(This article evolved out of a planning meeting in Thessaloniki of autonomists this weekend)

In these dark times when anyone standing up for justice in this world of hypocrisy, slavery and coercion, when those struggling for their own and others freedom by challenging the Empire are called terrorists, unity and clarity is needed now more than ever. Like the days of yesterday when the plantation owners slept drunkenly, obese in their towers and the slaves fought over the crumbs left to barely keep them alive, the infighting and divisions between the downtrodden left the tyrants asleep peacefully in their beds.

The struggle to reclaim the streets, the unoccupied premises, the fields, the organic harvest and the individual space to live and exist from the owners and the capitalists who have stolen them is the same as the mass struggles to liberate the factories and the schools and all the networks of resistance trying to reclaim our security in these times of war and surveillance. The attitudes of every woman, child and man battling in every corner of the globe came from the same principles. So why now do many of us see our battles as separate? Why now do we label, fragment and retreat into secrecy?

There is war against every one of us and it is a luxury to focus on our differences while the empire of wolves that would eat one another at any opportunity stand together as a pack to defend their horde. Imagine having that same unity and being right! They want us to believe in their terrorism of forcibly seizing foreign resources to protect our future, a theft paid for by lifeblood of others. And, they want us to hate the acts of those who violently oppose this.

From the great battle of Seattle on, they are unveiled and exposed. They have lost their legitimacy and they are trying to demonise the enemy within to control the uprising of the masses that is coming. But this enemy within is massive and bigger than ourselves. Now that the Red Zones surrounding their citadels and fortresses have become the new battleground of class war and their slaves are beginning to revolt, the Empire’s biggest fear are the housewives waving their red underwear from their balconies in Genoa, the South Korean students karate-kicking the police vans and the granddaughters banging pots and pans on the streets of Argentina.

The insanity is that when the hearts and minds of people are screaming out in their millions, we, the few hundreds are at each others throats fighting over how to fight. Autonomism has become so autonomous and egoistic that we have stopped building the relationship with the people we are part of. We, as the participants in these battles must also reflect the same aspirations of those who are with us in spirit but not in body. Then our small fist has a bigger impact. We are them and they are us, united in our oppression.

When the multitudes of global citizens arrive in Thessaloniki to combat the invaders of the Empire next summer, and the monetary problems of hospitality and support, before and after the actions, face us like a mountain, now is the time to make revolution a public phenomena. Let us demand, not ask, the authorities for social space – football stadiums, universities, squares – and make our demands public. If the authorities agree, they will be forced to acknowledge the fact that our demands are about us having the right to what is already ours in the eyes of the people. If they refuse, it will be another nail in their coffins sealing the lid on their legitimacy. The point then is to use the thing we all know and have forgotten - the strength of hundreds of thousands. Let us make our first action a reclamation of the social spaces we need, to flex our collective muscle, to gain confidence and to echo in the eyes of the people the essence of our ideas – that we have the ability to liberate ourselves. Imagine then the unity and determination that will follow.

Ours is a direct democracy that tolerates the individual acts whose origins we understand and there will be those who feel the acts threaten the movement but we will never be police in our own movement. Theirs is a ”democracy” that prevents individuals’ freedom of expression of their anger. And those, the mass media, through whose eyes people observe the battles, who are the mouthpieces of the Empire, our enemy – we must make into a utility. We have to learn ways to use their lenses for our own aims knowing that some will also spy on us, inform on us and misrepresent us. The road of disarming them by smashing their lenses and heads, of cleansing our actions of their presence or our own independent media - is a dangerous one. How can we know if a video activist is true or an infiltrator? Let us use their presence, try and make public declarations through the mass media, try to enlarge our own media and take precautions.

The Empire creates the enemy, the mass media points at it to highlight it and to put the fear of it in the minds of the millions. Now is the time for us to show we are not the enemy, or each other’s enemy. Now is the time to expose the Empire as the enemy and to rise up publicly in spite of them, to break out of retreats and isolation and to unite with the instinctive justice of those who do and can see through the fog. Because the stakes are so high. The price of social fear in a climate of surveillance and control is so obvious in those lands not so far away where individuals’ isolation means neighbours not knowing neighbours.

Everywhere, we must react to this climate of tension and state terror. Everywhere we must go on the streets as one unity and connect with the victims of state terror wherever they rebel – the immigrants, the unemployed, the Albanian children playing tumberleke, the school kids forced to cut their hair, the young male lovers torn from their partners to serve in the military. Anarchism must be made public before we are demonised, isolated, contained and extinct. The time is here and now for unity and time is running out.