Harold Pinter (He already said it on February 2003)

At the historical point we are now in, the contradiction of capital is increasingly clear worldwide. Proletarians around the world are in turmoil as the reproduction of their existence becomes more and more difficult. But while it is already difficult for proletarians to continue their lives, it is capital itself, as a relation of exploitation, which is in a crisis of reproduction: The current struggles of the proletariat are the expression of the current form of this relation of exploitation.

During the last year in China, where the economy is still growing very quickly, all kinds of contradictions were rising. Clashes of workers with the police are common for a number of reasons: the demand for the increase of the very low wages on which the steep economic growth is based; attempts to prevent land enclosures in villages; struggles to get compensation for dismissed workers, and against the inadequacy of a health system which results in a high mortality rate for children. In the U.S.A., where there is a historical low in workers’ struggles, thousands of homeless and unemployed people have occupied vacant houses which had been seized by banks. Students have occupied universities in California and New York writing on their banners: We have decided not to die. They are demanding what was until recently taken for granted, just their ability to continue being students. Proletarians in South Africa and Algeria, from their much more desperate position imposed by the hierarchy of capitalist states, have made the same demands, of water and electricity, against being forced to live in slums, as they clash with police. In India as well, workers fight because the price of bread has suddenly risen, and they are starving to death. Last year in Spain, workers in shipyards which were shut down burnt police cars. In South Korea, dismissed workers occupied factories and clashed with police for two and a half months. In Bangladesh, dismissed workers clashed with police and burnt factories. In France and Belgium, dismissed workers kidnapped their bosses, placed explosives in the factories and threatened to blow them up if they were not compensated for their dismissal. In India and China, they kill their bosses during the conflicts because of thousands of upcoming dismissals. In this historical phase, proletarian struggles are objectively struggles for the right of the reproduction of existence itself.

At the same time, the restructuring of labour relations has accelerated and precariousness is the predominant situation for everyone now. Precariousness is manifested in the worst conditions: there have been 43 employee suicides in France Telecom in two years; in the U.S. 1,000,000 unemployed are desperately waiting to see whether Obama will once again extend the unemployment benefit, which runs out in April, or if they will be left with nothing. Unemployment numbers in most countries have surged, hitting records higher than in any other historical period.

In this historical phase we are in, there are more than enough proletariats for capital as the latter cannot effectively exploit the former, cannot produce the amount of profit needed so as a part of it to be anew put into profitable investments. This is the essence of any capitalist crisis regardless of the form it takes. The present form of crisis objectively puts proletarians’ reproduction at the center of the contradiction. The crisis first appeared as debt crisis of proletarian households in the U.S.A. It has already been transformed into a generalized debt crisis, and it is possible it will be transformed into a monetary crisis; that is, a debt crisis of large countries with strong currencies or even whole blocs of capitalist states such as the European Union. The debt crisis forces capital to turn to its only choice at the moment, which is to continue the strategy that created this crisis. It must further reduce wages and benefits in every possible way. This is the only choice of capital, because the debt crisis is the result of globalization and the restructuring of capitalist relations from which there is no turning back.

From the proletariat’s standpoint: “[it is] caught in the stranglehold of competition that can only reduce prices by reducing wages, in the servitude of debt which has become just as indispensable as income in order to live. The waged have, to cap it all, the chance of being tyrannised at their own cost, since the savings [are] instrumentalised by stock-exchange finance, savings which demand to be repaid without end, are their own.” (Le Monde diplomatique, March 2008). From capital’s standpoint, it is a relentless pursuit of the lowest possible price of labour power across the planet, but which has a limit: the existence and reproduction of labour power as this is socially defined in every capitalist state.

