Red Pepper » Europe

Essay: Europe’s hard borders

admin — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 12:00:20 +0000

In the aftermath of the cold war, the more utopian prophets of globalisation hailed the advent of a new ‘borderless’ world in which national borders would become irrelevant and obsolete. Since then governments across the world have dismantled barriers and tariffs against the free movement of capital and commodities, and entered into regional and transnational agreements that have relinquished traditional tenets of national sovereignty.
Yet the past two decades have also been seen an unprecedented political concern with borders as symbolic markers of national identity, and barriers against the movement of unwanted people. In various countries, from the United States and India to Israel and South Africa, governments have reinforced their borders with new physical barriers, technologies and personnel.
This dual process of softening/hardening borders has been particularly striking in the European Union. On the one hand European governments have achieved something that only a few decades ago would have seemed unimaginable – the reintegration of Eastern and Western Europe, the removal of internal border checks and the creation of a vast ‘space of freedom, security and justice’ in which some 500 million European citizens can live and work freely anywhere on the continent.
At the same time European governments have gone to extraordinary and unprecedented lengths to limit and monitor the entry of people from outside the continent. From Ceuta and Melilla in the south to the 1,800-mile frontier that marks Europe’s eastern frontier with Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova; from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic and the Aegean, European governments have reinforced their borders with police, soldiers, border guards, naval patrols, and an array of physical barriers and surveillance and detection technologies that amount to the most extensive border enforcement effort in history.
The new political prioritisation of borders has been shaped by various factors, from economic insecurity and anxieties about national identity to law enforcement and security concerns. But the overriding priority behind the new border regimes, from the Rio Grande and the Sinai to the Greek-Turkish border, is the prevention of ‘illegal immigration’ – a category that generally refers to undocumented migrants from the global south, whether defined as ‘economic migrants’ or refugees and asylum seekers.
Today Europe’s immigration controls are no longer limited to the continent’s territorial frontiers but extend both inside and outside the continent. They include a sprawling archipelago of detention centres scattered across and beyond the EU; draconian ‘post-entry’ policies which victimise and marginalise asylum seekers in order to transmit a deterrent message; ‘upstream’ immigration controls aimed at detecting and trapping unwanted migrants before they can even reach Europe; and neighbourhood partnerships that seek to involve an ever-widening array of countries in Europe’s ‘externalised’ border controls.
Devastating consequences
This system has had devastating consequences for the people it is designed to exclude. At least 15,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the EU’s maritime and land borders. Men, women and children have drowned in the Mediterranean and the Aegean, frozen to death in the mountains of Slovakia and Poland, or been blown up in minefields along the Greek-Turkish border.
Migrants have also fallen from trucks and trains, or killed themselves to escape detention or deportation or because they were reduced to stateless destitution. Such deaths have since become so routine that even the most spectacular tragedies increasingly attract little more than cursory media attention.
European governments frequently attribute the horrific migrant death toll to the ruthlessness and cynicism of traffickers and people smugglers – and not always without reason. But the death toll on the continent’s borders has become a kind of collateral damage in an undeclared ‘war’ that treats undocumented migrants as criminal and harmful intruders to be kept at bay through a quasi-military enforcement effort.
The moral condemnation of the people-smuggling industry ignores the fact that that migrants make use of such services in order to find a way through the gauntlet of obstacles that have been placed in their path. It also tends to overlook the demand for undocumented migrant labour in key sectors of the European economy – a demand that is often enhanced by the fact that illegal workers have few or no legal protections.
European governments do not want migrants dying on the continent’s borders. But their common determination to prevent or at least slow down the pace of migration has in practice created pockets of impunity, in which the worst things can happen to migrants but no one is ever responsible or accountable for them.
In 2005 at least 13 African migrants were shot or fell to their deaths when Spanish and Moroccan security forces attempted to prevent mass crossings of the border fences in Spain’s Moroccan exclaves at Ceuta and Melilla. To date neither the Moroccan nor Spanish security forces have accepted responsibility for these deaths.
In the Aegean and the Mediterranean, there have been a disturbing number of incidents in which coastguard and naval vessels from various countries are alleged to have rammed migrant boats or refused to rescue their passengers. Such allegations have tended to produce inconclusive investigations, insofar as they have been investigated at all. These incidents cannot be considered the norm. Thousands of migrants have indeed been rescued at sea by European coastguard officers and naval personnel. But the horrendous death toll means that the glass must always be considered half empty, and the proliferation of ‘left-to-die’ episodes is the most extreme manifestation of the repressive model of border enforcement, which generally prefers to ensure that migrant journeys are as hazardous, difficult and harsh as possible – the better to deter others from following their example.
Undermining Europe’s principles
These priorities have remorselessly ground away at the principles that supposedly define the European Union, in ways that are not always visible to the general public. The European Union places human rights at the heart of its political identity. Article 2 of the 2007 Lisbon Treaty states that: ‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.’
This commitment to human rights is further reflected in various treaties and conventions, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, in addition to conventions and treaties to which the EU is a signatory, such as the Geneva Convention on the status of refugees, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Charter.
No European government has explicitly abrogated these agreements, even though some have called for some of them to be revisited. Yet these commitments are routinely violated in practice by the continent’s border enforcement procedures.
The Geneva Convention explicitly mandates its signatories to observe the principle of ‘non-refoulement’, whereby refugees and asylum seekers are not sent back to a country where they may face persecution or harm. But this principle has been regularly evaded or ignored by numerous European governments. In 2009, Italy signed its notorious ‘pushback’ or ‘towback’ agreement with Gaddafi’s Libya, whereby migrants intercepted on the high seas were handed over to the Libyan navy without any asylum screening procedures and sent back to a country with some of the worst immigration detention centres in the world.
Both ‘pushed back’ migrant detainees and migrants entering Libya from the Sahara were subjected to the routine violence, overcrowding, and sexual exploitation that characterised Libya’s detention regime – some of which received funding from the EU itself. Both Italy and the EU were aware of conditions inside these centres, but Gaddafi’s Libya, like Tunisia, was nevertheless allowed to play the role of migrant dumping ground – a role that has continued since his overthrow.
Other countries have also been drawn into the EU’s migration controls in an attempt to deny access to asylum in practice without explicitly refusing it. In Greece, the police and army have conducted secret deportations of migrants across the Greek-Turkish land border, and Turkey’s weak traditions of refugee protection have not prevented the EU from attempting to involve the Turkish government in its ‘externalised’ border controls.
In Slovakia and Ukraine, migrants crossing the border from Ukraine to seek asylum have been handed over to Ukrainian border guards without any assessment of their claims and placed in detention for months or a year in a country where almost no one gets refugee protection.
At the Moroccan-Algerian border, I visited forest camps where migrants, including young children, were living in homemade bivouacs (improvised shelters) at the mercy of the Moroccan police and army, who regularly shunt them across the border, and where female migrants are routinely raped or sexually exploited by bandits, law enforcement officials and other migrants themselves.
Within Europe itself, a number of ‘border countries’ have acted as dumping grounds and migrant traps as a result of the Dublin Convention’s ‘geographical’ clause, which limits asylum applications to a single country. In Greece tens of thousands of migrants have become trapped in a country that accepted few refugees even before the economic crisis erupted. In Malta migrants have sometimes been detained for five years from the moment of their arrival in detention centres that were condemned by all external observers.
Punitive array
Formal detention is only one instrument in an array of punitive measures aimed at isolating migrants from the societies in which they find themselves. Thousands of rejected asylum seekers across the continent are not allowed to work and receive no benefits because they won’t sign an agreement agreeing to return to the countries they came from.
In the Spanish exclave of Melilla in Morocco, some migrants have spent more than five years in the ‘migrant reception centre’ or living in camps on the outskirts of the city, waiting for their asylum applications to be processed. Even when migrants have been registered officially as asylum seekers and theoretically entitled to continue their journeys to the Spanish mainland, they have been turned back on the ferry and forced to remain in a city that effectively acts as an offshore detention centre.
In the Greek ports of Patras and Igoumenitsa, migrants have been harassed by police in an increasingly vicious campaign of persecution in an attempt to make them leave. In Calais, the demolition of the Sangatte ‘jungle’ in 2009 was followed by a relentless war of attrition, in which police have attempted to prevent migrants from using the city as a conduit to the UK.
In the spring of 2010, I personally witnessed police taking away blankets from more than 50 homeless migrants in Calais, in temperatures that were only just above zero, under the supervision of the local authorities. Since then police have raided migrant squats and camps, some of which have been demolished by the municipal authorities.
All these developments have formed part of a punitive response to what the European border agency Frontex once described as a potential ‘human surge’ of immigration that might overwhelm the continent.
In some countries, such as Berlusconi’s Italy, extreme right wing politicians have described undocumented migration as an ‘invasion’ – a fantasy that is sometimes reframed more specifically as an Islamic invasion that threatens to undermine European culture and civilisation. In other countries, even left-of-centre governments have presented ‘immigration management’ as an instrument of ‘social cohesion’ and an essential prophylactic to keep more extreme political forces at bay.
The result is a border enforcement model that is simultaneously ruthless, devious, incoherent, hypocritical and lacking in any moral credibility, and which has proven largely futile and counterproductive. If militarised border controls have sometimes succeeded in reducing the flow of migrants in some countries, these ‘victories’ have generally paved the way for new migratory routes elsewhere.
Europe’s need for migrants
Numerous economists have argued that a ‘greying’ Europe needs migrants to pay the taxes that provide the continent’s pensions and public services and to fill the demand for labour in key economic sectors. In 2011, a strategy paper presented to the European Commission noted that ‘European countries are facing labour market shortages and vacancies that cannot be filled by the domestic workforce in specific sectors’ and that ‘long-term population ageing in Europe is expected to halve the ratio between persons of working age (20-64) and persons aged 65 and above in the next 50 years.’
The paper called for less stringent visa requirements and the development of ‘migration and mobility dialogues’ with neighbouring migrant-producing countries that would attempt to transform migration into a mutually-beneficial process. These recommendations were accompanied by the same emphasis on restrictions, barriers, readmission agreements, and outsourced border controls that have dominated EU policy debates for so many years, and which called into question the paper’s stated aspiration to ‘protect the human rights of all migrants throughout their migration process’.
These contradictory objectives are even more glaring in mainstream political discourse. Too many politicians and policymakers recognise Europe’s need for migrants yet refuse to acknowledge this publicly and prefer instead to celebrate crowd-pleasing deportation statistics as proof of their ‘toughness’ on immigration, and commit themselves to drastic immigrant-reduction targets that cannot be met without replicating the ‘closed’ security-obsessed borders of the 1930s.
In Europe’s age of debt-driven ‘austerity’, it has become even more convenient for governments to prioritise national privilege and depict migrants as parasitical intruders – a tendency reflected in meaningless populist promises of ‘British jobs for British workers’, in unrealisable immigration reduction targets and in the Spanish government’s recent law denying free healthcare to undocumented migrants.
Today the economic crisis has become a further justification for an intensification of border enforcement, at a time when the numbers of migrants coming to Europe are falling across the continent because of the crisis. Not only have migrants in various countries begun to return home because there is no work available for them but European countries that have only recently undergone the transformation from ‘immigrant-producing’ to ‘immigrant-receiving’ countries have once again begun to produce a new generation of migrants.
These developments suggest an inherent rationality to migration that rarely features in media debates about immigration and policy documents pertaining to Europe’s ‘hardened’ borders. Instead of recognising such rationality and developing policies that can harness migration for the benefit of Europe and migrants themselves, too many governments have accepted the exclusionary model without any regard for its human or political consequences.
Contradictory principles and practice
The European Union was not only intended to be a trading bloc and an economic union. The project of European unity was a response to the most catastrophic period in European and world history. Its architects aspired to create a common European space that would reflect the continent’s best political traditions, rather than its worst. These aspirations are at odds with the punitive border enforcement policies that have been put in place over the last two decades – and the attitudes and assumptions that have shaped these policies.
A genuinely inclusive Europe that prioritises human rights and aspires to be a ‘Europe of asylum’ cannot coexist indefinitely with exclusionary policies based on detention centres; with target-driven deportations; with ‘externalised’ border controls that transform ‘offshore’ countries into migrant dumping grounds and prevent potential refugees from even reaching Europe; with border surveillance technologies, fences and barriers; with ‘post-entry’ policies that reduce men and women to homeless pariahs in the heart of some of the richest cities on earth.
Sooner or later the contradictions between principle and practice will become impossible to ignore or smooth over. If European governments are to avoid a dynamic of repression that risks replicating some of the darkest pages in the continent’s history, it is incumbent upon Europeans to develop a more humane and rational approach to immigration, which reflects the continent’s best political and moral traditions, rather than its worst, which places human rights at the heart of migration and does not treat people in search of work or a place of safety as criminals, invaders and threats to its cultural identity.
Thousands of people across the continent have already made this choice. They include NGOs, militant anti-border control activists, church and civil society organisations and individuals from a variety of different backgrounds who have intervened in Europe’s immigration wars to stop the deportations of migrants they have known as friends or colleagues, provided humanitarian assistance to destitute asylum seekers, or engaged in popular mobilisations against detention centres and deportation flights.
In their examples we can glimpse the possibility of another kind of Europe to the ‘fortress’ model that is currently under construction, one that is based on solidarity, inclusivity and common humanity, rather than fear, xenophobia and the demonisation of the alien Other.
The great challenge is how to find governments that not only pay lip service to these principles but are prepared to develop policies that reflect them in practice, and replace the continent’s hardened borders with a more generous and realistic approach to migration than the one that has dominated the past two decades.
Matthew Carr is the author of Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a gated continent. He blogs at www.infernalmachine.co.uk. Illustration by Andrzej Krauze

