Two more years have passed since the first police operation, which launched a barrage of repression and eviction in occupied self-organized areas and communities. Today, one can no longer deny the obvious, all-out and organized attack of the state against a large part of the struggling world, against its structures but mainly against its infrastructure.
So far, suppression has removed a large number of squats from the movement that extends throughout the whole of Greece, starting from the large urban centers and continuing in the provinces, attacking individuals to eradicate the whole. It works not by killing totally and openly the movement’s infrastructure through a Bliztkrieg, but by attacking the specifics of each venture, creating the idea that an attack on one project is a seperate incident and does not constitute an attack on the whole movement. Thus they work over time, grabbing every opportunity for a new attack. This tactic, in addition to its general goal, further undermines the struggler’s morale through a series of unmanageable defeats, confusion and fragmentation, waiting for the effects of repression to fall like a mature fruit.
By combining the tactics of shock (there were periods like December 12 or August 13 where there was one repressive action after another) and multiple open fronts, the state seeks to silence and kill the social movemnts.
Starting with the question “why is the state attacking squats” we have the opportunity to review the social field of recent years, starting on one hand with the undeniable period of misery of the lower and the small-middle-class social strata and a more general economic plot, and the exacerbation of the class competition and anticompetitive questioning on the other. The state is using the economic crisis as part of a broader restructuring plan for domestic capitalism that has as its basis both the looting of social wealth and the elimination of social and class resistance. The attack in the last two years in self-organized places – meeting places – occupations of schools – through means of disinformation, is not separated from the general social and class conflict. At the same time, strikes and struggle are criminalized and repressed, labor relations are dramatically deteriorating, and new austerity measures are imposed on the already impoverished social masses. At the same time new repressive methods are being launched, and the police army of repression is strengthened through their alliance with fascism, which acts as a weapon of the state, followed by an orgy of violence and terrorism against the socially weak and social militants. This culminated in the massive capture of immigrants and concentration camps (Xenios Zeus), the repression of the inhabitants of Skouries through criminal organizations, the assassination of Th. Kanautis over a bus ticket at Peristeri, and the murder of anti-fascist P. Fyssa fby the battalions of Golden Dawn in Keratsini.
In the context of a time of evacuations and retreats, there is a fertile ground for reflection of the movement’s reaction in each case, and with regard to the abundance of tactics, the dynamics of mobilization and activation in the world of the struggle, the means chosen, and the final result of all of the above.
A movement without its squats and meeting places, without the real territorialisation and the social roots produced by organizational and political work of the social base, will be a particularly weak movement. Not because the method of squatting is a kind of fetish, or holds the monopoly of the struggle, but because on these fields, we have largely chosen to organize ourselves and build our own bastions of resistance and counter-attack.
The question of whether we can defend our squats is is a positive response to their spread across Greece, but also to their “limited” total number, so that dynamics can be developed which not only create a line of defense against the state’s plans, but also play their own role within a context of a more general social and class counter-attack.
The question of whether we have adequately defended our squat, we can only answer “no”, with a few exceptions, irrespective of their final results. The resistanceswe have recovered and the battles we have fought so far are totally disproportionate to the circumstances and the stakes.
Even the very slogan of “ideas that are not evacuated”, which replaced the project “10-100-1000 squats”, advocates the above. If the ideas are not evicted, then we do not accept any kind of attack, since the state so far does not attempt to suppress our ideas but our organized structures. Moreover, even if their ultimate goal is our ideas, then state plans have declared a futile war, since our ideas, that is, the ones that are in sight, are not endangered by the evacuations, since they can not simply be evacuated . But is that the case? Yes and no. But if we want to be at least realistic, we have to accept that capitalism does not simply fight ideas, since they are cut off from the field of social dynamics and grounded in everyday life, rathey they assimilate and weaken them, destroying their radical characteristics. It is not just our ideas are dangerous, but our ideas in action, and this field is the target of state repression. Every piece of ground that creates the conditions and the background so that these ideas can open the way for a wider material and imaginative challenge against the spectrum of domination, and to re-create strong openings for movement self-defense and conditions of counter-attack.
In trying to find answers to the ways and means to respond to state plans, we conclude that the recipe of a one-sided defense tactic to rescue what we can (the tactic of the static barrier) can only lead us to painful defeat. It removes initiative from the movements, giving it over to the state, who now has the advantage of the exclusive choice of the space and time of a new attack, and the concentration of its forces on certain points, at the same time that this logic in us brings about the dispersion and the substantial weakening of the resistances by keeping us scattered and practically isolated in our individual ventures. On the other hand, with the suppression of the suppressed ventures, we have to fight back together by taking the initiative, putting together the social struggles and channeling our dynamics to the final victory of the radical movement.
12/10/13
ASSEMBLY OF SQUATTED PROSFYGIKA