Wrong. The AFP is reporting that the Greek group Anarchist Initiative “set up a special bank account to support 74-year-old Harikleia Ananiadou and collected 13,000 euros ($18,000 US)” two months after her kiosk was torched in street battles between anarchists and police. You can read more at Canada.com.
This sort of mutual aid is absolutely essential to our work as anarchists, and this is a wonderful example. Such acts of solidarity should not be thought of as lending aid to the petite bourgeoisie, as no doubt many will claim. Such acts are, rather, essential because they allow us to clarify that the business of dismantling a fundamentally destructive and exploitative system does not mean destroying the livelihoods of common people, but instead, actually improving our common living and working conditions.
Now, I am not saying that we as anarchists should devote our time, energy, and money to rebuild fundamentally capitalist enterprises, but such extensions of solidarity and mutual aid go a long way towards building allies and thus expanding our communities of resistance. You can bet old Ananiadou is now more likely to shelter those within the underground or those evading the uniformed agents of State repression than she was before.
But in the long run, rather than helping the people rebuild their shops, we are going to have to help them, just as they are going to have to help us, to tear it all down, rip it all up, and liberate the imprisoned earth below so that it may grow food and medicine, so that we might survive the consequences of our own creations.
Regardless, I applaud the work of these anarchists just as I do those who set the streets aflame. For indeed, they are one and the same.
Now is the time for the anarchist to rebuild the kind of society we all wish to live in. The need to set up as many community gardens as soon as possible and they need to squat as many empty buildings why they still have some power. The anarchist movement is always talking about fucking shit up then building a new society from the ashes well now the Greeks have the opportunity to actually do. All the stuff we talk about and dream about (gardens, squats, peoples parks, pirate radio, pirate tv, FNB, really really free markets, free hospitals, free stores and all that cool shit).
keep up the good work stim.