AGAINST THE PANDEMIC AND STATE-CAPITALIST CRIME… WE STAND IN SOLIDARITY!
For several weeks now we have been in the midst of an unprecedented health, humanitarian and social crisis, in which the spread of the pandemic of covid-19 highlights in the most emphatic way the criminal nature of the state and capitalism. The state and capitalist system of organizing society, which is already condemning millions of people to death by hunger, disease and warfare, is struggling not against the evolving pandemic, but in order to preserve their privileges, their position of power, the politically and economically powerful
To date, the state has not taken any measures that are really related to the treatment of the virus, measures that pass primarily through the strengthening of the public health system. A system that the state and capital have been trying for years to dismantle through underfunding, redundancies of medical and nursing staff, equipment cuts and hospital closures. The result is that today, the already ravaged public health system, is in danger of collapsing if it is called upon to deal with massive instances in the population.
On the contrary, political managers are attempting, through the media, using the rhetoric of individual responsibility, to transfer full responsibility for the covid-19 instances and the victims to us, to the bottom of this world, by laundering the governments and states of their own responsibilities, while also laying the foundations for giving the deathblow to people’s rights, achievements and freedoms. The pandemic is used by the state and the bosses to impose more and more weighty conditions of exploitation and oppression and to shift the burden of the system crisis to the social base
In this context, the ruling patriarchal capitalist system is attacking even more the women of the plebeian layers.
This means the continuation and intensification of the class exploitation of working women, state repression of those who are fighting, the inhumane detention of refugees and immigrant women in concentration camps, the spread of nationalism and fascism, the overcrowding of people in terrible imprisonment conditions, the cultivation and legitimization of social cannibalism by the institutions – which also expressed through gender violence, an aspect of which is the domestic violence. All this highlights the hypocritical interest of the state and its mechanisms, both in society in general and in the conditions of brutality suffered by women. Women workers, unemployed, refugees, immigrant women, the prisoners that riot. Patriarchal violence is present in all fields shaped by power as an integral part of state and capitalist barbarity.
The curfew, the compulsory confinement at home, the constant control and the fines are not related to the treatment of the pandemic, because the population overwhelmingly respected the self-protection measures, but to the military management of the crisis. Although accompanied by gold-priced “cute” advertising spots on the “stay at home” channels, they were and are for many women and children experiencing violence in their homes, devastating.
Under conditions of imprisonment, sexual violence takes off: the “stay at home” slogan, with the compulsory and uninterrupted cohabitation it entails, is a nightmare for women and children who suffer domestic violence. It is no accident that recorded cases of domestic violence have increased by 30% worldwide. Typical incidents are those of the young nurse’s murder by her partner inside their home in Italy and the double murder of two women by her cop husband in Kifissia. Of course, the media rushed to portray the murders as a logical consequence of the confinement amid quarantine, of “excessive love”, of “losing control” and not as the ultimate consequence of a system that promotes gender violence and social cannibalism. As for state campaigns to counter domestic violence, they are highly hypocritical. Because there is no more hypocrisy than talking about confronting gender violence by the very institutions of a system that promotes it through its laws and mechanisms. There is nothing more outrageous than the institutions that nurture and reproduce gender violence, to present themselves as those who fight against it. We stand in solidarity with the women who are subjected to gender violence and we stand by their side in their every attempt to protect themselves!
On the other hand, in fact, the ‘we are staying at home’ imperative does not apply to a large extent to thousands of workers in many sectors who are forced to work day and night.
Hundreds of doctors and medical staff – the vast majority of whom are women – are fighting a huge struggle with inadequate self-protection measures, day and night, with self-denial and solidarity, responding to these critical moments, working hard and standing by all patients, isolated for hours in the chambers of coronavirus-infected patients. We stand in solidarity with women workers in the health sector and stand with them in their every claim!
