Letter from Aris Seirinidis

from this is our job

In a period of intensification of class conflict, the state—through a methodically conducted police, judicial, and media operation beginning directly after my arrest on the afternoon of May 3, 2010—has managed to turn me into a hostage. Alternately comical and scientific, the set-up as well as the handling of my “case” makes this criminal prosecution feel twice as exemplary.
On the one hand, exemplary in the very sense of “making an example,” because of the attempt to make an example of me due to my firm, unwavering choice—now for 17 years running—to be on the other side of the barricade, where my class position and my conscience have positioned me: against capitalist domination and state terrorism.
On the other hand, exemplary because all this is happening during a new period of repression: an era of the IMF and total war waged on society by capital and the state. Alongside the structural weaknesses of the capitalist system, the current economic crisis is revealing the artificial, unpredictable nature of bourgeois democracy itself. While the IMF, the EU, and their local representatives are trying to impose a regime of capitalist economic totalitarianism, the mask of democracy has fallen. Simultaneously, via a most amateurish set-up worthy of the post-civil war police, matters are “settled” with “indisputable DNA analysis” in the laboratories of police headquarters.
I won’t go on and on making excuses about all the blatant legal and other violations regarding the handling of my case. After all, my imprisonment was approved on one of the floors of the National Intelligence Service building. I grant no legitimacy to this system of exploitation and oppression, no matter what happens. Nevertheless, to those whose objective is to make an example of me through imprisonment, I say this: For me, prison is a new battlefield, a challenge in the struggle against “the absolute power of law and order,” a chance to turn the most barbaric institution of control into a laboratory for my political and ideological maturation. Despite everything, the new repressive dogma—with its remarkable mania for vengeance—can’t hide the indebted Greek state’s panic in the face of the eventuality that generalized social rage becomes social insurrection.
From A wing at Korydallos Prison, I raise my fist to my comrades and to all who struggle, filled with the certainty that we’ll meet again on the battlefield of the social and class war—even more determined, even more combative, and even more potent.

—Aris Seirinidis; Korydallos; June 9, 2010