A recent communique by the Circle of Fire anarchist collective and the Anarchist Bulletin BLACK FLAG on the events of May 5th in Athens.
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ANARCHY IS STRUGGLE FOR LIFE,
FREEDOM AND DIGNITY
The general strike on May 5 against the harshest financial anti-social measures imposed the last decades became the moment for the expression of a combative social and class dispute of the entire bankrupt political-economic system. That day, we witnessed the manifestation of the accumulated popular rage and resentment, which is more and more threatening to explode, shattering not only this country but even the whole Europe, passing beyond the borders the dominators have drawn.
Especially in Athens, the demonstration of about two hundred thousand protestors, walking the open ways of struggle and through the ruptures created to the deceptively omnipotent regime by the revolt of December ’08, headed to the parliament and repeatedly clashed with the forces of repression, threatening to storm the building in waves.
As anarchists, workers, jobless and youth, continuing our mobilizations and our long-lasting struggles, we chose to participate in the demonstration of 5th May through our own political blocs, contributing from our part to the broader social and class struggle.
Nobody knows how much more the thousands of people could have achieved that day in the streets of Athens if a tragedy hadn’t taken place; a horrible event that was disruptive and catastrophic for the struggle, and an unexpected present for the state, its forces of repression and its propaganda mechanism who used it in order to slander the struggle and intensify their repressive attack in the streets, re-establishing their forces and the consent around them.
It was the murder of three bank employees caused by the arson of Marfin bank in Stadiou street. An atrocious act which was the end of a race of arsons by unknown persons who were moving in an estranged and hostile towards the demonstration manner, using it for hitting targets right next to the blocs, showing no interest in whether human lives were in danger by their actions.
The state is definitely the first responsible for this event, as well as for a series of everyday crimes. With the attack the state is launching against society, it is more and more creating the conditions of a kind of cannibalistic war of all against all; conditions in which eventually anything can happen, even the inconceivable.
Of course, also, the tragic outcome of the arson in Marfin bank, where the three victims and other people were trapped, has largely to do with the fact that the owner of the Bank forced his employees to work in a day of general strike inside a building which had its doors locked and had not any necessary precautions, such as fire safety measures and emergency exits. Yet, given that Vgenopoulos (the bank owner) is a capitalist, member of a class which, by definition, consists of cruel exploiters and murderers, his indisputable culpability cannot be an excuse for those whose actions led three working people to death.
Nor the claim that these people were working the day of the strike can be an excuse for their loss, since this was not an issue to be solved by anyone self-appointed, but an issue of the employees themselves, or their co-workers and of any probable strikers’ committees; and, in any case, the response to situations of unintentional or intentional strike-breaking couldn’t ever be what happened on the 5th of May.
Of course the masses of demonstrators, anarchists and anti-authoritarians among them, who became a human flood in the streets of Athens that day and confronted state repression with tactics of disobedience and social counter-violence are not to be held responsible for the triple murder. That murder came as an ultimate result of an irrational, meaningless and needless violence which is promoted by an autistic, un-political and anti-social concept that has become a parasite to the anarchist – antiauthoritarian movement, sucking its blood and disparaging it, leading it to criminalisation and social isolation. It is a concept that is elitist, hostile and antagonistic towards the resisting society as much as against anarchists; a concept whose emptiness is covered by the ideological rags of a individualistic-chaotic-nihilistic muddle which has, after all, embodied “values” and mentalities that belong to the world of Domination.
That outrageous event made the crowds of demonstrators freeze and emptied the streets of struggle at the most crucial moment for the social resistance. The wounded regime gained time to recover and re-organise its forces as much as it could. At the same time the lackeys of the regime, the media, literally acted as tomb-raiders, exploiting the deaths to promote the state’s ideological and repressive campaign against the people who struggle, and especially against the anarchists whom they attempt to charge with situations completely irrelevant to them.
Anarchists have absolutely nothing to do with what happened in Marfin bank, and could never have done such an action, ignoring human lives. It is also true that anarchist comrades and other protesters, although they were being threatened and physically assaulted, tried as much as they could to hinder inconsiderate attacks and to put out fires wherever lives were in danger.
No matter how much some would wish, we will not shoulder any collective responsibility for situations completely strange to us, which undermine and corrode our struggle and that would annul us as anarchists; nor will we be silent, hiding our complete opposition to such situations. Our political responsibility lies in the fact that, despite our clear conflict with those situations, we were not able to deal with them and politically isolate them as effectively as it should have been done; and in the fact that we have to create the terms to do so from now on. For this reason all of us are called to have a clear position, given that the tragedy in Marfin is a crucial moment and a crossroad for our struggle.
Moreover, it is our responsibility to act in solidarity and collectively in order to repel the slanderous attack by the state and its lackeys, and to continue fighting in political terms, in terms of a movement, within the community, together with its resisting parts.
