Many older dogmas and ideological schemes have collapsed or are gradually collapsing in the face of dilemmas such as career vs. family entertainment vs. moral temperance, and more extreme and vulgar individualism against the promotion of "the social good." Advanced capitalism penetrates everything. It sells opportunities for social and economic advancement in the form of investment shares. (And whoever fails bears personal responsibility for their poor investment.) It sells mass entertainment, sells the idea that in reality you should only care for yourself: to focus on doing your job well to get a promotion, to acquire a new car, new apartment, new furnishings, new routine. In your free time you seek entertainment spending hours of your life in shopping malls, cafés, clubs, cinemas, theatres, whether in the high culture or some alternative. We are encouraged to seek self-improvement, because you are never good enough according to advertising in hair parlours, beauty salons, gyms, diet centres...
The organisation of this lifestyle requires the assurance that nothing will penetrate your personal space, that nothing will disturb your bliss, that there will be no obstacles in your way. Yet in this society coexist the disinherited and excluded, who don’t have access to this lifestyle, not out of choice, but social conditions. Expecting not so much the possibility of mere survival, but the wish of living “like everyone else" produces violence, theft, burglary robberies, kidnappings, often with bloody endings. Other groups of marginalised youth ignore the orders of the legal system and vandalise their environment without a specific reason, just because they want to defuse a rage that they cannot define, but express everywhere.
Schools occupations, the battles in the stadiums, neighbourhood gang clashes to control the drug traffic, all of these are dangerous to the status quo. This is where the role of security comes in: "justice" that sends to hell whomever is cast out by the system, the police that offer order, the various police units and their frequent patrols and presence in the metropolis and throughout the country. But as the police may not be ubiquitous, their measures escalate. More cameras appear on the streets, and methods of surveillance become more evolved. As the outcasts become more evolved, so too the systems of security. Scientists work feverishly in universities and other institutions to develop smart solutions using the cutting edge of technology with public or private grants. Individual vendors specialise and can now offer alarms, access control systems, security shutters, electronic locks, motion sensors, all types of cameras, microphones, bugs, etc.
A whole industry has developed, with demand from the general public,because those who do not take special measures have a lot to lose. So many petit bourgeoisie establish small companies of this type and try to earn a few crumbs from the enterprise. A common culture of snitching is also developing, and for every dark spot not watched by a camera there is a vigilant eye watching from behind the shutters. For every delay in the police intervention, there is an indignant citizen who is eager to be a vigilante. But in this same society there are those who refuse, who defy these structures, institutions, and ethical and cultural values, promises, and hopes. Restless agitators who organise and attack the existing in order to eliminate it. Some who arm their desires for action. Some who will never rest until they see the ruins of this world.
There can be no oasis of freedom in this space and time. Everybody owes it to themselves, if they have any dignity to fight, to test the limits of endurance, and take part in the revolutionary struggle for a world without authoritarian institutions and property that will not exclude anyone, and therefore will not need the machinery of control and surveillance, and will not be run by the vampires in suits and uniforms, but will be organised by the collective synthesis of our free individual desires in ways that only the experience of the struggle can achieve.
That’s why we decided to hit three shops that sell surveillance systems and services, one on Tuesday at dawn in Gizi and two simultaneously on Wednesday morning in Kalithea. Not only has it proven that the great number of cameras in front of these shops cannot protect them but we also humiliated the frequent police patrols that go around like sheriffs in groups of twenty in the city centre. Our goal is to spread chaos and insecurity on the enemy’s territory; which is where every large or small property mediates human relations, constructing exclusions in every little corner of this rotten world. There is no security system or police patrol that will reverse our intentions, nor those of all the other comrades who are fighting for revolution. Let all the shopping malls fill up with cops, let the security guards get all the work they can, let the shops sell us more security systems, and let the bourgeoisie look under their beds before they go to sleep and they will still awake in the night terrified.
P.S. We salute all the comrades who alone or in organised groups are trying to transmit the virus of the revolutionary violence. We respond to the invitation for a new urban guerilla whose dimensions are already exploding even across the smallest cities in the countryside.
- Conspiracy for the Promotion of Insecurity,
April 15, 2009
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