Greek rebels take over capitalist labor union federation building

Since 8 o'clock in the morning the building of GSEE (Patision and Alexandras) is occupied. We
declare the building a Liberated Workers' Zone. ---- Open Workers' Assembly at 18.00 ---- The
Building is open to all workers all day long. ------DECLARATION------ We will either determine our
history ourselves or let it be determined without us. ---- We, manual workers, employees, jobless,
temporary workers, local or migrants, are not passive tv-viewers. Since the murder of Alexandros
Grigoropoulos on Saturday night we participate in the demonstrations, the clashes with the police,
the occupations of the centre or the neighborhoods. Time and again we had to leave work and our
daily obligations to take the streets with the students, the university students and the other
proletarians in struggle.-- WE DECIDED TO OCCUPY THE BUILDING OF GSEE -- To turn it into a space of
free expression and a meeting point of workers.

-To disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes, and that
the rage of these days was an affair of some 500 "mask-bearers", "hooligans" or some other fairy
tale, while on the tv-screens the workers were presented as victims of the clash, while the
capitalist crisis in Greece and Worldwide leads to countless layoffs that the media and their
managers deal as a "natural phenomenon".

-To flay and uncover the role of the trade union bureaucracy in the undermining of the insurrection
-and not only there. GSEE and the entire trade union mechanism that supports it for decades and
decades, undermine the struggles, bargain our labor power for crumblings, perpetuate the system of
exploitation and wage slavery. The stance of GSEE last Wednesday is quite telling: GSEE cancelled
the programmed strikers' demonstration, stopping short at the organization of a brief gathering in
Syntagma Sq., making simultaneously sure that the people will be dispersed in a hurry from the
Square, fearing that they might get infected by the virus of insurrection.

-To open up this space for the first time -as a continuation of the social opening created by the
insurrection itself-, a space that has been built by our contributions, a space from which we were
excluded. For all these years we trusted our fate on saviours of every kind, and we end up losing
our dignity. As workers we have to start assuming our responsibilities, and to stop assigning our
hopes to wise leaders or "able" representatives. We have to acquire a voice of our own, to meet up,
to talk, to decide, and to act. Against the generalized attack we endure. The creation of
collective "grassroot" resistances is the only way.

-To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees
and collective grassroot procedures, abolishing the bureaucrat trade unionists.

All these years we gulp the misery, the pandering, the violence in work. We became accustomed to
counting the crippled and our dead - the so-called "labor accidents". We became accustomed to
ingore the migrants -our class brothers- getting killed. We are tired living with the anxiety of
securing a wage, revenue stamps, and a pension that now feels like a distant dream.

As we struggle not to abandon our life in the hands of the bosses and the trade union
representatives, likewise we will not abandon no arrested insurgent in the hands of the state and
the juridical mechanism.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF THE DETAINED
NO CHARGE TO THE ARRESTED
SELF-ORGANIZATION OF THE WORKERS
GENERAL STRIKE


WORKERS' ASSEMBLY IN THE "LIBERATED" BUILDING OF GSEE
Wendesday, 17 December 2008, 18:00

General Assembly of Insurgent Workers