Organising to survive in Greece

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:00:36 +0000

Greeks queue to buy cheap sacks of potatoes sold directly by farmers at cost price in the northern town of Thessaloniki. Farmers in northern Greece have joined forces with local residents to provide cheap produce for the people. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis
The first problem is that in Greece now we have 25 per cent unemployment, with youth unemployment reaching 58 per cent and unemployment in areas that used to be highly industrialised sometimes reaching 70-80 per cent. Many industries either close because we have very low consumption or, as in the case of the big multinationals like Coca-Cola, they are leaving.
Around 170,000 small companies have closed in the past three years. It is almost impossible to set up a new company today in Greece because you can’t get the finance. The banks are taking 80 per cent of the money that Greece is getting from the EU and IMF. But they are not lending a euro to the people.
Unemployment benefit only lasts for one year, and then you get nothing to survive on – only help from friends and family, from social networks and working for very little in the black economy. The problem up to now hasn’t been as severe as it could have been because of very strong family and friendship networks – if someone had difficulty in paying bills, for example, others would support them. But it isn’t possible to sustain this kind of support indefinitely.
A related problem is homelessness. In the past, homeless people were mainly those who had problems with drug use or illness. Now many are homeless because they lost their jobs. There are least 20,000 homeless in Greece now – some estimates are much higher. And state-provided shelter only covers around 250 people.
At the same time, there are 300,000 houses for sale in Athens because people need the money to live on. About 40 per cent of mortgages are in arrears. There are few repossessions at the moment because the mortgage companies would not know what to do with the houses. But they are talking about it.
Salaries have fallen substantially – by up to 70 per cent in some cases. When the state cannot pay its debt, it reduces public sector salaries, as well as pensions. My sister has been working in education for 25 years. Her monthly salary has dropped from €1,400 to €1,000 (£800). People with bigger salaries have seen an even bigger drop. So talented people, especially the young, are going abroad to find better paid work.
Food direct
At the same time, contrary to the normal assumptions about prices falling during a recession, they are actually going up. The reason is that many products are imported and with trade in the hands of big companies, these companies can keep prices high. This is why, with Solidarity for All, we’re trying to create a network to provide food direct from producers without using the normal market. In this way we have been able to lower prices by up to 50 per cent compared to what they are in the supermarket. This is a big movement in Greece now. We have not managed yet to organise for all products, but there are now networks for the direct exchange of some vegetables, potatoes, oil, flour and lemons, for example.
There are many families who are undernourished. Children are fainting in schools because they haven’t eaten anything for a day or two. We have therefore tried to push the government to provide some food in schools – something that hasn’t happened since the 1950s.
There is a big problem with the health system. Most people have to pay health insurance. But they have not been able to keep up payments, so they can’t go to the hospital, to a doctor, or buy medicine. Insurance is very expensive, €350 per month – so it is very difficult to afford when salaries have been cut from, say, €2,000 to €1,000. More than one third of the population can’t use health services because of this. So we have tried to set up small health centres with volunteer doctors, and gather from pharmacies some medicine for people who have no insurance. We’ve also tried to collaborate with some hospitals where there are sympathetic managers and send them the more serious cases.
There is a particular problem with the most expensive medicines, such as those for cancer. Even the hospitals don’t have these medicines because of lack of funds, so the patient ends up just being given cortisone. Every day in our network we try to inform people who have these diseases where they can find the right medicine – one day it’s this hospital, three days later another one.
Another problem is the taxes. The government has reformed the tax system but it has benefited the rich. Before the change those with up to €10,000 income wouldn’t pay taxes. And beyond €10,000 the taxes were between 10 per cent and 40 per cent (and for companies from 25 per cent to 40 per cent). Now individuals have to start to pay taxes from the first euro, with tax rates for individuals between 20 and 35 per cent, while corporate taxes are now 25 per cent maximum. The idea is that this gives the companies an incentive to invest. But at the moment most companies show no intention to do so.
There has been a big increase in suicides. Before the crisis, the suicide level was very low but in the past year suicide ranked equal first with car accidents as a cause of death. This particularly affects middle class men who have lost everything. One newspaper reported that every day we have 500 attempted suicides, around 50 of which are successful.
Solidarity networks
The solidarity networks are working in six spheres: food supply and health services (see posters, right), education, cultural activity, legal advice and social economy.
We are people of the left and radical left, and connected with Syriza – though it’s not only people from Syriza who are involved. Syriza also decided that 20 per cent of its MPs’ salaries would be given to solidarity actions. We have decided that this will be used to help people to start small collective businesses, or to buy essentials for social kitchens, but we don’t use it for direct payments to people or for paying rent.
Solidarity for All is a growing movement – last year there were maybe only 100 initiatives and now it has grown to 2,000. There is a lot of activity, spreading fast. So far it has been people taking action by themselves but we are trying to coordinate it. We are trying to make a database of all the small groups doing solidarity actions so they can meet each other and exchange experiences. The aim is to make a movement out of this, and try to find solutions to the problems encountered by solidarity networks.
Many of these problems arise from state intervention. For example, there is a very important solidarity centre in the town of Volos in Thessalia, in the middle of Greece, where products and services are exchanged without money. They have a social currency called a ‘tem’. They have created an exchange system, so that, for example, one kilo of potatoes is one tem and one hour of babysitting is one tem. So if you want someone to babysit you could give them a kilo of potatoes in exchange. As this grew, the state asked them to pay taxes on the services and products they were exchanging. Up to now the state has not succeeded in enforcing this but we don’t know what will happen in the future.
Another example of state hostility is towards the social kitchens. The state told us we didn’t have the necessary sanitary conditions or permission to run these kitchens. In response, all social kitchens got together and answered with a huge communal meal where many people cooked all together and challenged them to arrest us all!
Our work on education is important because in Greece you have to pay for subjects such as languages, music and so on. People increasingly can’t afford this, so we have volunteer teams giving lessons in foreign languages and music in many neighbourhoods in Athens and other cities.
Then there are teams of people who provide legal information when people have problems with the banks and so on. Also we have groups who put on music or theatrical performances, where people can watch by donating food, which then goes to feed others in need of it. And finally we have networks working on different aspects of the social economy – for example to support people taking land that is not being used and cultivating it, or people occupying a free space and running a social marketplace in it, with very low prices.
People are expecting an even bigger crisis and we have to be prepared. The most important thing is to provide medicine and food. Greece is very competent in agriculture, so we could easily become self sufficient in food.
Reducing fear
It is also important to ensure people aren’t isolated and fearful. The only weapon of the government is fear. My mother is an old woman and is afraid of losing her pension. She knows that the money Greece receives from the EU is not, as the media pretend, for salaries and pensions but is for supporting the banks. No one really believes the government’s policies are right, but many people are afraid to protest.
We are trying to reduce people’s fear, so that they can exert their right to protest. But our aim is also to counteract the increasing support for the Nazi Golden Dawn party in Greece, which is now approaching 12 per cent support in the polls. These people offer their own kind of ‘social solidarity’, but only for white, Greek Orthodox people and mainly as a media trick. They go to a square, call the media and distribute food, and if, for example, a woman who is not originally Greek tries to take some food they chase her away in front of the media. They campaign for nursery schools to give priority to ‘Greek’ children and not to take the children even of legal migrants. And the most severe problem is that they attack migrants every day without any punishment from the state. Worryingly, they are starting to have an influence in high schools, where they have formed gangs.
Their vote comes largely from the middle class or poorer – though not the poorest – people, including many from rural areas. Their voters believe that Golden Dawn is an anti-system party because its MPs vote against the austerity measures in parliament. We are trying to inform people that in fact they are the violent hand of the system.
More positively, Syriza is coming first in many polls now, with about 32–33 per cent support, with the governing New Democracy party on 27–28 per cent and the old social democratic party PASOK collapsing. In a recent poll asking ‘Who do you think will form the next government in Greece?’, 58 per cent answered Syriza and only 28 per cent New Democracy.
We have received support from the left all over Europe, but it’s not yet organised in an effective way. The strikes across the EU on 14 November gave strength to people in Greece. But we also need to create a network of help and solidarity. Maybe people could come and volunteer in Greece – doctors, for instance, or a solidarity brigade that could come and work on the land. Or maybe organisations could donate food and medicine. The solidarity brigades could be organised in an open and symbolic way, so that the solidarity with Greece is very visible.
People willing to offer solidarity should contact +30 210 380 1921 or email solidarity.for.all@gmail.com
Tonia Katerini was talking to Red Pepper at Firenze 10+10, a convergence of networks and campaigns working against austerity and debt, for natural and social commons, for social and labour rights, for democracy, global justice and peace, for gender liberation and for migrant rights. Meeting in Florence exactly ten years after the first European Social Forum met there, it agreed a common day of action around the EU spring summit on 23 March 2013, with a combination of Brussels-based and decentralised actions.

