SOLIDARITY AND ACTION February 22 to 28 WEEK OF AGITATION throughout Italy against techno-sciences and the world that produces them
26 February PROTEST AGAINST EFSA, European institute for food safety
From 12.00 to 17.00 in front of the EFSA headquarters Viale Piacenza – Parma
“It does not suffice to change the world. We do that anyway. And to a large extent that happens even without our involvement. In addition we have to interpret this change. Precisely because to change it. That therefore the world does not change without us. And ultimately into a world without us.”
Günther Anders
Dealing with techno-scientific power and its principal manifestations: biotechnology, nanotechnology, computer science, neuroscience is not just focusing on some aspect of this particularly harmful society. As Ellul wrote over fifty years ago, technology has made itself the system and mediates our lives beyond any will whatsoever. In this also the other animals and the whole planet are crushed and manipulated according to the needs of the moment under the technical imperative.
The techno-sciences are recombining and converging towards what has always been their ultimate goal: total control over living beings. Many wonder why we are paying so much attention to technology when the problems around us are so many. In a technical system like that of the present where everything is marked by the machine, technology represents the time, place, space that covers every form of exploitation. Sometime call it green economy, others scientific progress and yet others catastrophe management, covering the areas that once redesigned will widen the network where all the relations of power are developed in every link, such as the launching of a GMO or the manipulation of the germ line, from where there is no return. A struggle against toxicity cannot disregard the social context that produces it, is desired by it and rendered necessary for all.
This means that our criticism will fall into superficial common sense or pseudo environmentalism unless it reaches the actual problem. Power is fully deployed in every technological apparatus around us, a technological democracy that appears at every corner, oversees every intersection, controls every aspect of our survival to the point of entering our bodies, while its totalitarian essence remains fundamentally unperceived. A techno-power which, thanks to more and more nanoscale devices, is becoming more than it seems and starting to not appear at all. This week of mobilization is not to circumscribe a route or define boundaries, on the contrary we hope that these days will inaugurate new or reinforce past determination and the will to act. We think that each situation could use these days in its own territory to organise initiatives related to theme of noxiousness, especially that related to the converging sciences that are taking over the earth and bodies more and more. February 26 there will instead be a collective initiative at a national level: a protest against the EFSA (European authority for food safety) based in Parma.
EFSA is the internationally recognized body to which the European Commission refers to concerning toxicities such as GMOs, pesticides, chemicals and nanotechnology. It can authorize the commerce of GMO products and sows them in the open field for commercial and experimental purposes. Like the American FDA (Food Drugs Aministration), it is no more than a government arm of the multinationals especially biotechnology, where very narrow close relations allow a continuous exchange of administrators, scientists, managers and the inevitable technical staff: what better way to permit a capillary distribution of GMOs also in Europe. Thanks to contamination thresholds tolerated in food and seeds, GM feed, transgenic crops in the open field … the work of spreading has been underway for too long. Europe has given itself a body called upon to guarantee the safety of every toxicity along the lines of the American FDA. To protect, as well as the interests of the biotech-chemical-pharmaceutical multinationals, an economic, political and social system that clings to the new bio nano-technological revolution, producing more and more environmental and social disasters that underlie techno-industrial development, of which the manipulations of the living are deadly.
We are not for the creation of a safer, transparent and democratic EFSA, which could never be realized even if one wanted to create it. A security organ like EFSA assumes that regularly harmful substances can be created and spread over the planet putting at risk its very survival. Just as a plant for the disposal of radioactive waste always requires the atomic plants of a war economy.
We totally reject this techno-system along with all its manifestations of death with the same determination and conviction whether they are used to create peacekeeping missions or to create war: their peace is already a perpetual war on the planet and all its life forms: already bad enough to put up a relentless resistance.
On March 2, at the court of Turin the new hearing will be held against Silvia, Billy and Costa, accused of attempted sabotage with explosives signed Earth Liberation Front against an international centre of research on nanotechnology in Switzerland of the multinational IBM.
For us continuing this solidarity means that we continue to hear the scream of a dying planet, which an ELF group in the US once wrote had motivated them in their path of resistance, not to be confused with passivity but with burning anger throughout the struggle.
Solidarity Assembly
Contact: [email protected]
www.resistenzealnanomondo.org
