Defeat is not loss, nor is it death. Defeat is acceptance. It is the oblivion of the dead of the class war. It is the bloodless surrender of collective history to the dustbin of oblivion. Defeat is assignment and messianism. Prolonging the battle, truce and compromise to a life below the class necessities and circumstances of the times. Defeat is not to give one’s life and freedom for the struggle, but to live deadened by the lack of social solidarity and class consciousness. To look to save your own skin when the person next to you is losing his steps, being left behind, dying. The times we live in are characterised by a profoundly dystopian condition, where everything seems predetermined. It is a time of dilemmas and great decisions. In the face of this dark period, it is our revolutionary duty to light the way with the hope of overthrow. To believe in our powers, to justify the loss of those who believed in them and are no longer with us. That is the stakes today: to keep alive the flame of subversion, the flame of insurrection until it becomes a fiery revolutionary conflagration. To be the link between the struggles of yesterday and tomorrow. For this land will only be cleansed by fire. Only with revolution.
The concerted attack of the state and the bosses on the ranks of the exploited social base leaves behind dozens of dead every day in the sweatshops of wage slavery. The barbarism in this society is the normalization and acceptance of the death of the proletarian base for the profits of the employers. A condition which is enshrined through class blackmail and methodical intensity of exploitation by the bosses. And it is not only the pervasive lack of determination and social solidarity that prevails in the ranks of the exploited. It is the very need for survival that narrows the thought of assertion and negotiation in the face of collective doom. It is the steady work of the employers’ trade unionism of the GSEE and the reformist left to jointly deconstruct the class barriers and degenerate the workers’ struggle. Abuse workers’ rights, assimilate and manipulate the radical aberrations of the workers’ struggle. To bury any attempt to overcome class exploitation, opening an unbridgeable gap between representative protest and collective resistance and subversion. And while the list of the dead of our class grows longer, avenging their loss is a matter for fewer and fewer of us. But class duty remains unabated.
Our daily life is drenched in blood. A dead construction worker, a dead supermarket worker. A work accident at a power station, in the sweatshops of the multinationals. And the proletarian rank and file, spectators to their loss and with tears in their eyes, bow their heads in resignation to life. The responsibility is suffocating us more and more every day. For all those whose names history will not record, for all those whose lives were sacrificed for the great interests, for the great overcoming of the crisis of neoliberalism. For all of them we are still here to fight every day. So that they are not forgotten. For their loss not to become mere statistics and numbers on analysts’ lists. For all of them we are here to fight our daily battles, with our small forces. Because the losses on the field of class warfare do not bear any more tears but are a cry for new hostilities.
Every dead worker is a bullet in the chamber of class revenge.
Class memory is not rubbish, it does not forgive, it does not forget those who are responsible for daily proletarian death. It is the basic material for the construction of collective faith, for the reconstruction of radical barriers to class exploitation. It is the oil in the gears of social consciousness and solidarity. We live to stomp on the heads of our masters. But until then, we must not faint in the face of the forces of the times. Death is not the end, it is the beginning of the battle. By sharpening the axe of the revolutionary war against the state and the bosses through Operation -Class against Class-, we take responsibility for a series of attacks with low-power explosive devices on bodies where employer violence and capitalist profit are bloodying the working class base and proletarian interests.
– Explosive attack at the Metro construction site at the Agia Sofia stop: Where on 9 September another worker breathed his last, dying instantly after a fall. The 54-year-old worker was working at a height of 3 metres without any safety measures, simply climbing up a ladder (and not on a scaffolding as required by the provisions on safety measures at underground construction sites) without even safety harnesses. For ΑΚΤΩΡ’s contractors, however, life before profits is of no value. We will not forget that a year ago, for the capitalist needs of the same employer mafia, a 47-year-old worker lost his life when he was crushed by concrete at a construction site for the construction of the section of the Vertical Axis (Bulgaria – Echinos – Xanthi, road construction project between Bulgaria and Greece) near Dimario, while two more were seriously injured. The attack at dawn on Wednesday 16 June – the day of the adoption of the anti-labour Hatzidakis bill, at the same construction site that was stained with the blood of our fellow human being, is a minimal class tribute to the memory of another victimized worker for the pockets of the bosses.
– The explosive attack on the offices of ΟΑΣΘ ( Οργανισμός Αστικών Συγκοινωνιών Θεσσαλονίκη, Thessaloniki Urban Transport Organisation) 46 Paleon Patron Germanou Street. For a year and a half, measures and bans were introduced on movement, socializing and social contacts, thousands of fines were imposed for violations, while at the same time one could observe that on the buses people were stepping on each other to get to their jobs. And for transport workers, no prevention and health care measures. While the unions were demanding immediate measures such as the construction of partitions for bus drivers, an increase in the number of routes and the fleet of vehicles to reduce congestion, prioritisation of vaccinations, the management of OASΘ was indifferent. The workers themselves complained that not only were no measures taken but they were forced to work in vehicles that did not even have windows for ventilation. More than 10 workers in Athens and Thessaloniki died in the moving coffins of public transport during the pandemic, while in our city alone, more than 10% of the workers of ΟΑΣΘ had fallen ill without any real care and attention. Through our attack in the morning of June 16th at the offices of ΟΑΣΘ, we send our solidarity and practical support to the public transport workers, who are sidelined by the employers and the state in order to continue the uninterrupted neoliberal reconstruction of capitalism through the unabated movement of commodity.
