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.

postcolonial studies

from Kleio's notebook: on Troikas, debts & Protecting Powers 

'The insurgent Greeks had contracted loans, on disadvantageous terms, in the City of London during the war of independence and in 1832, the three Protecting Powers [that agreed to recognize Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire and selected a monarch to rule over the new nation, the 17-year old second son of Ludwig I of Bavaria], Britain, France and Russia, guaranteed a loan of 60 million francs, much of the proceeds of which were expended on the army, on King Otto's Bavarian bureaucracy and on the service of the loan. 

'In the 1880s, further loans, totalling 630 million drachmas, were contracted, the service of which came to consume a third of the revenues of the state. 

'When, in 1893, there was a collapse in world demand for her principal export, currants, Greece was forced greatly to reduce interest payments and was effectively bankrupt.

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.

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.

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

vlahos: piraeus tower/elounda summit/kotsakis

Vangelis Vlahos, The Differences between the Parts Are the Subject of the Composition, 2009.

This and the following post introduce here the work of artist Vangelis Vlahos, whose researches and installations probe recent Greek history by combining architectural models and photographic archives. The presented three-part project, with Vlahos’ own textual notes, was installed in The Breeder in Athens in 2009. The essay in the following post is a commentary on Vlahos’ project by artist and theorist Kostis Stafylakis.
GR

The models depict Piraeus Tower, an abandoned high-rise building in Piraeus port, Greece. In each model of the Piraeus Tower the number of the building’s floors alters. Taking into account the modernistic design of the Tower, the models appropriate the grid structure of its minimal skeleton in order to produce an almost symmetrical composition of 6 different pieces with seemingly regulated changes. The images in the archive involve [PASOK Prime Minister] Andreas Papandreou's personal "mediation" between France and Libya over arrangements for bilateral troop withdrawals from Chad, in a summit meeting in Elounda Bay, in Crete, on November 15, 1984. The photos, taken from different media, depict Papandreou, Mitterrand and Gaddafi seating around a table. All the photos depict the same scene from different angles of view.

The title of the project is based on a found sentence from Sol LeWitt’s text “Serial Project No.1 (ABCD),” Aspen Magazine, 5-6 (1966)

About the Piraeus Tower: Piraeus Tower is a 24-story high-rise building in Piraeus port, technically the second tallest building in Greece. Architecturally the building follows the rules of the American International Style. Originally the building was planned to become a business and trade center similar to the World Trade Center in NY and be operated in a similar manner by the Piraeus Port Authority. Although the building was planned to serve as an icon signifying the progress Greece was making during the years of the military Junta (1967-1974), after the completion of its frame in 1974, it was never fully used apart from the first two floors, which have been occupied by a toy store, a home electronics chain and a school. The last serious development to the 24-story frame came in the early 1980's where it was gladded with glass and marble but without any other development on its frame. 

In the past there have been many rumours about the cause of its incomplete construction status, including an engineering mistake or miscalculation that greatly affected the building's overall stability. However, nothing of the above has ever been confirmed officially.

The particular building along with a series of other initiatives, investments and infrastructure works held during the period of the dictatorship tried to create the impression both in Greece and the West that Greece is a modern country which could play a leading role in the wider area of the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe.

The Elounda Summit (The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition), 2009. About Greece’s relationship with the Arab World: Greek governments have traditionally pursued a policy of friendship with the Arab states. This relationship is based on both historical and contemporary factors. In the wake of the oil crisis and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, both in the mid-1970s, Greece's Middle East policy appeared to slant strongly toward the Arabs. This seems to be dictated by two needs: for Arab support for Greece's Cyprus policies and for stable oil supplies from the Arab oil producers. After the fall of the Greek dictatorship in the mid 1970s, Greece asserted its intermediary role between the Middle East, North Africa and the European Community hoping to become an economic and financial centre and a crossroads in the region. In the early 1980s, the Papandreou socialistic governments continued this policy, establishing close relations with most of the so called at that time radical regimes of the Middle East such as Syria, Libya, PLO etc. The PLO was granted recognition at the end of 1981; closer relations were cultivated with Libya and Algeria; Papandreou visited a number of Arab countries; a direct line of communication was established between Greece and Syria; and an agreement was signed with Syria against world imperialism and racist Zionism. Papandreou’s initiative to invite Mitterrand and Gaddafi to discuss an issue not directly connected to Greece’s affairs can be seen in the context of a broader Greek foreign policy at that time to play an intermediary role between the West and the Arab world.

Kostas Kotsakis (The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition), 2009. The photographs depict Greek architect Kostas Kotsakis, whose name was found in the agenda of an associate killed during a bomb attack attempt against the American embassy in Athens in September 1970. This project is presented as a grid of 49 small size b&w photographs where the amount of light is progressively reduced. The title of the project is based on the same found sentence from Sol LeWitt’s text cited above.

