dispatch from greece: murder of an antifascist

Pavlos Fyssas (aka Killah P)

Antifascist Killah P Stabbed to Death by Golden Dawn Member in Piraeus

by Contra Info

In the early hours of September 18, 2013, 34-years-old antifascist Pavlos Fyssas (aka Killah P) was stabbed to death by Nazis of the “Golden Dawn” party in Piraeus (port of Athens).

Raw reports on indymedia relate that the murder took place just after midnight on Wednesday in Amfiali, in the Keratsini district of Piraeus. It appears that Pavlos Fyssas and his small company of friends were persecuted and ambushed by a larger group of Nazis. This in the presence of cops from the DIAS motorcycle unit. Minutes later, the antifascist was stabbed twice by one of the Nazis who came out of a vehicle and attacked him. The assailant was arrested by cops at the scene. But the exact circumstances of the assassination are yet to be confirmed, and much of this news comes from mainstream media coverage.

Pavlos Fyssas succumbed to his injuries shortly after he was evacuated in the Nikaia hospital. His funeral was arranged for September 19 at the Schisto cemetery.

In recent months, there have been several attempted murders and assassinations of ‘people of color’ (migrants, etc.) across Greece. This time, a Greek-born white leftist was assassinated by fascist scum. It appears, though, that Pavlos Fyssas was not a member of any leftist organization, but rather a street fighter with strong antifascist action. Killah P(ast) was his stage name as hip-hopper/rapper.

Meanwhile, there were major ‘repercussions’ in official politics. The establishment parties already tried to manipulate this deadly incident for electoral gains, while the Golden Dawn parliamentary thugs as always refuted any involvement of their devoted followers in any murder, again for electoral gains. However, the 45-year-old stabber Giorgos Roupakias, resident of Nikaia, has confessed his deed to the police, as well as his close association with the Golden Dawn. His association with Golden Dawn MP Kostas Barbarousis is well documented. The murderer is in custody, and three other Nazis — including his wife — were also detained (for withholding evidence of Roupakias’ association to the Nazi party).

On September 18, antifascist protests were called in response to the assassination in more than twenty cities/towns across Greece. Also, in few cities (e.g. in Chania, on Crete) Golden Dawn offices were trashed, and police troops were attacked. Various different direct actions happened at numerous spontaneous protests throughout the day.

During a large evening demonstration near the murder scene in Keratsini, heavy clashes broke out against the police; dozens of protesters were detained amid street battles (many faced charges). Previously, the leader of the far-right party “Independent Greeks” alongside his patriot henchmen were effectively attacked by antifascists. At least one demonstrator suffered severe eye injury from a direct shot of police tear gas, and underwent surgery at a local hospital. Doctors from the Tzaneio hospital stated that 31 protesters who were treated after the antifascist march in Keratsini were all wounded on the head by DIAS and DELTA cops. In addition, anti-riot squadrons and plainclothes thugs attacked antifascists jointly during that demo in Piraeus.

Clashes occurred in Thessaloniki and Patras, too, where mass detentions were reported.

Thanks to the comrades at Contra Info. -GR

review: AIRossini in berlin

AIRossini: Opera as Critical Entertainment

By Anna Papaeti & Áine Sheil

The death of opera has been pronounced and debated almost since the inception of the art form. Often criticized as a dated and costly medium, monopolizing the majority of state funding for the arts, it appears to be addressed to a small, upper middle-class, elitist and, in most cases, aging audience. This critique is one of the most serious ones faced by opera houses internationally. Despite their many (often imaginative) efforts to attract a wider public through education departments, outreach programmes and technological dissemination (for example, New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s High Definition cinema broadcasts or the Royal Opera House Covent Garden’s Big Screens in public spaces), opera audiences do not appear to be changing significantly in profile.[1] Except in cases where opera houses are heavily subsidized by taxpayers, operatic repertory is essentially focused on popular composers of the canon such as Puccini, Verdi, Mozart and Rossini; Wagner remains for the most part the reserve of larger, better-resourced companies. Although the rise of so-called director’s opera, inspired by Regietheater, has led to more complex and critical opera stagings in continental Europe and to a lesser degree in the UK, many companies shy away from overtly political productions, perhaps for fear of alienating patrons and harming box office returns. The Metropolitan Opera’s recent staging of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen is telling. Employing an impressive array of new staging technologies, its director, the renowned Robert Lepage, disappointingly chose to convey Wagner’s story in a literal, one-dimensional fashion, minimizing the multi-layered political, social and historical aspects of the work. In effect, this production became part of the culinary culture with which Bertolt Brecht famously associated opera in his essay ‘The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre’, written in 1930. For Brecht, opera as an ‘apparatus’ of entertainment establishes an attitude in the spectator that is uncritical and ill-suited to reflection on social and political issues of the day. Its ‘culinary’ aspect leads to an enjoyable intoxication, mainly aimed at pleasure, entertainment and illusion – a criticism he mounted in particular against Wagner’s music drama and the fusion of the arts (Gesamtkunstwerk).[2]