– Arson attack on a substation of the ΔΕΔΔΗΕ (Διαχειριστής Ελληνικού Δικτύου Διανομής Ηλεκτρικής Ενέργειας, Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator) in Ioulianou Street: For the multinational conglomerate ΔΕΗ (Δημόσια Επιχείρηση Ηλεκτρισμού, Public Power Corporation) employer murders are the fuel in the engine of productive activity. ΔΕΗ invests in death. Death for the working class through criminal working conditions and class exploitation. Death for local communities through the operation of industrial plants that degrade life, local development and micro-productive activity in the face of uninterrupted big profits. Death for nature as a whole that kneels before the energy-consuming investment power and the brutality of energy imperialism. A typical example of this condition is the employer murders of 5 workers in 15 days in the labour sweatshops of the ΔΕΗ – 3 workers in a subcontracting company of “ΑΚΤΩΡ”* met a martyr’s death by electrocution in the Gymno of Eretria in Evia, during maintenance and repair of a damage to a ΔΕΔΔΗΕ network (one more was taken to hospital with burns), while 2 more contract workers of the company “MUEHLHAN Cyprus Ltd” lost their lives by falling from a great height at the 5th unit of the Agios Dimitrios Steam Power Plant (ΑΗΣ) in Kozani. The attack on the substation of the ΔΕΔΔΗΕ at dawn on June 28th, comes to keep alive the flame of revenge for every employer’s murder.
In the face of the intensity of class exploitation and the structured extermination of the proletarian base, the control mechanisms of the state play a central role. The labour inspectorates have been transformed from bodies for strengthening workers’ defence and the class interests of the grassroots into a washing machine for employers’ responsibilities in capitalist barbarism. The inspections they carry out are sham and in direct consultation and collaboration with the bosses in order to comply with health protocols without affecting the profits and needs of the employer elite. It is a common secret, for example, that in industries such as HELPE, the workers themselves cook up the results of investigations and inspections at the behest of the inspection bodies in order to present an image of social sensitivity and environmental responsibility. A workers’ paradise is being built on the hell of class exploitation. And if until now the cover-up of employer arbitrariness was a common secret, the regulatory provisions of the anti-worker Hatzidakis bill have come to incorporate the bosses in the legal procedures of negotiating the interests of the workers through the establishment of private arbitration bodies vis-à-vis the ACA. At the same time, the offices of the Directorate of Occupational Safety and Health of the College hold the absolute responsibility for the coordinated state indifference throughout the pandemic crisis for the immediate adoption and observance of substantive and welfare measures for all workers, which were and still are today a stubborn fuel in the capitalist machine. At the same time the state is foreshadowing coercive medical acts such as compulsory vaccination (throwing all the international conventions on human rights and freedoms to the dustbin) while granting class privileges and controlled accessibility to the exploited.
The militant constitution of the class counter-attack is a matter of social necessity, faith, consistency and purposefulness in the defence of proletarian interests and resistances. The state, through the passing of the latest reactionary bill, enters into the biggest agreement with the employer elite, investing in the death of the social base. The next day is dawning with the working class being called upon to face a new economic crisis, which will succeed that of the pandemic period, in order to recover the financial system, to fill the coffers, to make the bosses richer. The crisis will take on even greater social dimensions, bringing all the exploited to the limits of their endurance. The state and capital have nothing more to promise than to intensify poverty, misery, squeezing our productive power, turning popular anger towards social cannibalism.
The road to social liberation and class self-management is one: it is the road of the revolutionary overthrow of the state and capital, of the relations of exploitation, power and subordination. And this road opens only through the conflict with the dependence on statism, the enslavement to class exploitation, the reliance on employers’ trade unionism. The road to freedom is not paved with rose petals. It has thorns, wires and blood everywhere, but proletarian duty cries out before history that we have a revolutionary duty not to take a single step back. No matter how heavy our steps are, comrades, we will always go forward.
To crush the traitors and seducers of the workers’ struggle
To build up our class defences
Violence against the violence of power
Operation ‘Class against Class‘ – Anarchist Action Organisation
From: Athens IMC
*A multinational Greek construction group (largest in Greece) with operations spanning various sectors of public and private development (real estate, energy (biogas and others), railway (Athens-Piraeus Electric Railways upgrade), fuel pipes, other infrastructure development) in ten countries.