GRECIA
PROVE GENERALI DI UNA LOTTA
NON SETTORIALE
(LA GRECIA, “I GIOVANI”...),
MA PROLETARIA INTERNAZIONALE
Pubblichiamo qui di seguito un documento di compagni greci direttamente impegnati nelle attuali lotte (di grande rilievo, e in tutti i sensi) dei “giovani”, che rappresentano, al momento, l’ala più militante ed “aggressiva” di un movimento che, però, è ben lungi dal ridursi ad essi, tanto meno se considerati sotto un’ottica generazionale ed aclassista e che riguarda, invece, l’insieme del proletariato.
Lo pubblichiamo anche se non siamo esattamente a conoscenza dei “tratti segnaletici” del gruppo da cui promana ed anche se certamente non si tratta di un testo riconducibile fondamentalmente alla nostra tradizione, soprattutto se intesa in termini letterari (vi è infatti evidente una venatura movimentista di tipo autonomo, anarchico o, per certi versi, da sindacalismo rivoluzionario, suo parente prossimo). Rispetto a questo secondo punto precisiamo subito: non desta in noi alcuna sorpresa né scandalo che un inizio di antagonismo di classe deciso prenda le mossa da lidi non perfettamente in linea col marxismo, vista la catastrofe mondiale delle “istituzioni marxiste ufficiali”, che di fatto resuscita vecchie suggestioni eccentriche rispetto alla nostra impostazione come giusta e salutare reazione alla “vulgata” marxista nel concreto e, in questo senso, da valutare persino con simpatia (salvo...) come premarxismo in grado di evolvere (e venir fatto evolvere).
Dove stanno le ragioni d’interesse che suscita positivamente in noi questo documento?
Cerchiamo di sintetizzare al massimo per punti.
Esso parte dalla fondamentale constatazione che ci troviamo nel cuore di una crisi del sistema capitalista non attribuibile ad un determinato paese, ad un determinato governo cattivo od “incapace”, ma, per l’appunto, ai meccanismi inesorabili del sistema in oggetto. Tant’è: Karamanlis non è neppure citato. Questo fatto ci suona tanto più significativo in quanto, qui da noi, e persino nei nostri immediati dintorni, imperversa una retorica demagogica di tipo pressoché esclusivamente antiberlusconiano che sembra fatta apposta per scansare il cuore sistemico dei problemi e ridurre il tutto ad una sorta di rivendicazionismo più o meno di tipo sindacale grazie al quale (così, forse, ci si illude) gettare un ponte alle masse... sinistrate.
Di qui il richiamo alla prospettiva dello scontro rivoluzionario internazionale di classe, entro cui è esattamente collocata la sua attuale “frazione” greca. Il tutto, correttamente, senza confondere l’attuale ovviamente insufficiente livello delle lotte qui in corso con questa prospettiva e questo esito ineludibili. Con perfetta lucidità si dichiara che il proletariato, chiamato per ciò in causa, non si definisce per la sua collocazione statistico–sociale entro questo sistema, ma per il suo farsi classe per sé; risultato che non può darsi che attraverso il dato oggettivo delle lotte cui esso è obbligato. Questo il punto di partenza; la coscienza viene dopo. Sin qui saremmo ad una perfetta concordanza con quanto sostenuto dalla nostra “corrente” (vedi, in particolare, Partito e classe di Bordiga); salvo che il richiamo a Marx qui appare monco dell’indispensabile seguito: il proletariato si costruisce in classe e quindi in partito politico. Perciò noi ci richiamiamo al Manifesto del partito comunista e non ad un Manifesto del proletariato (per quanto si tratti della “stessa faccenda”).
Altro punto essenziale: la constatazione che l’attuale crisi non può non significare, in profondità, la messa in crisi di tutto l’assetto della sinistra tradizionale, il cui “riformismo” si era accompagnato in dipendenza con l’essor capitalista post–bellico, ed oggi, col venir meno di tali presupposti, non potrà in alcun caso dar luogo a “riconversioni” antagoniste, ma, al contrario, al terrore di un’insorgenza di classe e, all’occorrenza, a soluzioni noskiane della crisi.