A recent Greek-German collaboration between The Beggars’ Operas, Athens, and Neuköllner Oper, Berlin, brings back to the fore the question of opera’s relevance as a forum for critique, political intervention and debate. Although perhaps not strictly Brechtian, the two productions that have stemmed from this fruitful collaboration have put contemporary politics on stage, clearly taking on board Brecht’s critique of opera. Politics are not staged in the usual manner of a shallow reading of a work, highlighting obvious (often historical) political dimensions. On the contrary, urgent contemporary politics pervade the very core of the two productions undertaken so far, namely Yasou Aida! (2012) and AIRossini (2013). In both cases, Alexandros Efklidis (director), Kharálampos Goyós (composer) and Dimitris Dimopoulos (writer) have used certain core elements of old works, on which they have built a new contemporary story. Musically the works are adjusted for a small stage and a very small orchestra.  In the case of Yasou Aida!, the music of Verdi’s Aida was used along with the opera’s colonial discourse to form the basis of a contemporary story about the economic neocolonializing policies in Europe and the crude national stereotypes stemming from the Greek economic crisis in the era of austerity. It received both box-office and critical acclaim. Glowing media responses were not restricted to cultural columns and were not solely published and broadcast in Germany and Greece (where it was staged), but also appeared in the international media (e.g. BBC News).

on the new phase in greece

Brutal Nihilism


by Yannis Stavrakakis


The recent decision to shut down ERT, the Greek public radio and television, has shocked the international community due to its brutal symbolism. However, although it constitutes a serious escalation of the ‘shock and awe’ strategy unfolding in Greece during the last three years, it should not cause surprise. The thoroughly unexpected and violent blackening of the screens has only highlighted the nihilism characteristic of the dominant policies already implemented under the auspices of European and international institutions.

While in the first stages of the crisis the imposition of the austerity avalanche involved and relied on its meaningful packaging, its embellishment with an ideological meaning able to secure a minimum of hegemonic consent – even one based on fear, blame, moralism and demonization – during the last period a variety of indications signal the passage into a new phase. Decision-making has gradually stopped claiming any concretely meaningful foundation, it lost any interest in winning consent – even through fear and extortion. What remains is, thus, its brutal imposition. It is not an illness, anymore, that justifies the (bitter) medication; it is not guilt that justifies the (harsh) punishment. Medication and punishment are autonomised and affect severely and equally the ill and the healthy, those who are guilty and those who are not-guilty, very often without the articulation of any persuasive justification. As a result, politics and policy is detached from any reasonable content and domination is reduced to repression. Distanced from any real argumentative support, the measures implemented openly reveal their functioning in favor of establishing a nihilistic system of domination through cruelty, which reduces citizens to ‘serfs’. This seems to be their only meaning and purpose.

marcuse on ecology and revolution

Ecology and Revolution

By Herbert Marcuse

(from Liberation 16 (September 1972):10-12)

Coming from the United States, I am a little uneasy discussing the ecological movement, which has already by and large been co-opted [there]. Among militant groups in the United States, and particularly among young people, the primary commitment is to fight, with all the means (severely limited means) at their disposal, against the war crimes being committed against the Vietnamese people. The student movement – which had been proclaimed to be dead or dying, cynical and apathetic – is being reborn all over the country. This is not an organized opposition at all, but rather a spontaneous movement which organizes itself as best it can, provisionally, on the local level. But the revolt against the war in Indochina is the only oppositional movement the establishment is unable to co-opt because neocolonial war is an integral part of that global counterrevolution which is the most advanced form of monopoly capitalism.

So, why be concerned about ecology? Because the violation of the earth is a vital aspect of the counterrevolution. The genocidal war against people is also “ecocide” insofar as it attacks the sources and resources of life itself. It is no longer enough to do away with people living now; life must also be denied to those who aren’t even born yet by burning and poisoning the earth, defoliating the forests, blowing up the dikes. This bloody insanity will not alter the ultimate course of the war, but it is a very clear expression of where contemporary capitalism is at: the cruel waste of productive resources in the imperialist homeland goes hand in hand with the cruel waste of destructive forces and consumption of commodities of death manufactured by the war industry.

