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Title: Positions – Proposals – Framework Author: Antiauthoritarian Movement Date: May 2017 Language: en Topics: position paper, anti-authoritarianism, Greece Source: Retrieved on 19th March 2022 from https://www.antiauthoritarian.gr/positions-proposals-of-a-k/
Antiauthoritarian Movement (Αντιεξουσιαστική Κίνηση or A.K.) was created
in 2002 with main goal the participation in the mobilizations against
the summit of EU member states, which took place in June 2003,
Thessaloniki. Today, 16 years later, it is the longest-standing
network/organization in the antiauthoritarian “space” with several
groups in different Greek cities.
On the occasion of the 16 years of existence and the dense historic time
through which we have passed through as Greek society, we feel it is
necessary to re-examine our aims and the reasons why we choose to be
politically expressed through A.K. network and not through any other
collectivity or organization.
The reasons because of which A.K. was created remain the same even
today. The radical forces does not seem to have overcame their
ideological paralysation, trying to fit the reality in their theory,
which is being presented as undeniable truth. In an age which forces us
to chase the reality and situations rather than to create them, as we
once did, the danger of becoming ridiculous and forgotten on the shelves
of history is closer than ever. As Antiauthoritarian Movement we choose
to observe and research the reality, to interact with active subjects
and from this base to emerge our theory, direction, values.
Antiauthoritarian Movement has, as its framework, 3 basic principles:
the agreement on non-seizure of power, the anti-hierarchical structure
and Direct Democracy, along with the admission of the idea that in order
to create radical libertarian political cracks and potentials there is
no need to place your trust in metaphysical readings of reality or
wishful thinking. Today, we seen how the political fields of theory and
practice, raised by the Antiauthoritarian Movement, are being embraced
by growing segments of society. Free social spaces, social management of
commons (water, garbage, transport, information), ecological struggles
(the river Aheloos, the movement against coal, Skouries), squats for
housing of refugees and migrants, as well as more concrete issues like
transnational networking, protection of demonstrations, political
festivals in metropolises and provinces, all these are based on and
derive legitimacy from the wide social processes taking place in Greece
and abroad.
We can identify 2 main reasons why A.K. still exists and is interacting
WITH society, not leading it as an enlightened avant-garde, but also
neither following it, trying to catch up with new developments.
The first one is the stubbornness of the people that constitute A.K.
during all these years, so they could intervene in all social spaces,
interacting with many different subjects, which surely are not the
“revolutionary” models that some of the supporters of the “clean” and
“uncontaminated” ideologies would like to see. The big “taboo” of the
so-called ideologically “pure” subject was gradually broken, to a large
extent exactly because of such type of interactions. That is, the
long-lasting refusal of large sections of the radical space to
participate in struggles, which were not strictly part of the anarchist
or the leftist circles. Characteristic examples are: the movement of the
squares and the “Aganaktismenoi” (2011), where obviously the thousands
of people were not hard ideologically politicized cores but nonetheless
they kept in tension a whole government and huge police force because of
their persistence and massiveness; as well as older such cases like the
student demonstrations from 2006–2007 where again thousands
non-ideological students, alongside with other parts of society, managed
to suspend the abrogation of Article 16 and the privatization of high
education; and even the revolt of December ’08, where for one more time
the angry youth (and not only), which was viewed as fluid and
“apolitical” subject, managed to put on their knees – politically and
ethically – the dominant mechanisms of the state.
The second reason is the complex issue of autonomy on which A.K. network
is based. This means essentially that each city, movement, group or
person inside A.K. can maintain their autonomy, and not their
autonomization from the rest. A.K. strives at being a framework for
organizational convergence, even if on different issues there is a
different approach to interpreting social problems. I.e. the assemblies
of the network that exist thorough Greece (Athens, Thessaloniki,
Giannena, Larisa, Patra, Komotini, Piraeus) are pieces of one general
whole, but in the same time they maintain their autonomy, not
autonomization, from the rest of the network, mainly through the
Panhellenic Assembly of all the people that participate in any way in
the activities of A.K.
Essentially this is the main and basic difference between A.K. and other
political formations that either existed before (anarchist collectives
and leftist parties) or have emerged recently. Organizing through closed
structures with fixed membership, the inability to make decisions if
they are not validated by a central committee, and generally, the
inelastic operational framework, which we consider as obstacles to
individuals to reach their own conclusions, with collectivity
functioning as helper and not as instructor, there are reasons why we
believe that these forms of organization cannot respond to the complex
political and social context that has been shaped today.
We believe that solving a problem which concerns a local community does
not come out of a political manual or manifesto with positions, analyzes
and projects that have been implemented and have failed in different
times and places. The way in which each society is called upon to solve
its issues is by the self-determining actors who consist it, and not
through directives and guidance. One such more recent example is the
case of Skouries in Chalkidiki, which is the tangible example of the
resistance of a local community to capitalist development with its own
radical and self-organized characteristics, and not with instruction
manuals or raids in the sky.
Surely this method is not a panacea; anyway, we admit that a common
solution to all the problems of the world is more of a field of the
church and not ours.
What we want to make clear is that from the beginning of 2000, when
essentially the anti-globalization movement ended, the only practice we
were willing to try (since all the rest have been tried and have failed)
was the test and error procedure. A new social and political field opens
before us, in which we must leave aside the certainties and in which our
compass must be the past experiences and the depots for which we have
struggled so much, because the paths towards the solution are not just
based on right choices but also on wrong choices.
We are quite sure anymore that the decentralized social and economic
systems, organized in direct-democratic, non-statist way, will come only
through common struggles of different movements and broader social
participation. Therefore, instead of constantly trying to define what
“true” anarchism is, for example asking if EZLN and Rojava are enough
anarchist, we decided to try another approach: to locate the
anti-authoritarian characteristics of various already existing social
movements and to identify their common enemies (oppressors) and thus to
connect them. And in order such connections to be made, narrow
ideological narratives have to be abandoned and replaced by general
anti-authoritarian culture, which can simultaneously be determined and
itself to determine the context in which it was created, thus initiating
one contemporary anticapitalist-antistatist enlightenment.
Moving beyond Ideology does not mean abdicating from our ideas and
principles but their constant reevaluation and development. To the fears
that without ideological identities we will be absorbed by the dominant
culture of political apathy and mindless consumerism, we can answer with
the creation of a broad citizen culture of autonomous individuals who
are, before all, speakers of words and doers of deeds. One broader plan
for exiting capitalism, based on the virtue of mutual respect and the
principle of “positive liberty” of self-governance (and not simply the
“negative liberty” of non-interference), will keep the
anti-authoritarian spirit while allowing for interaction with large
sections of the society and the implementation in practice of our ideas
in different contexts. Only one such approach would help us avoid the
“sectarianism” (with all its separatism and lifestyle) of the political
movements that haunts them from the 20^(th) century until today. Because
of this we use the term ANTIAUTHORITARIAN in our name.
Direct democracy is Antiauthoritarian Movement’s (A.K.) political
project as a prerequisite of social and individual autonomy. It actually
contains the two elements of the three-pronged principles underlying our
policy collectiveness, that is, non-seizure of power and anti-hierarchy.
It becomes clear that, democratic pre-orientations as the process in
each functional area is based on these two elements.
Democracy, by definition, stands against any authority that tries to
dominate or exert itself over the power the people themselves hold. The
people are the municipality, citizens who are self-defined as free and
the only way for people to really be self-governed, the actual people
and not some transplantation or imaginative construction, is for every
citizen to act as a natural person and take part into the institutions
of the decision and act upon them, across the range of social functions,
into a free public space and time. Therefore, a substantive precondition
of democracy is the essential and complete equality, which in turn
requires individual and social freedom.
Since no one stands above the power of the municipality/people, who in
turn recognizes itself as the primary source of power and meanings,
these same meanings are being called into question. The question raised
concerns the law, since the problem is that there is no mechanism
separate from the political body that enforces the law, and the
precondition for the law is not submisiveness but persuasion. Instead of
heteronomy, the concept where the law comes from elsewhere, the law of
authority, which is tight and closed, democracy is a condition of
autonomy, social autonomy, since legislation and self-government are
explicit collective actions, and consequently a condition of individual
autonomy.
Direct democracy implies an entire project of self-government and the
establishment of a society with clear content. It proposes the equality
of all citizens and the freedom of every individual, it demands the
existence of a true social space and an open social time, it shows the
potential of a political doubt against the existing system. It is
incompatible with any bureaucratic hierarchical mechanisms which
attribute social power to the benefit of a state and preserve the
separation of society from politics through the existence of the state.
It can only exist against and in direct opposition to each state and
hierarchical establishment. We must not forget that the project of
modern movements in the world, from Occupy to Rojava is direct
democracy. All spontaneous and radical social experiments and all the
networks of social self-organized collectives that exist, essentially
work in terms of direct democracy.
The request of direct democracy in the social field explicitly raised
the question of social transformation, it questioned the dominant
institutions and it provided a chance for a re-institutionalization of
the social reality. The explicit acceptance of this request by a huge
part of society at the moment where it was on the streets, militant, is
a socio-historical moment of enormous importance.
In an autonomous society, based on direct democracy, politics, economic,
social, ecological sphere should be organized on the basis of
self-management and anti-hierarchy. Direct democracy should be embedded
in each sphere to stay true.
What is today the experience of direct democracy from which the modern
radical political collectives and groups can learn? Of course, the
adoption of direct democracy and the instilling of its meaning into
modern social redevelopment both in public space and time. That is:
A radical challenge to the existing social status/authority concerning
it’s fundamentals. These fundamentals of the state power are:
Instead of and against those, we stand for:
commons (communication, energy, water, nutrition, health, education,
information, rubble, environment, etc.).
centralized management and centralized certification either from
ethnographic bureaucracy, or from economic-bureaucracy.
communication and knowledge, the setting up of planetary networks for
the exchange of information, ideas and products and the widening of
global solidarity.
social activities; economy does not rule the society, we do.
political decisions and acting on them, without exclusions.
possibility of a collective decision and act, for the possibility of
people themselves who are involved in this to decide their daily working
activities in the public time and space they choose to create. Not as
producers separated and divided from consumers with a relationship of
economic interest, but as people in a single community that seek
autonomy for direct democracy.
free research, the diffusion of knowledge inside society but also by
participating in institutions of direct democracy.
principle of state and capitalist mechanisms. Defend the free and social
character of public space and time, abolition of the statist and private
capitalist exploitation of the public.
of the people to move freely as they want and broadening even further
their rights to equality and freedom through the creation of autonomous
and democratic institutions in which everyone will participate.
