Received 02/12/2019
The New Democracy party, in the wake of SYRIZA’s social-democratic strategy, has placed its bets on pointing out an internal enemy so that it can proceed seamlessly with management adjustments of domestic capital that go unnoticed and without reaction. Thus, the issue of Exarchia,”confronting lawlessness in neighbourhoods and universities”, the imposition of the “law and order” doctrine, is high on the right-wing agenda, investing in the most cannibalistic and conservative characteristics of the local population and by building a cover-up strategy for the ever-increasing degradation of the labour force. A strategy of making the dead, tortured and excluded at the borders, on the sea, at workplaces, on metropolitan roads, detention centres and prisons, invisible. A strategy that would turn the public eye to the antiauthoritarians’ conflicts with the cops and the attacks on the symbols, structures and people of power, characterizing it as the dominant, structured form of violence, and therefore the most prominent threat that lies over mainstream citizens’ heads.
The wording used by the dominant authoritarian narrative is not chosen by chance, depicting occupations (outlaw dens), social centres in universities (hideouts), people fighting on the street with cops (vandals), people who capitalism’s violence turned away from their homelands to try to find a better fate here (illegal immigrants), armed guerrillas and radical expropriators (terrorists, robbers and murderers). And linking all these expressions with the “Exarchia” abstraction. We will not go into the history of Exarchia, the struggles, the relationships, the roots that have developed within them. All of this has, for a long time, been analyzed much more delicately and thoroughly. We only want to say that, in the “Exarchia” abstraction, the intended figure of the enemy within, the subject who must be crushed, destroyed, imprisoned, exiled, excluded from the normality of bourgeois democracy, takes a specific form and substance. The subject who must firmly and unambiguously confirm who holds sovereign power, who defines the basis on which relations between people are built, but also with their environment, resources, the goods they produce, time and space.
Exarchia is, after all, the urban space and anthropologically defined point that highlights what modern capitalism fears, what modern western States fear. Places of self-organization, the expropriation of resources, space and time, anarchist propaganda and the diffusion of anti-authoritarian theories on a social basis, direct action and guerrilla-type attacks in the metropolitan field, the realization that we are two parallel worlds on a collision course, the conclusion that capitalism is not the end of history: this is what they are afraid of. And that’s what they want to strangle. Exarchia is the visible and embodied symbolism of what they want to stifle. That is the reason for all the manic repression against the structures, the means and the subjects of the antiauthoritarian struggle.
We saw this repressive rampage explode on the bodies of those arrested on November 17th 2019 and those gathered in solidarity at the courts the following day, pouring out on the pavements and streets of Exarchia together with the blood of people tormented by the uniformed trash lingering on the TV channels in an atmosphere of “victory for democracy” and “sweep of the anarchists”. Against this state-endorsed rampage, we believe that our answers must be prudent, taking into account more and more factors, in order to be as dangerous and effective as possible in our actions. Completing the mosaic of the anarchist presence on the street that day and following the logic of hitting where they are not expecting us and gathering their forces, early in the evening of November 17th, we smashed the windows and the ATM of Eurobank on Mihalakopoulou street in Ambelokipoi. We thus wanted to remind them that they can’t have eyes and ears all the time everywhere, and that when we define the place and time of the conflict, it turns out that their metropolitan grid, their repressive structure, and their political fame & status are fragile and vulnerable.
The present action was a signal of solidarity and complicity with the rebels of Chile. It was also a cry of solidarity and strength to our fugitive, persecuted and incarcerated comrades.
PS. Dimitris Armakolas, always present in revolutionary memory.
Friends of assymetric violence
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Actforfree notes: Dimitris Armakolas [comrade who died after falling and receiving an electroshock while climbing to hang a banner in solidarity with an anarchist imprisoned in Athens on November 10, 2018. t/n.] He is always present in revolutionary memory.
via:https://athens.indymedia.o
Translated by Act for freedom now!
