BY JAMES VASSILOPOULOS
GENOA — "Capitalism cannot be made to be more human, it must be overthrown", Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire leader and Euro MP Alain Krivine told a rally of 2000 which preceded the mass mobilisation of 300,000 on July 21.
The rally was a joint effort of the French LCR and the British Socialist Workers Party, a show of unity and strength, a sign that socialists have found a renewed confidence to struggle and to win.
Krivine said that this new anti-capitalist movement means the defeats of the last 20 years, from Thatcherism to the counter-revolution in Nicaragua, are over.
Now socialists are not seen as "zombies", as they were 20 years ago, he said. While there was no new international, rather a network of socialist parties, if the socialist movement avoided sectarianism and opportunism it will thrive.
Opinion polls in France show that 60% of the population are against corporate globalisation, Krivine reported. The French media even reported the direct actions differently from the Italian media: they admitted the police repression. Even French President Jacques Chirac was forced to say that the people must be listened to.
The times were more favourable than for decades, he said: the LCR and another socialist party, Lutte Ouvriere, won more than a million votes in French elections, a historic first, there have so far been two European-wide meetings of the far-left, and, most of all, socialist parties were striving to provide leadership for the new anti-capitalist movement.
A Greek socialist outlined how opinion polls in Greece had shown that 54% of people support the anti-globalisation protesters and only 10% oppose them. Fifty-nine percent of people associate globalisation with the rule of multinational companies.
The SWP's representative voiced outrage at the July 20 killing of Carlo Giuliani: "guns are not like sticks and stones. One protestor is already dead, and one person [nearly] died in Gothenburg."
The G8 protests are the "European Seattle", he said. We must reject the old world of Thatcher, Blair and Bush and "build [the] optimism of the struggle, of Prague, Genoa and Quebec."
"Revolutions are back on the agenda, it may take months or years, but it will involve millions of people."