Solidarity with anarchist prisoner Claudio Lavazza
Thursday 14 April 19.00 AT ASSOE ECONOMIC UNIVERSITY Athens .
EVENT – DISCUSSION on the case of Claudio Lavazza, with video screening.
Claudio Lavazza – A whole life dedicated to the struggle
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF COMRADE CLAUDIO LAVAZZA
SOLIDARITY TO ALL CAPTURED REVOLUTIONARIES AROUND THE WORLD
by Anarchist initiative against the state murders
Via & Translated by Act for freedom now!
On Saturday 9 April, 2022 following the call of the assembly of solidarity with the imprisoned, persecuted and fugitive militants, more than 200 comrades gathered at Exarcheia Square in solidarity with the anarchist prisoner Giannis Michailidis.
During the meeting, which lasted about an hour and a half, the text of the assembly was read, texts were distributed and fliers thrown. Then a march followed through the streets of the dependencies, without the presence of the police or any other problems.
The response to the meeting and the march was another message to the State that the anarchist comrade Giannis is not alone. He has with him the movement of solidarity with the political prisoners that will always give all its strength to break the regime of exclusion that the State and capital have in store for them. The “indefinite” detention regime imposed on the comrade is another example of this brutal repression of the enemy within.
Source: athens.indymedia
Via & Translated by Act for freedom now!
Athens, Greece: Text of two imprisoned comrades
Comrades, we are writing to you from the penitentiary hellholes of Korydallos and Avloras, two more detention centres, both of which aim at our physical confinement and remorse of our political conscience. By making our case public, we would like the reason for our detention and evidence of the practices of the EΛ.ΑΣ National Police used against us to come out.
In the early hours of 14 November 2021 we didn’t stop during a check carried out by a DIAS cops bikes team in the area of New Faliro. Immediately a chase was launched against us by a civilian vehicle that did not bear the characteristics of the service. As white people, we did not receive a plethora of bullets, but in the area of Moschato, the car rammed us while we were moving and threw us on the road (with a high risk of being fatally injured). Our arrest was linked to an attack on the Piraeus traffic police earlier that night, which took place more than three kilometers from the checkpoint (the checkpoint was being controlled by fixed units outside the stinking Skye channel). We were taken to the ΓΑΔΑ, (Athens Police HQ) where we refused to give fingerprints, which, as well as genetic material, were ordered to be compulsorily taken a day before we went before an interrogator in an attempt to identify us with the evidence found in the attack and with previous cases. With invalid evidence against us, it was decided to remand us in custody on the pretext of identical clothing, as shown by video footage from the department.
This case is a fiasco and a desperate attempt by the police to win a major victory and legitimize the new criminal code in the eyes of the public. A decisive role in this is played by the state disinformation media, which first ran to prejudge us, using against us evidence with no legal basis – they talked about a yafka house(safe-house), an explosives manufacturing plant and spread false news about the first Molotov cocktail detention in Greece, thus exaggerating the work of the police and the necessity of the changes in the criminal code. The changes to article 272 and how they relate to the changes to 264 and 270 are intended to spread terror in the anarchist/anti-racist movement, to anyone who resists or questions the sovereignty of the state and its partners. As anarchists we are not surprised by this case and how it has developed so far, we do not believe in bourgeois justice and have no illusions about who it serves. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Text of two imprisoned comrades Fotis D. and Iasonas R.”
GATHERING-SOLIDARITY MARCH
SATURDAY 9 APRIL 8PM ΕXΑRCHIA SQUARE
FREEDOM TO ANARCHIST GIANNIS MICHAILIDIS
STRUGGLE FOR THE RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS
Anarchist prisoner Giannis Michailidis has been imprisoned for more than 8 and a half years in the cells of democracy and 3 years in fugitive status in two different periods. His consistent commitment to the anarchist struggle, his unrepentant stance in front of the executioners of bourgeois justice, his practical questioning of the world of power and bourgeois legitimacy has put him in the crosshairs of the repressive and judicial mechanisms for years.
Giannis was prosecuted on the basis of a trumped-up charge of the mass revolt of the prisoners of Korydallos prison against the violent seizure of the then hunger-striking anarchist prisoner Dinos Giagtzoglou.
A persecution that targeted, without any evidence beyond solidarity texts, all the political prisoners of that period in order to put them in a new regime of hostage-taking, discontinued leaves, transfer from rural prisons, etc. Faced with the risk of prolonging his imprisonment and being transferred from the rural prisons where he was being held Giannis chose freedom, making an escape that allowed him to walk the paths of freedom for which he has fought consistently and at great cost throughout his life. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Freedom to anarchist Giannis Michailidis – Gathering – Solidarity March Saturday 9 April 20:00 PM Εxarcheia Square”
ANOTHER WAR IS POSSIBLE: CLASS, ANTI-STATE, REVOLUTIONARY.
