MAY 1ST: A DAY OF STRUGGLE
AGAINST THE PANDEMIC AND THE ONGOING STATE AND CAPITAL CRIME ON SOCIETY, CLASS SOLIDARITY IS OUR WEAPON
For the past two months, we experience an unpresented health, social and humanitarian crisis due to covid-19 pandemic, which underlines, in the most tragic and brutal way, the gigantic contradictions and dead-ends of the state’s and capital’s organization model of society and its’ parasitic, antisocial and murderous nature.
On a world scale, the key for Earth’s powerful men, in the middle of the pandemic, is to preserve at first and later on to strengthen their privileges. Even if this translates into condemning hundreds of thousands to death because of the virus, due to the insufficient, problematic and discredited health systems that the state’s antisocial and murderous policy has created through the years. Even if that means the creation of millions of unemployed, homeless and poverty stricken people, forced to face on their own not only the pandemic itself, but also the crisis that comes along and deepens day by day. For that reason, the militarization of public life, the increase of population’s control and the stabilization of emergency regime are all, at heart, precautionary measures against possible uprising. The world dominants, who see the upcoming possibility of generalized poverty conditions and also the possibility of an escalation of social and class conflicts choose to build armies instead of hospitals and fund cops instead of doctors. Already, the uprising incidents in Paris ghettos and in Torino neighborhoods, both as answer against repression, are percussive events of this escalation.
Moreover, the same time that society faces the blackmail of working under numerous difficulties of everyday life in the middle of the pandemic while also tries to protect itself from the killing virus, by taking self-protection measures and performing social distancing to restrict the threat, state’s and bosses’ mechanisms not only have not stopped but also plot new schemes of attack against the social base. They, in fact, foresee the restart of the global economy, in terms of plundering workers and social base.
As far as the Greek state is concerned, the dissolution of the health care system and of all the social welfare system, because of the Memorandum policy of all the previous governments, has led to major lack of both material structures and means and of human resources in doctors and nursing staff. In the middle of the pandemic, millions of people are forced to live in conditions of fear and ignorance, without diagnostic tests, without immediate access to treatment and means of protection, while for more than two months they are condemned in surviving with 800 euros allowance (that is even less than the minimum monthly salary) or, even worse, they had no other choice than to work, putting in danger their health, under circumstances of increasing work intensification and insecurity, even if their professional object clearly is not one of social necessity or utility.
Especially, those who work in the health sector, give all their energy even up to today, with self-sacrifice and major personal exhaustion, while they do not have access to essential self-care equipment, for the sole purpose of saving lives. As a result, sometimes they become ill themselves. And it was them who first mobilized to demand the basics for themselves and for the suffering society. For that, they were slandered by the mass media and the police forces tried to repress them, whilst there is an ongoing lockdown and prohibition of struggling mobilizations.
Furthermore, those who work in the supermarkets of other basic distribution sectors keep on working under gravely dangerous and even intensified conditions, lacking means of self-protection, without taking any allowance of unsanitary work, with no diagnostic testing. In the very same condition, thousands have to work long-distance, from home, without being provided with the needed infrastructure and without having a fix working schedule and obligations. There is also the option for the employers to have their employees working in every other day or every 15 days or even in more flexible schedule that will, in the end, allow them to cut back on payments.
At the same time, governments’ planning does not stop. The far-right, neoliberal party of New Democracy is handing for the Parliament to vote on an anti-environmental draft, which is in favor of the investors. It also leads the way for more mining activities, for building more wind industries and for allowing constructional activities at all areas, which will result in the destruction of natural spots of inexplicable beauty and importance.
Also, a new draft on education is being prepared. This adds even more to class barriers, to intensification and evaluation on the sector; it demolishes the working rights and degrades even further education’s public character.