Practical and actual solidarity with refugees and migrant populations.
and the governing authority, this is where the social violence that
occurs should be seen as something that might happen and not as the only
cause. Social violence for the sake of emancipation and autonomy is not
the only cause but means to an end.
During the period of memorandums and the economic crisis, the greatest
attack ever on labor has occurred trying to take back our rights and
conquests from previous eras. The idea that Greek debt is public, is the
basis upon which state and employers seek to fully disrupt the labor
relations to the detriment of employees. This process, the results of
which the majority of Greek society is experiencing, is part of the
overall degradation of life of the “average human” in one constant
condition of poverty, control and repression, cultural decline, violent
seizing of public space and huge environmental damage.
However, requests for no further degradation of labor and restoration of
the principal industrial relations to decent levels often dominated over
other aspects of the overall of the social crisis and have been
expressed independently by various social groups. This framework of
claims, which is mainly based on the syndicalist unions on all-levels,
public and private, leftist or not includes the requirement for wage
increases, freezing of redundancies, recruitment, etc., has been proven,
especially as of late, something more than insufficient. The main tools
of trade unionists in these claims, namely the short lived strikes and
stoppages, in conjunction with the negotiation with the bourgeoisie or
the state for more favorable conditions of exploitation have also
reached a quagmire.
At the same time, the worker’s figure, as the supposedly revolutionary
subject, has collapsed after numerous fragmentary struggles cut off from
the rest of society, and instead we have examples of labor conflicting
with social movements (see Skouries). That is to say that traditional
labor arguments work against radical social movements. With these facts,
to call upon the identity (of the “working class”, or the proletariat)
can only be an obsessive, perpetual attempt to revive the revolutionary
“scientific” promises of Marxism, which have been repeatedly
contradicted throughout history.
These findings are not a question of the class composition of modern
societies, nor are positions of defending employers obviously. The
conclusion, on the other hand, is that economic inequality and
exploitation will not be eliminated through traditional fetishist class
analyzes and the trivial tools of trade unionism, even though trade
unionism defines itself as revolutionary.
Considering the role of labor today, which is often opposed to the wider
social interest (nuclear factories, arms factories, mining companies),
two facts emerge. On one hand, social movements can, on occasion, be
“anti-labor” and on the other hand, the management of production in a
different way from the dominant one passes through the eventual
destruction of a large harmful and useless part of it and that should be
an issue for which the whole community will decide, not just the
workers. In this context, the first fully self-managed and
self-organized factory in Greece, Vio.Me. in Thessaloniki, is what we
have in mind. The workers of Vio.Me., when confronted with the
unemployment spectrum, made history for the labor movement in Greece.
They ignored the voices of traditional trade unionism that urged them to
claim damages and decided to put into orbit one of the most important
self-organized and radical projects. Since the beginning they opened the
door to society by making it an equal partner through the processes of
direct democracy on the issue of production, thus creating a strong
solidarity movement. They placed respect for the environment as a
predominant value and adapted their production to the contemporary
ecological crisis. They did not perceive their operation as a simple
alternative to survival in capitalism but as a radical incision in the
existing exploitation system by not placing their products in
supermarkets and participating in wider social movements and claims.
Already, other projects are getting ready to follow in the footsteps of
Vio.Me. while international recognition of this top example of
self-organization of production with an ally of society is remarkable.
Self-organization, with a social and ecological sign, is projected as an
appropriate plan to overcome the misery of traditional labor struggles
and demands. It also broadens the horizons of complete social autonomy
from the state and capitalism, extending it to the field of tertiary
production. We consciously choose to be there at every step of these
struggles, for a society without bosses and employers.
It is a fact that the initiatives from below have multiplied and now
cover a wide range of activities in all areas of production. In the
primary sector, small producer’s groups cooperate and small-scale
producers are establishing distribution networks for their products,
having as goal the quality and, to a certain extent, the low price. The
squeezing of the market, with the intermediaries taking advantage of the
situation, leaves no room for these producers and their turning towards
direct distribution creates new conditions in productive relations.
Relationships that not only shape the needs created by the crisis, but
also by the active presence of consumers who want to have a say in the
production cycle. In this way, there are being introduced new criteria,
such as the locality and the work relations.
Something similar is also happening in the tertiary sector, with greater
dynamism, due to the peculiarity and character of the Greek economy. The
most difficult case is that of the secondary sector, where, even though
there are great opportunities for the easy occupation of factories, the
bureaucratic syndicalism, with completely different and hostile goals in
its agenda, and sometimes the timidity or the conservatism of most base
workers, make the initiatives of the cooperative economy in industry (as
much as we can talk about industry in Greece) minority in all of the
economy.
All such endeavors, that have impact on over 3,000 to 100,000 citizens
(being part of such collaborative initiatives), create a new reality in
one society, that was used with the representation and the resignation,
in spite of its post-glimpses.
Let’s not be in a hurry though. The tragedy of the recent past will not
be easily followed by either new optimism or new pessimism. Hopes and
dangers still vary, and this is exemplified by the heated debates that
have broken out both inside and outside of these initiatives. This
assures us that the field is open and the directions are still pending.
Here are some basic issues regarding the certain problem that is
grounded in the demands of the times and therefore on the role we can
play in this fluid reality.
First of all, the endeavors in their whole, if we exclude some crooks
who are hiding or intend to hide behind cooperativism, are not uniform
in their framework nor in their direction. They de facto operate within
the formal market economy and are struggling to survive. The pressure is
twofold. It affects both their social reach and their range of action,
which is confronted with the organization of the market and the
anthropological type it has constructed and continues to do so, but also
in relation to the former, with the state’s mechanisms for supervised
legality and its existing institutional framework.
Of course these endeavors as economic units, act antagonistically
towards the formal economy, but this alone cannot determine our attitude
towards them. What will determine our attitude is their political
orientation and the relationships that emerge from it as real imprint
against the formal economy.
Competition is inherent in capitalism at all levels and, above all,
economically, but the root of its politics is common for all its
competitors that operate with its rules. It is of little interest
whether this happens individually or collectively or cooperatively in
this case. The economic antagonism of our own endeavors against capital
stems from our political planning. The root of our own politics is the
universality of equality (words-deeds) and of solidarity. This
determines our participation in initiatives and is the one that provokes
changes in the cycle of social reproduction.
By focusing on the core political differences between the various
endeavors we can distinguish two main tendencies:
dominant production system and softens the huge effects of inequality
and marginalization. In this case, the production and the productive
relations of the endeavors either remain on the periphery of the formal
economy and do not threaten it (within the boundaries of a legitimate
but low-intensity underground economy), or as they grow stronger they
adopt market rules and become assimilated by them. There is abundance of
such examples that operate as NGOs of the economy.
state, for which the gaps of the formal economy are a preferred field
for action beyond the dominant rules. It is the base, the ground for
confrontation with the existing socio-economic system that is being
carried out daily inside and outside this path.
The political direction and the vision are therefore the measure of
evaluating the different initiatives of the solidarity economy.
Undoubtedly the great debate and interest is presented for those
endeavors that see themselves beyond the market and the state. This is
the threat of the breach caused by the crisis.
The dangers inherent in these ventures are related to their survival,
which in turn is linked to isolation, internal collapse, and repression.
And if the last one is the result of external factors, the other two
depend on internal ones.
The isolation of such endeavors can reproduce relations based on
equality for some time, but the fact that they become politically
indifferent cuts them off from collective social needs and processes,
and the more they are being isolated from them, the more are they likely
to be eroded by dominant competitions. Their strengths are being tested
on individual rather than on collective-social level, thus becoming
fruitless islands.
The internal collapse, on the other hand, has to do with the strategic
choices of such endeavors regarding real social needs, which, as long as
they don’t identify, remain in danger of reproducing the same world in
different way, slowly retreating to the social periphery. It has to do
also with the degree of internal participation in the collective and
equal processes, when after certain limit, there can’t be taken
decisions or if such are being made, they cannot be implemented by the
critical “mass” that makes these types of endeavors horizontal and
functional.
This is the point where is being transformed the organization of such
initiatives (which as further away it goes from horizontality and the
functional rotation of responsibility, leaves room for internal
competitions), but also the management control of their direction (where
neglect or indifference can lead to economic collapse).
Finally, the threat of repression, economic or physical, can be
prevented by the shield of social and participatory solidarity. This
depends on the magnitude of the interactive penetration of these
ventures into the society that they target and vice versa. This brings
us back to the measure of evaluation, which is their political
direction. If the outcome of the confrontation is of any significance,
then the social terms and their qualities that will be shaped in this
interaction have a thousand times greater significance.
Despite the abundance and pluralism of such projects, networking between
them is disproportionate to their numbers. Here we will specify the
terms of networking.
Networking cannot be based only on a joint declaration of principles and
positions without to embody a materialized imprint on which to test the
principles and positions of the common politics of collaboration and
coexistence. The political context of this imprint is not just the
common component of individual frames or their sum, it does not obey the
rules of mathematical equation.
It is a new creation of synthesis of certain projects, the existence of
which is a condition of horizontal networking and this in turn is a
prerequisite of their non-autonomization. Through networking endeavors
become something other from what they were before. The dynamics change:
scope, participation, commitment, responsibility, political goals. In
other words, there is a change in the message and the symbolism of it.
And in the fluid age we live in, the message can be more powerful than
the physical imprint of networking.
When talking about physical footprint we mean nothing more than the
creation of one or more new endeavors as a result of the activities of
the first ones. The geographical location (distance), as well as the
necessary and functional number of initial such initiatives can
determine the type of secondary ventures, but at the same time this kind
(productive or/and cultural) must be subsequential and endogenous with
wider social needs.
This has to do with the strategic political planning (what, how, and
why) of this choice. The precondition of this design is to not negate or
assimilate existing ventures to the extent that their vital space, that
makes them functional and useful, is being eradicated, so as not to
jeopardize them with a new competitive centralization. Such secondary
formations create the conditions for tertiary ones etc, embracing a wide
geographic spectrum. This process of material and political osmosis of
the ventures creates free spaces that, as much as they multiply, the
dominant system will feel their breath.