Capital is forced to try to resolve the crisis by destroying fixed capital (buildings, machinery, infrastructure) and variable capital (humans) in order to recreate the conditions of its reproduction, without being, at the moment, able to do it through its only directly effective manner, widespread global war. Thus, for the time being, the restructuring will inevitably deepen. The wage cuts are reaching the point where the lowest wage and the unemployment benefit tend to be equal, resulting in the explosive growth of debt for more and more proletarians. The privatization of “public” sectors (health, education, social insurance) is increasing dramatically. The unemployed have smaller and smaller benefits and are forced into slave-like working conditions with wages below the level of reproduction. The present historical period has reached its limit. That’s why the state places police guards outside schools in France or inside schools in the U.S.A. to arrest ‘undisciplined students.’ Capital’s only way out today is repression, but there is absolutely no way out of the crisis. This is obvious in cases of natural disasters such as in Haiti and Chile. In such cases, the capitalist system is directly put into question by proletarians, who, temporarily unable to be exploited as labour power, organize the expropriation of commodities and use them according to their needs in order to survive. Here, the only way to maintain capitalist property is by using military violence: Curfews during the night and straight assassinations are imposed in Haiti, while or imprisonment without trial takes place in Chile. Suddenly life looks like a prisoner’s life in concentration camps for the undocumented migrants who live in the thousands, imprisoned at the borders of each capitalist state.

The attack of capital against part of the working class in Greece is an aspect of this crisis of reproduction of capitalist relations. Greece today is in the eye of the storm of the debt crisis for many reasons. The most important is that the most precarious part of the proletariat rebelled in a way we all know in December 2008. Greece is an experimental lab for the new phase of the absolutely necessity of capital’s global restructuring. The bourgeoisie in Greece, as has happened many times in the past, has asked for help from more powerful bourgeois classes in order to impose a new form of exploitation. From the very beginning, the new government announced a higher national debt than the previous government in order to accelerate the introduction of the Stability Program). But the bourgeoisie itself is at the centre of the global crisis. The entire international economical press is waiting to see the reaction of the proletariat here in Greece and then to have an overview of the situation internationally. The biggest stores of loan sharks are competing with each other in order to lend and, thus, control the future of the Greek state, and thus the form and intensity of the local proletariat’s exploitation. The creation of the European Monetary Fund to IMF standards clearly shows that the contradiction of competition between capitals can now be solved temporarily, but it also shows that it does not matter who the boss of the proletariat is.

Any attempt to present the situation in a “better” way than it really is a meaningless effort. Any attempt to present the restructuring as Germany’s attack against Greece is suitable only for second rate TV-stations. SYRIZA (a leftist parliamentary party) has tried this approach, issuing nonsense about “sacred money” as compensation for a German Nazi occupation. An Orwell-type propaganda of the mass media has been mobilized, and restructuring is being presented as a natural disaster. At present, this propaganda has been partly successful. Some workers in the private sector have welcomed the reductions in the salaries of the employees in the public sector. The employees in public sector are divided on the basis of who is “truly privileged” and who is not. But all of them are in danger. If someone is wondering what being privileged means, they can ask the dismissed workers of Olympic Airways who occupied the State General Accounting Office. 15 days ago they accepted “the difficult and quite heavy program of the Ministry,” while the deputy-minister ignored them after they had begged him for a meeting. If someone is wondering about the impact on workers’ daily lives because of the attempted restructuring, one can ask the workers at the National Printing Office who after reading the text of the austerity plan’s law and realizing that 30% of their income was to be cut, decided to occupy the building they work at in order to prevent the printing of the Gazette! One can also ask them about the role of their trade union leaders who ended the occupation because they were orally “promised by the government” a circular amending the law!

There is nothing that can improve the situation. The ceremonial demonstrations called by leftists, as long as they remain as such, result in nothing but dead-ends. We are unmasking reality from the veils of politics. The stones that were thrown last Friday (March 5), and which covered the sky are not enough to make them listen to us. As more and more unemployed people occupy buildings and the police repress them; as more and more precarious workers and the unemployed clash with the forces of repression at any slightest opportunity; as the social chaos leads to organization on its own and takes the form of class revolt, then, the smiles of the showmen on the TV-news will freeze on their faces. The battles will be of similar levels to the violence accumulated over many years through the accumulation of capital and the expropriation of proletarian lives.

“What will happen in history, tomorrow, it can only be compared with the major geological disasters which change the face of Earth …”
- Victor Serge

agents of chaos

The interview in pdf

Download the full text in pdf.

Statement by prime minister K. Karamanlis, one of these days

“There is no question of ‘violence’; there is just a side being attacked during a war already in progress and thus the question of the means sufficient for victory”.

Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile, Paris, June 2006

“VIOLENCE means working for 40 years, getting miserable wages and wondering if you ever get retired…

VIOLENCE means state bonds, robbed pension funds and the stock-market fraud…

VIOLENCE means being forced to get housing loans which finally you pay back as if they were gold…

VIOLENCE means the management’s right to fire you any time they want…

VIOLENCE means unemployment, temporary employment, 400 Euros wage with or without social security…

VIOLENCE means work ‘accidents’, as bosses diminish their workers’ safety costs…

VIOLENCE means being driven sick because of hard work …

VIOLENCE means consuming psycho-drugs and vitamins in order to cope with exhausting working hours…

VIOLENCE means working for money to buy medicines in order to fix your labour power commodity…

VIOLENCE means dying on ready-made beds in horrible hospitals, when you can’t afford bribing.”

Proletarians from occupied GSEE, Athens, December 2008

1.

This December, the wind of insurrection blew once again over cities. The joyful and festive atmosphere was set on fire together with the Christmas tree on Syntagma sq. The assassination of the 15-year-old student Alexis Grigoropoulos by special police guard ignited the spark. Thousands of enraged proletarians got to the streets and set the cities of commodity on fire. The social explosion we still live cannot be explained only by means of rage against one more state assassination or against police. It’s much more. It’s the explosion of accumulated rage deriving from their constant attempt for years now to depreciate our lives, something which seems to be accelerated by a capitalism in crisis. At last, we had the opportunity to decisively and practically declare “That’s enough! Now it’s our turn!”. Despite our smaller or greater sporadic reactions, we have all these years been tolerating more and more work for increasingly tinier wages, we have tolerated our indirect wage being attacked by the benefits-pensions system reform, student life being intensified, the recent universities’ reform, more and more layoffs, growing precariousness, environment’s devastation and brutality against immigrants. We have been tolerating the multiplication of human-waste -those who don’t fit to their economy’s development diagrams- and bosses’ arrogance. And during all these years, we have been accumulating rage, while bosses hoped this social bomb wouldn’t explode and the naive wouldn’t believe it will explode. But history proves that explosion is inevitable and it always compels everyone to take sides. The old mole is not dead yet…

2.

Since we got to the streets, a grand mass of non-politicized teenagers showed us what we had to do in order to proceed. However, this revolt isn’t a student one. We met school kids, university students, young (mainly, but not only) workers, unemployed. Several of them (mainly in Athens) were immigrants who stood up against brutal exploitation, silently tolerated for two decades now. We heard about prisoners abstaining from food for 24 hours, manifesting their support to rebels in the cities. In the streets, dividing identities were practically negated. We merged in a crowd attacking police departments, banks and stores, fighting police, liberating public buildings (even provisionally) at the center of the cities and various suburbs, holding popular assemblies and demonstrations in the neighborhoods. This mixed crowd obtained homogeneity in the revolt against the everyday violence of commodity’s dominance, in the violent manifestation of its desire for real life. This insurgency is spontaneous and uncontrollable, while at the same time it explicitly implicates the rejection of politics, since no concrete demands or political proposals were put forth. We made clear that we don’t trust politicians of any kind, whose only goal is to maintain social peace; peace that veils the misery of our everyday life, our exploitation and alienation. Our rage is manifested in the wild simplicity of banners saying “Murderers!”. This insurgency constitutes an authentic proletarian moment of negating the conditions which we are forced to live in…

3.