Workers in supermarkets, workers in telephone centers (where countless complaints about dangerous working conditions have been made), in cleaning workshops and elsewhere are forced to work exhausting hours, stowed on top of each other, without the necessary protective measures and with an obvious risk to their health. In other cases, they are forced to work from home, without being given the necessary means and without a specific work shift. Job rotation can also be imposed, cutbacks up to half the salary and with the possibility of prolonging the payment of the Easter gift until the summer. And all of this in the middle of a curfew, where any claim in these spaces is labeled by the state as “unnecessary movement”.
In addition, a large number of people employed in black jobs in businesses and/or domestic work (baby sitters, care of the elderly), the majority of whom are women, are invisible and fully exposed to the pandemic since no measure is taken to their survival, leading them to total misery and poverty. We stand in solidarity with the (women) workers who are exhausted every day by keeping the production chain open, with the mothers who are working and at the same time trying to support their family, with the women who are raising their own children and even face the risk of being fired when they have nowhere to leave them and with the unemployed in the middle of a pandemic!
“Stay at home” is not at all about the populations that are under exclusion regime: homeless people, immigrants, refugees and prisoners are being sidelined into a deadlock situation for their own lives, for their own survival.
The outrageous campaign by state institutions, “we are staying on the camp”, which is being marketed as the equivalent of “staying at home” and which, in pandemic conditions, calls on refugees and immigrants to remain in concentration camps, is the most vulgar manifestation of the exclusion regime. Isolation in the horrors of concentration camps and detention centers, where even the most necessary infrastructure is lacking – accommodation in makeshift lodgments and tents, and in some cases, there is not even drinking water – does not provide basic medical care, and calls for emergency items, medicines and self-protection facilities are increasing from the camps of Richona, Malakasa. All these clearly constitute a state and capitalistic crime. Within this treaty, migrant women and women refugees, who have been forced to leave their countries because of war or economic impoverishment, are called upon to fight to survive themselves and their children, coming out to obtain the necessary supplies, even putting their health at risk. Also, as an undocumented illegalized population in an exclusion regime, migrant women remain vulnerable to slavers and trafficking rings. Neither threats of fines nor repression can silence the voices of the excluded. This is evinced by the hunger strikes and demonstrations in Moria, Paranesti, Drama, peaking in the clashes that broke out between refugees and the cops on Saturday, April 18, following the death of a refugee at a hotspot in Chios by unknown causes, after having been taken to the hospital with suspected coronavirus symptoms and contemplated by presenting an underlying disease. We stand in solidarity with women refugees and migrants who live in an exclusion regime, and we are fighting together against the state and the repression, for solidarity and freedom!
At the same time, the same conditions of overcrowding and congestion apply in prisons that violate even the very laws of the rotten system of power and oppression. A top incident of state crimes committed daily in the warehouses of souls that the state itself has built is the death of detainee Azizel Deniroglu in Thebes’s Elaionas prison on April 9th, who died helpless in her cell, suffering from cardiological problems and having symptoms of coronavirus. There was a prison uprising by her fellow inmates brutally suppressed by riot police. The detainees are calling for the obvious, amid a pandemic: immediate prison decongesting due to the coronavirus pandemic, release of patients, the elderly and those considered vulnerable, release of all prisoners who have served 2/5 gross sentence. We stand in solidarity with the prisoners in prisons and stand alongside them in every claim. Immediate fulfillment of their requests!
Against the gloomy reality of the world’s dominants hold for us, we stand in solidarity with and propose the organization of all those from the bottom and the assertation of all these that belong to us. We propose the organized class counter-attack of all the exploited, women and men, to overthrow the world of patriarchy, the state and capitalism, to create a society without exploitation and oppression, to create a society of equality, solidarity and justice.
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE FOOD, HEALTHCARE, HOUSING
GENDER VIOLENCE IS A REGIME AS LONG AS THERE IS A STATE AND CAPITALISM
HANDS OFF THE WOMEN WHO FIGHT!
AGAINST STATE AND PATRIARCHY – FOR EMANCIPATION AND ANARCHY
