A FEW WORDS

The Saloniki counter demonstration against the European Summit conference in Chalchidiki on July 21 2003 attracted the interest and expectations of thousands of anarchists well before the event. Representatives of the European political mafia had chosen this country characterised by an anarchist movement envied both for its numerical strength and the sustained combativeness of comrades in the social struggle, including revolutionary solidarity with rebels all over the world.
Expectations were great both inside Greece and in other countries.and in fact, thousands of anarchists turned up in Thessaloniki to make sure that the enemy’s plans would not go undisturbed.
Many comrades have expressed the desire to examine this encounter critically. If they consider the present document in that vein, they will be seriously disappointed. While not intending to emulate the event, we also do not wish to dissect and analyse it, something which, in our opinion, must be done within a critique of the very concept of ‘summits and counter summits’ itself.
What we are doing here is therefore a simplification. The summit took place, the demos took place. We were there, we share responsibility for what happened before, during and after. We are letting some of the events speak for themselves within the context of the demonstration as a whole, and above all, the solidarity afterwards with the arrested comrades during their protracted hungerstrike. This is not because we are against critical examination of our actions as anarchists, on the contrary, that is an essential part of the latter which, having no blueprint or ideological premise, are always something unique and irrepeatable in the great experimental laboratory of the struggle.
It is precisely through the continuation and deepening of the social war and its demands that moments such as counter summits reveal their ephemeral nature in terms of outlets for a real attack on capital. What remains is the undissectable part, the solidarity, the love of one's comrades, the little hoaxes against power, and above all the unquenchable, burning desire not to simply to ruin their parties but to reduce the whole edifice of capital and the State to rubble without delay.