In a virgin forest, a wild mountain, a quiet clean sea, a beautiful neighbourhood, the capitalist sees a “fillet”, a new field of investment and profitability. There is nothing in the world we live in, in the world of state power and the capitalist organization of the economy, that does not have a certain exchange value, that is not valued in money. Such is the nature of capital that it is driven to perpetual expansion as a condition of its survival and reproduction. Everything in nature and society is a target and a field for exploitation. In a miniature version of this process, the neighbourhood of Exarchia has recently been subjected to one of the strongest attacks in recent decades by the State and Capital. Like many other neighbourhoods in the centre of Athens, Exarcheia is still an ‘unexploited’ field for various kinds of big investors. A neighbourhood in the centre of the city, in the midst of its facade, that has been “left behind” in terms of infrastructure, big investments and profit supply to the capitalist machine.
But it is also a special neighborhood. It is different from the other – several other – downtown neighbourhoods that remain ‘underdeveloped’ and undeveloped and for which the same future of ‘development’ is foreseen. It is the neighbourhood of movements, of struggles, of politicised youth, of radicalism, of anarchists. The state has every reason to allocate many of its forces and resources to subjugate, refine, clean up, normalize Exarcheia and offer it, under its auspices, as a pawn to investors. The state knows that, traditionally, Exarcheia is the reference point of radical movements, the “headquarters” of the internal enemy. In recent years, and with particular intensity during the New Democracy government, the state has been attempting to fight what it imagines to be the final battle for the neighbourhood.
This is not, of course, a choice detached from the big picture of state policy. At the juncture of the last few years, the state seems to have considered – and, moreover, proclaimed – that it is the historically and socially appropriate moment to end the deep-rooted domestic revolutionary tradition, political radicalism, anarchists, movements, what its right-wing managers call the “ideological hegemony of the left”. In the era of economic crisis, high inflation and the coming recession, war and geopolitical upheavals, the Greek state is being shielded in the face of an unstable future.
It was rather easy to foresee and it did not take long for it to become apparent to growing segments of society that gentrification and upgrading meant displacement of the poorer classes through skyrocketing rents or non-renewal of contracts when houses were turned into Airbnb. Next to this are the already ongoing auctions, even electronic, of the first home and the open road for the march of real estate capital at the expense of the exploited. We see the neighbourhood changing: residents are forced to leave their homes and in their place are tourists – clients of hotels and Airbnb who are sprouting everywhere like mushrooms and are often owned by multinational investment funds and companies. Along with them come shops for the rich (tourists and non-tourists) with prohibitive prices and an alternative style, since this is what “sells” now in Exarcheia.
The other side of development and gentrification is, as always, repression and surveillance. Uniformed garbage adorns the metal sheets of the metro construction site in the square and excludes residents from using the Strefi Hill which is slowly being destroyed, movement spaces and squats are suppressed and closed while hipster shops spring up, cameras are placed in more and more places around the new businesses. These cameras are also being used by the state in the service of repressing the struggles and confrontational choices of people active in the neighbourhood. A recent and typical example is the cameras in the streets around the monument of the anarchist A. Grigoropoulos, which were used by the state in the last mobilisations for December.
State and capital are making a coordinated and strategic advance on the neighbourhood, attempting to alter its political character, to suppress self-organised projects and to erase from memory and space the history of the struggle of Exarchia, trying to turn it into a sterile entertainment and resort.
For our part, as a part of the people who consider the neighbourhood of Exarcheia to be of key importance for the perspective of the struggle, who want Exarcheia to remain a field of fermentation, politicisation and resistance, we choose to respond to the multiform violence that power unleashes in a coordinated manner against us and against our structures and neighbourhoods. We call on the world of the neighbourhood, the world of self-organised radical struggle to choose to confront the state and capital, however they appear by invading Exarcheia and beyond. To attack in practice and with every available means the investments/mining that are attempting to wipe us out. Perhaps an attack that lasts over time, a “war of attrition” on our part, even in material terms, will be able, alongside all the other struggles centred on Exarcheia that have been and are being given over time, to stand as a real barrier to the designs of domination.
In this context, we take responsibility for the damage to cameras at 20 Kolettis Street, 75 Methoni Street and the Eurodiagnostics at 4 Patousa Street, as well as for the paint, slogans and minor damage to bells of Airbnb apartments at 32 Tsamadou Street, 23 Solomou Street, 72 Methoni Street, 28 Arachovis Street and 61 Charilaou Trikoupis Street. Finally, we take responsibility for the following attacks by breaking entrances, facades, windows and cameras of the following hotels and Airbnb:
Zoia House – The Hill (Kosmas Melodou 30)
Kosmos Melomel (Komos Melomos – Komos Melomos Melios (8 Kleisovis Street))
PAME Paradiso (Kleisovis 7)
Exarcheia Housing Project (Sp. Trikoupis 28)
The Diplomat’s ABR (Char. Trikoupis 95)
Asclepius 102
Komninon 8
Solomou 32
-Anarchists