Dawn of a new danger

admin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:00:59 +0000

Members of the neo‑Nazi Golden Dawn march through the streets in their blackshirts. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis. Below, Hitler on the cover of Golden Dawn magazine
Golden Dawn is not exactly subtle in its Nazi allegiances. This is a group that in 1989, four years after it was founded, decided to put Hitler on the cover of its magazine (pictured right). Even as late as 2007 the publication led on a big picture of Rudolf Hess.
In 2005 the magazine ran an article headlined ‘May 1945-May 2005: We have nothing to celebrate’. It read, ‘[The real] winner is the young fighter of the Hitlerjugend, who fell fighting in destroyed Berlin. The soldier of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS, against the forces of nature and the forces of the enemy.’
Yet somehow Golden Dawn continues to deny that it is a neo‑Nazi organisation. ‘Let everyone know that they should not speak of neo-Nazism,’ says Ilias Kasidiaris, the Golden Dawn MP best known for punching left-wing MPs on a TV chat show. ‘For us, this is hubris and criminal defamation. We are Greek nationalists.’ This is a man who, in an article written for Hitler’s birthday just last year, wrote that the Nazi leader was ‘a great social reformer and an organiser of a model state’.
While the veil might seem transparent, and the international media hasn’t been slow to build up the threat from Golden Dawn, 425,000 people in Greece still voted for this neo-Nazi party. How did that happen?
To answer this question, we need to look back at where Golden Dawn came from, the base of its support and how it has built a following during Greece’s crisis. Only then can we look beyond the horror story to see who is really threatening democracy in Greece – and how we can stop them.
The long shadow of the colonels
Golden Dawn was founded in 1985 – but its roots stretch back much further, to the fascist dictatorship of General Metaxas that ruled Greece from 1936 to 1941, and more directly to the colonels’ junta of 1967 to 1974.
The personal political history of Golden Dawn’s founder and leader Nikos Michaloliakos shows the links. At the age of 16 he joined the ‘4th of August Party’ – named after the 4 August 1936 coup that brought General Metaxas to power. Then in 1984 he became the head of the youth organisation of fascist party EPEN, a group openly nostalgic for the colonels’ regime. Michaloliakos was put into the position on the order of the chief of the deposed colonels himself, Georgios Papadopoulos.
Since 1980, Michaloliakos had been publishing a magazine called Golden Dawn. When EPEN failed to make the electoral breakthrough that had been predicted in 1985, he decided to split and turn Golden Dawn into a new party.
He was helped by the fact that large parts of the state were left unchanged despite the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. The extreme right remained strong in the police and the security forces in particular.
Today Golden Dawn’s ties with the police and the secret state are becoming more and more obvious, as anti-fascists and migrants are constantly harassed and physically attacked but the neo-Nazis remain uninvestigated and unpunished.
This September, for instance, supposed ‘indignant residents’ backed by Golden Dawn completely destroyed two shops belonging to migrants and a Tanzanian community centre. The police pressured the migrants not to identify those who had been involved in the attack. When one insisted on doing so, he was arrested – while his attacker was set free. Ioanna Kurtovik, a lawyer who went there to support the migrants and was attacked, reports that Golden Dawn members and police officers could be seen chatting all over the police station.
More recently, arrested anti-fascists reported police bluntly telling them: ‘We will send your names and photos to Golden Dawn and they will come after you.’
The battle of the nurseries
Over the last few years there have been two factors that have helped Golden Dawn’s rise. The first was Italy and Spain’s crackdowns on migrants, in particular Italy signing a treaty with Libya’s then-dictator Gaddafi to close the ‘Libyan corridor’. This has meant that nine out of ten ‘irregular’ migrants trying to make their way to Europe now come through Greece.
Then, in 2009, Greece became the epicentre of the global economic crisis, and the Eurozone debt crisis in particular. Greece’s two traditional governing parties, New Democracy and the social democrats of Pasok, both turned to scapegoating migrants to try to divert anger away from the austerity measures that the EU, finance and employers demanded.
New Democracy leader and current prime minister Antonis Samaras claimed that migrants were ‘taking the places of Greeks’ in council-run nurseries. He was exploiting the fact that publicly funded nursery places are limited by income to the very poorest. Migrants are often the poorest of the poor, meaning they get places that used to go to low-paid workers. Much like the issue of housing in Britain, this has become explosive.
Once Samaras had opened the door, Golden Dawn ran through it and went much further. The party pledged to go into the nurseries and violently throw out migrant children.
With stunts like this the neo-Nazis try to pose as an ‘anti‑capitalist’ force that is on the side of the middle and working classes against ‘corrupt’, ‘traitor’ politicians. Their answer to austerity is an awful form of ‘direct action’ that claims to win more resources for struggling Greeks by taking away migrants. For example, Golden Dawn often barges into businesses and threatens employers, telling them they must fire their migrant workforce and hire Greeks instead.
But in truth this does not threaten the bosses’ system – in fact it helps it. The businesses are more than happy to hire Greeks at the same wage they were paying the migrants, not least because doing so undermines collective labour agreements along the way – which the trade union movement is struggling to defend. And Golden Dawn, for its part, doesn’t limit its attacks to migrants – it has also attacked left wing activists, as well as journalists, gay people and all the other long-established targets of fascists.
A question of democracy
So who is voting for Golden Dawn? Are there really 425,000 Nazis in Greece?
According to pollster Christophoros Vernardakis, Golden Dawn’s primary audience is the traditional lower middle class: small business owners, shopkeepers, lower middle class unemployed people, and of course the police.
As well as making political capital out of immigration, Golden Dawn has also been able to tap into the general ‘anti-political’ mood. Nikos Michaloliakos frequently declares at rallies that ‘democracy hasn’t worked’. In today’s Greece, with the austerity-pushing troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF undermining democracy at every turn, and those who claim to speak in the name of democracy daily demonstrating their disdain for the people, that’s a message that appeals to many.
Meanwhile the media whitewashes the Nazis, reporting on the marriage of this Golden Dawn MP or the love affair of the other one. They are legitimising Golden Dawn’s anti-democratic views through day to day banality.
But none of this means that it is too late to stop Golden Dawn. This is a country, after all, that will have seen at least four days of general strikes this autumn alone. And the marches during these strikes, and the local committees organising people’s everyday struggles against austerity, are places where Golden Dawn never goes.
Indeed there is a constant struggle taking place over public space. In many places, people have mobilised to stop Golden Dawn’s marches and anti-migrant raids.
But the labour movement and the left in Greece is in a battle against time. Progressives need to hurry up in not just bringing down the government but agreeing an alternative programme to the anti-democracy of the troika: more public services, more rights, more power to working people. All over Europe and the world, we need to put an end to austerity and privatisation – before more racist gangs like Golden Dawn get in our way.

