Anonymous Comrade writes

WE, THE PEOPLE

Ida Dominijanni

Il Manifesto, 16 feb 2003

www.ilmanifesto.it

Translated by Snafu

"We, the people, do not want this war: millions of Americans are with you and challenge President Bush" says from the stage of San Giovanni in Rome, Mss Campbell the first woman priest of the council of churches of United States - firstly welcomed with coldness and then applauded with warmth. "We the people", the signature that inaugurate the American Constitution, a formula than returns a plural conception of "the people", which is one, just as long as it is aware to be made of many and different, "we". "We the people" will say few hours later the demonstrators of New York. But even in Rome, it is not only from the mouth of Mss Cambpell that the formula resounds in the air.

In the air of Italian capital, oscar of the world pacifist day, with the complicity of a transparent air as only the Roman winter can donate, you can see in transparency something new under the sky of politics. Over the time, we saw the declining of the stars of party representation, flag belonging, national and nationalist identity; we saw, over the last two years, the uprising of a multiple and global movement, unlimited for the perception of space and for the planetary dimension of its goals. Thus, such a multifarious, young and mature, male and female demonstration, so rainbowing to shadow all the party, particular and belonging flags; so global to never fall in the trap of identity juxtaposition that make a single entity of an enemy government and its people, this was unseen yet. Singular-plural: we the people for the peace, in all the world, without nothing else in the middle, nor national borders, nor states, nor governments, nor parties. We the people, the signature of American Constitution against the American Sovereign, the disorganized civil society against the armed organization, the global multitude against the stars and stripes Nation which wants to appropriate globalization by proclaiming wars of civilization.

New furrows, new contradictions as we would say once upon a time, announce the political panorama of the new century and rewrite the heritage of the world. There's something new, a sort of heterogenesis of the aims, in this so Americanized civil society - from the clothes and slogans to the rock soundtrack - which turns against the cupola of American power. As if by passing from modern European forms to the postmodern ones on the other side of the ocean, from active political representation to passive video-politics, from organized to plebiscite democracy, western politics would have draw a complete circle and found itself to a watershed: not at sunset though, but at a new beginning, in which the European origin and the American century remix themselves in new combinations.

It is not only a new space to be draw by the planetary march that unravels itself from capital to capital from timezone to timezone, but also a new time. Born from the ashes of bipolar world, grown together with the promises of a world without borders, with the declining states and the hybrid identities, the other politics is already in action and it says, all over the world, that war that rebuilds the borders, the Leviatan, the identity cards is, above all, anachronistic: out of time, Give peace a chance, sings the march, and we can give it more than one."