Altro punto di primario rilievo: la lotta proletaria, nel suo crescendo, dovrà dar luogo (e già da luogo, in parte) ad una socializzazione tra i vari segmenti proletari in quanto comunità umana capace di cancellare le vecchie tare “corporative” insiste nel proprio essere “classe del capitale”. Come scrive Marx, una rivoluzione è necessaria al proletariato per scuotersi esso stesso di dosso la vechia merda (usiamo i termini classici), senza di che la prospettiva socialista sarebbe destituita di senso. L’unità comunitaria sociale della classe: questa la vera conquista che deriva da una vera lotta conseguente. Gli esempi addotti possono essere, in qualche caso, dubitabili (vedi l’eccessiva enfasi sugli spruzzi italiani), ma resta valida l’impostazione metodologica. Certo falso rivoluzionarismo di altri tempi, ma tuttora in corso seppur con altro linguaggio, parlava qui da noi di “conquista delle casematte” capitaliste (Magri ne era un teorico conseguente!). Si tratta di ben altro, e cioè proprio di quel che scrivono questi nostri compagni.
Tanto basti a introdurre il testo che segue, che a questa stregua merita la massima attenzione (e continuerebbe a meritarla anche nel caso non ci trovassimo di fronte ad una espressione di movimento di per sé immediatamente significativa: ipotesi iettatrice, ma che possiamo anche mettere in conto).
Data la semplicità del testo (basta un piccolo dizionario per tradurre qualche singola parola) abbiamo ritenuto opportuno pubblicarlo direttamente in inglese.
30 dicembre 2008
da "Indymedia Atene"
WE DESTROY THE PRESENT BECAUSE WE COME FROM THE FUTURE
The first dawning light comes out of the deepest darkness"
Up until the Saturday night of 06/12/08 we could say that "jusqu' ici tout
va bien", watching everyone's personal fall into the desert of the
capitalist system. Then the crash came, and the destructive madness seized large
parts of the youth of the country. At first, like so many times in history, it
was the actions that did the talking. First the cop gun talked, shouting in the
crudest manner the repulsion of Authority of every kind toward the phenomenon of
life. The blood of a teenager was spilt, and immediately another cry instantly
transmitted from Exarchia to the economic center of the metropolis and other big
cities, a cry made out of collapsing glass and flames, transforming banks and
malls into a raging cloud with the inscription: REVENGE.
Two days later the christmas centers of the cities looked as if they had been
the targets of war bombing, while the already crisis-ridden economy took
another deadly blow in its heart by hordes of "hooligans" looting commodities.
"The Varkiza Treaty is broken, we are at war again". We are talking about the
return of class struggle to the foreground, we are talking about the solution to
the crisis: For us. And we're only getting started. Let's go...
We are part of the revolt of life against the daily death the existing social relations impose on us. With the destructive power that was latent in us we realize a wild (but contradictory) attack on the institution of private property. We occupy the streets, we breath freely despite the tear gas, attacking the most despiteful image of ourselves: the image of ourselves as the bosses' slaves, that in its most extreme, most repugnant form is the cop. We erect a steadfast barricade against the loathsome normality of the cycle of production and distribution. In the current conjunction, nothing is more important than consolidating this barricade against the class enemy. Even if we retreat under the pressure of the (para-) state scum and the insufficiency of the barricade, we all know that nothing will ever be the same in our lives.
We also position ourselves in the historical conjunction of the recomposition of a new class subject, that carries from long ago the promise of assuming the role of the gravedigger of the capitalist system. We believe that the proletariat was never a class because of its position, on the contrary, it constitutes itself as a class for itself on the ground of the clash with the bosses, first acting and only later gaining consciousness of its actions. The recomposition is taking place by groups of subjects that become aware that they have no control over their own lives, from groups that have been -or are getting- squeezed on the bottom of the barrel, and are now entering a contradictionary trajectory toward unification.
Wage work has always been a blackmail. Nowdays this holds even more, as the number of workers that are employed only circumstancially and precariously in sectors which, while necessary for the reproduction of capitalist domination have no social usefulness whatsoever, is also growing. In these sectors, class struggles, exiled from the field of self-management of production, move into the field of the generalized blocking and sabotage. Simultaneously, the automatization of production and the abandonment of the politics of full employment create whole reserve armies of jobless proletarians who are pushed to the fringes of society and resort to insecured labor or turn to crime economy in order to survive. Jobless, precarious workers, highschool and university students destined to become future wage slaves, migrant workers of the first and second generation that daily live the marginalization and the repression constituted along with radical workers' minorities the community of the insurgents of December, a community based on the common condition of alienation and exploitation that defines a society based on commodity-work. Let's remind ourselves that the eve of this feast-day was celebrated from those even lower, from those who have lost every joy in the places of torment of democracy, from the prisoners of the greek prisons.
