RESPONSIBILITY CLAIM FOR THE BOMB ATTACK ON THE MINISTRY OF LABOUR AND HELLENIC TRAIN
“Death on the scaffolding, death on the trains, capitalism is fed with blood”
Slogan born in the huge demonstrations of March 2023 for the state capitalist crime in Tempi.
On 26 January 2025 and 28 February 2025 respectively, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated against the government of murderous anti-worker restructuring and Hellenic Train, a subsidiary of the Italian monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato, which bears the main responsibility for the murder of 57 fellow human beings in Tempi on 28 February 2023.
The demonstrations and strikes are a contribution to the formation of our collective defence as a Class and at the same time, since they took place in a country that played an active role in the US-Zionist genocidal war in Palestine, a practical act of solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people, who, with gun in hand, are showing the way for the liberation of the peoples of the whole world.
In particular, the strike of 28 February was a response to the rivers of blood that are spilled every day in the labour sweatshops. A response to the unspeakable pain for our fellow workers, our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our sons and daughters, our friends and girlfriends, lost or crippled in the struggle for a living wage. A response to the relentless class warfare we live every day here.
The massacre of the working class in the workplace as a conscious policy of capital and the state apparatus
The figures for deaths at work, even those given by official state statistics, which do not record a large number of incidents (e.g. of migrants) or show deaths as pathological, are inexorable. In the last three years alone, over 600 workers have died and over 1000 have been seriously injured (amputations, permanent paralysis, severe respiratory and cardiac problems), while thousands of others have been injured in need of medical treatment (with all the multifaceted costs that this entails) in over 40,000 work ‘accidents’. These figures are much higher if we include the hundreds of deaths per year, according to estimates by independent international organisations, from diseases (cancers, cardiovascular diseases) related to unhealthy working conditions (e.g. permanent exposure to chemicals, exhaust fumes), which the Greek state does not even register as such, in violation of international guidelines.
The butchery of the working class in the workplace has a name: it is called class exploitation, the pursuit of maximum profit by capital, the extraction of surplus value. It is called employer terrorism, it is called state policy of strengthening the competitiveness of the labour market, it is called employer trade unionism. It is called memoranda, it is called a policy of reducing public debt, it is called the EU’s fiscal stability pact, it is called the Achtsioglou law, the Hatzidakis law, the Georgiadis law. It is called poverty, unemployment, extortion of survival.
The parliament is a mechanism of class domination. The ministers and deputy ministers, the general secretaries, the technocrats of the Association of Enterprises and Industries, the banks and the shipowners who staff the legislative committees for the drafting of anti-worker laws are well aware of the consequences of the laws they pass. They are fully aware that the abolition of collective labour agreements, compulsory unpaid overtime, six-day work, the slashing of heavy and unhealthy work, the linking of wages to productivity (minimum wage law), the increase in retirement thresholds, the virtual abolition of the labour inspectorate, the criminalisation of strikes and the liberalisation of dismissals, the abolition of basic safety standards, all lead with mathematical precision to an explosion in the number of workers’ deaths and injuries. But that is their job, their role, that is why they are in this position. To shield and reinforce the capitalists’ profitability with the blood of the working class : with the blood of construction workers, shipbuilders and dockers, with the blood of bicycle drivers and train and transport workers, with the blood of call centre and catering workers, with the blood of workers in industry and public works, with the blood of migrant farm workers.
This is precisely why its persons and structures have been in the crosshairs of the proletariat and the revolutionary movement throughout time. From the execution by urban guerrillas in the Nazi occupation of the fascist corrupt labour minister Kalyvas to the bloody battles of the building movement in the 1960s in front of it and the attacks on its structures during the Junta by anti-dictatorship organisations, and from its constant targeting in the post-war period by revolutionary organisations to its militant blockades by workers’ unions.