In a very specific sense, the genocide and ecocide in Indochina are the capitalist response to the attempt at revolutionary ecological liberation: the bombs are meant to prevent the people of North Vietnam from undertaking the economic and social rehabilitation of the land. But in a broader sense, monopoly capitalism is waging a war against nature – human nature as well as external nature. For the demands of ever more intense exploitation come into conflict with nature itself, since nature is the source and locus of the life-instincts which struggle against the instincts of aggression and destruction. And the demands of exploitation progressively reduce and exhaust resources: the more capitalist productivity increases, the more destructive it becomes. This is one sign of the internal contradictions of capitalism.

dispatch from spain

[Last autumn, a new and awful form of protest came to Spain. A string of homeowners on the verge of eviction by court orders and the riot police (antidisturbios) committed suicide by leaping from the windows of their mortgaged houses. The growing anti-eviction movement has altered the dynamic of social protest in Spain, broadening and deepening the opposition to austerity already manifested in the 15M and 25S movements. In the general strike of 14 November, called for by the largest unions, ‘everyone except the Partido Popular and Basque nationalist unions’ poured into the streets. Darío Corbeira, editor of Brumaria, sends the following reflection on the context of the unfolding social struggle. Many thanks to him for taking the time, and to Maria Adelaida Samper for the fine translation. –GR]

Hermeneutic Antidisturbios: 25S, the Anti-Eviction Movement and the 14 November General Strike in Context

By Darío Corbeira

On 25 September, several thousand citizens responded to an anonymous call to surround Madrid’s Congress of Deputies: ‘Surround the Congress, remain there indefinitely. Desert and break with the current regime, demand the dissolution of the entire government, courts and heads of state, and abolition of the existing Constitution. Begin constituting a new system of political, economic and social organization.’ The gathering citizens aimed to convey to the parliamentarians their deep opposition to the austerity program of Mariano Rajoy Brey’s governing Partido Popular (PP) and to the interventions of the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and European Union. Framing it was a radical critique of the parliamentarism that came out of the so so-called Transition to democracy. As made clear in their manifestos, proclamations and chants, the protesters saw that form of democracy as utterly bankrupt. What began that day has become known as the 25S movement, distinct from but clearly related to its predecessor 15M and the other movements that have emerged from the neighbourhoods, universities, hospitals, cultural centers, and manufacturing areas. All were questioning the perverse effects of neoliberal policies designed by financial capitalism and applied to the letter by the governing authorities. Those effects have shaken the fragile ‘welfare state’ slowly built up since Franco’s death and have undermined all it has achieved by way of diminishing the gaping social and economic disparities that persist in Spain despite the governments of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party/PSOE).

capital and biosphere

Modernity and Biospheric Meltdown:

Rethinking Exits, Austerities and Biopolitics

by Gene Ray

In setting out the agenda for this conference, Yannis Stavrakakis calls for a critical and postcolonial reflection on the Greek crisis. He asks us to think about the current politics of debt and austerity within the historical force-fields of “Heterodox Modernity”: “A global crisis provides the opportunity for the enforcement of one more project of ‘modernizing’ Greek culture under circumstances of a quasi-state of emergency.” The terms constellated in this formulation point me to the emerging crisis within modernity itself.

    

My thesis here is that modernity exists but cannot be sustained. It stands exposed today as untenable and unviable – indeed, terminally so. Why? For all the good old reasons set out by critical theory long ago, but also, now, for some new ones. Today, biospheric or ecological meltdown and mass extinction announce the end of modernity. Our challenge now is to rescue ourselves from it: we need an exit from the logic it imposes, not a fix that would prologue it.

    

Given the stakes, which I clarify below, this challenge should be at the very center of political discourse and debate. It should be included now in every serious discussion about the so-called sovereign debt crisis, or art, or the postcolonial. Instead, we continue to leave it out. For many reasons, we’re avoiding this challenge. It’s too huge, too unthinkably catastrophic, too difficult and uncomfortable on so many levels. But avoidance and disavowal won’t make the biospheric crisis go away. It will impose itself now as the absolute material limit of modernity – the real constraining objectivity that will shape all politics, all possible futures.

overidentification and the greek crisis

Rethinking Overidentification:

On Some Activist Practices in the Greek Crisis.

by Kostis Stafylakis

Discussion about practices of ‘overidentification’ has to start by rejecting the idea that overidentification is, or can be, a concrete strategy for assaulting the forms of metapolitical and postdemocratic administration prevalent in today’s societies. Overidentification is not some full-on avant-garde attack on social systems of power and control. It is rather a ‘symptom’ of the ideological uncertainties and identity dislocations of late capitalism. That said, overidentification is a term for those impure moments within cultural practices when subjects can try out the consequences of their identifications, attachments and orientations of desire. The overidentifying subject embraces the risks involved in these games. To overidentify is to accept that one is fully imbricated in a social bond, in a field that does not pose neat and unproblematically clear choices between resistance and conformism. Overidentification is related to forms of critical cultural practices; its ‘criticality’ is generated when ‘subjects of overidentification’ begin to admit and embrace the fact that their subjectivity is deeply interwoven with and by social discourses, power, authority, heteronomy – and is structurally involved in their reproduction. In this respect, practices of overidentification can potentially foster a critical interrogation of current social dogmas to the extent that an unconscious part of one’s own attachment to the social apparatus is (re)enacted. In this gaming or acting out, the ‘over’ or surplus of overidentification is the movement beyond the safe, controlled, supervised representation of identity.

