An article published at the Rioters Agency on the May 5th events

WITHOUT EMERGENCY EXIT
On May 5th demonstration and the three dead Marfin bank employees

To the strikers that are still smashing shit up

It is indeed inappropriate to “put the entire responsibility” and blame on Mr. Vgenopoulos for the depressing deaths of the three employees of the burnt Marfin bank. The fact that he forced his employees under threat of dismissal to remain locked in the upper floor offices of a seemingly empty and unprotected bank, without any fire protection or emergency exits, in the epicentre of the greatest strike demonstration of the last thirty years, was not just another criminal negligence on the altar of profit [1], that his class has got us used to. This conscious use of workers as a human shield for banks and businesses [2] is one of the boss class’s responses to December and the common violence of insurrection that spreads, de-legalising and destroying the circulation of commodities, breaking and torching vehicles, shops, its police guards and most of all its headquarters: the banks.

To be clear, the intention of Vgenopoulos and his class to sacrifice a few workers in order to block the process followed by insurrections up until now, must be answered as such. Legal points or leftist evasions such as: insurrection means storming the parliament and not the banks/shops, having no idea what they’d do there of course, do nothing more than refuse to address the issue.

You see, it is common for a boss to know better what his interests are and how to pursue them, than the workers do. And any boss always knows that “we’re at war”, even if they’ll never cry it out openly, as these naive people that think that in a war it is ok to hit but once challenged one should rely on an intervention of an allegedly neutral justice. By setting ourselves (or other workers) under the tutelage of the state, we recuperate even the most extreme act into nothing more than violent reformism. The only justice in the streets, to the degree they are under our power, is us. The responsibility for whatever happens there, who lives and who dies, is ours: PROLETARIAN DICTATORSHIP period. If we lack – other than an effective guard of strikes that wouldn’t leave any colleague in the hands of the bosses – an essential trust among us, a trust manufactured through our common experiences in struggles and meeting in the streets, then the next step will be to call the police ourselves in our demonstrations, for them to be in charge and bear responsibility for whatever happens. WHOEVER CARRIES VIOLENCE, FORCES JUSTICE. To perform violence, ignoring the “sense of right” it comes with, to bring – abstract – chaos, doesn’t promote anything other than the highest organized structures, that come with their own ferroconcrete plan of “justice” (the Stalinists, the police, the mafia, the parastate groups…). Victory belongs to those who bring chaos WITHOUT CARRYING IT INSIDE THEM.

Fetishising insurrection as the destructive act itself, represented a past phase of our movement, weak and marginal at the time, though after December, and the stripping of every fetish from violence with its simultaneous open communisation, must now be overcome. A second December would no longer be a victory but a defeat. Any related invocation, shows nothing more than a complete lack of any plan for afterwards. Our enemy has advanced, we are forced to do the same if we are not to disappear from the historical scene.

We must not sit home to be disciplined by their TV programs as if we were naughty children given too much leash. We must retake Logos (speech) back to the streets. Spit on the bourgeois and TV justice that “vindicates” the pain of one with the suffering of another, accumulating misery for all and socializing their cannibalism. The most retarded of these vultures, before they ascertained how the three employees’ deaths would paralyze us, were trying to make us feel guilty for a bunch of ridiculous things, from the expected fall in the tourist trade to the country’s image abroad. To make us feel guilty for fighting. To divide us into “peaceful workers” and “hooded criminals with molotovs”, now that everyone knows (except of course the Communist Party that only saw provocators) that on 5/5 there were no peaceful workers that didn’t stand up – with or without hoods and molotovs, no importance – to the State’s last playing card: its police terror.

Their justice devours blood, the blood of the offenders, of anyone that resembles them, or most of all the anarchists, since it is they that generously have given their flag to any insurrectionary violence of even the most isolated elements of our class, globally [3]. But, it wants something more than that. It wants to open as a larger trauma to the social memory, that would break our familiarization with our own violence, with the violence of our struggle, with its subjects and the communication among them. Our justice will deal with nothing other than the healing. We don’t know what kind of persons the dead were, if their sense of dignity would cope with the fascist scum and the TV vultures mongering their deaths or not, but we are sure that as workers their interests were with the victory of our struggle, with all the workers of Europe and the World. We won’t drag one another down – we will rise together:

GENERAL WILDCAT STRIKE!

Let’s embrace the occupations!
Let’s stay in the streets!
Let’s talk!

2 of the 200.000 provocators

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[1] For the time, let’s bear this in mind : 36,1% pure rise in profits for Marfin bank this year, in the middle of the “most harsh crisis” to which every worker must reconcile working and obeying in the name of the nation.

[2] Similar incidents with that of Marfin bank on 23, Stadiou street, proceded to Bazaar supermarket behind Omonoia square, where a worker from inside put out the fire with an extinguisher, and Ianos bookstore that was open (as it is known, culture merchandising doesn’t give a fuck about strikes).

[3] The night of 5/5, armed gangs of Delta, Zeta, plainclothes cops and riot police stormed the squat of “anarchists for a polymorphic movement” on Zaimi street, the Immigrants Haunt on Tsamadou street, and many houses and cafes at Exarchia, beating and intimidating people. In the same time on the TV, everyone was more or less asking for the anarchists’ heads.

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[Thanks to J. and S. for correcting this translation. Greek version: click here.]