At the municipal and regional elections taking place in a few days, all the “active” citizens of “our” pathetic democracy will be called for one more time to play their theatrical part that the authority calls “democratic electoral right”. Elections is one of the most well presented frauds that sovereignty has created to put to the obedients’ minds the illusion that they are the ones to decide upon their future. This fututre though is already full of dilemmas which every political authority puts to the people. Once it was the fear of constitutional diversion through a “coup d’ etat”, today it is called “submission to the government’s choices or destabilization”.
For this year’s elections, the parties’ headquarters have turned this dilemma to their main political thesis. Through this trick the citizens become vulnerable to various blackmails (absence of government due to electoral abstension, economy collapse and country’s bankruptcy, loss of institutional and national sovereignty, etc) by political and financial circles, and being terrified they don’t dare to doubt them ending to choose their voluntary slavery.
The November 7 elections are supposed to bring out the new mayors and district comissioners, but their essence is that they have always been a miniature of the parliamentary elections, with local “lords” cmpeting in demagogy, jobbery spoils and bribery, the “nation’s fathers”. Since the candidates elected are members of political parties and many of them in urban areas have taken government posts before -as we know such posts are utterly connected to investment and business circles- this should be considered natural.
This relationship is today empowered with the plan “Kallikratis”, with which they try to reduce the functional expenditures of the municipalities and districts, and cut down on financial and human resources. This plan dismantles and donates to the private sector whatever public service has still remained. It connects the function of municipal services to profit criteria, it decomposes the working relations, it imposes the market’s rules deeper in our lives. All of these lead to the formation of local “governments” with the district comissioner playing the role of a local “prime minister”. So instead of the much advertised de-centralisation, we have the hype-rcentralisation of authoritative institutions and state wealth to the hands of a few parties’ chosen ones , and increase of the distance between the people and the decision-making centers.
Conscious abstension from the elections is an act of political dignity, which up to an extent expresses the people’s disgust towards a totally corrupted political system. It is now imperative to go for a step beyond. To stop giving our live away to “specialists” and so-called “saviours” and take this in our hands. To create self-organised structures inside the social struggle against the grimpresent and future they plan for us, but also in every part of our life, in every neighborhood, village, workplace. Structures based on real solidarity and mutual help, and not on the anibbalistic competitiveness they try to impose. With popular assemblies where we will decide for ourselves and deal with our problems equally and collectively, without the guardianship of “lords”, bosses and all this sovereign mob of drones.
Antiauthoritarian perceptions like this concerning the collective dealing with common issues through direct-democratic, participatory and other counter institutions that people freely dream of and bring to life, are not just some ideas of the anarchist movements worldwide. They consist an imperative necessity against a model of social organisation whose contradictions and absurdities have led to a multidimentionaly marginal crisis, that pushes humanity and nature to a definite extinction.
Such self-organised models are not utopian. They have existed through human history, and today they still exist in whole areas, towns and villages in Spain and latin America, as well as in self managed workplaces in Germany, in Argentine and elsewhere. Thus, we must start thinking of the power we hold in our hands. We have to start taking clear decisions for our future.
ABSTENSION FROM THE ELECTORAL ILLUSIONS
WE SHOULD TAKE OUR LIVES IN OUR HANDS
SELF ORGANISATION – SOLIDARITY – PUBLIC ASSEMBLIES.
in greek: http://evagelismos.squat.gr/?p=896