Since the late 1990s, significant theoretical approaches have contextualized the relation between cultural activism and grassroots social movements resisting the deregulation of societies and economies associated with globalization and neoliberal policies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s activist practices unwrapped an agenda of tactics and strategies against the neoliberal exploitation of public space, the waning of the welfare state, and the control of information and mass media by powerful corporations. Reclaim The Streets took back public spaces, the Yes Men tried to de-legitimize the politics of WTO and the managerial discourse of big corporations, and Critical Art Ensemble interrogated late capitalist eugenics and biopolitics. In a similar fashion, Geert Lovink and David Garcia coined the term ‘tactical media’ in 1997 to address the new nomadic and tactical zeitgeist of networked cultural resistance.

postcards from france

against austerity

The resistance to immiseration in Europe is heating up and beginning to spread. In France, open-ended strikes are continuing, with students now joining in. Friends and comrades from Contrainfo (Athens) share this report on an occupation of the Acropolis by precarious cultural workers.

GR

‘Beneath the Acropolis we go on strike…’

by Contrainfo
15 October 2010

Approximately 100 ministry contractual employees barricaded themselves inside the Acropolis site overnight on Wednesday, 13 October, demanding two years of back pay and permanent contracts. They padlocked the entrance gates and refused to allow in tourists. Guardians of the Acropolis site (Athens, Greece) work in behalf of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Tourism either as civil servants (with permanent contracts) or as contractual employees (with temporal contracts). More than 400 contract-workers of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism have been working unpaid for up to 22 months. These are workers who have up to 20 years of service. The Greek government shows them the door of unemployment. Most of them will be laid off after years of flexible and underpaid work.

brumaria on the general strike

Spain: The General Strike of September 29th

by Brumaria

On September 29th, a General Strike (Huelga general) against the Ley de Reforma Laboral — driven by Zapatero’s government and passed by the parliament — was organized by the practical entirety of labor unions and leftist organizations and parties, with unequal results.

It is necessary to search for the antecedents to said events in the profound economic crisis that Spain has suffered from during the last three years; this crisis (latent and prior to the global crisis of September 2008 involving the financial markets) is inscribed in the following parameters and events:

- Enormous growth of public works and construction of homes during the last 15 years (currently in Spain there are 3 million empty homes)
- Unstoppable increase in the number of unemployed (4 million to date)
- Economic recession, drop in consumption, and zero growth the last two years
- Exponential increase of public debt based on the search for financial resources with which to pay social loans to the unemployed

spectacle and austerity

Across France on Saturday (2 October), huge demos protested misery measures. But how huge, and who decides if such protests matter?

No secret: the business of capitalist news media is to market assertion, not to expose the truth about what happens. Circulating along with all the other transmitted garbage, truth rushes past, like slips of the tongue - but above all as truth about the concentration of social power congealed in every media report.

In the current coverage of resistance to austerity in Europe, what is striking is how relentlessly state and corporate news reports reduce massive, embodied contestation to mere contention - to assertion and counter-assertion about how many protesters were actually in the street.

The process is a form of castration: precisely the logic of spectacular representation Guy Debord raged against more than forty years ago. Maybe it won't be useless to recall how it works, and see how it is still operating today.

the fightback

Three days ago (29 September), the first general strike in Spain in eight years coincided with a general call-out from the European Trade Union Confederation to protest Eurozone austerity programs. The strike, although limited in time, was evidently strong and effective, and union actions and protest demos took place in many European capitals  - including Brussels, where 100,000 workers took to the streets.

the greek laboratory

The Greek Laboratory: 

Shock Doctrine and Popular Resistance

by Stathis Kouvelakis



“There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.”
Jack London, The Iron Heel

‘Shock and Awe on Greece’
One of the ways it that seems to me more relevant for the understanding of what is happening in Greece is to use the notion recently developed by Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine. Seen from this perspective, the meaning of the Greek situation is simply that it’s the first time this so-called ‘shock’ doctrine, a constitutive element for any neoliberal purge, is put into practice in a Western European country, after having been tested, of course, many times in the past in other parts of the world and in the eastern part of the European continent, with results that are now very familiar to us. The idea of the shock doctrine is, to put it as briefly as possible, the following: it’s impossible for this neoliberal purge, or, rather, for this kind of qualitative leap in rhythm and the depth of the neoliberal purge, to be implemented, and furthermore, to be, if not accepted, at least tolerated by societies, without creating and staging an ‘exceptional’ situation, a situation of emergency, in the wake of which, somehow, normal life is disrupted and what seemed until quite recently unimaginable just happens.

