Statement from the Occupation of the GSEE in Greece
by the General Assembly of Insurgent Workers
Dec 17, 08
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=948395
http://libcom.org/news/greek-workers-occupy-union-offices-17122008
http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/2008/12/17/24-1218-ricochet-scenario-now-official-general-confederation-of-workers-building-occupied-acropolis-solidarity-banner-hanged/
At 8:00 am the building of GSEE (General Confederation of Workers in Greece) is under occupation from free workers and associations of working people.
GSEE is a mandarin organization loyal to the government and the bosses.
The building now turned to Released Workers Area.
Open Workers Assembly at 6:00pm.
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 crumblings, 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" resistances 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 ingore 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
Wendesday, 17 December 2008, 18:00
General Assembly of Insurgent Workers
----
Communique #3 (17 December 2008)
An answer from the liberated building of GSEE
Panagopoulos declared this morning that we are not workers, since workers are at work. This, among many other things, reveals what Panagopoulos' "job" really is. Panagopoulos' "job" is to make sure that workers are at work, to do everything within his reach to secure that workers are at work.
But for the last ten days, workers are not only at work, they are out on the streets. And this is a fact that Panagopoulos and every Panagopoulos can't hide, even if he succeeds in hiding the sun that brings light to our steps and rage onto the streets of this city.
We are working people, we are jobless (paying in layoffs our participations in strikes called by GSEE, when they -the trade unionists- are rewarded with promotions), we are working under contract moving from job to job, we work insecured formally or informaly in "stage" progams or in subsidied jobs to lower the unemployment indices. We are part of this world and we are here. Whoever wants to understand can understand.
We are insurgent workers, end of story.
Every single one of our revenue stamps is paid with blood, sweat, violence, broken waists, broken hands, knees, feet, heads.
The entire world is made by us, the workers.
PS. We heard on the radio that our act was an artistic happening. We accept this characterization, but only as far as the proletariat will abolish art and philosophy (along with state and capital)...
two enraged proletarians from the liberated GSEE
---
Panagopoulos is the president of GSEE
No comments:
Post a Comment