The Greek Grassroots Challenge to the Politics of Austerity

by Thomas Harrison and Joanne Landy
Co-Directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy (New
York)

August 14, 2012

http://www.cpdweb.org/docs/2012.greece.shtml

[Harrison and Landy recently returned from a trip to Greece,
where they met with activists and others to gain a better
understanding of the popular upsurge against the Greek
government's austerity program. They can be reached by email
at [log in to unmask]]

The crisis in Greece began with the discovery that the Greek
government had been concealing the size of its debt in order
to stay within the monetary union guidelines: it was revealed
to be 120 percent of GDP, one of the highest percentages in
the world. This massive debt was the result of several
factors: reckless borrowing, for example to finance the
Olympics and to buy weaponry from Germany and the U.S. (Greece
spends more on defense as a proportion of GDP than any other
EU member) and flagrant tax evasion by the rich but also the
structure of the Eurozone itself, which was designed to create
a market for German exports in Greece and the other weaker
European economies by replacing weak local currencies with the
Euro. This encouraged excessive borrowing. The "Troika" of the
European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the
International Monetary Fund agreed to a "rescue package"
three big chunks of bailout money in return for Greece
signing a "memorandum" promising massive privatization of
public assets and harsh austerity measures cutting government
spending on wages, pensions, social welfare to free up money
for paying down the debt.

In part because of the worldwide recession, government
revenues fell despite the spending cuts, and the debt
continued to grow. Meanwhile, the austerity program provoked
massive resistance from the Greek people. Huge protest marches
on May Day 2010 were attacked by the riot police and followed
by a general strike the first of 16 since that date. Over the
next two years, hundreds of thousands demonstrated repeatedly
in the streets of Athens and other cities, Parliament was
stormed several times, clashes with the riot police were a
regular occurrence, and public squares across the country,
including Syntagma Square in Athens, were occupied. As
Parliament continued to do the Troika's bidding, passing one
savage austerity package after another, popular support for
the two political parties that have dominated Greek politics
since the 70s the conservative New Democracy and the
nominally socialist PASOK collapsed.

Elections in the spring of 2012 constituted a political
earthquake. In the first round of voting in May, the Coalition
of the Radical Left, SYRIZA, hitherto one of the country's
several minor parties, came in second, with nearly 17 percent
of the vote, just behind New Democracy. PASOK saw its share
of the vote plummet from 44 percent in the last election in
2009 to 13 percent. At the same time, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn
gained parliamentary seats -- 18 -- for the first time as a
result of winning more than 425,000 votes, close to seven
percent of the total. This is in comparison to three years
before, when Golden Dawn had a tiny .46 percent of the vote.
After attempts to form a new government failed, another
election was scheduled for June 17. With opinion polls showing
that SYRIZA might come in first, the Greek corporate media and
European, especially German, officials went into high gear,
warning the Greek people that a victory by SYRIZA would bring
internal anarchy and result in Greece's expulsion from the
Eurozone. To a certain extent this terror campaign worked.
Despite the growing popularity of SYRIZA and its leader Alexis
Tsipras, many voters apparently took fright and either
abstained or voted for the parties of the memorandum. By the
same token, however, many other voters rallied to SYRIZA for
refusing to back down on its opposition to the memorandum. As
a result, while SYRIZA again came in second, this time it won
an astounding 27 percent of the vote.

Everyone seems to expect that the current coalition government
of New Democracy, PASOK, and Democratic Left a more
conservative social-democratic split-off from SYRIZA will be
short-lived and that new elections might very well bring
SYRIZA to power. The Troika has so far appeared determined to
make an example of Greece by not allowing any renegotiation of
the memorandum. Meanwhile, the country is enduring depression-
like conditions, with official unemployment now at 23 percent
but probably closer to 30 percent in reality, and youth
unemployment exceeding 50 percent.

This was the background to our visit to Athens, July 5-12. We
met with a number of SYRIZA activists, including party
leaders, a woman involved in immigrant rights, and two young
men from the Front of the Greek Anti-Capitalist Left,
ANTARSYA. We also spoke to several people who were not
political activists.

