Κατηγορία: Uncategorized

May 2017

Under the hot May sun, a dozen of Prosfygikans right now busily cleans our neighborhood, plants more flowers and trees, protects them from parking cars. Indeed, communal gardening itself is a revolutionary activity. Look yourself.

“Those who wait on the wooden bench are
the poor, our people, the capable.
The battleworn and proletarians …
… are our own Christs, our own Saints “

On 03/11/14, 138 occupied apartments in the neighborhood of Prosfygika turned over TAIPED (State Service for Sale of Public Property) in order to be sold and thus exploited. According to this plan, the explusion of more than 500 residents of the refugee, families, patients, immigrants and refugees, combatants and workers, will happen in the near future.

Before this territorial attack, there was a war of propaganda. For days, the ravens of the mainstream media attempted to create a climate that could pave the way for invasion by cops and fascists in the Agios Panteleimon area of Athens. Slander, depreciation and profiling are the propaganda arms of the state and the bosses, used against society and its struggles.

The impending destruction of Prosfygika as a proletarian neighborhood demonstrates all aspects and levels of urban cannibalism. The reactionary cries against immigrants and the poor fall in line with the agenda of investment companies and their undercover dealings with “progressive” charities, erasing dozens of people’s lives. It is typical paranoia, especially as those who claim to work for progress build the most nightmarish realities, to propose the expulsion of refugees in order to build a museum for refugees, and to expel patients for hosting other patients. Behind all this, are hidden aspirations to gain control, and the political opportunism that devastats the lives of dozens of people. The bourgeois cannibals smile showing rotten teeth. Vampires of urban world attempt to give life to the self-righteousness, and show cruelty to the lives and blood of the persecuted.

The attack in the neighborhood of Prosfygika is a condensation of the modern junta of local and transnational bosses and the fascist leadership of the Greek government, the IMF and the Troika. It encompasses all the individual characteristics of the non-stop war that has been declared against society and the working class itself and all those social and political subjects under the pressure of capitalist tyranny, and against the responsibility of creating a world of justice, equity and freedom.

In Prosfygika Av. Alexandras, there currently live more than five hundred people in each category of the order of the oppressed: Refugees, immigrants, families with children, the elderly, the sick, formerly homeless, political activists, recovering drug addicts in the ELPIS hospital, and people of all nationalities and religions. It is a multiethnic mosaic of communities and the most persecuted peoples of the world. People who have experienced the capitalist war, refugees and torture, poverty and misery, persecution and hunger.

The history and present of refugee captures the struggle of the workers and plundered. Those who never found solid ground to stand on, and those who never stopped fighting. You hear bursts of guerrilla machinegun and the stound of rebels marching passed from house to house through bullet holes left from the long ago December of guerilla fighting. You are alert to the cries of tortured political prisoners in Averoff prison and the rumble of demolishing bulldozers. We are suffocated, today, with the new tyranny imposed on us and stands menacingly around us through the violence and brutality expressed symbolically through boht monsters of the ruling power, the mansions of violence and repression, the police headquarters that all besiege us.

The story of the neighborhood of Prosfygika speaks to the struggle for survival and dignity, solidarity and companionship, for self-organization, equality and social struggle for interracial and interreligious coexistence in times of poverty and cannibalism. Its a social and cultural workshop, a self-managed community that continues to be there for those who built it, immigrants, refugees and those looted by capitalist barbarity. It talks about the smiles of dozens of children playing in the streets of the neighborhood, collective kitchens and self-organized production structures, self-education, social and political activities, caring for patients and the weak, maintenance, with limited means, a place that encapsulates working class struggles memories of the last eighty years.

Every fighter, man or woman, is called upon to struggle. We are called to realize the imagined community of struggle with genuine solidarity and autonomous initiative in conjunction with collective coordination. The victory of Prosfygika against the repression and plunder of the state and the bosses will either be a victory for greater multiform radical movement or will be a geat defeat.

