Gentrification

Exarcheia, Athens, Greece: Video from the Day X protest & riots to resist the occupation of Exarcheia square by cops and the building of a metro station

Posted on 2022/06/26 - 2022/06/26 by darknights

Exarchia, Saturday night, around 20:30, 26 June 2022. People are starting to gather in Exarchia Square for the march against gentrification, evictions, political denaturalization and state repression in Exarchia. In front of the astonished eyes of the assembled people 5-6 motorbikes of the police group DRASI are defiantly passing by Exarchia Square. Apart from voices denouncing this provocative move by the police and warning of the response they will get the next time they provoke, there is no aggressive move against the police.

What are the police officers going and doing on their part? They leave and come back with more reinforcements to provoke incidents, about 15-20 motorcycles. The result of this is what is recorded in the video.

During their panicked retreat and after once again suffocating the area with asphyxiating gas, they even left behind radios, according to witnesses.

The march through Exarchia moved dynamically with the participation of hundreds. Continue reading “Exarcheia, Athens, Greece: Video from the Day X protest & riots to resist the occupation of Exarcheia square by cops and the building of a metro station” →

Exarcheia, Athens, Greece: 25 June – Day of national and international support for the Exarcheia – Demonstration in Exarcheia Square 20:00

Posted on 2022/06/25 by darknights

Continue reading “Exarcheia, Athens, Greece: 25 June – Day of national and international support for the Exarcheia – Demonstration in Exarcheia Square 20:00” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the attack on the OBA store

Posted on 2022/06/24 - 2022/06/24 by darknights

On the night of May Day we chose to attack the new store in the area of Exarcheia, at 45 Themistokleous Street, called OBA. We smashed its window and left the political message of our action with stickers saying that since the opening of this shop the homeless person who lived in front of its window was displaced.

This action was our response to the displacement of the homeless man who had resided for years in the arcade in front of that store and who, after the store opened, was forced to seek shelter in another corner of the neighborhood.

How those who are left over are displaced to make way for urban and middle-class shoppers is also shown by the fact that on the opposite side from the store we raided there was a housing squat, which the state evacuated some years ago, sealing the building to prevent its reoccupation.

The tactics of capital’s domination of the public space of the city were also shown by the well-known story of the Janus bookstore that had its entrance blocked to prevent homeless people from sleeping there. The store that we attacked behind the mask of being LGBTQ-friendly consumers is participating in the transformation of the neighborhood into a hipster consumption zone, the touristization of Exarcheia and the displacement of those who are left over.

Any store that puts its stake in the gentrification of the Exarcheia will get a rock in its window.

Get the hipsters out of Exarcheia.

We want immigrants in every neighborhood, not tourists on vacation.

Get the cops out of our lives.

Anarchists

Source: athens.indymedia

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the incendiary attack in Pefkis-Lykovrisi – To burn the beast of gentrification to the ground by Thousands of Suns of the Night

Posted on 2022/05/27 - 2022/05/27 by darknights

On 27/04 we placed incendiary devices in the offices of the Nea Dimokratia (New Democracy) Pefkis-Lykovrisi, burning them completely outside and a large part inside, essentially closing the office.

We hold this party accountable for a series of actions that form the backbone of the Greek state’s agenda.

Redevelopment-Regeneration-Repatriation-Suppression

From the beginning of its term of office, ND as a government has shown its intentions on the issue of the city. The Athenian centre is constantly being shaped as a luxury showcase for global and European tourism. This process started and accelerated already in the years of the covid-19 boom when hundreds of thousands of euros were given for the construction of the Grand Walk (pet gentrification project of Athens mayor Kostas Bakoyannis). Public space is increasingly occupied by goods and consumers. Universities and spaces that once seemed to be meeting points for movements and collective processes are now being cleared, controlled and mapped with cameras and cops (ΟΠΠΙ, university cops). The state’s attempt to turn the Gini polytechnic into a monument in a move of gentrification is also characteristic. At the same time, student movements are subjected to extreme repression, with typical examples being the pressure in other universities such as the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, as well as the case of the 14 students who are being persecuted under the umbrella of manipulating DNA files. In continuation of the pressure on the anarchist movement with reference to meeting places is the continuous repression of the occupations in the centre of Athens and Thessaloniki.

