Greek Workers Occupy Union HQ

The six-day-long occupation of the City Hall of Ag. Dimitrios in Athens ended last night with a march of more than 200 people. The last assembly of the liberated city hall called for another popular assembly meeting for next Monday evening in the grounds of the City Hall. Meanwhile, occupations have been continuing around the country, including a series of short-term takeovers of radio stations and (briefly) the state TV station (ET). The occupation at the City Hall in Sykies, Thessaloniki succeeded in opening the space for a popular assembly and a second assembly was held last night at Ano Poli, another area of Thesaloniki. These meetings and others elsewhere in the country have been attended by hundreds of local residents spanning virtually all sections of society.

This morning, in perhaps one of the most interesting (and significant) actions so far, the building of the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) was taken over, proclaimed a liberated workers’ space and renamed the General Assembly of Insurgent Workers. The following communiqué was released today by the GSEE occupation:

Since 8 o’clock in the morning the building of GSEE (Patision and Alexandras) is occupied.

We declare the building a Liberated Workers’ Zone.

Open Workers’ Assembly at 18.00

The Building is open to all workers all day long.

- 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 [and] 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 “grassroots" resistances is the only way.

- To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroots 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 no 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

* * *

This latest occupation is being seen as particularly significant since it indicates the evolution of the insurrection towards not only the government, the police and the banks, but also towards all entities which believe in mediated – as opposed to direct – social relationships. As one Greek comrade remarked earlier today, “the syndicalist organisations in Greece are almost entirely controlled by the political parties, and many people feel that the unions are more concerned with advancing the interests of their parties and factions than the real interests and concerns of the workers. The last several days have also seen the firebombing of multiple offices of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE, the 3rd largest political party in Greece) around the country. The position of the Communist leadership during the insurrection has been in my opinion truly despicable. They have dismissed the insurrection as American-directed provocation, and have accused the Left Coalition, the only political party (no. 4 in Greece) which has not outright condemned the insurrection and the street tactics, even though they have called for peaceful protests themselves, of “caressing the ears” (sweet talking) the “hooded ones.” KKE members have also taken over some university buildings with the explicit goal of preventing their occupation by other groups and opposing the free and open popular assemblies that the anarchists have been organising”.

For more info/updates

http://anarchiststrategy.blogspot.com/

http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/

http://libcom.org/tags/greece