Fifteen Years On, Comrade Lambros Fountas Lives
On March 10, 2010, the anarchist Lambros Fountas was shot and killed in a battle with greek police. On the fifteenth anniversary of his death, Pola Roupa and Nikos Maziotis, imprisoned comrades from the organization Revolutionary Struggle, to which Fountas belonged & on behalf of which he was acting at the time of his murder, have released the following text (original at Athens Indymedia).
While their text memorializes the anarchist martyr Lambros Fountas, it also provides deep, valuable analysis of both the context in which he was acting and the situation in the present day. I have translated it below.
In all revolutionary social-liberation movements, the fighters who lose their lives fighting for a free society become a political reference point not only for those who lived and fought with them, but – mainly – for those who come after them, for the new generations of fighters. However, for a fighter to remain alive over time, the responsibility lies with his contemporaries. To have honored him as he deserves, to keep him with them in the struggle, to refer to him. This is achieved by honoring the struggle he himself participated in, the political struggle for which he lost his life, his political values, his political-social goals and their historical timelessness.
2010 was a year of political milestones for the whole of society and for those involved in struggle. It was the year that the country plunged into an unprecedented – in its modern history – crisis. A crisis that began as a financial crisis triggered by the collapse of subprime mortgages in the USA in 2007, expanded into a global financial crisis and brutally hit this country as a financial and debt crisis. The PASOK government under the auspices of G. Papandreou, since late 2009, was preparing to hand the country over to the long-term supervision of supranational economic and political institutions (the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, the European Central Bank), in order to avoid the admission that bankrupt Greece had not gone bankrupt and thus to save the domestic Greek banking system and by extension the European one. The price for this would be a series of loan agreements with the most abominable terms for the people. The social base would bear the entire burden for the restoration of the economic regime and the survival of the political system, which had passed into complete social delegitimization.
All of the above was already apparent in the fall of 2007. It began to crystallize in 2008 and in 2009 it was clearly inevitable. It was up to the movement to recognize the coming storm in time, not to protect itself, but to be ready for the opportunities for struggle that the crisis would create. In the previous years, the years of “growth and prosperity”, capital and the state had implemented economic policies that supported capital expansion through debt.
It was a given that for Greece the debt bubble would burst leading to a major fiscal crisis, as we had written as Revolutionary Struggle in 2005, in the proclamations with which the organization assumed responsibility for attacks on the Ministry of Employment and the Ministry of Finance. When in 2007 it seemed this time was coming, the Revolutionary Struggle organization devoted itself politically and operationally to preparing for action in the coming crisis. Through a series of actions and proclamations in 2008 and 2009, Revolutionary Struggle focused on exploiting any systemic instability and highlighting political opportunities for struggle with analyses, with organizational proposals for the revolutionary movement and society, and with proposals for a radical way out of the then-current crisis and from every crisis.
Comrade Lambros Fountas lived and acted within this political framework. This political framework cannot be removed, because to do so would erase his politics. Comrade Lambros Fountas, a member of the Revolutionary Struggle, was assassinated by a police bullet on March 10, 2010 in Daphne [a suburb of Athens] during an attempt to expropriate a car for the organization for an action related to the imposition of the first “memorandum”, the first memorandum agreement imposed by the troika and accepted by the Papandreou government and the entire political and economic power in May of that year. It was an action in line with those that had preceded it within the same political direction, intensifying the struggle against a political and economic system of power that was sinking into crisis and had begun to falter.
