Comrades, I have a sufficiently coherent political understanding and a firm commitment to collectively formed scholastic positions on the relation between ends and means, to be able to weigh the importance of the hunger strike as a means of struggle, whenever it is chosen. The main line of battle of the hunger strike is the body of the striker and the frontal force of this line is constituted by the movement it triggers. The breadth and cohesion of this front depend on the political significance of the cause and on its understanding by the solidarity movement and, furthermore, on its perception of the striker’s credibility in remaining on the front line until the end of the battle and his steadfastness to the declared cause.
During my 3 years of captivity I have carried out a solidarity strike with no predetermined end date, which I stopped at 3 weeks based on the development of the struggle, and also many short symbolic strikes (from 1 to 7 days). This strike is different. Now I am the one who opens up the struggle, I define the purpose and hold the front line. I ought to be transparent about the purpose, the circumstances that brought about the need and my practical intention.
The hunger strike is a very serious means of struggle, because it has a direct physical cost and endangers the life of the person struggling. This condition can and does give birth to an ad hoc mass and aggressive movement. Moreover, the results of the hunger strike shape the conditions for subsequent struggles with the same means. Since the main line of battle is the body of the striker, its might against the class-political enemy and its influence on the social movement depend on the determination of the striker to fight to the end. Whenever the escalating strike (i.e. the one that has no declared end) is used indiscriminately and ends in a retreat, the credibility of this means diminishes for the whole movement, the class-political enemy gets bolder and the next strikers have to march further in order to achieve the collapse of the enemy’s reaction line. Comrades, I have political understanding and self-discipline. I did not make a recklessly hasty decision, I am not feigning, I am not looking to a negotiation. The circumstances that led me to this choice are politically and personally borderline.
I’ve said before, that for prisoners the hunger strike is not the ultimate mean, it is the real means of resistance, besides those of revolt and of mass workers’ strike in prison. For prisoners there is no scale of means, no room for maneuver, no room for tactical moves. Under built-in borderline conditions, we must resist with the ultimate means.
However, I must leave no doubt about the importance of the cause and the urgency of the circumstances. It may seem disproportionate to give my life for 4 square meters inside the special prison. I am fighting for a minimum space where the rule of ‘might is right’ cannot prevail. I am fighting to de-legitimize the terrorizing and provocative use of cannibalism, by the state. So that the threat of penal burden, even of life incarceration, does not hang over any political prisoner who will stand up to the physical violence of any would-be ruler. This is my most basic self-defense in a place where there is no community combative force. I must survive both as a body, as a person, as a decent human being, in order to remain a political subject. The political meaning of my demand and its objective purpose are crystal clear.
If I made a bigger demand, either speculatively, to mobilize people more, or opportunistically, to make the most of the maximum means, I would be deceiving the movement. Moreover, in such a case, if I won the main objective, it would look like a retreat. What chance of victory would we have if I requested my transfer to another prison? The facts would not weigh in favor of the struggle, since I am convicted for armed guerrilla organization, and the walls of the special prison of Domokos have so far been immovable for unrepentant captive guerrillas. Moreover, in percentage terms, I am still, at best, in the first half of my captivity. The goal of my transfer from the special prison would be astronomical. No victory is assured, even for the minimum that I am now demanding. The seemingly minimal demand does not ensure that the state will not treat this as an opportunity to murder me, or, even more so if it retreats, that it will overlook the attempt to inflict maximum damage on me, at the least cost to itself. But to understand the gravity of the necessity which determined an apparently small purpose, the difference between my living in this special prison and living in any other prison, would be infinitesimally small in proportion to the difference between living under constant physical terror and living in a condition of elementary self-defense. The gravity of the need dictated that the claim be kept to its most basic terms. And it is a need that cannot wait until we talk with the movement, organize, etc. Those who are caught unprepared by the rapid developments of the class-political struggle probably have ways of organizing that are inappropriate for these times. As the Organization Revolutionary Self-Defense wrote: immediate response to the terror of the state and the bosses with whatever forces are available.
These days in the prison “infirmary” cell, even if they are my last, they are beautiful, in contrast to the prospect of years of captivity under physical terror, constant threat of torturous prison transfers and additive sentences. These are days when the terror of the state, direct or indirect, cannot touch me.
I will honour the fight I have taken up. I will not hand over to the next resistances from prison, the line of non-retreat further back from the point where previous hunger strikers in greek prisons and internationally have rooted it.
If we cannot fight for 4 square meters, how will we fight for the whole earth? In these 4 square meters of self-defense within the tightest captivity, lies the common struggle with Palestine, Kurdistan, the land of Mapuche, the global South, outside and inside the metropolis, the common struggle for an internationalist revolutionary movement. As comrade Duran Kalkan from the PKK noted, they want to politically or physically eliminate the guerrilla and the captured rebels, to eliminate the consciousness of self-defense and its organization by the free society.
Dialectic from the PKK, we do not fight when the objective conditions are favorable, but against them, because the objective conditions work towards our annihilation. This is not a hunger strike in forbidding objective and subjective conditions, but instead, it is a move that, by establishing that nothing can nullify resistance, is ready to open up space and perspective.
Dimitris Chatzivasileiadis
Saturday 29 June, 9th day of hunger strike
from the special counter-revolutionary prison of Domokos
PS: Practical update: As in every hunger strike so far, I drink only water. I only find meaning in prolonged strikes, with sugar, salt and tea, when it comes to mobilization campaigns, as practiced by the Turkish and Kurdish revolutionary movements. Apart from that, in the present conditions and in the middle of the summer, delay will not strengthen the struggle. It is likely that I will intensify the struggle soon. So I am informing on time. With open cards on the table. The “fixed rendezvous’ are the main battles.