The defence of the life of the working class is a condition for its political formation and its counter-attack
The struggle against the generalised labour slaughterhouse is for the working class a struggle of life. A struggle for its present and future. A defensive struggle and at the same time offensive-revolutionary. No workers’ claim can be won if we cannot first effectively defend our own lives, and on the other hand no effective defence of our gains can be made if this defence is not perceived as a starting point for conquests and revolutionary leaps. We certainly have no illusions that there can be safe working conditions within the capitalist system. Work under capitalism was, is and will be inherently unsafe as the legal theft of labour power by capital, as alienated labour, as wage slavery in the final analysis.
However, until labour is liberated from the shackles of capital, or rather until the way is opened for it and the “society of freely co-operative producers”, we must first of all return from our jobs alive and well. And for this to happen, our first concern cannot be other than the multifaceted development of the promising multinational proletarian current that is being born today in the depths of capitalist production: from the sweatshops of the call centres to the courier companies and from the ports and factories to the strawberry fields and all the sweatshops of wage slavery.
Because, as historical experience has shown, it is precisely there, in the high temperatures of the class struggle where “steel is bound”, that the revolutionary class organisations of the future are born, those which will ground the revolutionary project in the present historical time, and will constitute in this direction the necessary political-military structure for the confrontation with the bourgeoisie, its state and its imperialist allies.
The state capitalist crime in Tempi as a turning point of the class struggle
Similarly to the labour slaughterhouse, the state capitalist crime in Tempi and the government’s management-cover-up in terms of mafia and social humiliation, brought the question of class organisation and defence, forms of struggle, and revolutionary perspective to the fore. For the development of the class struggle in the post-amnesty era, the Tempi was a turning point. They illuminated and at the same time concentrated in an explosive way central aspects of the Greek social formation. From the intensity of the opposition of labour capital and the – elastic – appropriation of social wealth by local and foreign capital, to the role of the state as collective capitalist and the class content of bourgeois justice. And from the -zero – value of our class lives for capital and the -shallow – moral background of state governmental power to the power of popular mobilisation, class solidarity and humanity. In particular, the crime in Tempe showed what the memoranda, privatisations, policies of public debt and deficit reduction meant. What the national objectives of remaining in the EU and Economic Monetary Union meant. No matter how much the systemic propaganda strives for the opposite, since 28/2/2023 the social memory has been imprinted with the “death-murder of 57 people in Tempi” as an answer to the above questions.
The debt of the ΟΣΕ [Hellenic Railways Organization] as a transfer of wealth from the working class to capital, with the state as guarantor
The course of privatisation of the public railways and the results it marked are revealing and leave no room for misinterpretation. Similarly, as it happened in all public infrastructures, from ΟΤΕ [Hellenic Telecommunications Organization], ΔΕΗ [Public Electricity Company], ΕΥΔΑΠ [Hellenic Water Supply and Sewage Company] and forest fire-fighting, to public health and education, the devaluation and dismantling of the public railways was a specific state policy, integrated into the strategies of Greek capitalism and the EU. Public transport, like all public infrastructure, is a burden for the Greek bourgeoisie, an unnecessary burden that it always wanted to get rid of before it was plundered by the big public contractors, the banks and the day labourers of the bourgeois parties and governments.
In any case, the term “public transport”, referring to the ΟΣΕ, can only be misused, just as any use of the term “public” is misused when it identifies enterprises of the civil state. For since it was founded in 1971 by the Junta (retaining a large part of the Junta’s administrative staff even after the post-war period), the ΟΣΕ has been constituted in terms of a private enterprise and not, of course, as a service oriented towards the promotion of the public interest. It was therefore always subject to the capitalist accounting framework defined by the relationship between profit and losses, unlike what would correspond to a public service, albeit under state control, which is supposed to exist to serve the public interest, regardless of profit.