We take responsibility for the arson attacks that took place from March 2 to 14 in areas of Athens. Specifically
At dawn on Wednesday 2/3 we set fire to and destroyed a company van of AKTORA in Chrysostomou Smyrnis Street in Vyronas. On 1/4/2021 in Evia, the bodies of 3 dead workers were found hanging on the DEI poles and thrown lifeless on the ground at an AKTORA construction site. The murdered workers of the class war are not included in any official statistics, many times they do not even have a name, nationality, age. They are mere fuel and legalized collateral damage. Only proletarian organization and revenge can keep alive the memory of the murdered workers and our class hatred against their murdering bosses. Giannis Carlatiras, 43 years old, George Toskas, 55 years old, and Alex Brouka, 45 years old. stand next to the names of Antonis Dellios, Stamatis Diplaris, Giritlis Tzihat and many other local and migrant workers, all of them murdered on AKTORA construction sites, in our own accounts, in our own memory.
Let us realize that the organization of class revolutionary anti-violence was not, nor is it, a secondary dimension of workers’ action. It is on organised proletarian counter-violence, on the destruction of capital’s proletarian elements and the targeting of its cadres, on the wildcat strikes, that not only any “bargaining power” of the exploited masses is based, but also their very unity in the fields of class warfare. It is the resistance and attack of the workers against the bosses that unites the Class, not the bargaining for the material conditions of its simple survival.
In the midst of declared war and class lockdowns, trade union slogans have been reduced to “health protection measures, masks, tests and vaccinations”, legitimising automatic conscription and therefore universal devaluation of labour power in the name of public health. War, every form of war organised by states, is an automatic devaluation of the class not only in terms of wages and rights but also in simple material and biological dimensions. War means extermination, destruction, death, and when it is officially declared, the generalized appeal to peace simply digs our hole. It can only seem dystopian to claim individual military helmets and safe passage routes to work in the event of an actual military conflict. A working class disciplined to the dictates of the state and capital is a working class vulnerable, easy prey to their warlike designs. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for arson & incendiary attacks by Cells of Anti-Militarist Action – Another war is possible”
A young man with 2 saxophones stopped me and told me 5 years ago in Brooklyn, I had to pawn my saxophone and now I’m going to start playing again. When I left the area had surrendered to fire and the flames were snatching away what little the expropriators had left behind. To this question I answer YES, a new concept is emerging, the concept of direct anti-authority.
With historical memory, critical thinking and class consciousness, we cannot but recognise our enemies in the neighbourhoods, parliaments, courtrooms and town halls. Particularly in Kaisariani, which is also a neighbourhood with a tradition of struggles and social resistance, various cabals that have nothing to do with the popular part of the neighbourhood of Kaisariani are appropriating its history in order to camouflage their investment projects, from which the developers and the bosses will be the winners.
Specifically, the plans of Voskopoulos and Theodoricakos are:
A new condition is shaping everyday life in the neighbourhoods of the city centre. The pre-election “promises” of Mayor Bakoyannis* for the complete transformation of the centre of the Athenian metropolis into a tourist zone are being put into practice with the fencing of the last squares and their conversion into metro stations.
The displacement of oppressed populations from the neighbourhood of Exarchia, the foundations of which have been laid under the Syriza government, through the evacuation of migrant squats, continues in terms of class warfare through the appropriation of the neighbourhood.
The unaffordable rents, the posh shops with expensive goods and services, the cameras on every corner and face controls at the entrance of shops make it impossible for the social base to stay.
Housing becomes a commodity and capital is called upon to exploit it to the fullest. Houses and former squats are being converted into airbnb and luxury housing, which local and international capital is throwing into the real estate market at the expense of the needs and burdening the lives of those below. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attack on luxury altenative tourist appartments ‘Graffiti Boutique’ in Exarcheia”
Regenaration, development, gentrification. Concepts that have become embedded as spikes in the discourse and action of the antagonist movement, must be seen as another aspect of the attack of the ruling classes against the oppressed class. Capital aims at subordinating the whole of life to its exploitation and reproduction, and therefore organizes more and more aspects of human activity in this logic.
The process of enclosing community/public spaces for the purpose of capital’s reproduction is a process as old as capitalism. In recent decades we have experienced the long deconstruction of social democratic management, with the mediation of the state receding, giving more room for the defensive subordination of activities of social life to capital. In this sense, a concerted attack has been launched in recent years on public spaces, squares, parks in the metropolises, transferring their management from the state to private individuals, with the aim of creating new fields of profitability for capital.
