A song keeps playing in my head:

Long ago with vertigo-o-o
He had a fatal accident
The balance of Barry's had went
And nothing could prevent him falling off

As the title of this post suggests, the name of the song is The Death of Barry the Roofer with Vertigo by Toy Dolls. Berry is a roof worker and he is so afraid of heights that he ends up dying of fear before even getting on the roof.

This is, in a way, where many workers and activists I feel are now. Not defeated only by their employers, the state, the police or repression, but by the vertigo produced by our complete and utter powerlessness. The undying idea that what we do is useless and nothing will change in our lifetimes.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, since October 7th, since the war in Iran and since the invasion of Lebanon, we are constantly bombarded with images of violence. We usually refer to the Palestinian genocide as the - most televised genocide - in history. The (in-)famous crowds that we try to appeal to have become desensitized. The truth, in the form of documentation, mapping, recordings and investigations, is in front of the eyes of anybody who wants to see. But if this is the end-goal of journalism, it should definitely not be the end goal of the movement.

We gather, march, shout, get beaten, get registered, get arrested, and then go home waiting for the image of our own suffering to do the political work for us. But the images do not do that work. The power relations do. The media spectacle of martyrdom is almost always reframed and forgotten within a few days. Only our small, militant bubble has the heart racing and the hands shaking when seeing a defenseless comrade getting beaten and attacked by police dogs.

1) Action at Maersk HQ, Copenhagen 2026. 2) 13/12 Protest at American Embassy, Copenhagen 2025. Photo Credits to Street Action 3) Protests at NATO summit, Helsingborg 2026.

The time for civil disobedience as a political strategy, if ever there was one, has ended. The power relations that made civil disobedience a viable choice for the struggle are just not there anymore. I could cite tens of cases just in the past two years where actions that ended with comrades going to the hospital have not moved the public discourse of a centimeter. Our energies are finite and we do not have the privilege of wasting them, nor do we have the privilege of losing comrades to physical and mental trauma.

Locked in the streets in our pre-determined positions of antagonists, we tend to forget that 100 people will hardly make any difference if the city is fully militarized (e.g. NATO Summit protests in Helsingborg, 2026). If our aims are truly political and revolutionary, we cannot afford to yield in a resistive and memorialist stance of a nonexistent past glory. The only thing power responds to is a comparable - or bigger - power.

The most recent example of this have been the three general strikes organized in Italy in the fall of 2025 and spring 2026, under the slogan Blocchiamo Tutto - Let's block everything. The strikes were organized in response to the kidnapping of the Global Sumud Flotilla activists by Israeli forces and against the complicity of the Italian government in the ongoing genocide. The long and exhausting process that brought life to such big mobilizations, thanks to the grass-root unions USB/CALP and the political movements, is maybe the topic for later analysis.

In the first general strike on September 22, I was just one out of the 40 thousand people marching in Napoli, one out of the hundreds of thousands people all over Italy. The feeling I had during that time was that the strength that 40 thousands people have, when marching together towards a common goal, is unmatched. The crowd managed to first block the rails in the main train station and later to block the docks with little to no resistance from the authorities.

This shift, from commemorative resistance to materialism, from staying inside our militant bubble to blocking essential infrastructure without getting beaten to death, is the missing piece of the puzzle for the global movement.

If we want to move beyond the ritual of defeat, beyond the spectacle of our own suffering, then we have to stop asking power to pity us and start forcing it to respond to us.

We have to climb the roof together, before vertigo kills us on the ground.