Revolution #151, December 28, 2008
Protest and Rebellion Light Up Greece
“The children were very angry that one of them had been killed; and they wanted the whole society not to sleep quietly about this, they wanted everyone to feel the same fear they felt. And they were also expressing anger toward society, towards the religion of consumerism, the polarization between the few haves and the many have nots.” (Comment by the mother of a 17-year-old explaining why her son was in the streets in the wake of the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos.)
It was around 9 pm in the Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, Greece, on the night of Saturday, December 6, when a bullet pierced the chest of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, killing him almost immediately. Fired by a member of the special guard division of the Greek national police, that bullet set off weeks of protest and rebellion.
Within hours of Alexandros’ death, with the aid of text messaging, Twittering, and networking sites like Facebook, word spread of the outrage. Hundreds of youth took to the streets and battled with the police, not only in Athens but also in Thessaloniki, Greece’s “second city,” and the rebellion spread to many more locations besides—even to remote islands best known around Europe for their beaches.
As we go to press, Greek society is entering its third week of convulsions. Police cars have been burnt, banks and government buildings have been trashed and demonstrations of thousands have taken place almost daily called by various forces. Invariably these demonstrations are attacked and dispersed by riot police. But even peaceful candlelight vigils have been attacked by the police who have used up their entire stock of tear gas canisters in the last two weeks—and have ordered more from Germany and Israel. There have also been significant strikes and work stoppages, blockades of roads by farmers, continued occupation (“takeovers”) by students of hundreds of universities and high schools, and disruptions of news broadcasts. Huge pink banners were even hung at the foot of the most famous spot in all of Greece, the Acropolis, calling for resistance throughout Europe. Over 400 people have been arrested since the rebellion began.
This upsurge is very just. In articles this week, we will begin to outline where it has come from and what it represents for the revolutionary movement.
A Rebellious Youth Movement
There is a history of an anarchist and generally “anti-authoritarian” youth movement in Greece that has traditionally been involved in skirmishes with the police. The Greek police force is known for its thug-like brutality and hated widely by broad sections of society, including the oppressed and super-exploited immigrant population (from Albania, the Middle East and Africa), but also even significant sections of the Greek middle classes. This broad hatred of the police is in part bound up with the legacy of a military coup (called “the junta” in Greece) that set up an extremely repressive, fascist regime from 1967-1974.
The imprint of this coup is still felt on the modern political terrain—even among the youth who were born more than a decade after it was toppled. One of the turning point events at that time was a heroic uprising of students in November 1973 at the Polytechnic University in Athens (one of the most prestigious universities in Greece). This uprising was violently suppressed, resulting in the deaths of 22 students. Since the fall of the junta, it is forbidden by law for the police to enter any state university, and this has facilitated these campuses acting as political bases for the current struggle. The anniversary of this massacre is also currently a national holiday and is marked by demonstrations. Often pitched battles with the police develop, with the anarchist and anti-authoritarian youth at the core of this. The Exarchia neighborhood of Athens, where Alexandro was murdered and which borders the Polytechnic, is an area where these youth congregate and hang out, and where many of these skirmishes take place.
Breaking the Bounds
These recurring battles between the police and youth have in their own way over the years become somewhat of an “institution” in Greece where both sides have a sort of unstated agreement on keeping the confrontation within certain bounds. On Saturday, December 6, this unstated agreement was shattered by the police murder of Alexandros. The outrage in reaction from the youth was intense. But Alexandros’ death became not only a call to resist the police and their brutality, but was a spark in relation to a deep cauldron of discontent that has been brewing in Greece for some time and may well give a glimpse of things to come in other parts of world, including other imperialist countries.
The Greek government for decades has been rife with scandals and corruption by whichever party has been in power. The global financial crisis has had major impact in Greece. Currently, 20% percent of the population is living below the official poverty level (which is 485 Euros or about 700 dollars/month), prisons are overcrowded (sparking protests and hunger strikes among the prisoners), and the standard of living of the middle classes has been plummeting, with many forced to take a second and even third job. Official unemployment rates for 20- to 30-year-olds is 21%, but some economists argue that the true rate for this age group is more like 30%.
The children of even the majority of the better-off strata have been experiencing “downward mobility.” Touted as the first generation in modern times that will be doing more poorly than their parents, it is widely reported that the young professionals are called the “700 Euros (about $1000 dollars) generation” after the fact that most are confronting a ceiling in wages or salary of this amount: not enough to live on—or even move out of their parent’s homes—even after obtaining college degrees in what has become an increasingly dog-eat-dog process.
