The Greek Revolt and Freedom of Expression

This December marks one year since the young of Greece rose in revolt after the police murder of fifteen year old Alexis Grigoropoulos.  It was a burst of energy that still thrills me twelve months later…and I wasn’t even on the same continent.  We all go through formative moments in our lives, moments that shape our years to come.  I am sure that those explosive days were such moments for tens of thousands of Greek youth.

I remember hanging out with comrades at the time talking about it.  How exciting it was to see all of those working class kids staking claim to their lives.  Near the end of the conversation a comrade said, “yeah, and I bet there is mad fucking going on behind those barricades at night.”  I bet there was.  Revolt, revolution, is the most life affirming act there is and the ecstasies of that ebullient winter could be felt four thousand miles away.  The generation who experienced that won’t easily forget it.  I am confident that those December rages will reverberate in a thousand ways in a million lives and place its stamp on the future of the Greek class struggle.  Let those that pull the strings of those that pull the trigger rue the day they murdered Alexis Grigoropoulos.

In this essay(1) Savas Michael Mastas of the Greek Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK) gives his take on the revolt.  The translation is by no means perfect and the analysis, in my opinion, “catastrophist” in a number of places. That said, it is a clarion defense of  those workers who would determine their own fate and a just denunciation of those, especially on the left, who would seek to tie the fate of workers to the interests of capital.

The Greek Revolt and Freedom of Expression by Savas Michael-Matsas

The revolt in Greece in December 2008 did not take place, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard’s well known (but misleading) statement 2, at least according to what the mainstream mass media were presenting to the Greek public and the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) publicly and repeatedly was declaring.

The orgy of bourgeois democratic disinformation and of Stalinist slander during the December events is a monument to the glory of freedom of information and freedom of expression under capitalism. But above all it worked as a weapon in the war of the rulers to repel and defeat the mass rebellion of the ruled, which indeed did erupted challenging the monopoly of violence of the State and bourgeois power itself. It was the most important revolt in the country after the civil war of the ’40s and the 1973 uprising in the Polytechnic University of Athens against the military dictatorship.

The killing of a 15 years old boy by a Special Guard of the Police on December 6, 2008 became the fateful act that played the role of a catalyst for a the explosion; a direct confrontation of the youth with the capitalist State and all institutions of economic, political and bureaucratic power started. Day after day, week after week, the popular revolt with the very young generation of schoolchildren, students, unemployed and precarious workers in the forefront, supported by the broadest layers of working people, was mobilized all over the country, from North to South, in cities, towns and villages, putting under siege police stations, occupying public buildings, schools, universities, offices of bureaucratized unions, burning banks, clashing with the hated riot police which exhausted all its brutality and tear gas against the youth rebels and had to buy new ones from Israel. The places under occupation became centers of action and sites of the general assemblies discussing and deciding future action. Daily demonstrations were taking place

This unprecedented social explosion and its causes were totally disfigured in the bourgeois mass media. These are few examples:

Only the police version of the actual killing of the young Alexis Grigoropoulos was broadcasted claiming that the murder in cold blood by the Special Guard Korkoneas was just an unintentional accident (The killer himself was presented in a very sympathetic light in a disgusting “literary” story in the Arts Section in the Sunday issue of the daily of the Stalinist KKE “Rizospastis”3).

The mass revolt was presented exclusively as the isolated actions of blind violence by small gangs of anarchist hooligans covering their heads with a hood. In the Stalinist version, these hood bearing persons were provocateurs implementing the orders and a plan of local and foreign secret agencies.

The immigrant workers were particularly targeted by the media and demonized as actors of vandalism and looting.

When the night of December 23, a death squad of the bosses attacked with vitriol the Bulgarian immigrant worker and class struggle trade unionist Kostandina Kuneva, there was not only a complete cover up of the crime by the police but also a complete black out of information by the media. When an unprecedented mass movement of solidarity based on the December revolt itself emerged in the country and abroad and the issue could not any more ignored, information was systematically distorted and manipulated not only to cover up the crime but above all to stop the growing workers and popular movement that made the heroic trade-unionist Kostandina the flag of every social battle.

As sectors of the “deep State” turned to a kind of Italian style “strategy of tension” to repel the upheaval generated by the December events, a grenade was thrown by fascists against a gathering of antimilitarist activists in the Club of Immigrants in Exarcheia on February 24, 2009; only by chance the life of more than 35 people was spared. But the Police and mainstream media misrepresented the case as an “armed clash between competing anarchist groups”!

Not only the dimensions and the social depth of the great revolutionary Event of December that interrupted bourgeois normality had to be hidden and/or distorted by the mass media but even its trace had to be erased. In London, it was publicly announced that in the Hellenic Center an exhibition of artistic photography by Spyros Christofis and George Kasolas would be opened on January 14 to last until the end of January 2009. But the same night of the inauguration, after the ceremonial opening, the exhibition was canceled because the pictures were showing Athens in flames with the youth in rebellion clashing with the State repression forces…4

Resistances

This systematic campaign of disinformation did not remained unanswered. On the contrary, the right for information and truth, for freedom of expression became one of the main battlefields.

Cyberspace functioned as a space of freedom of expression and networking, a channel of counter-information and a powerful means for mass mobilization, sometimes instantaneous as in the night of December the 6th.

The challenge to the mass media manipulation condensed to the slogan Stop watching TV! Every body in the streets! took also the form of direct action.

On December the 16th, a most spectacular action was performed: the occupation of the ERT State TV Broadcasting. When the State TV station was broadcasting the main 15.00 pm News, and the Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis was addressing his parliamentary group and the Greek people on the recent huge financial scandal involving the government and an orthodox Monastery in Mount Athos(a scandal that cynically was covered up by the government closing now any further legal investigation on the affair), suddenly the image was interrupted ; another image of a group of 100 militants was broadcasted holding banners with slogans against the murderers of the State and for the liberation of those arrested during the revolt!

