Crisis, "bankruptcy" and probation are a generalization of the social and class war. No consent to the austerity plan!
Translated communiqué by the anarchist group Resalto in Athens
"At your draws the galley slave
was always the one to lose
and to be savaged.
But the time of happy shipwrecks is over.
When the admirals fall into the sea
don’t count on us to throw a life-jacket
unless it’s one made of stone."
Crisis, deficit, debt, spreads, probation, austerity plan, emergency measures, necessary measures, additional measures …
A campaign of social terrorisation has been launched in the past few months that is spinning around the capitalist crisis and the state deficit, especially after the staged elections of October for the handing over of the government position to the social-neoliberal political management. The pre-planned, full-scale class attack from the side of Capital, aiming at further shrinking of labour costs and pensioner rights, as well as the continuation of the "necessary" capitalist restructuring, were both showing signs of delay and incapacity to be introduced by the previous political leadership – whose social status after December’s revolt had been shredded apart. A "fresh governance" with an equally fresh "mandate from the people" was needed and was achieved with ample pre-electoral selling of hope to the gullible.
Of course, the promises and fake words disappeared overnight. Suddenly they "discovered" the "lies of the previous ones regarding the size of the state deficit"; they were "perplexed" and "enraged" by the "country’s tragic finances" and they imposed a "state of emergency" calling for "national conscription" to face the situation – promoting for themselves the image of an "honest government, negotiating and fighting hard for the country’s good".
"We must all contribute to the rescuing of the national economy", howl the political and financial bosses and their journalist-lackeys. All who eat with golden spoons, exploit human labour, pocket bribes, sort out their own people and loot social wealth. The bosses, the financiers and the managers, the bank / stock market capital and its golden boys, the governors, the party headquarters and their electoral clientèle, TV station owners, salaried hack writers and the journalistic mouthpieces, the managers of public administration, of state organizations and insurance funds … This raffle asks us once again to “tighten the belt”, to accept the new plans of austerity, the cutting-down of wages, pension freezes, additional tax exactions; "restructuring" in the insurance plans, "flexible" and insecure labour, and so on.
How boring and lousy a repetition of the same defrauding tactics. For twenty-five years now it’s been always the same, always with a different disguise. And of course it is anything but a coincidence that the guarantors of this global-scale experiment of social and class discipline and further pillage are the watchers of the EU, the howling dogs of the EU Commission, with a parallel observation of the IMF.
And so pensions must stay put and salaries must be cut, with a 30% cut of the Easter and Christmas bonuses; apart from the further 12% cuts to the rest of the bonuses of the public sector employees (for now, this is “limited” to the public sector, but how long will it really take to debate its extension to the private one too?). New taxes must be applied to petrol, cigarettes, drinks, together with the increase of the VAT across all categories (from 4,5 to 5%, from 9 to 10%, from 19 to 21%) and new tax scales have to be constructed at the expense, once again, of the waged and the pensioners – now to include the so-called "middle incomes". At the same time the number of the officially registered unemployed has sky-rocketed to 800.000 as of early March, making the estimate of the minister of employment, Loverdos, of 1.000.000 during 2010 looking rather mild.
The domestic and supra-national sovereignty, the local and globalized elites of political and financial power, which have amassed and privatized incomprehensibly huge wealth during the past 30 years of (neoliberal) development and looting, are now attempting to spread across society their damage and to continue apace with their attack and their looting. "We have gained everything and it’s time for you to pick the bill" is their cynical statement. With some determination that fills our city centres with cops of all kinds: check-points, pedestrian and motorcycle patrols, neighbourhood police, undercovers and units of crowd repression (the well-known MAT). A very real occupation army for the dealing with of any possible social reaction, unrest or uprisings. After all, the memory of "December" is still fresh, in society as much as in the government boards.
The new round of the social-class war has started and goes under the names of "Crisis", "Probation", "Austerity and Development Plans"… and more is to come. Intensification of exploitation in the workplace; new measures for further flexibility of the job market” (read: further labour insecurity), laws for the complete deconstruction of the system of social security, increase of the reserve labour army of the unemployed. The ruffians are brutal: "work more for less", that’s the only way for costs to go down, for investments to come back, for capital to move, for new work positions to open up, for us to exit the crisis. And who knows what comes next …
And so questions immediately open up: is it ever possible for someone, after all these years of exploitation and mocking, to still believe in or trust the political and business establishment together with its supranational coalitions (EU, IMF and so on?) Is it possible for us to take in stoically the looting of our lives, to consent with our crushing? Illusions of "rights" – "vested" or else, are over. Any further time credit to this deteriorating world of alienation, of exploitation and obedience must end the soonest. The state-capitalist system no longer has anything to promise other than more poverty (material, emotional, mental), environmental destruction, human wrecks, fear and repression.
Let’s organize and strengthen our fronts and our trenches in the social-class war that is storming ahead. Promoting the logic of the community, of mutual aid, real solidarity in-between the lines of the exploited and the suppressed, away from fictional dichotomies and constructed divisions (workers-unemployed, new-old insured persons, locals-migrants, and so on). Promoting the logic of conflict with the political and financial authority and its advocates. Against fatalism, individualization, individual and social defeat. Promoting the logic of direct, collective action; without hierarchies, without any experts or mediators , away from all party, syndicalist or media conduct. Not only for our defense and our survival, not for the little and the immediate, but for the self-determination of our own lives. For the prospect of a free, self-organized society with no authority, no class divides, no social discrimination, alienation or existential dead-ends.
Fight back against the pillage of the state and the bosses
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