Ta Paidia Tis Galarias

The magazine Τα Παιδιά της Γαλαρίας (The Children of the Gallery) has been published irregularly in the last 20 years. The first issue was published in April 1990. As we wrote in the editorial of that first issue, we had already abandoned the artificial collectivities that our former anarchist ideology dictated, and aiming at speaking to our potential comrades everywhere in our name, or at least only in our pseudonym, we refused to follow an ideology separated from our everyday life or to create another one. This practically meant that we would not try to juxtapose an activist “users’ guide”, a model of an “ideal theory and organization” to be used by all kind of followers, but we would try to develop a consciousness of our own struggle showing to other proletarians, through the depiction of the ideas, the emotions, the practices and the perspectives that emerge in class struggles, the profound causes we are in a continuous, everyday conflict with the ruling class as also with each other.

For us the abolition of waged labor, commodity exchange, democracy, the state, the separations and fragmentations within the proletariat still remain not only a desirable target but also a practical potentiality that emerges in a contradictory way in class struggles, every time they overcome their partial character. The historical movement for communism –which we believe we are a part of– is a practical necessity which comes out of the dead-ends of the contradictory and decadent movement of capitalist social relations and the everyday struggles of proletarians; it is the continuous and arduous search for the recomposition of the human community (Gemeinwesen). The method that we use in our issues to analyze the social-class antagonism, is that of negative dialectics and self-critique.

Our name was inspired from the title of a film we are fond of which refers to the plebeians, to the proletariat that used to frequent the galleries of the Parisian popular theaters during the 19th century. In our use of it, the title indicates the unbound proletariat that sneers at the spectacle and every form of normality.

(Source: LibCom.org.)