‘Shock and awe’ is exactly what the shock doctrine is about: shock and awe directed within societies, targeting the social body itself, and of course within the social body, the popular classes and the subaltern groups of each social formation, at its very core. This is how the ‘normal’ time and the ‘normal’ course of events are interrupted. I’ve been to Greece many times these last months and each time I was amazed by the very concrete experience I could feel a constant acceleration of the pace of events. The acceleration was certainly dramatized by the media and the political system, but it was essentially coming from the unfolding of the objective contradictions of the situation. This event has therefore to be understood as the unleashing of violent elementary systemic forces, comparable, to quote some examples underlined by Klein in her book, wars, military occupations that follow, military coup, or the management of certain natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, for example. A major economic crisis, such as the one that is happening, is precisely an event of this type. Major here means that it is not one case of the usual cyclical recession, but rather something close to a collapse affecting the foundations of the economy of the state, of the social and political system in its entirety. It is an organic crisis, to use the term of Antonio Gramsci.

From this follows that the social and political forces in Greece have to face a new and unprecedented situation. A situation for which no one is prepared, neither on the top layers of society, nor on the bottom, on the side of the popular forces and of all those who will suffer the consequences of this economic and social hurricane. Everyone is destabilized, and this is why the outcome of the Greek situation is absolutely crucial. In a way, what I’ve said about the shock therapy is of a much more general validity. But what is specific to Greece is that, as has been suggested in very powerful terms by the previous speakers, this shock therapy and this neoliberal purge is even more necessary because we have to deal here with the weakness of the political structures and of the Greek state more specifically.

Why is the Greek State so inept?
Costas Lapavitsas very aptly spoke of the failure of the Greek ruling class. This failure can be understood in two ways. The first is the short term way. There has been an immediate failure to deal properly with the contradictions of the Greek capitalist system. The whole recent cycle of economic growth relied on a very fragile and even unsustainable basis. The analysis of these contradictions has already been outlined by Lapavitsas and his collaborators of the Research on Money and Finance group, so I will say more on this. But there also is a more long-term understanding of this failure, that I want to emphasize now.

I come from, and I situate myself, within the Marxist tradition. One of the key ways within this tradition of dealing with the state is to talk about its “relative autonomy.” Nicos Poulantzas famously elaborated a lot on this notion. The relative autonomy means that the state has the capacity to be at a distance from the different factions of the ruling class and of the balance of class forces in society. The state intervenes to constitute the overall outcome of those class forces and it is constituted itself as the condensation of that balance between class forces and class relations, as Poulantzas famously said.

The characteristic of the Greek state is precisely that this relative autonomy, for reasons that go very deep in Greek history, has been much weaker, much more limited than in other cases. The Greek state, indeed, has been in constant war with the popular classes and with its own people for many decades. What is at the very root of the weakness of the Greek state, paradoxical as it may sound to some people, is the very failure of the popular classes in Greece to reach a permanent form of representation and regulation of their interests within the state itself. All the phenomena we’ve been talking about so far in this discussion, such as the diffusion of corruption “from below”, clientelism etc, are just ways to compensate, from above and below if you prefer, this sort of weakness. This affects an essential part of the popular classes, who are deprived of a more institutionalized, stabilized form of social compromise that has been reached by the popular classes in other parts of the European continent in the context of the so-called welfare state. These classes have therefore to bypass this lack in order to reach some particularistic or fragmentary form of fulfilling certain immediate interests via practices such as those mentioned before. But this is, of course, much more the case of the ruling classes and the dominant groups. What we call corruption in Greece just means how obscene and incestuous are the relations between fractional capitalist interests and the Greek capitalist state as such.

Perspectives of the popular resistance
How are we to understand now the new possibilities opened up by the structural weakness of the Greek state as they develop in the current crisis? I would point to two of them. The first has to do with the relative position of the Greek national formation within the international division of labor. I think that one of the main interests of this very important piece of research produced by Costas Lapavitsas and the group of economists working with him, is the way it updates and renews the analysis about the polarizing effects of the core/periphery division in Europe. I think we have to distinguish two levels of periphery within Europe. The first includes Greece, the Mediterranean South, the so-called ‘PIGS’, and the second is even more peripheral, it is the ‘periphery of the periphery’, and corresponds of course to Eastern Europe, the new ‘Mezzogiorno’-type, cheap labour reserve of the continent as whole. The weakness of the Greek state, in the context of the shock therapy, just means the loss of the remnants of what can be a form of “national sovereignty”. I’m not mentioning this because I want to defend any form of national sovereignty means or out of a principled hostility to any superseding of national sovereignty as such but because, in this case, it amounts, on the side of the popular classes, to the loss of elementary forms of democratic control of the state and the disorganization of the representation, of the relation of representation, between the state and the fractions of the dominant class. This downgrading of the position of the Greek state within the international system will have far-reaching consequences. It is within this context that the popular forces have to situate their own struggle, elaborate their own strategy, and build their own system of alliances on a European and on an international level.