But what appeared to be the losses of ΟΣΕ, and how over the years these losses accumulated to create the huge debt of the organisation and then its bankruptcy and its sale to capital, namely to the Italian railway monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato, whose subsidiary is Hellenic Train? Apart from the provocative theft of public money by the ΟΣΕ’s administrations, appointed by the bourgeois ruling parties and closely linked to public contractors – which gave birth to the socially repugnant caste of the senior public-police bureaucracy, as in the rest of the public sector, what appeared to be a loss was the difference between the meagre revenues – from the relatively cheap tickets – and the high costs required to keep the railway running at a basic level. A discrepancy which the state covered, as it should have done, albeit to a limited extent, since the money it spent was so much that the railway simply had to survive, money which was not its own, of course, but the people’s money from its heavy taxation. In reality, therefore, the stolen social wealth that the bourgeois state embezzled – at the same time as it relieved big capital from taxation – in order to finance the public services in an underwhelming way, retaining of course a not inconsiderable amount for its people, was registered as a debt of the ΟΣΕ. And to whom was this debt of the ΟΣΕ and therefore of the state and ultimately of the people and the working class? But to the creditors of the Greek state, i.e. the banks and consequently the creditors of the Greek banks, i.e. the European and mainly German, English and French financial capital, as well as, of course, the American capital. The predatory nature of the capitalist imperialist system, which converts the debt of capital to the working class into a debt of the working class to capital and the robbery of the social wealth of a country into a debt of the people of that country to imperialist capital, is revealing.
The privatisation of ΟΣΕ as a state strategy, an EU imperative and a memorandum commitment
In this context, while debts were piling up while the railway was still operating in the terms of past decades with an outdated and small network, the urban clamour for the modernisation and consolidation of the ΟΣΕ and the EU’s demands for ‘enhancing the competitiveness of the transport and public transport sector’ as a precondition for Greece’s accession to the EU and later to the EMU, were in fact the battering ram for its dismantling and eventual privatisation. In 1996, the now modernising PASOK (a social-democratic political party) will carry out the first partition of ΟΣΕ, with the establishment of ΕΡΓΟΣΕ ΑΕ, which undertook the modernisation of the network on the basis of private economic criteria, while five years later ΓΑΙΟΣΕ ΑΕ is established for the exploitation of ΟΣΕ’s real estate. In 2005, under the ND government, the fragmentation of ΟΣΕ was deepened – after another huge transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top through the nationalisation of ΟΣΕ’s EUR 4.5 billion debt – with the establishment of ΤΡΑΙΝΟΣΕ ΑΕ, which undertakes ΟΣΕ’s passenger and commercial services, with tens of millions of euros in endowments, in accordance with EU directives. Three years later in 2008 and while the then New Democracy MP Kyriakos Mitsotakis was speaking openly from the Parliament about the need for the immediate privatization of ΟΣΕ “in order not to burden the Greek people any more”, the then Minister of Transport K. Hatzidakis would lay the foundations for the reconstruction – privatization of the railway, demagoguing indecently about the circumstances of a serious railway accident in Bralos in the same year with 16 injured, where again “human error” and “bad public” had been highlighted as causes, and not the overloaded wagons for profit in violation of all regulations, as the findings of the experts proved.
What New Democracy failed to implement due to the change of government in 2009, the new PASOK government will undertake to continue by transferring 49% of ΤΡΑΙΝΟΣΕ to private investors, until the bankruptcy of the Greek state in 2010 and its inclusion in the regime of memorandum supervision by the EU, the European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) create new dynamics. The complete privatisation of the railways will become a memorandum commitment of the Greek state towards its creditors, in order to disburse the instalments of its ‘rescue’ from the gigantic debt accumulated by a number of predatory procedures of a similar nature to those that created the railways’ debt, which in 2010 had reached almost 10 billion euros.
In the years that will follow, the railway will go on with reduced and poorly paid staff, non-existent investments in new technologies and safety standards, fully depreciated, so that in 2017 – under the SYRIZA ANEL government and with the consent of PASOK and ND – the privatization of the railway will finally take place, through ΤΑΙΠΕΔ [Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund] and it will be sold off for 45 million euros to the Italian monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato. In other words, a public good, which had been paid for with tens of billions of euros of stolen workers’ surplus value, was sold to capital for the above-mentioned paltry price.
