EUROPA

From Blockupy towards a European May

As we got back from the Blockupy Action Conference, in Ukraine mass demonstrations broke out demanding for the government to sign the agreement with European institutions and start pre-accession negotiations. Is it then a matter of picking what’s best – Russian authoritarianism or the Troika dictatorship? […] The only alternative is another Europe which can only come from below, from the awareness that no reformism whatsoever is at this stage possible: we have to turn this Europe upside down, rebuild it on the basis of new constituent processes.

The Blockupy Action Conference was a new step in the path that from Amsterdam, through Athens and Rome, is leading us towards a common space for struggles in Europe, based on a shared language. A space where we meet not only to speak about what we do or what we are, but to connect local struggles and organize them at transnational level.

We arrived in Frankfurt after the Agora99 meeting held in Rome in early November, and tried approaching the conference with the same methodology: an open process to define common perspectives.

Hundreds of people from many countries gathered in the university of Frankfurt, organising and holding in common dozens of workshops and assemblies, united by the strong tension towards the construction of important days of struggles against the future opening of the ECB tower.

The new premises of the European Central Bank will be inaugurated next autumn at the presence of European and world leaders, whose decisions keep impoverishing entire regions of our continent. The Blockupy Action Conference was clear on this: we will take back the party! No Central Bank can be opened without the “participation” of all citizens suffering daily because of its policies. We wish to make it possible to go back to Frankfurt again in the autumn and reiterate our NO to austerity, to the privatization of the commons and to neoliberal policies.

We want to be clear on this: going to Frankfurt is not about conferring greater strength to German movements – it’s about the common process that will take us there and how it can make social movements stronger all over Europe, regardless of national borders.

Blockupy is not important for the event in itself, it’s not a matter of organising a counter-summit, but of making it possible for everyone to participate in opposing this Europe, giving meaning and strength to the protest that will invade the streets of the EU’s financial capital through a process that anyone experiencing the crisis can engage with.

In Frankfurt we have also made another step towards the construction of coordinated mobilisations in May. We cannot tell today if it will be a month, a week or a day, but what we are interested in connecting struggles already ongoing in the territories and already united by a common sense. We want to find a frame through which these resistances can talk to each other and get stronger.

Fighting against mini-jobs in Germany isn’t also opposing precariousness in Italy or the reform of the labour market in Portugal? At the end of May, European elections will take place: why not using those dates to reverse the meaning of Europe, rather than being crushed between pro-European technocrats and neoliberals and anti-European populists, nationalists and racists? Could the European May be up to the challenge?

From north to south, east to west, beyond the Mediterranean and the Urals… Europe is our minimum space … #democracy #commons #solidarity

#democracy #commons #solidarity