Many other TV and Radio Stations all over the country were temporarily occupied and statements of the revolt broadcasted.

Early January 2009 another direct action challenged the role of bourgeois mass media and the “tolerant repression” of freedom of expression: “On Saturday, January 10”, their Declaration announces, “a group of employed, unemployed, and unpaid workers and students in the media industry took over the headquarters of ESIEA (the union of the Greek journalists, photographers and other workers in the media industry). This endeavor, which basically opposes dominant Discourse, aims at demonstrating medieval working conditions in the mass media, as well as at promoting the need for the creation of a single assembly for the expression of ALL those who work in the media industry(See http://www.katalipsiesiea.blogspot.com).

The connection of overexploitation by “flexible” labour relations under neo-liberal capitalism in crisis and the lack of freedom of expression stressed by the activists of the occupation of ESIEA demonstrates the material social base not solely of this specific group in action but of the December revolt as a whole.

Against the dominant official explanation of the events presented by sociologists and other academics mobilized by the mass media barons focusing one-sidedly to the youth as an age group and denying the deeper class character of the revolt, for all the participants in this historical experience it was clear that the driving social force of the revolt was the emergence of a new proletariat, both native and immigrant, working under “flexible”, precarious, low paid conditions of overexploitation To this factor combined was with the dead end of an educational system that condemns the students to a future of unemployment ( 50 per cent of unemployed youth in Greece has a degree) or of precarious labour that has nothing to do with their studies. The proletarianization of vast petty bourgeois strata and a growing tendency to social exclusion and pauperization has added more explosive material.

“Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear!”

In direct contrast to the false, artificial image given by the mass media, the ruling classes in Greece, in Europe and internationally, and their spokespersons did recognized its revolutionary potential. The French daily Le Monde, in the first days of the revolt, had published an editorial with the headlines “Greece without a State”5. Dominique Strauss –Kahn, the head of the IMF has admitted in a public statement the real world historical nature of the December revolt as the first political explosion produced by the current world capitalist crisis. President Nicolas Sarkozy spoke about the threat that the Greek virus” spreads in France and in Europe and he had to retreat on an anti-Education bill to avoid the threat by the youth movement6. Despite the efforts, he could not prevent two powerful General Strikes on January 29 and March 19, 2009, millions of demonstrators in the streets and a 40 days insurrectionary General Strike in Guadeloupe that was extended in Martinique and Reunion, the overseas territories of metropolitan France.

Even in the Far East, voices in the Chinese ruling elite warned for the danger to see in Beijing scenes like those seen in Athens!7 In Iceland and Latvia the governments did not even survive to receive the warning. They fell under the impact of the crisis and mass unrest

The December revolt in Greece shows the future, the emerging class war in Europe and internationally. It sent its season greetings to the world bourgeoisie with the writing in the University wall in the center of Athens: Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear!

The weakest link

Greece became the stage for the fist social political explosion of the current world economic maelstrom because it is the weakest link, economically and politically, in the chain of the Euro-zone countries.

The social economic development of Greek capitalism in the last 20 years was based on the global expansion of finance capital and the process of integration of the European Union after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the East.

In the 1990s, the PASOK governments, especially the Blairite “modernizers” of the Simitis government tried to adapt Greek economy to the demands of capitalist globalization by introducing privatizations and flexible labour relations, attacking social rights of the workers won after the fall of the dictatorship, increasing the gap of inequality between a rich minority and the increasingly impoverished large majority of the people.. The 1997 international Crash centered in South East Asia made Greece one of the emergent financial markets attracting surplus capital searching an outlet. The boom in the Athens stock market was ephemeral and finished by ruining mass of small investors and enriching a few financial sharks, particularly those connected with the government. Cheap labour by the hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers flooding in the country after the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the “socialist” Balkan countries made possible to make a successful bid to join the Eurozone in 1999.

The link with the Euro provided the necessary guaranty to attract loans as the credit expansion reached new highs in the period of the international economic upturn of 2002-2007. Greek capitalism thought that its old dream to rise as the regional economic hegemonic power in the Balkan Peninsula became finally true as the Greek industries de-localized to the Balkan countries and the Greek banks made unprecedented inroads in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania.

The parasitic nature of Greek capitalism was exacerbated. The Greek capitalist social formation was “born already old”, as Pantelis Pouliopoulos, the former general secretary of the KKE in the 1920s and later leader of Trotskyism in Greece, had rightly written in 19348; it was industrialized and completed the full formation of its own Nation State in the epoch of wars, revolutions and capitalist decline.

World credit expansion in 2002-2007, permitted to public and private debt to soar from $162 billion in 2003 to $360 billion or even, according to other estimations, half a trillion dollars in 2008. The European Commission estimates that the foreign debt of Greece in 2008 reached the staggering pint of 148 per cent of the national GDP. 9 From 2004 onwards the GDP grew $80 billion in current prices, an average annual increase of $16 billion, from which $6 billion was coming from the EU. The State had a $10 billion deficit and it borrowed $12 billion annually to achieve only a growth of $16 billion or, if are included the EU subsidies, just $ 10 billion, exactly the same as the deficit!10 At the same time, the current payments deficit rose to 15% of the GDP, and there was a continuous flight of capital abroad, increasing from a $100 billion in 2003 to $210 billion in 2008.