Left leading: Interview with Die Linke leader Katja Kipping

admin — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:43:59 +0000

With 76 seats out of 622 in parliament, Die Linke is Germany’s fourth largest party. It was founded in 2007 in a merger between the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG). Members of the PDS were predominantly East German and many had also been members of the Socialist Unity Party, the former ruling party of East Germany. WASG, meanwhile, was predominantly West German and made up of trade unionists and social movement activists, as well as social democrats who had left the German Social Democratic Party.
Since its founding, Die Linke has campaigned on a variety of social justice issues and for greater regulation of financial markets, while also remaining critical of the deployment of the German military abroad. Its members have supported mobilisations such as the anti-G8 summit protests in 2007 and, more recently, the Occupy/blockade protest Blockupy. The two new co-chairs, trade union organiser Bernd Riexinger and Katja Kipping, who is known to be close to social movements, stand for a renewal within the party that aims, among other things, to close any remaining gaps between East and West Germany.
Emma Dowling Congratulations, Katja, on your election as co-chair of Die Linke. In recent speeches and interviews, you have proposed a ‘break towards the future’ for the party. What does that mean concretely?
Katja Kipping There are two directions. My co-chair and I have launched a ‘listening offensive’ within Die Linke. We’ve set up a website called ‘Walking we ask questions’ and are doing a summer tour around Germany to talk to people directly. Beyond these internal initiatives, we have plans to engage a broader public on three key topics – the crisis, precarity and public services.
In contrast to somewhere like Greece, the crisis in Germany manifests itself as a kind of creeping precarity in our ways of life and work, and there are commonalities across different segments of society. Everyone is experiencing more and more stress: the agency worker; the self-employed on their laptop; the unemployed person who is stressed because they have to go to the unemployment office and be subjected to all sorts of pressures and humiliations.
We see a strong connection here with the crisis because Germany has had a massive trade surplus that is based on low wages. The problem of the ‘debt brake’ [new post-crisis legislation in Germany limiting permissible levels of structural deficit] is also further exacerbated by the fact that privatisation occurs where public finances are lacking. To us, privatisation is theft of public goods. We want to prevent further privatisation and fight locally for recommunalisation, for example of private electricity grids.
ED How far has neoliberalism eaten into the German social model? In as far as this was ever a functioning model, to what extent and in what ways has it been destroyed by neoliberalism?
KK Thanks to the trade unions in Germany, the negotiation over reduced working hours made it possible to curb mass unemployment. However, it is also the case that neoliberalism has reduced the power of unions. I would also be more critical and say that there is growing inequality that partly has to do with the continuing increases in the salaries and bonuses of managers. Often, these salaries are decided upon in meetings where there are trade unions present. My plea is for union representatives to be more forceful in demanding that in any company the highest salary should not amount to more than 20 times the lowest salary. If a manager wants to earn a million, then he has to ensure that the cleaner earns €50,000.
ED How could that be enforced?
KK Well, on the one hand there are the unions. On the other hand, we need pressure from the streets. I was very happy about the Blockupy protests in Frankfurt this spring. In Germany Occupy is not yet that strong, but there is fragile protest that is growing. Also, there is a need for a strong left-wing party. This is what we are trying to achieve and we are preparing to obtain good results in the elections, not just for the party, but in order to transform power relations in Germany.
ED How do you think that you can take on the responsibilities of power without repeating the experience of, in recent times, the Greens, or historically, most social democratic parties that have existed?
KK Concretely in the German context there can only be real change to German politics with participation from Die Linke. If we say we need ecological change, then this requires a focus on ecological and social components. It also requires a critique of capitalism, meaning in practical terms, independence from corporations. This is a position that is not held by the SPD or the Greens, but is essential to Die Linke.
Secondly, I think a left government has to protect itself from identifying too strongly with the compromises it has to make. Of course any participation in government requires making compromises, one cannot pursue one’s own political programme 100 per cent.
But I think that a constant feedback loop to critical intellectuals and to independent social movements is necessary. One of the problems of the SPD-Green coalition was that a large part of the environmental movement suffered from strong feelings of loyalty with regard to the Greens and therefore found it difficult to act. This has to change.
I am one of the co-founders of the Institut Solidarische Moderne (see http://tinyurl.com/solidarische) because we think a change of government needs to be well prepared. It’s not enough to simply replace ministers; we need to shift hegemony and that requires people to accompany this shift in hegemony – i.e. organic intellectuals, to cite Gramsci.
ED The relationship between political parties and social movements is not always easy. You have been active in social movements yourself. What kind of relationship do you envisage between the party and social movements?
KK One of the first things that Bernd Riexinger and I have done is set up a movement council. This is made up of people who represent the full political spectrum of the left, from the unions to the radical left. We haven’t invited the press, because we want to create a space for internal dialogue, both about the current potential for mobilisation and about the issues Die Linke should focus on.
It’s striking that many of the movement representatives said that while they thought social protests were important, they believed in the need for a real left-wing party in parliament and wanted us to run a successful election campaign. When Die Linke entered the Bundestag, we set up a contact point for social movements.
This is a point of contact where there can be continuous collaboration and analysis regarding the cooperation between movements and members of parliament, as well as the party more generally. And this is necessary especially because in movements a lot happens and there are always many shifts and changes.
What shouldn’t happen is the dominance or undermining of social movements by the party. But equally problematic would be a situation in which movements think, well, the party has money and can provide services for the movement. Collaboration also means that there is engagement; that means conflict and discussion about politics.
Another model is the open office. The most well known and successful of these is the linXXnet in Leipzig. The representatives organise their offices so that movement initiatives can meet and work out of there, making more regular exchanges possible.
ED So is there a division of labour between movement and party?
KK The party is neither the secretary nor the boss of the movement. There are a number of differences between party and movement. Movements are much more cyclical. They rise and they fall, have successful mobilisations, but also dwindle without any strong continuous organisation. In contrast, the party is much more cumbersome. Once in motion, it moves, but not very fast.
Another difference is of course that parties have direct access to parliament, meaning the party can help inscribe demands articulated by movements in legislation. Parties have a much stronger collective memory for particular perspectives and traditions and are also broader in terms of their focus.
ED Occupy, for example, has also been about developing an altogether different kind of political process, a different kind of democracy than parliamentary democracy. This was also something that was present in the alter-globalisation movement – an alternative democratic practice.
How does this sit with the representative politics of the party?
KK A particular advantage of social movements is that they are a kind of laboratory for new forms and new methods. Parties cannot take these on exactly. For example, the party could never take up the consensus decision-making practice that ATTAC has. This would not make it possible to govern in any effective way.
Certain practices can be taken up though. For example, we have adopted the ‘murmur rounds’ used by ATTAC. During debates as well as afterwards people can talk to one another, or you can leave the bigger group and deepen the conversation with someone, then come back to the bigger meeting. I’ve experienced this as very positive in movements. We are using this at a national women’s conference. Or [there is] the organising model of trade unions. These are things that we are trying to use in our election campaign.
ED How do you reach those people who are not already organised or political?
KK For some years now we’ve been witnessing growing dissident forms of resistance, like Blockupy or in Dresden where people blocked the Nazis. What we’ve seen is that many young people come to these events and get really involved, but afterwards they don’t stick around, neither in the movements nor in the party. And this is where the internet is both a curse and a blessing. Before you had to be in a political organisation in order to find out what was going on. Today all you need to do is check the internet.
Your question was how to reach those people who are not into politics. Well, that’s exactly the question that concerns us. One way is to connect what’s happening in the world with people’s everyday experiences. So, when we talk about the crisis, we’re not only talking about the European Central Bank or trade deficits, we’re trying to show the connections to people’s everyday experiences.
A second point is a little more provocative in that we need a certain degree of left populism, a sense of ‘us down here’ against ‘those up there’. We need to give the crisis a face, and that means not only complaining about Mrs Merkel, but criticising the rating agencies that are deciding the fate of whole countries. Rating agencies have no democratic legitimacy, they’ve not been elected by anyone.
ED Does Die Linke still have to address its historical legacy?
KK One accusation that people make is that we haven’t engaged with our past, with state socialism. I think that this is a false accusation. It’s no coincidence that I’m involved with publishing a magazine called Prague Spring [Prager Frühling]. I think there’s an important tradition that Die Linke has to connect to, namely socialism with a human face – a democratic socialism. And of course it’s very clear that today we’re talking about democratic socialism. We don’t mean a return to the GDR. On the contrary, we want to learn from the mistakes of the GDR, which means getting rid of all secret services.
ED Some might say that the Pirate Party is replacing you as the party of protest. What is your relationship with them?
KK I had a meeting with the leader of the Pirate Party and I can say that it is not yet decided whether they are going to be a left-wing party or not. Are they a modern party with smartphones but without any women? I mean, they are not feminist. If I listen to the kinds of things their leader has said about taxes – i.e. a flat equal tax for all – this is simply unjust. He also thinks that the foreign military deployments are legitimate. He‘s in favour of the debt brake. All that sounds to me like voting for the Pirates is supporting FDP [free market liberal] positions.
I think this is a real shame, in particular because there are many people in the circles of the Pirate Party who consider themselves to be left-wing. But obviously a large part of the leadership has decided on a different course of action. The Pirate Party is proud to be free of ideology, but I think that this is the most ideological of any position, because it obfuscates the existing dominant ideology.
ED What are the challenges for Die Linke in government?
KK Recent opinion polls show that if there’s to be a clear change in government away from the course of the CDU/FDP, then we can’t make this change without the SPD. That’s pure mathematics. Bernd Riexinger and I have a particularly proactive answer to this question – we‘re willing to do this under a number of conditions. We want to introduce a tax on the highest income brackets that would guarantee that no monthly income would be lower than €1,000, and that there would be a basic income.
We think the SPD needs to take a stand before the next elections. They can’t be left-wing before the elections only to become right-wing afterwards. For some social democrats like [current SPD leader Frank-Walter] Steinmeier, it seems it’s all just about having power. I know there are also other social democrats who really want change and would support a tax on wealth. But they still have to convince their leadership and that’s something the SPD needs to sort out.
We won’t stand in the way of a change of government. What are the risks? One point of contention is of course the question of foreign policy. Generally, as Die Linke, we can’t imagine agreeing to foreign military deployments. A further point of contention is the sanctions around Hartz IV [welfare ‘reforms’ limiting the length of time claimants can receive full unemployment benefit]. I can’t imagine agreeing to [benefits] that are below the minimum one needs to exist. At present the SPD isn’t prepared to get rid of these sanctions. These are real problems.
ED You’ve said repeatedly that you’re concerned about the situation in Greece. What can and should social movements in Germany and Die Linke do?
KK First of all, on the situation in Greece. We need to emphasise repeatedly that that there’s a social catastrophe going on there. A pregnant woman has to pay €1,000 in order to have her baby in a hospital; mothers are handing over their children to charity organisations because they can no longer feed them; the extent of homelessness – all of this is very worrying.
We have to counter the incredibly racist narratives here in Germany, namely that the Greeks have lived beyond their means. We have to say no, it’s actually the case that German employees have lived below their means, because it’s precisely the foreign trade imbalances that have exacerbated the crisis. We also have to emphasise that it’s of no help to anyone, neither the Greeks nor the euro, if Greece is pushed out of the euro. Sahra Wagenknecht [Die Linke economics spokesperson] has pointed out that if Greece exits the euro, then for Germany that means a deficit of €80 billion. So, even if one were to take such an egoistic perspective, it doesn’t even make sense on its own terms.
And what should the party do? I think the party needs to provide a counter-narrative regarding the causes of the crisis and talk about the unequal distribution of wealth, the trade imbalances and the lack of regulation of financial markets. The task of social movements, as well as the task of a European party, is to call for the regulation of financial markets and a tax on wealth. It wasn’t the Greek employees who caused the crisis, it was financial speculators. The state deficit exploded in the light of the 2008 financial crisis. That’s what we have to emphasise.
ED What is your interaction with other left-wing parties in Europe like?
KK Well, we founded the European Left Party with the intention that we support one another in our respective election campaigns. For example, [the left-wing Italian politician and president of Apulia] Nichi Vendola was in Berlin and spoke at an event where [former Die Linke co-chair] Oskar Lafontaine also spoke. It’s about supporting one another. We also invited Alexis Tsipras [leader of the left-wing Syriza] to tell us about the situation in Greece and we’ve organised joint actions, such as a European-wide collection of signatures for a public bank. The third thing is that we run with each other’s good ideas. For example the demand of the French candidate Melenchon for a maximum income – I’ve taken that up here. These are ways in which we can strengthen a European public for left-wing demands.
ED What do you think we can learn from the experience of Syriza in Greece?
KK I don’t think we can translate the exceptional experience directly to other places in Europe. There are perhaps two things, however, to say.
From the beginning, different to the Communist Party, Syriza took a pro-European line. They always said they wanted to stay in the EU and in the euro. They achieved good election results with this. Second, they said they were not entirely against being in government but that they had concrete conditions and plans. I think that’s a good mix – to make it clear they didn’t want to necessarily be in government but that they were willing to do so if particular conditions were met. At the same time, they took a pro-European line and showed that it is possible to mobilise in a difficult situation.
ED How do you view the UK in relation to the crisis of the eurozone?
KK Yes, well, Cameron! The official positions of the UK don’t do much more than slow things down, like the implementation of a currency transaction tax. Thus, the UK plays anything but a laudable role in the current crisis.
ED So, you are now the co-leader of Die Linke. How did you end up in this position?
KK Well, I didn’t plan this. Politics has always been part of my life. Politics is always part of a good life. Also, I am not an individual fighter, I work collectively together with other people. I never had one mentor; when I started my election campaign I did this together with a group of people who said they wanted to change the party in order to change society. That is my understanding of politics and of what it means to be non-aligned.
Emma Dowling is a lecturer in sociology at Middlesex University and has been active in global justice movements for many years. This interview took place in August in Berlin, and was translated from German by Emma

