We didn’t need another martyr

While Greece was preparing for its general strike on Wednesday 10 December against the Karamanlis government and against the economic crisis, and with the grassroots mobilisation in schools and universities growing for some time against proposed reforms, Alexandros Grigoropolous, only 16 years old, was the unlucky choice to become victim and scapegoat of the police apparatus and was killed in cold blood by the State’s forces of repression.

The economic crisis sparked off by international capitalism against the exploited of the whole world, which is being managed with measures imposing general impoverishment by the States, is damaging the fragile equilibriums and the precarious alliances of power between groups of power and both right-wing and centre-left parties, enabling us to see the true anti-democratic, subversive vocation of the State and its apparatus of (in)security): alienation, criminalisation and the elimination of social opposition.

It happened with Carlo Giuliani in Genoa in 2001, it has happened many times in recent years in place like Palestine and Oaxaca in Mexico. Last Saturday it happened in Greece.

At the moment thousands of school students are demonstrating outside police headquarters in Athens, but also in a great many cities and towns all over Greece.

Spontaneous demonstrations throughout the country are the result of political, popular anger with the Karamanlis government and the criminal actions of the police. The Greek government first armed and unleashed the killer cops, then set up a pathetic ballet of excuses and resignations, but is not punishing anyone. In fact it is trying to shift attention onto the destruction of public and privateproperty, while attempting to repress the demonstrators, attacking people with chemical weapons and torturing arrested demonstrators.

The revolt is only beginning. And the general strike, a union and social, political and class-struggle general strike, can transform the people’s rage into organised, grassroots building of the libertarian alternative.

In every country, capitalism’s growing crisis is presenting the bill to the working classes and the exploited of society.

We must respond, in every country, by building together the social opposition that is needed to defend ourselves from annihilation in the name of Profit.

Solidarity with the Greek anarchist movement and with the victims of repression, international solidarity with all social struggles, in Greece and in the rest of Europe!