From the very first moment after the assassination on December 6, state and media mechanisms were activated to confront the explosion of the proletarian rage. Initially, they attempted to put possible reactions under control exploiting the spectacular submission of the resignations by Pavlopoulos and Chinofotis (the Minister and ex-Deputy Minister of the Interior, correspondingly), the Prime Minister’s promise that anybody responsible for the death of the 15-year-old kid will be ‘exemplarily punished’, all oppositional parties’ and many journalists’ disapproval of the government and the ‘discreet stance’ of cops against demonstrators. However, very quickly, they unleashed every form of repression: threats of declaring the country in a state of emergency, mobilization of fascists and para-governmental organizations of ‘indignant citizens’, dozens of arrests and beating of demonstrators, more shootings by cops in Athens. All bosses’ parties in a body (with the Communist Party being the most vulgar amongst them) and the TV scamps attempted to spread fear. Similarly, the two major union confederations, GSEE and ADEDY, cancelled the routine strike demonstrations against new year’s state budget when they suspected the danger of those demos being transformed into riots. However, against union bureaucrats’ jabber about government’s failing to ensure social order and peace, demos did take place during the general strike day and were indeed wild. Thus, reality is different: bosses are those who are afraid. When the foreign minister of France stated from the very first days of the insurgency ‘I would like to express our concern, everyone’s concern about the progress of conflicts in Greece’, he would express bosses’ fear for the possibility of this social explosion to be circulated, since solidarity demos to insurgents in Greece are taking place in many cities all over the world. Particularly in France, the Ministry of Education withdrew the impeding reform in secondary schools, thus giving an end to an emerging movement of high school kids applauding the flames of insurgency in Greek cities and towns.

4.

On the news, we watch the police campaign of dividing demonstrators, either by presenting insurgency as an adventure of teenagers, whose inherent sensitivity due to their age gives them a right to rebel against their parents’ world (as if proletarian parents wouldn’t rightfully desire this world’s destruction) or by mobilizing racist reflexes using the fake separation ‘Greek demonstrators – immigrant looters’, but mainly by attempting to divide demonstrators between good-peaceful ones and bad-rioters. The right of demonstrating is affirmed by bosses and their lackeys only to suppress the need to revolt. Because they want to avoid any further socialization of violent behaviours in the streets, they seek by all means to present them as actions of ‘antiauthoritarians’ or ‘hooligans’ who intrude into demonstrations of otherwise peace-loving civilians. Well, not only (and not mainly) anarchists loot, smash and attack police. Anarchists participate up to a point. The significant depreciation of youngsters and immigrants for years now explains the harsh and standing conflict against the state and the generalized looting. Smashing as a proletarian action declares the everyday existence of police departments, banks or chain stores as moments of a silent war. It also manifests the rupture with the democratic management of social conflict, which tolerates demos against this or that matter, provided that they are deprived of any autonomous class action. Invoking the ultimate political rampart of capital’s dominance, that is democracy, the prime minister declared that ‘social struggles or the death of a teenager cannot be confused with actions against democracy’. Democracy of course approves devastating cities and the countryside, polluting atmosphere and contaminating water, bombing, selling weapons, creating dumps of human beings, forcing us to stop being humans in order to become objects-that-work (or look for work, since more and more people are or will be unemployed because of the crisis). He thus implicates that some people can destroy anything they want as long as new chances for profit are created and development is promoted. However, doing this against private property constitutes the ultimate scandal for a society which has established this essential right from its early birth. Burning and smashing constitute wounds to this society’s legitimacy. The ‘hooded rioters’ is an empty notion, intended for police use exclusively. Police monopolizes the shaping of the threat’s profile.

5.

For the image-producing machine, the very opposite of the ‘hooded rioter’ (that is, the image constructed to separate proletarians) is the ‘peaceful civilian whose property is destroyed’. Who is this celebrated ‘peaceful civilian’, enraged by smashing? In this occasion, ‘peaceful civilians’ are the small businessmen, the owners of ‘small’ stores, the petit bourgeoisie. The state has been fooling even them, since many of them are being destroyed by the capitalist crisis. During this December, turnover is half of that of December 2007, not only for stores at Ermou and Stournari streets (the first being the place with the more expensive stores in Athens and the second the main street in Exarchia district), but also for open-air markets; yet no such market was attacked during last days… Bosses claim that smashing stores has made many people lose their jobs, while at the same time one hundred thousand layoffs are to be announced soon in Greece because of the crisis. However, whatever smashes of ‘small’ stores were not carried out by hooded state servants are commented by workers in such stores in a leaflet written by the ‘Autonomous Initiative of Shop-assistants of Larisa’: ‘We denounce whoever attempts to terrorize and convince us that defending some properties stands above human life and dignity; besides, these properties have been created by precarious workers’ unpaid, black and surplus labour; no small properties have been damaged during symbolic attacks against banks and public buildings [indeed, this is true for Larissa and other provincial cities]. If they really care about shop-assistants, they should increase the miserable wages they give them, they should learn what social security is and they should create human working hours and conditions’. Let bourgeois (petit or grand ones) worry about their stores. We don’t stand at the same side in the class war; during periods of social polarization, as the one we live today, each one has to take sides.

