions, but we can have dreams and sharp strategic thinking. It is true that the dismantlement of the welfare state in many regions and the reduction in social spending every where has been accompanied by the self-activity of people, the seizure of land, the practices of self-help, the seizure of opportunities for new collective projects. However, power is now flirting with many of these experiments, as it did with workers' co-ops in the past, and calls these experiments coming from the grassroots "third sector". We do not trust power's flirting. In the current circumstances it attempts to recuperate our activity and use it to produce a buffer to the social devastation produced by unemployment, poverty, social exclusion, low paid jobs, etc. Power is afraid that its own creation can disrupt the working of the machine. Power flirts with our solidarity and humanity in order to make it working for its own purpose. It gives us grants if we confine ourselves into a role compatible with its policies. It bless us, if we are willing to recognise its inhuman market might as legitimate.
We are aware of this, and must go beyond the market-collusion of this "third sector". A third way is only possible beyond the market and beyond the state. A third way is only possible in self-organisation, and self-organisation needs direct access to the means of production, distribution and exchange.
Therefore, we want to talk about wealth, how it is created, what is available, haw can we redistribute it, how can we re-organise it, how can we expropriate it when it is concentrated in few hands and make it available for new social practices.
If the current power's neoliberal strategies talk about "privatisation", our strategy cannot counterpoise statalisation to it, but socialisation. Where to start from? We start from the beginning and from the humanly obvious, from the inhuman waste produced by power. Thus, we demand:
De-criminalisation of the right of squatting of non utilised land, empty building and social expropriation of means of production non utilised.
The production for profit implies an enormous waste, not only of consumer goods, but also of factories, machines, warehouses, lands and building. The processes of restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, the continuous running of capital of the 1990s have turned "wastelands" around cities in all world. Furthermore, the speculation on the price of land and of the building is based on the abandonment of these, while many people does not have a house or a piece of land, while many of us could utilise the space of a non used warehouse in order to produce cultural, social and otherwise self-organised productive activities. This demand is therefore against the capitalist waste and against speculation, and at the same time it offers us a platform within which we can start thinking about alternative uses of means of production of different kind and open ways towards the constitution of new identities de-linked as much as possible from the capitalist market.
We also demand:
Universal right to the means of social communication.
Us, the people, are interfaced with a machine that never says enough. The result is a global factory. The interface is made possible by the great social nexus of our time, money. Money allows us to substitute itself to direct communication of people, and to mediate our interaction with each other. Thus, we turn into commodities. But the people often say enough of this. They build bridges, and refuse to be things, refuse to be commodities. They talk to each other instead of having money to do the talking. They tell each other stories. They talk about actions, and ways forward. Then power deploys the police, the army, the law, secret services, hired assassins. But most of all, it deploys lies. There are many lies. Lies are things said which are not true. Lies are the many things which are not said and left out of the picture. Both lies are spread by powerful bodies which manage the world's media in different ways.
In this way, power's attempt to model our many cultures and our minds is based on the almost total monopoly on the means of communication. This monopoly is not broken by the substitution of one media master with two or three, or ten. A dictatorship is still a dictatorship when there are more than one sharing the role of dictator. A part from the case of cyberspace, which is a terrain in which there exists a certain degree of people's autonomy in communication, radio, newspapers, TV are in the hands of global capital in collusion with restrictive laws that prevent the creation of non commercial and self-organised radio and TV. This in a situation in which the production of music, recorded interviews, stories, images, has become increasingly easy and potentially open to everybody. The result is misinformation on people needs and aspirations, misinformation on people's struggles around the world, and cultural colonisation.
The only way to get rid of lies is that the people has free access to the means that allow them to talk and tell their stories, to organise, to imagine new worlds. The only way people can continue build bridges among themselves is that they talk to each other, and listen to each other. The building of a new world that include the many worlds, the building of new inclusive identities necessarily passes through the communication among us.
III
We demand what is due to us. Third then, why do we demand it?
We demand what we demand in order to discover each other in our differences, as part of a collective that power attempts to interface to the machine that never says enough.
We are demanding what we demand only in order to shift the balance of power away from power, away from the machine, away from the global factory.
We demand what we demand only in order to empower ourselves of what is ours. We empower ourselves of what is ours so as we exercise power in any aspect of our lives.
Much more than what we demand is ours. But we start little by little, so as we gain strength in the process, and acquire confidence in ourselves.
We demand what we demand to continue our struggles on a different ground.
We demand what we demand as a way to say enough to the machine that never says enough and to build a world that containts the many worlds.
We demand what we demand because we are working for a revolution that makes revolution possible.
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