On this basis, while the country was leading to a fantastic crisis of over indebtedness and virtual bankruptcy, social inequalities, working conditions, and unemployment were severely worsened and the social tissue was disintegrating. Popular discontent against both parties that ruled the country for 35 years, the social-liberal center left PASOK and the neo-liberal center right New Democracy, was building up. Together with it, State authoritarianism and continuous, unpunished police brutality against the “enemy within”, especially the angry, unemployed or socially excluded youth and the immigrants, intensified. A non stop series of financial scandals of State and party officials exacerbated the crisis of legitimacy of the entire bourgeois democratic political system as it was formed after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. Social struggles were sharpening. Main landmarks are the victorious 2001 General Strike that blocked the destruction of the workers’ pensions and accelerated the fall of the PASOK government and then the 2006-2007 student revolt led by the far left that prevented the attempt of the New Democracy government to amend the article 16 of the Constitution to permit the privatization of Higher Education.

The illusory upswing of Greek capitalism the last decade was based on finance capital globalization and collapsed with its implosion in 2007-2008. The dreams of the ruling class turned into nightmares. The over-indebted economy is actually bankrupt and only the fears of the impact of an official default on the Eurozone prevent its official declaration. Greece joins Ireland, Portugal and Italy in the higher positions of the list of EU countries under threat of imminent bankruptcy. The bonanza and over-exposure of the Greek banks in the Balkans have turned into an imminent danger of collapse of the entire Greek banking system as well. The government bail out of the biggest banks with 28 billion euros is unable to prevent a process of restructuring by mergers, and at the end, nationalization.

A metropolitan revolt

In meantime, capitalist globalizations has deeply transformed Greece from a country of a medium level of capitalist development in South East Europe into a State-member of the EU and of its Euro-zone, and further more into a metropolitan knot in the plexus of globalized capitalist relations.

This metropolitan transformation of the Greek social formation does not mean its ascent into the position in which they were raised in a previous period of historical development of world capitalism and in the early phase of imperialism, the countries of North America and Western Europe; it takes place when the hegemonic hierarchy of the imperialist centers is long ago established and cannot be challenged by entities like Greece; above all it coincides with a new phase of integration of world capitalist economy in an advanced stage of its historical decline, bringing Greece closer to the “hard core” of the centers of European imperialism while, at the same time, deepening the gulf separating it from them, making its fate more dependent from them than ever in the past .11

The metropolitan transformation goes beyond the dichotomy Metropolis/colonies or imperialist center/colonial and former colonial periphery, internalizing many features of these dichotomies within the urban space of contemporary mage-cities (internalizing for ex. “Third World” zones as ghettoes within the “First World” cities), and re-shaping power relations for the surveillance and control of an heterogeneous population of over-exploited workers and socially excluded.

Greece, and its capital Athens, where nearly half of the population, now increased by important numbers of immigrants, is concentrated, marked symbolically its ascent to a metropolitan status by hosting the Olympic Games in 2004. As a precondition to that symbolic enthronization, the imperialist centers, particularly the United States and Britain, put the integration of Greece in the international “war on terror” by introducing special legislation and by dismantling the remnants of urban armed groups, especially the “ November 17th ” organization and ELA( “Revolutionary People’s Struggle”). The latter, in fact, was already self-dissolved many years ago, while the November 17th group was in an advanced stage of decomposition. The arrests of a number of people on prefabricated charges for most of them, in summer 2002, the hysterical witch hunt atmosphere spread by the mass media, and the show trials that followed were just a pretext to introduce special “anti-terror” laws drafted on Anglo-Saxon patterns, and impose an artificial State of Emergency opening black holes in the constitutional bourgeois democratic order that replaced the dictatorship in 1974. The restoration of parliamentary democracy in Greece proved to be extremely vulnerable to the forces of decay building up together with the inner contradictions of the capitalist system.

State authoritarianism, police brutality, systematic surveillance of all aspects of the life of the citizens against any right to privacy, etc. were not just an adaptation to the post 9/11 international environment; the emergence of an increasingly authoritarian State based on the impunity of corrupt State officials, politicians and police forces, masked with a parliamentary facade and governed by a center left or a center right neo-liberal government, was a necessary complement of the “modernization” process in Greece linked to finance globalization, Euro-zone integration, and over-exploitation of native and immigrant workers.

The decay of bourgeois democracy internally conditioned by the driving forces of capitalist decline produced the framework of the recent rebellion.

In 1973 a dictatorial regime was challenged by a youth uprising in the Polytechnic University demanding democracy. In 2008, it was the turn of decaying bourgeois democracy to be challenged by a young generation demanding not only the end of police brutality but a reorganization of all social relations. It was not just a demand of freedom of expression but a revolutionary expression of freedom itself

The 1973 Polytechnic uprising of the youth against the naked State of the Armed Forces of the victors of the civil war was the last battle of the civil war. The 2008 December revolt was the first metropolitan rebellion in Greece of the young proletarians and of all the wretched of the earth.

The 1973 uprising was interconnected with the international wave of revolutionary struggles unleashed with the collapse of the post war boom based on the Bretton Woods 1944 settlement. The 2008 revolt is one of the first acts of the emerging new international wave of struggles coming with the collapse of the finance globalization that came as a way out to the crisis produced by the end of the post war boom.

All the world’s a stage

As a continuation of the December upheaval, in February 2009 the National House Opera Ethniki Lyriki Skini was occupied for 9 days by young artists and students of Drama, Dance and Music schools. May 1968, 40 years later was revived. Artistic events, debates on art and revolution, on Kostandina Kuneva and immigrant workers, on the struggle for the liberation of all those arrested in December and persecuted by the “anti-terror” laws( more than 200 people, most of them, 15 years old kids!) took place. As usual not a word was said or written in the press or the other media during the occupation- apart of the publication of a Joint Communiqué of the Director of Lyriki and of the bureaucratic trade union leaders condemning the occupation. Once, the occupation ended, all the venom of the ruling class was unleashed against those who have as a banner in the front door of the opera the words Our Art is the Revolt- Our stage is on the streets!

