In 2014, after an anarchist comrade published a critique of the CCF’s behavior in the Koridallos prison wing they shared, five members of the CCF severely beat him with sticks, breaking his limbs. The project Act For Freedom Now! later published a zine containing the criticism of the CCF’s behavior as well as several reactions of disgust to the beating from many anarchist prisoners. You can read it in full here.
“The use of physical violence as a means of imposing opinions within the anarchist/anti-authoritarian movement is exactly the consequence of transforming cafe discussions and personal hostilities into political texts, whether due to mental ankylosis or vanity. The verbal violence which for years now has been tolerated and reproduced by the anarchist movement uproots basic anarchist values such as mutual respect and understanding, has paved the way for the application of such practices.
To conclude, the matter for us is not to cite another black page in the history of anarchist struggle, it is not to isolate political tendencies or anarchist organizations, but to delete once and for all behaviour that denegrates the substance of our struggle. And of course, let’s not pretend to be sacred virgins, most of us have been involved in incidents of endo-anarchist violence.
The CCF-imprisoned cell have given us an example to avoid, which simply reveals the development of a culture of violence. Let’s go beyond it.”
– SOLIDARITY TO ANARCHISTS GIANNIS NAXAKIS AND GRIGORIS SARAFOUDIS
AND THE STORY OF THE AMBUSH SET UP AGAINST OUR COMRADE AND FRIEND GIANNIS NAXAKI 2014
In years past, a handful of projects in the US translated and spread the writings of the CCF, without contextualizing them within the broader social war in Greece. These texts seem to have circulated so widely in anarchist circles, and in particular nihilist ones, due to a fetishization of the group’s militancy while glossing over the ways in which the proposals presented in their writings conflict with informality, not to mention their authoritarian behavior. Anarchists have continued to romanticize the CCF, stemming from an alienated and shallow relationship to this history and predictably fostering bombastic Internet sloganeering. It is beyond time that this stops.
To our knowledge, only two texts published in North America have articulated their own critique of this authoritarianism. Both are addressed to our context to warn against following a similar path.
LITTLE TURTLE CARRIES THE WORLD
(2023, excerpt)
The experience of the insurrectionary anarchist movement from the mid-2000s to our current time also contains two other lived lessons which it already seems most of the comrades in Atlanta have absorbed but bear repeating: the importance of discourse, sharing ideas, and the ability to give and receive feedback and criticism in good faith from people in the struggle locally and abroad if the channels of communication are open; and the vital importance of maintaining an experimental, informal and joyful approach to even the most militant projects of resistance. In the past two years of supporting the struggle against Cop City from afar I’ve been really amazed by the wider strategy of the movement to maintain complexity, spontaneity, informality and humor. The tendency to overtly specialize and militarize can be a pitfall of the clandestine struggle and is especially important for us to avoid. Those who strike at the machinery of power beneath cover of darkness are intelligent, blessed, and brave, braver by far than any cop, but they are not above the rest of the movement. As our old adage goes – revolt needs everything. There are important experiences to remember lived by some informal anarchist groups from the last fifteen years, such as the transformation of the imprisoned cell of Greece’s Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF) from one of the most intransigent and visionary revolutionary groups on the planet into, by some accounts, little more than a prison gang who spoke of themselves as the only true anarchists of action, as well as the disturbing spiral of the Mexican eco-extremist group ITS (or Individualists Tending Toward the Wild in English) into a death cult supported only by internet fanboys. While some may wisely choose the path of assassination and bombing when necessary, we are not agents of Death. Many of our ancestors on the anarchist path have chosen thus, and we welcome Death as a part of the great cycles of life – but anarchy is lived joy, freedom, chaotic harmony. A friend shared a picture last summer from a party somewhere in the Southeast that expressed it better than I can: “This Life is a Miracle. All Love is Possible.”
Resignation is Death: Responding to the negation of anarchy
(2016, excerpt)
Around the same time as the anti-police insurrection that took place in Greece in December 2008, a different beginning for this tendency was taking place. The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF) developing out of the youth culture in the city centres of Athens and Thessaloniki, began waging spectacular attacks. And since this time, nihlism and cynicism towards revolutionary activity (unless it is coming from nihilists) has become the dominant philosophy for taking these kinds of actions. All around the world now, actions claimed under the banner of FAI/IRF and CCF are being framed as the only real anarchist activity, with websites like 325.nostate.net acting as a sort of ideological platform for actions and statements taken out of their social contexts. As has been pointed out by comrades in Barcelona [1] this tendency has a number of problems associated with it (even from an insurrectionary perspective), due to its romanticization, and the arrogance of the statements it’s cells make, cuts itself off from critique and further development.
In “A Conversation Between Anarchists: Conspiracy of Cells of Fire & Mexican Anarchists” [2] the CCF imprisoned cell illustrate this problem very well. In the interview they make a claim that they, the CCF, are the only rightful carriers of an anarchist struggle given that they are the only anarchist prisoners who carry on their struggle inside of the prison walls. They claim, for example, that after an escape attempt by their members, that other anarchists “did absolutely nothing” when jailers were taking their comrades back to prison. This would seem a fair assessment of the incoherence of some anarchists when faced with repression, the problem is that they leave out some important information. In January 2014, when individualist anarchist prisoner Giannis Naxakis publicly criticized the behavior of some of the CCF imprisoned cell, for behaving in a manner not different from other prison gangs; for apologizing to the guards for the “immature” behaviour of himself and others to prison guards and administration, they ganged up on him and beat him with stakes, leaving him with broken bones. The public CCF statement justifying the beating, is written in a tone no different than you would expect from any Stalinist guerrilla, describing his critiques as slander, delegitimizing him as an anarchist who isn’t following the correct line that the CCF was laying out [3]. Their line in relation to the beating would vastly differ from the position they declare later, in the interview with the Mexican comrades, that a fundamental basis for an anarchist conception of society would be constant change “anarchists who don’t want to be in it and will carry out a struggle to reach something different, unknown territories never explored, territories of more freedom….new deniers of the existent”. Their general tone is instead that of a “with us or against us” attitude. They act as if non-nihilist anarchists have not been carrying out the same struggle for a long time. For example, the Greek prison revolts of 2007 were sparked by the beating of anarchist bank robber Giannis Dimitrakis. Is it not unreasonable that the divisions the CCF have intentionally forged between imprisoned “anarchists of action” might have created the context for the silence they describe from the other anarchist prisoners? Or perhaps that they are over-embellishing the silence of these other prisoners?
It should be taken into consideration that we are talking about the psychology of those who are facing extreme repression at the hands of the greek state as well as a high level of disdain from the broader leftist anarchist tradition in greece. The fact that the state is presently charging many anarchists arrested for clandestine attacks and bank robberies as members of the CCF, regardless of their actual identification with the label, as well as the star power they are receiving internationally can’t help but contribute to the paranoia the imprisoned cell may feel. Of course these comrades didn’t help themselves with this from the beginning by forming a quantitative informal anarchist organization, an identification with a label, a tally of attacks, an evaluation of pricier targets, etc. Rather they do not treat informal organization as qualitative, a tool to be used in the struggle for anarchy, a means of fluid organization and resisting representation. For example, is it any better to have the CCF describing the do’s and don’t’s of real anarchists, legitimizing or delegitimizing the activities of other anarchists based on their own doctrine than it is from a card carrying Anarchist Federation member?
Submitted Anonymously Over Email