This is exactly the condition of the sale of a series of public green spaces by the Municipality of Athens to the company UNISON Facilities Services, such as the hills (Strefi, Filopappou, Lycabettus, Turkovounia), squares (Protomaya, Victoria, Kypseli, Attiki, Ameriki, Drakopoulos, Agios Panteleimon), parks (Platonos Academia, Kyrpo, Patision, Goudi) and pedestrian streets (Agia Zoni, Fokionos Negri). UNISON (formerly ISS), belongs to a category of a new type of company that, through contractor privatisations, is simultaneously financed by state-taxed, collectively produced surplus value, and at the same time intensifies the exploitation of its workers through miserable wages, flexible working hours and violation of workers’ rights. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the arson attack on a company vehicle of UNISON Facilities Management in Exarcheia”
Revolution or Barbarism
In recent years our days have been filled with news of deaths, with numbers of dead, with the words of “experts” who command arrogantly and boastfully from the power they have been given. They are filled with unreasonable orders and outrageous government impositions. We do not intend to extensively analyze positions on the health crisis. The tragic shortages of medical personnel, equipment and infrastructure, the “stain” of 100 deaths a day, i.e. the dire consequences of decades of privatization of public health care. The provocative strengthening of the private sector, exemplified by the big pharmaceutical companies and health giants, whose profits have reached historic highs. The re-emergence of the ‘strong’ state model to restore capitalist equilibria. The strengthening of centralised powers and the emergence of a new caste of all-round technocrats, with the role of abdicating and covering up the responsibilities of the state apparatus and shifting the responsibility for the spread of the virus to the individual. These are just some of the points that shape the management of the pandemic by the capitalist states.
Throughout the pandemic, the key issues that have dominated the public debate have been around public health, mental health and the effects of incarceration, the social exclusion of increasing segments of the population, growing class inequalities, the wider capitalist division of available resources, the role of science and technology, civil rights and the diminished role of bourgeois democracy in emergency situations.
The health crisis has affected in a universal way the relations constituting the social reproduction of capital. The inability of the social formation to reproduce the formed conditions of capitalist production led to an ideological crisis of the applied model of neoliberalism, while at the same time, following the dictum that “for capitalism every crisis is an opportunity”, it served as a key tool for the organised transition to a new era. The capitalist restructuring under way is the huge-scale operation to rescue a system that is plunging into chain crises of a structural nature. It is also the attempt to move capitalism into a new phase, something that its apologists of all kinds openly admit. It is a given that the contradictions that are developing within societies, states and big bosses will be on a trajectory of bloody conflicts in the coming years. The emergence of a powerful bloc within the imperialist bourgeoisies, consisting of the owners of the great technological giants, with the decisive potential for extracting cultural hegemony, is shaping a historical intersection in which the passage to the new capitalist formation will universally determine the lives, habits and lifestyles of the social majority. In the new totalitarian capitalist world that is emerging, the possession of information (data) will be (to an even greater extent than now) only one of the many fields of profitability of these oligarchs, who, in addition to the sharp increase in their profits, will concentrate even greater powers in their hands. On the other hand, those who live within the hyper-connected metropolises will literally become fully exploitable commodities, as they will not only sell their labour power, but every field of social, personal, consumer, recreational interest will be a profitable process for capital, they will constitute an uninterrupted flow of data. Every click, every piece of information unlocked by the algorithms on their screens will fill the pockets of their provider with profit in an endless game of exploitation and total control of every aspect of human activity. Continue reading “Greece: Direct Action Cells – Responsibility claim for a barrage of incendiary attacks in Athens and Thessaloniki”
Letter of Panos Kalaitzis
On Tuesday 08/02 at 19.00 I was arrested by the anti-terrorist squad outside my comrade’s house in Ano Polis. The reason for my indictment was the arrest that same morning of Thanos Xatziagkelou and Georgia Voulgari accused of placing an incendiary device in the Foundation for National and Religious Reflection. I was taken to the General Police Directorate of Thessaloniki, where hours later I was informed of my arrest on felony charges and membership of the Anarchist Action organization. I remained in custody for two days in the basements of the GADTH, on Friday 11/02 I passed through the interrogator and the prosecutor where I was notified of my pre-trial detention.
Being now in the throes of a comic process that is taking place against me, I declare myself unequivocally and categorically innocent of all the charges against me. I am currently in custody without a shred of evidence linking me to any participation in the charges against me, without a single mention of my name in the statements of the anti-terrorist police in connection with the activities of the organisation. The only attempted connection is through the house I rented next to the shop I ran with my associates as well as next to my comrade’s house (where I actually lived), which I reserved as a quarantine and recovery space from covid-19.
I am making an effort to stand up to this conspiracy that has been set up to deprive me of my freedom. I am trying to keep my mind alert and clear so that I can resist this injustice that wants to strangle me. I am trying to stand up to this arbitrariness that sees my life as a pawn on an invisible chessboard.
Against those who take human relationships and use them as they want and as it suits them to compose whatever puzzle they design.
I’m going to make it.
Solidarity to my friend, colleague and comrade Thanos Hatziangelou and to comrade Georgia whom I met a few days ago in the basements of the ΓΑΔΘ (Thessaloniki Police HQ cells)
Panos Kalaitzis
Korydallos Prison
15/02/2022
————-
Source: athens.indymedia.
Via & Translated by Act for freedom now!