The government attacks to the indepedent free soup kicthens

Friday, January 27, 2012

The government just issued a decree which in the name of public health, attacks to the regular soup kitchens organised by political groups that cook and offer food to the increasing mumber of homeless (reaching 20,000 in Athens only).  Homelss people though are not the only ones depending on these soup kicthens, but plenty more neo-poor who cannot afford to buy food depend on them. The Secretary of Public Health named Dimopoulos issued a decree stating that only formal agencies can offer food for free in public these are the church, the municipalities and NGOs any other such effort has to be approved by the authorities.

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Pawn shop in Athens goes up in flames – claim of responsibility

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Greek original

On Saturday, January 21 we placed an inflammatory device in a pawn shop on Ragavi Street, in Gizi (Athens). It was a symbolic response to the spread of these contemporary black-marketeers in the neighbourhoods of Athens, who, taking advantage of the condition of generalised poverty attempt to loot our fellow humans who are struggling to survive.

The appearance of the black-marketeers is an outcome of the attack enforcing popular impoverishment; it is yet another aspect of the charging-ahead of the state and capital as part of the even more intense sucking of social wealth. Against the gangs of loan sharks and the violent attempts of our impoverishment, we must raise social solidarity and social class violence.

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“Dignity out of steel” – two and a half months of the steelworks strike in Greece: two-day solidarity event in Barcelona

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

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Film-maker Theo Angelopoulos dies

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Theo Angelopoulos, (1935-2012). Killed in a road accident, run over by an off-duty cop. The symbolism of it all… Instead of words:

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“The historical sweetness”

Monday, January 23, 2012

Translation of a text published by the blogger “old boy” — Greek original here. The text was also published in Unfollow, a new, independently-run magazine in the country.

Euro and memorandum-permitting, I will be turning forty this year. I think of those who were born forty years before me. Someone born in 1932 would have time to live whether directly or by reflection, until his own forties, a dictatorship, a war, an occupation, a civil war, a post-civil war state with all the mess that came with it, and a dictatorship once again. Shall we take the forty-year old person before them, born in 1892? Talk of their historical plate being full. But poor us, what did we experience historically from the moment we can remember ourselves? No-thing. Obviously, much happened in all those years, but how can they possibly compare in their dramatic nature compared to the past? 1989 saw some earth-shattering changes, but neither our world nor our history didn’t radically change. Our own world, being in the winners’ camp, continued to flow uninterrupted for another twenty years. Wasn’t it about time for an end to the boredom, wasn’t it time for us to take our shot of History, wasn’t it about time for us to taste its sweetness?

When you grow up outside dramatic History, you become addicted to a way of thought that makes you think that the plot will continue like that until the end of your life. What is equally, if not more shocking than a world that collapses, is the entirely unexpected element of its collapse. Previous generations knew that anything can turn upside down at any moment, that everything is hanging by a thread. To us, everything looked firmly grounded in unchallengeable bases and away from fear. There was always, of course, the fear of your personal collapse, but any collective collapse at peacetime seemed inconceivable.

Yet the most basic addiction is another one: you become addicted to the conviction that History before the crisis was unfolding in your absence, and likewise it unfolds in your absence within the crisis; you become addicted to the conviction that you are too small and too unimportant to intervene and to attempt to affect it. It is much more consistent according to the up to this point inactive role of yours and it is much easier, psychologically, for you to play the role of the carcass. You prefer to be slaughtered rather than risking for you to slaughter. Such a risk scandalises and untunes you more than anything. And so, even if you realise by this point that much more than what has already been lost is about to be lost,  the defense you’ve been playing is less of some extreme hope for the off-chance to savor the game, and more of a defense of a freeze in the face of the fear of taking your fate into your own hands and to turn yourself from a dominated into someone with a free will. For all these years – and how could you stop now?- you’ve been a small child allowing the grown-ups to take care of the grown-ups’ affairs. You would play with your private games and you would leave the fate of the public life to the grown-ups. Your tiny hands would feel safe when held by the palm of the responsible politicians and the media forces of this land.

They hold you and they lead you straight to the cliff; you can see it, so many around you have fallen off it already, you see that, yet that’s what you’ve learned, to be led, that’s what you’ve learned, to leave these matters to those who know better; at least at the time when they push you over you find solace in knowing you did nothing wrong, that you caused no indiscipline with your actions, that you may have fallen, but you fell as a good child, you fell following the path of sensibility, knowing that there was no other path than that one. Between the panic of finding yourself emancipated just before the cliff and trying to escape on your own, you prefer the hand pushing you confidently over it, and the mouth that at that moment whispers in your eary that any other option would be disastrous, that anything it does, it does it for your own good and the wider good of the country an your children; your children which, by the time they turn forty are most likely to have faced much more History than you ever did.

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Gang-style police raid migrants’ houses, robs them from valuables and cash – statement by the “movement united against racism and the fascist threat”

Sunday, January 22, 2012

The “movement united against racism and the fascist threat” has issued the following statement in response to the near-inconceivable events taking place in the neighbourhoods around the axis of Acharnon Street in central Athens (including the neighbourhoods of Agios Panteleimonas, Attikis Sq, Victoria and Amerikis Sq) over the course of the past few months.

A gang of police and ‘local residents’ has been profiting on a regular basis within the past few months in the wider area around Acharnon Str, storming into houses and looting whatever they can get their hands on. The same gang, in fact, appeared three times immediately prior to cleaning-up operations by the national and the municipal police, demanding money from the street traders in order to avoid the coming police attack against them.