This huge transfer of wealth from the social base to capital, especially foreign capital, was attempted to be justified by the then Prime Minister Tsipras as an obligation imposed by the memoranda and that without this sale the Greek state would have paid a 600 million euro fine to the EU, while the payment of the instalments would have been suspended. And indeed this was the case, except that we do not forget that it was the government of the time that had passed the third memorandum, annulling the sweeping popular anti-memorandum will of July 2015, just as we do not forget that he himself had publicly expressed himself in favour of the privatisation, stressing that in the sale contract the Italian monopoly was expected to make productive investments of 600 million euros in the coming years. However, no investment was made – and there was no control in this regard, lest the new investors become unhappy – despite two very serious railway accidents, the first in Serres in 2016 with two deaths and the second in Andendros in Thessaloniki with three deaths. Incidents that had highlighted the non-existence of even the basic safety standards, light signalling, telecommand, European ETCS system, single track over a large part of the network, etc. according to the clear complaints of the workers since then. Controversies that had highlighted the scandal of the non-implementation of the famous 717 contract of 2014 worth several million euros, a contract that would have implemented much of what is necessary for railway safety, but which was deliberately undermined by the private -in essence- ΕΡΓΟΣΕ and the competent state government officials (ministers, general secretaries), in order to keep ΟΣΕ discredited, while the funds of the contract were being subject to provocative waste by the ΕΡΓΟΣΕ management.
Thirsty for services to big capital after almost 5 years away from governance and its gains, the New Democracy, the predominantly historical party of the Greek bourgeoisie, will deepen its policy of privatisation and its “all to capital” policy in all sectors. In particular, as far as the railways are concerned, the government will go so far as to boast about the positive balance sheets that the privatised railways were now showing due to the state subsidy and the state cancelled debt, but also about their ‘modernisation and safety’, even though there were constant complaints from the workers about the deplorable state of the network, the non-implementation of the 717 contract and the unsuitable type of many trains used by Hellenic Train. In order to reward it for these services, the government of the New Democracy will even go as far as to sign a contract with Hellenic Train in July 2022, under which the Greek state undertook to pay more than 60 million euros annually for 15 years (a total of more than one billion euros), including for the development of the network’s barren lines – something that never happened – while it legally relieved the company of almost all of its obligations of 600 million, which it had undertaken when the sale contract was signed in 2017. A law that was accompanied by the government and the competent Ministry of Transport headed by Kostas Karamanlis for the “new era in railway services and safety”.
The crime in Tempi, the government and Hellenic Train
From then on, everything was predestined. Hellenic Train, lavishly funded and free of any trace of formal restriction and with a government ruthless in serving its interests by its side, could now freely indulge in what is the dna of every capitalist enterprise. That is, the pursuit of maximum profit, in that field where, as Marx said, “there is no crime that capital is incapable of committing and no human law that it cannot break”.
On 28 February 2023, in conditions that had been approached several times before, a freight and a passenger train collided head-on in Tempi, resulting in the death of 57 of our fellow working class people. Fathers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandmothers, grandfathers. Young people, students, workers, engine drivers, immigrants, pensioners.
The country’s railway network, which was still operating on single lines, in the absence of any investment for its development, “as a cost to the positive balance sheets of the company”, was not equipped with either light signalling, or telecommand, or of course with the modern means of preventing oncoming traffic on single lines. These were also ‘anti-competitive costs’. The management of Hellenic Train and, of course, the government and the Ministry of Transport knew full well what these criminal deficiencies meant. They knew very well that without all these systems, the railway, understaffed due to staff cuts and without safety infrastructure, was destined at some point – even on the basis of human error due to the lack of training and the overwork of the employees – to bring about many years of misfortune. And of course, alas, if in 2023, with this development of productive capacities, the question of the safety of hundreds of people were to be left entirely to the human factor, without multiple safeguards to nullify the effect of a mistake. These safeguards, however, were not in place, with Hellenic Train fully aware that this would be tantamount to directly exposing the travelling public to death. And of course with full conscience on the part of the Ministry of Transport, which, through the mouth of K. Kramanlis, was smearing the workers as “spoiled” -as the Health Minister today calls the struggling health workers- when they exposed the huge safety gap, the miserable working conditions and the non-implementation of the 717 contract.