Here too, the geographical location of the message is being catalyzed by
its dynamics. And this dynamics is neither mathematical, nor
deterministic, nor rational, but political. It is the dynamics of a
political choice that is part of the general plan for overthrowing
capitalism and reshaping life simultaneously on many levels (at the
workplace, in defending public spaces, defending common goods, etc.),
with goals that are being born by the confrontation, but at the same
time carry the “germs” of alternative project.
The liberated space (from one farm until a whole mountain like the case
of Skouries, from one free social space until one neighborhood assembly
on a square, and from one workshop until a whole factory) from the
shackles of the market and the state, the direct-democratic institutions
of equality in these spaces, and the production and cultural structures
of participatory solidarity, is the triptych of one already existing
world that is being created within the shell of another, hostile world.
Of course, the existing horizontal projects of equal social reproduction
cannot change the world by themselves, but the world also cannot be
changed if they are being drastically reduced or destroyed. Everything
depends on what type of society we want, what form of social
organization, with what institutions and structures. Anyone who leaves
these questions for the “great moment” (of the revolution) has already
paved the road for a new domination, by preferentially reserving for
himself, imaginarily or in reality, an indeed privileged and “sweet”
relationship with her.
The social and solidarity economy and its networks, integrated within
this framework, can be the answer to the destruction and dissolution of
life, which is being progressed by the accelerationist rhythms of
capitalism.
We want a decentralized, equal, solidarity-based, horizontal and
direct-democratic society that will send the economy back in its place.
As one of human activities, and not as the main objective around which
the past, present, and future are intertwined, interpreted and
determined. A society free from the devastating myth of growth, with
enormous ecological footprint, that acts unrestrained in a finite world
and creates the anthropological type of the immortal narcissist into a
mortal world.
The present endeavors and their networks have to be seen as liberating
educational laboratories of social reproduction and as examples of
political planning for the creation of one society consisted of small
autonomous communities.
Small: To enable the deliberation of the specificities of their common
and immediate problems, equality of speech, effective decision-making
and direct implementation of decisions taken through open assemblies.
With solidarity and participation: Because only in this way they can
coexist. Their solidarity is the social condition for their existence,
individual and collective and not just a critical moment of need
resulting from deprivation.
Direct-democratic and equal: Not because in this way we can secure one
free society, but because it allows the possibility of shaping the
conditions of freedom. Therefore, for these initiatives direct democracy
and equality are not a procedural and limited event, but a universal way
of organizing social reproduction at all levels.
Autonomous: Because they have full control and collective jurisdiction
of management and change, over their institutions and structures,
knowing that they are their own creations that derive directly from
them, and this relationship is not a relationship of power with a third
side.
We experience a period where movements together with society, propose
the common production and management of basic goods such as water,
seeds, food, waste, energy, communications, information, education,
health, technology, culture, solidarity and public space.
Nowadays, the instituting of the commons is no longer a marginal
proposal. On the contrary, it is a central political issue that is
extensive and in conflict with the enclosure of the capitalist market,
the world of commodification and state repression. It is a proposal for
the appropriation of the public as a commons beyond organizational forms
based on state and capital. And it finally forms a practical way out of
today’s capitalist societies, which are destroying people and nature.
The road towards one democracy of the commons is being paved, little by
little and we learn to participate and share everything we need. And we
open this path by walking together.
We can declare that natural resources belong to all (present and future
generations, all living beings) and that the production of social wealth
is basically the result of social co-operation. However, the attribution
of specific relationships to the (re)production of life and the
acceptance of these relations as a natural phenomenon in the dominant
imaginary results in domination over the management of natural resources
and produced wealth by powers separated from society. The diffuse
implications of such a management constantly raise the question of its
transformation. Therefore, sooner or later society faces a dilemma:
STATIST OR PRIVATE? Although the state and private versions of
management are, to a large degree, different sides of the same coin,
they are being presented as different, and often incompatible, things.
In essence, it is only the manager of social production that differs,
with the world of labor and society remaining, in both cases, in the
same position of exploitation and domination, dependent on the same
employment relations and execution of orders.
The escape from this pseudo-dilemma lays in the meaning and significance
of the PUBLIC – FREE – SOCIAL nature of management of socially produced
wealth, which is being deliberately confused with state management,
while it is precisely the opposite of it. PUBLIC – FREE – SOCIAL is the
type of management when society itself undertakes the control of
socially produced wealth and not some power separated from it, such as
the state and the private enterprises. PUBLIC – FREE – SOCIAL are the
forms of direct-democratic organization and self-institution, through
which society as a whole participates in the management of wealth and
workers, as an extension of the social, participate in the management of
the production. PUBLIC – FREE – SOCIAL is the equal and inclusive
distribution of the socially produced wealth according to the needs of
each and in a harmonious relationship with nature.
The commons are dynamic social relations. They are being formed whenever
a group of people, through practices of direct actions, collectively
manages a resource with an emphasis on equal and sustainable access and
use.
Any material, social and intellectual resources that make up the social
wealth are not part of the commons except only through the direct action
of the social movements, which enables equal access, sharing and
participation in their (re)production and management. The formation of
the commons from movements and societies is an inherently
confrontational process, based on declarations of independence from the
control of the state and the capitalist market. The appropriation of a
material, social or intellectual resource for the formation of the
commons goes through its detachment from previous rights of private or
state property and, above all, through the proclamation of its communal,
inalienable and non-commodifiable character. The circulation and
networking of the commons is a process that directly challenges the
world of capital, destroying, influencing its flow and reproduction, and
decolonizing whole spheres of common life from capitalist relations.
The commons are open and dynamic systems of social relations, that bring
certain characteristics, that create anticapitalistic perspectives.
Above all, the commons overturn the institution of property, private or
statist, taking the possibility of control over the commons away from
any authority that is separated from society. Furthermore, they are part
of an alternative social reproduction, based not on commodity value, but
on the use value of products/services, thus advancing not the logic of
profit, i.e. of accumulation, but of satisfaction of social needs. But
also, through the formation of movements for “commoning” of goods the
social subjects liberate their collaborative and creative potential,
detached from the commodification/alienation of the capitalist type of
production.
The commons create perspectives for the articulation of responses from
below to the ecological crisis. They are social relations, which,
depending on the survival of communities from local natural resources,
impose their good management, thus disrupting the rule of capitalism and
economic growth and leading towards degrowth of production.
Of course, the common, like any other projection of the world we want,
can only be an inherently confrontational precondition, since it carries
elements of both the old, the rejected, and the new that is being
imposed. Thus, within the sphere of the commons and as long as its cycle
is not closing, even at a local level, there may survive elements of the
barter economy that oppose the gift economy or elements that retain
remnants of private enclosure versus their communal character. This
contradiction, however, is not a sign of some sort of permanent defeat,
as is often being perceived as, but on the contrary, it is indicative of
a multilevel, fertile struggle and a plan for the ultimate overthrowing
of the wild globalized capitalist market.
The creation of commons unites, with a thin red line, all the
initiatives of the social movements. It has the prospect of bringing our
struggles together in a coherent plan for change, giving a tangible
outlook beyond, against and outside of the state and the capital,
depicting a power that is embedded in society. If the cell of the
circulation of capital is the commodity, then the cell for the
circulation of social anti-authority is the commons.
After the historical experience of the social struggles of the past, we
are able to say that the falsified ideology of the public as statist has
undergone complete bankruptcy. The modern social struggles and the
social conflicts of tomorrow are now structured around the “commoning”
of the public, around the formation and preservation of the commons.
They are increasingly taking the form of social resistance to the
expropriation and destruction of natural and social wealth by the
state-capital cluster and, on the other hand, the re-utilization of
resources and the formation of the commons.
Today we can challenge the dominant paradigm of globalized capitalist
market through the possibility of networking and long-term distributing
the local commons.
Against the expansion of capitalist relations in every aspect of life,
we can set in motion and circulation an ever-expanding sphere of
alternative social relations that harmoniously unites the economy with
politics on the basis of direct action and direct democracy, a direct
democracy of the commons.
Against the destruction of society/nature by the capitalist machine, we
must aim, not at the creation of islands or autonomous zones, doomed to
be absorbed by the system, but to complete the cycle of the commons.
In contemporary societies, along with man’s exploitation, we have the
exploitation and complete domination of man over nature. For us, the
relation of humans with the natural environment, the ecological issue,
is inextricably connected to the overall organization of contemporary
societies. All ecological issues are related to social ones, that is,
they are caused by today’s prevailing social, political and economic
system.
Therefore, it isn’t “humanity” in general that is to blame for the
ecological problems, but rather concrete social-economic systems, such
as capitalism, that lead to nature’s destruction and undermine social
life itself. The environmental disruption is deeply rooted in an
irrational, anti-ecological society, whose basic problems cannot be
healed with fragmentary reforms. Overcoming the ecological crisis
requires, according to social ecology, a free society without
hierarchical discrimination.
If we consider which is the basic value that motivates the decisions of
politicians today, “growth” comes immediately to our mind. Both
rightwing and leftwing, capitalist and socialist governments promote the
theory of how much we need more production and consumption for societies
to develop and overcome contemporary crisis. The narrative of constant
economic growth is part of the dominant system’s hegemonic discourse.
But some questions arise: What exactly is being developed? For what
purpose should something be definitely developed? Isn’t the economic
sector already too big?
This constant process of large-scale extraction and consumption of
natural resources has caused serious degradation of nature. Scientists
are warning that we are witnessing the biggest extinction of species
over the last 65 million years. Human’s economic activity has caused a
climate change (getting worse every year) that among other things,
threatens to provoke mass population’s mobility (climate refugees). The
soil fertility is being degraded, because of genetically modified crops,
while the water and the air are being polluted, threatening human
health. Entire islands of rubbish/waste are being formed over the
deepest parts of the oceans. And the list goes on. We are talking about
a war against nature. It is not clear how we will we be able to reverse
the ecological crisis, caused by the Anthropocene Era, if we continue
the same way.
Today, European Left (having the actual example of SYRIZA) is coming
back promising to divide the “pie” more fairly. But again, as if it
isn’t big enough, it needs to grow even more. It is not clear why this
should happen, instead of simply sharing equally the abundance that
already exists.
Economic growth is incompatible with ecological and self-sufficient ways
of life. To continue with a growth like this, contemporary economy needs
to absorb as many Common Goods as possible, thus making the human
interactions outside of it impossible. Several enterprises, such as
Google and Facebook (the two fastest growing multinationals in the
history of capitalism), go even further commercializing our very
existence in the digital field, crushing it in order to gain surplus
value. By doing this, economic growth is actually empowering the
capitalist system, which bears the responsibility, together with the
state apparatus for the deepening of social inequalities.