The second consequence of that weakness of the Greek state, to put it very simply and a bit more optimistically, is that it opens up the possibility of direct intervention of the popular forces. Indeed, as we all know, Greek history and even recent events in Greece have been characterized by exactly this direct intervention of the popular forces, of the popular struggles in the political scene. What has happened today, gives us a taste of what will follow in the forthcoming weeks and months. Let me mention here some examples taken from the last decade. In 2001, an uprising of the Greek Trade Union movement succeeded in preventing the brutal and savage reform of the pension system initiated by the so-called ‘modernizing PASOK’ government of Costas Simitis. In 2006 and 2007, Greece was the only country in Europe where the student movement succeeded in blocking many of the effects of the Bologna process, and preventing the partial privatization of higher education. In 2008, as the result of the murder of the Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the police, the very legitimacy of the state was put into question in the most significant street riots and mass confrontations with the police that have happened in Europe since the 1970s.

What we have seen today happening in the streets of Athens and of other Greek cities is a combination of all those events. The two-day-long national strike organized by the unions, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating, public sector workers entering into violent clashes with the police and other insurrectionary practices. This form of social practices developing from below tend to break the existing framework of political representation, of political confrontation and of public debate. Beyong any doubt, it will be one of the major characteristics of the period to come. It will also be one of the major challenges the Greek left and the popular forces in Greece will have to face in the forthcoming future. From this test and from this challenge, they can be destroyed. This is not rhetoric but a very real eventuality: if the Left and the organized forces of Greek society are not able to meet the challenge, if they appear powerless and fragmented, they will be swept away the dislocation of social relations and the rise of despair and, probably, of the most reactionary and regressive tendencies withing society.  But if they find ways to intervene offer a genuine perspective to the people’s anger, then this perilous situation can also open up a new and unprecedented perspective for the future of the country, of the popular movement, and moreover, of the progressive forces in Europe and elsewhere.

Stathis Kouvelakis is Reader in Political Theory, King’s College London. He sends this text version of his talk for the panel held at Birkbeck on May 5, the day of a massive demonstration and general strike in Greece. On that day, three people were killed when a Marfin Bank branch on the route of the main demo march was firebombed.

GR

focus on greece

Across Europe, the governing technocrats of parties in power have responded to the new phase of meltdown (the so-called sovereign debt crisis) with neoliberal reflexes conditioned by three decades of there-is-no-alternative orthodoxy. Fortify the banks of reified consciousness and re-launch the New Enclosures: no matter that orthodoxy is bankrupt, administration is incapable of proposing anything else. Capital punishment, aka “austerity measures,” will now begin to bite; the product of the process, spiking social misery, won’t be long in coming.

So this winter and fall, struggles will intensify in those places where the power of labor and traditions of resistance are strongest – certainly in Greece and Spain, probably in France and some other countries as well. What will follow remains to be seen.

Greece has already been rocked by a series of general strikes this spring. The strike and protest demo of 5 May, the first undeniably massive rejection of the misery plan, bringing two-hundred thousand angry people to the streets, was a warning ignored. The confederated unions of the GSEE and the public sector ADEDY have called for another genral strike on 29 June. Meanwhile, the Spanish unions, now stirred, have planned a general strike for 29 September, which may turn out to be a day of resistance across the Eurozone.

The Greek conjuncture looks most explosive:  there, economic insolvency, social neglect and weaknesses in the state combine with relatively robust and militant unions, the remnants of an organized radical Left and a vibrant anarcho-autonomist counter-culture – all in a social force field that continues to activate material legacies and cultural memory traces of Nazi occupation (1941-4), imperialist intervention (military, by the British, in December 1944; thereafter by overt and covert American “aid”), a civil war (1946-9) and seven years under a military Junta (1967-74).

We’ve just been ten days in Athens, hearing from friends and comrades, discussing over meals, coffees, beers, tsipoura and ouzos; in an old mageireio on Praxitelous Street; in an alley bar in Monasteraki, where the local rembetes stop by to jam in the afternoons; in numerous joints in Exarheia, where the assassination of Alexis Grigoropoulos in December 2008 triggered an uprising (the complex character and resonations of which are still being debated); and on a poly-union demo, from Propylea and Klafthmonos Square to Syntagma, where walls of robocops blocked the approaches to Parliament, and drifting back along Panepistemiou before veering off, up Emmanouil Benaki.

We’re full of impressions and relayed insights, and it will take some time to process them. The news is not all good. Synaspismos, the largest party within SYRIZA (the radical Left coalition) and heir to hopes for a non-Stalinist alternative to the KKE (CP of Greece), has been distracted by a series of crippling splits and rancorous departures.

So far it has been the unions that have given form and tempo to popular resistance, choosing the days for major strike actions. Will the struggle pass beyond those forms, if the ruling parties remain intransigent over fall and winter? In theory, the parties to the left of the governing pseudo-socialist PASOK – the KKE on the one hand and the parties and groupings bundled in SYRIZA on the other – should now have their chance.

