A small contribution about Solidarity

Until the day comes we will remain with the head held high....

1. Solidarity is our weapon

Many things have been written and said about solidarity. Usually when there have been so many discussions and so many texts have circulated on a matter, it ends up trite, predictable and without any particular interest. It seems as if its content has run out and it’s constantly being repeated.

We believe there are no trite practices, but trite ways of thinking. Particularly today, in the suspicious days we are living in, with the dozens of imprisoned urban guerrillas and anarchists, we should sharpen the blade of solidarity and remove it from its repeated stereotypes that confine us within the nefarious cycle of “freedom to whichever comrade”.

Because this way, names change, more are added while others are forgotten, and solidarity remains stagnant and often a privilege of friendly, personal and “public” relations.

However, the moment that the names of imprisoned fighters and their cases are browsed through incuriously like pages of an advertising brochure, authority will have won an important bet, the moral extermination of its political opponents. It will have achieved the installation of prison in us as a natural acceptance.

2. From defence to attack

We could not however speak about solidarity without first mentioning repression. It is undeniable that repression is re-organizing and is upgrading in the military sector (e.g. new forces of cops such as DIAS), in the scientific – technical sector (e.g. record of DNA collection), in propaganda (terror-scenarios of the Media) and in the law (new provisions of the terror law). The enemy is trying in this way to internalize fear as a condition in anti-regime circles as among others.

However, before we get caught up in a web of defence against the onslaught of repression, we should look first at what preceded. Because only our knowledge and the heritage of memory can overcome fear.

For some years now, together with the explosive moments of December 2008, the ensuing anarchist urban guerilla has declared a permanent presence that has led to deaths and injuries on both sides of the war, coordinated incendiary attacks, the placing of explosive devices on symbols of sovereignty, organized sabotage of infrastructures and the articulation of a subversive discourse that is seeking revolution in the here and now.

On the other side, repression is in permanent war in relation to the forces of subversion. This is why we believe that its aggressive reformation did not result as an autonomous initiative of the state in neutral time, but as an answer to the increasing growth of the new urban guerilla and naturally as a shield of protection against the rapid oppositions of social automatism (economic crisis, unemployment, strikes…).

Focusing on our own choice of the new urban guerilla we can with certainty say that repression functions as a step in the logical continuity of the ‘action – reaction’ phenomenon. So we do not view ourselves as being in a position of defence.

Even in the condition of captivity we choose to reverse the terms of a defeatist capitulation and proudly take responsibility for our actions, defending the positions and values of the Conspiracy Cells of Fire in which we participate, organizing new plans of subversion, attack and sabotage.

Hence repression is not a ghost that hovers above us, but the response of the State in the war that we declared upon it. This is why we consider that new comrades and accomplices in the mutiny do not need to face authority as an omnipotent enemy that knows everything, but as a challenge in order to wage new, harder battles against it. Anyway, the victories of the enemy usually rely on our own errors, but this is another discussion for the future.

We place ourselves therefore, far from complex positions of defence and fear, remaining on constant attack. While for those who are in a hurry to speak of defeat, because of the many arrests, we answer that the consequences of an action do not provide sufficient fodder for evaluating the reasoning behind a choice. Anyway the genuine value of freedom is not in its safekeeping at any cost, but in its endangerment while searching for something better, fighting for an authentic life beyond the law.

3. Let solidarity become the file of escapes from both sides of the walls

Revolutionary solidarity is a live map onto which are printed facts and perceptions that the language of sovereignty wants to methodically erase from memory, eliminate from consciousness and abolish as if they had never existed.

Simultaneously however, solidarity is also a diachronic argument of behaviour, relations and transubstantiation of the values of the revolution in the here and now. It is a way to exist collectively against the society of loneliness and segregation.

Solidarity constitutes the hot lava that runs in the veins of all who oppose, each one in her/his own way, their era and the sovereign order of things. With its momentum it clarifies one undeniable fact, that whoever fights power does not need to be our friend but deserves, not necessarily our unlimited acceptance, but our full hearted support. This reasoning inspires all our attacks and the actions that we carry out as autonomous personalities who participate in the Conspiracy Cells of Fire.

It is however important we comprehend that revolutionary solidarity through the choice of a permanent attack was not born out of the fantasy of a supposed identification between thought and action. Because often solidarity is misunderstood and becomes perceptible as an absolute agreement of theory and action between those imprisoned and those in solidarity.

On the contrary, it was born out of the response to the eternal dilemma of our times: ‘You’re either with the State or with the revolution’. The recognition of this heritage does not mean of course that we will hide the weapons of criticism or make discounts on our speech in order that we become liked by those that we disagree with. Solidarity without criticism is revolution without action. With criticism we deepen the substance of the case. Thus we recognize the common ground but also the different references of each one of us. We evolve our thought and our practice, and we listen to the particular characteristics of the different variations that constitute the anti-regime movement. This is also the beauty of revolution, there’s no single truth, just as there is no orthodox tradition that dictates what is right and wrong.

On the contrary, the anti-authoritarian movement is a mosaic of denials that is connected, engages, rivals, is always supplemented, but remains always within a dialectic. This is the dialectic of solidarity that never forgets who is the enemy, who are those that plunder our existence, who are those that want to get rid of us by “burying” us in the cement graves of the prisons.