We have to abandon overall the growth doctrine and shift our attention
to the already existent financial “pie”. There is no point in trying to
make it even bigger. On the contrary, if we want to have a future on
this planet, the idea of degrowth is necessary. We need to share the
“pie” equally, something that the state or other hierarchical structures
outside society are incapable of doing, since equality requires equal
participation in the decision making of all citizens. So, we reach a
point where we have to talk about a complete change of paradigm: a total
abandonment of economism of homo economicus and the adoption of social
ecology with active citizens, passionate with the common affairs and
aware of their coexistence with nature.
So, instead of elected representatives, economic oligarchs or contrived
economic indicators that determine how the “pie” will be divided, we
need networked, grassroots institutions (like public assemblies and
councils of revocable spokesmen) that will give the opportunity of
participation to all members of society. This way, social ecology and
degrowth are only a part of the general direct democracy project.
The rejection of economic growth doesn’t mean going back to primitivism,
but on the contrary, it means a different use and understanding of what
we already have and what we will obtain in the future.
We reach the conclusion that economic growth, either coming from the
right or from the left, cannot solve today’s social problems. On the
contrary, it reinforces capitalism and state hierarchies that can only
deepen the crisis roots. In order to face them successfully, a
completely different paradigm is needed, one that will not aim to small
changes but will confront holistically the real causes of our problems.
A holistic and sustainable vision for the reconstruction of society on
rational bases, and with co-existential rather than antagonistic
relations between people, and also between man and nature.
What we are doing and will continue to do is to provoke, support and
participate in such social struggles and movements, trying to bring them
together and connect them in a new form of federalism (networked local
communities) with content the management and production of common goods
by the users themselves, based on self-limitation and Direct Democracy.
The public space consists of the “inner” urban area of the city and the
“external” natural environment. It is not just the geographical location
but it is mainly determined by the individual-interpersonal
relationships that develop within it and define it. In both of its
aspects, the private / public, let’s say a town’s central square, and
the fully public, that is, the political assembly, also known as Agora,
is the common ground where the social functions and institutions that
define the social establishment – are assembled and shaped.
Public space is essentially the place of politics, and as long as it is
under the sovereignty of the state and private capital, society is
excluded from lawmaking and self-government. The emergence of global
neo-liberal capitalism with its tools, economic crisis, shock and
leveling of local societies is essentially a boom in the public space
through the privatization, homogenization, commercialization and sealing
not only of urban but also of natural resources, i.e. of human relations
in terms of society and the environment. It is no coincidence that
social resistance and the new global social movements have placed the
focus on the liberation of the public space, its reconstruction and its
claim as free and social, against the state and capitalist power.
From the streets and squares of the world, from the self governed
communities of Chiapas and Rojava to the free social spaces in the
neighborhoods of the small cities and the bigger cities, the claim and
the diffusion of the social struggles take place in and around the
reconstruction of public space as free and social.
Free public space is a common place-territory, giving space to the
equal, free personal-interpersonal relationships that develop within and
define it. Public space is always constituted by something: a common
claim or struggle (Halkidiki) and it even makes a use of a real place
temporarily (e.g. occupation of municipality buildings during the hunger
strike by N. Romanos) when necessary. It is activity and action, a
process of gathering, is the place in which social norms are critically
presented and are exceeded through the exhibition.
The attack of authority in the public sphere stems from state abuse of
power, and today it is expressed either as a privatization or as a
nationalization in totalitarian regimes. Differences are about the
property, but not about the performance or the use, since in both cases
the public space is capitalized and imported as a financial size to the
gears of the global financial system.
This is what links, in terms of negative dialectic, the uprising of Gezi
Park with the resistance of the inhabitants of Messochora to the
cataclysm of their village that will lead to the diversion of Acheloos
river or Chalkidiki (Skouries – Gold Mining struggles), while positively
linking them to the meaning that is formed through the defense of public
space. That is, the social content of public space against the imaginary
of growth and the economy that dominates, both in Left and Right. It is
no coincidence that all aspects of the political spectrum in the world
are converging on the notion of unlimited development through the
economic exploitation of both social and natural resources. All of these
resources are the common goods of humanity, and so the struggle for
their defense is the struggle of the whole of society.
Free public space is a space of resistance and creation. In the modern,
fragmented world, where the presence of state mechanisms does not allow
the realization of a fully public, autonomous political space of
self-government (which presupposes the destruction of state power and
authority), free public spaces are multidimensional, partial and often
temporary.
Temporary free public spaces are occupied squares and occupied public
buildings when they become centers of struggle for a wider social
revolt. Permanent free public spaces are free social spaces, either as
squats or rented places, when they are open to all and avoid
self-referential encroachment (as is the case with strict ideological
affinities), squares and neighborhoods when they are self-organized by
permanent assemblies, and of course self-governed communities where they
are established. The latter, insofar as they claim their autonomy from
the dominant information and exchange system, can turn into fully
political public spaces, at the heart of political decisions, by
establishing forms of direct democracy.
In direct democracy, both sides of public space, as a town central
square and as an assembly, as a gathering and as a co-decision, as
friendship and equality, are necessary in order for social literacy and
freedom to become realized institutions.
Liberated public spaces are already forms of institutionalized
anti-authority in practice, that they emerge within a heteronomous
social institution but can develop into autonomous nodes of direct
democracy, if they succeed in establishing self-government. Thus, their
existence, even at the embryonic level of just free public places of
education and resistance, is radically threatening for the established
separated power of the state and the capital. They dispute not only the
dominant establishment, but all established institutions, the separation
of society itself from power and the state-capital dipole itself.
To do this, however, the absence of state jurisdiction is not enough.
Besides, the edge of licentious authority is lawlessness. Autonomy
presupposes that a free public space is not an end in itself, but also
an instrument. Public space is equally an instrument and an end in
itself, an end in itself as the freedom of coexistence, but at the same
time it is the field in which social issues are raised. This is a means
to achieve and expand social autonomy in the face of global liberation.
In order for the public space to be truly free, it should have some
central features:
mechanisms. The very community that creates public space is
self-regulated and self-governed. This self-government means full
respect and recognition of each person’s freedom, equality and autonomy.
system, with radically putting into question every authority and
recognition of the self-sufficient person. The functioning of public
space presupposes the principles of equality in participation and
decision-making, as well as the ensuring of the horizontal and the
non-assumption of power or of state intervention. Anti-racist,
anti-sexist content and self-protection and restriction structures that
promote participation. The openness of assemblies on any issue is
necessary.
the community. Reversing the relationship of subordination of society to
the economy and making the economy a tool of free, equal social
activities. At a universal social level, this would mean full income
equalization and full transparency of economic processes as tools rather
than as goals. At the micro-social level, it means the questioning of
capitalist economy, the absolute transparency of exchanges, the
promotion of alternative trading methods and the abolishment of profit.
individual separately, even if not all of society has participated in
their creation. For example, Vio.Me.’s success has not only been the
self-organization of production at the labor level, but also that it has
opened up this self-organization to society, that it has raised its
product, that it has escaped centralized state certification and created
a consumer network, radically changing the relationship between producer
and consumer. It goes without saying, of course, that the mechanisms of
the state and the capital that drain society are out of society, as well
as the people who participate in them, while they participate and do not
leave completely. Representatives of these mechanisms are automatically
out of public space, until the mechanisms themselves are destroyed. Free
public spaces should always be against any exclusion by multiplying
horizontally by displacing in any way the state-capitalist dominance.
networking, on the central principles of parity, freedom and direct
democracy. Already the networks of social resistance and solidarity
constitute a fragile global network of autonomy that needs to be
consolidated and strengthened. Through horizontal networks with global
reach, the national lie can be overcome and the local links with the
global, the local resistance with the global community and the local
self-governing community with the world movement.
communication and exchange and a whole world, cyberspace. Fights and
battles against the prevailing sovereignty are also happening here, with
free software movements, digital commons and hackers. The geographic
public space, the common ground of physical communication and
co-decision, is now directly linked to an infinite and direct public
space of information and communication and through it to other existing
similar communities. This whole range forms a world of resistance and
democracy that intersects and exceeds (already) the state entities. It
is also linked to the massive movements of populations, involuntary and
imperative, which, however, call into question the very foundations of
the state, the borders. For example, the state’s attack on refugee
solidarity networks is attacking the nodes and arteries of this world
movement.
Our goal is to continuously and creatively expand public space in as
many ways as possible. Matters and demands primarily raise the issue of
power, and therefore of public space, as a space of co-decision and
self-management.
Finally, there is the enormous issue of survival of humanity itself
within the nature and relation of society with the external physical
environment, with natural resources (social resources and production
resources). The ecological problem is what urgently illustrates the
problem of the relationship and the need for an immediate-democratic
interaction of the local with the global one. For example, no autonomous
community that lives along a river, can have full jurisdiction over the
river, as it belongs to the very nature and humanity in it. No use of
the natural environment can reach to its destruction.
Some natural resources and some commons cannot belong to a small part of
humanity. Thus, the concept of free-public space when it comes to the
natural environment also contains an inversion of the relationship
between man and nature, from exploitation to cohabitation. All modern
environmental movements, ranging from parks in urban fabric to
Chalkidiki and beyond, highlight this relationship with the natural
environment and demonstrate that the struggles for the earth are the
school for direct democracy.
Free public space will either be the place of truly democratic, free
education or it will be nothing.
Therefore, the notion of free public space, that is being recreated by
the direct democratic and equalizing social movement, is already
changing the political question, the question of power. Instead of
taking over the established power, it is proposed to displace and
destroy any hierarchical social institution towards the open horizontal
fields of direct democracy.
It can contribute in practice to the creation of free public space, to
its defense, to its opening to society, and then to autonomous and
self-governed individuals to open up to the common creation of real
institutions of freedom and self-government.
This is the meaning of our political action and creation, from the free
social spaces, Mikropolis in Thessaloniki, Nosotros in Athens, Adelante
in Komotini, Alimoura in Giannena, Alana in Larissa, Favela in Peiraeus,
to our participation in the struggles of society on streets, squares and
mountains against the state and capital.
