DiEM25 in Rome. Screenshot Talk Real.Shortly after DiEM25’s Rome launch, I received a splendid Open Letter from George Souvlis and Samuele Mazzolini. It reminded me of another such letter I had received from John Malamatinas prior to DiEM25’s Berlin launch. George and Samuele raise crucial questions about DiEM25 and our project to democratise Europe. Here comes a feeble attempt to answer them.Who/what is DiEM25? What escapes us is who DiEM 25 exactly is and who its ‘enemy’ is meant to be. More precisely, who are you fighting against?DiEM25’s Manifesto answers as follows: We call on our fellow Europeans to join us forthwith to create the European movement which we call DiEM25To fight together, against a European establishment deeply contemptuous of democracy, to democratise the European UnionTo end the reduction of all political relations into relations of power masquerading as merely technical decisionsTo subject the EU’s bureaucracy to the will of sovereign European peoplesTo dismantle the habitual domination of corporate power over the will of citizensTo re-politicise the rules that govern our single market and common currency
Going beyond the Manifesto, and speaking personally here, DiEM25 would have been unnecessary if:
- we did not have an EU founded on a cartel of oligopolistic central European industries and run by a bureaucracy on the basis of rules that were designed to ‘de-politicise’ politics and a common money (which is essential for the cartel’s price stability) – a process that leads to a class war against waged labour and small business
- this cartel-like EU had not entered (as it was inevitable it would) a process of disintegration that manifests itself through a combination of mutually reinforcing authoritarianism and deflation.
This degenerate yet incredibly powerful process and its agents (that include the EU bureaucracy and the national elites feeding it while being fed by it) is the ‘enemy’ against which DiEM25 member are banding together.