As anarchists we have a lasting, multiform solidarity activity within the social-class struggles, always on the side of workers, youth, migrants and refugees, and other oppressed and resisting people; and in no way will we stop doing so.
We will not tolerate the denigration of our struggle, which is a struggle for life, freedom and dignity against death, enslavement and humiliation both of the individual and of society; a struggle against inequality, hierarchy and injustice, against any form of exploitation and oppression.
We don’t forget the three dead workers
EVERYONE TO THE STREETS!
No peace with the bosses – Wage slavery is terrorism
The struggle continues… for social revolution, anarchy and communism
We express our solidarity with the people who were beaten and arrested by the police on 5th May and we stand by the side of Zaimi 11 squat in Exarchia which was evacuated after a police raid during which eleven comrades were arrested.
Anarchist collective Circle of Fire
Anarchist Bulletin BLACK FLAG
10 May 2010
20 Comments
http://efendisizler.blogsport.de/2010/05/24/anarchy-is-struggle-for-life-freedom-and-dignity-2/
An other text about the 5 may deaths:
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=en&article_id=1168635
and his french translation:
http://dndf.org/?p=7062
Reformists preaching solidarity to bankers. F U! Did those 3 pricks at Marfin care for a better world, for the ? No, they didn’t! While people were out on the streets voicing their anger towards the establishment, they nonchalantly carried on their dirty money making and raking in of profit for the capitalist regime. Trying to portray them as “workers” who were terrorised into submission from their boss is ludicrous.
What happened on May 5th was sand was poored inside the capitalist machine and a few of its cogs broke. This is the reality of class warfare. You may not like it but telling me I need to identify myself with those cogs is bloody outrageous. Those pricks took bonuses for being efficient parasites. And don’t you dare lecture me on the necessities of maintaining the capitalist financial institutes.
@Faust, not everyone who works at a bank is like a Goldman Sachs broker, do you have any idea what you are talking about or are you just being obnoxious?
Yeah, lowly fucking bank clerks are mere tiny functionary cogs the retail side of banking, and they were probably paid peanuts too…By your logic, anyone who has any kind of job or has money in their pocket is a cog in the capitalist machine, and you’d be right up to a point, but that doesn’t mean they should be killed for it…Obnoxious is right. Your self-righteous revolutionary purity makes me want to puke.
Hey, ADMIN I thought you were deleting remarks that defamed the victims of the fire? But never mind, FAUST has told us what a Big Bad Killer Commissar he wants to be, when he grows up…and we need to know that.
New York Times 19.05.10:-
Vassilis Chajiakovou, the 44-year-old manager of the Ianos bookstore in central Athens, faced down one of the koukouloforoi who bombed Marfin Egnatia bank and his own bookstore on May 5. The bookstore was already in flames when a wiry young man in the hood and mask threatened Mr. Chajiakovou with a gasoline bomb.
“I’ll burn you alive,” Mr. Chajiakovou recalled the young man yelling in a shrill, boyish voice. But when Mr. Chajiakovou charged him, the young man ran away.
Across the street at the bank, employees trapped inside were screaming for help. Soon, two women and a man in their 30s were dead from smoke inhalation.
That day’s protests had a particular resonance to Mr. Chajiakovou. A former anarchist and anti-authoritarian himself, he recalled how, at 19, he had thrown rocks at the French nationalist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was visiting Athens in 1985, while his friends lobbed Molotov cocktails.
Years later, his bookstore, which suffered €100,000, or $126,000, in damages during the recent attack, became a popular hangout for counterculture intellectuals. Yet now he fears that a legitimate protest movement that once was motivated by social justice has become consumed by hate.
“I don’t want to believe the people who threw bombs at us and murdered three people across the street belong to any legitimate ideology,” he said. “The people who stormed into our store wanted to kill for the thrill of it. There’s nothing revolutionary about that.”
@nihilist
If the voice of TRUE WORKERS (those who actually toil in the punishing cold and under the blistering sun to actually PRODUCE something, unlike the economic parasites who from the comfort of airconditioned offices cook numbers and propagate worldwide indebted serfdom) who just can’t cope with the blodletting imposed by the banks and criticises the morality of working for them sounds obnoxious to reformist pricks like you, then so fucking be it. You will not whitewash the responsibility of choosing a profession that diresctly and blatantly HURTS THE WORLD.
You want a better world without capitalism – DON’T WORK FOR A BANK!
…and tell Chajiakovou to shove his “legitimate ideology” up his arse.
YES, WE ARE HATEFUL
YES, WE ARE ENRAGED
FIGHTING FOR SURVIVAL
If you don’t understand this is bacause you invested too much in your puny little direct-democracy assemblies to notice that the world turned into a bank thrall and your lukewarm calls for reformism will not turn the tide of the enraged slaves as they slowly awake to their predicament.
