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) <http://www.cpdweb.org/docs/2012.greece.shtml>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 cpd at igc.org
Clip from the article:
".... 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 apologise, 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 organise 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."