Who is Syspirosi Atakton?

We consider ourselves as part of a wider anarchist/antiauthoritarian movement willing to deconstruct and undermine the structural forms of the current socio-political system and put into practice alternative forms of socio-political organisation. Based on our local experience we are participating to an international antiauthoritarian network, trying to circulate the ideas of self-organization, self-legislation and solidarity.

The world, now, is passing through a grave crisis. The present political dynamics will decide if the current state of emergency, -with its military invasions, oppression and social repression- will extend, or whether the resistance being developed worldwide will prove to be efficient enough to halt it. We are marching towards the hope that this global resistance will prevail, fighting the solid base of this brutal system: capitalism/hierarchy/patriarchy.

The above three aspects of our lives are structurally interlinked, dominate our actions and subjugate the human spirit. Therefore we believe that antiauthoritarian practice should take place in various forms including matters of class, race and gender –always refuting bipolar dichotomies and fighting the ways in which our current political system is creating domains of abjected beings and domains of subjectivity based on arbitrary bias. The radical movement should primarily start from the inside: it needs to fight any hierarchical, sexist, racist, nationalist behaviour because this normative discourse and practice is allowing the present system to reproduce itself.

Our efforts also take under consideration the environmental crisis, referring to “ecology” as a particularly fragile domain of the current reality. At the same time, as a libertarian movement we should get rid of any neoliberal attitudes which deduct the class character from our struggles and present our fight as a simple claim of more rights without the utopian vision.

Our region, Cyprus, due to its natural resources has been for decades in the eye of the storm. Competition for domination in the region has already driven to numerous wars and conflicts. The totalitarian post-colonial regimes that were formed do not represent the interests of their people. We are in solidarity with every movement fighting towards social liberation and emancipation from local and foreign sovereignty.

Cyprus is one of the most militarized areas on the planet. Those of us who live here, trapped for decades in nationalist conflict, have allowed the elite to exercise their authority and implement their interests in a wider area without confronting any serious resistance. It is vital that the hegemony of nationalism breaks. We will be actively present in any effort to defuse it.

At the same time exploitation of workers from other countries has developed new unfavourable conditions for the workers. Within the struggles for equality in society, there is no place for exclusions based on birth place or other made-up identifications. Immigrants, as the most oppressed part of our society, are our potential allies. We must escape from any charity logics and seek for new ways towards substantial political and equal collaboration.

City as our main field of action is a reflection of what is happening in our wider society. Its nationalistic division, the invasion of capitalistic interests threatening to transform it to a window display, “clean” of any elements causing “nuisance”, church as the largest landowner with its own vision of “development”, are only some of the factors creating a challenging field of action, in which we aim to intervene creatively by expressing and accomplishing our own proposals for societies organized against hierchical, capitalistic and sexist institutions and logics, on the basis of self-organisation, solidarity, collectivity and liberality.

Syspirosi Atakton, Nicosia, Cyprus