@FAUST-
All of us are part of the system. Are you a capitalist pig cos you have change in your pocket, pay bills, circulate commodities by working in a shop?
Capitalism and Authority lives inside YOU too. What you gonna do? Blow your own brains out? Molotov yourself?
@Faust: As a german i might actually remind you, that Hitler and the facist used to classify capital as good “german producing capital” versus the “jewish finance capital” and your statement slightly reminds me of that. why bother with dignity, when we can have a revolution, eh? let’s rather not do the failures made before…
Oh dear FAUST, if you take a moment from frothing at the mouth, then you just might realise that you have indeed made a pact with the Devil, because the nearest thing to that fairy tale in reality, is the bourgeoisie. You are living proof of the dehumanising effects of their system…You care as much for those bank workers as Vgenopoulos did…
Doubtless cos you THINK I’m a ‘reformist’ (and probably not a “True” worker either) you’d kill me too…and I suppose your idea of a post-revolutionary society without “puny little direct-democracy assemblies” would mean we’d all have to graze the hill-sides like goats in order to eat or bash the “False” workers over the head and eat them?…Primitivist Stakhanovism anyone?
@Incubus
What “post-revolutionary society”, you highbrow buffoon! This is not about some bloody revolution, just an insurrection at best and your prissy undue humanitarianism is getting in the way of even that! Do you think the foolish avant-guardist rhetoric your insignificant little collectives so pompously churn out have any meaningful effect on the sedated proletariat? Give yourself the benefit of a little sincerity, will you. Work with the wrath of the masses for now and make the most of the time until the State regains its composure, to bring as much destruction to its institutions as posible and MAYBE afterwards we can debate about revolution. Stop cushioning the blows to the capitalist machine with sermons of identifying with bankers which fly in the face of common sense. If you’re not working for a bank, then you are too detached from the current economic reality to sense the evil of those institutions. Either way, your blue-collar/white collar division cum Primitivist cum cannibalist worldview straw man argument won’t give you the escape from the big issue I put forth here:
Is it okay to work for a bank knowing the money you make are somebody else’s blood?
You are obviously untouched by their bite, hence your eagerness at advocating undue tolerance. I, on the other hand, am in agony of death thanks to those irresponsible individuals who knowingly pursue a career of financial speculation and usury. There are many others like me (hell everyone I know owes at least 50000€, coincidence?) and I wager it’s only until this slumberous unpolitical group of modern serfs gains critical mass before your misplaced class solidarity is pelted by angry mobs where it rightly belongs to: History’s garbagebin of irrelevancy.
P.S.: I never said I want to kill anyone, I just don’t share your irrational empathy for unworthy money-whores who enjoy increasing prosperity by propagating pauperization.
You’re absolutely right! About Everything. You’ve convinced me, totally. At the first opportunity I get, I’m going to repeatedly stamp on the face of a bank clerk, and shout out- “Fuck your Humanity and Fuck you”! Better still if she’s pregnant; the bastard offspring of a ‘money-whore’…In Argentina 01/02 the popular assemblies occupied banks and set up social centres, communal kitchens, clinics and workshops…I guess they were wrong to be so constructive? Please tell me Your Pureness, I need to know! Sob!
Those “constructive” projects were in banks willingly given up by their owners when they heard the clang of the casseroles or was it because there had alsready been extensive rioting and smashing of other banks. Man, you are thick!
Unless you’re migrating to Utopia anytime soon, return to whomever sold you those daffy romantic views about revolt you carry around and ask for a refund.
Remember: All roles alienate equally, but some are less despicable than others.
Don’t talk down to me:Cop.Cunt.Dog. The Argentinians rightly rioted, but they didn’t kill bank clerks, they included them. You’re nothing but a macho specialist in violence. Fuck your proto-fascist inhumanity and Fuck You!
@INCUBUS
You keep throwing the “humanity” card on the table but the theory of peacefull social change doesn’t hold well in scrutiny. Where are those “included” bankers in Argentine now? Back to their careers of pillaging our lives for selfish profit, mayhap?
I’m nothing but a man in self defence, it’s the banks doing the offensive here. Your tenacious attempts to reverse the blame here betray your disconnection with reality.
It is especially important that…The guerilla warfare of selfdefence be made as coherant as possible. Commando raids should be mounted…only to support and to expand the revolutionaty workers movement and not separately as is the case with terrorism, Blanquism or leftist activism: and should it prove useful, the attentat should be used selectively (against counter-revolutionary leaders with a view to rendering them harmless, or against police centres with a view to neutralising them) and never indiscriminately (e.g. bombing of railway stations, banks or public places).
@FAUST
Read,learn and disseminate this reality:
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24fd.pdf
Heya this is somewhat of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML.
I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding knowledge so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be greatly appreciated!amateurseite
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