6.

This is insurgency’s third week. Although mass media attempt to conceal this by all means, demonstrations, occupations, popular assemblies still continue to take place, mainly in Athens but in other cities as well. Insurgents demand the immediate release of everyone arrested. The only effective way to support arrested people is by developing the struggle, part of which they are as well. It’s true that this very moment it’s difficult for anyone to estimate whether and how this social unrest will continue. Regardless of what will happen, nothing will be the same not only for us who have been in the streets but for the whole working class as well. Lots of discussions and critical accounts have to be made regarding what happened during this December. But such a project concerns insurgents or whoever has interest in this world’s destruction and not the news or politicians. To conclude: this year, Christmas is canceled; there’s a revolt goin’ on!

Nothing is over yet, the struggle continues!

Immediate release of everybody arrested during the social revolt!

Some of those who have been in the streets of insurrected cities

December the 23^rd 2008

To begin with we should write some introductory lines about the students’ movement that spread throughout Greece during last May and June. We believe this is necessary since very few information on it is available in English. We write considering ourselves a part of that movement, given that at least half of Blaumachen’s members are students themselves.
Higher Education in Greece undergoes restructuring in accordance to “Bologna Declaration” (1999) and as a part of the wider neo-liberal restructuring of the indigenous capital relations. The aim is, as elsewhere in Europe, producing a rather flexible labour force, susceptible to life-long learning and reskilling. This policy has created an increasingly proletarianized young population, doomed for its most parts to flexible working conditions and/or unemployment. The present Higher Education restructuring has met the first waves of resistance in the 2001 students’ struggle. However, that struggle has ended, schoolwork has been increasingly intensified since then and at the same time some legislative reforms have already taken place (although they have not been implemented yet). The present (neo-conservative) government’s efforts aim at revising the constitution which for now secures the public character of Higher Education and reforming the legislation concerning Higher Education in order to align university with the imperatives of evaluation, competitiveness, flexibilization and commodification. This attempt ignited the recent students’ struggle.
“June’s days” have been the most massive students’ movement in Greece since 1986. 430 university and technical university departments have been occupied (451 in all), a great number of demonstrations (with the biggest of them in Athens and Thessaloniki with twenty and ten thousands demonstrators respectively), clashes with cops in Athens’ centre and massive general assemblies have taken place. In our opinion, “we can understand nothing about this struggle if we think that the draft proposal of the new bill is the only problem for this young proletariat occupying university buildings, giving up studying, demonstrating and making its own festivals. Instead, we live a social explosion which reflects the accumulated anger, the negation of an everyday life in campuses increasingly intensified, of the poverty of the limitlessly limited choices offered by the spectacle, of the promise of a future with nothing more than even more work, even more insecurity, even more fear. The strong and decided opposition to the new bill represents this young proletariat’s reply to the neo-liberal fixations: don’t blame us for the fact that social needs are not covered; we won’t pay for this; we won’t try any harder. However, this negation is segmental and (so far) not united towards a radical critique of the existing world. What emerges so far as the dominant tendency of this movement, a tendency which is continually reinforced by the Left, is the defense against the legislative reform in Higher Education, which means the affirmation of an earlier form of class settlement. This is reflected in slogans such as “Public and Free Education”, “We want jobs, not unemployment” …” [1]. Eventually, this movement ended at late June, when the government announced that the introduction of the new law will be postponed till autumn; in regard to this, we shouldn’t ignore both the practices of the (reformist or radical) social-democratic leftist organisations and the imminent summer break.
We know that this introduction is too short to describe and criticize a whole social struggle. This is not the place to take on such a work. We are working on such a project in Greek right now. For now, we publish in English our contribution Occupation, not democracy!. This leaflet was written by some of us together with other comrades during the early days of the movement. It was distributed during the second week of the occupations and in the 10000 people demonstration in Thessaloniki. Its content was determined by what we saw then as the major weaknesses of the movement, i.e. the adherence to democratic procedures and generally to a democratist ideology along with the absence of any critique of schoolwork and of the media’s mediating role. Another leaflet under the title Let the occupations become time-barricades was distributed in Athens and Thessaloniki during the third and fourth week of the movement, criticizing the various leftist groups and introducing the “social wage” demand. We hope that this will be also available to English readers in the future.