During the occupation of the National Operas House in Athens, in the other side of the world, the artists and workers of the famous Teatro Colon of Buenos Aires expressed together with their own demands their full solidarity in struggle to their Greek brothers and sisters in occupied/liberated Lyriki. Messages of support came to Lyriki not only from Argentina but as well from Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. If “our stage is on the streets” all world is a stage, to use, in a new context, Shakespeare’s wonderful verse12!

The question of freedom of expression is an international and a class question that merges today with the question of revolt and social revolution. It cannot be limited in the straight jacket of a moribund bourgeois democracy.

Marx had pointed out that a mode of social production is a mode of expression of life.13 And the same time he brought into light the characteristic contradiction of capitalism as a social system: it is this specific mode “whose expression of life (seine Lebensäusserung) is its loss of any expression of life (seine Lebensentäusserung)”.14

There cannot be a real freedom of expression within as system where any expression of life is lost.

One of the main slogans shouted by the young people in the liberated Lyriki was “The last few days I feel to live- It is pity my friend Alexis that you are not here!”

The first revolt of the new era opened by the world systemic crisis of capitalism has put at the center the question of Life itself, of the re-appropriation of what is lost under capitalism, the freedom of expression of life in all its manifestations; a freedom which can be achieved only by the revolutionary expropriation of the expropriators of our life, by the overthrow of world capitalism and universal human emancipation.

Athens, March 25, 2009

1)Paper presented in the Critique Conference 2009 on Capitalism and Repressive Tolerance, London School of Economics, March 27, 2009

2) Baudrillard, Jean (1991) La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu, Paris: Galilée. In English, Baudrillard, Jean (1995) The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

3)Rizospastis 28 December 2008

4)Art News( Greek edition, Ta Nea Tis Texnis ), No 175, March 2009

5)Le Monde 10 December 2008

6)Le Monde 13 December 2008

7)Jamil Anderlini, “China battles unemployment to deter unrest”, Financial Times, December 21, 2008

8)P. Pouliopoulos, Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece? in Greek, first published in Athens 1934, reprinted in 1963, by Difros Publications.

9)Figures published in the Greek daily Avghi, on May 3, 2009.

10)Figures published in the Greek daily Kathimerini, on January 18, 2009

11)The concept of “Metropolis” acquired a new connotation lately and became an object of intense debate among Marxists and various schools of autonomists. See for ex. the article by Giorgio Agamben Metropolis in http://www.generation-onlien.org/p/fpagamben4.htm . This article is quite informative although our approach differs from Agamben’s as we link the concept of modern Metropolis with that of capitalist decline.

12)William Shakespeare, As you like it, Act 2, Scene 5

13) K. Marx-F. Engels, The German Ideology Marx-Engels Collected Works(MECW), Progress Moscow 1976, vol.5 p. 31

14)K. Marx, 1844 Manuskripts in Marx Engels Gesamt Ausgabe (MEGA) 2nd Edition, Dietz Verlag, Berlin1982, Erster Abteilung, Band 2, p.392

Greece: Farmers Enter the Fray

Savas Michael January 25, 2009

A new explosive element entered the situation, already destabilized both economically and politically in Greece, particularly after the December revolt: the peasants, who in their vast majority in Greece are small proprietors of land, (owing about 42 acres each peasant family), have rebelled and paralyzed all traffic throughout the country by their road blocks. All the main routes from North to South and from East to West, have been blocked by thousands of tractors. The borders with neighbor countries have blocked too. The peasants of Serres have blocked the border with Bulgaria, the peasants of Kilkis the border with the former Yugoslav Macedonia, the peasants of Evros the land, borders with Turkey.

The cause of the peasant revolt is the collapse of the prices of agricultural products (cotton, wheat etc.) because of the world capitalist crisis and its deflationary trends. Between the Greek small farmers and the market, an oligarchy of middle men and multinational food industries is reigning, buying very cheap from the farmers and selling in very high prices to the consumers in the cities. The collapse of the prices commodities under the impact of the current world capitalist crisis opened the “scissors” between the low prices paid to the producers and the high prices (and profits) of the middle men and the food industries. Until recently the gap was filled by subsidies provided by the EU. Now, the crisis drives a drastic cut in subsidies.  Furthermore, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has as a target to diminish the space occupied by agriculture in countries like Greece. While at the end of the 40s the peasantry was the majority of the Greek population, now it is less than 18 per cent and continues to shrink; the EU target for Greece is to reduce the peasantry to a 5 per cent of the working population.

The peasants in revolt demand that the gap of prices, the enormous costs and accumulated debts of their production should be subsidized by the State- something forbidden by the EU and CAP. The demanded sum amounts to 4-5 billion euros.  The Karamanlis government, already shaken by a huge economic/political crisis and by the recent popular revolt following the assassination of young Alexis, has promised to the peasants to give them half a billion euros. For that sum the government will take a new loan from the international banks in conditions of credit crunch. Such a move cannot satisfy the peasants, it will add more burdens on an over-indebted capitalist economy virtually bankrupt, and it will be followed by heavy fines by the EU because of the break of regulations. The ruling class is divided on that issue. The peasants themselves have rejected so fat this governmental offer.

It is important to notice that the large majority of these peasants in revolt have supported in the last two elections the right wing New Democracy, as they had clashed in the last decade with the agricultural policies of the previous PASOK governments. So, it is the political bases of both bourgeois parties alternating in power that are disintegrating.  What we have here is a regime crisis.