About Kotsakis: Although not widely known, Kostas Kotsakis (64 years old today) took an active role in the fight against the Colonels’ Junta. After the capture of the active members of the November 17 terrorist group in the summer 2002, Kotsakis was represented in the Greek press as linked to terrorist networks. According to reports at the time, he seemed to be a member of the Epanastatikos Laikos Agonas (Revolutionary People's Struggle, known by the acronym ELA). After the group November 17, ELA was the most important terrorist group of the Greek radical Left. Kotsakis’ name was also found in the archives of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, connecting him with the terrorists Carlos the Jackal and Weinrich. Kotsakis denied any link with ELA and none of the above allegations was ever confirmed.

For the record, according to his own statements, Kotsakis had only a supportive role in the bombing attempt against the American embassy in Athens in September 1970. The attempt failed because of a defect in the bomb mechanism, which killed his companions Giorgos Tsikouris and Maria Elena Angeloni. Kotsakis’ name was found in Tsikouris’ agenda, and the regime declared him a co-perpetrator, putting a reward of 100,000 drachmas on his head. He succeeded in fleeing to Paris and did not return to Athens until 1975, after democracy had been restored.

Both November 17 and ELA developed out of the opposition to the military Junta and both groups were widely identified with the period after its fall in 1974. They were both strongly anti-American and sought the removal of US military forces from Greece. Until the end of the 1980s their activities and declarations were to a certain extent viewed favourably by the Greek people. ELA ceased its activity in 1995, while the November 17 group was disbanded in 2002, the period before the Olympic Games in Athens.

Photos courtesy of the artist and The Breeder, Athens:
The Piraeus Tower (The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition), 2009. Six scale models 1:150 on a wooden base (210 x 135 x 15cm).

The Elounda summit (The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition), 2009. Eight press photographs on a wooden shelf (c. 2.5 m). 

Kostas Kotsakis (The differences between the parts are the subject of the composition), 2009. Forty-nine photographs (6.5 x 9.5cm each) in glass frame 50 x 70cm.

stafylakis on vlahos

The Tower

by Kostis Stafylakis

“The Differences between the Parts are the Subject of the Composition.”

The first years after 1974, a key period for Vangelis Vlahos’ research, saw a great boost in the production of historical literature/testimonies. As Nikolas Sevastakis points out, it was the issue of seeing justice done for the crimes committed by the colonels’ regime and for recent events in Cyprus that fueled such production, in a general spirit that called for the moral vindication of the victims and the punishment of the perpetrators. If, in previous projects, Vlahos’ main intention has been to provide the necessary material for the construction of an anti-narrative, or an alternative version of Greece’s recent political history, then the Piraeus Tower project makes such an "elliptic" use of the historical document as to allow for the emergence of a space that is open to a host of associative processes. In the lines that follow, we will attempt to navigate this enigmatic space of association.

What could be the link between this decaying, half-finished tower of Piraeus, whose construction was a project undertaken by the colonels’ regime, and Andreas Papandreou’s foreign policy in the Middle East? At first glance, the two appear wholly unconnected! It is as if the work were suggesting something to which we have no access; something we cannot possibly grasp for lack of the necessary cognitive tools that might facilitate our understanding of it. Still, what we are confronted with belongs to the recent past – the very recent past, to be more precise! Today’s eighteen-year-olds may have no picture of the state of "hyper-politicization" that was typical of the 80s in Greece; they may not be familiar with the trials and tribulations of Greek foreign policy and its inexorable dependence upon crises fitfully breaking out in the interior, upon reversals and swings shaking the country from within. And yet, no matter how apolitical a younger generation may be – now between 25 and 35 years of age – it may very well recall some of the slogans chanted during the 1981 election. Young Greeks have surely heard, even as a distant echo, slogans such as "Out of the EEC" or "Out of NATO," although none of these "threats"’ ever materialized. Perhaps they may even be carrying, stored in their memory, images of Papandreou’s meetings with leaders of the so-called "independent world" of "anti-imperialist powers." If anything, they are certainly aware of Greece’s excellent relations with the Arab world, although they may be less familiar with such political choices as a verbal support of the Jaruzelski regime, a close relationship shared with the PLO and declarations made in favour of the Sandinistas –choices stemming from a determination to make perfectly clear that "Greece should no longer be considered a submissive satellite of the West." They may well remember the era’s dominant anti-Western and anti-American rhetoric, which was nevertheless accompanied by a full renewal of the contract allowing US military bases on Greek soil. They may have heard something about the strategy of greeting EEC and NATO communiqués with endless memoranda, as about the steady course steered by the Papandreou administration in constantly adopting a different position to that stated in such communiqués. They may even have heard that this strategy went hand in hand with a warm welcome of development funds provided for by the EEC’s Integrated Mediterranean Programs.    