But up to this point this Left has shown more disarray and indecision than readiness for the coming test. The complex relations between parties, unions, classes, constituencies and counter-cultures – the constraining scars of history – have long tended to block the formation of a united or popular front against neoliberal rollback and plunder. Will the terrors of austerity finally break through these inherited impasses and produce effective defensive alliances?

Behind the Greek state, the EU (on economic matters long ago integrated into the Washington consensus, occasional spats aside) is armed with some formidable powers of enforcement. These impose a structural constraint: Greece cannot realistically hope to leap out of the austerity zone all by itself.

The critique of the Euro has been compellingly argued by a group of Greek academics teaching in the UK – namely, Costas Lapavitsas, Stathis Kouvelakis and their associates. But any viable exit from the Eurozone would need to be part of a new counter-bloc and project organized across the most affected and dissenting peripheries of Europe, through shared interests, alliances and strategies that have yet to be seriously proposed and debated. And it would need to be supported by new alliances outside Europe – a major diplomatic challenge.

Recent attempts to invent a cross-border politics and culture of solidarity under more or less radical new-left umbrellas such as Transform! and the European Social Forum processes have so far not counted much in the balance of forces but certainly point in the needed direction. Such aims in any case open quickly onto the democracy-deficit of the governing Euro-technocracy and the problem of effectively confronting it from below.

Of course, it matters how alliances, coalitions and fronts are put together – what balances are struck in the organization of practical force, which principles are never compromised and which are bent or sometimes allowed to bend. There are good reasons why Synaspismos and the KKE are divided by a wall of distrust: their organizational forms and principles diverge drastically.

The KKE's refusal to critically process its Stalinist past is notorious. No one doubts that the KKE’s rigidly centralized, top-down party-model amounts to a form of technocracy aimed leftward. In the current crisis, however, real alternatives will be driven from below, by demands for radical democratization, rather than by diktat from another technocracy, albeit one more disciplined than the status quo.

Meanwhile, the anarchists and autonomists, organized in affinity groups, are the ones practicing everyday democracy: focusing on their neighbourhoods and workplaces, discussing, writing, initiating micro-projects. While they are riven no less than others by sharp divisions and debates (notably, over the perennial problem of violence), the anarchists have been the staunchest supporters of immigrants and the most consistent critics of nationalism in Greece. Their general rejection of the party-organized Left, along with the state, leaves them isolated, however. What will they offer to this struggle, when it reaches the point of demanding the remaking of the state and the requisite diplomacy with other states? And – the burning question – where do they stand on the Euro?

Out of these blocked potentials, a new constellation will presumably have to emerge, before the rage of the base can be translated into adequate counter-proposals and programs. If this struggle is to prevail, new aims and the power blocs to realize them need to be organized from the legacies that still constrain it. There’s still time, and things can move quickly, but alternatives to the ruling logic aren’t plucked at will out of thin air. Or, to put it differently: if the Greek people are expected to decathexize from “Europe” and transfer their politicized libido investments to a new counter-hegemonic project, then that project needs to be envisioned with compelling clarity and appeal. Who will – or can – organize that?

Meanwhile, rumors are flying. We’ve heard that default will come next week, or else in August, when many Athenians are out of the city. We’ve heard that night after night on the docks of Piraeus, ships from Canada have been secretly offloading the rolls of paper needed for printing drachmas, and also that PASOK has already started to print them in secret, also by night!

Yannis, our Lacanian friend, thinks these rumors are a clear case of people “enjoying” their own ruin. More optimistically, maybe, they suggest that unconsciously people are preparing for default and a possible exit from the Eurozone.

Resistance has opened a real political moment in Greece. Reified normality has begun to fissure, exposing naked relations and interests. For the moment, in the lethargy of a mid-June heat-wave, normality is still holding. But come autumn?

As this key struggle unfolds, there are many risks – including, if the Left fails to project a clear alternative to restoration, a swing to the Right. But in this risky mix is also a real chance for a re-alignment toward radical democracy and away from the terror of capital: possible steps toward a different Greece and a different Europe.

In this context, we’ve invited Greek friends and comrades to share their thoughts, and to send us texts in their own voices, with images of their own choosing. We’ve also asked some artists and critics to share their work and insights. We hope this ongoing thread of posts on Greece, the opening front in the Eurozone struggle, can supplement other sources of critical news and reflection, and in that way modestly help to disseminate resistance and foster needed solidarities.

AP/GR

another default is possible

The general strike and demonstrations protesting the misery plan masquerading as “bail-out” yesterday were massive and robust. The several hundred thousand who impressively filled the streets and Syntagma Square are constituting a political force that today is the real locus of democracy in Greece. 

Protests like these helped to bring down the dictators in the early 1970s and more of them now can topple a pseudo-democracy that has failed the country. As PASOK leads the IMF Trojan horse through the gate of Parliament, the unions and groups are gathering for renewed protests this evening.