Of course, the attitude of Hellenic Train and the government is perfectly compatible with their “being”. And surely one cannot expect sensitivity to the lives of the people from those who have systematically robbed them for years. Ruthless criminal capitalists are the owners of Hellenic Train, the Italian state monopoly Ferrovie Dello Stato. Una faca una raca (One face, one race) with our ‘own’ working class murderers: the shipowners, the industrialists, the bankers and their political representatives, with many of whom, moreover, they work closely. And, of course, Ferrovie Dello Stato is flesh and blood of the always fascist at the core – and openly so today – of the Italian State and of the imperialist Italian big bourgeoisie with its spheres of influence in North Africa and the Mediterranean and its central position in the European industrial division.
A monopoly with organic relations with the NATO war machine and the Zionist state, the murderer of Israel, as evidenced by its dealings with military industries that supply NATO on the one hand, and its relations with the Zionist ZIM, the main supplier of arms to Israel, as well as with the Zionist state itself, for which it undertakes many commercial transports, which is why it maintains offices in Tel Aviv. A monopoly with a long history of class warfare against the Italian proletariat, which also gave birth to armed violence on the part of the latter during the years of revolutionary confrontation in Italy in the 1970s.
The cover-up of the crime in Tempi as an assumption of political responsibility by the government
The class nature of the crime in Tempi determined, as it was obvious, the terms of the political and judicial management of the crime by the government and Hellenic Train. They directly blamed the blame on human error and the “chronic pathologies of the Greek state and public sector” even before the blood had dried, demanding in fact even more freedom of movement for capital, more privatisations and new attacks on what public infrastructure remained. They have been rushing around the scene of the disaster on government orders – disregarding the bodies of the dead – and in violation of every protocol, thus making the investigation very difficult in order to cover up the various responsibilities of Hellenic Train, including those for the monstrous pyrosphere that cost the lives of passengers, responsibilities that could reveal serious aspects of the link between the state, capital, Hellenic Train and illegal black capital. They took out of the frame of criminal responsibility, through their own justice system, the management of Hellenic Train and the Ministry of Transport, as well as of course all those responsible over the years, top government and state officials, who contributed to the railway being in exactly the situation it was in on 28/2/ 2023: that is, a railway of public danger.
In fact, we are not even talking here about a cover-up, but about taking responsibility for the murder of 57 people. Because when not only is the owner of the railway company, which is clearly responsible for the crime, not only not prosecuted, but remains at the helm of the railway, then we are certainly talking about the government, capital and the supervising EU taking political responsibility through bourgeois justice, in its historically familiar role of covering up the crimes of the system (from the magnificent corruptors of the occupation and the torturers of the Junta, to the murderous capitalists of today and their executive organs, the security forces). An assumption of responsibility that becomes even more deafening when even today the basic safety systems have not been installed on the railways, as demonstrated by numerous incidents, the most notable being the one in Agioi Anargyros a few months ago, where by chance we did not have another head-on collision of trains full of passengers. Which becomes even more deafening when the EU continues to make its budgetary programmes for Greece dependent on the progress of transport privatisations, while placing as EU transport commissioner the chosen one of Mitsotakis, Tzitzikostas, as the guarantor of the cover-up of the crime in Tempi.
Practically today the government, the state, capital, the judiciary, the domestic power system as a whole, are saying with bottomless cynicism to the whole society: “this is the framework of the system in which you live”. Similarly to the deaths in the labour camps, similarly to the deaths in Pylos, similarly to the deaths in the fires and floods, similarly to the deaths in the police stations, similarly to the abused and murdered women of the trafficking circles, similarly to the genocide in Gaza in which the Greek state actively participates, the deaths in Tempe are the necessary blood tax for the system to exist and reproduce. Just as the slogan of the March 2023 demonstrations said : “Death on the scaffolding, death on the trains, capitalism is fed by blood”.