The solution to the problems of the impoverished labouring peasantry could come only from the workers in the cities in a common struggle to make the capitalists pay for the crisis, not the rural and urban poor; to expropriate the middle men and the food private companies, nationalize the land and forming real peasants cooperatives connected with workers’ committees in the cities, planning the economy according to social needs. Against the CAP and the EU only a revolutionary struggle of workers and poor peasants can be effective, to finish with this imperialist alliance of big capital, for the Unites Socialist States of Europe.

In other fronts, now: a General Strike and demonstration of the public sector workers will take place on January 28.

Turmoil in Universities continues particularly in defense of the right to asylum, to forbid intrusion of the police in the university space.

Last but not least, the campaign in solidarity to Kostandina Kuneva and against the super-exploitation of immigrant and local workers escalates and expands beyond the borders of Greece. In France and in Europe a petition for Kostandina is signed by personalities of the intelligentsia such as the well known philosopher Alain Badiou. A new march for Kostandina will take place in Piraeus on January 30^th.

Day 16 of the Revolt in Greece

 The night of Saturday the 20^th to Sunday, December 21^st, the area around the central square of Exarchia and the Polytechnic University of Athens became again the battlefield between the riot police and groups of youth. Earlier, Saturday night at 21.00 pm, at the same hour and place of the assassination of the young Alexis by the Police, a two weeks memorial meeting was held attended by a thousand people. The street itself was renamed and new plates were installed with the name   “Alexandros Grigoropoulos Street”. The clashes started immediately after the memorial and continued until the morning.

Sunday the occupation of the GSEE (General Confederation of Labor) by the other “GSEE” (General Assembly of Labor in Rebellion) was called off. Before leaving the building in excellent conditions, the workers have called the security service of the trade union bureaucracy and together examined the place and signed a paper signaling that everything is OK. This was necessary to avoid any provocation: the planting by the police of weapons, drugs or fake claims of destruction of the luxurious neoclassical building in marble where the so-called “leaders of the working class” are sitting doing nothing and preventing the working class to do something. The workers occupying the building left it in an orderly manner and marched through Athens as a powerful group of 500 people shouting slogans for the release of the arrested, for workers’ self-organization, and for a General Strike.

The Popular Assembly of Petralona has occupied for a while the private station 9.89 of the Town Hall of Athens and broadcasted a political declaration denouncing the assassination of Alexis, the Police, and the capitalist government of the murderers, calling for the continuation of the revolt, and for a General Strike.

Marches and conflicts with police took place in most of the working class areas: in Kaisariani (famously called “the Greek Stalingrad” because of the battles  from house to house and from room to room by the Communist Partisans against the Nazis in 1944), Nea Ionia, Vyronas, Nea Smyrni, Chaidari etc. 

The General Assembly of the schoolchildren took the decision to continue the occupation of the schools. The main slogan is: “Christmas are postponed but not the revolt!”

  Now all the efforts are focusing in the preparation of the big national march of schoolchildren, students, teachers and workers next Tuesday, on December the 23^rd.

 The revolt continues in the context of a deepening political and social economic crisis, as an expression and as a factor of it. A phony budget presented by the right wing government and claiming that Greece will not experience a recession (!) or a surge in unemployment (!!!) in 2009 was voted tonight in the Parliament despite the fact that everybody, from the government or from the opposition knows very well that the budget is a fraud, rejected even by the EU authorities. What was spelled out by former PASOK Prime Minister Costas Simitis in the discussion is the already known fact that the country is actually bankrupt, Greece possibly will be evicted from the Euro-zone and the IMF will intervene.

Two former ministers of the previous PASOK government, Christos Verelis and Thodoros Pangalos (the ex Foreign Minister who betrayed and delivered the Kurdish PKK leader Ocalan to the hands of the Turkish MIT) made a call to appoint a jointly accepted “supra-party” economic virtual dictator in the Ministry of Finances and/or to form a Coalition government of the right wing New Democracy and of PASOK to manage the national bankruptcy. The same Pangalos in an interview in a Sunday paper, “Elefterotypia”, today, called the revolt “sheer political hooliganism” blaming the reformists of  Synaspismos / SYRIZA, and fully agreeing with Aleca Papariga’s accusations ( despite his own well known anti-communism or rather because of that). Papariga, the General Secretary of the Stalinist KKE gave today an interview in the Sunday right wing paper Real news where, apart from her fervent defense of Stalin, of the Moscow Trials and of the mass purges of the ’30s, she was repeating that “there is no revolt” and the clashes with the police is “the realization of a plan organized long ago by the foreign intelligence services of imperialism”!! It is not a surprise that the yellow right wing populist paper Avriani had in the front page the headlines: “The Police are useless- Let ask the citizens or the KKE to re-establish order!” 

This order is now needed by the ruling class more than ever as the disintegration of the over-indebted capitalist Greek economy accelerates. Another former Minister of PASOK, Alecos Papadopoulos proposed to invite officially the IMF or another international institution of this type to take control and manage the economy of the country!

  Karamanlis is preparing a reshuffling of his government that will solve nothing. Early elections that appear inevitable cannot solve the country from a bankruptcy. The current revolt is a precursor earthquake and not the principal earthquake, which is coming in 2009!

As the slogan on the wall of the Athens University says in English: Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear! 

Savas Michael, Athens, December 21, 2008

Day 11 of the Revolt in Greece: Occupation of State Television

Listen to an interview with the author Savas Michael on Suzi Weissman’s Pacifica radio show Beneath the Surface.

This morning started with a very unpleasant surprise for the riot police, the special force against popular mobilizations, which is busy all these days of popular revolt in Greece to attack and brutalize13-14 years old kids: their central headquarters/caserne in the Kaisariani area, in Athens, was put under siege for hours by a multitude of young people throwing to them stones and Molotov cocktails.

