Mainstream media coverage of protests held against the summit was conspicious by its absense. Six years ago in Hamburg rather than New Delhi, an imaginative protest by hundreds of zombies called for us to ‘wake up!’ ‘The mud-crusted zombie figures were meant to be a symbol for “a society that has lost faith in solidarity and in which the individual struggles only for his own advance,” according to 1000 Gestalten’s official website. The act of shedding these costumes during the performance signified the idea that change can start with just one person. “We cannot wait for change to emerge from the world’s most powerful people, but we must now show all of us politically and socially responsible,” a speaker of the collective declared in an official statement’ (Popsugar. 6 July, 2017). Correct. The revolutionary change that socialists strive for cannot come from above, from leaders, but only as a result of the majority understanding the need for and acting to bring about a world of free access and production for use.
One revolutionary who shared this perspective was Rosa Luxemburg. The irony that an artwork with this name, one by '...Jean Paul Riopelle (1923–2002) showcased at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec..' represented '.. Canada in an exhibition.. alongside the G20 Summit,'
went uneported,
Red Rosa wrote three years before the start of the war to end all wars:
'Militarism in both its forms — as war and as armed peace — is a legitimate child, a logical result of capitalism, which can only be overcome with the destruction of capitalism, and that hence whoever honestly desires world peace and liberation from the tremendous burden of armaments must also desire Socialism' (Peace Utopias, 1911). This quotation from another work, The Russian Revoltion (1918),
was valid then and today, not just in Russia and the Ukraine: 'Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party – however numerous they may be – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of “justice” but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when “freedom” becomes a special privilege.'
ROSA LUXEMBURG ON SOCIALISM
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