International call for SOLIDARITY to VIOME, Thessaloniki, Greece.

 

Today Viome is in danger. The terrain on which the occupied factory lies has been sold to a speculative fund. Find below a text [ in english, french, german, italian, portuguese, spanish and russian] inviting you to participate in the solidarity action week at 18-19 of February, to send the message that we are determined to stand in the way of all plans of "investment" of the fund and all attempts of expulsion by the government.

Since we drafted that text, however, developments have been fast. Late at night on February 28th, a train collision in the recently privatised and chronically degraded railways left 57 dead, many of them students at Thessaloniki's local universities. Since then, there has been permanent mobilisation, marches, demonstrations and strikes, at a scale we have not experienced in about a decade. Feelings of mourning and rage have overtaken the country, as a large part of the population is waking up to the fact that the train collision was not an isolated incident due to a "human error", as they want to have us believe, but the logical outcome of years of degradation, neglect and precarisation of our lives orchestrated by all governments in favour of private interests. The train collision is only the culmination of the Greek state's necropolitics, with thousands of migrants dead at the borders, tens of thousands of preventable Covid-19 deaths at hospitals ravaged by austerity cuts, arbitrary assassinations of dissenters and ethnic minorities at the hands of the police, and a surge in femicides in the last few years. Students, trade unions and the feminist movement are at the forefront of the mobilisations, against  an arrogant government that has been ruling for too long through repression, propaganda, fear and surveillance. Among our slogans are "This was not an accident, it was murder", "Their profits, our dead" and "They talk about profit and loss, we talk about human lives".

Viome and its solidarity movement are an integral part of these mobilisations, clamoring for public goods and services under social and workers' control. We invite you to join us in our struggle to #defendViome and defend human life and dignity against the cynicism of capital.

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