Athens certainly does not look like a city in the midst of
great upheaval, let alone on the verge of revolution. We were
in a working class district at one point and in another
residential area that seemed pretty modest, as well as in the
center. Especially for foreign visitors, signs of economic
distress were hard to detect, although we were told that there
is great suffering "behind closed doors." We can't recall
seeing any begging. Wherever we were, we scarcely ever noticed
political signs or posters or people leafleting. Of course, it
was summertime, when things simmer down for a while. Perhaps
too we were seeing signs of fatigue after two and a half years
of militant protest. On the other hand, steel workers were on
strike in an Athens suburb, and there were environmentalist
protests against gold mining in Chalkidiki. And we heard and
read about almost daily attacks on immigrants by members of
the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, Chrysi Avgi (more about which
below.)

SYRIZA

Michalis Spourdalakis, a professor at the University of
Athens, told us some of the history of SYRIZA. Until now, it
has been a coalition of several parties rather than a single
organization. The largest by far is Synaspismós, whose older
leaders come out of the Eurocommunist current that split with
the Communist Party, the KKE, in the 1980s. SYRIZA itself
emerged from the Greek wing of the anti-globalization movement
about eleven years ago. But it was the great popular upsurge
against austerity that turned SYRIZA into a major force. Since
the crisis began, the organization has been joined by some of
the more leftwing members of PASOK, including a few members of
parliament. Its mass support, however, is recent and comes
from the streets. Time and again we heard that SYRIZA had
earned the respect and loyalty of activists, especially of
young people, by its intense involvement in and its "non-
hegemonic" approach to the strikes, demonstrations and
occupations. SYRIZA, we were told, showed its commitment to
listening to and building the movement -- rather than simply
recruiting members, building their own organization, and
heavy-handedly insisting on acceptance of SYRIZA's agenda.

Spourdalakis stressed, as did most of the Greeks we spoke to,
that SYRIZA is not a typical electoral machine but is instead
rooted quite deliberately in mass actions strikes,
demonstrations, occupations -- in the midst of which its MPs
and officials can be found along with rank and filers. SYRIZA
people we spoke to seemed acutely aware of the danger of
substitutionism, that is, substituting the party for social
movements. At the same time, Spourdalakis insisted, having a
presence in parliament is essential because that is where so
much media attention is focused and where, of course, major
decisions are made.

Now that it has achieved a position of great trust and
potential responsibility, SYRIZA has decided to transform
itself into a unified organization, rather than a coalition of
different organizations, and to recruit aggressively. While we
were in Athens, SYRIZA announced that it was launching a big
membership drive with the goal of growing from the current
15,000 to a party with many times that number of members. The
separate components of the SYRIZA coalition will be able to
become tendencies within the party. Recruitment will take
place at worksites, on campuses, in the streets and at the
local assemblies that SYRIZA has been holding since before the
elections. We attended one of these assemblies in an open area
in the working-class suburb of Peristeri, attended by around
600 people, according to our estimate. Tsipras gave a rousing
speech, and we were told there would have been a discussion
period following the talk had it not been so hot outside.

Spourdalakis was cautiously optimistic about SYRIZA's future
and said the party's ability to grow depended very much on
staying deeply connected to extra-parliamentary struggles. For
one thing, SYRIZA is now engaged in organizing unorganized
workers for example, bookstore employees, couriers, tutors,
and other urban service workers -- into new unions. Greece has
two main labor federations, one for public employees and the
other for private, both of them controlled by PASOK, and a
third, smaller but still sizeable federation run by the KKE.
Most Greek unions contain caucuses that are linked to SYRIZA
and ANTARSYA. We were told by ANTARSYA that their group is
especially significant in the teachers' union, as is SYRIZA.

SYRIZA declares that its first act, on winning power, will be
to repudiate the memorandum. It will then demand re-
negotiation of the debt to write off a major part of it. If
that demand is rejected, a SYRIZA-led government will stop
debt repayments. The party promises to impose heavy taxation
on corporations and the wealthy, to nationalize the banks and
re-nationalize those public services that have been
privatized, to restore the minimum wage and labor contracts
that have been undermined during the crisis, to drastically
cut military spending, to emphasize renewable sources of
energy, and to construct a strong social welfare state.

