Governments in Greece do not hesitate to put the profits of banks and capital above people’s lives and to seize people’s homes, generalizing poverty and misery. After 15 years of EU/IMF agreements, layoffs, further flexibilisation of labour relations and wage cuts are leading thousands of poor families to the absolute impossibility of servicing their loan debts. At the same time, the aim of creating a new field of profitability for capital is being served by turning housing into a commodity and opening up a new rental housing market managed by large companies. In Greece there has been no social housing programme for years and rents (in proportion to wages) are the highest in the EU.  Auctions and seizures of people’s homes by the banks and funds are constant, with the right to housing being abolished even for families with health problems and zero income. The houses of thousands of people become a ‘financial product’ of a cannibalistic system as the parasite funds feed off the failed banks, which in Greece have been repeatedly financed after 2011 with 4 recapitalisations, paid by the people’s taxes.

The only thing that stopped the grabbing of people’s homes was a strong movement that succeeded in reversing the imposition of the banks’ profits over the people. For years the movement in Greece had delayed the operation of the auctions by occupying notary and courtrooms. The Greek state, in order to protect the banks’ profits, is carrying out an exhaustive process of persecution against the militants of the movement. Among them, the teacher Elias Smilios, a member of the Teachers’ Union, a municipal councillor in Thessaloniki and a member of NAR and ANTARSYA, who has been accused of five different charges for his participation in the movement. In one of them he was sentenced to 10 months in prison with a 3-year suspended sentence, while in the coming months he faces further prosecutions.

What is on trial is not the militants, but the very possibility of  collective resistance and action. The persecution is dictated by the government’s policy of repression and authoritarianism, at a time of an all-out attack on income, social goods, democratic freedoms and rights, while house evictions are multiplying in the poor neighborhoods. Organising resistance is more than ever necessary today to counter the system’s  fierce attacks on rights and freedoms.

With the power of solidarity we will fight! Hands off the militants! Stop the trials of militants! End the judicial hostage-taking of those who struggle! We call on the forces of the workers’ movement to take a stand and fight the battle of solidarity and the defence of the right to social struggle for bread, peace, health, education, democracy!

Let us regroup internationalist forces to fight for a revolutionary solution to capitalist barbarism

Statement of the meeting held in Buenos Aires –

prensaobrera.com