There is extremely deep and very widespread alienation among the youth, including very much so the youth of the middle class in Greece. Alexandros Grigoropoulos is a case in point. He came from a solidly middle class family and was attending a private high school—and in one of the photos circulating in his honor he is sporting a T-shirt with the logo of the ’70s punk rock group the Sex Pistols song, “God Save the Queen (Her Fascist Regime).” Demands have been raised in various protests during these last two weeks to disarm the police and stop police brutality and on a host of issues from government corruption to unemployment. But it is these youths’ anger, frustration and discontent and even hatred at the ways things are overall and an expression of a deep desire and determination to not live in the world as it is that all came together in response to the police murder. And this has, at least in the short run, articulated what many more sections of society have been thinking and feeling. Recently a major Greek newspaper (Kathimerini) reported that 60% of the people they polled said “the riots were a social uprising rather than an outburst by an isolated fringe of violent protestors.”
Different Responses
to the Uprising
Meanwhile, in politics as usual, the opposition “socialist” party PASOK is demanding that Prime Minister Karamanlis step down. But Karamanlis at this point is not budging, fearing collapse if he were to do so in the face of an uprising. And there is broad disaffection with these two main parties of Greece. In describing how the protesters enjoy a huge amount of public sympathy and support, including in the middle classes, the Telegraph (UK) reported a statement by a public affairs consultant that, “Greece has the characteristics of a failed state. These 15-year-olds are articulating what all classes are feeling. Everybody feels disenfranchised. Greece just isn’t working at the moment. The depth of disillusionment goes way beyond party politics. Greeks are as fed up with the opposition Socialists as they are with the government.”
Greece is also a country with a very established revisionist Communist Party (KKE), as well as various parties and coalitions of “leftists” (many former KKE members) attempting to lead people down the dead end of struggling to reform capitalism. The KKE, like all revisionist parties, may use the label of communism—but it does not in any way, shape, or form speak of revolution, of actually abolishing capitalism and advancing to a whole different epoch in the world where there is a rupture with all traditional relations and traditional ideas. These KKE revisionists have actually openly opposed this rebellion. Aleka Papariga, a leader of the KKE, went so far as to accuse the rebellious youth of being police agents or agents “linked to centers abroad,” and that the point of these youths’ activity was “to turn attention away from and disorient the mass mobilizations of the youth and the people..” She continued on about how the “KKE firmly believed that the working class of the cities and the periphery has the power to change things, provided that they acted and fought for their rights in every place of work and created their own anti-monopoly alliance.” In other words, stop resisting, fight for pitiful reforms and put things into the “proper channels”—and under control of the revisionists!
Revolution came across online a widely circulated “Letter to My Parents” (the version that appears on revcom.us is translated from Greek) which seems to capture well the sentiments of many of the youth at the core of the rebellion. These sentiments are clearly way more radical than the blather of the KKE’s leadership. They actually express a deep hatred for the way things are and the actual social relations of exploitation and they convey a deep-seated alienation with capitalist society. At the same time, the vision does not break, in the final analysis, with that of an extremely angry radical democrat; there is the outlook of individualism and thinking which actually flows from and can only serve the continuation of exploitative relations. It reminds one of some of the sentiments and even proclamations of the profound student uprising that shook France in 1968, save for the very important element that it is absent totally of the influence of Mao Tsetung and the “Red Book”—the current of all-the-way communist revolution that held state power in revolutionary China at that time, and which electrified rebellious youth all over the world.
In a future issue of Revolution we will wrangle more deeply with the sentiments exemplified by “This Letter to My Parents” and the decisive questions—and juncture—discussed in the Manifesto of the RCP, Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage. The intensity of rebellions like this—what they signify about people’s underlying feelings about the future and the ways in which they may be harbingers of things to come—all this underlines the need for a real answer to be out there; one which can unite with and speak to the discontent and anger while pointing to the real way out of the darkness.
It is not clear as we go to press what turns this current uprising will take. The cost of the rebellion to date has already exceeded two billion Euros and is already exacerbating the problem of Greece’s huge national debt. While there have been hundreds of arrests, widespread police beating of demonstrators, some reports of right wing paramilitary gangs working in conjunction with police, and vilification of the protestors in some of the bourgeois press, the full repressive forces of the state (such as was unleashed in Los Angeles in the U.S. in 1992) have not been brought to bear in this situation. This may be a calculation on the part of Greece’s rulers that this crisis can be ridden out; or it may be fear that heavier repression right now, especially given some of Greece’s history, could provoke much wider resistance, and further undermine the legitimacy of the whole system. A possibly even more significant calculation and fetter is the ramifications globally if the full forces of the state were unleashed to suppress the uprising, especially the potential effect in Europe where the rebellion has already resonated and the masses face similar social and economic conditions, including the alienation of wide strata of the youth.
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