Initiative from the occupation of the Athens School of Economics & Business

If I do not burn/If you do not burn/ If we do not burn/ How will darkness come to light? (Nazim Hikmet, “Like Kerem”)

… Tomorrow dawns a day when nothing is certain. What could be more liberating than this after so many long years of certainty? A bullet interrupted the brutal sequence of those identical days. The assassination of a 15 year old boy was the moment when a displacement took place strong enough to bring the world upside down. Where once each day was seen through in oppressive monotony, the displacement brings so many to the simultaneous thought: “That was it, not one step further, all must change and we will change it”. The revenge for the death of Alex, has become the revenge for every day that we are forced to wake up in this world. What seemed so hard proved to be so simple.

If something scares us it is the return to normality. For in the destroyed and pillaged streets of our cities of light, we see not only the obvious results of our rage, but the possibility of starting to live. We no longer have anything to do other than to install ourselves in this possibility of transformation. A transformation grounded in our creativity in the field of everyday life, grounded in our power to materialise our desires, in our power not to contemplate but to construct the real. This is our vital space. All the rest is death.

Those who want to understand will understand. Now is the time to break the invisible cells that chain each and everyone to his or her pathetic little life. This does not require solely or necessarily one to attack police stations and torch malls and banks. The releasing of each person from their couch, from the passive contemplation of their life has the destabilising force of a nuclear bomb. They take to the streets to talk and to listen, leaving behind anything private. This ruptured fixation of everyone on their own microcosm is tied to the traction forces of the atom. Those forces that make the (capitalist) world turn. This then is the dilemma of our event; to be with the insurgents or to be alone. And this is one of the really few times that a dilemma can be at the same time so absolute and real… (11/12/2008)