As far as the people already living under an exclusion regime are concerned, the thousands of refugees and migrants living concentration camps and the inmates, they are submitted in a despicable testing in order to save their lives, being left helpless. Sadly, some of them did not make it during this period, without the actual numbers of ill people or diseased are not known. The Ministries of Justice and Immigration have chosen a firm strategy of hiding information. Amongst the ones passing, we know of inmates Azizel Deniroglou and Selim Zerolari, a 47th year old refugee, previously living in a camp in Chios island, all three of which were left to die helpless while they could have been transferred in time into hospitals.
The past few days, the main goal seems to be the reopening of markets and the restart of economy in general with solely financial criteria and in order to benefit the bosses. That been said, nothing is announced for measures to protect the society and mass testing, and the necessary doctors and nursing staff are not yet hired. Since, in the middle of the pandemic, they have managed to lay off more than 70 thousand workers and to enforce precarious working conditions to others, something they have been trying for over a decade, now the moto is ‘going back to normality’, meaning they will try to impose more anti-social measures, so that we all will be burdened with the economic downturn to come. The Acts of Legislative Content, that concern the suspension of contracts and the in-rotation working because of coronavirus, give the employers the right to choose the number of staff that will still be working when they will reopen, make the working relations more flexible and give the opportunity to reduce the salaries’ cost and to liberate the ‘black’ and unpaid working.
In front of all those criminal planning, the social and class movement has to reorganize, overcoming the inevitable difficulties that do exist because of the danger of the virus but also because of the ones that the state methodically cultivates in order to repress resistance and to control the population. Taking all the self-protection measures for the protection of society and prioritizing the defense of human life against the death-policy of state and bosses, we have to try to walk again the path of struggle. We have to meet again when just is at stake, life and liberty. We have nothing to wait from the sell-out high ranked trade unionists who submit to the state’s and bosses’ imperatives and purposes.
Today, 134 years after the workers’ uprising in Chicago and in the middle of an unpresented condition in which the state prepares a merciless attack against the social rights, under the pretext of coronavirus crisis, we shall continue to struggle as humans and not as self-seeking “cannibals”, as people of the struggle and not as terrorized and defeated, as anarchists, fighting for a society of free and equals, a society that will give priority to the protection of the most vulnerable, that its main and prime interest will be the social needs and a society, whose main concern will be the well-being and support of the people and not of a powerful caste that leads humanity to the dystopia of death, impoverishment and control.
Not to let the law enforcement on the working field! Hands off from the working spots and the workers’ conquests. No one fired, no cutting in salaries and pensions. The coronavirus crisis ought to be paid from the bosses. Organize in the base – Social self-defense – Class counterattack!
We stand in solidarity with the Health workers. We demand the immediate and unconditional mass recruitment (instead of the mockery of short-term contracts and voluntary work) of doctors and nurses and the provision of all necessary resources and means, in order to cover the healthcare needs of the population, additional insurance coverage and care for all those working in the health sector, in order to avoid exhaustion and serious danger to their own health.
Hands off the women who fight. We stand in solidarity against patriarchy, sex and intra-family violence. No one is alone!
We demand the release of the refugees and immigrants from the concentration camps and the requisitions of the empty hotels for their protection from the pandemic, as well as the creation of special health structures for all.
We demand the immediate satisfaction of inmates’ demand for decent living conditions and for the prisons’ decongestion due to coronavirus. Demolition of all prisons!
Now is the time that we must connect the substantial and petitioner struggles for tenure and stable employment, for access into the social goods of housing, health, education, for the defense of work and social rights, for the protection of nature with the total and timely, social and political demand to bring down authority and to establish the libertarian reform of society.
EVERYTHING FOR EVERYONE FOOD, HEATH, HOUSING
AGAINST THE DYSTOPIA OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM, STATE AND CAPITALIST BRUTALITY THAT BRINGS DEATH…
SOCIAL SOLIDARITY AND CLASS SELF-ORGANIZATION
Anarchist Political Organization-Federation of Collectives
