A Few words on the upcoming Court of Appeal on the Mylonas’ Kidnapping case.
“Of course I, too, condemn the act through which a man violently and through ruse takes possession of the fruits of someone else’s labor. But it’s precisely because of this that I made war on the rich, thieves of the goods of the poor. I too want to live in a society from which theft is banished. I only approved of and used theft as the means of revolt most appropriate for combating the most unjust of all thefts: individual property.
In order to destroy an effect you must first destroy the cause. If there is theft it is only because there is abundance on one hand and famine on the other; because everything only belongs to some. The struggle will only disappear when men put their joys and suffering in common, their labour and their riches, when all will belong to everyone.”
Marious Jacob, anarchist, member of the illegal proletarian group “Workers of the Night”
When one early-2007 day I received a call from an old friend, asking for my help to hide from the state watchdogs who were after him, i didn’t need to think twice to accept and unconditionally offered to help him. I was fully aware of the risk that came with my decision. For me, my solidarity with Vassilis Palaiokostas did not come from any illegalist fetishism, but fullfiled concrete elements of my antiauthoritarian vision.
Vassilis is flesh born of the flesh of the proletariat, having felt in his own flesh, since a teenager, the bosses’terrorism and capitalism exploitation, working as a wage slave in a factory. Quickly, both instinctly and consciously, he got armed and turned against the bosses and their watchdogs. No, Vassilis Palaiokostas is no ‘’common thug’’, neither just an ‘’ex-con’’, nor has he anything in common with what we call ‘’organized crime’’. He claims no part in that particular sector of the economy, of ‘’black’’ accumulation and illegal capitalism. His illegalism was never targeted against his own class, as he did not belong to this peculiar civil watr of delinquency, where the poor and oppressed rob other poor and oppressed. Even if one disagrees with one or other aspect of his activity, we have to admit that Vassilis Palaiokostas targeted exclusively the plutocrats and state authorities. He belongs to a long lasting rebellious tradition of our country’s popular culture, a tradition we can trace back to the Byzantine era, with the Bogomils, the Apelates etc., going through the Ottoman Empire with the kleftes, the Hajdouks and Hainides, the post-Ottoman period has its own Listokratia: the reigh of popular bandits, and the thieves-rebels joining the ELAS resistance etc), lasting to our days, demassified, by a handful of conscious proletarians.
Therefore for me, solidarity with Vassilis Palaiokostas is yet another stop on a never ending journey of class solidarity: with every exploited, to every oppressed regardless of nationality or gender. It is the same solidarity to the fired workers of Mylonasstrikers in Greece and to the striking oil workers of Zhanaozen, Kazakhstan, overturning trains, occupying and setting fire to the national independence celebrations. It is also solidarity to the wilful strikers of the Greel Steel Industry and the unconquerable Indians and proletarians of Peru resisting the plan Conga of the North American capitalist ore exploration. It is also solidarity to the Palestinian people and to our class brothers and sisters setting the streets of Santiago and Oakland, London and Damascus, Rome, Tunis, Paris and Algiers on fire. It is also solidarity to the wretched industrial workers in China and India, the weavers of Bangladesh and other modern dungeons around the planet. It is also solidarity to our brothers and sisters languishing in a African mine, a Brazilian favella or in a ghetto in the USA, a Paris banlieue or a ‘’third world” slum….
My solidarity to Vassilis Palaiokostas is the same solidarity to every proletarian who fight back.
Good luck, comrade.
Continuous struggle for the classless society, where everything will belong to everyone.
Polykarpos Georgiadis
Kerkiras prison (Corfu)
06/01/2012