The fascism of the domestic capitalist political system and the opposing class awe that is struggling to form
The rulers believed that with the above line – a mixture of bourgeois neoliberal arrogance and extreme right-wing crudity – they could impose themselves against a society badly traumatised by the defeats of the recent past and rehabilitated by the daily struggle for survival. They were, however, disastrously denied. The big social outbreak of March 2023, with three weeks of mobilisations with many hundreds of thousands of people all over the country, which succeeded in synthesising a multitude of political practices (demonstrations, big strikes – one even organised from below without the employer ΓΣΕΕ [General Confederation of Greek Workers], occupations, clashes – street fights) was the first resounding response. A response that obviously drew on the remarkable rearguard battles of the previous period (pandemic – health crisis, the hunger strike of the revolutionary D. Koufontinas, labour struggles, insurrectionary events in Nea Smyrni), and which opened a serious rift in the relations of social representation, which fuelled various political processes and dynamics, both visible and underground, that would inevitably find their way back to manifest themselves. The elections of 2023 with the emphatic victory of the New Democracy did not close this rift, nor did it mean, as unfortunately many voices within the movements argued, that there had been no rift at all and that society had accepted its submission. Alas, with more than 45% abstention, elections can be the ultimate indicator of the orientations of a social formation. And in any case, what the elections showed was that this rupture is real, it is just that one side is coherent, having built around it on the basis of some relative annuities that it can still marginally offer, a strong social coalition with petty-bourgeois and middle-class strata as well as with backward sections of the working class, as bourgeois power has always done. In contrast to our side, which continued without organizational preparation corresponding to the intensity of the attack and with a political discourse often unable to give necessary transitional objectives (e.g. lifting of privatizations) a strategic breath, while it was unable to listen in depth to the universal demand for justice and thus to give it the political class content that corresponds to it, gradually even coming to put the crime in Tempi on the back burner of its priorities.
Almost two years later, in January 2025 – and in the midst of the politically significant solidarity mobilisations in Palestine – the intensification of the class struggle will unleash unprecedented dynamics. All it would take was an audio document capturing the last words of the young people who were dying of oxygen deprivation on the fatal train (and thus illuminating the horrific circumstances of their deaths and the defiant lies of the rulers). The massive demonstrations of 26 January across the country were confirmation that the divisive section centred on the Tempi not only exists, but has a much greater depth, seeking the organisation and political content to become a social explosion and class revolt.
In panic, the system of power, not waiting for the evolution and seeing the popular current threatening it with an overthrow, mobilized all its class hatred, revealing in all its extent its rotten value background, turning without hesitation against the relatives of the dead, practically to the dead themselves, practically to the whole society, saying in fact: “We will kill you and you will bow your head!” But this is in fact the word of a regime, more correctly the word of a fascist regime that demands mass social humiliation and subjugation by force.
If we want to look reality in the face, what the government and its bosses (local and foreign) attempted to do from 26 January 2025 -and from much earlier, of course- was to impose a fascist regime on the country, a regime that they have been diligently establishing for years through specific actions (repressive murderous management of the pandemic, interception, employer and state terrorism, transformation of the country into a vast American base, alliance with Israel). For only a fascist regime can be perceived – and is currently perceived by significant sections of the people – as a condition in which the authorities will murder en masse and openly cover up the murderers, while at the same time bending the memory of the dead, slandering their relatives and suppressing with a murderous instinct the people demonstrating in the streets. Precisely because only such a regime can today guarantee the needs of Greek capitalism in the destabilized international environment of intensifying antagonisms (transnational and imperialist), the new economic and financial crisis and the generalized social discontent and of course only such a regime can effectively serve the interests and plans of its imperialist protectors (USA and EU) and Israel.
In practice, therefore, the dilemma to which we are now called upon to respond, a dilemma to which the historic strike – uprising of 28 February throughout the country gave an equally historic answer, is clear. It is the same dilemma, albeit in different proportions, as the one faced by the peoples and proletariat of the whole world when faced with the danger of tyranny : “Chains or arms”. Let us resolutely choose the latter!
We dedicate these two actions to the Palestinian people and their heroic resistance.
Honour forever to Kyriakos Xymitiris and to those who fell fighting on the road to social revolution!
Revolutionary Class Self-Defence
Source: athens.indymedia
Translated by the Ghost of Pavlos Bakoyannis