What then happens when one is confronted with Vlahos’ stark, indexical space? What would a younger viewer surmise from a first, hasty attempt at "reclaiming" historical time? They would probably form the impression that Piraeus’ emblematic commercial tower, a token of an economic policy that directly depended upon the geopolitical realities of the Cold War, is a symbol of the past that remains unconnected to the sort of "independent," "heroic" foreign policy pursued in the years of the metapolitefsi [“regime change,” referring to the return to democracy following the Junta]. The historical circumstance that established Andreas Papandreou as a leading figure on the international diplomatic chessboard, the notorious "Elounda Bay Agreement" (1984), is mysteriously cited alongside the architectural models of the Piraeus Tower. A series of photographs showing Papandreou, Qaddafi and Mitterrand, taken at this event from different angles and by different photographers, serve to remind us of Papandreou’s initiative for Greek mediation in the conflict between France and Libya, which ultimately led to a compromise between the warring parties the two countries supported in Chad. On a first level then, an associative processing of the information at hand might allow us to identify a gap, a discontinuity that supposedly symbolizes the transition from a period of oppression in Greek history to one of "freedom," of popular sovereignty and socialist political choices. As a matter of fact, a large portion of what is known today as the "socialist or democratic wing" continues to view that "heroic" period of Greek socialism with intense feelings of nostalgia, perhaps as a reaction to the "discontent" and "embarrassment" caused in them – for reasons open to discussion – by the period of "modernization."

I think this might help us draw certain useful political insights. It is helpful to understand that the identity of contemporary Greek political awareness is still largely determined by a stereotypical "before-and-after" type of division. Thus, the documentational space that Vangelis Vlahos creates by juxtaposing photographic documents and architectural models operates as a sort of psychological experiment, or a general knowledge board game like the ones we used to play when little. The document reveals nothing about history; it rather reveals something about subjects themselves, who project their own fragmentary narrative upon the historical trace, attempting to ensure their ideological integrity by means of identifying a clear distinction between a "before" and an "after." 

And yet, things are not that simple. Those on the receiving end of the project feel that there is something disturbing lurking within it – something that threatens their very own ideological makeup. There is something slightly off about its image. This lifeless building of Piraeus does not rise in the middle of some ruined Balkan or Middle-Eastern ghost-city, but right at the heart of a large and thriving port of the Mediterranean. Moreover, it seems that it was always on the agenda of successive administrations of the metapolitefsi years, which was ensured mainly through the Piraeus Port Authority. Still, despite political planning, the building continues to stand in its place like a menacing apparition. For several reasons that remain largely unknown, including unsubstantiated rumors about the building’s flawed statics, it was never used, save the few stores that were occasionally housed there. How ironic! After 1974, the building’s first two floors would house a toy store, a home appliances chain store and a school. What could best describe the period’s pervasive hope for prosperity if not that? At the beginning of the 80s, part of the building’s exterior was covered with marble and glass. Nevertheless, there is some inexplicable reason that still prevents completion of the building, keeping it in this state of the modernist grid/framework that forms the core of an American architectural style now adopted internationally, which one may identify in almost all the buildings Vlahos chooses to examine in his work. Of course, the marble and glass fittings on the exterior of the Piraeus Tower seem to bring this international style closer to the sort of "Greco-international" style later to be imposed by a fledgling class of managers along Kifissias avenue. Perhaps what this citing of seemingly "incongruous" documentation really achieves is to intimate a sense of continuity – the enduring nature of the imaginary realm of political power, on which the change of regimes or administrations has no bearing. It is indeed hard to offer an explanation of the building’s mysterious "resistance" to governmental plans. In the end, the building is nothing but an empty shell, a modern carcass that remains unaltered – or, perhaps, keeps returning to the same place, if a metaphor might be allowed.
 
On the issue of justice for the crimes of the Junta, see, Nikolas Sevastakis, Koinotopi chora: Opseis tou dimosiou chorou kai antinomies axion sti simerini Ellada (Commonplace Land: Aspects of Public Space and Value Antinomies in Contemporary Greece), Athens, 2004. For an analysis of Greek foreign policy during the early 1980s, see Nikiforos Diamandouros, Politismikos dyismos kai politiki allagi stin Ellada tis metapolitefsis; in English as Cultural Dualism and Political Change in Post-Authoritarian Greece, translated by Dimitris A. Sotiropoulos, Athens, 2000.

the weak link

[Sorry, this video link is no longer active.]

Stathis Kouvelakis concisely lays out the situation in Greece, the stakes and choices, in the context of a new neoliberal austerity offensive in Europe and beyond.

Additional online resources:

Audio podcast of the panel "Eurozone in Crisis: Reform or Exit?" at Birkbeck, in which Costas Lapavitsas, George Irvin, Costas Douvinas, Stathis Kouvelakis and Alex Callinicos analyze the structural background and political option of exit.

RMF (Research on Money and Finance working group) Report on the Eurozone, in which Costas Lapavitsas and collaborators analyze the EU's center-periphery dynamics and the structural contradictions behind the sovereign debt crisis.

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.

general strike

In Greece on 11 March, hundreds of thousands of workers responded to Parliament’s passage of austerity measures with a 24-hour general strike – the third in a month – bringing airports and public transportation to a standstill.

The strike was called by the main unions, the GSEE and the public-sector ADEDY, which together represent half of Greece’s five million wage-workers.

In Athens and Thessaloniki, tens of thousands protested in union-organized demos.

In Athens as Parliament passed the austerity package on 5 March, employees of the National Printing House occupied and shut down the government presses in an attempt to block the measures from becoming law. (In order to become law, they must be formally published. The government ignored this law, of course.)

ADEDY has called for another general strike on 16 March.