Firenze 10+10: Back to Florence

louise — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:56:38 +0000

Photo: GUE/NGL/Flickr

It is a long time since we met in Florence on 9 December 2011 at the forum on ‘La via d’uscita’ (‘The way out’) and it seems even longer because of the intensification of the austerity attacks which have been hitting Europe after the 2008 crisis. The push from the movements has not weakened, even if, as Donatella Della Porta observes, this second wave is more national in character compared to the first one, the Global Justice mobilisation. But it is important that we are moving from protest to proposals, from the generous but unrealistic ‘We won’t pay for your crisis’ – indeed we are paying for it everyday – to ‘How is an alternative possible’.

The powers that be and the ruling institutions seem to be the only ones not hearing this voice, when indeed they don’t attempt to suffocate it, as in Greece and Spain. They keep following the neoliberal road, imposing the burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the least wealthy countries and onto the subaltern classes. It’s a cruel and dead-ended way, and it’s not only the hardcore Marxists who keep reiterating this, but also scholars like Krugman and Stiglitz, and some of our local voices, like Luciano Gallino or Guido Rossi. Portugal, Spain, Italy, and, more dramatically, Greece, are in, or are entering, recession. Growth does not take off, while the debt to pay the debt is growing (by four points here in Italy). Whatever Mario Monti says, recovery is nowhere to be seen.

In France, the Hollande government and its small alterations, have announced the fiscal norms for the wealthiest, which has stirred turmoil from the Right and all of the mainstream media. This has actually affected public opinion, and you can hear poor people in the local markets, repeating rhetoric like, ‘if the government taxes them, you can’t blame them for going abroad’. In France at least one firm per week goes out of business or relocates abroad, the projected national growth has been reduced from 0.8 to 0.2, public services are being heavily cut (apart from education and healthcare), the unemployed number is more than three million (10% of the labour force) and that number is growing.

The numbers of unemployed in Europe has reached almost 26 million, a figure which does not include – which is a real scam – the millions of casual workers, employed only for a few days per month or per year (Gallino, Fumagalli). The ECB managed to stop excessive financial speculation against the most indebted countries, but these countries have had to accept the imposition of extreme conditions, whilst the strongest countries are attempting to put their spending under control, and veto it if necessary. The reluctance of the ‘hard working’ North helping the ‘lazy’ South shows the weakness of continental solidarity.

As soon as the Euro seemed to be saved, the intention to move to a two-speed Europe was revealed. If it were a cruel but an effective therapy it would make a bit of sense. But it’s not. It doesn’t solve the public fiscal crisis and it pushes 90% of the population to despair. The richest 10% and especially the richest 1% are continuing to feast on the backs of the rest. The result is that everywhere, a new far Right is emerging which blames not only the masters, but Europe and its mechanisms too. The arena of the Left is being conquered by fascist models that had appeared to be finished at the end of WWII. But the most powerful are managing to take advantage of what once was the obvious and maybe a rather crude resentment against the rich. The Left, in their fear, seem to have forgotten the lessons of the twentieth century.

The question we must ask at the new meeting at Florence 10+10 – starting today – is why the explanations, the power, and the mobilisations of the movements have failed so far to open a breach in the effective wall of the neoliberal governments, and make no impact on the majority of the population, who are voting for them. On what kind of disillusion, disorientation, and mistrust are they founded? One out of every two Sicilians did not vote last week, which has never happened before. Between our focused mobilisations based on solidarity and the institutions, there is the space of abstention and ‘grillismo (from Beppe Grillo – Movimento Cinque Stelle), opening another crack in our battered democracy. We are now facing very urgent tasks and the time is short.

It seems clear to me that we must strengthen the unity of those moving in the same direction as us. We must put reasonable pressure on the unions, who are divided within each country and within the continent itself, even when the masters they are facing are the same. In this way they can be easily attacked by the local Marchionne of each country. We must ensure that all the historical Left forces and their supporters fully face the facts that they have been disoriented and have sometimes switched to the other side. They are being continually forced into compromises, and their influence, once mighty, is being ostensibly eroded. True, a cultural and moral tsunami happened from the 1980s up to today, and it is stupid to say that it’s just that ‘the times are changing’. Capitalism won, there’s no way around it. It is now up to us to expose its cracks as well as its inhumanity. The evidence of the ecological arguments should not be the object of disputes, but a great boost for the best tradition of the Left.

For what concerns Sbilanciamoci and its many collaborators, the forecasts stated in ‘Rotta d’Europa’ are all becoming the reality. If our persistence was useful in obtaining a small taxation on financial transactions – not a great achievement – we must proceed on this road with reason and determination. The power of finance is still vastly out of proportion, and it is a continual source of increasing inequalities and the corruption of democracy. Europe accepted with ease that foreign corporations could steal its know-how on its territory, only to depart after a few years leaving entire areas deserted and thousands of workers unemployed – the latest case is that of the French iron metallurgical industry, that Mittal is getting rid of. This exposes the naïve adoration of the markets, that fear one devil only, that of nefarious protectionism. The same could be said for any control on the movement of capital, and for tax evasion. Even in the USA, which used to doing anything for their companies, the threat of ‘if you raise my taxes I’ll leave’ is answered by saying that ‘if you fiscally leave, you’ will lose your citizenship.’

There is much to be changed, and we need to open a new way for growth. A responsible, eco-compatible growth, which is able to get rid of all the waste caused by the way we live our lives. There’s no money? We are burdened by the debt? Well, the Southern European countries, trying to get France involved, must renegotiate together and must firmly renegotiate the timing of repayment. The tightening of the noose around the necks of Greece and Spain must be stopped. What could happen? Germany will start a war against us? I do not think so. We are more constrained by our cowardice than by the threat of Mrs. Merkel, who has her own troubles and has possibly a fatal deadline in less than one year. Current European policies are indefensible. Neoliberalism is unable to come out of the swamp which it has created.

Rossana Rossanda is the author of ‘The Comrade from Milan’, a much lauded account of the European Left in the twentieth century, published by Verso. Available here : http://www.versobooks.com/books/476-the-comrade-from-milan

Italy, where did the protest go?

louise — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 12:49:59 +0000

Photo: Georgio Montersino/Flickr

Harsh austerity policies have been hitting broad segments of the population for a long time, but today their force has increased. One of the questions which are often posed to social movement scholars (and to activists as well) is: why, facing such a strong challenge, the mobilisation keeps being so relatively limited? Why – differently from Spain, Greece, and the USA, and Iceland before them – there seems to be so little protest?

First of all, it is necessary to observe that protest exists, grows, and is focused on demands regarding social rights and real democracy. Research that we carried out, together with Lorenzo Mosca and Louisa Parks, on the protests reported by a national daily newspaper in 2011, shows that not only is mobilisation high, but it is focused on social issues. Almost half of the reported protest events involve workers with stable employment, more than half if we add casual workers More than one fifth is student protest. Moreover, even if the unions are very present in the mobilisations, important actors are also informal social movement groups, i.e. the occupied social centres and various kinds of associations. It is not a case that the statistics on strikes signal a 25% surge in the last year.

Although anti-austerity mobilisations are numerous, it is true that, in the last months, the big demonstrations that contributed to the downfall of Berlusconi’s government were not to be seen. This is also a signal that neoliberal policies could not have been effectively imposed by a libertine and in many ways delegitimised head of government. The shift from Berlusconi to Monti did not mean a change in the direction of public policies, but the buying (for quite a cheap price) of the support for them from the ex-opposition (i.e. the centre-Left Democratic Party). If the 15 October 2011 demonstration, with its great mobilisation capacity, was an exception, its evolution did not facilitate the recovery of a process of protest accumulation at all.

A first reason for the difficulty to network the existing mobilisations is to be found in the crisis itself. Social movement research has repeatedly proved that protest does not increase with deprivation (neither absolute nor relative), but when resources are available to those that want to challenge the decisions of the government. The studies on the labour movement have shown that strikes increase with full employment, not with unemployment. Insecurity discourages collective action, and the depressive effect of the crisis is aggravated by the new kind of labour market. It is certainly harder for casual workers to mobilise to defend their rights, because they can be blackmailed, have less free time, and often lack the physical spaces for aggregation that were so important for the labour movement.

If this kind of explanation, structural so to speak, has some grain of truth, it does not help us to understand why in Spain, Greece, or the US (but also in Italy in other periods) the groups most hit by the economic crisis and by the growing inequality produced by neoliberal policies (which in addition are responsible for the crisis itself) mobilised in broad and visible protest movements, from Indignados to Occupy. Moreover casual workers in Italy did produce significant protests, especially in the first half of the last decade.

Social movement research provides us with another explanation, more suitable for the Italian case. In order to grow, protest needs political opportunities. Among them, the position of potential allies like parties and unions is fundamental, they are important to broaden the mobilisation, for the logistic resources they can offer, and, even more, to increase the political influence of the protest. Mass protest was more substantial and visible when it was against centre-Right governments, when it found the support of parties and unions. This is especially true in Italy where, reciprocal critiques notwithstanding, the relationship between movements and Left parties (when they existed) has always been intense.