About some widely spread myths;
to be used by the fighting students (and not only them) of June

We begin this small note by tracking a moment of the social explosion in France a few months ago. Indeed, we are referring to France but mainly not to what actually happened there but to what didn’t happen; to the failings and weaknesses of that movement; to the revolutionary content that didn’t exist and to the practices that didn’t take place; to anything we need to overcome as that struggle’s lessons become a part of our own memory, of our own struggle here. The movement in France has ended. What it has left is not only the partial withdrawal of the “CPE”, but also a legacy in the minds of those been there, in the streets of the “City of Light” and the rest of France; moments of human poetry and collective joy.
The whole campus in our city is now occupied and under our control. We demonstrate in the streets to overthrow capital’s attack against our lives, an attack represented by the new bill. We do not accept the solution capital offers us. This doesn’t mean that we are satisfied with what now exists. By occupying the university, by fighting, we create a time-barricade, which we desire to become a total attack against the existing world. We are tired of working more and more intensively and always without pay. We are tired of all this crap like “student life”, “knowledge” and “education”. We are outraged with the fact that we get to think how capital could better manage our exploitation. We are distressed by political games, political tactics and every thought concerning political cost. Only those who go into politics could have a political cost. The only politics we are concerned with is the abolition of politics. So we need to get over with some myths haunting the minds of lots of people with whom we struggle together, side by side.

First myth: Majority is always right.

The idea that within a movement one must count hands, or even that one could, makes no sense. To yield to this idea is to place oneself at the mercy of the democratist illusion according to which the collective will is the simple addition of sovereign individual wills, whereas in reality it is always the result of a complex play of reciprocal influences. The democratic myth wishes to convince us that only individuals exist, each one with its own responsibilities [2], its own will and its own thoughts. Our experience, however, proves that human relationships, communities and the joy of human contact exist; what we see is that all these are destroyed day by day. Their democracy wants us to be alone, neurotic isolated individuals. Their contradiction is that we cannot produce profit for them by being isolated, so the productive cooperation between us must always be ensured. In this contradiction is where our power lies.
When deliberative proceedings are constituted (an assembly, a coordination or a parliament) the principal question is not the procedures by which the will of all the participants can best express itself, but the relation between the process of debate and the action, a question which cannot be dissociated from the nature of the action itself. We don’t care about procedures in which everybody’s opinion can be expressed. We don’t want to debate with everybody. The opinion of those who try in a certain time to change the conditions of their lives is what concerns us. If a situation is sufficiently rich in possibilities, one can well conceive of a minority undertaking its own action alongside the majority, and that the result of their actions then leads a good part of the majority to join the minority, or else shows the minority that it was mistaken. The domination of the democratic illusion would lead the minority to inertia due to respect towards the majority and the movement as a whole would lose the opportunity for a qualitative leap forward.
What we say here can be easily understood if we think of the procedure of the students’ general assemblies. We are all glad that the majority supports the occupation and the struggle. But what would happen if DAP [the governmental students' organisation] (or any “DAP”) mobilised more people in some schools (or even in all of them) becoming the majority? Should we accept our defeat by adhering to democratic legitimacy? Every democratic procedure ends up in turning against our revolt. The State and all parties are quite familiar with breaking the limits of the democratic legitimacy whenever it doesn’t suit their aims. The proof lies equally in the history of fascist regimes and our direct experience of our struggle right now. We would be even happier if 500 people determined to keep up fighting, although a minority in a general assembly, destroyed majority’s dictatorship.

Second myth: Occupation is just a means to an end.

