Hope is not elected…
Front-page article issue 28
‘…whoever votes and doesn’t prepare social revolution is for us harmful, but equally harmful is the one that doesn’t abstain from elections and doesn’t prepare social revolution…’
Buenaventura Durruti, Spain 1936.
The above quotation from the anarchist fighter may have been rendered 80 years ago, but in the post-voting political scene of Greece it regains potency: whoever, through one vote and only, imposes (or, even in our case, reposes…)his hopes to the leftish management of the system, without opposing it daily, sooner or later he/she will be dramatically refuted. Left, in all its expressions, had always had honest people in its ranks, and ‘easy’ fighters with an ethos that is far superior to the wickedness that has now rightly passed. However, very rarely did the image of the left assume the face of those honest fighters: in the past, as well as the present, the choice of that image derived from upright, hierarchical structures, stone- faced dictations and, especially today, (class-) distanced from the social stratum, in the name of which it speaks. Furthermore, when we talk about Syriza, which took an order from an electoral body/concoction, which is willing to run the other way in the face of the first difficulty, but which is in itself a paradoxical mixture, with many elements of fraud, opportunists and power-freaks from the ex, two-party regime. Even more so, when all this becomes combined with burn-outs and sprayed- upon worshipers.
To return to the point of our initial proposition, our issue is not whether the new system of order will be pleased to return some crumbs of quality for our lives and dignity, to a desperate, humiliated population, even if we obviously recognize the significance in this. The issue is, primarily, to not forget that, these things are really extracted from whichever authority, by challenging, with battles, every day and forever, before and after the elections – these things are not ‘politely offered’ because the government is ‘leftish’ and charitable. Secondly, and more importantly, the dilemma that remains is not ‘euro or drachmas’,’ debt-deal or no debt-deal’, ‘left or far-right management’. We don’t disregard that we have to position ourselves against all that, by discerning their differences, but in reality the choice is between the system and its distraction – the choice was and remains: capitalism or revolution. Meaning, so we don’t drag on, that either we rest self-deceived in a diachronic, omnipotent, heartless mix of suppressing relations and decrees (which by nature gives births to crisis constantly) will be ‘humanised’ by every Alexi and his consultants, or that ‘we will prepare social revolution’, meaning a radical social reconstruction, that will wave goodbye to parties, governments, employers, directors, wage hunting early mornings, nightshift concerns of unemployment, profit and debts, to be replaced by local districts and divisional citizen bodies, employees, residents, that will decide with equal freedom and through representatives’ commissions, for the nature and manner of satisfying their needs, for the volume of their work – contribution, for their pleasures and responsibilities.
Besides, as the poet wisely suggests ‘the best journeys are the ones we haven’t taken yet’. It’s in our own hands, not in the hands of… the Left of the Lord; a Left that continues always to presume masters and slaves.
p.s. Gestabo Men: that you have found a third party inspires us to thrash you any chance we get, you and the rest of Baltakolite* rubbish of the ‘great right party’.
Hope cannot be elected
