 Hello everyone in Hamburg. This is Jens Orfakis. This message is coming to you from Greece. I wish I was there. G20. Another G20. Another meeting of the world's high and mighty. But this time things are quite different. I read and hear in the systemic media that the G20 demonstrations are nothing like they used to be in the past. But yet again the G20 is not what it used to be in the past. Once upon a time you will recall after the collapse of the Soviet Union the expansion of the G7 to the G8 and later on the expansion to bring into the fold the rising powers of China, Brazil, India and so on. The G20 was formed. There was a time when these various Gs were meetings in which neoliberalism took shape and the Washington consensus was spread throughout the world. It was a time when the United States government, the Japanese government, the British government and the European Union were in unison about the need to push down wages, deny trade unions rights, expand the reach of multinational corporations and create pure freedom for capital and commodities while the peoples of the world were caged behind barbed wire. That was a time when the G20 was a force of regression, a force of neoliberal expansionism and it was of course a time where the G20 caused a reaction amongst progressives who got together to fight the G20 on the streets of various cities around the world. Nowadays, after the 2008 crisis we have a different set of circumstances. Financialized capitalism has come up with a response to its 2008 crisis that is wholly inadequate even from the perspective of the interests of capital. We are now going through a period that I think historians are going to refer to as the great deflation that has followed the great recession of 2009-2010. Deflationary periods, just like the 1930s, create fragmentation of capitalism and give rise to the various cockroaches of xenophobic racism that we see all over the world. The nationalist international as we at DiEM25 refer to it. There is a problem we have with the G20 at the moment, for instance in Hamburg, as progressives. The G20 arrived in Hamburg in a state of disrepair. They disagree on almost everything with one another. They are nothing like the G20 used to be. They are not united anymore behind any particular project, not even a neoliberal one. Donald Trump on the one hand and Angela Merkel on the other, they are at odds, they hardly speak to one another. Or they do, but it's facetious talk without any actual outcome. It is very difficult for us to unite and to be truly energized against the G20 that is a shambles. But we must. And we must because the establishment always manages to coalesce around misanthropic, degenerate, recessionary, deflationary, antisocial themes. Even through their disagreements, they are remarkably good at in the end forging an unholy alliance that turns against decency, against humanism and against the interests of the many. It is a gross error to think of our struggles as separate from those of the past decades and centuries for that matter. One thing we have learned over the years and the centuries is that there is no such thing as a final victory. There will be no moment when you and I, all of us, are going to be able to rest on our laurels and say well we've achieved that which we should have achieved it. But you know the fact that there is no such thing as a final victory also means that there is no such thing as a final defeat. We, our generation, your generation, I'm sure many of you are much younger than me, are condemned and blessed at the same time with the duty of fighting the same fight, the same war that previous generations gave and fight it again and again and again. There will be no final victory and there will be no final defeat. But there is going to be a major improvement to the lives of millions, billions, as a result of what you're doing in Hamburg today, as a result of the struggles that everybody around the world is involved in, the struggles that we at DM25, the Democracy Europe movement, are supporting and are part of throughout the continent of Europe and actually beyond. Because let's face it, the G20, whether they are united as they used to be in the past or disunited the way they are today, they are pushing humanity towards a multiple crisis from which it is very possible that we will not recover as a species, ecologically, financially, socially, ethically. We are the only force that can stop that and we are going to succeed in proportion to our capacity to say both, a big no and a big yes, a big no to the punitive neoliberal misanthropy that the G20 leadership is pursuing and a big yes to an alternative way of conducting humanity's affairs. At DM25, we put it so simply, in two words, constructive disobedience. We have a duty, this is a yes part, a big yes part, to put forward an agenda of social, economic, political change, an agenda that is based on realistic policies and realistic changes to existing policies that can be affected tomorrow morning, which then can be mapped into much more radical change in two years' time, in five years' time, in ten years' time. This is a constructive part and at the same time, disobey. This is the disobedience part, the no, the big no part, disobey that which is being peddled by the G20, by the punitive neoliberal failed establishment. Today is just the beginning like every other day. We are never going to achieve victory and we're never going to be defeated. We are going to do something different, a far more radical and far more important. Steer humanity, steer the peoples of Europe, the peoples of the world in the direction of improvement for the many and in the direction of disempowering those who possess illegitimate power and who use it, not just illegitimately, but misanthropically. With solidarity and wishes for everything you're doing in Hamburg, this is Gennys Walloufakis for DM25.