top
International
International
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

We won't fight for any post. Proletarians have no national homeland

by AntiWar Internationalist Movement
Our Homeland is our Class
All of us have recently seen a serious tension arising in the Aegean Sea between Greece and Turkey. This is a dangerous competition between their representative bourgeois classes aiming in broader imperialistic goals for the Middle East and Africa.

Erdogan's Neo-Ottomanism comes in clashes with the strategic axis formed by the Greek State, Israel, Cyprus and Egypt. Both bourgeois classes are unified in the role that is held for the "nation" of workers on each side: that of an expendable product. Series of important imperialistic interventions take place in the Eastern Mediterranean and transform into civil wars, concluding to devastating whole states and creating walking "rivers" of desperate refugees.

The Aegean Sea has been upgraded in the geostrategic schemes. Its basic role as the key route of the imperialistic fleets, integrates with a gigantic energy planning referring to the triangle engulfed by Caucasus, North Africa and the Middle East. Even more, the Aegean Sea is growing into a killing zone for refugees, intercepting and beefing up the "security" of fortress-Europe. This is the place, where EU is piling up massive forces of military and police units, sovereign and international, so it can erect a fierce "wall". This is anything but the place and time NATO confirms its defense and security doctrines developed during the past two decades.

From this point of view, the recent incidents in the Aegean is just a sequel to the escalations in Turkey’s "domestic" affairs. This not only applies to the Kurdish issue but also to the effort of the Erdogan regime to elevate Turkey to the status of leading regional power through the riots that sake the country, due to fierce inequality and heavy suppression. On the other hand the same incidents in Greece appear as an attempt to export the Greek crisis as regional aggressiveness of the local capitalists. The Greek ruling class claims its piece from the loots, offering troops, military bases and logistics for every campaign conducted in the region with the ultimate goal being: "Reassuring the terms and means needed for the next round of capitalistic growth", while the governments, one after the other, face destabilization when they come to apply the barbaric austerity measures that they have agreed with the Troika. This is a two way battle, domestic and at the same time regional.

These two plans come to an inevitable confrontation due to their uppermost goals and means. They both attempt to mold the appropriate coalitions in a harsh geopolitical and social environment where local and regional uprisings transform into devastating civil wars and finally mingle with the type of proxy wars conducted between universal and regional imperialistic blocks and state-forces (USA, EU, Russia - Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran).

This brutal race obviously contains in its rivalry all the Greek-Turkish disputes around the division of the Aegean (borders, reef rights, EEZ etc). These issues have fueled the conflict and been the number one topic of secret diplomacy for years. Nobody oversees the fact that it is of equal importance to clearly determine the timing, the terms and the nature of the expected compromise.

Greece and Turkey cooperate in full harmony under the NATO or Frontex command, waging the war against refugees and immigrants, in every international military drill and at each imperialistic "peacekeeping" operation. And surely they seek for a "mutually beneficial" agreement, an agreement "among gentlemen" for their national disputes.

Be sure for this, such agreements are signed with the blood and the corpses of both the peoples of the "combatants". The peoples which will be called to execute the service of the police force, the mercenary, become the cannon fodder for the ruling elites’ interest. In other words, the strongest unity of the two states is their unity against the real enemy, the “public enemy”: the working people.

The single sided nationalistic projection of the "Turkish aggression" by the mass media and the SYRIZA-ANEL government (as if the Greece-Cyprus-Egypt-Israel Axis doesn't project the exact same goals) aims to obscure the imperialistic context of the Greek aggressiveness for the control of the Aegean Sea and the Southeast Mediterranean. The quarrels abroad, the military adventurism of both turkey and Greece in Southeast Europe build up to higher level of social warfare which is conducted in their domestic regions. The project of the "threats to national security" or "to the rights of the nation" is nothing else but the effort to integrate the assault against the local working classes to the strategic plans of the ruling classes.

In Greece this sums up to the Memorandums, the slaughter of the new pension system, the robbery of the tax system reform, the brutality against refugees, the obliteration of the workers' rights in the name of production regroupment. In Turkey the equivalent sums up to cruel exploitation of local and foreign working force in the industrial complex, the savage civil war, against both the Kurds and the left. It's the only way to achieve broad social alignments needed to enforce strict national discipline (this means: class truce) either in the name of fear or in the name of nationalism. But always under the banner of state goals.

We know our enemies: From Tsipras and Kammenos to Erdogan and Davutoglu, the civil parties in total, the interests they represent. They all scream for national unity and the silence of class conflict, while serving the terms of capitalistic profit through Parliamentary Totalitarianism.

The nationalistic ensemble appears on stage. It consists of the big fish reporters, the pro - memorandum parties and their clowns and promoters. All of them are anxious “not to give an inch of land” while they privatize and sell out public wealth, devastating any remnants of welfare and infrastructure left. The "buyers" are well known: the hot shots of the local entrepreneurial jet set, the same that gained profits from the "Imia Crisis", the Stock Market scandals and the Arms deals in the Balkan and Middle East wars. In the meantime investigations reveal the cruel numbers: The mass amount of the funds from the bailout packages headed to the old debts (86.9 billion euros), interest payoffs (52.3 billion euros) and the salvation of domestic banks (37.3 billion euros). What has remained from all this? Just 9.7 billion euros (5%) to the national budget and just a fraction for social needs.

For us it's crystal clear. There is NO kind of national interest. There is nothing for us to serve or sacrifice for that bows to the flag of any nation. We won't fight for THEIR interests. We won't enroll in their armies, we won't work for their wars at any post. Our present and future is bounded only to the fate of an independent international workers' movement. The common struggle of the working class against the ruling class, the state oppression and their military aggression. We only settle for the overthrow of both the government of Greece and Turkey. In the age of Totalitarian Capitalism we can already see the rise of an age of riots. This controversial era gives birth to a new hope: The hope of social struggle in Kobane and France, in the uprisings of the underdogs from the Greek December 2008 to the Arab Spring till the workers' struggles spanning from the regional to the metropolitan.

Now is the time, it is more necessary than ever before. We must become the everlasting threat to overthrow this system. A time for an anti-war movement to appear with one and ultimate goal, emerging from the finest moments of workers' class struggle: Inverting the imperialistic war to open class warfare.
We just have to do the self-evident. That which several struggling people have done before us. They refused to go to war against their fellow brother workers. They demanded their lives back, back from the ever stealing governments of the bourgeoisies and the oppressors. Our guns are aiming the other way round. Against EU, NATO and against the capitalism as a whole. We shall rest only when this system becomes just a distant memory in the age of social liberation.

Anti-War Internationalist Movement
(Antipolemiki Diethnistiki Kinissi)
Add Your Comments
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network