The following claim of responsibility was posted to Athens Indymedia on April 24.
The image is a map I made of the attacked locations, for anyone who might find it useful to know where to find some of these spiderholes of capital.
While I tried to be very faithful to the original text, there are a couple tiny tweaks for English readability. For example in the first sentence where I boringly say "prime real estate," the original used the colloquialism "φιλέτο," literally fillet, but metaphorically meaning the best part of something… but then in my attempts to translate idiom into English, I am always cruelly butchering the living language of my comrades …
Taking responsibility for attacks on Airbnbs, hotels and cameras in Exarcheia
In a virgin forest, a wild mountain, a quiet clear sea, a beautiful neighborhood, the capitalist sees prime real estate, a new field of investment and profit. There is nothing in the world we live in, the world of state power and the capitalist organization of the economy, that does not have some exchange value, that is not valued in money.
The nature of capital obligates constant expansion as a condition of its survival and reproduction. Everything in nature and society is a target and a vector for exploitation. In a microcosm of this process, the neighborhood of Exarcheia has lately been under one of the most relentlessly powerful assaults from State and Capital it's seen in decades.
Like many other neighborhoods in the center of Athens, Exarcheia is still an "unexploited" area for various types of large-scale investors. A neighborhood in the center of the city, in the middle of the city's showcase, that's been "left behind" in terms of infrastructure, large investments and offering profit to the capitalist machine.
But Exarcheia is also a special neighborhood. It differs from the other – many – neighborhoods of the center that remain "degraded" and unexploited and for which the same future of "development" is predicted. It is the neighborhood of movements, struggles, politicized youth, radicalism, anarchists. The state has good reason to devote so many of its forces and resources to subjugate, gentrify, purify, normalize Exarcheia and then offer it, under state auspices, to investors. The state knows that traditionally Exarcheia is the reference point for radical movements, the "headquarters" of the internal enemy. In recent years, and with particular intensity during the New Democracy administration, the state's waging what it imagines to be the final battle for the neighborhood.
Of course, this is not a decision detached from the bigger picture of state policy. In recent years, the state seems to have decided – and indeed declared – that this is the historically and socially appropriate moment to end the deep-rooted domestic revolutionary tradition, political radicalism, anarchists, movements. In an era of economic crisis, hyperinflation and impending recession, war and geopolitical realignments, the Greek state is bracing itself for an unstable future.
It was easily predictable and it didn't take long to see in larger and larger segments of society that gentrification and improvement meant displacing the poorer social strata through skyrocketing rents or non-renewal of contracts when homes were turned into Airbnbs.
Next to that are the already-held housing auctions, even electronic ones, of people's primary residences, and an open road for the encroachment of real-estate capital at the expense of the exploited. We see the neighborhood changing: residents are forced to leave their homes and in their place come tourists – customers of the hotels and Airbnbs that are growing everywhere like mushrooms and often belong to multinational investment funds and companies. Along with them come shops for the rich (tourists and non-tourists) with prohibitive prices and an alternative style, since this now "sells" in Exarcheia.
The other side of development and gentrification is, as always, repression and surveillance. Uniformed trash [cops] bedeck the sheet metal of the subway construction site in the square and prevent residents from using Strefi Hill, which is slowly being destroyed. Movie theaters and squats are suppressed and closed while hipster stores spring up; cameras are placed in more and more spots around these new businesses. These cameras are also used by the state in the service of crushing the struggles and conflictual actions of people in the neighborhood. A recent and characteristic example is the cameras in the alley around the monument to the anarchist A. Grigoropoulos, which were used by the state during the most recent December mobilizations.
State and capital invade the neighborhood in a coordinated and strategic manner, attempting to alter its political character, to suppress self-organized projects and erase from memory and space the militant history of Exarcheia, trying to turn it into a sterile entertainment district and resort.
For our part, as some of those who consider the Exarcheia neighborhood of vital importance from the viewpoint of resistance, who want Exarcheia to remain a field of fermentation, politicization and resistance, we choose to respond to the multifaceted violence that the authorities unleash in concert against us and against our structures and neighborhoods.
We call on the people of the neighborhood, the people of self-organized radical struggle, to confront the state and capital invading Exarcheia and beyond in whatever guises. We call on the people to attack materially and by every available means the "investments" that are trying to destroy us. Perhaps persistent attacks over time, that is, a "war of attrition" on our part, will succeed, alongside all the other struggles centered on Exarcheia waged throughout time– to build a real barricade against the designs of sovereignty .
In this context, we take responsibility for the damage to cameras at Koletti 20, Methonis 75 and that of Eurodiagnostics at Patousa 4, as well as for the paint, slogans and minor damage to doorbells of Airbnb apartments at Tsamadou 32, Solomou 23, Methonis 72, Arachovis 28 and Harilaou Trikoupis 61. Finally, we take responsibility for the following attacks by breaking doors, facades, windows and cameras at the following hotels and Airbnbs:
- Zoia House – The Hill (Kosmas Melodou 30)
- Trendy Hotel (Kleisovis 8)
- PAME Paradiso (Kleisovis 7)
- Exarchia Housing Project (Sp. Trikoupi 28)
- The Diplomat's ABR (Char. Trikoupi 95)
- Asklipou 102
- Komnenon 8
- 32 Solomou
— Anarchists