Even though most universities in the country are occupied, there are still many different understandings of the significance of our occupying our workplaces. Occupation is an act that blocks the productive process, whether cars are produced, higher education or human-commodities, namely us. From this point of view, occupation can be considered as a means of pressure, since it freezes the profit-producing process (and no boss, no government can accept such a freeze). But, all the more so, occupation is an act of re-appropriating the space and time dominated by capital. Blocking university’s function means that first of all we stop working, studying, going round hospitals and compulsory courses. At last we have some time… some time to live (something that we cannot usually do). At last we feel that the university campus belongs to us and we give up wasting our everyday activity in an alien place. At last we can truly meet with other people, laugh, laze, enjoy ourselves. We know that in the present situation these moments of negation are probably temporary. In a couple of weeks the occupation will end. Nevertheless, we have to embrace with serenity the fact that there will be no return to normal, and then inhabit this irreversibility.
To prevent this bill from being voted or implemented is important since the latter would make our lives worse. It’s also important to create those organizational forms that would question the democratic myth and avoid to get fixed as such, since every fixed organisational form is alien to us. No particular form will ever guarantee the nature of the movement. But, what primarily concerns us is to create situations able to make the possibility of returning to the former state of affairs difficult. It is a question of starting to modify, however slightly, the conditions of existence of those touched by the movement – both within it and outside it. About 20 years ago, in France again, some postmen put forward the idea of delivering the mail for free. If only one post office had done it -for example by stamping all the letters without charge- it would have made an impact from which the whole movement would have benefited and the shock waves of which would have spread throughout society: the action of a minority would have had infinitely more weight, for themselves as well as for the others, than a hundred thousand votes in the assemblies.

Third myth: Images and actions.

This movement is haunted by the idea of drawing the media’s attention to its actions and “fair demands”. We find this idea absurd and even hostile. The only role the media can play is that of incorporating the movement’s language into the dominant one, into capital’s language. The only attitude we should have towards the media is that of totally negating the domination of images. As long as the movement remains within the limits of managing capital’s problems it will be reconciled with the language of the media (or at least of those [media] in opposition to present government’s strategy). Our word may escape the mediation of images and journalists’ lies only by the development of its own quality and its reflection into the respective decided actions. Practices of revolt have already emerged; we have blocked the productive process of teaching and research in the campuses. We have to expand such practices into the terrain of circulation of commodities-things and human commodities by blocking roads and railway stations. We have much to learn from the French experience in relation to this. After all, don’t we want to block the reproduction of capital’s social relations? Don’t we want to abolish anything that alienates us from our own life? Towards this direction, the movement has to find its own means of circulating its word; it must develop its own voice. The strength of a movement is in its effective power, not in what is being said about it, and the malicious gossip about it.
The dictatorship of images isn’t restricted only to the relation between the movement and the media. It also involves the relations developed among individuals into that same movement. Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle; separation between those involved in the movement and those watching it (fragmented) on TV; between those just voting for actions and those taking part in them; between those just taking part in and those organizing actions and so on…these separations create spectators at different levels. This world which is founded upon our separation from the products of our activity and our creative ability reproduces us as spectators of our life. We are used to watch our life rather than make it. This fact is so firmly imprinted on our brains and bodies that it is preserved during our struggles, too. Take as an example the admiration for those with “leading abilities” or with the ability to give a rousing speech, the applause for vain unionists’ words, the millions of photos from massive general assemblies, the obsessional idea that our demonstrations should head towards governmental buildings-symbols of decision making, the spectacular collision with the cops…this is the spectacle laying wait. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. What the movement must do is to crush the images through our creative actions.

Fourth myth: Coordination.

National coordination reflects the sterility of politics and essentially our weakness. Unionists, dozens of leftist groups offer platforms written in advance by their leadership. National coordination is a certain political power’s attempt to dominate the movement. We know that coordinating the actions of the various parts of the movement in a broader framework is necessary; so is the development of ideas within the movement. However, not only doesn’t the national coordination (in the way it has developed so far) promote this, but it is also hostile to such a necessity. The only existing debate is about whether coordination is necessary or not, about the “when” and the “where”, but there is no discussion about what exactly we are going to coordinate. Discussion about the content of our actions is almost totally absent from the most occupation committees. In cases where only one political power dominates, content is self-evident; it is its political platform. In the rest of the committees discussion is always postponed in order for a so-called unity over the “minimums” not to be disrupted.
It is quite clear that under such conditions national coordination means the domination of the political platform of the organisation or the organisations that will dominate (primarily in terms of numbers) in the amphitheater’s conflict. They want us to be spectators. Instead, since we don’t seek for the “minimums” but for the maximum (“We don’t want just a loaf of bread, but the whole fucking bakery”, according to an old slogan), we must destroy their aspirations and coordinate our actions in an autonomous way.

