On the occasion of the shut-down of the State broadcaster ERT ... Let's stop being spectators! Let's take life in our own hands!

Shutting down the signal of ERT, rang a bell that the country is well on the way of questioning democracy itself. The demand for 'Greek public radio-television' dominates and the big slogan that unites everyone is that of the defence of democracy and information as a public good. And scenarios for elections are firing up.

But what is unfolding in front of our eyes is nothing more than the escalation of the frontal attack on workers that we have experienced over the last three years. This attack is not unleashed by a military dictatorship but by elected governments, which with the seal of the "popular mandate", i.e. under the fake democratic parliamentary constitution, are passing successive austerity packages to try to manage the needs of a capitalism in acute crisis. What we have against us is the true face of a system that is not prepared to make the slightest concession precisely because it is immersed in deep crisis. The bourgeoisie is rigid and willing to commit the greatest crimes in order to protect its profits because it is a matter of survival, a matter of life and death.

We stand by the workers of ERT as by every worker, employed or unemployed, who sees the depreciation of his life because of this situation and he wants to connect himself with the wider class struggles. So far the workers of ERT are the first who have managed to stop the attacks that every working group that resists has to put up with.

We note however that this struggle of the workers, who are carrying out a first promising attempt at self-management and production of a television program on a 24 hour basis without managers and bosses, is monopolized of "TV personalities", professional bourgeois politicians and union bureaucrats. Furthermore, what we can see in front of ERT these days is, on the one hand a game of who will be seen more on the cameras (in view of the scenarios relating to elections) and on the other, the role of the mass movement that come there to express its solidarity. This role is only acting as a pressure lever without participating actively in the struggle, its procedures and decisions.

The demand for a “Greek public broadcaster” is nothing more than the acceptance that anything that belongs to the state is for all citizens and thus hides the fact that the broadcaster is also a part of the bourgeois state (which is not class-neutral) and it articulates and reproduces the word of its representatives. And the appeal to national sentiment intrudes once again leaving the class nature of workers' struggle in the background. Under capitalism there are no common goods there are only commodities, goods that you can buy and sell. Common goods can exist only in a classless society, with real equality and common ownership. In a society where everything that is for everybody is not a commodity, is not sold and purchased, but belongs to everyone. In such a society we can have real public broadcasting, which will be a source of objective information and promotion of a universal high culture. As for journalism, the only way for it to be a vocation is to no longer be a profession.

The demand for the “defence of the citizens' right of information as a public good” leads to the acceptance that information is a social need and not merchandise within the capitalist system.

The demand for the “defence of democracy” comes down to accepting and in the end succumbing to the myth of the parliamentary system as class-neutral. It means strengthening the state, subjecting oneself to its power and robbing oneself of every possibility of self-activity. Parliamentary democracy is bourgeois democracy, a democracy in which the bourgeois class govern through its political representatives -right or left – with the consensus or tolerance of voters. The parliamentary system is the democratic dictatorship of capital. We can only have true democracy in a society without exploitation of one human by another, in which governance is practiced directly by equal citizens.

The demand for the “lay off of the prime-minister Samaras and not of workers” cultivates populist illusions. Elections can not change anything. Even if a government of the "Left" is formed, it will have to manage the crisis of the system. And the management of this crisis can be done only for the benefit of the system. Besides, all examples of such "leftist governments" in history confirm this claim. So it is a big lie that it is possible to stop the policy of austerity by the establishment of a "left government".

A real change in the situation will not just be a change of government, the change of the form of capitalist exploitation, but the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system itself. Capitalism cannot be gradually improved, nor can it be managed in a human way. As strange as it may seem, today it is infinitely easier to overthrow the system itself rather than to reverse its policy and replace it with a new social order in which money and exploitation will no longer exist.

The overthrow of the system can not be achieved without the self-organization of the working class, without its rupture with the bourgeois ideology, without breaking all ties with the unions and the bourgeois parties - including the Left parties of capital - without the formation of the most conscious elements of the class to a revolutionary political organization that will unify their struggles and give a political orientation in times of social crisis.

Only a strong and subversive class movement that will dynamically organize the resistance against the anti-worker onslaught, that will forge the unity of all workers against the capital, that will stand by the weakest strata of the proletariat and the oppressed in general -first and foremost the immigrants-, that will build its own instruments of struggle, that will confront the brutal violence of the repressive forces, that will crush murderous Nazi gangs, is what will be able to open the way for the final rupture with the system of capitalist exploitation and the overthrow of bourgeois state.

Let's take our life in our own hands!

Let's get organized!

To overthrow the system of exploitation and social impoverishment!

For a classless society!