Of course, along with all the above comes the redevelopment of squares, parks and hills. The criminal collaboration of the state with capital leads to the appearance of construction sites and dust in the squares, security barriers, blocking of work sites, extra security with security and cops and as expected: displacement of the poor, the marginalized, migrant women. Even the few places that the poor, the people from below, the people of our class had to catch their breath, are being forcibly taken away from them. This plan is being carried out all over the centre, from Galatsi and Pagrati to the most migrant neighbourhoods, Kypseli Square, Protomaya Square and soon Exarcheia Square. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the incendiary attack in Pefkis-Lykovrisi – To burn the beast of gentrification to the ground by Thousands of Suns of the Night” →

Thessaloniki, Greece: Communique for an arson attack upon mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis’ car by ‘Nightriders of the Flame’

Posted on 2022/05/14 - 2022/05/14 by darknights

Life in the metropolises is suffocating. In recent years, we have seen the urban beast growing larger and sucking life into its path. Cops and snitches lurk around every corner, poverty and deprivation are reflected in every aspect of daily life, oppression (labour, sexual, racial) is a brutal reality, while the circle of ‘freedoms’ and ‘breaths of life’ are getting narrower and narrower. In this suffocating grip, capitalism comes to remind us that we are expendable materials for its machines, which produce endlessly and thirst for profit.

The gentrification projects are the blunt admission by the state that we exist simply to produce for them. Squares, parks, neighborhoods that were once appropriable by their inhabitants are being gentrified by labor and handed over to tourists and urban bourgeois. Expensive cafes, airbnb, surveillance cameras, increasing tourist population, overall increase in the cost of living are some of the consequences of redevelopment. Consequences that result in the displacement of people who once lived in these neighborhoods as they can no longer cope with the new existing situation. So the so-called ‘gentrification’ thus creates ‘fortress’ (urban) areas with increased social control and repression while other urban areas are ghettoised and impoverished. The segregation of neighbourhoods within cities and their so pronounced differentiations, clearly facilitates the work of the cops in terms of mapping and surveillance.

We see such a project unfolding before us in the Pavlos Mela military camp. A huge space within the confined metropolitan prison, freely appropriable by all and sundry, has been included in the redevelopment plans of Mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis. Continue reading “Thessaloniki, Greece: Communique for an arson attack upon mayor Dimitris Demourtzidis’ car by ‘Nightriders of the Flame’” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attack on ‘airbnb StrefiHomm’ in Exarcheia

Posted on 2022/05/14 - 2022/05/14 by darknights

Last week we chose to disrupt for a while the now dystopian normality of the neighbourhood of the Exarcheia. The tourist industry is stepping on our bodies, displacing the local population, the poorer classes, the immigrant(s), grabbing more space from the hands of the antagonistic movement. A very important example of the ruthless march of capital into the neighborhood is the real estate firm, Homm.

This Greek company manages, buys, sells, rents apartments, villas and all kinds of properties in Athens, Mykonos, Evia and other areas. By browsing their site, one can see the luxury apartments they manage in “run-down” areas such as Patissia, but also in classic neighborhoods where gentrification has been completed such as Koukaki. Exarcheia seems to be their preferred neighborhood as they operate many properties such as luxury apartments and airbnb. Many of these are being targeted in protests in Exarchia. In fact, one can distinguish them by the paint people throw on their facades and the slogans they write.

The company has 135 properties on booking.gr and its offices are located at 83 Poseidonos Street in Glyfada. It is neither the first nor the last company that camps and does business in Exarcheia, but it is a main agent of gentrification that, despite the hostile climate it receives, insists on expanding more and more, opening more properties. We will not tolerate another one of them making fun of us right in our faces, investing at our expense, selling alternativeism, head-butting the struggles and the history of the movements in the region. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attack on ‘airbnb StrefiHomm’ in Exarcheia” →

Athens, Greece: 4-11 June Week of Reconstruction of the Alexandros Grigoropoulos Monument