The owners of the commodity labor-power who had it invested in the stock exchange of social security and in the hope of seeing their offspring exiting this condition through social ascension, continue to observe the insurrectionary party without taking part, but also without calling the police to dissolve it. Along with the substitution of social security with police security and the collapse of the stock market of class movability, many workers, under the burden of the collapsing universe of petit-bourgeois ideology and the state hybris, are moving toward a (socially important) moral justification of the youth outbreak, but without yet joining the attack against this murderous world.
They kept on dragging their corpse on three-month litanies of the professional unionists and on defending a sad sectional defeatism against the raging class aggressiveness that is rapidly coming to the fore. These two worlds met up on Monday, 8/12, on the streets, and the entire country caught on fire. The world of the sectional defeatism took the streets to defend the democratic right of the separated roles of the citizen, the worker, the consumer, to participate in demonstrations without getting shot at. Nearby, not that far away, the world of class aggresiveness took the streets in the form of small organized "gangs" that break, burn, loot, smash the pavements to throw stones onto the murderers. The first world (atleast as expressed in the politics of the professional unionists) was so scared by the presence of the second, that on Wednesday, 10/12, attempted to demonstrate without the annoying presence of the "riff-raff". The dilemma regarding how to be on the streets was already layed in: Either with the democratic safety of the citizen, or with the clash solidarity of the group, the aggressive block, the march that defends everyone's existence with sharp attacks and barricades.
The December events ("Dekemvriana") of 2008 in Greece are the latest link in a series of insurrections that are sweeping through the capitalist world. In its decadent phase, capitalist society neither can, nor does it aim at gaining the consent of the exploited through the integration of partial demands. All that remains is is repression. With the restructuring that began in the mid-seventies (to repel the proletarian mutiny that is known as "movement-68"), capital faced the following contradiction: while it had the ability to create a human mass of passive tv-viewers and commodity-consumers, it had to simultaneously refuse them (by lowering their wages) the possibility of buying these commodities. From this point of view, the looting of a mall in Stadiou str. by people who are daily sharing the promises of a false consumer happiness, while being refused the means to realize these promises, shouldn't come out as a surprise.
The insurrection of December didn't put out any concrete demands, exactly because the participating subjects daily experience, and therefore know the denial of the ruling class to meet any such demand. The wisperings of the left, that initially demanded the removal of the government were replaced by a mute terror and a desperate attempt to relieve the uncontrollable insurrectionary wave. The absence of any reformist demand whatsoever reflects an underground (but still unconscious) disposition toward a radical subversion and surpassing of the existing commodity relations and the creation of qualitatively now ones.
Everything begins and matures in violence – but nothing stops there. The destructive violence that unleashed in the events of December caused the blocking of the capitalist normality in the center of the metropolis, a necessary yet insufficient condition for the transforming of the insurrection into an attempt for social liberation. The destabilation of capitalist society is impossible without paralysing the economy – that is, without disrupting the function of the centers of production and distribution, through sabotage, occupations, strikes. The absence of a positive, creative proposal for a different form of organizing the social relations was –up until now– more than self-evident. Nevertheless, the insurrection of December must be understood within the historical context of an enlivement process of class struggle that takes place on the international level.
A series of struggle practices – some have surfaced in elementary form in many countries where significant class conflicts took place recently – propose and realize in a germinal level the human community that abolishes and creatively transcends the alienated commodity relations: occupied schools can be used as regrouping centers to reclaim the streets and the public space in general; public anti-lessons organized within the context of the recent movement of precarious workers/students in Italy, putting knowledge under the service of the forming community; collective appropriations of supermarkets and bookstores, and the collective life in the occupation as a self-fullfilment of the demands for free feeding, housing, books; the radical contestation of the property relations, cooperation instead of personal appropriation (and sometimes reselling) of the appropriated commodities; neighborhood assemblies linking up, starting from the local issues, prefiguring thus a society where decisions are taken and are executed without the mediation of any separated power whatsoever (sf. Oaxaca); free transportations with the public transportation, the déménages (invading into employment agencies and throwing all their stuff into the street) as were systematically made during the anti-CPE movement in France. These (and countless others, that can be born out of the personal and collective intelligence) are the practises that can enrich and fertilize the powers of negation, so that through the turmoil of insurrection, the free, communist society will start to take shape.
We do everything within our reach not to abandon the occupations and the streets, because we don't want to go home. We get miserable and unhappy with the "realistic" thought that sooner or later we will have to return to normality. We get full of joy with the thought that we are in the beginning of a historical process of enlivenment of class struggle, and that if we want to, if we fight for it, if we believe in it, it can lead us out of the crisis, into the revolutionary getaway from the system.
Proletarians from the occupied ASOEE