Greek youth revolts against a revolting world

In Greece a massive youth movement is underway expressing outrage against police brutality and the general social situation in Greece. For many days, despite repressive measures, the situation on the streets has been out of control and the government has proved unable to restore order. It is the biggest rebellion since the collapse of the Colonel’s Junta back in 1974.

In the centre of Athens the riots were, as usual, concentrated around the universities (In Greece the universities have political asylum status enshrined in law); in Patras, the main police station was placed under siege. There have been numerous revolts and may participants in Athens and in every other Greek city and generally throughout the country; there have been sieges and attacks against dozens of police stations, violent riots, occupations of public buildings and sit-ins. On Friday 19th of December there was a demonstration involving tens of thousands of students who have resisted despite the tear gas. As we write there are 800 schools and 150 faculties occupied. The offices of the trade-union federation, (GSEE) have been occupied by left, mainly anarchist, groups.

Those participating in the movement are mainly students, anarchists and most of all angry young school students. They are expressing their rage not only against the recent murder of a student by police, the spark that set off the riots, but against the consequences of the social crisis: against poor education, poverty, social inequality, corruption and high levels of youth unemployment. It is a generation which feels it has no future, and many of them express their rage through violent riots against the police: for days hundreds of young people have been directly confronting the special forces, hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at them.

Today, fifteen days after the student was killed, the movement is isolated. As usual, a sign of this weakening is the actions of the anarchist groups, ‘fighting their revolution’ by attacking the police and engaging in ‘exemplary’ violent actions. Every such disorder is used by the bourgeoisie to discredit the movement and to keep workers away from it.

But this movement cannot be likened to the one in the banlieues of Paris. Even though Athens has poor suburbs, naturally, they don’t have the ghetto-like quality of the ones in Paris. And the demonstrators aren’t of the same type: here they are mainly students and young people in general, not the ‘invisibles’ of the banlieues.

The working class hasn’t so far reacted and the proletarian masses in general haven’t taken part in the revolt. A general strike, which had already been planned before the latest events, took place on Wednesday December 10th. The prime minister repeatedly called for the heads of the Greek Workers Confederation to suspend it but they refused. The strike received wide support, mainly from the public sector, as usual.

The line of the rightist government, floundering in a deep political crisis, has been one of ‘zero tolerance’. The police has received orders to use aggression and provocative measures. More than 100 people have been arrested.

The social democratic opposition (PASOK), standing for the next government, is keeping its distance from the movement and studiously avoided mobilising its supporters. The powerful Stalinist Greek Communist Party has taken a shameful position by backing the government, attributing the assassination to the policeman’s lack of training and condemning the riots as organised provocations originating from mysterious centres inside and outside the country. The rioters are denounced as criminals. Anyway, they are trying to control their rank and file by calling party rallies. Only the smaller left coalition, Sinaspismos, which wants to join PASOK as part of the next government, has supported and taken part in the demonstrations, but nevertheless condemning the rioting and calling for appeasement.

The union bosses are doing everything they can to avoid supporting the movement and mobilising the workers. The only organised forces with an important role in the movement are the anarchists and the groups of the Greek ‘far left’ (trotskists, Maoists, etc) who play a leading role in the university student movement. These forces, which bow to spontaneity and idealise youth, talk of popular insurrection and call for the overthrow of the government. Some of the demonstrators are influenced by the anarchists, whose ‘strategy’ for the most part, in Greece, can be reduced to rioting: in other words, handing the bourgeois state an excuse to repress the movement on a plate!

The profound social transformation in Greece over the last twenty years is what is responsible for these events, of course. According to the official data 21% of the population live in poverty. Tens of thousands of young workers and employees take home around 700 euros a month. The rate of unemployment is around 10%. And all this before the world financial crisis has hit the country, although that is only a matter of time.

The problem is that the working masses haven’t got involved, and probably, even this time, they won’t. And there are many reasons why that is so.

The trade unions are completely controlled by the trade union bureaucracy, linked in its turn to the bourgeois parties of right and left. The working class has suffered greatly over the last few years seeing its standard of living, working conditions and social security worsening considerably. Most families are in debt to the banks through mortgages on their homes, consumer loans and credit cards. Thousands of workers are faced with the threat of unemployment and lack of job security. The workers think of themselves as isolated, fed up individuals trying to ‘make do’ in a rapidly worsening situation. Despite the wide-eyed dreams of petty bourgeois leftism, anarchism and spontaneism, a youth movement, even a very robust one, won’t be enough to get the working class to take to the streets.

Another very important factor is a general disillusionment with politics and the lack of a social perspective, something that is certainly the case in the rest of Europe as well.

Thus the government was able to take forceful steps against the demonstrators whilst at the same time counting on the movement simply dispersing over the Christmas holidays.

We need to analyse what lies behind these events and see them for what they are. It isn’t an ‘insurrection’. It is a youth movement that by its very nature has its limits. One can’t say that some tens of thousands of demonstrators in a capital of 5 million inhabitants is an ‘insurrection’.

There is no insurrection without the working class. The only true insurrection is the revolt of the proletariat. Nothing can replace the historic role of the working class. Its mobilisation alone represents the real danger to the capitalist system. In Greece, as elsewhere, the movement cannot take root without the mobilisation of the great proletarian masses, which is yet to raise its head. The State’s main preoccupation therefore is keeping the working class repressed, because the bourgeoisie fears a future outbreak of the workers’ movement in response to the dire effect of the world economic crisis. The events in Greece are a prelude to much greater social disorder.

Obviously, given the absence of the party, the level of class-consciousness, both amongst the young and amongst workers, is practically zero. The prevalent political demand, advanced by many leftist groups, is to get rid of the right wing government. This is simply an expression of the left-wing ‘militant reformism’ so typical of the bourgeois oppositional forces of PASOK.

But what these recent events actually reveal is the necessity for a communist internationalist party, the one force that can express the true interests of the working class. That is what lies at the heart of the matter.