These allies were there against Berlusconi, but a grand coalition government like Monti’s has drastically reduced the opportunities for political alliances. Parties that are supporting the neoliberal government in the parliament would not be credible allies for those who are opposing its policies. Moreover, the incumbent government has succeeded in propagating his self-depiction of a ‘technical government’.

There is little empirical evidence for this self-representation. Inter alia, it is sufficient to have a quick look at most ministers’ careers within institutions that cannot be neutral about their policies, or at the measures of deregulation, privatisation, and reduction of the will and capacity of the state to intervene in reducing the inequalities produced by the market.

Clearly this self-representation as technical government has caught on with the media and beyond. Not only the main national newspapers are critically praising ‘Super Mario’. Even the academic institutions, that in the past have carefully cultivated an image of political neutrality, today often provide a political stage for a head of government that claims to be technical. This stage is then used for strictly political and ideologically neoliberal speeches.

No doubt, this Italian anomaly contributes in explaining the difficulties to network the multiple streams of protest that exist. Anyhow, this diffuse resistance could contribute to an aggregation and politicisation of the mobilisations, not just through the challenge against specific policies, but also by underlining the political and neoliberal nature of this government.

Rooted in the neighbourhood: what happened to Spain’s assemblies?

admin — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:00:41 +0000

Barcelona, early September. It’s a beautiful warm evening in the local square. Thirty or more old people are sitting on benches, people-watching. Dog-walkers mingle with commuters and shoppers. But there is no sign of my neighbourhood assembly, which should be meeting here right now. So I wait. A few people in political T-shirts walk by promisingly, but continue walking. I take a stroll around the block. A Chinese restaurant is offering a ‘crisis menu’. A clothes store has a closing-down sale. Half an hour elapses. I finally spot the assembly: 15 activists standing around chatting. Shortly afterwards, the group reconvenes in a local squat.
A non-event of a meeting is hardly a surprise to anyone accustomed to left and radical organising. But the same square played host to weekly assemblies of 200 to 300 people little more than a year ago, as neighbourhood assemblies sprung up in towns and cities across Spain as part of the massive mobilisations that began in central squares on 15 May 2011 and became known as the indignados or 15M movement. With more than a quarter of the Spanish workforce unemployed, and austerity cuts biting ever harder, it’s fair to ask: what happened? Is this typical of their fate?
Dying of boredom?
The assemblies have definitely lost momentum, according to David Marty, a Madrid-based activist who recounts to me the state of the movement as it first burst to life. ‘In the beginning when people formed assemblies, the first thing you noticed was a huge crowd, and the second was that it was an unusual mix, all sorts of people – even those you would usually identify with more conservative ideas,’ he explains. ‘Now the assembly movement has been reduced to small groups. The feeling everyone has is that it’s dead.…
‘[But] it’s only that bad if you look at the assemblies,’ he continues. ‘If you look across movements, the 15M has really ignited something new in the activist community in Spain.’
Carlos Delclós, a sociologist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who is also active in the 15M movement, agrees that many neighbourhood assemblies have dwindled. The work of the assemblies requires a lot of dedication, he explains, so it’s inevitable that participation gets whittled down to those who can make the time to fully participate.
For Marty, this dwindling has been accompanied by a narrowing of the movement’s political base. He recalls how, at first, when people formed neighbourhood assemblies, ‘it was always very personal and moving. It would usually start nervously, but with sincere feelings about this amazing thing that was happening, this solidarity’. But the assemblies became increasingly dominated by ‘trained’ speakers, he says, speaking from ‘a rehearsed ideology’.
Delclós has a more benign explanation, suggesting that the decline of some assemblies is simply a sign of the emphasis of movement organising moving towards platforms that cut across local neighbourhoods and municipalities.
Others are more optimistic. Marta Sánchez has been involved in the 15M movement in Madrid from the outset, as well as researching the movement for a project of the Centre for Human Rights in Nuremberg. She recognises that some of the assemblies that sprang up after the birth of the movement are no longer active, but gives many examples that are ‘growing even stronger, better organised and supported by the commitment of a lot of people’.
Why assemblies matter
‘Assemblies are not just a means to an end but as well an end in themselves, since participatory democracy, or direct democracy, is deeply rooted in the movement’s discourse and ideas,’ say Sánchez and fellow 15M activist Pedro López Herraiz, a postgraduate student at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
The organisation of assemblies, they say, ‘has facilitated the politicisation of a lot of people, who wouldn’t have engaged in political struggle through the conventional and corrupted political parties and trade unions.’ They have engendered a great deal of ‘self-confidence’. Although Sánchez and López disagree on the current state of the assemblies – about which it’s hard to gauge an overall picture – their assessment of the importance of participatory organising is quite similar. As a result of the 15M movements, says Marty, ‘a lot of people who were never active in that sense now feel they are actors’ in political and social struggles.
The spread of ‘horizontal practices’ is a vital part of the 15M movement’s contribution, providing not just a model through which groups can arrive at democratic decisions, but also a means to ‘catalyse indignation into meaningful action’, says Delclós. They have prepared a new vocabulary for articulating the social and economic situation, he adds, so that even emerging public sector trade union actions are not drastically different to the 15M movements.
Action platforms
The Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), convened by people facing eviction as a result of the country’s mortgage crisis, offers a clear example as to how the movement has catalysed action. The Platform, which was created in 2009, received a massive boost from the new wave of activists politicised by the 15M movement, says Marty.
Neighbourhood assemblies have provided a practical infrastructure in support of the Platform’s ‘stop forced evictions’ campaign, says Sánchez, by collecting information on evictions planned locally and organising activist mobilisations on the eviction dates. As a result, around 200 evictions were stopped over the last year.
Although most actions and organising platforms don’t cross the media radar, they have become more deeply embedded. As well as blocking evictions, Delclós catalogues the emergence of collectives to confront police racism against immigrants, offer more ethical banking options, create time banks, and consumer and producer co‑ops. Similar initiatives have sprung up in Madrid, report Sánchez and López, and their extent is not limited to the country’s largest cities.
Cristina S Marchán, a 15M activist in Santiago de Compostela, reports that although most of the assemblies there are no longer active, the movement remains alive in many forms. As well as a thematic assembly focused on labour issues and unemployment, the city has seen the creation of various new co-operatives.
A hot autumn
The legacy of the 15M movement to date extends beyond practical organising, however. ‘Maybe the movement’s biggest contribution has been to problematise economic and social misery as a problem requiring more democracy and not less,’ says Delclós. ‘What 15M has done with a lot of success is to provide an interpretive framework that is easily understood and very quickly signals the guilty parties in this scam that the grey, Eurocratic technical fetishists and their kleptocratic elites like to call an “economic crisis”.’
As social and economic conditions become worse, most activists are gearing up for further protests against austerity. Education and health cuts – including recent measures to limit care for immigrants and unemployed people – are at the centre of these protests, while housing remains a key issue. But the movement’s debates and mobilisations are also focused on a more systemic critique of austerity.
That might also lead to increasing militancy, starting with a 25 September demonstration which was planning to encircle parliament and demand that the government steps down. ‘That will be followed by general strikes in Galiza and Euskadi [Galicia and the Basque country],’ says Delclós. ‘And the mainstream unions are also talking about a country-wide general strike relatively soon. So we are definitely in for a very, very hot autumn!’

Joining forces for another Europe

James O'Nions — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:33:50 +0000

In Europe we are living in particularly dramatic times. Democracy is in death-agony and we are witnessing post-democratic processes taking over at the national and supranational level. EU leaders have further concentrated decision-making power on public and fiscal policies in the hands of an oligarchy of governments, technocrats and the European Central Bank (ECB), which are subject to the dictates of the financial markets. Neoliberalism, the real cause of the crisis, not only is not dead, but it appears to be in perfect health: it uses the crisis to destroy social rights and workers’ rights and to privatise commons, public goods and public services.

Finally, the most incredible propaganda operation of our times is in full swing, in which states and ‘markets’ try to make people believe that public debt was caused by excessive social spending and high salaries. In fact the financial sector caused the crisis and the fiscal deficit in the EU is the result of the crisis, not its cause.

A moment like this needs a strong social answer: it is urgent to act now, uniting our forces, creating the conditions for a common social response, for a pan-European mobilisation. There is an objective need to build a European space of ‘strategic alliances’: in order to elaborate common strategies and initiatives and to rebuild solidarity. When the attack on Greece by the great economic powers and the ‘troika’ [the International Monetary Fund, the European commission and the ECB] began, we, in Europe, were unable to organise a social response. Rather, each stayed wrapped up in their own crisis and their own national dimension, leaving the Greeks alone. It must never happen again.

Beyond fragmentation

We must go beyond the current fragmentation of our forces. Most of the time, we agree on analysis and proposals – now in Europe we have hundreds of similar documents, calls, statements which are a good basis for a common platform - but we need to join forces.

Firenze 10+10 is only a contribution to a more general process. The European space today is the minimum space necessary if we are to build a credible social and economic alternative. To underestimate the global dimension of the clash between capital and labour, capital and nature, capital and the commons is a mistake. In Firenze we want to provide to the real social actors with a useful space for alliances and strategy at the European level, linking up the local resistance and struggles.

We must also break down the wall between eastern and western Europe by getting the east and the Balkans fully involved. And of course we must build bridges towards the southern Mediterranean, where the next WSF will be held in 2013.

Finally, it is necessary to have a long-term vision. That’s why the name is 10+10: Ten years after the 2002 ESF, but above all ‘plus ten’: which shows the need to build a common strategy and vision for the next ten years and not limit our horizons to tomorrow, to the next political elections. It is a question of understanding which way we want to go.

Not the ESF

Firenze 10+10 is an experiment, building on previous experiences and processes: a space for reconnecting, in an action-oriented way. It is not a European Social Forum (ESF), despite the fact that the ‘excuse’ for setting the process in motion was precisely the tenth anniversary of the first ESF. The ESF constituted an extraordinary moment in the construction of a continent-wide demos, which presented analyses, proposals and solutions which – had they been translated into policies – would have avoided Europe and the world crashing into the terrible economic, environmental, social and democratic crisis in which it is now mired.

Ten years on, there is no desire to celebrate what we had then and even less do we intend today to repeat paths which belong to that time and that stage of development. The social movements have changed, new actors have emerged, there have been defeats but also victories, such as that of the water and commons movement in the Italian referendum one year ago. For sure it is no longer the time for spreading ourselves out over thousands of workshops and seminars, but time to produce a nucleus of strong, shared actions and initiatives.

