Message/greetings from Nikos Maziotis at the International Conference on Political Prisoners organized by the Prisoners’ Voice Platform (TSP) in Paris (20/12 -21/12/2025)
Comrades, thank you for your invitation to the International Congress of Political Prisoners that you are organizing. I send you my warmest greetings from Domokos Prison, Greece.
If the history of humanity is the struggle of those who aspire to freedom, equality, and solidarity against those who seek to impose slavery, inequality, exploitation, and oppression; if the history of humanity is the struggle of women against patriarchal and sexist power, the struggle of the poor, the people, and the working class against the ruling elites, the rich, the slave owners, the feudal lords, the bureaucrats, or, in today’s terms, against the State and Capital, then this struggle has been paid for with blood. Countless comrades, all over the world, have given their lives in this fight.
They fell in confrontations with the enemy, during clashes with repressive forces, died in prison or during hunger strikes, and were murdered during demonstrations and strikes. Over time, this struggle has cost millions of lives, genocides of entire populations, thousands of years of accumulated imprisonment, as well as torture and isolation. In this social war and class struggle, the current international system of domination, the State and Capital, is not content with simply eliminating us physically or imprisoning us. It demands that we renounce our political identity, our struggle, our organization, the choices of confrontation we have made, revolution, and armed struggle.
It demands that we acknowledge being criminals, terrorists, and social detractors, when these are precisely the defining characteristics of the system it embodies. Our duty, as political prisoners, is therefore to remain faithful and consistent with the choices we have made in our struggle. This is our moral and political victory against the state and capitalist criminals and their apparatus. No revision, then. No repentance for our choices.
We live in an era where the international state-capitalist system of domination is moving towards ever-greater totalitarianism, aiming for the total subjugation of human beings to power and their transformation into docile and depoliticized instruments. The undermining of all the workers’ and popular gains won through past struggles, within the framework of the neoliberal hegemony of recent decades, the anti-terrorism legislation, the hardening of repression and the penal framework, the creation of prisons and special isolation facilities, the criminalization of strikes, and the restriction of the right to demonstrate, all converge towards this objective.
At the same time, imperialist competition between the major industrial powers within the international system of domination, as illustrated, for example, The war in Ukraine and the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza expose the hypocrisy of states and their leaders who invoke “democracy,” “human rights,” or “international law,” etc.
The so-called bourgeois “democracy” has now lost all meaning. Elections are devoid of purpose, since the governments of nation-states, regardless of their ideological leanings and without any popular will, implement policies dictated by the bureaucracies and power centers of the international capitalist-state system (G7, European Union, IMF, NATO, etc.). Their bourgeois “democracy” is increasingly taking on the characteristics of a dictatorship and an authoritarian regime with totalitarian aspirations.
In Greece, following the social defeat of the 2010–2012 uprising against the loan programs imposed by the European Union, the ECB, and the IMF, we are already experiencing the concrete effects of this authoritarianism: the lasting impoverishment of the working classes, permanent austerity, and the continuous hardening of state repression.
But beyond the intensification of exploitation and totalitarianism, the international state-capitalist system, with its logic of infinite growth, its limitless accumulation, and the ecological destruction it engenders, confronts us with a fundamentally existential question: that of our survival as a human species, and indeed the very survival of the Earth and its ecosystems. This ecological catastrophe, with its already irreversible consequences, undoubtedly constitutes one of the most powerful forces driving the people to overthrow the global system of state-capitalist domination. This places us before a fundamentally existential question: that of our survival as a human species, and indeed the very survival of the Earth and its ecosystems. This ecological catastrophe, with its already irreversible consequences, undoubtedly constitutes one of the most powerful driving forces for people to overthrow the global system of state-capitalist domination.
If Rosa Luxemburg formulated the dilemma “Socialism or Barbarism” in her time, today the dilemma is posed in these terms: “Social Revolution or Annihilation.” Despite the difficult conditions in which we live and the bleak future that the State and Capital have in store for us, our struggle to overthrow them must continue at all costs.
Comrades, I wish you strength and courage in the struggle. I wish all political prisoners to hold firm, wherever they are, in prison or in solitary confinement, in Europe, Turkey, Israel, America, everywhere.
SOLIDARITY AND FREEDOM TO ALL REVOLUTIONARIES, ANTI-CAPITALIST, AND ANTI-STATIST POLITICAL PRISONERS
From Domokos Prison in Greece, Nikos Maziotis, 20/12/,2025