Panos Trigazis, head of Synaspismós's foreign policy section,
was our genial host in Athens, introducing us to SYRIZA
leaders and intellectuals and bringing us to a press
conference, where we met Alexis Tsipras. Panos explained a
great deal, including the meaning of SYRIZA's emblem: three
superimposed banners, red for socialism, green for
environmentalism, and purple for feminism and other social
movements. As far we could see, the party's foreign policy is
not too well defined at this point. Its printed statements in
English are pretty much limited to relations with the EU and
to regional disputes. SYRIZA takes the position that Cyprus
should be re-united as bicommunal, bizonal federation without
foreign armies and foreign bases. It wants better relations
with Turkey and a mutual reduction in armaments, and it calls
for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. SYRIZA's platform
advocates the withdrawal of Greek troops from Afghanistan and
the Balkans, and declares "No Greek soldiers beyond our own
borders." It calls for the abolition of military cooperation
with Israel, and support for the creation of a Palestinian
State within the 1967 borders. The platform does call for
Greek withdrawal from NATO, but a few people told us that this
meant severing the military connection only. In any case, the
platform also calls for closing down the U.S. base in Greece.

The KKE and ANTARSYA

As for the KKE, virtually every leftist we spoke to expressed
disgust for its grotesque Stalinism (this is not just an
epithet; the party actually glorifies Stalin) and fanatical
sectarianism, which has seriously undermined the anti-
austerity movement. The KKE has refused to join any kind of
united front, and apparently its chief slogan during the
elections was "Do Not Trust SYRIZA." In general, the KKE will
not participate in any action it does not control for example
the huge annual Anti-Racism Festival, which we were lucky
enough to attend. This three-day festival has been held in a
park on the outskirts of Athens every summer for 16 years and
is a moving expression of solidarity with the country's
beleaguered immigrant communities. This July organizers
estimated that more than 22,000 people, immigrants and non-
immigrants, had attended.

The KKE is anti-EU, but so are other elements on the left,
including a group within SYRIZA, the Communist Organization of
Greece, the KOE, which has Maoist roots. Also in favor of an
immediate "Grexit" from the EU is ANTARSYA. One afternoon at a
café near Syntagma Square, we talked with two of its young
members. They were worried about popular demobilization now
that the elections were over and were skeptical of SYRIZA's
ability or willingness to spearhead struggles against the new
government's plans to privatize much of Greece's state assets.
They warned that SYRIZA was not preparing people for a
showdown with the Troika and the EU. ANTARSYA calls for
unilateral cancellation of the Greek debt, except for money
owed to pension funds; this in contrast to SYRIZA's position
of repudiating some of the debt but negotiating the rest. And
it advocates immediate withdrawal from the EU rather than
attempting to transform and democratize it, which is the stand
taken by SYRIZA's leading elements.

The ANTARSYA members said that SYRIZA is run by a small group
around Tsipras, which is fairly autonomous, even in relation
to Synaspismós members, and that a strong presence among
SYRIZA's leadership is also occupied by former PASOK MPs. The
revolutionary groups within SYRIZA have almost no public
profile, they said, and instead of pushing the party further
to the left have restrained themselves in response to pressure
from what they describe as the dominant social-democratic
elements and a perceived need for unity. They claimed that
after the June election, Tsipras had said that SYRIZA would
not put people in the streets but would act as a "responsible"
opposition.

It was difficult for us to assess the validity of ANTARSYA's
various critiques of SYRIZA and its strategy of immediate exit
from the Euro, but in any event we asked the young ANTARSYA
members if the group might not be more effective as a left
wing within SYRIZA, rather than outside it. They said no, it
was necessary to maintain their organizational independence to
avoid cooptation, which they charged was or would be the
inevitable fate of internal critics. We questioned this
conclusion. It seemed to us that SYRIZA was a party in motion,
attracting mass support and membership, and with, yes, the
possibility of capitulating to the Greek and pan-European
elites, but also with the potential of sparking a powerful
chain of resistance to those elites. It should be noted that
many ANTARSYA members voted for SYRIZA instead of the party's
own candidates in June, and that some of ANTARSYA's leaders
have gone over to SYRIZA.

Lessons for the U.S.

In fact we were struck by the contrast between SYRIZA, with
its base in popular movements and its radical possibilities,
and the Democratic Party in the U.S., which year after year
corrals progressive movements into a party dominated by
corporate interests incapable of fighting for progressive
goals. In our country there has been plenty of direct action
in the streets, in the public squares, on campuses, in
workplaces. But unlike Greece, this has not been accompanied
by direct action at the ballot box through a political party
that is not beholden to big business and is clearly a party of
the left. We think that the millions of Americans who are
outraged by the ruthless pillaging of their society by
arrogant elites desperately need an electoral movement like
SYRIZA that is rooted in popular struggles and committed to
winning and using political power to achieve progressive
change.