Fifth myth: You are wrong; I don’t work…but when I grow up I’ll become a doctor!

Very few people have yet to understand that university is tied up with the labour market; nobody believes that higher education has such fairy aims as broadening one’s horizons, creating “renaissance men” or other such crap reminding of Plato’s Academy (for the lovers of antiquity we should only remind that in ancient Athens there had not only been those nice guys -male of course- debating during the procedures of direct democracy, but many, too many slaves as well, who would pleasantly piss upon the gates of the “ideal society”). On the one hand, university produces knowledge necessary for the reproduction of waged labour relations (new technology, the ideological mist of an exploitative society etc). On the other, new workers are produced furnished with those attributes that make them more exploitable for their future employers (unskilled, flexible, categorized and of course compromised with capitalist reality – the new law is just to complete this condition).
What is well hidden is that university studies are labour, not just potentially labour. We are already involved in the productive process, producing a very precious commodity; ourselves. Students’ working hours resemble those of the “free” employable or better still those of the one who is totally subsumed under the labour exploitative relation; of them who have been working for their whole life. In medical school (most of us waste our everyday lives here), which vomits a so-called upper crust of workers into the market, schoolwork is increasingly intensified. The modern version of the future doctor is constructed of many hours of practical training in teaching hospitals, days of duty, compulsory attendance at several courses and lectures and full-time studying, which has nothing to do with the renaissance dream of homo universalis. The ideological veil of this intensified unpaid labour consists of words like “education”, “professionalism” and “conscience”. A whole generation of young people has been nursed with the values of the American  – Dream – Made – in – Greece, that of becoming a respectable lawyer or doctor; and when one is committed to become an expert at their object (see exhaustive work without any “free time”), complete their university qualifications with honors (see individualism and fierce competition), lick his doctors-educators’ ass, they will be rewarded with the respective social acknowledgement and a big wage.
We’ll probably have to remind that the era during which many doctors had been a secure middle class faction has ended for some years now. Medical students come in their majority from working class families, which cannot afford even a small private consulting room. Most of them are going to be employed in one of the various health services’ enterprises (private or state funded) or otherwise be a part of the so-called industrial reserve army. A huge medical proletariat has emerged in Greece during the last 10 years; capital has nothing else to offer us as a solution apart from introducing exams in order for one to get a medical specialty, together with a system of continuously evaluating working doctors. One can advance when they deserve it. Deserve what? A reward for being more productive for capital. Exhaustive alienated labour in the school means (not for everyone) passing the exams and becoming a resident; becoming a resident means (for everyone) exhaustive alienated labour in the hospital.

Sixth myth: A myth that includes all myths.

In order to conclude; we are not concerned with any discussion about the knowledge provided by the university. We don’t seek for an alien, dead, indifferent, incomprehensible knowledge facing us, with ourselves just absorbing it. We are not concerned with any discussion about improving the democratic institutions of this society. We don’t desire to be alone, isolated individuals with our relations mediated by money, images or voting. We are not concerned with any discussion about the way our representatives could correspond better to our demands. We don’t want to be spectators. We are not concerned with any discussion about the way our labour could be organized in a different way. We don’t want to work. We don’t want to be fragmented: doctors, workers, citizens, consumers, men, women, now working, later entertaining ourselves and once in a while voting in procedures separated from the unceasing movement of life. We are concerned with turning our life into a unified and creative experience. In order to manage this we must abolish this university and the rest of the commodity society.

“We’ve made our body a vast graveyard of murdered desires and anticipations; we abandon the most important, the most essential things, like playing and talking with kids and animals, with flowers and trees, playing with each other and being happy, making love, enjoying nature, the beautiful products of human hand and mind, gently diving deep inside ourselves, getting to know ourselves and people next to us…”

-Chronis Missios, Smile, man… What’s so damn hard?

With regards from AUTH’s Medical School’s occupation,
Luther Blissett