4. The weapons of criticism and the critique of “criticism”

Through this context we have occasionally criticized, and sometimes particularly harshly, procedures, other organizations, occupations, practices and traditions of struggle. But we always know in which direction we look with hostility and where we aim our weapons. We never forget that between revolutionaries and the enemy there is a straightforward, clear defined line.

We continue to believe that within the anti-authoritarian movement, despite the differences, contradictions, disputes and tensions, what unites us is greater than what divides us. As long as we learn that the dialectic is based on the mutuality and sincerity of intentions and motivations for the promotion of the revolutionary war, and not on foolish ambitions of personal promotion to informal leaderships within the anti-regime circles. Such behaviour would be met with our violent disgust.

Beyond that we recognize ourselves as a part of the anarcho-individualistic nihilistic tendency of the anti-authoritarian movement, where we support the diversity of the anarchist revolution. Acting publicly, either through our illegal infrastructures, or as imprisoned members of the Conspiracy, we seek critique, so we exercise it and also receive it. We never claimed that we hold the exclusive truth of the revolution, let alone that we want to keep it for ourselves. We are convinced that the authentic expression of self-criticism and criticism through revolutionary solidarity can only have something to offer to the case of subversion.

It dismantles doctrinal truths, forms new concepts, transfers experiences, formulates questions and concerns, opens communications, enriches agreements and disagreements and synthesizes a new perspective for everyone of us in the community of rebels.

5. Moments of struggle against the wind

Beyond that solidarity with each of its expressions can be the occasion for a fruitful field of dialectic and dialogue between those in solidarity and the prisoners. But also for the beginning to achieve more. The achievement to form a new starting point of coordinated actions which are not restricted exclusively to the theme of confinement. A matter which we will refer to in one of our future positionings.

Tracing the historical experiences of the past, we meet some of the highest moments of struggle where those in solidarity and the prisoners learn from one another, are organized and set up common subversive plans against imprisonment and the condition of authority. Solidarity is the gathering of all these moments (Uruguay, England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.) where imprisoned urban guerrillas and many other dignified prisoners, despite the arguments and controversies are associated within the mosaic of a multitendency anti-regime movement. From the execution of members of the regime and kidnapping of politicians and businessmen, to solidarity meetings and posters of counter information and slogans on the walls, to bomb and arson attacks, dozens of physical and mental escapes were carried out.

Because up until today a bomb or an incendiary device that along with the shrapnel carries a message of solidarity, or a poster of support, a gathering outside the prison or a letter, a text become the few trusted “friends” of a prisoner during the battle of captivity.

These moves are the best answer to the democracy of directors that have built us within tombs of concrete, cement and bars. It is solidarity that keeps us free even as prisoners. On the contrary oblivion is a form of death for the prisoner since the days do not pass, but get poorer, narrow and are emptied of any content.

So through the critical dimension of solidarity, solidarity ceases to be a sterile repeatable procedure and exiles far away from it a Christian humanism that speaks the language of begging to the enemy.

Several years ago the incendiary part of anarchy in the majority limited itself to a self-referential solidarity that repeated through telephone calls-responsibility claims, the stereotype “freedom to him/her”. So each case is inevitably personified, cutting off the intelligence connection of the choice (arson, robbery, vandalism on a demo) for which the comrade prisoner was being persecuted with any other autonomous personality who wanted to discover the common meanings with it. In this way, solidarity becomes a case involving a few close friends and works with a barometer “rates of sympathy” that the individual prisoner prisoner gathers.

In recent years we believe that the transition from occasional aggressive action to the creation of groups of direct action and organized infrastructures released incendiary solidarity from its stereotypes and began to produce total discourse through proclamations, analysis and texts that present each illegal revolutionary practice as an open proposal for everyone to know and either choose, reject, or, most important, develop.

The same also happened through some specific assemblear processes, which without offering each prisoner the immunity of false heroization, made a step to speak through leaflets and telephone conversations and develop a live movement of dialogue, agreements and contradictions.

Because the bet is not to create a broad solidarity movement that “runs” behind the cases of prisoners, but to set up a genuine channel of communication to mentally remove the walls that divide us.

At the same time we consider very important the opening of solidarity on an international level. The open proposal for the creation of an Informal Anarchist Federation – International Revolutionary Front, contributes in this direction. It is a way to break in practice the silence and misinformation about what is happening in a distant “elsewhere” and to collectivize all those moments in every part of the world that say no to authority, do not bow their heads to the State, go against the wind of our time and form those utopian territories, liberated territories of liberated lands where the revolutionary war is as necessary as the sun is for life ….

Long live the Informal Anarchist Federation – International Revolutionary Front
Nothing less than everything
Armed struggle for the revolution

Conspiracy Cells of Fire
Olga Oikonomidou - Panoagiotis Argyrou - Haris Hadjimichelakis - Giorgos Nikolopoulos - Giorgos Polydoros - Christos Tsakalos - Gerasimos Tsakalos - Damianos Bolano - Michalis Nikolopoulos

6/4/11