Golden Dawn

While we were inspired, even exhilarated, by the strength of
SYRIZA and its meteoric growth in influence and potential
power, at the same time, we became increasingly aware of the
ominous threat posed by the rise of Golden Dawn. Although it
denies any association with neo-Nazism, Golden Dawn has
adopted Third Reich paraphernalia and uses a symbol closely
resembling the swastika. Its leaders have written and spoken
of their admiration for Hitler and the Nazis. It is mobilizing
anti-immigrant sentiment among many Greeks who blame
immigrants for the economic crisis. Currently, SYRIZA has 71
MPs, compared with Golden Dawn's 18, which reflects the fact
that so far they have been more successful than the right wing
in gathering support from people enraged by the country's
economic horrors. But there is no guarantee that this relative
success will last.

Golden Dawn regularly terrorizes immigrants, particularly
those from Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the streets, in the
public squares, on the metro, and in immigrant neighborhoods.
They recruit bodybuilders from the gyms, and clothed in black,
run through the streets in groups of 30 or 40, shouting anti-
immigrant slogans, threatening and beating people with darker
skins. Many of its members are criminals convicted of contract
killings, trafficking, assaults, rapes, and armed robberies.
At the same time, they position themselves as the defenders of
public order, for example offering to accompany older people
to ATM machines to protect them from robbers.

Golden Dawn has an alarming degree of support from the police,
especially the riot police. It has been reported that as many
as 50 percent of the police voted for its candidates in the
June elections. Rather than protecting immigrants, the police
regularly turn a blind eye to Golden Dawn's assaults. They
often tell immigrants who complain of being attacked that they
will have to defend themselves, or that they will have to pay
a fee in order to file a formal complaint. In fact there are
no such fees. [For a fuller account, see the Human Rights
Watch report "Hate on the Streets: Xenophobic Violence in
Greece," July 10, 2012
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2012/07/10/hate-streets

Golden Dawn's vicious xenophobia is accompanied by a crude
male chauvinism that is shocking to see in the 21st century.
We were told that the party believes that woman's place is in
the home not in public positions of power. This was acted out
on a television talk show ten days before the June elections,
when Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris threw water in the
face of one female SYRIZA MP, Rena Dourou, and then hit
another woman, Liana Kanelli, a Communist MP, three times in
the face. Kasidiaris was elected to his seat in parliament in
the elections that followed soon after this grotesque
incident. The British Guardian reported "Several hours after
the incident, with the group still resolutely refusing to
apologize, two MPs with the socialist Pasok party were
attacked by Golden Dawn supporters as they campaigned in
northern Greece.... In recent months, and especially in the
weeks that have elapsed between Greece's two [May and June
2012] ballots, the party has been linked to a number of
attacks on migrants, liberals, human rights activists and
journalists, particularly women. ["Golden Dawn MP's live TV
assault shocks Greece," by Helena Smith, June 7 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/07/golden-dawn-tv-assault-greece]

Hilary Wainwright, founding editor of the lively left-wing
British magazine Red Pepper, was in Greece at the same time we
were. She has written an account of her trip in the current
issue entitled "Greece: Syriza Shines a Light"
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/greece-syriza-shines-a-light/.
Wainwright gives the following account of SYRIZA's response to
Golden Dawn's virulent racist behavior:

On 23 June, for example, a gang of Golden Dawn thugs raided
Pakistani grocers' shops in the working class suburb of Nikea,
near the port of Piraeus, telling them they had one week to
get ready and go, `or else'. Syriza had won 38 per cent of the
vote in Nikea ... and after the attack the party helped to
organize a rally and march of 3,000 in support of the
shopkeepers....

SYRIZA has long opposed racism in Greece. It has for many
years participated in the Anti-Racism Festivals. Meanwhile,
however, the brutal attacks on immigrants continue, and we
asked people in SYRIZA how the party was responding to these
assaults on a day-to-day basis. Specifically we asked if, in
light of the failure of the police to defend the immigrants,
was SYRIZA organizing any kind of physical response to the
Golden Dawn attacks.