Two examples of the gang’s operations:

- On Wednesday, January 11th, they stormed into a house by breaking down its door. Five policemen took part in this operation. Once in the house, they started smashing cupboards while the tenants told them ‘we have the keys for you to open them up’. They found boxes of cigarettes and 600 euros — they took it all without filling in any confiscation form. They also took credit cards with their pin numbers and immediately after that they withdrew 700 euros from an ATM. They injured an individual in their eye with a fist blow. This was the third time they demanded money from them in the past month alone.

- On November 9th, the same group entered another house and demanded they were handed over 1500 euros. One of the migrant tenants, alarmed, started collecting money from all those present and reached the sum of 1145 euros. Then, they took him downstairs, handcuffed, put him into a car and started driving him around to allow time for the others to collect the remainder of the sum they had demanded! While en route, the policemen where particularly talkative and showed him spots where they collect money from selling heroin, hashish, etc.

The name of one of the policemen as well as the number plates of their cars are known to our group.

I am convinced that this denouncing statement will fall in deaf ears, judging from the immunity that these criminal racist gangs of the area seem to enjoy, with everyday pogroms that begin at around 6.30 pm in Attikis Square and commence five hours later with baseball bat blows and the robbing of personal items of migrants on the doorstep of the church in Agios Pantaleimonas. The identification of extremely well-known people participating in these criminal acts daily has yet to take place [by the police].

You might issue all the fines you want, but you cannot silently legalise so obvious cases of illegal police activity. If these people are not police, then who is it covering up for them, and accompanying them in such a systematic and uncontrollable activity?

On behalf of the ‘movement united against racism and the fascist threat’,

Petros Konstantinou, member of the municipal council of Athens, tel. 6932828964

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The sweet taste of class struggle: sweetshop in Thessaloniki occupied by its workers; police raid sees eight arrests; workplace struggle continues

Saturday, January 21, 2012

On Thursday, workers at the sweetshop/patisserie chain “Hatzis” in northern city of Thessaloniki occupied the chain’s branch in the suburb of Kalamaria, culminating a struggle that had commenced in December, when they started abstaining from work in response to their bosses’ refusal to pay them salaries for the past five months, along with their christmas and easter bonuses.

According to a statement issued by the workers’ struggle committee, the company made profits of millions of euros in the past few years [it is one of the most successful chains in the country] yet for the past two years it has been paying irregularly, leading to it now owing the workers up to five wages, stipends and the -legally required- christmas and easter bonuses”. According to the committee, the company has accumulated a debt of millions of euros to the public insurance funds and its plan is to dissolve and to formulate a new legal entity, in order to bankrupt the old company and to avoid paying all its existing debts.

Taking advantage of the sweeping effects of the crisis, the bosses at Hatzis would force newcomers to work without being formally employed, working 6-day weeks with minimal insurance contributions, or demanding that new workers sign their new contract together with a “statement of voluntary withdrawal”, to avoid paying any compensation to fired workers.

In the past few days, after one of the company’s three stores closed down and its factory in Chalkidiki ceased its operation, part of the workers were transferred to another store. At the same time, four workers were fired and it appeared more were on the line. Those “lucky enough” not to be fired are planned to work under the company for salaries of 400 euros for 12-hour shifts, according to the workers’ struggle committee. In response, the workers occupied the store in Kalamaria, to stop the bosses from shutting down another store and removing all its equipment.

On the second day of the occupation (Friday Jan 20), police raided the store and arrested eight people in total (four workers and four people in solidarity). The woerkers’ external guarding of the building, and their struggle, continue.

 

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Athens sees its first city-wide strike as workers begin to break away from the control of reformist trade unions

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Today, January 17th marks a very important date in the recent history of labour struggle in Greece – responding to, and in solidarity with the struggle of the workers at Greek Steelworks, the six Labour Centres of Greater Athens (Attica) and the Workers/Employees Union of Athens have called a city-wide strike.

Approximately 15,000 people took to the streets of the city on the day. What follows below is an excerpt from the text issued by base unions, workers groups, workers and unemployed in their call for the strike:

For the past two-and-a-half months, the caldrons of the Greek Steelworks remain unlit – but class war has been ignited instead.  The terrorising by the boss Manesis, with his tens of firings and his plan for employment in turns, has been cancelled out in practice and shattered in the face of the unity and fighting spirit of the tenacious workers and in the face of the river of solidarity, an oxygen-feed for the continuing strike.

For two and half months at the “Gates of Fire” [title of an independent documentary on the strike, in Greek] the striking workers show us the way of struggle. A struggle that has inspired the unpaid workers at the Loukisa factory, who have been denied their wages for the past month. The struggle that strengthens the workers at ALTER TV station, unpaid for months, those at the Eleftherotypia newspaper; it strengthens the resistance of workers at Notos Galleries struggling against employment in turns; it led the workers at the factories of AGNO and MEVGAL to victory.

The bosses, after the troika and the greek strate paved them the way, believed they could easily in the midst of the crisis suck out the last remains of the blood of the exploited. They have started to be contradicted by reality.

Now, more than ever, we must promote class solidarity and our common struggle. We must all, workers, unemployed, locals and migrants, not merely stand in solidarity with these struggles, but we must turn every workplace into a pole of struggle, without waiting anything from party or syndicalist bureaucracies.

(Greek original)

 

"As the 'gates of fire' burn, with the self-organisation, solidarity, the knowledge of our interests and our class consciousness we open up the 'gates of hell' for the bosses"

“Selforganised, Unguarded, Ιntransigent Struggles – Solidarity to the Struggle of Steelworkers – The Selforganisation of the workers will Become the Grave of the Bosses – Strike and March in Propylea Tuesday 17 January – Assemply of Anarchists for the Social Selforganisation”
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