That’s why the programme for Firenze 10+10 is not simply a space to be filled up with hundreds of disconnected initiatives (nor a sort of ‘Summer Academy’ for social movements). On the contrary, we have together identified, during the preparatory international Milan meeting, five key ‘alliance spheres’ (or focus areas), starting from the subjects which networks and coalitions are already working on in Europe.

Five key spheres

1) Democracy.

Networks, social movements and organisations from all over Europe intend to oppose the top-down constituent process with a grassroot process, in order to build a democratic Citizens’ Pact (the foundation for a democratic Europe based on respect for the dignity of everyone, native and non-native, and on guarantee of individual, collective, labour and social rights). It is also a question of building a democratic floodwall against the right, against xenophobia, against the breaking up solidarity: democracy also means rebuilding social solidarity.

2) Finance/debt/austerity

During Firenze 10+10, we will discuss both public and private debt with the purpose of formulating new proposals for another European economic model, free from financial markets and debt dictatorships and based on the solidarity and participation of people into the decisions that determine our future. This will bring together campaigns against austerity, the European fiscal compact, and for debt audits and tribunals.

3) Labour and social rights

Labour rights cannot be separated from social rights in general and there is a need to propose concrete alternatives to give everyone a life in dignity and jobs with a future. Many different proposals are to be discussed, including a universal basic minimum income.

4) Commons and public services

This ‘alliance sphere’ brings together many issues in relation to our natural, social, digital commons and public services, such as land, food, water, energy but also social rights, education, and knowledge. It will also tackle and refute the post-Rio agenda covering the green economy, financialisation of nature and unnecessary large-scale infrastructures which are supposed to help us out of the crisis. The aim is to find mutual ground and strategic joint actions as well as concrete solidarity solutions for those fighting right now on the ground to protect their public services and commons from privatisation and commodification.

5) Europe in the Mediterranean and the world

This sphere of alliance rests on some fundamental elements: the necessary inclusiveness of Europe; cooperation, solidarity and fair trade; peace and social justice; the support for the struggles for democracy and human rights (the Arab revolutions, the struggles against the occupation – Palestinian territories, Western Sahara – and rights of entire peoples like the Kurds). Strategies against the militarisation of the Mediterranean will also be discussed.

Concrete outcomes

In the best-case scenario Florence 10+10 could produce a hard core of proposals for action, which are the fruit of the five ‘alliance spheres’ when we converge, and launch a sort of grand common European mobilisation for the beginning of 2013: a continent-wide demonstration? An international rally in Brussels? A European strike? We should at least try to identify something which we can do all together.

At the same time, we aim to build a third level: to start together a process for the medium-long term. One of the main ideas and proposals is the launch of the ‘Alter Summit’ as a process that will start in November and have several stages including various mobilisations and a culmination point for 2013 in late spring, probably in Athens.

A huge range of social actors are now behind the initiative: social movements, trade unions, citizens’ groups and associations (environmental, cultural), student organisations, feminist groups, individual activists.

In Florence many existing processes will flow together: the first gathering of the European Water Commons Movement; a big assembly on democracy, which will bring together very different actors (including 15M in Spain and Blockupy Frankfurt); the meeting of the different coalitions working on finance and debt; the meeting of critical economists, just to mention some examples.

Firenze 10+10 is an opportunity and a contribution. It is not a process in itself: it’s a crossroad part of more extended process. Maybe this process is not perfect and November is just round the corner, but our enemies – the economic-financial powers, the technocrats – are very fast, while at the moment we’re too slow and fragmented.

Tommaso Fattori is an Italian anti-privatisation activist and member of the Firenze 10+10 organising committee. For more on Firenze 10+10 go to www.firenze1010.eu

The Dutch elections: From euphoria to red neoliberalism?

louise — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 19:50:10 +0000

Photo: harry_nl/Flickr

For a few months, it genuinely looked like the first left-wing government in over forty years would succeed the most right-wing government the Netherlands has had since the Second World War. The Socialist Party was historically high in the polls; expected to reach up to 20 per cent of total votes, and many left-leaning voters were said to be willing to strategically vote for the Socialist Party just to make sure that we could counter the neoliberal austerity policies implemented by the Rutte government.

The euphoria lasted until the campaigns officially started. Roemer, the leader of the Socialist Party, didn’t seem to be the dream candidate many of us had hoped for. He was unable to hold the floor, even though what he was saying was obviously right most of the time and people would consider him to be the most honest politician of all. Samsom, the leader of the Social Democrats (PvdA) did much better, coming across as a strong and charismatic debater who had no problems countering Rutte, especially with Roemer being much weaker and softer.

In the run up to the elections there was a clear scare-campaign being conducted by the biggest Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf, as well as VNO-NCW, the biggest employers’ organisation in the Netherlands. Their chairman, Wientjes, called the Socialist Party a disaster for the economy and employment, and stated that they have destroyed the so-called ‘poldermodel’. On 28 August, De Telegraaf headlined in the days leading up to the elections: ‘SOCIALIST PARTY COSTS JOBS’, on 29 August ‘ROEMER LIES’, and ‘THE LEFT KILLS SME’S’ on 11 September.

In the end it seemed like left-leaning voters played it safe and voted for Samsom. The Social Democrats gained 10 seats and is now at 39, and the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) also gained 10 seats putting them at an historic 41 seats in parliament. This means that the most likely outcome will be a coalition between the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy and the Social Democrats. On the other hand, the Socialist Party stayed at 15 seats and for the first time since entering the political arena, the Party For Freedom (a right-wing political party) lost seats, going from 24 to 15.

This outcome has led many to conclude that ‘the centre’ is back. But what they seem to forget is that the Social Democrats won with a clear left-wing message, with strong leanings toward the Socialist Party. At the same time, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy has adopted much of the language and ideas from the Party for Freedom.
The rise of populist right-wing parties in the Netherlands (first Pim Fortuyn and after that Wilders and his Freedom Party), like in other European countries, has partly been the effect of the ‘Purple’ cabinets from 1994 to 2002; which led people to believe that there really was no choice: voting for the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy or the Social Democrats (the main parties in the purple coalition) would result in the same neoliberal policies. Now that both of them have been elected with clearly opposite messages and will have to form a coalition together, it seems like we’re going back to the nineties. The outcome of this ‘red neoliberalism’ will go one of two ways: a growing Socialist Party or a revival of right-wing extremism.