During all day, the main roads of the Greek capital, particularly in points near schools, were blocked by the schoolchildren for hours stooping the chaotic traffic for hours.

In general, its has to be pointed out that all the schools and all the Universities of the country have stopped functioning and their students are in the streets fighting, protesting, singing, shouting slogans, clashing with police, putting under siege or occupying public buildings( town halls, cultural centers etc.)

In the evening, as it was decided previously in a general assembly, a powerful march of thousands of inhabitants of Exarchia( the area in Athens where the young Alexis was killed) took place to the local police station of the murderers, which was pout under siege for hours.

The most spectacular action today, it was the occupation of the State TV Broadcasting. When the State TV station was broadcasting the main 15.00 pm News, and the Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis was addressing his parliamentary group and the Greek people on the recent huge financial scandal involving the government and an orthodox Monastery in Mount Athos( a scandal which just is scandalously covered up by the government closing now the affair), suddenly the image was interrupted and another image of a group of 100 militants was broadcasted with banners against the murderers of the State and for the liberation of those arrested so far!

It was not the first broadcasting station which was at the hands of the activists- the Radio Station of Ioannina in Epirus (Northern Western Greece) is already under occupation- but undoubtedly this action was the most impressive. The people received it with enthusiasm and the authorities with hysteria. The Stalinist party KKE found that the slogans of the activists in the State TV Station today “were not appropriate…” In general the Stalinists are against our call for the liberation of the arrested that are considered by the KKE as “hooligans” or possibly agents of the police and of the CIA!!! In two at least occasions today as our trade unionists report ( in the general assembly of the Federation of high school teachers OLME and in the health sector, held to prepare for the strike of December 18, the Stalinists voted down our call for the immediate liberation of all those arrested, who most of them are young adolescents).

In Volos (Central Greece), we took the initiative to circulate a leaflet of MERA (Front of radical left which includes EEK) addressed to the members of the KKE asking them to kick out from their Party the Gen. Sec. Aleca Papariga and all those collaborating with the capitalist state against the revolt, and to join us in the common battle. It created a lot of discussion on many levels.

La Luta continua!

Savas Michael Matsas, December 16, 2008

Day Six of the Greek Youth Revolt

Six days after the murder of the young boy Alexis Grigoropoulos by a policeman triggering the biggest revolt of the last six decades in Greece, the rebellion of the youth continues, with the schoolchildren in the vanguard. More than a hundred of schools and faculties are under occupation. Demonstrations of school children erupted in the morning in most of the neighborhoods of Athens, police stations were attacked, and public buildings were occupied. The provocative attitude of the murderer and of his infamous lawyer Kouyas attempting a character assassination of the victim, presenting him as a hooligan with a disturbed behavior etc., and the attempt of the police to present the crime as an accident gave anew impulse to the mass revulsion and rebellion. In the afternoon a new demonstration of thousands of youth took place in the center of Athens, and another one will follow tomorrow.

Outside Athens, the revolt is engulfing the entire country; demonstrations take place even in regions traditionally conservative such as Laconia in the South.

News for actions of international solidarity from Moscow to Buenos Aires, and from Tokyo and Istanbul to Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Bologna, Paris, Grenoble, Copenhagen, Stockholm, etc. is received here with enthusiasm. The European bourgeoisie, on the contrary and its press show great concern and fear for the contagious effect of the Greek revolt to other European countries. Particularly the French bourgeoisie and Sarkozy himself expressed their fears. The paper “Minute” wrote that there is a danger for a new May 68 starting this time from the revolt in Greece. Financial Times wrote that the rebellion in Greece is an anomalous situation for the European Union”…

As the Greek schoolchildren say “Let’s make real ‘their’ worst nightmares!”

Savas Michael 11 December 2008

The Revolt in Greece: Day Five

Savas Michael, December 10, 2008 of the Greek EEK (Workers Revolutionary Party)

While the clashes between the riot police and the people, particularly the youth, five days after the killing of the 15 years old Alexis Grigoropoulos continue without interruption, a General Strike called by GSEE( General Confederation of Labor) and ADEDY( National Federation of Public Employs) for December the 10th took successfully place. The Strike was particularly successful in the Public, Education, Health, and Transport sectors.

The Prime Minister Karamanlis made a public call and sent an official letter to the leadership of the Confederation to cancel not only the march, which traditionally follows the central rally the day of the General Strike, but the rally in Syntagma Square as well and the strike itself “because of the tense situation”. The trade union bureaucracy had already cancelled the march and transferred the rally from the traditional place in front of the headquarters of GSEE to Syntagma Square, in front of the Parliament “in support of parliamentary democracy”… But the GSEE leadership dominated by PASOK did not dare to cancel the Strike or the rally, as Karamanlis demanded, fearing that the mass workers movement will mobilize independently and against the bureaucrats.

Under the combined pressures of the New Democracy government, of PASOK, and above all, of the Stalinist KKE which accused the reformist Synaspismos and its allies in SYRIZA to cover up for the “hooligans destroying social peace and private property”, SYRIZA cancelled its march and transferred its rally near Syntagma Square.

The Stalinists of KKE( who recently rehabilitated officially not only Stalin but also the verdict of the Moscow Trials and the purges of the ’30s in the Soviet Union) have become the main slanderers of the youth revolt calling the young rebels “Talibans”, “gangsters”, “drug dealers”, ” prostitution dealers”(!!), “police agents” etc. Today in all mass media, the Right and particularly the fascists of the far right party LAOS praised, quoted approvingly, and repeated ad nauseam all the despicable slanders of the Gen. Sec. of KKE, A. Papariga against the revolt.