The violent attempt to homogenize the world has so far led to the
dissolution of entire states, creating a huge crowd of people, without
hope of survival, moving to the West. The base of the overwhelming
majority of the new population mobility is located in a space of
war-torn conflict, totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist horror, and
it concerns the uninterrupted mobility of people from Syria, Yemen,
Eritrea, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.
The Spring of the Arab world was quickly followed by the horror of the
Syrian civil war, the consolidation of the Maghreb states as failed
states and the emergence of ISIS and Al Nusra as regulators of barbarism
in the territories of Syria and Iraq.
The low-intensity Middle East warfare recalls the responsibilities of
the West. If at one point it launched imperialist wars in a never-ending
effort to widen its spheres of influence and open up new markets, it is
now embroiled in warfare, leaving behind dissolute states and oppressed
ethnic and religious groups.
Of course, when we talk in the West about population mobility, we almost
always define them as a phenomenon that arises exclusively as a result
of wars or economic poverty. Without wanting to underestimate these
factors, we note that for many decades the West exerts particular charm
as a model of progress and modernized smooth institutional functioning
in populations, oppressed by the theocracies of the East, the clan mode
of social organization and the sense of cultural and economic hardship.
The need for new political structures expressed within the countries
themselves during the Arab Spring was handled and dealt with by the
great Western powers in every case occasionally. They were more
concerned with the opportunities presented to them in terms of managing
geopolitical competition (US-Russia, etc.), rather than with the
political texture of these mobilizations and the latent social
tendencies they showed.
Instead, they treated these countries as a chessboard in which a proxy
war would unfold (in the terminology of the geopolitical think tank),
ignoring, as usual, social injuries and social turmoil that they had
undergone with this tactic.
To understand the current situation, we need to look at how migratory
and refugee movements have developed during the 20^(th) century, as well
as their institutional/state treatment.
With the strengthening of the powers of the state after World War I and
the enormous refugee waves that followed and numbered millions of
people, refugee definition is created in international law and
transnational agreements on the regulation of refugee flows are
established. Following the end of the Second World War and the
displacements of the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period, there
were 30–40 million refugees in Europe. With the choice of mass
naturalization and the repatriation of those displaced by the war, the
issue of global movement enters the years of Cold War conflicts.
However, the legal definition of the refugee, despite the increased
waves created by the decolonization process, is limited to the example
of the individual persecution of dissidents by the communist states at
the peak of Macarthy era in the U.S. The flow of mobility since 1950 has
been determined by transnational agreements on the basis of common labor
markets or labor cover policies in the west of capitalist growth. With
the oil crisis in 1973, up to which about 20 million migrants had been
recruited under the “hired worker” status, western European states
decided to unilaterally ban the influx of workers. This policy, the laws
limiting illegal immigration and the rapid realization of the permanence
of travel, leads to the concept of separating a refugee and immigrant
without papers, which will then determine the legal status of the
displaced.
Through this separation western states will try to shape a migration
policy that will allow them to accept migrant populations and meet their
productive and developmental needs, while at the same time blocking the
large quantities of people arriving outside their borders, keeping their
social equilibrium within (relatively) intact.
The invasion of history in social time with the recent mobility of
populations has created cracks for the reconstruction of all the legal
categories on which the European institutional order was based. The fact
that the overwhelming majority of migrants correspond to what the
refugee law defines as a refugee together with their inability to absorb
altogether in the direction of a resettlement policy and the
impossibility of total legal cover erodes the legal and authoritarian
separation of an immigrant and a refugee.
How should we define those who are displaced as a result of food and
environmental crises or those who are trafficked or politically and
religiously persecuted in the course of their journey? The greatest
population movement we have ever witnessed since the Second World War is
being carried out today and carries a new political situation, not a
problem to solve.
From the emergence of the refugee-immigrant figure in the foreground,
several expressions, theories, visuals, deductions corresponding to more
general ideological forms of interpretation of reality have been
formulated by ideological groups that search for a new “subject”. In
this way, the migrant refugee loses his or her real presence and becomes
a “subject” in order to realize himself and at the same time to make
through it a more general ideological, religious or political design.
The migrant /refugee is constructed as a subject in order to complement,
multiply, promote a social change or even improve the existing social
structure through charity. In this case, we clearly distinguish the
complete homogeneity of imagination and interpretation of both the
Christian and the Marxist (historical materialism) model of analysis.
Both of these analysis were tried out in the past and they did not even
manage to rescue a single refugee-immigrant hair from state racism, nor
of course the duplication of these models of analysis would hinder a new
Auschwitz. In other words, neither the statist ideology of “class
brothers” nor the religious solidarity about pure “siblings” can
constitute a serious basis for defining the refugee-migrant in a
political society where power has the privilege of creating the state of
exception. So, regardless of what the migrant refugee was, what is now
in this treaty has characteristics of non-existence: no land, no papers,
no secure existence, no rights, no society. A modern homo sacer (naked
man) and a largely camped man, who suffers from the legal power of the
state of exception that is imposed upon him. In this way, the immigrant
refugee stripped off is naked and vulnerable, prone to be murdered by
the state or fascists after the trunk of survival-existence has been
sown.
The persecution suffered by the migrant refugee is lethal and the death
that follows this fugitive comes from both states and nature and does
not stop on the ground where he hopes to secure a prospect. Again as a
second-class existence is recognized in this new situation, too, only
the “benevolence” of the new power will allow it to survive. With no
social order, position or social status guaranteed in an ethnic or a
state manner, this situation of the refugee-immigrant figure can not be
compared. That is where the role of anti-authoritarian criticism and
solidarity lies in defending survival and equality against nature and
power/authority.
This development has sparked a major crisis within western societies, a
crisis that highlights their deep political and social deadlocks.
History is a field of open social processes and radically new
definitions. The nation as a creation of particular socio-historical
conditions and conflicts has allowed the assimilation of dissimilar
populations by offering individuals the possibility of joining an
imaginary collective body. It has been a huge area of identity
production, unifying the difference and shaping uniformity, and the
legitimate foundation of the establishment of the modern ethno-state
under the predominant idea of the general will.
It has been a huge area of identity production, unifying the difference
and shaping uniformity, and the legitimate basis for the constitution of
the modern ethno-state under the dominant idea of general will. If
nation offered the common bond that linked the scattered psyches to one
body, then the general will was the ideological starting point for the
political expression of this body as such.
Over the past 30 years that migratory movements have been perpetuating
the borders of the West each year and more persistently, European states
have responded with comic serfdom. The repression and militarization of
the borders, the fences, the misappropriation of the mobility, the
detention centers for immigrants and, in general, the spasmodic
movements of the European elites show very clearly how thin the current
political quo of the European immigration policy is.
In particular, since the launch of what was called “refugee crisis” in
the public sphere, the failure to manage the situation appeared on each
side. Despite the fences, the camps, Frontex, NATO and, in general, all
the repressive arm that Europe had developed on the management of
migratory and refugee movements, refugee flows broke the border lines,
radically altering the above framework and forcing states to renegotiate
their strategy, which directly confronted them with reality.
Europe’s proposal to create “hot spots” in Turkey with the offer of
exchanges, while Turkey is putting siege into entire regions within it,
creating a fence in Hungary, shielding nationalisms within states, a
policy of relocation and a refusal to participate in several Member
States, at the same time as the unilateral suspension of the Schengen
Treaty by Germany, demonstrate the contradictory nature of western
liberalism and of the EU construction.
Migratory flows have revealed the identity crisis in the modern western
world. The debate on asylum and nationality grants to immigrants has
sparked different types of discourse across countries. Citizenship in
particular, which is essentially the anteroom of recognizing a migrant
as a citizen, is perhaps one of the most characteristic issues of
polarization in public discourse today. The provision of citizenship to
all, outlines a fundamental challenge for a new social institution as it
disrupts the conditions of exclusion, if we take into account that the
lack of this legal identity dissolves all other property of the human
subject which thus slides into the sphere of non- man and naked life.
The wreckage of western multiculturalism is revealed in the uprisings of
the Parisian bells and the London suburbs. On the one hand, we have the
emergence of an Islamophobic rhetoric, whether it is clearly far-right
or covered in an enlightening mantle. On the other hand, we have
excluded populations within the European metropolis, which, in the
insignificance and meaninglessness of contemporary barbarism, are
turning to religious archaism.
Young Europeans joining ISIS and traveling to Middle East to participate
in the battlefields and, of course, the terrorist attacks in Paris and
Belgium show in the purest way the identitarian discomfort in which
large sections of European population live.
This was ultimately the most important problem of multiculturalism: that
it never became interculturalism. The immigrant communities of European
cities and local populations did not come together in a meaningful
interaction that surpasses prejudice, stereotypes and (at best)
cosmopolitan or hipster exoticism. The invisible walls and cohabitation
in terms of mutual tolerance was overwhelming, and did not attempt to
obtain common references and starting points, to clarify the way they
perceive their common future, to finally form themselves as a society.
So it seems that two or more worlds have been created in western cities,
worlds that do not meet until the moments when they are spectacularly
and violently clashing with each other.
Somewhere in there lies our political duty. In a world that seems
unrelated and scattered, our primary political goal is to create social
ties within a modern framework of recreation of social life. The housing
squats for refugees and immigrants (Notara 26, Kanigos, 5^(th) Lyceum,
etc.), the creation of proximity communities with those moving under
material conditions is and must be our political plan today. The
political processes within them, the movemental tide that they brought
after a tideless period, will be the ones that will also house the
political struggles of the future, bypassing for the first time the
scandalous fact that in a country with so many immigrants, they have
almost always been absent from the political movement processes, which
today seem to be determined by the subjectivity of the younger native
activist.
Against the television view that sees refugees only as victims, their
exoneration from the left and anarchist space, which with force wanted
to give them liberating qualities and set them up as subjects (without
their consent always), we, through these processes we learn and
experience them on a daily basis. Pieces of the wealth of their journey
are written over us through our common assemblies, our joint actions and
our effort to manage our lives together. This is the element that can
not be perceived by all those who are comfortable with constructing
fantastic subjects and putting their political deadlocks on them at the
same time as denouncing social proximity to immigrants as “charity”.
When population movements peaked in July 2015, we realized from the
outset that this is one of the most important political developments at
the global level. The journey of the refugees would create a new
political situation.
Our participation in housing squats was intended, of course, not only to
provide physical assistance but to also help with the emergence of
different meanings of how we can build communities that include
immigrants, in order to try and make this new political situation less
complex and breaking the state of exception along with migrants.
