It’s a revolt and it’s struggling; sometimes it burns, sometimes it speaks

It’s a revolt and it’s struggling; sometimes it burns, sometimes it speaks Trying to evaluate the aspects of a social struggle, while it is still evolving, is difficult and awkward. It is even worse, when this struggle has characteristics of a generalized insurrection. Who could try to give an overview of all the forceful incidents? How could those multilateral actions, originating from various social levels, be distinguished into “important” and “unimportant”, into “pro-movement” and “provocations”, into those which “push towards the revolutionary precedence” and those which don’t?.. Of course it’s hard to say. Though, the problem is that, while we talk about this difficulty, thousands of others (journalists, politicians, cops, priests, home-makers), are trying to create their evaluation and add the last words to this insurrection, leading it to an obviously early end. Let’s see carefully what’s happening around us… High-school and university students, anarchists, employees, immigrants, hooligans, luben proletariats, are in the streets, having their discrete identities, no identities, or getting their identities mixed. As they are rising in revolt altogether, a war of communication is in on. A war that concerns everybody, including the most conservative parts of the society. It has to do with a basic rule of the Democracy game, a rule that the authority usually decides to apply. It’s a relatively easy scheme: in order for the repression to function, there is a need beneath the formal legality, for an underlying layer of political legitimacy. This is why now, when some rebels are ending up in the prison, being revenged by the authority, the state or privately-owned mechanisms of control (media, parties, institutions etc.) are the first to offer the required excuse, shifting the focus of the common sense, from the heart of the revolt, to the presumably terrible social and economical consequences of it, alleging that these would mainly affect the lower social levels. At the same time, similarly, we can read in the newspapers that historical figures of the left wing don’t allow us, the hooded ones, to identify ourselves as a movement and to link ourselves with the historical struggles of the past; we read that it’s time for the society to draw a line between the peaceful and the violent demonstrations. For those who didn’t get it, you are supposed to applause for the high-school students and set the rioters apart… (meanwhile, on the back side of the same page, we go nuts; we read that according to another opinion, this same left-wing foments the riot, and fondles the rioters -we wonder how the rioters can be fondled, being covered by hoods). Before trying to spot several exaggerated points of the media war concerning the destruction, we should make this clear: We don’t feel that we need to apologize to anybody for the consequences of a social revolt, even if it intends to totally destroy a world based on exploitation. Neither will we try to balance the destruction with the state murders. THERE IS NOTHING that can be put in balance with the missing life; and this is not a generalized statement of some abstract sentimentalism, but a clear political position against the authority. The 15-year-old student was not killed in a car accident. His death is the absolute and totalitarian projection of the state violence onto the real life. Even if we could accept -within a terrifying abstraction- that this was the only reason for the revolt, that would be enough to “counterbalance” the total destruction of this corrupt and murderous system. Nevertheless, there was never such a catastrophe that would have such disastrous consequences, resulting into the extermination of the poor and the weak… and let the mass media cry for the opposite. There are two basic communication barriers, set up during the last days, concerning the social and economical implications of the destructions, and they are used as a shield by those compliant with the state: (a)The thousands of lost working hours of the single citizens and (b) the terrible damages on private properties, owned by low proprietors. The first barrier is a relatively new recipe; a recipe that goes nicely along the economic crisis and gives “a little bit of class concern” to the reactive soup, while it meanwhile stands as an excuse for low and high-level capitalists to misbehave as employers. It is just a simple effort of shifting the consequences of the economic crisis from the bosses to the employees, using in parallel the idea of the internal enemy and the foreign forces (both the communist and the extreme right wing party claimed that even the Americans were behind the riots). Therefore, this led into the focus of the public opinion (already mediated at a terrible level) to be shifted from the issue of the tremendous social injustice to the discussion about those 2,500 working positions, which would be lost when those people lose their jobs… Though, it is still unknown why these working positions were “lost”. A fair statement by a serious mainstream journalist (…) could be that 2,500 employees (provided that they are so many), couldn’t go to their jobs, the following day. Well. Maybe for two or for ten days, as long as their everyday prison was being repaired. Nevertheless, if these employees didn’t receive their wage from their bosses, that should not be attributed to the rebels. Same if there was an asthmatic in Exarchia; he couldn’t blame the demonstrators that their actions result into extraordinary use of tear-gas by the police (of course this is ALSO expected). Also, several clever entrepreneurs, despite the compensation they receive from the state and despite the compensation paid by insurance companies, they will still get the chance to sack some employees, without even giving them the legal compensation; this is a fact that has nothing to do with any revolt or any destruction… (not to mention that, whether we like it or not, capitalism gets back to a motion and balances back, after the destruction: the financial newspaper Naftemporiki estimates that more than 50 million Euros will be paid back by the insurance companies. As if by magic, exactly the same value of destruction had been previously estimated by the Chamber of Commerce…) The second barrier of the war of communication, focusing on the destroyed property of the poor people, is a known successful recipe against every social struggle. It is not by chance, that this also includes a tiny bit of a class theory. So, if we would try to counteract to this barrier, beyond using a slogan for a general depreciation of the private property (keeping an analogy to what Proudhon said, we could for example say that “small property is small theft”) we have to note that there is no clear definition for what is a “small store” in Voukourestiou str. or the small but fair boss in Patission str. After all, yes, there was a lot of destruction, and some it was in small stores (we said: THERE IS A REVOLT). Nevertheless, during December, there were two obvious data that radically changed the image of the destruction: (a) that a lot of commercial kings were shown as small stores, eg. fast food chains (shitty food, shitty life) were presented as restaurants and (b) that both the multinational corporations and the several small stores with broken windows got in the same list of damages, resulting into that famous list reported by all the TV channels, having more than 400 destroyed small shops… Let’s set the scam apart and come back to our own barriers; let’s count our “profit” from this struggle that is still on: solidarity, self-determination, multilateral action. By looking on the other side, where there used to be the barrier of the enemy, through this dirty mass, we may see a ray of light. If we are careful enough, we may see that the whole chatter about the damages of the small properties, is making a little underlying point. This constant reporting on the private properties of the poor people in conjunction with the general silence for the damages on the banks and the multinational corporations, may mean a general disappointment of a new form. It may mean an underlying depreciation of AT LEAST the large property, which seems to be considered, by almost the entire society, as provocative; PROVOCATIVE during these hard times we live. Who knows… Maybe it is the beginning for the depreciation of all property. Perhaps, this simple, generalized, even populist depreciation of the large property, will be accounted in the future as one of the “movement profits” gained by this insurrection. Similarly, another “profit” may be accounted in the future; the simple and unstrained inclusion in everyday speech, of an old slogan that unites all of us, “PIGS-COPS-KILLERS”.