Welcome to the oasis of the reality

Welcome to the oasis of the reality We have been together in the streets, since plenty of days, along with thousands of others. Thousands of others whom we didn’t seem to know before. We happened to meet relatively recently, within the flames of the roadblocks, the solidarity of the demonstrations, the assemblies of the occupied spaces. This is probably why the media call us the “known unknowns”. We are both, in fact. Unknown to each other we are, as we live, since years, in a situation where everything alive is being destroyed, every hope is being impaired, every expectation is being contradicted. We live in this same desert with many others, but we live in distance; separated, scattered around, overwhelmed by a feeling of weakness; including the boss that pays just 700 € per month and sacks us whenever they want, the unbelievable effort required to make a living, the massive TV stupidity of a happiness that we peek through the key-hole of that mortgaged LCD TV set bought by our parents. All these situations are parts, fragments of our common life. Therefore, we are unknown to each other, in a common desert, where everybody makes a clumsy effort for their own survival. Everybody has an ego, among so many other similar egos. Until the first days of December, we were unknown for this society. As if all that we had been living, didn’t fit anywhere; neither in the TV, nor in the declarations of the left for an organized struggle, nor anywhere. During those days, accumulated anger flooded the streets; following almost twenty years of successive defeat and retreat, we got our back from the wall. Despite tons of tear-gas, sprayed by the repression forces, we can now breath freely. These don’t refer just to the people who have been in the streets, but also to those who couldn’t join us, but see that we have the right on our side and smirk in a meaningful way, as they learn what is going on. Those breaths are precious for all of us; we need them, since it is now our turn to start pushing. But, after all, who is responsible for the insurrection? Is it the furious high-school students, or the second-generation immigrants? The powerful student movement or the so-called “generation of the 700 euros”? The luben proletariat or the antiauthoritarian scene? Comrades and enemies struggle in order to define the subject of the insurrection, to find the objective conditions that generated this outbreak, to sketch the anonymous crowd that flooded the streets. In vain. The answer is simple: the insurrection is done by the insurrected ones and this finding is not a terrible tautology, it’s the crux of the matter. The paths that lead each person to the streets are a lot and are hazardous; there is a separate reason for each rebel. Though, by the moment those subjects join together and act in common, something new is created; and this one has a name: it’s called a historical act, a collective creation, a dash. Take care: all the reasons are still there, but this time reformed into an act of resistance. The insurrection involves pupils, immigrants, students, precarious workers, politically active parts, including others, of course. But the crux of the matter is not what exactly these people are, but what they become. Through the decision to go in the streets, through the encounter and the communication, the solidarity and the comradeship, the anger and the contradiction, the demonstrators become masters of their own lives. The blocked city centers are the field where all these different identities melt together and every segregation stops; even in snatches, even for a little, even if this segregation is back within a few days. It is not so important whether those who block the streets, shout slogans, give out leaflets, spray on the walls, throw stones, burn banks, are students or unemployed. What’s mostly important, is that they do all these and they do it together and this is a victory that we can’t be deprived, even under heavy repression or when everything is back to the normality. After all, what does “pupil”, “uninsured”, “immigrant”, “student” mean in this capitalist universe that it’s called “world”? Aren’t they just different names for the repression that we all live? What does “insurrection” mean, if not “taking our lives on our hands”? The days of December do not belong to anybody, but they belong to everybody at the same time; they don’t belong to any political side, any party structure, any revolutionary avant-garde; not even to the antiauthoritarian scene. The anarchists where in the streets by the first moment, accompanied by their anger and their conscience, their determination and their knowledge, their practices and their principles. Though, the reality overcame us, and that was good. This is not the right time for anybody to extend their “political store”; what is important is to try and understand, act together, build bridges. What is being unfolded in the Greek cities, is a social insurrection, and this is the only thing we can learn from; in order to get the content, to learn the new forms of organizing, to inspire ourselves from the actions. What gets in the foreground, in a really obvious way, is the social antagonism itself. Every social conflict of this scale and strength is like a civil war. Parts of the society that have different interests, relationships and ideas, confront each other. This traumatic dimension of the reality is scary and is supposed to be covered, manageable. The authority invents the necessary segregations: good students vs. bad rioters, citizens in self-defence vs. destructive freaking-out demonstrators, real class struggles vs. incited provocateurs. It’s not convincing; it’s playing its last card: calling for the unity of the nation and the displacement of the enemies of the democracy. Indeed, this is an issue. The thing is breaking and the fragments threaten the image of the authority. Democracy, as a governmental management of discipline commands, as a puppet show without symbols, stares into the chaos of reality and this chaos stares back. Their nation is fake and their democracy has no meaning at all. Yes, we are the enemies of the democracy, the betrayers of the nation. The society is not uniform, it is the field of a constant confrontation, which is sometimes underground and sometimes, like now, obvious. The state is not alone, it’s accompanied by those who see the private property as the only thing that deserves protection. Whenever the societies try to enter the accelerator of the history, there will be the ones who try to save their power, by defending the unity and the continuity of the nation, the state and the normality. Betrayers on the way from the streets to the parliament. These days, the fossils of the left wing were scared, since they felt totally alone, behind the times, quaint. The head of the Church agreed with the head of the Communist Party, alleging that “foreign forces” incited the insurrection. The Communist Youth locks the faculties up, in order to avoid spreading the revolt. The national backbone, in the entire spectrum from the left to the right wing, formed an alliance and got a position. The last resort of the defenders of the order was enabled, just in case it could sort things out. Though, we are many people in the streets of the struggle, and we will make sure to confirm their worst nightmare: to let us be the best possible social antagonism. The notion of movement is usually connected with specifying requests, with a possible positive plan that the rebells are supposed to adopt; a set of positions that would allow their representation by the parties. Part of the left-wing are concerned about that, since they try to promote a possible stepping back of the government as target according to the will and the prospects of the rebells. Nevertheless, the whole set of the rebels’ wills and practices cannot fit into the fabricated schemes of the political representation, the sociological management and the mediation by the mass media. Of course, we don’t think that we are in any better position, within this storm. What we want is to get wet and never dry again; to get to know things from the ones we meet in the streets, to live in the only way that our days deserve: against the authority. In order to understand this, you need to get drought by the tear-gas, to break the loneliness of the habit, to share the joy of revolt, to let your anger burst out. We saw structures of self-organization dominating the streets, counter-structures of information jumping out of the struggle, symbols of the state, the capital and the spectacle being destroyed. We saw many other things that we couldn’t imagine, that overtook us. Luckily. Things have a tremendous speed, into thousands of currents. In such moments, there is a crisis for the state, as a monopoly of violence and for the structures of representation, as unique administrators of the political field. In such marginal moments, it is the community of the struggle that is being born, full of meaning, not just an indefinite plan for the future, but as a present practice. The city turns into a field of encounter and experimentation, where everything is possible: the destruction of this world and the creation of different values; the creation of a new class, instead of reproducing the mainstream one. We don’t know what will be left after this insurrection. The ways it is being developed give a spectrum of possibilities that we want to live, instead of predicting. In much worse times, some comrades wrote “we are in our future”. During these days and nights, we are in our present. And we don’t want to get out of it.

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