We have said in the past that the thread that unites us with immigrants
is not an abstract class solidarity, but the oppression itself in its
most naked form, the overthrow of the state of exception, the perceptual
rather than the super sensible world. What we have said before is true,
but today, beyond that, we are also joining something more important:
the structures, the ventures, the common struggles we have built with
them, our common search for breaths of freedom.
What we are doing now with migrant/refugees, we would do it with Jewish
people, Roma people and homosexuals when they were being hunted and
killed by the Nazi state. We would take them to our homes and squats,
just to become equal in the eyes of power and authority by overthrowing
the death condition. For individual and social liberation.
The views that the patriarchal family, personal property, state power
and social inequality derive from the nature of every human being and
that the female anatomy is responsible for every woman’s general
weakness has been supported over the world by a vast variety of people.
The patriarchal model while seeking for permanent confirmation resorts
to, misinterpreted or not, biological references and often inaccurate
historical sources, making it if not absolutely natural, surely a
standard.
It is considered that the predominant sexes are two: male and female,
and their role in society is specific and determined. Recognizing
individuals of the lgbtqia++ community as active parts of the society
and not as pariahs, and recognizing other genders is still at an early
stage. In the countries where religious law prevails, the inferiority of
women is taken for granted and is accepted by a broader part of society.
In the Western world, equality between the two genders is
institutionally guaranteed and theoretically men and women enjoy the
same rights. Both inequality and different treatment are considered
unconstitutional in most countries. But does this mean that patriarchy
has been eliminated?
Even before the person gets a name or enters the community, doctors give
him his first identity. Suddenly, ages of stereotypes fall on the
shoulders of every unborn child. Male and female. Son and daughter. Blue
and pink. Without seeking to establish a ground zero, the moment when
the identity is given can be considered as the start of the liberty
deprivation of every person. Humanity has often proved that in order to
interpret the world, its existence and coherence, it creates binaries.
Although gender identity standards are being manufactured continually on
a world-wide basis, their foundation in the sense of social status takes
place during socialization, no matter how triteness that sounds, with
the perpetuation of the nuclear family, in which the role of mother and
father diverges rather than coincides during everyday life.
Regardless our will to believe that we have left the model of the Greek
family of the 50s behind us, in a world of single parent families,
either the state or the social treatment of the latter, frequently
remind us the intangible and informal law of natural and normal which is
floating above our heads.
School as a pillar of children’s knowledge, according to the existing
obsolete and inadequate educational system, is enhancing the gender
separation either in the classroom or in the schoolyard. In classrooms
students learn that male grammatical endings prevail against the female
ones. For example the teaching of history is not only ideological and
ethnocentric but also gendered. We come across great men and either
small or unimportant women. When it comes to kids’ toys, stereotypes are
once again repressive as the children’s toy industry is promoting strict
norms with a burst of false weapons and make-up dolls which limits not
only the imagination but also the liberty that should be promoted by the
game. We learn social reality as it ‘is’ and we are called to consider
it as the ideal model. We are struggling to distinguish when the
stereotypes’ reproduction stops and when the individual’s conscious
choice begins.
Patterns of beauty, interpersonal relationships, professional
orientation, sexual life, etc., are, in fact, gender bonds and both
oppressive. By destroying the gender in today’s theory and practice, the
world of tomorrow will be created, without the concept of normal and
different.
A world where gendered expression will not only be limited down to two
possible choices but will be a vast spectrum of possible identities from
which everyone can choose his own particular place. We need to recognize
to each body the right to a life worth living, breaking the roots of the
forced binary, demanding either no gender or many.
The consecutive sexual assaults in a number of cities in Greece, such as
Volos and Komotini, the transphobic attacks in the center of Athens, the
murder of Vaggelis Yakoumakis (a 20 year old student who was
consistently bullied by his co-students, ending up to commit suicide)
are not random neither a coincidence. In 2018 a country that has
constitutionally enshrined gender equality, has legally recognized the
cohabitation of same sex couples and is considered as being part of the
‘’civilized west’’ is witnessing daily rapes, attacks against trans
people, homophobic bullying and confronts in a racist way anything
different. The society keeps building itself on patriarchal bases, which
accept and demonstrate eteronormativity as the only natural orientation
and place the male sex at the epicenter. Therefore, the sexist mentality
perpetuates, incorporating a variety of oppressions and justifying at
the same time any means of violence against the subject which is
considered as inferior.
The sexual act, as a concept, is also based on the androcentric model.
The phallus takes the role of the primary organ of pleasure for both
sexes, since the relief of sexual desire is accomplished through the
phallic penetration solely. If a woman cannot climax using the previous
method is blamed to be anorgasmic, whereas if a man fails to have a
satisfying erection is considered as impotent. This dominant perception
for the sexual intercourse is very important in order to understand the
equivalent main concept which is linked to the act of rape. In Greece,
as rape is considered the forced intercourse. Hence, the criteria that
have to be fulfilled in order for an act to be characterized as rape are
the lack of consent and the actualization of phallic penetration. What
happens, however, when it comes to the previous acts before the
penetration? The threatening approach, the intimidating words, the
touching without permission? And what if the penetration never took
place for whichever reason? Perhaps, a full and precise definition of
rape is hard to be constructed. However, what has to be done is the
recognition and the projection of whichever act makes a person feel like
losing the authority of her/his own body as an act of sexual violence.
Having realized the aspects of gendered violence in the social, erotic
and sexual life we now have to relate this type of violence with the
gender/sexual identities. Which is the limit of violence if a person
does not match the narrow definitions of masculinity and femininity? The
time to reject the social construction of two genders has come.
Despite the number of movements that occurred during the last two
centuries (demanding of women rights, movements about sexual orientation
rights, acts for the liberation of sexual desire and self-determination)
there are fundamental characteristics that haven’t been incorporated yet
to the modern movements, but they are considered to be vital for their
efficiency.
Each and every demand and process of this type has to be transformed
into a social movement and be part of the wider radical action in order
to avoid the trap of a narrow pursuit of rights. Taking this into
consideration each social group has to link its requests to the general
social liberation-emancipation and not only to its own fulfillment. It
has to seek for fundamental alteration of the existing against all forms
of authority and oppression, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
orientation and gender identity are concerned
violence
transphobic stereotypes by the media.
The fascist front, whose appearance has been deafening after the recent
elections, leaves little room for time to deal with. The speeds are
great and the changes are fast.
The shifting of a significant part of society towards a more brutal
state of being is now more than obvious. The crisis, as a universal
rupture within the exploitation system, liberated forces that moved on
its edges, loaded with a past that had the weights of crime. In order to
break the “egg of the snake”, which certainly was not birthed from the
economic crisis, two main things had to happen: the de-legitimization of
the regime and, at the same time, the birth of a guilt free extreme
version. The economic crisis, which quickly became political and social,
destroyed the traditional foundations of governance, conveying with it
the entire post-civilization superstructure on which the political
system was based. After the defeat imposed by social deprivation from
traditional institutions, the stakes are not their salvation, but
whether society can be re-established at its feet, creating new
institutions of cohesion, solidarity and co-operation, on the basis of
an ontological equality among people, without discrimination and
exceptions, or will fall into the disintegration and war of all against
all. Instead, this society is called upon to respond, and this work can
only be a bottom-up project. How can a world that is massively outside a
lets say formal society, devalued without any prospect of a recovery
within the system, to organize its own life strategy in a united way or
whether, on the contrary, fascists, gangs and organized crime prevail in
a rooted social landscape; The latest version is already threatening.
The reinforcement of Golden Dawn, backed by media and channelists, by a
significant section of the police, and by the closure of the eye by
militia and deep state operatives, makes it not only systemic but a
pillar of the deepest state, the most extreme version of it. Its
emergence in a social stream with salient characteristics gives it the
legitimacy to set up paramilitary mechanisms that use murderous violence
and hatred in the Other (other race for example) as structural features
of consistency and coherence. It mimics the way of anti-authoritarian
and left-wing work as a propaganda tool, but with the context of
stimulating the most humiliating instincts of the poorer masses, the
petty miners, the wounded youth. It is the excitement of grudges that
travels with the destruction of the meanings, the destruction of
critical thinking with the reconstruction of historical experience, with
beneficial fiction, in order to turn its fellow travelers into the
easiest goal, to hunt the weakest, to the immigrant, the mentally ill,
the disabled, the homosexual. It is the easy way, the useful recipe, for
a wider rally, in order to join and compose the critical mass for a
wider attack.
Let us bear in mind that for the sovereign system prosperity and
impoverishment can go hand in hand, only thing is that the first
one(prosperity) nowadays concerns a small part of the population, while
the largest one only refers to the second. In this social barbed wire,
the first ones will have ensured their well-being, as long as the second
ones are controlled by the police, being thrown into zones of
lawlessness and simultaneous destruction, provided that one has to
impose their decomposition in a violent way.
In this project the Golden Dawn has a lot to offer and that is why it is
very useful for the exploitation system that is being shaken down:
impoverished and marginalized masses.
oppressed people. Essentially working as a police force against
movements
will render unrealistic all initiatives of solidarity and cooperative
community ventures.
ones with the practices of Golden Dawn. The theory of the two extremes
where one completes the other brings us back to arguments about the
collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler in power. It is
the theory that closes the eye to the fascists, puts their agenda in
public speech and preserves their immunity with the backs of the police,
leaving the weak exposed to their assassinations.
Respectively, the phenomenon of fascism is dangerous and historically
with tragic results because it condenses all those smaller or larger
events with total and fascist connotation that occurred during the fake
periods as it turned out to be prosperous. All those practices of wrath,
indifference to the public, political, social and economic issues to the
“specialists” in exchange for temporary benefits find shelter in Nazi
herds.
Once again, the submissive miserable man, with the will of the slave,
assigns his wrath, his will for justice, the content of his struggle, to
the one who is ready to give him a “package” at any price. After the
road from the neo-liberal governments and the fascist LAOS-type
constructions was pushed, the monstrous views of Nazism are heard once
again in this country and of course its price is always scary.
The question of fascism therefore goes hand in hand with the
revolutionary affair and the transformation of a voluntarily enslaved
society into a society of free people. But this is a matter that
requires the effort and the physical presence of everyone and it does
not disappear when the TV is closed.
