In Greece you buy your bus tickets at news kiosks and various places, you buy several at a time, to save you looking for a kiosk every time you want to travel. On entering the bus you "validate" your ticket by putting in this little machine, and that means you can't use that ticket again. If you are caught sitting on the bus and you haven't "validated" your ticket you will be fined. So some enterprising people have come up with a simple method to totally undermine that system. The beauty of simple ideas.
Removed bus ticket "validating" machines.
From the beginning of 2016, dozens of ticket machines have been removed from buses in our neighbourhoods. With simply means, by unscrewing 4 screws and cutting one wire, ticket validation machines were removed from the buses of the local routes (250, 732, 203, 054), securing free transport for everyone even if just for a bit. Commuting with public transport is not strolling in the city. Commuting is a necessity which is directly related with the search for work as well as with us getting there on time. It is commuting for us, “those below”, the workers, the unemployed and the immigrants who serve the profits of the bosses.
That is why the ticket prices are increasing, that is why controls intensify, and that is why they establish special transport cops, leading to the enforcing of completely controlled zones on public transport and the increase of the cost of our lives. For us, therefore, transport is a blackmailing social necessity and we will not tolerate it being transformed into a daily stress about where we will bump into an inspector, or whether or not the money is enough for a ticket.
We will not tolerate our total exclusion from something that essentially belongs to us. This is why we factually resist and sabotage the control systems on public transport: on the ones that already exist (such as the pilot system of turnstiles on buses –i.e. bus 224- which were removed as soon as they appeared) as well those to come (electronic tickets, CCTV, cops, price increases) disrupting thus the technical possibility of our bosses to impose on us whatever suits them. We are not the state. We are against it, and its left wing, which shares out crumbs for “free commute” and presents the flexible workers, the part-timers and the workers of 300, 400 and 500 euro as privileged, while it simultaneously promotes class exclusion for all the weak and grabs more from their wage: with taxes, social security, illegal and unpaid labour.
Against the state which calls us to consent and abide to its strategies for more profit and more discipline, we propose the resistance to control, sabotaging of surveillance mechanisms, refusing to pay as well as the factual solidarity amongst locals and immigrants, those who resist, amongst all us who have nothing to gain from state policies. And we call all those who want to and possibly fear, to do their part: factually refuse the controls and prices in our daily commutes, sabotage control systems on public transport in every way and everywhere, individually and collectively defend their free commuting. Because our attitude against public transport represents our overall attitude in society and against the structure of the state. And all of this is an inseparable piece of the struggles we fight against the misery and devaluation of our lives, against the employer arbitrariness and oppression, for the defence of social reproduction and social goods.
AGAINST COMMODITIES AND SELF-ORGANIZED,
WE ARE TAKING OUR LIVES INTO OUR OWN HANDS.
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