RESPONSIBILITY CLAIM FOR THE BOMB ATTACK ON THE MINISTRY OF LABOUR AND HELLENIC TRAIN
“Death on the scaffolding, death on the trains, capitalism is fed with blood”
Slogan born in the huge demonstrations of March 2023 for the state capitalist crime in Tempi.
On 26 January 2025 and 28 February 2025 respectively, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the government of murderous anti-worker restructuring and Hellenic Train, a subsidiary of the Italian monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato, which bears the main responsibility for the murder of 57 fellow human beings in Tempi on 28 February 2023.
The demonstrations and strikes are a contribution to the formation of our collective defence as a Class and at the same time, since they took place in a country that played an active role in the US-Zionist genocidal war in Palestine, a practical act of solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people, who, with gun in hand, are showing the way for the liberation of the peoples of the whole world.
In particular, the strike of 28 February was a response to the rivers of blood that are spilled every day in the labour sweatshops. A response to the unspeakable pain for our fellow workers, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our friends and girlfriends, lost or crippled in the struggle for a living wage. A response to the relentless class warfare we live every day here.
The massacre of the working class in the workplace as a conscious policy of capital and the state apparatus
The figures for deaths at work, even those given by official state statistics, which do not record a large number of incidents (e.g. of migrants) or show deaths as pathological, are inexorable. In the last three years alone, over 600 workers have died and over 1000 have been seriously injured (amputations, permanent paralysis, severe respiratory and cardiac problems), while thousands of others have been injured in need of medical treatment (with all the multifaceted costs that this entails) in over 40,000 work ‘accidents’. These figures are much higher if we include the hundreds of deaths per year, according to estimates by independent international organisations, from diseases (cancers, cardiovascular diseases) related to unhealthy working conditions (e.g. permanent exposure to chemicals, exhaust fumes), which the Greek state does not even register as such, in violation of international guidelines.
The butchery of the working class in the workplace has a name: it is called class exploitation, the pursuit of maximum profit by capital, the extraction of surplus value. It is called employer terrorism, it is called state policy of strengthening the competitiveness of the labour market, it is called employer trade unionism. It is called memoranda, it is called a policy of reducing public debt, it is called the EU’s fiscal stability pact, it is called the Achtsioglou law, the Hatzidakis law, the Georgiadis law. It is called poverty, unemployment, extortion of survival.
The parliament is a mechanism of class domination. The ministers and deputy ministers, the general secretaries, the technocrats of the Association of Enterprises and Industries, the banks and the shipowners who staff the legislative committees for the drafting of anti-worker laws are well aware of the consequences of the laws they pass. They are fully aware that the abolition of collective labour agreements, compulsory unpaid overtime, six-day work, the slashing of heavy and unhealthy work, the linking of wages to productivity (minimum wage law), the increase in retirement thresholds, the virtual abolition of the labour inspectorate, the criminalisation of strikes and the liberalisation of dismissals, the abolition of basic safety standards, all lead with mathematical precision to an explosion in the number of workers’ deaths and injuries. But that is their job, their role, that is why they are in this position. To shield and reinforce the capitalists’ profitability with the blood of the working class : with the blood of construction workers, shipbuilders and dockers, with the blood of bicycle drivers and train and transport workers, with the blood of call centre and catering workers, with the blood of workers in industry and public works, with the blood of migrant farm workers.
This is precisely why its persons and structures have been in the crosshairs of the proletariat and the revolutionary movement throughout time. From the execution by urban guerrillas in the Nazi occupation of the fascist corrupt labour minister Kalyvas to the bloody battles of the building movement in the 1960s in front of it and the attacks on its structures during the Junta by anti-dictatorship organisations, and from its constant targeting in the post-war period by revolutionary organisations to its militant blockades by workers’ unions.