Our interventions in the nationalist greek parades have to do with our
opposition to the totalitarian policies summarized in a parade,
militarism, faith in the State and the violence it exerts, submission,
and a statement of respect for leadership. Generally, the parade in its
essence and practice is the field that conveys in spectacular form all
those features that plunge into barbarity and the world’s misery. This
makes it a privileged field of expression of fascist speech in a field
that is seemingly devoid of barbarity but in truth it is full of it.
We do not accept and question directly the image of the powerful state,
as well as its fascist follower, the Nazis of the Golden Dawn. We do not
consider the political leadership of the state traitors to be punished
for this, but instead in reverse they must be overthrown because they
remain faithful to the extermination of society and its subordination to
the neo-liberal framework.
We believe that a share of responsibility also lays with parts of
society for what they have done and for so many years they have been
giving freedoms in return. We think we have a share of responsibility
for what we do, and especially what we did not do to create a free
society. But we are present, still fighting and putting everyone in
charge of trying to overthrow our course towards total barbarism.
By attempting a brief historical review, we realize that the concept of
correction exists in a rather primitive form since the 16^(th) century.
The first prison facilities appear in Netherlands, where prisoners were
mainly used as workforce. The imprisonment sentence was totally
identical to the forced labor that was imposed on prisoners.
Since the 17^(th) century, there has been a vigorous alternation of the
corrective tactics. The dissociation and isolation of the offender from
the rest of society supposedly aims at the consolidation of the latter
through the exemplification and the avoidance of such incidents. When it
comes to the 18^(th) century, Foucault analyses the prison system
indicating that the imprisonment sentence was not legally enforced but
was used by the lords and masters as a mean of repression of the
political dissidents following brutal punitive methods. In the 19^(th)
century, tortures are prohibited and new conditions are being created in
prisons, constituting a new status quo while making inmates fight each
other and develop the instinct of survival. As far as the 20^(th)
century is concerned, the prison system is presented in the current form
we know and in the wretched living conditions of the prisoners, which
still exist nowadays.
Correction is ideally a process through which someone who is not
‘prudent’ and against society’s principles becomes once again a
‘healthy’ member of it. Here lies the question of whether these values
and meanings are set by society itself and not by state mechanisms and
authority. The main method of correction is the imprisonment, which
primarily deprives the individual of the basic right of his or her
liberty.
This method forms the marginalization of the incarcerated by society,
which often treats indifferently the issues that have to do with the
former, as it usually considers them threatening for the social treaty.
This is the reason why often any “comfort” (mobile phones, access to the
internet, etc.) which is given to prisoners behind the walls meets the
discontent of the social majority.
On its part, power has shown a continuous course of circumvention of
basic rights using methods such as the vindictive imposition of
penalties, the unjustified reductions in the exit licenses, the ban on
visits, the unannounced violent checks in the cells and the terrible
conditions of hygiene. Moreover, the targeting of relatives is a method
which has been used to intimidate the ‘disobedient’ even further, such
as in the cases of Athina Tsakalos’ and Evi Statiri’s where restrictive
measures were imposed respectively with a ban on leaving the island of
Salamina for the former and the one kilometer limit from her residence
for the latter.
There still is the social segregation between the detainees who are
wealthy and powerful and the ones who are not as strong (based on the
money and the interconnections), something that affects the way in which
the sentence is served and the conditions of living inside the prison.
Thus, the same roles that exist in society are reproduced and those who
do not have the financial comfort remain on the sidelines without having
a choice. The use of systematic torture by prison staff reveals the
punitive mood inherent in the prison institution. Despite the countless
accusations of the detainees for such power abuse, a regime through
which the members of the prison staff conceal each other under the
tolerance of the judiciary is detected. The white cells, the beatings
and the prohibition of having access to the prison yard are some of the
usual methods which are used in order to humiliate the detainees as the
prison personnel operate under absolute and unchallenged authority.
Finally, the wretched living conditions, the small cells, the complete
lack of medical care and the use of psychiatric drugs complete the harsh
conditions that the prisoners have to face. The aim is, of course, the
total psychological breakdown of the individual.
A typical example of the abandonment and the indifference of the state
is the hospital of Korydallos’ prison ‘Agios Pavlos’. Poor facilities,
lack of staff, lack of space and images of patients stacked together
without anyone being interested in their existence. Indicative is that
there are 8 doctors for 3,500 prisoners, while there are over 200
patients (many of which are HIV positive) instead of 60 which is the
standard. As a result, the outbreak of tuberculosis is a risk for the
lives of those who are hospitalized and threatened by different
diseases, even death due to unavailable ambulances or the delay of the
National Instant Aid Centre.
The state and the authority, in periods of institutional controversy and
prevalent meanings, in order to be shielded and equipped, operate
outside the legal frame they have created and criminalize everything
that they consider dangerous for their existence and reproduction. Under
the occasion of the battle against terrorism and the maintenance of
social peace, authority has found in the face of the (terrorist)
organization ‘Nov. 17’ an internal enemy, which, due to its perilosity,
could not have the treatment outlined by the procedural procedure by the
state repressive mechanisms. In 2003, for the first time, we see the
defendants of ‘17N’ being tried behind closed doors in order to avoid
the publicity of the procedure followed, while the jurisdiction of the
mixed jury court (which would normally had to judge the case according
to the criminal law) has been overridden in order to subject the
defendants to a tougher judicial control, while excluding any favorable
treatment.
The fight against terrorism and the 17N’s trial constituted the kick-off
and the precursor of a new way of managing, in which the state and the
power, suspend constitutional provisions, freedoms and rights in order
to protect themselves. The provisions of articles 187 and 187A of the
Criminal Code have now validated / formed the legal status of the
exception in criminal matters which had already begun to be outlined in
previous years.
In particular, the provision of Article 187A has also contributed in the
conformity of the Greek legal order with the counter-terrorism standards
that were formulated and enforced after 9/11 and the state of emergency
that was declared at international level. In the Greek case, the
establishment of such a legal structure was politically oriented and
motivated and aimed at suppressing by any means the political dissidents
who had chosen as their field and mode of action the guerrilla of the
city.
According to this law, even misdemeanors can be upgraded to felonies if,
according to judicial or even police authorities, these actions aim at
terrorizing and intimidating a population or a public authority or an
international organization.
With the evaluation of someone as a terrorist some differentiations are
also occurred concerning their legal treatment by the state mechanisms.
Defendants who are persecuted with this law are deprived of their basic
rights to communicate with their lawyer or even to read the documents of
the case against them, while convicts lose their right to communicate
with the outside world, even with their own family, or their right to
abbreviate the penalty or obtain exit permission for a few days as the
law indicates.
The Article 187 of the Criminal Code, on the other hand, while focusing
on the suppression of mafias, it was attempted to be applied against the
social movement in Skouries of Halkidiki, which resisted the gold
mining, modern state totalitarianism and the total depreciation of human
life at the altar of profit. Whereas, in order to establish this
article, it is necessary to prove that the actions of the organization
focus on making profit, as well as the existence of hierarchical
relations and structures among the members, the state with the judicial
authority tried to expand the content of the law in order to enclose in
the framework of this arrangement a whole village of 300 dwellers,
including people who were standing in solidarity, as a criminal
organization.
In the meantime, Article 187 was used to match the social
counterviolence of the movement in Skouries with the violence of the
neo-Nazi organization of the Golden Dawn party, on the occasion of the
assassination of Pavlos Fyssas. Thus, in criminal and ideological /
social terms, it was attempted to equalize social resistance with the
violence of extremist fascist elements, in order to consolidate the
theory of the two extremes that the right-wing government of New
Democracy brought to the political dialogue.
Within a period of time, the prisoners are fighting daily to improve
their living conditions and claim their rights. The recognition of a
framework of rights for detainees has been for several years out of the
debate, since the prison institution is precisely structured in a way
that suppresses any breath of freedom, transforming them into passive
beings. Against these conditions and despite the fact that society has
marginalized them, detainees react to every arbitrariness using any
means available.
From 2007 onwards, a generalized mobilization of all detainees in
prisons begins and a series of requests are made for the first time.
From the denial of cell closure to abstaining from prison meals and
hunger strikes, prisoners have managed to improve as much as they can
the living conditions despite the wild beatings, the transportation to
other facilities and the enlargement of their sentence. At the same
time, it is important to consider the interaction within and outside the
prison, with society pressuring the state power to satisfy the demands
that the prisoners bring forward each time.
“I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet“
Subcomandante Marcos
While the global domination continues to incorporate self-organized,
anti-hierarchical movements into the sphere of imagination, the examples
of the Zapatista and Rojava demonstrate in practice that
self-organization is not some kind of utopia, but a viable possibility.
These two autonomous societies propose an alternative, sustainable model
of social self-management that is contrary to capitalism, but also to
the traditional revolutionary logic, which poses as a necessary
condition the seizure of power.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is an armed guerilla
movement that began its activity back in 1983 with the target of
defending the rights of the agricultural population of Chiapas and the
occupation of state authority. Soon they realized that the vanguardism
of their ideological doctrine did not express the society they wanted to
build and turned instead to self-organization by abandoning the idea of
taking power. On the New Year of 1994 they occupied the southernmost
city of Mexico, Chiapas and the wider region, declaring war on the
Mexican government and the capitalist world, at the time of the signing
of the North American Free Market Agreement (NAFTA). The EZLN is
composed of indigenous, Mayan people whose rights have been suppressed
for five centuries by US-led governments and colonial mechanisms of
Mexico. After armed conflicts with the Mexican government that are
continuing until today, they have managed to achieve and maintaine their
autonomy in significant parts of Chiapas.
The Zapatistas, as suggested by subcomendante Marcos, one of the main
speakers of the movement in the international media and a member of the
EZLN, revolted from below aiming not at seizing power but at abolishing
it, thus challenging the concept of revolutionary avant-garde. The
non-seizure of power is one of the main features of the Zapatitas and
indicates a break with Marxist-Leninist perceptions of social
transformation that dominate traditional, revolutionary logic. Zapatista
communities make decisions through the process of democratic
confederalism. “Caracoles”, the administrative centers, comprise of
three levels of governance: the municipality and the community are based
on the decisions of popular assemblies operating in a democratic manner
and the good governance councils are elected, with the precondition that
delegates will rotate regularly and involve as much more people as
possible. At the assemblies and Councils, women and men are equally
involved, as the empowerment of women has been an important part of
EZLN’s project since the beginning of the movement. Each Caracol has its
own health, education and justice systems.
