On Saturday, February 20, 2021, the Anti-capitalist assembly of Amsterdam, organised the demonstration “Corona is the virus – capitalism is the crisis.” The demonstration took place at 3 pm at Mercatorplein (Amsterdam) with more than 150 comrades who participated from different organisations. Further, a lot of bystanders and neighbours in the area sympathised, agreed with, or could associate with our cause. We are interpreting the choice of location as a success.
The cops were surprisingly passive this Saturday, what started with one neighbourhood cop on a bike ended with only 8 or 9 cops surveilling the demo, whilst perhaps having 1-2 undercover inside the demo. However, there were some repression attempts in advance of this event.
The Police tried to ban the flags associated with the Kurdish liberation movement, they used fear as an excuse, they said that “Turkish and Moroccan people” would be a danger to our demo. Of course we do not see Turkish or Moroccan people as threats or our enemies at all, rather, our Turkish comrades marched with us. We stayed in solidarity with our Kurdish comrades and together we resisted the repression attempt of the cops. Fascism is fascism! Even before the demonstration started, the cops showed their racism by stating that they would not keep us safe from “Turkish and Moroccan people” if we held our demonstration in this location. But we had our own security ready, and we didn’t expect cops to protect us from anybody. We understand that the cops do not keep us or anybody safe, because safety is a privilege of the rich and ruling class. We stand with our Kurdish, Turkish and Moroccan comrades. We will not fall for this tactic that tries to pit us against locals of this neighbourhood. Our true enemies are the state and capitalism.
The cops are just the class traitors that uphold this system. During the demonstrations, several groups, organisations, and political groups read their political statements to the crowd, and comrades were chanting in solidarity with these statements. Some of the local residents participated in the demo as well. There were grey wolves around who tried to take photos of our Kurdish comrades. This was unacceptable to us, which is why we took extra security measures at the end of the demo. Despite the Dutch state remains to be one of the only ones in western Europe that currently does not allow demonstrations to march, we have spontaneously decided to break this “normality” and take the streets after the speeches to protect our Kurdish comrades .We were happy to see that everyone was respecting social distancing and was wearing face masks at the demo. In self-organisation, we closed the street and traffic and called people from the square to occupy the street; Even some of the bystanders and neighbours joined and took the street with us. Then, with anti-capitalist, anti-fascist/anti-racist and anti-state slogans, we started marching towards Rembrandtpark near the initial gathering place; The surprise for and the passiveness of the police and the successful organisation of the protest meant that there were no particular problems for the demonstration and the comrades ended the march in the Rembrandtpark without a single arrest. After the demonstration ended, we left the park with security measures.
We were happy to see the energy of the people during and after the manifestation, and consider this to be a starting point!
We are living through a crisis where capitalist institutions are clearly (again) not capable of taking care of the contemporary challenges.
Change can only come from below!
Another World Is Possible!
The Anti-Capitalist assembly of Amsterdam