Tag Archives: Syntagma square

Autonomia,Debt,democracy,Disobedience,Multitude,Politics,Refusal,Social Movements,Space

Athens: Metropolitan Blockade – Real Democracy

Dimitris Papadopoulos, Vassilis Tsianos & Margarita Tsomou

Metropolitan blockade is when urban space turns against itself, blocks the movements and the connections that sustain it, only to mobilise space as a direct means for political action. Metropolitan blockades are today the chinks in the wall of established politics through which we can get a glimpse of the future. It was the blockade of Syntagma square in Athens in 2011, which gave birth to a new frame of time and space in Greek politics, where future was again at stake, where future took place instantly in the discourses and practices in people’s assemblies. The area of Syntagma square became a zone outside of representational political power and oligarchic democracy. From the perspective of established political power this turn of urban space against itself is conceived as process that creates Συνέχεια →

Κλασσικό
Crisis,Social Movements

An absolute refusal? Notes on the 12 February demonstration in Athens

1. The 12th February demonstration in Athens, consolidated, what is becoming clearer in the past weeks: a growing majority of the Greek people support the refusal of the memorandum no.2 no matter what. In spite of the fear mongering spread by the pro-memorandum forces that a negative parliamentary vote would entail an immediate euro exit and the ensuing Africanisation of Greece, the popular support for the new EU-ECB-IMF loans and the correlated austerity measures is waning significantly. The formal political debate is increasingly based on a politics of fear: the government’s and mainstream media’s principal argumentation is stripped, on the one hand, to the bare threat of what a disorderly Greek bankruptcy would entail -invoking often assumed similarities with Greece’s plight during the World War II occupation by German and Italian troops- with basic food and medicine shortages and a lack of basic public amenities like gas, heating, electricity; on the other hand even mainstream media cannot but be critical vis-à-vis the most dismantling provisions of the memorandum no.2 for any sign of consensual legitimacy, such as the automatic decrease by 22% of minimum wages, the content and scope of collective bargaining and so on, insisting however ‘in the final analysis’ that the dilemma posed leaves only one choice.  Συνέχεια →

Κλασσικό
Occupations

The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach

by Nelli Kambouri and Pavlos Hatzopoulos

The global occupy protest movement is proliferating by “contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes”.[1] Furthermore, it materialises and disperses in multiple ephemeral processes of transformation that construct a common for the multitude of protestors. The common produced by the global occupy movement is not a mutually shared opposition to the capitalist crisis, nor a collective identity (of the “indignados” or of the 99%), nor a consensual political project (for real, authentic democracy). The common does not even embody an identical strategy of occupying public space, but rather to a series of becomings that question established categorizations and taxonomies that normalize the production of subjectivities and the organisation of life.

More so, the common is not produced in a genealogical, linear fashion, evolving from past forms of mobilisation and protest but rather it emerges directly out of the exceptional material circumstances of crisis contagion and catastrophe that spread like an epidemic in different territorialisations.

In order to perform this argument, we will attempt to trace forms of becoming cockroach in the context of the global occupy movement. Συνέχεια →

Κλασσικό
Crisis,Multitude

cucarachas en la plaza Syntagma

Nelli Kambouri

Desde anteayer (28 de junio), vivimos como cucarachas en la plaza Syntagma. La policía griega nos rocía constantemente con productos químicos, independientemente de lo que hagamos o digamos, pero persistimos. Nos vamos un rato de Sintagma para recuperar la respiración y volvemos una y otra vez. Descansamos un poco y volvemos. Incluso antes de que empezaran a estallar los productos químicos, ayer por la mañana, estábamos, sin más, Συνέχεια →

Κλασσικό
Crisis

Καθώς γινόμαστε κατσαρίδες

της Νέλλης Καμπούρη

Απο προχθές στο Σύνταγμα ζούμε σαν τις κατσαρίδες. Μας ψεκάζουν ασταμάτητα ανεξαρτήτως του τι κάνουμε ή λέμε κι εμείς επιμένουμε. Φεύγουμε για λίγο και μετά ξαναερχόμαστε. Μετακινούμαστε, ξεκουραζόμαστε και μετά πάλι. Στη Βουλής πριν ακόμα αρχίσουν τα δακρυγόνα σήμερα το πρωί καθόμασταν σ’ Συνέχεια →

Κλασσικό