Greece: Syriza shines a light

admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:50:30 +0000

Syriza holds a rally just before the 17 June election at which it became Greece’s second party with 27 per cent of the vote. Photo: Mehran Khalili
Like a swan moving forward with relaxed confidence while paddling furiously beneath the surface, Syriza, the radical left coalition that could become the next government of Greece, is facing enormous challenges calmly but with intensifed activity.
In the palatial setting of the Greek parliament, Alexis Tsipras, the president of the radical left coalition Syriza’s parliamentary group, opens the first meeting of its 71 new deputies with his characteristic mix of cool and conviviality. At the same time, across Greece, other Syriza activists are organising neighbourhood assemblies, maintaining ‘solidarity kitchens’ and bazaars, working in medical social centres, protecting immigrants against attacks from Golden Dawn, the new fascist party that won 7 per cent of votes in the election, creating new Syriza currents at the base of the trade unions – and kickstarting the transition from a coalition of 12 political organisations (and 1.6 million voters) to a new kind of political party.
In the midst of all this they still find time to cook, dance, debate and organise at a three-day anti-racist festival. This annual festival, now in its 16th year, was founded with 40 organisations to ‘intercept’, in the words of Nicos Giannopolous, one of its driving forces, ‘the growth of nationalism and racism in the early nineties’. In its aims, principles of organisation and the plural culture that it promotes, it symbolises the strength of the internationalist civil society that Syriza has both helped to build and of which it is in good part a product. Now more than 250 organisations and parties are involved in organising the event and more than 30,000 people of every age and ethnic origin pour into the still-public space of Goudi Park in Athens.
A common focus in all this activity is how to turn the electoral support for Syriza into a source of self-organised social power for change, as well as to build on it as the electoral path to government. When, on 6 May, Syriza won 17 per cent of the vote in the general election, most activists were stunned. After all, three years ago the alliance had only just scraped past the 3 per cent barrier to parliamentary seats, with 4.7 per cent. By 17 June, when the second election saw Syriza’s vote rise to 27 per cent, members had begun seriously to imagine their coalition in government.
Dimitris Tsoukalas, one of Syriza’s new MPs and a recruit from Pasok, the main centre-left party in Greece since its foundation in 1974, describes the vote as ‘an expression of need’. Tsoukalas’s recent history is indicative of the unravelling of Pasok, and with it the balance of political power in the trade unions. Formerly president of the bank workers’ union, he resigned from Pasok the day after then-prime minister George Papendreou signed the troika memorandum of understanding on economic policy with the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank. Tsoukalas then joined the ‘No to the Memorandum’ coalition to stand against Pasok in the regional elections for Attica – elections in which the Pasok vote first began to crumble, from 40 to 23 per cent.
Tsoukalas isn’t getting carried away with Syriza’s success, however. He warns that ‘votes can be like sand’. The sand won’t blow back to Pasok. But New Democracy, Greece’s main right-wing party, which came first in the June election, was able to harvest the fruits of the fear that it and a wholly hostile commercial media stirred up at the prospect of a Syriza victory – a process that is likely to intensify. There is also the danger of an ill wind from the direction of Golden Dawn. Formed in the early 1990s as a marginal semi-legal fascist organisation, it has achieved wider electoral and street-level appeal recently in reviving an explicitly fascist tradition in a new form to lead a xenophobic, anti-immigrant response to the social devastation caused by policies of the troika.
Roots of change
As yet, though, it has been Syriza and the left that has made the most substantial gains in the wake of Greece’s debt crisis. So what has produced a political organisation that is both rooted in the movements and engaged in seriously restructuring the state? What is its organisational and cultural character?
Now is not the time to analyse in definitive terms. The structures of the new party are to be discussed by members and supporters, new and old, over the coming six months or so. But it is possible, learning from its history, to sketch the personality with which it enters this new phase. And everyone I talked to in Greece insists that its fundamentals must not change.
Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, was founded in 2004 following the success of a new generation of young activists from the left-wing Synaspismos party, including Alexis Tsipras and Andreas Karitzis, a key political coordinator, in taking over the party leadership. This generation had been formed through the alter-globalisation movement of the first decade of the century, and especially the massive demonstration in Genoa and then the World and European Social Forums. The experience of the social forums, including the Greek Social Forum, was decisive in turning the predominant culture of the new Greek left away from loyalty to a particular ideology in favour of pluralism, democratic collaboration, openness and a belief in the importance of proposing an alternative.
This culture grew on fertile ground. The young activists and intellectuals who helped to found Syriza were from the first generation that rejected capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union, and who came to the left independently of any ‘actually existing’ alternative. Their involvement in movements and struggles was part of a process of developing an alternative rather than promoting one that had already been worked out.
They knew that governing from above wouldn’t work but they did not know what would. ‘We try to find another way,’ says Karitzis. ’I believe you need state political power but what is also decisive is what is you are doing in the movements/society before seizing power. Eighty per cent of social change cannot come through government.’
Synaspismos provided a hospitable home for this kind of practical but principled process of creating a new kind of socialism. It was the product of a number of splits in communist politics, breaking both from Stalinism and from an accommodation with capitalism. In general, the new young leadership was welcomed by many older comrades, who had already involved Synaspismos in the alter-globalisation movement.
With their strong belief in the need for the radical left to collaborate, the young and old worked with the organisations with which Synaspismos had created the Greek Social Forum. This included other political organisations (Maoist and Trotskyist, for instance) and green, feminist, gay and social rights networks. They all came together to form Syriza, with its green, red and purple flag. Standing outside, with arms folded, secure in its increasingly imaginary inner strength, was the KKE, the apparently immovably dogmatic Greek Communist Party. At that time it had 7.5 per cent of the vote. In this year’s June election this had fallen to 4.5 per cent. (There are signs that younger activist members are looking towards Syriza, as the KKE seems to be an organisation unlikely to change.)
When, nine years and many movements later, the latest forces of change converged on Syntagma Square, Syriza members were there too. There they helped to build the movement, not to recruit to the party, to push a line or take control. Yanis Almpanis, a Syriza member active in the Network of Social and Political Rights, describes the way they participated: ‘Small groups of us often came together in the square, either because we knew each other or agreed with what each other were saying.’ They shared principles – for example, not allowing any anti-immigrant slogans – and applied these to find practical solutions through the general discussions. On the first day, for instance, many people came to the demonstration with Greek flags and did not allow party flags. After a few days and much argument the idea emerged of having different flags of other nations, including from the Arab Spring. ‘It changed the image of the action,’ says Almpanis. ‘This is how to build a radical and political movement.’
It is this principled immersion in the movements, including the uprising in 2008 following the police killing of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, that led many people to decide that Syriza was the instrument they could trust to help them rid Greece of the memorandum. ‘Syriza was always with us,’ says Tonia Katerina from the Open City coalition. It was a sentiment I heard again and again.
When Tsipras declared that Syriza was prepared to form a government to stop the memorandum and break the old ruling order, he linked anger with hope. The parliament stands some distance back from Syntagma Square. Syriza was committing itself to open up a two-way channel of power and energy from the squares and society to parliament and back.
Politicised solidarity
In its work outside parliament, Syriza gives a high priority to supporting and spreading networks that in effect systematise the customs of informal mutual support that are deeply rooted in Greek society. Some begin with neighbours coming together to help others with greater need. Others involve solidarity kitchens linking with food producers; doctors and nurses responding to the crisis in the health system by creating medical social centres; support for actions against electricity cut-offs; legal help in courts to cut mortgage payments. Syriza’s involvement in this work follows in part from its members’ high alert to the threat posed by Golden Dawn. Andreas Karitzis stresses that if the left does not ‘build the new social connections, someone else will’.
The fascists are already creating their own social infrastructure for Greeks only and taking direct action to drive out immigants. 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 (a higher vote in working class districts and among those under 35 was the general pattern of Syriza’s electoral support) and after the attack the party helped to organise a rally and march of 3,000 in support of the shopkeepers.
These solidarity networks, in which Syriza is only one participant among many, are run on an explicitly self-managed democratic basis. ‘We persuade people to participate, to become organisers; we explain that solidarity is an idea of taking and giving,’ says Tonia Katerini.
Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras serves food at an annual anti-racist festival organised by 250 civic organisations. Photo: Aggelos Kalodoukas
The networks are not a substitute for the welfare state. ‘People are facing problems of survival,’ explains Andreas Karitzis. ‘We cannot solve these issues but we can be part of socialising them. These solidarity initiatives can be a basis for fighting for the welfare state. For example, medical staff involved in the social medical centres also fight within the hospitals for resources and free treatment. The idea is to change people’s idea of what they can do – develop, with them, a sense of their capacity for power.’ In this way consolidating Syriza’s vote is also about a deeper preparation for government: ‘If we become the government in a few months time people will be more ready to fight for their rights, to take on the banks and so on.’
Preparation for government
Opposition as an opportunity to prepare for government also drives those Syriza members who are working closer to the state. Aristedes Baltas, coordinating member of Syriza’s programme committee, describes the work already underway on the committee of MPs, experts, civil servants and civic organisations whose purpose is to shed light on (not simply ‘shadow’) the ministry of education and propose alternative policies. ‘Through Syriza members who are frontline civil servants – and Syriza won over 50 per cent of the vote of these workers – we are mapping the obstacles, knowing who to rely on, how to release the ideas of staff with a commitment to the public good,’ he says.
These committees – rather than single ‘shadow ministers’ – are also intended through their openness and links with social movements to be one way of countering the tendency of parliamentary institutions to pull the representatives of even the most radical political parties away from the movements for which they intend to be a political resource. Baltas, an activist-cum-professor of philosophy from the older generation of Synaspismos, the largest party in the Syriza coalition, co-ordinated the drawing up of a detailed, 400-page programme involving Syriza members and supporters from every social and political sphere. This contributed to the organisation’s insistence on positive solutions and its confident approach to government. One of the programme’s four sections concerned ‘restructuring the state’.
Baltas summarises the approach that Syriza is now preparing to put into practice in every ministry. It is an ambitious strategy for democratising a state that is institutionally corrupt. It is also a direct challenge to the troika’s claim to be modernising the Greek state through privatisation. For each ministry, Syriza committees are preparing to sweep away the bastions of corruption and open up the work of the ministry to the stifled capacities of frontline civil servants, building on and encouraging the latent honesty that Baltas is convinced generally exists amongst such public service professionals.
Under Pasok and New Democracy rule, each minister brings 40 or 50 advisors who control everything. This, Baltas says, ‘is a deadly structure, suppressing all initiative and creating focal points for corruption throughout the system. We would not bring in such a layer. We will ask for a general assembly of all those who work in the ministry and explain the new situation, and encourage their initiatives to make the state responsive to the needs of the people.’ The hope, he explains, is to encourage ‘a surge of people wanting to participate, produce ideas. This will be the first time such a thing will have happened in Greece.’
Old challenges, new openings
Alongside these various preparations for government, inside parliament and outside, activists are alert to the dangers of losing their social roots, becoming ‘another Pasok’. In the formation of the new party, a shared priority is to create, as new MP Theano Fotiou puts it, ‘a structure for the people to always be connected to the party, even if they are not members of the party, to be criticising the party, bringing new experience to the party’.
One factor pulling the parliamentary representatives of radical, pro-movement parties elsewhere has been the resources bestowed on them by the state, while the party, and often the movement, loses key cadres to the parliamentary routine. Syriza will receive €8 million (almost triple its present budget) as a result of its electoral success, and each MP is allocated five members of staff by the parliament. How will Syriza’s emphasis on struggles in society be applied to the distribution of these resources?
Andreas Karitzis answers: ‘The biggest part of the new funds should go to what we can do in the neighbourhoods. For example, to employ people to spread initiatives like social medical centres, explain what is successful and what is not, or people who would connect people in cities with producers of agricultural stuff. And to improve the ability to build these relationships online. These are the kind of things we are discussing, as well strengthening the capacity of the party in parliament.’ Out of the five staff allocated to MPs, two will work for the MP directly. One will work for a policy committee and two will be employed by the party to work in the movements and neighbourhoods.
A further challenge will arise from the fact that although there are strong women in the Syriza leadership, the overwhelming majority are men. Sissy Vovou, a member of Syriza’s 200-strong leading body and member of the Syriza Women’s Network, says there is a tendency to treat women’s equality as ‘something that should wait until we are in government’. There is a new dynamic developing though. A third of Syriza’s MPs are women, who have been elected on a proportional system based on open lists. So they have been voted for on the basis of their local leadership. They made it clear at that first parliamentary meeting opened by Alexis Tsipras that women’s equality cannot be put on hold.
New sources of radicalism are also evident within the trade unions. The dramatic collapse of the old political order is producing a potential earthquake in the unions, whose structures were closely tied to the old parties of Pasok, the KKE and New Democracy. The consequences for Syriza of these changes and the development of radical independent unions in Athens especially, where more than half of the population lives, are not yet clear. But they open up the possibility of a strong grassroots trade unionism that could in turn reinforce the radical character of Syriza, especially if and when it is in government.
Finally there is a challenge to us. Syriza’s rise, along with the defeat of Sarkozy in France, has encouraged the rejection of austerity measures across Europe and shifted the balance of forces in the EU. But it is not enough simply to applaud and walk away. The avoidable catastrophe imposed on the Greek people worsens every day. Syriza is clear that the memorandum cannot be reversed by national resistance alone.
The most effective form of solidarity across Europe would be to learn from Syriza how to build in our own countries new kinds of political organisation that are sufficiently open and loose to enable all those people who desire an alternative to capitalism based on values that many of us describe as socialist, but without a precise model in mind, to become a powerful and popular political force.
Syriza has shown how this movement-style politics can be combined with a disciplined intervention in the political system to defend – and regain – the basic social and political rights that mainstream parties now treat as dispensable. Its example, which was necessarily forged in the heat of the most extreme manifestation of neoliberal austerity, can be taken up by the rest of us. In doing so, the political geography of Europe would be reshaped, with profound effects in Greece, potentially allowing Syriza not just to shine but to succeed.

For more see
Union Solidarity International
Greek Solidarity Campaign
Another Road for Europe
Syriza’s website

The Transnational Institute funded and supported this research. Thanks to Euclid Tsakalotos, Afrotiti Stabouli, Anastasia Kavada, Haris Golemis, Chris Jones, Pavlos Kazakopoulos, Petros Kondylis, Lef Kretsos, Alex Nunns, Hilde van der Pas, Michael Spourdalakis and Panayotis Yulis.

This article is from the forthcoming issue of Red Pepper – for more like this, subscribe today.