There are many possible resolutions to this crisis. By no means is the official immiseration plan a “done deal,” as the capitalist media now acknowledges. Even the Wall Street Journal recognizes that default could follow from determined resistance.

Greece faces hard times, but who will have to bear the brunt of the pain? This is a political question that will be decided by the struggle now unfolding.

Who should pay? Whose dignity is to be sacrificed? Why should the banks and creditors, the politicians and major tax-evaders escape the plight they have dumped on the country through corruption, negligence and opportunism?

These are questions of justice and community, and the usual glib mix of lies, platitudes and neoliberal clichés is not going to satisfy a people awakened and stirred.

A real political moment has been opened in Greece.

Default would mean renegotiating everything. But who can be trusted to negotiate for Greece? Certainly not PASOK or New Democracy.

So it’s also time to question the form of democracy, and, if necessary, to change it. Not just the ruling government, then, but government as such is at issue.

Whatever Greece gained under the sign of Europe now comes at the price of immiseration, and there are no guarantees that ostensible benefits will survive the bailout – as any honest analyst admits.

If the Euro founders and the project of “Europe” breaks up, as Merkel in Berlin is whining, then junk this neoliberal, technocratic Europe and let’s see what real democracy can put in its place from below.

These are days for solidarity and focus.

In the fog and tear gas of struggle, we hope comrades will act with all possible care and compassion. We understand the rage and frustration, and the economic terrorism behind it. And we can see the everyday context of state repression and provocation, falling hardest on immigrants and autonomist young people.

The deaths of three employees at Marfin bank is a shock that hits us, too. The loss of three lives is terrible, and a real disaster for their families and loved ones. While we doubt this was intended by any comrade, we’ll also refrain from shifting all blame onto the bank’s chairman, who insisted with threats that his employees stay at their desks on the path of a massive and angry protest. The bank’s negligence was in any case well summarized by an employee, in a letter that has circulated widely.

There is, always, an ethics of struggle, and we hope there will be searching reflections and discussions of appropriate tactics and strategy in this one. We also hope solidarity and realism will keep those debates, when they happen, from becoming divisive.

As far as we can see, this is above all a struggle for dignity and the meaning of democracy. Dignity and real democracy are worthy aims that are not beyond reach in Greece. In the context of Europe, no struggle now is more important, and the hype and spin of mediatized wedges driven from above should not be allowed to distract or divide it.

AP/GR 

Letter from a Marfin Bank employee, in Greek original on Indymedia Athens and translated on Occupied London.

watching greece

Watching, observing from abroad – these “posts” issue from the wordy distance of this position and have often underscored it – one is staggered by the crudity of European hypocrisy regarding Greece.

Greece: one in five Greeks already lives below the poverty line, and yet the Greeks as a whole work more and longer than their European neighbors, the fabled Germans included. Now these same people are routinely and thoughtlessly blamed for their collapsing economy – their plight attributed to, among other chauvinist clichés, a purely fictional laziness undeserving of European “rescue.”

What garbage! This national economy was ruined not by “the Greeks” – the men and women who live and work there – but by the corrupt political class that administrates it and the tax-evading Greek ruling class that, along with the raiders of international capital, have plundered it for decades.

In this tired trope of “blame the victim,” we should be scandalized by the two extra months per year that public sector workers earn, thanks to the struggles of their unions, etcetera, etcetera.

To save the Euro, if this grace in the end is extended, those lazy Greeks will have to break their unions and lower the cost of their labor-power – and should be grateful to their masters and administrators for the opportunity to do so. Tame and demoralize those working people! Austerity, and more of it, quickly!! 

Hearing and reading what, obviously and crudely, is being said and written between the lines, addressed to, directed at, “the Greeks” and their “self-made crisis,” by the amplified voices of “Europe,” by the very voice of arrogant administration, of managers, custodians and mouthpieces of exploitation, the neoliberal technocracy that deems itself qualified to issue directives from above and is shocked if obedience does not immediately follow – hearing and reading and watching, one knows whose side to take.

But where is the international solidarity with the Greek men and women on whom a fraudulent austerity is being foisted and forced, as if it were natural necessity?

What to say, what can be said, by an outsider, observing? I admire and am inspired by Greek resistance, by this determined, visible refusal to accept administered fiat. Too bad others elsewhere don’t follow their example; if more of us did, the rule of pseudo-democracy could begin to open up and change.

There is evidently no solution for Greece within the constraining logic of the EU and Euro, other than the neocolonial dependency of the IMF debtors prison. Such is the global power of capital, against which other logics are necessary.

It’s for the Greeks and no one else to decide if this “Europe” is worth the misery that is its price – or whether, relying on their own impressive inventive resources, they might not instead rethink and reorganize the bases of their collective autonomy. For the others, for the rest of us, isn’t it time to remake “Europe” and everything else, from below?

Another general strike and day of protest has been called for May 5...

Here's the EU’s own statistics on working hours and work intensification in Greece.