SOLIDARITY: FIELDS OF EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISTICS AND POLITICAL PRISONERS
We live in a chronicle period which is discerned by the intensity of state repression, arrests and prosecutions, and the sharp increase in the number of political prisoners. Furthermore, several trials are starting for cases of armed actions with defendants who either deny the charges or take responsibility for participating in armed groups. As Action for Liberty, we believe that a substantive discussion on solidarity, in the framework of the movement, is extremely necessary nowadays and this text attempts to contribute to this discussion: How the question of solidarity takes effect from an anti-capitalistic / anti-authoritarian perspective? From whom and to whom? On which point meet the general ideological and political solidarity to persecuted fighters with the specific needs of legal defense for some of them? Finally, solidarity is a core value of the social movement and why the solidarity to political prisoners particularly is a key component of the revolutionary project?
FIELDS OF SOLIDARITY’S EXPRESSION
Generally we express our solidarity
a) to those people who are affected by the capitalist / state vampirism, oppression and barbarity (or sides of them) and
b) to people who struggle against the Capital and State - regardless of the intensity and forms of their struggle.
The first category includes workers and unemployed, immigrants, social discriminated and folks who experience the capitalist looting and imperialist terrorism while the second category includes from strikers, protesters and squatters to militant fighters and urban partisans.
The broad field of solidarity is not determined by an abstract sensibility, but by all the contradictions of capitalist domination and the multiplicity of the (potential) competitive subjects that are created by the domination itself - or tends to create. In this sense, solidarity, and any social or political practice, has an ideological sign. What defines a revolutionary solidarity from other forms of solidarity is that it confronts with the nucleus of capitalist domination and bourgeois legality, that it links the current "special" issue with the "general" question of the liberation project. Of course, the solidarity to political prisoners, because of the profile of the recipients and the centrality of "antiterrorism" in the speech and the strategy of the dominants, condenses anti-regime criticism and action, as, beside the previous ones, it is directly challenging the state monopoly on violence, which together with private ownership are the pillars of the capitalist system.
CHARACTERISTICS OF SOLIDARITY
Solidarity is not one more form of anti-regime propaganda and action, although it contains elements of both. It is primarily a definite political intervention, obviously with different targeting, character and form depending on the recipient, but with an overall aim to change with practical and material way the social and political relations benefit for the person it is expressed to. Namely, solidarity does not get limited in condemning the situation of the recipient, slipping to sketch her/his profile as a victim, nor takes off in a general and abstract revelation of regime barbarity inspired by how the State treats to the person who receives the solidarity, ignoring the real needs of them in the particular time and space.
Solidarity also does not require the identification of the overall route and figure of those people for whose it is expressed. So, solidarity does not consider about the political opinions of any discharged worker, for example, and generally respects the framework of struggle that is chosen by the defendant, neither considers if the persecuted person is a leftist, anarchist or urban partisan or if she/he has used forms of struggle which the solidarists disagree with.
The relationship between the solidarists and those who express their solidarity is “exoteric” and in the same time “esoteric”. It is “exoteric” because the carriers and the recipients of solidarity do not share in that same time the same degrees of repression and barbarity; but meanwhile, it is “esoteric” because the two sides share experiences and knowledge of repression and barbarity, but mainly share the project of overturning the status quo which gives birth to repression and barbarity. It is a dynamic but also fragile relationship, which requires, besides co-communication and co-respect, to identify the roles both of the solidarists and the persecuted as equals of the "community of struggle”.
SOLIDARITY AND POLITICAL PRISONERS
The solidarity with political prisoners has the advantage that both carriers and recipients of it agree from the beginning with the project of social subversion while the political prisoners (can) operate as a collective subject, which is extremely encouraging their own struggle but also the solidarists.
Of course, all political prisoners (as, respectively, all the solidarists) do not have the same understandings on all issues of the social competition and the revolutionary overthrown of the status quo. However, we believe that the political prisoners are implicitly a political subject when are met the way and views of them as fighters before entering the prison with their attitude and aims after they were captured.
By this logic, the "subject political prisoners” (may) includes fighters who have been found for different reasons in prison in the frame of the anti-capitalist / anti-authoritarian struggle, so as prisoners with different defending lines, under the precondition, one, that everyone respects the way and attitude of the other and, second, that all together are self-recognized as political prisoners. Moreover, it is the State itself which, while doing everything to erase any ideological perspectives from armed actions, “gives” to someone the attribute of political prisoner definitely from the “special” way that confronts her/him.
We firmly believe that in non way the attitude to the accusation (the ascension of responsibility or the refusal of accuses, the statement of participation in an armed organization or the statement of participation in anarchist / antiauthoritarian scene etc.), of course if accompanied by the corresponding decent struggling attitude in the court, can be a criterion for the status of political prisoner and, following, to determine the degree of solidarity – the principle “no hostage in the hands of the State” is now more valuable than ever.
From the facts above follows that the carriers of solidarity respect the general political stance and the specific defensive line of the political prisoners, specifying when it is needed in any case, but never evaluating and prioritizing based on ideological sympathies, genealogy proximities or political considerations. At the same time, the recipients of solidarity, namely the political prisoners, respect the solidarists, without requiring them either to identify with all their concepts and action or select specific political prisoners excluding others.
As Action for Liberty (and Solidarity Movements in the past), we have expressed and we are still expressing, from view against the status quo, our full solidarity to political prisoners, both on the streets and inside the courts, both to those who have no connection with the accusation and to those who accept their participation in activities or organizations. The inclusion of many of us, already from the '70s and '80s, in the movement of solidarity to political prisoners (of course, under other socio-political conditions and with very different approaches) has taught us that the strength of solidarity is counted by the specific victories against the State (among them are included the release of political prisoners and halting back the terror-lechery and the "criminalization" of the armed organizations), but above all by this “kind” of struggle which, without holding back force and emotions, describes and creates the world for which’s realization the political prisoners are behind the bars and we are on the streets.
ACTION FOR LIBERTY
(the text in greek: http://actionforliberty.wordpress.com/ )