Again, what we’re seeing in Greece is not about amoral thugs with “nihilistic goals of wreaking havoc.” The violence we’ve seen is a response to oppressive social conditions, and a reaction to ongoing violence and oppression initiated by the state. (There is talk of holding some of the arrested protesters in pre-trial detention for up to a year, which used to be a violation of people’s civil rights here in Canada.)
Most importantly, violence is only one facet of a much broader social movement:
In its immediate context, the uprising of the last 10 days comes on the heels of a rising oppositional movement: recently, the Greeks managed to achieve a general strike with support from 80-90% of the working population against privatization of national industries and other neoliberal policies, and for doubling the minimum wage. A broad hunger strike among Greek prisoners, with mass solidarity from Greek society, has also compelled the government to agree to the release of about half the prison population (and the movement declared that this would not be enough).
The “spontaneous” anger of young people against police violence has beneath and alongside it long-standing movement structures that are allowing it not simply to “discharge” and dissipate, but to grow, strengthen itself and expand into new political areas. It is taking place in a population that is highly politicized and has a history of resistance to draw from.
But it’s extraordinary to see the mass mobilization of very young people — high-school students between the ages of 11 and 17, taking to the streets, taking over their schools, developing a politics that addresses their lives directly. It’s not just resistance to police repression now, but a wider discussion is taking place about education social organization — with students holding mass assemblies in their occupied schools, trying to decide what the meaning would be of an education that is part of the life they want for themselves, and not the life that is being prepared for them by the existing society. [...]
At this point, hundreds of schools, colleges and universities have been occupied and are being transformed into centers of organizing. They are running their own radio stations, some of which are private stations now under occupation. They are occupying public buildings; attacking police stations and government ministries.
Yesterday, students occupied the central state-run television station during its news broadcast of the Prime Minister’s speech and stood with a banner saying, “Stop watching and go out into the streets!” Two smaller placards read, “Freedom for all those who have been arrested,” and “Immediate release for all the arrested.” (Video here.)
In a separate action, another group attacked the central Athens headquarters of the MAT, burning vehicles and a portion of the building. The MAT (Monades Apokatastasis Taxis “Units For Restoring Order”) are the “riot police” — a specifically political branch of the police force developed to suppress “civil unrest.” They were developed by police who received training in the US. (Greece has been a central recipient of US police training and technology for repression.) The dissolution of the MAT is one of the central demands that has come out of the assemblies of occupied schools and universities. [...]
At the center of the battle in Athens is the historic Polytechnion — the university famous for the events of November 17, 1973, when the junta attacked protesting students with tanks. As a result of that history, the police are constitutionally unable to enter the university, making it a protected enclave for political organizing and a tactical base of operations. Every evening now, after the protests and street battles, students and other active members of the movement gather for a general assembly. The Coordination of the General Assemblies and Occupations in Athens has given the movement both a political face and a structure of continuity for building, planning and deepening its political consciousness. (Website and blog.)
The uprising in Greece has a particular relevance at this moment in history. If you read the military manuals and strategy papers of the US architects of empire, Greece is a centerpiece of “counterinsurgency” doctrine. In the immediate postwar period, the US and England fought an extended counterinsurgency war to suppress the left (communist and anarchist), which had become the most powerful political force in the country through the years of resistance to the German occupation. The strategy was to brutally repress the armed resistance (80,000 British troops and the arming of domestic fascists to kill, imprison, and torture left guerillas), while at the same time promoting elections and including a legitimate “socialist” opposition, which supported surrendering arms and using the parliamentary system.
This is the “handbook” which the US uses in its imperial wars of conquest and occupation. It’s called “promoting Democracy.”
Yes, there is violence. But it grows out of a (US- and UK-sponsored) history of state and paramilitary violence against the left; out of anger and frustration with the current neoliberal regime; and above all, out of a broad, organized movement of ordinary people seeking to change their lives for the better, for themselves.
Here’s a statement from a group that interrupted a television broadcast on the 16th:
We believe that the media systematically cultivates a climate of fear, promoting misinformation as information, and portraying a multi-faceted uprising as an outburst of reckless violence.
The explosion of civil unrest is explained in criminal rather than political terms. Crucial events are selectively brushed under the carpet. The uprising is served up as entertainment, something to watch until the next soap opera comes on. The media are being used as a means of suppressing free and original thought on a daily basis.
Let us organise ourselves. No authority can provide solutions to our problems. We must rally together and turn our public spaces – streets, squares, parks, and schools – into areas of unhindered expression and communication. Let us come together, face to face, side by side, to formulate our cause and our course of action as one.
Let us overcome the fear, switch off our television sets, come out of our houses, continue to assert our rights, and take our lives into our own hands.
We condemn police violence and call for the immediate release of all protesters held in custody.
We stand for emancipation, human dignity, and freedom.
The workers who occupied their trade union’s headquarters have similar goals:
WE DECIDED TO OCCUPY THE BUILDING OF GSEE
– To turn it into a space of free expression and a meeting point of workers.
– To disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes, and that the rage of these days was an affair of some 500 “mask-bearers,” “hooligans” or some other fairy tale, while on the TV screens the workers were presented as victims of the clash, while the capitalist crisis in Greece and Worldwide leads to countless layoffs that the media and their managers deal as a “natural phenomenon.” [...]
– To open up this space for the first time -as a continuation of the social opening created by the insurrection itself-, a space that has been built by our contributions, a space from which we were excluded. For all these years we trusted our fate on saviours of every kind, and we end up losing our dignity. As workers we have to start assuming our responsibilities, and to stop assigning our hopes to wise leaders or “able” representatives. We have to acquire a voice of our own, to meet up, to talk, to decide, and to act. Against the generalized attack we endure. The creation of collective “grassroots” resistance is the only way.
– To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroots procedures, abolishing the bureaucrat trade unionists.
All these years we gulp the misery, the pandering, the violence in work. We became accustomed to counting the crippled and our dead — the so-called “labor accidents.” We became accustomed to ingore the migrants — our class brothers — getting killed. We are tired living with the anxiety of securing a wage, revenue stamps, and a pension that now feels like a distant dream.
Radicals? Yes. Hooligans in love with destruction for destruction’s sake? Hardly.
Who is to blame for the crisis: the architects of a repressive and failing socio-economic system, or the people who want to toss that system aside and create a better world?