“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