Leaders of SYRIZA told us that they believed that the
effective response to Golden Dawn was political, to put
forward a radical democratic agenda that could address the
economic crisis in a progressive way rather than scapegoating
immigrants. They also advocate human rights training for
police and call on the police to do their job and protect
victims of racist assault. They said that in their opinion to
resist Golden Dawn physically would simply lead to disastrous
fighting in the streets. SYRIZA wants to prevent the media
from portraying a confrontation with Golden Dawn as a "clash
of two extremes."

We were concerned that the SYRIZA response, while good in many
respects, is not adequate, and we found that several young
SYRIZA members and supporters we spoke with also thought that
more was needed. One young woman, for example, told us that
when she had seen a Golden Dawn thug menacing an immigrant on
the metro, she walked over and confronted him, demanding that
he stop. Which he did. But, she said, if there had been five
Golden Dawn thugs instead of just one, she doesn't think she
would have been able to intervene in the same way. SYRIZA has
to mount some kind of organized physical defense for the
beleaguered immigrants, she thought.

Another young SYRIZA member told us that recently in response
to the repeated physical assaults on immigrants a group of
young anarchists had beaten up a number of Golden Dawn
members. He said that while SYRIZA wasn't able to confront the
Golden Dawn this way, he was very glad that this had happened.
It was a blow against impunity.

When we asked SYRIZA leaders whether Golden Dawn could attack
SYRIZA, they replied that Golden Dawn "wouldn't dare,"
suggesting that SYRIZA was so much stronger and more numerous
that such an attack would be foolhardy. But we were concerned
that, in addition to the moral imperative to defend immigrant
victims, a failure to respond to Golden Dawn more forcefully
now could embolden them for broader aggression against the
left down the road. Even now, as we noted above, women,
journalists, human rights activists and leftists have been
targeted on occasion.

There is a battle between the left and Golden Dawn as to who
will be able to tap into and organize the rage of Greeks
responding to their desperate conditions. We were told by a
young SYRIZA member how this struggle emerged as early as the
2010 occupation of Syntagma Square. As we knew, the lower part
of the Square was occupied by SYRIZA supporters and other
leftists, but we learned that the upper Square was occupied by
non-political people and right wingers who were waving huge
Greek flags and saying that all politicians, including
leftists, are corrupt and hopeless sell-outs.

Large sections of the Greek population are cynical about all
politicians, and this cynicism is justified by the record not
only of avowedly conservative and centrist parties but also
purportedly left parties like PASOK and Democratic Left, which
have shown themselves unwilling to challenge the Troika's
austerity prescriptions. The June elections of 2012 were
marked by a historically low participation rate, which
reflected this popular distrust of all political parties.

The Challenge Ahead

This is the challenge now facing SYRIZA: Can it sustain
resistance to the Troika and crucially, if elected, can it
carry out a radical program that addresses the needs of the
Greek people? Admittedly this won't be easy. There is a good
chance that Greece will be forced out of the Eurozone if there
is a SYRIZA government, though it seems that the country may
be ejected even before that. Greece today revives many of the
old questions about whether one can build "socialism in one
country," and we saw the disastrous consequences of the
attempt to pursue that path in the Soviet Union. SYRIZA will
need to implement the maximum possible anti-capitalist program
at home, while at the same time engaging in the critical task
of winning support for a radical, democratic socialist
alternative from the rest of Europe -- from other countries
with weak economies like Spain and Italy, to the countries of
Northern Europe which, while more prosperous, also suffer from
inequality, insecurity, and down the line, instability.

Solidarity

Dimitris Vitsas, the secretary of Synaspismós, discussed with
us the need to build international solidarity, not just with
SYRIZA but with the Greek resistance as a whole. He suggested
strengthening an international campaign that has already
started around the slogan, "We Are All Greeks." Vitsas said
that Greeks refuse to be the guinea pigs for extreme
neoliberalism. Greece has been the weak link in the chain of
austerity, but now SYRIZA's success offers the possibility
that Greeks can show the way to fight back. We at the Campaign
for Peace and Democracy plan to organize a campaign along
these lines in the U.S., building on the Occupy Wall Street
solidarity initiative several months ago. Stay tuned for
future developments.

==========

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