The long and disastrous neoliberal cycle is being exhausted with the same blood and violence with which it began.
This neoliberal cycle has systematically devastated the environment, impoverished daily life, reduced wages, precarised labor, privatised public services, permanently incited to war all against all.
This cycle began in 1973 when North American ideologues used a murderer whose name was Pinochet to destroy the democratic experiment led by Salvador Allende, elected by the majority of Chilean people and killed by the fascists who wanted to defend profit economy.
Global liberalism, which is (re)presented as a humanitarian and democratic force, was born thanks to military dictatorship and authoritarian violence. In the Thatcher and Reagan years, the counterrevolution experienced in Chile and Argentina was exported throughout the West as economic violence and brutal repression of all attempts at social defense.
We should not forget that the philosophy of Neoliberalism is basically based on the same principles as Hitler’s Nazism: natural selection, the imposition of the law of the strongest in the social sphere, the elimination of all differences between society and the jungle.
This Nazi-Liberalist philosophy was imposed on the world through the elimination of the workers’ vanguard and the massive restructuring of production; through the privatization of schools, the health system, public transport and the occupation of the media by corporate bosses.
Forty years of Nazi-liberalist violence have led to the collapse of the very building of democracy, to the depletion of the planet’s physical resources, to climate catastrophe and to the massive spread of aggressive and even suicidal psychopathies.
But lately, we are beginning to understand that where this Nazi-liberalist madness began, it will soon be over.
In recent weeks we have witnessed an explosion of different, dis-homogenous, even contradictory revolts: the Ecuadorian insurrection, the youth revolt in Hong Kong, the massive wave of protest against Spanish centralism in Catalonia, the armed resistance of the Kurdish people against Turkish genocidal fascism.
And now, the uprising of Chilean students and workers, which began as a protest against the rise in urban transport costs, is transformed into a practical and massive criticism of financial violence writ large, thus calling on students and workers from all over the world to march alongside the children who every Friday protest against the destruction of the planet.
Capitalism is a corpse that continues to entrap the potentialities of invention, progress, imagination and solidarity. We are told that capitalism has no alternatives: in this case we have to prepare for war, for the environmental apocalypse, for a probable extinction of the human race.
But the alternative exists: it is based on overcoming the economic obsession of compulsory growth, the redistribution of resources, the reduction of time in salaried work and the extension of free activity time (teaching, therapy, solidarity action).
In every country of the world we have to express solidarity to the insurgents of Chile, Ecuador, Hong Kong, but above all we have to descend to the streets, stop daily activities, attack the centers of economic and financial power, build the structures of ecological and social reconversion that humanity needs. Now seems to be the moment, perhaps so long awaited, to deliver the final blows to this mode of production that is death; attacking it, without respite, in all countries and places.
In support of the peoples before our eyes who do not surrender, in total support for the lives now at risk by fighting against those who only seek to maintain their outrageous privileges, that such international solidarity be raised as has not been seen in perhaps a century and against the genocide that they do not cease to want to provoke, to open at last another era, another time and a life worthy of being lived!
Franco Bifo Berardi
Vitrina Dystópica, la realidad no es capitalista