Lambros Fountas stands to this day and will forever stand above the supranational financial system Citibank, one of the pioneers of the economic bloodletting of the peoples. He stands above Eurobank and the domestic banking system. He stands and will stand, alive, above the stock exchange, the temple of social robbery, the temple of pillage and social plundering. He stands and will forever stand above all the key economic and political institutions against which Revolutionary Struggle acted. He stands alive above the Bank of Greece, the branch of the European Central Bank, and the office of the International Monetary Fund that the Revolutionary Struggle struck four years after his death, thus continuing the shared path of political struggle against the imposition of loan agreements. The IMF was and remains a central pillar of the country’s supervisory regime, then as one of the troika, today overseeing the economic policy of governments. This attack was dedicated to the comrade and was undertaken in his name. Comrade Lambros Fountas stands alive with the entire society that acknowledges him and next to every fighter. Lambros Fountas is alive, as alive as the content and messages of his actions. Time is frozen and he is everywhere. He turns today into 2010 and brings 2010 in all its meanings to today.
What has changed in these 15 years? The precious opportunity for struggle that the system itself granted us via its deep crisis was not utilized. Lambros Fountas and Revolutionary Struggle showed the way. From protest, from uprising to social revolution. From rebellion, to the formation of a revolutionary movement with goals and prospects for a new social organization. From rebellion, to a collective plan for overcoming the state and capital.
The “memorandums” were imposed and instead of being a cause for overthrowing the system, they became a steamroller that ushered the political system into its current authoritarian form. Because when we do not seize the political ground that a deep systemic crisis leaves free, when we as liberation movements and as a society do not seize ground that delegitimization of the system of domination opens up, then it will instead be occupied by the state, which, ever more furious, will impose an increasingly merciless power, an increasingly brutal oppression.
The whole of society, the lower social strata, experienced and are experiencing the results of all the lost opportunities in the two years 2010-2012 and of the political directions taken by the movements in the years that followed. And this political space that proposes another society, a society of freedom, equality and social solidarity, has the greatest responsibilities in this period. Because no generalized social uprising and – above all – no social revolution, no radical social change is ever achieved in history without the active presence of a revolutionary movement.
During these fifteen years, all governments have implemented and are implementing the same policy for the management of – and not the treatment of – the crisis that broke out in 2010. They follow the same policy of creating surpluses in state coffers through the increasingly ruthless exploitation of the socially weak, through cuts in health, education, wages, pensions (the increases that are given from time to time are a mockery, everyone knows, since their purchasing power steadily decreases). Through cuts in public transport safety, the response to fires. Through the support of profiteering, since via this and the over-taxation of the weak, but also through indirect taxes, billions enter the state coffers that are intended for the reproduction of the state and the profitability of capital.
At the same time, the state debt is growing. In 2010, when the loan agreements were imposed, the debt was at 127% of GDP (we entered 2010 with a debt of 295 billion, which within a few months of an escalating crisis reached 142% of GDP). Today, this debt has exceeded 400 billion. The New Democracy government celebrates because it is “reducing” the debt by increasing it, and it achieves this by maintaining inflation and refusing to control prices, since inflation, as is known, “gnaws” at the debt. So, if there is a question as to why the government refuses to do anything about cost of living, but instead does everything it can to maintain it, it’s because this is its strategic policy: through inflation, debt appears to be reduced as a percentage of GDP and at the same time increases GDP percentages by financially draining the lower social strata through price increases and over-taxation, but also by reducing public spending in terms of the daily life and problems of the economically weak, that is, the majority. And the cycle of borrowing and over-indebtedness of the next generations continues…
Thus, the faith the economic ruling class and, by extension, the supranational supervisory institutions have in the Greek economy remains unshakable. The supervisory institutions that will monitor the course of the Greek economy throughout its life, the European Central Bank, the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) and the Single Resolution Board (SRB), congratulate the government on the economy’s outperformance, while the latter is increasing its cash reserves through taxes, cuts, and withholding billions from the Recovery Fund, all of which it presents as revenue. All of the above lead to the Greek state attracting lenders who see government outperforming debt in an environment of stability. A temporary stability that is recognized as such by the vultures of debt, the lenders, since they are not used to buying long-term, but short-term Greek debt.