Posted on 2022/05/05 by darknights

Revolutionary memory is not an empty letter. It is not a museum affair. It is not a dry ritual that is exhausted in anniversary recurrences. Revolutionary memory is the thread that binds the past to the present and that lays the foundations for a future that will do justice to those who sacrificed for a different world. A world where no one will see the sky through barbed wire, where no one will have their bodies broken in the sweatshops of class exploitation, where no one will be murdered on land and sea borders, in police stations, in the urban ghettos of metropolises. Revolutionary memory brings together those who are missing from our side, making them complicit in our subversive projects and dreams. Revolutionary memory, if we give it the value it deserves, becomes a subversive project, a springboard for struggle, a source of inspiration and disposition in the beautiful cause of freedom. For the words that will form a conceptual framework different from the one spoken today by politicians, economists, military analysts, industrialists, the golden boys of the stock exchange, journalists. Or they will be words armed ready to become an impulsive energy. Or they will be nothing.

The metropolises are the modern steam engines, they are the universal factories of capitalism. The transparent sweatshops where capital’s domination, control and repression of the explosive contradictions it produces are absolutely institutionalized.

The crimes of the state and capitalism within the metropolises become isolated incidents. They are recorded in fragmentary narratives by the bourgeois ideology that imposes its hegemony. Our own memory, which should highlight them and transform them into social consciousness, into a perception of our role and position, is constantly absent. When it is not, it is blurred, colourless, non-existent, empty of content. Fascist censorship here has for the moment been replaced by a new form of active censorship. The production of incessant distorted knowledge, the methodical reversal of facts, their insidious substitution. It is revisionism that attacks consciences, memories, the very history of the struggles. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: 4-11 June Week of Reconstruction of the Alexandros Grigoropoulos Monument” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the incendiary attack on the political office of Development Minister Adonis Georgiades by Proletarian Cell Dimitris Christoulas

Posted on 2022/04/14 - 2022/04/19 by darknights

“The occupying government of Tsolakoglu literally annihilated my possibility of survival, which was based on a decent pension which for 35 years I alone (without state support) had been paying for it. Because I am of an age that does not give me the individual possibility to react (not excluding of course if a Greek would take the kalashnikov the second would be me) I find no other solution than a decent end before I start to look in the trash for my alimony. I believe that the young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the national traitors upside down in Syntagma Square, as the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945 (Loreto Square in Milan)” Dimitris Christoulas*

We take responsibility for the incendiary attack on the political office of Adonis Georgiades, the representative of capital, politician responsible for the poverty and misery suffered by the people through poverty.

From the economic crisis of 2009 from which the country never came out, to the socialization of the losses of capital from the pandemic Covid 19, the latest increases in the price of electricity, fuel and almost all essentials are added to the already unbearable cost of survival of the working class and the people, to the pre-existing queues of the ΟΑΕΔ (Employment Insurance) , to the pension cuts, to the crumbs of the basic wage. The “development” invoked and evangelised by the domestic bourgeoisie is reflected physically and materially in people who die trying to keep warm, who look in the garbage for food, who commit suicide for economic reasons. It is reflected in workplaces that are graveyards for people of our class, where dozens of workers do not return home because a few extra euros were not “wasted” for the safety of the workers. Their growth translates into slow death in the corridors of hospitals. To the nearly 27,000 deaths from Covid 19, to the blockade of care in public hospitals amidst the increasing privatisation of the ΕΣΥ (National Health Service). Their deployment amounts to a daily battle for the survival of the next day for the majority of society at the same time as a handful of industrialists, shipowners and contractors continually speculate on our backs, reap the rewards of the toil and slavery we produce, extract surplus value from our starvation wages, continually devaluing the value of our labour power. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the incendiary attack on the political office of Development Minister Adonis Georgiades by Proletarian Cell Dimitris Christoulas” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the arson attack at the Town Hall of Kaisariani

Posted on 2022/03/26 - 2022/05/18 by darknights

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:

Zoning that includes 14 dual-capacity spots (28 parking spaces) and accessible electric vehicle recharging points.
The historic Harama Center will be restored and become a museum.
Theater ,open, 700 seats.
Redevelopment of the National Resistance Museum.
Construction of climbing walls and Skate Park.
Redevelopment of Kaisariani square with cold materials and intelligent lighting.

Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the arson attack at the Town Hall of Kaisariani” →

Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for the arson attack on a company vehicle of UNISON Facilities Management in Exarcheia

Posted on 2022/02/25 - 2022/02/25 by darknights

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” →