Ecology and respect for nature play an important role in Zapatista’s
self-organization and culture. Their mainly rural economy, organized at
communal / cooperative level, is based on traditional methods of
indigenous production. The Zapatistas advocate for degrowth and
“decolonization” of the imaginary from consumerism and economic growth,
promoting instead values such as respect for the environment, local
traditions and more generally for people who want to live with dignity
without setting as their main goal biotic development.
The Kurdish people are indigenous to the Middle East, who throughout the
course of their history has been subjected to multiple conquests and
massacres, becoming the largest nation without its own state, with a
population of more than 30,000,000. Kurdistan’s pieces belong to Turkey,
Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Kurdish liberation movements have been
revolting, which, despite some transient successes, have long been
disturbed by feudal, patriarchal and racial structures that have
cultivated individualistic perceptions.
In June 2012, in the wake of the civil war in Syria, a new revolutionary
paradigm was adopted in the Rojava region with a completely different
approach to the Kurdish question, based on Ocalan’s prison writings.
Ocalan, influenced by the works of Bookchin and the Zapatist movement,
by revising traditional Kurdish tactics and rejecting the
Leninist-Marxist revolutionary approach, abandoned any form of
nationalism (including the Kurdish), criticized the role of the state
(even the socialist), and advocated for the social liberation of women.
The political system of Rosava opposes the modern state model, showing
similarities with Zapatista. It operates on the basis of democratic
confederation, with horizontal anti-hierarchical structures (councils),
in which universal participation is praised, while there is no room for
gender stereotypes, religion or nation. The party is not recognized as a
form of liberation, as opposed to direct individual participation in
political processes, which is achieved through councils. The importance
of universal participation is evident from the fact that councils have
been created for a whole year before the revolution began as well as by
the high participation of the female population. Thus, the gradual
degradation of patriarchy is achieved and women are equal members in
every aspect of public life in a community in the heart of the Middle
East. This is evident even from the creation of female militias, which
together with male ones have replaced the regular army, giving Rojava an
intense anti-militaristic character.
Regarding the economy, it is free but completely different from modern
totalitarian liberalism. The economic committees at local and regional
level play a major role in this by showing solidarity with the weakest
and controlling product prices. In this way is being achieved
elimination of competition and monopolistic use of property, while
unemployment rates are low, so any adult can obtain full independance of
themselves and to ensure the continuity of the revolution. The above
institutions in combination with the setting of horizontal cooperatives
and producer networks indicate that the model of a social and solidarity
economy is a practical counterexample for economies on larger scale.
At the same time, we observe the “adoption” by the Kurds of the
principles of a form of green communalism. All this, coupled with the
rejection of Western capitalist standards, contributes to the creation
of a framework for degrowth that refers to the reduction of
over-consumption of energy and materials. Degrowth is not opposed to
improving living conditions, nor is it identifiable with the economic
downturn, but it breaks with the logic of squandering natural and human
resources for profit. It proposes an exit and a change in production and
consumption patterns, becoming a necessary step towards a more
sustainable society.
The revolutionary patterns formulated by Rojava and Zapatista led to a
historical shift in the modern perception of revolutionary processes,
abandoning revolutionary dogmatism. They are the only successful
experiments for social change without reformist tendencies, struggling
for radical and holistic changes in all of the regions in which they
operate. The question here is not a system based on the logic of growth
but on the redefinition of social, political and economic relations.
Without the “help of the developed Western world” and now liberated from
the left narratives, they produce a modern revolutionary theory with
clear anti-authoritarian paradigms.
After the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the Greek police in the
neighborhood of Exarchia, a generalized rebellion followed, which was a
crucial moment in Greece’s modern political history. For about a month,
thousands of protesters across the country went outside to express their
indignation against police violence and impunity, as well as the general
social injustice that was at its peak at that time. The uprising of
December had a massive, social and aggressive character. Dozens of
occupations of public buildings, attacks on the forces of repression,
and mass marches in all neighborhoods gave flesh and bones to the “New
events of December” as they were characterized.
Thus, a large and resounding “NO” was said by the Greek society, a “NO”
expressed in stones and molotov thrown at the MAT (riot police), at shop
windows and decorations in Christmassy Athens, an “NO” addressed to the
institutionalized imaginary of the master and his sterile ideals. In
essence, the insurgents expressed a constant negative dialectic in the
imperatives and affirmations of western consumerist paradigm and against
the culture of impartiality, wealth and property. December 2008, was a
question, as the typical slogan on the walls says. A question about to
where one society is heading, when blindly following Puritan morals,
eroded institutions and anti-social rules. A question about where will
lead us this dangerous obedience and tolerance to hierarchy,
bloodthirsty national ideals and atomic narcissism.
This question managed to spread throughout the Greek society despite the
efforts of domination to silence it. The rebellion managed to defeat the
conceptual repression, which was launched by the government and state
media and attempted to shift the public opinion into focusing on damaged
property and lawlessness. On the other hand, it managed to achieve many
street-level victories, with the insurgents effectively dealing with the
repressive army of the state that had murdered a 15-year-old child a few
nights earlier.
However, the protesters did not oppose the MAT merely to avenge Alexis’s
unfair death, but in this way they questioned and broke with the very
concept of statecraft and the rhetoric that presents it as an integral
meaning next to that of the social existence. The uprising attacked the
state apparatus collectively, reclaiming key buildings and demanding the
re-creation of public space. In the period of December, spontaneity, not
as apolitical behavior, but as an autonomous political act dominated and
at the same time all parts of society were connected and rallied, not
around specific corporate or managerial demands, as would a leftist
narrative propose, but around the universal questioning of the state as
a way of organizing. Occupations of schools, universities, town halls,
open neighborhood assemblies and collectives were co-creating and
co-deciding by giving political space and time to self-management and
direct democracy. Indeed, society has fought against cynicism, political
apathy and individualism that dominate the sovereignty, and has
established equality of political discourse and participation in the
political processes that took place during the revolt.
Another important feature of December was the attack on spectacle and
commodity. The rebellion questioned the practice of imaginary careerism
and the culture of consumerist isolation. All kinds of shops were
destroyed and burned down, while various products were expropriated
mainly for collective use. In this way, the insurgents reacted to the
consumerist manners of social standards, and this reaction succeeded in
bringing the struggle for life back into the collective sphere,
overthrowing the dominant notion that wants to transform man into a
being that aims exclusively at the perpetual acquisition of more
material goods than his neighbor.
For the first time, in modern Greek reality, the presumption of
innocence of the commodity has fallen and finally its guilty role has
been demonstrated. In a society that tended and tends to lose its human
character, as the continuing downward trend in the value of the use of
goods and services leads to the alienation and fragmentation of its
members through their fictitious needs, the December uprising raised the
meaning of emancipation and asked this marginal until then question to
the 21^(st) century consumer people: what kind of freedom can exist in a
world where social acceleration, and the stress that accompanies it,
overwhelms our everyday life, where concrete and industrialization of
everything characterizes our style, where countless of useless and
alienating artifacts fill the void in our lives?
December was a post-modern uprising for the post-modern society of
consumption in which we live in. A rebellion that clashed with
traditional norms and values, united thousands of people around the
collective denial, and rejected any leadership or guidance. For these
reasons, the “new events of December” went beyond the Left’s projects,
leaving them behind to try to interpret ineffectively the revolt by
using ridiculous analyzes. A rebellion that, as mentioned above, was a
negative dialectic to all the dullness and rootedness of the instituted
order of things, part of which were and still are the professional
revolutionaries and politicians.
On the contrary, for us, who have proposed self-determination, direct
democracy and social anti-authority, the December uprising gave time and
space to our ideas. Our projects were embodied by the emergence of the
collective person, the collective processes in open and public areas,
the re-occupation of the public space and the practical questioning of
authority. All this left a very important deposit for the radical space
and is among the reasons for the ongoing social movements in Greece.
Few years later, in May 2011, mass mobilizations began in dozens of
cities in Greece. The “indignant” movement, as it was called, began with
a call from anarchists in Spain and began to spread in many European
countries. Gatherings in squares sprang up as well as in almost all the
major cities of the country. Anti-governmental gatherings, provoked by
the economic crisis and social injustice in every part of the world,
that later turned into popular assemblies, anti-hierarchical and direct
democratic, surrounded by the majority of society.
The movement of the squares did not maintained the trivial demand for
changing of faces on the steering wheel. On the contrary, it insisted
that nowadays the Western parliamentary states are unable to manage and
stabilize the grim situation of crisis and austerity. The social
contract between the rule of law and the citizens for securing a decent
life for the latter has collapsed and society has to go forward as the
crisis is not just economic or political, but a civilizational one,
reaching deeply to the core of the system itself. This is what happened
on May 2011, expressing the project of horizontal social organizing
based on direct democracy, which not only adds a critique to the
existing but abolishes it.
Thus, the movement of the squares became dangerous and antagonistic to
the existing authority and its organizational basis as the mobilizations
and assemblies of the movement gave structure, space and time far a
different political path, that of self-management. The biopolitics of
anti-authority took on flesh and bone, and for this reason the state
responded with repression. Every day, statist and governmental actions
were taking place with the goal of undermining the fervor of the daily
popular mobilizations, as well as systematic attempts to alter the
character of the popular assemblies. Moreover, the clashes of many
social groups with the suppression forces had as a natural consequence
the socialization and the political grounding of the practical conflict
at all levels, as the movement questioned the regime of fear that the
authorities had showed in previous years.
In the summer of that year, we had a movement that was not aiming at the
seizure of power but in the radical transformation of the
socio-political institutions. A movement that condemned parliamentary
democracy as a whole and denied the identity clusters of the traditional
political actors. Obviously, in the squares, the political deficit of
all sorts of self-proclaimed revolutionary avant-gardes was made
visible, these wanna-be leaders watched how society is overpassing them
explicitly or implicitly opposing them, thus adding another arrow to the
quiver of the traditional against one of the most massive attempts at
social change. From the noticeable absence of the anarchist space, which
did not saw its symbols and feared an eventual state assimilation, chose
to deny any prospect to this movement, to the vulgar and antisocial
attitude of the KKE, which chose to collide with the movement, defending
together with the MAT, in October that year, the alienated political
processes of bourgeois democracy that were in danger.
Ultimately, the movement of the squares demonstrated the ability of
people to act politically with their only identity as natural subjects
away from parties and factions. The project of direct democracy has come
to the forefront.