I have received this as part of a call to direct action in the context of G8. I am pasting here what has made me think.
Marching is not enough. Go after the real solution to poverty – take control back over our own lives. Wealth is not money in your pocket, but freedom to have power over your own life.
It is us who store our money at the banks that keep us in debt, who join their armies to fight their wars over oil, and who fill our cars with petrol in order to work at jobs we don’t even like. Ordinary people created this world, and it is within our power to change it. We must seize the power back from the G8 to solve the world’s problems, and take matters into our own hands. Poverty can only be made history if the G8 and capitalism are made history.
And now the text goes on to “call on everyone to join the blockades against the G8 in order to physically stop the G8 leaders from meeting”. But I think that, more challenging that blockading roads, it would be to stop storing our money at the banks that keep us in banks; or at least stop getting into debt by leading alternative lives, not filling our cars with petrol, or better still not having cars, not buying their entertainment. I am not the first one to say that governments can perfectly cope with controlled demonstrations, even with short uncontrolled demonstrations. Repression after these is known. What they can cope worse with, is day to day resistance. As the text says, taking our lives into our own hands would be the real solution. But it takes a lot of guts to dare to do that, or having nothing to loose.