And yet, it is not an oxymoron. In 2010, a global bubble burst that was born from a growth model largely based on the creation of profit through debt. Debt was and will continue to be a very important source of profit for capital. At the same time economic growth is collapsing for most countries, falling short of the 3% safety limit for the reproduction of capitalism, global debt has tripled since 2010, with the USA leading the way as the most indebted state of our time; while the gap between rich and poor is increasing everywhere, debt is – even moreso since 2010 – the industry of the fastest and greatest profitability for capital, with state debt occupying a significant position. Consequently, a new global crisis has already hatched and is expected to manifest, with the well-known consequences for the social majority, which will be forced, yet again as historically, to bear the burden of making capitalism and the state whole again. To pay for the debts of the rich, to pay so that capital has the smallest possible losses.
Comrade Lambros Fountas fought to radically address the causes that give rise to crises, so that we do not experience such crises again. To address the real causes that are none other than the permanent and timeless policies of capitalist development, the profitability of the rich and the reproduction of the state.
Fifteen years later, the lower social strata, that is, the social majority, are living a bleak situation at all stages of their lives. They exist in the vortex of a merciless economic bloodletting to support the state and strengthen the rich. They live with exhausting working hours and starvation wages, without being able to cover their basic needs and with housing becoming a luxury. Workers are killed in work “accidents”, epidemics spread without the possibility of meaningful treatment, with the health system in disarray.
The social majority lives more immersed than ever in the anxiety of survival and the depression of an existential void that grows as long as it sees no prospect of a better life. It sees its children abandoning their homeland, becoming immigrants. It sees a political system doing everything it can to throw the children of the poor out of school at ever younger ages and pushing them into the most precarious jobs with starvation wages.
It sees its the deaths of its children in Tempi validate the dominant position of those who hold power and wealth, reinforcing that the lives of those who do not have power and wealth have no value. It sees people of all ages being burned alive in Mati for the same reasons. Because the repayments of debt to the bankers, the creation of surpluses by squeezing the poor to strengthen capital, were, are and will be of greater value than the secure life of the social base. Because the price of the existence of capital is profitability in every way and the devaluation of life in the face of profits and power.
It sees the lives of “third-class” people, immigrants and refugees, lost in the Greek seas and the Mediterranean being transformed into an immense cemetery. It sees the dozens drowned in Pylos with the government responsible and covering up this crime with a terrifying indifference. This same political and economic system, with the exploitation of countries, with the wars of Western states, multinationals and their allies, with the climate crisis and the destruction of the planet, gives rise to immigration and treats the uprooted wherever they are on earth as garbage, as waste products of capitalism. The social majority sees wars flaring up. In Palestine – with the blessings of the government and the Western states as a whole – it sees a merciless genocide being carried out for the interests of the Western states.
It sees how the lives of all those who do not possess power and money are increasingly devalued and, ultimately, crushed in the “head-on train collisions” caused by the thirst for profit and power. And as these lives are completely devalued, they are buried under “tons of rubble,” so that the crime may be forgotten.
The political and economic regime of power is a regime of covert and sometimes overt hatred for the lower classes and socially disadvantaged. Because the state was born through competition, racism, sexism, discrimination, separation, violence of the strong against the weak. A hierarchical social structure makes it impossible to promote equality at any level, impossible to participate in social solidarity, to prioritize people’s lives.
Fifteen years later, the social base is looking for its new “footholds” to resist through high-profile events such as the Tempi crime, attempting to leave behind the defeatism that brought about a period of deadlock in social resistance to the “memorandums”.
Lambros Fountas is present in the new struggles. Fifteen years later, comrade Lambros Fountas stands and shows the way. The path of increasing resistance, the path of making struggle meaningful, the path of a struggle with deep, durable, material substance, a struggle that shows ways out and does not stop at denouncing the impasse. It shows the path of the highest militant social solidarity. It shows the path of Social Revolution.
HONOR FOREVER TO COMRADE LAMBROS FOUTAS, MEMBER OF REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLE
Pola Roupa – Nikos Maziotis,
convicted members of Revolutionary Struggle
https://anarchistnews.org/content/fifteen-years-comrade-lambros-fountas-lives
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