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. Continue reading “Athens, Greece: Responsibility claim for attacks on Airbnb, hotels and cameras in Exarcheia”