The attitude of each and every oppressed person of struggle ought to defend what we have gained so far and, even further, stand in opposition to those oppressing our lives. Prosfygika and the entire movement must overturn government plans and the bosses by opening wide the struggle to all people, creating pressure through interventions in various fields, and the mass mobilizing and combative defense of our occupied ground.

All of us, people – refugees, squatters – will not give up an inch of land without a fight to the bosses. United we will stand up to halt the onslaught of modern totalitarianism. We will struggle to stop every attempt to sell and privatize Prosfygika. Until it becomes impossible, we will defend our spaces, our sturctures and our lives against private economic operators with our bodies.

“… Blessed is our bitterness,
Blessed our brotherhood,
Blessed the people that is born … ”
Giannis Ritsos

HANDS OFF THE LABOR NEIGHBORHOODS – REFUGEES – IMMIGRANTS

SOLIDARITY WITH SQUATS AND THE WORLD OF STRUGGLE

PROSFYGIKA BELONGS TO RESIDENTS OF THE COMMUNITY

NOT ONE STEP BACK

3/12/2014

ASSEMBLY OF SQUATTED PROSFYGIKA

December 2013

In the world of modern capitalist exploitation, societies are subject to plunder and raids from the entire spectrum of kyriarchy. Local communities threatened by investment plans both domestic and transnational bosses, social groups facing misery, entire neighborhoods or areas that are at the center of economic regeneration plans. Both metropolises and rural areas, are constantly opened to new exploitation and repression fronts on one hand, and struggle and resistance on the other, greatly magnified by the new conditions imposed by the economic and political restructuring of the ruling class, against the “bottom” (which we commonly understand to be a crisis).

The games developed on these unsolved challenges (natural environment destruction, plunder of natural and human resources at the expense of local communities and for the benefit of the financial interests of companies, changes in the fabric of social daily life according to the dictates of new investment projects, etc. ) show that they not only unite many people with different backgrounds in radical directions, but also push the fighters to confront these repressions . The dynamics of these propositions are based on material circumstance, the depth and understanding of the target audience, the ability to be create social self-organization, the knowledge of the terrain and circumstances, and the ability to mobilize the entire network grid and inherent energy dormant within them. A series of struggles, some larger and others smaller, in the small towns (20 years of struggle in the villages of Chalkidiki against gold mining, fights against the landfill in Keratea and Lefkimi, Corfu etc.) and others in the metropolis (self-organized squats that were threatened such as Cyprus park, Navarino park and fights against high voltage electrical infrastructure, etc.), are juxtaposed with politically and economically repressive mechanisms, which mostly ended with victory for the struggle and disorderly retreat by state and bosses.

The experiences of kyriarchal attack creates new consciousness and reconfigures understanding, this has recently pulled fragmented social groups towards the creation of new communities, theoretically and materially identified by the conditions of social compression and dissatisfaction.

These new communities are created on in the field of struggle as self-adminstrated autonomous sociopolitical bodies that create thier own significance through the stimuli of daily life and struggle; their experiences and their own re-illustration of the world as it stands in relationship with them. Their generally antagonistic relationship with the sovereign power bodies enhances autonomy and radicality and brings new people and ideas, often outside of the existing power grid and political structures.

Meanwhile, the same struggle within their communities bears responsibility for their radical features. These new communities are not formed out of nothing, rather they stand on old materials of social and political orientation, and on a new ground of changing material conditions and relations. There is conflict between these worlds, the new radical forces emerging from the ongoing conditions struggle and needs of communities of struggle, and preexisting activities and cultures that force assimulation and manipulate spontaneous insurrectionary actiion and movements (local economic elite, opposition political staff, etc.);this is the field on which new squatting communities must find their path.

The number of already existing communities of struggle, and those yet to be born into the turbulent reality that surrounds us, constitute the de facto seeds of new community as the synthetic product. The creation of this the new community of struggle depends greatly on the radicalization and interconnection of individual communities of struggle through the movement and mutually supportive relationship between them.

SOLIDARITY WITH THE FIGHTING RESIDENTS OF N.E CHALKIDIKI

ASSEMBLY OF SQUATTED PROSFYGIKA