INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-GREECE:

INSURGENT WORKERS OCCUPY UNION CONFEDERATION HEADQUARTERS:

I originally discovered the following item on today's LibCom site, but it is here, there and everywhere across the "anarcho-net" today. it is likely that the original source is the Athens Indymedia where it has been translated into Spanish and French as well as English. there is another take on the story as well at THIS LINK.

To say the least this may be the most important development in the events in Greece so far. Despite much government(and Communist Party) propaganda the students and immigrants have not been the only people present in the past two weeks of demonstrations and riots. Ordinary working class people, disgusted with the venality of the government and its conservative policies, have joined in as well, despite the efforts of the socialist PASOK and the communist KKE to contain and defuse the protests.

The role of the Communists (whose initials 'KKE' are known in Greece as either "kappa-kappa-epsilon" or "koo-koo-eh", the latter being most appropriate) has been particularly despicable. They have taken to sending their goon squads into premises to prevent their being occupied. They are also the source of the bizarre assertion mentioned earlier on this blog that the uprising is an "American plot". Like my asshole chews bubblegum. But unreconstructed Stalinists can believe anything. Look what they believed for decades. The problem with the goon squads is that they simply don't have enough goons to cover the now hundreds of targets of occupation. Can we say "outnumbered". The problem with the great lie is that only the most mindless party loyalist could take it seriously. The actions of the KKE are such that persons unknown have already firebombed several of their party headquarters in anger. Molly certainly doesn't agree with this sort of tactic, if for no other reason than the fact that such places contain resources that should be put to better use than Communist propaganda.

Within the union movement the Socialists and the Communists have held a stranglehold for decades. The occupation that is reported below shows that at least a segment of the workers that the politicians claim to represent are fed up with their conservative tactics, and are in support of more fundamental change in Greek society. The Communist-Conservative alliance in all but name should hardly be any surprise to anyone who knows the history of working class upsurges in the past half century in western Europe. The rejection of the traditional political parties of the left is an absolutely necessary prelude to any fundamental change in any developed country today. That may be happening in Greece today, even if only at a small level so far.

Before moving on to the article Molly would like to recommend a site that covers the events in Greece at a truly admirable level. The Open Anthropology Blog doesn't just post the news. It also has what is the best list of other libertarian sources on what is happening in Greece today that I have come across. VERY highly recommended.

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Workers in Greece occupy union offices:
The historic central offices of the General Confederation of Greek Workers in Athens have been occupied by militant workers.

The action forms part of a strategy to counteract the designs of the union bureaucracy to distance its membership from the current revolt, and protest its management and mediation of workers' struggles in Greece. The occupants aim to create a space in which to facilitate a grassroots and self organised workers response to the crisis, and bring the wider working class into the events unfolding on the streets of Greece. Town halls in Athens and Thessaloniki have also been occupied in order to hold general assemblies.

The communique of the "General Assembly of Insurgent Workers" follows below:
DECLARATION:
We will either determine our history ourselves or let it be determined without us.

We, manual workers, employees, jobless, temporary workers, local or migrants, are not passive tv-viewers. Since the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos on Saturday night we participate in the demonstrations, the clashes with the police, the occupations of the centre or the neighborhoods. Time and again we had to leave work and our daily obligations to take the streets with the students, the university students and the other proletarians in struggle.
WE DECIDED TO OCCUPY THE BUILDING OF GSEE
-To turn it into a space of free expression and a meeting point of workers.
-To disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes, and that the rage of these days was an affair of some 500 "mask-bearers", "hooligans" or some other fairy tale, while on the tv-screens the workers were presented as victims of the clash, while the capitalist crisis in Greece and worldwide leads to countless layoffs that the media and their managers deal as a "natural phenomenon".
-To flay and uncover the role of the trade union bureaucracy in the undermining of the insurrection -and not only there. GSEE and the entire trade union mechanism that supports it for decades and decades, undermine the struggles, bargain our labor power for crumbs, perpetuate the system of exploitation and wage slavery. The stance of GSEE last Wednesday is quite telling: GSEE cancelled the programmed strikers' demonstration, stopping short at the organization of a brief gathering in Syntagma Sq., making simultaneously sure that the people will be dispersed in a hurry from the Square, fearing that they might get infected by the virus of insurrection.
-To open up this space for the first time -as a continuation of the social opening created by the insurrection itself-, a space that has been built by our contributions, a space from which we were excluded. For all these years we trusted our fate on saviours of every kind, and we end up losing our dignity. As workers we have to start assuming our responsibilities, and to stop assigning our hopes to wise leaders or "able" representatives. We have to acquire a voice of our own, to meet up, to talk, to decide, and to act. Against the generalized attack we endure. The creation of collective "grassroot" resistance is the only way.
-To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroot procedures, abolishing the bureaucrat trade unionists.

All these years we gulp the misery, the pandering, the violence in work. We became accustomed to counting the crippled and our dead - the so-called "labor accidents". We became accustomed to ignore the migrants -our class brothers- getting killed. We are tired living with the anxiety of securing a wage, revenue stamps, and a pension that now feels like a distant dream.

As we struggle not to abandon our life in the hands of the bosses and the trade union representatives, likewise we will not abandon any arrested insurgent in the hands of the state and the juridical mechanism.
IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF THE DETAINED

NO CHARGE TO THE ARRESTED

SELF-ORGANIZATION OF THE WORKERS

GENERAL STRIKE

WORKERS' ASSEMBLY IN THE "LIBERATED" BUILDING OF GSEE

Wednesday, 17 December 2008, 18:00
General Assembly of Insurgent Workers
A banner handing from the facade of the building reads:
From labor "accidents"to the murders in cold blood

State - Capital kill
No persecution

Immediate release of the arrested
GENERAL STRIKE
Workers' self-organization

will become the bosses' grave
General Assembly of Insurgent Workers