Who we are, what we want, and why
We are an open social-political collective that started with people who met in anti-racist and anti-repression struggles in the city. We see that in the generalised context of the increasing commodification of our lives, of impoverishment, displacement and imprisonment, of mass state and capitalist murders and genocides, the state—which has a cop and a contractor for all jobs—cultivates and tests society's worst reflexes.
It tries to convince us that we are indeed expendable, as it sees us, it tries to terrorize us into retreating into an individual, passive and isolated, it attacks us while bombarding us with police reports until we are convinced that we are threatened by those next to us and not by those above us. The state wants us to be cannibals and divides us by targeting the most vulnerable people in our class, immigrants and Roma, more harshly.
Faced with this situation of division and devaluation, we are actively striving to find common ground and a common struggle. We connect within the collective with mutual responsibility, meaning we commit to supporting each other and implementing the decisions we make together. We act horizontally on the basis of solidarity and self-organization, recognizing our ability to resist and build another life together on the basis of solidarity and cooperation, and we take on the responsibility that this entails. We make decisions together in our assemblies and begin to organize the structures and resistance required by our collective needs, based on our abilities, as we recognize that no one will do it for us. At the same time, we seek connections with those who want to do it with us, each from their own corner. We seek connections with our neighborhood, with collectives and self-organized structures, with migrant and Roma communities, with people in camps and prisons.
Basic Principles and Methods
Our basic principles are anti-racism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, and anti-patriarchy, while we propose solidarity, equality, horizontality, self-organization, and collective care, principles that we strive to implement for ourselves as a collective with a community perspective, and which we propose as the basis for broad social and political organization.
Our goal is to build communities of struggle for migrants, Roma and Balam, locals and "foreigners," of all colors, religions, and nations. Our goal is to become such a collective, with multilingual texts and references, with people who struggle together to break down, as much as possible, the borders and contradictions created by capitalism. Our struggle is local, against racism in the city and in the neighbourhoods, against imprisonment and concentration camps, against murders at the borders, but it is also internationalist, against the causes that generate the disasters that push people to take the path of migration, against genocides, wars, and the economic and ecological destruction created by the bosses' passion for ever-increasing profits.
Our main methods are assemblies, working groups, structures, and role rotation, while recognizing that no organizational tool is sufficient outside of an ongoing effort to cultivate a culture of collective responsibility, honesty, and mutual support.
The Collectivity is open, and participation in it means agreement with its principles. We do not place ourselves outside of society, and therefore we understand that we are all carriers of dominant, egocentric, and competitive behaviors, as well as patriarchal and racist remnants. However, we recognize these as characteristics that are contrary to the relationships we seek, as well as contrary to the broader socio-political struggle. Therefore, agreement on the principles also means a commitment to recognize and eliminate them through collective and personal work.
Finally, within collectivity we find tools, but collectivity itself should not be perceived as a tool for achieving goals. Collectivity is its people, our relationships, the organized responses it contains; it is a process that we create but also shapes us.
A few words about the general situation
Palestine
We understand that we live and act in a world of monsters. The horror of war becomes routine, a news item on television, as long as it is far away from us, as long as others are being murdered and not us, as long as it happens at the border and not next door, as long as it happens in other countries and not in ours.
The ongoing genocide of the Palestinians is a turning point for humanity. Not only because it has been revealed once again that the regime of occupation, apartheid, imprisonment, and terrorism imposed by the state of Israel on the Palestinian population has gone beyond anything seen before. Mainly because all this slaughter, the mass deaths of children, the bombing of hospitals and schools, the destruction of infrastructure, the enforced starvation and thirst, are being carried out without a trace of shame. It is all happening in broad daylight, under the glare of social media and international observers. Such is the cynicism of the state of Israel and its allies that they dare, with billions spent on propaganda, to present the criminals of the IDF as heroes and the Palestinian people as terrorists. We stand alongside and together with the international solidarity movement, and together with the Palestinian refugees in our country, we declare that we are fighting for the victory of the Palestinian resistance, for a free Palestine.
The Greek state is allied with the murderers of the state of Israel, and it has many reasons to do so. Beyond the obvious, such as economic and military cooperation between the two states, the exchange of "know-how" (as they call the methods of torturing Palestinians), and the influx of Israeli funds into the local market, the Greek ruling class sees Israel as an example for the present and the future. Because the Greek state has its own displaced and imprisoned populations. Those it murders at its borders and imprisons domestically. The Greek state wants to deal with these migrant populations, as well as the Roma, the excluded, and the poor, as "effectively" as the state of Israel.
A few words about the general situation
The war against migrants and the systematic attack on the Roma
The current conditions faced by migrants in Greece can be described as an undeclared war against them. The Greek state's racist treatment of migrant populations has deep roots, whether one looks at the treatment of migrants from Albania in the 1990s or going even further back to the Greek-speaking refugee populations of 1922. Today, however, since 2015, the intensity and extent of not "only" their oppression and exploitation by various means by small and large employers throughout the country has skyrocketed, but a murderous wave has been unleashed, starting at the borders and reaching the cities. The murderous push-backs by the coast guard, the rapes, torture, and murders in Evros, the imprisonment on charges of alleged "smuggling," and the constant and permanent confinement in closed structures, concentration camps for people, have intensified, especially since 2020 and the announcement by the head of state that migrants are now considered "invaders" and internal enemies. With the new law, these conditions are now becoming totalitarian.
From January 1, 2026, a comprehensive attack is planned on every opportunity that immigrants have had until now to obtain papers and legalization. The seven-year and three-year work-based residency requirements are being abolished, people are being imprisoned for years and punished with heavy fines, their only "crime" being that they do not have documents. Greece, and the EU, are on a racist and misanthropic downward spiral.
A key part of this upgraded central racist policy is the creation of a police force for Roma, locals who the state insists on treating as second-class citizens. The creation of this police force not only obscures the poverty behind stories of crime (as the ruling class and its parrots systematically do), but also attempts to marry it to the repugnant construct of race. The result is an occupation force in Roma settlements with the shameless name "Safe Coexistence Team."
Multiform Collective Struggles
We live in a state that worsens our lives and the living conditions of the poorest social strata every year, shifting the blame onto immigrants, Roma, minorities, and populations that it demonizes and treats in the most inhumane and murderous ways. It wages a fierce war with daily torture, pogroms, and murders on land and sea.
Multiform struggles and multi-level collectivization are the only way forward for those who refuse to accept a world that reeks of oppression and death, that imposes poverty and destitution on the majority of people and perpetuates itself by destroying anything that is considered a threat. Thus, amid the horrors of war, the brutality of impoverishment, the anxiety and loneliness of life under capitalism, we, the oppressed, sometimes create barriers and resistance that allow us to breathe. From small daily actions to organized mobilizations, we try to break the passivity and fear imposed on us. We find meeting points with people around us who do not normalize brutality and do not accept oppression, violence, and death as conditions of life. Together, we break down isolation and the culture of individualism in practice. All together, locals and foreigners, Roma and Balamos, until we build a world worth living in.
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