For the General Strike, they organized their own separate rally in Omonia Square and then they moved two blocks in the other direction and dispersed! They were less than 4.000.

So the only march in Athens in the day of the General Strike was that organized by the far left organizations of MERA( Front of Radical Front, which includes EEK) and of ENANTIA( United Anti-capitalist Left), joined by two Maoist groups and the Anti-Authoritarian Movement (anarchist). Some class struggle sections of the trade union movement, particularly in the Public sector, Health, Education, technical engineers etc., including the Federation of the high schools teachers refused to go neither with the PASOK-led GSEE or the Stalinists and joined us putting themselves in the first ranks of our march. It was the most impressive march of the Greek far left for decades: about 25.000 people! EEK had its strongest contingent for all its recent history. The Italian TV( which took also an interview by Savas Michael of EEK) as well as other foreign TV channels have showed our march- but not the Greek State TV, which nevertheless showed the tiny rally of GSEE in Syntagma and the Stalinist gathering in Omonia…

There were only small clashes with the riot police during the march, which, of course, geometrically escalated after the end of the march, and still continue this hour (around midnight, Greek time) around the Polytechnic University under occupation. The police use there tonight also goons of the paramilitary fascist group “Golden Dawn” – as they already did yesterday in Patras injuring with a knife a young girl- and threaten to attack also our Independent Action Center in the occupied Law Faculty in the Athens University.

In the Law Faculty under occupation, after the march, two General Assemblies took place: a Workers Assembly joined by hundreds of class struggle trade-unionists and a Student Assembly joined by representatives from nearly all the student unions of the Athens University. The traditions of the 1973 Polytechnic uprising against the CIA junta are revived: at that time too there were a Workers’ and a Students’ Assembly coordinating their actions as we do today. The Independent Action Center is precisely this Coordination.

A Statement was drafted and voted with a series of demands (for the abolition of anti-trade union, anti-pension, police state legislations, for wages increases, against privatizations, for nationalizations under workers control etc.), a call for an indefinite General Strike to overthrow the government, and a solemn decision for civil disobedience, demonstrations, strikes etc. against the State of Emergency prepared by the New Democracy government. The Statement, of course called also for the immediate release of all arrested, whose number until now is higher than 150 people, most of them young boys and girls around 15 years, the first target of this horrendous capitalist government of kid killers.

Another provocation became public today: the Medical -Legal Department of the Police wants to issue a verdict declaring the killing of Alexis …an accident. At the same time the two police murderers in their deposition in the Interrogator, made public by their lawyer (a notorious lawyer of the mob), accused their young victim to be “a nasty hooligan with a disturbed behavior”, “kicked out from his school” (the school rejected officially the slander). This character assassination- the Second Murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos- undoubtedly will provoke a new wave of explosions, keeping in mind that in the forefront of the struggle is 14-15 years schoolchildren.

Tomorrow there will be another student and schoolchildren demonstration. The same, the day after tomorrow. The mobilization will not stop until victory.

On December 18, the government budget is voted in parliament and another General Strike is planned for that day.

¡Venceremos!

Note: Ditto previous comment on translation.  Forgive the use of the bourgeois news channel Al Jazeera, I don’t usually do that but I thought that this particular program at least got at some issues.  Certainly better than anything I have seen on the BBC or US news .

RR

Greece in Revolt!

By Savas Michael Mastas of the Greek Workers Revolutionary Party (EEK)

Athens and all Greece are in flames from last Saturday night. The cowardly murder of a 15 years young boy by a member of the Special Guard of the Police in Athens on Saturday, December 6th was the immediate cause for a popular revolt, particularly of the youth, which embraced not only the Greek capital but the entire country. It is, undoubtedly, the biggest revolt from the time of the civil war of the 1940s and the Polytechnic School uprising in 1973 against the military dictatorship.

Immediately after the news of the death of the young boy the area near the site of the killing, near the Polytechnic University of Athens, was full of people, mainly young. Clashes with riot police have started and barricades were erected in the streets. The Polytechnic was occupied and a call for a demonstration next day was issued. Similar mobilizations took place the same night in Thessalonica, Ioanina, Crete, Patras and other Greek cities.

Sunday, December the 7th at least 20.000 people joined a mass demonstration towards the Police Central Headquarters in Athens, which soon took the dimension of mass riots, continued during all night.

Monday, December the 8th, from early morning tens of thousands of very young schoolchildren of 15 years or less marched through Athens and occupied the forefront of the Police Central Headquarters. Youth attacked or occupied police stations and/ or town halls all over the country, from Corfu to Rhodes, from Evros in the North to Crete in the South.

Early in the evening a mass demonstration in Athens, double from that of the previous day, was transformed to generalized clashes with the riot police all over the capital. The Faculty of Law of the Athens University, the Athens Economic University and the Polytechnic, are all occupied and general assemblies are discussing and deciding the course of action.

Today( December 8), it was announced and then denied that the right wing Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis will meet the president of the Republic and the leaders of other Parties in parliament to explain the necessity to declare the country under a State of Emergency.

The mass media try to cultivate hysteria among the middle classes against the “social hooligans” who “exploit the unfortunate death of the boy” and “destroy private property and put on fire the banks”. The x- Minister of Education Marietta Yannakou, who had to resign because of the mass student movement of 21006-2007, has accused “middle aged (!!) Trotskyites and anarchists who lead the riots through the occupation the Law Faculty in Athens””!!

The revolt, of course, is not manipulated by anybody. It manifests the explosive situation produced by the world capitalist crisis. The rebellion is an expression of a mass anger accumulated the last period when the young generation lives without future, in a present of misery under the worst conditions of labour flexibility, unemployment, and continuous police harassment. Thousands of young boys and girls have identified themselves with the innocent victim, the young Alexis Grigoropoulos, and his tragic end. Sometimes the explosion of their anger takes the form of blind violence, as in the 2006 revolt in the Paris neighbourhoods- and this is why that many representatives of the ruling class call for a “Greek Sarkozy”. But both in Paris and in Athens, the real causes are deeply social, actually class issues.

The pseudo socialist PASOK official opposition condemns the riots and their members in the leadership of the General Confederation of Labour voted together with the Right to cancel the march in Athens next Wednesday, December, 10, the day of a 24 hours General Strike.

The official left takes also a dubious stand. The Stalinist KKE the first days did nearly nothing, apart sending a delegation to discuss with the leadership of the Police, i.e. of the killers. It does not take part in the common demonstrations, organizing separately its own, and “guarding the social peace from the anarchists and ultra-leftists”. The reformist Synaspismos (ex-Eurocommunists) try to play the role of the “mediator” between the mass movement and the State.

The far left, mainly the forces of two fronts, of MERA (Front of radical Left, where also our Party, EEK, participates) and of ENANTIA (United Anti-capitalist Left), some Maoists and the Anti-authoritarian Movement (anarchist), coordinate their actions. We issued together a Call for a continuous struggle and a General Strike to overthrow the Government of the Killers and put an end to its capitalist policies, which try to make the exploited pay for the crisis of the system. We decided the following actions:

Tomorrow, December the 9th, a mass demonstration of schoolchildren, students, and University professors will take place in Athens. A delegation of the march will participate in the funeral of the young Alexis. In the afternoon, demonstrations and agit-prop actions will be waged in all working class neighbourhoods.

On December the 10th, the day of the General Strike against the decision of the leadership of the GSEE (the General Confederation of Labor), we organize a march in Athens and in all main cities of the country.

EEK intervenes in all the main cities of the country fighting to transform the strike into an indefinite General Strike on a program of transitional demands for a workers socialist way out from the crisis, against the murderous capitalist State and its government, for workers power.

UPDATE

December 9: Day 4 of the revolt in Greece

Today at 15.00 pm took place in Palaion Faliron, in a suburb cemetery of Athens, the funeral of the unfortunate 15 years old boy Alexis Grigoropoulos murdered in cold blood by a policeman on December the 6^th, a State crime that triggered the biggest revolt on a national scale from the end of the Second World War. Thousands of people, young and older, participated in the funeral raising the left fist in revolutionary salute. But at the end of the funeral, the riot police attacked the crowd, targeting the youth. Clashes erupted. The big scandal now is that the Police used again guns, shooting at least 15 bullets apparently on the air to disperse the crowd!

Before the funeral, at noon, thousands of schoolchildren, students, teachers and University professors demonstrated in Athens and violent clashes again took place in Syntagma Square, in front of the parliament, with the riot police attacking savagely 13-14 years old young boys and girls.

The time of the funeral, protest marches took place in all the main cities of Greece which ended invariably to violent classes with the State repression forces. In Patras, the city with the harbor connecting Greece with Italy and Western Europe, behind the police were forces of the “Golden Dawn” fascist paramilitary group and goons of the New Democracy youth organization( that have assassinated in 1991 the left wing teacher Temboneras). Important clashes took place also in Thessalonica, Volos, and Crete. In many occasions very young schoolchildren stormed the Police headquarters of their respective town.

The Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis met with the President of the Republic, the leaders of the Opposition parties in parliament, and the Chairman of the Parliament. Although he did not succeeded to receive their direct endorsement for the declaration of a State of Emergency, the government is moving towards this direction, namely to declare a ‘state of exception” using the article 11 of the Constitution to forbid demonstrations and occupations. The hysteria campaign of the bourgeois mass media against the “hooligans” is a part of these preparations.

Tomorrow is the day of the long ago announced 24 hours General Strike against the government budget. In collaboration with the Right, the PASOK leadership of GSEE (General Confederation of Labor) has cancelled the rally in front of its headquarters as well as the march. In replacement it will held an “all democratic memorial meeting” in Syntagma Square.

The PASOK leadership of George Papandreou limits itself to verbal criticisms that “the government does not use effectively the police to protect social peace, the property of the citizens and the public buildings”…

The Stalinist KKE leadership goes farther to the right, by denouncing together with the government and the far right … Synaspismos (the ex-Eurocommunists) as “protector of the hooligans and provocateurs”. The General Secretary of KKE, Aleca Papariga described the young rioters as “Talibans” created by the secret services of the State under the governments of PASOK and of New Democracy and now becoming uncontrollable!! She received an enthusiastic praise by the right wing government and the fascist anti-Semite leader of the far right.

The KKE organizes its own separate meetings, in other place and hour, absolutely respecting the social peace that the current government of boy killers wants to impose.

Synaspismos, forming with its allies in the extra-parliamentary left the “Alliance of radical Left”-SYRIZA, calls for “the democratic re-organization of the police” and other mild reformist economic measures to raise the living conditions of a young generation with a miserable present and without a future. Being under constant pressure from the right, Synaspismos / SYRIZA cancelled its previous decision to hold the rally in front of the GSEE headquarters and then participating in a popular march of the strikers. It will hold a rally nearby Syntagma Square.

So, the only march tomorrow in Athens will be that organized by a number of far left organizations, including EEK, from the Polytechnic University to Parliament. The situation, of course, is precarious, open to all dangers for a police attack, but we will not yield to State terrorism and the cowardly pressures by reformists and Stalinists.

9 December 2008, Savas Michael

Note: These articles are imperfectly translated. Sometimes confusion or the wrong meaning can be taken when this happens, but the urgency of the situation has necessitated getting them out. RR