The Battle against Neoliberalism: Massive Popular Uprising in Greece
By Yorgos Mitralias
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=25219
Global Research, June 11, 2011
Hundreds of thousands of Greek ‘Indignés’ (‘Outraged’) walk out to wage war against their neoliberal persecutors
Two weeks after it started the Greek movement of
‘outraged’ people has the main squares in all cities overflowing with
crowds that shout their anger, and makes the Papandreou government and
its local and international supporters tremble. It is now more than just
a protest movement or even a massive mobilization against austerity
measures. It has turned into a genuine popular uprising that is sweeping
over the country. An uprising that makes it know at large its refusal
to pay for ‘their crisis’ or ‘their debt’ while vomiting the two big
neoliberal parties, if not the whole political world in complete
disarray.
How many were there on Syntagma square (Constitution
square) in the centre of Athens, just in front of the Parliament
building on Sunday 5 June 2011? Difficult to say since one of the
characteristic features of such popular gatherings is that there is no
key event (speech or concert) and that people come and go. But according
to people in charge of the Athens underground, who know how to assess
the numbers of passengers, there were at least 250,000 people converging
on Syntagma on that memorable night! Actually several hundreds of
thousands of people if we add the ‘historic’ gatherings that took place
on the main squares of other Greek cities (see map).
At this juncture we should however raise the
question: how can such a mass movement that is shaking the Greek
government (in which the EU has a particular interest) not be mentioned
at all in Western medias? For these first twelve days there was
virtually not a word, not an image of those unprecedented crowds
shouting their anger against the IMF, the European Commission, the
‘Troika’ (IMF, European Commission, and European Central Bank), and
against Frau Merkel and the international neoliberal leaders. Nothing.
Except occasionally a few lines about ‘hundreds of demonstrators’ in the
streets of Athens, after a call by the Greek trade unions. This
testifies to a strange predilection for scrawny demos of TU bureaucrats
while a few hundred yards further huge crowds were demonstrating late
into the night for days and weeks on end.
This is indeed a new form of censorship. A
well-organized political censorship motivated by the fear this Greek
movement might contaminate the rest of Europe! Confronted as we are with
this new weapon used by the Holy Alliance of modern times, we have to
respond together both to expose this scandal and to find ways of
circumventing such prohibition to inform public opinions, through
developing communication among social movements throughout Europe and at
once creating and reinforcing our own alternative media…
Going back to the Greek ‘Outraged’, or ‘Indignés’ or
Aganaktismeni, we have to note that the movement is getting more and
more rooted among lower classes against a Greek society that has been
shaped by 25 years of an absolute domination of a cynic, nationalist,
racist and individualist neoliberal ideology that turned everything into
commodities. This is why the resulting image is often contradictory,
mixing as it does the best and the worst among ideas and actions! For
instance when the same person displays a Greek nationalism verging on
racism while waving a Tunisian (or Spanish, Egyptian, Portuguese, Irish,
Argentinian) flag to show his internationalist solidarity with those
peoples.
Should we therefore conclude that those demonstrators
are schizophrenic? Of course not. As there are no miracles, or
politically ‘pure’ social uprisings, the movement is becoming gradually
more radical while still branded by those 25 years of moral and social
disaster. But mind: all its ‘shortcomings’ are subsume into its main
feature, namely its radical rejection of the Memorandum, of the Troika,
the public debt, the government, austerity, corruption, a fictional
parliamentary democracy, the European Commission, in short of the whole
system!
It is surely not by chance if for the past two weeks
demonstrators shout such phrases as ‘We owe nothing, we sell nothing, we
pay nothing’, ‘We do not sell or sell ourselves’, ‘Let them all go,
Memorandum, Troika, government and debt’ or ‘We’ll stay until they go’.
Such catchwords do unite all demonstrators as indeed all that is related
to their refusal to pay for the public debt.[2] This is why the
campaign for an audit Commission of the public debt is a great success
throughout the country. Its stall in the middle of Syntagma square is
constantly besieged by a crowd of people eager to sign the call or to
offer their services as voluntary helpers…[3]
While they were first completely disorganized the
Syntagma Aganaktismeni have gradually developed an organization that
culminates in the popular Assembly held every night at 9 and drawing
several hundreds speakers in front of an attentive audience of
thousands. Debates are often of really great quality (for instance on
the public debt), actually much better than anything that can be seen on
the major television channels. This in spite of the surrounding noise
(we stand in the middle of a city with 4 million inhabitants), dozens of
thousands of people constantly moving, and particularly the very
diverse composition of those huge audiences in the midst of a permanent
encampment that looks at times like some Tower of Babel.
All the qualities of direct democracy as experimented
day after day on Syntagma should not blind us to its weaknesses, its
ambiguities or indeed its defects as its initial allergy to anything
that might remind of a political party or a trade union or an
established collectivity. While it has to be acknowledged that such
rejection is a dominant feature among the Aganaktismeni, who tend to
reject the political world as a whole, we should note the dramatic
development of the Popular Assembly, both in Athens and in Thessaloniki,
that shifted from a rejection of trade unions to the invitation that
they should come and demonstrate with them on Syntagma.
Obviously, as days went by, the political landscape
on Syntagma square clarified, with the popular right and far right
located in the higher section, in front of Parliament, and the anarchist
and radical left on the square itself, with control on the popular
assembly and the permanent encampment. Of course, though the radical
left is dominant and tinges with deep red all events and demonstrations
on Syntagma, this does not mean that the various components of the
right, from populist, to nationalist, to racist and even neonazi, do not
further attempt to highjack this massive popular movement. They will
endure and it will very much depend on the ability of the movement’s
avant-garde to root it properly in neighbourhoods, workplaces and
schools while defining clear goals that throw bridges between huge
immediate needs and a vindictive outrage against the system.
While fairly different from the similar movement in
Spain through its dimensions, its social composition, its radical nature
and its political heterogeneity, the movement on Syntagma shares with
Tahrir square in Cairo and Puerta del Sol in Madrid the same hatred
against the economic and political elite that has grabbed and emptied of
any significance bourgeois parliamentary democracy in times of arrogant
and inhuman neoliberalism. The movement is stirred by the same non
violent democratic and participative urge that is to be found in all
popular uprisings in the early 21st century.
Our conclusion can only provisional: whatever is to
come (and the consequences may be cataclysmic), the current Greek
movement will have marked a turning point in the history of the country.
From now on everything is possible and nothing will ever be the same
again.
Translated by Christine Pagnoulle
Yorgos Mitralias is founding member of the
Greek Committee Against the Debt, which is affiliated to the
international network of CADTM (www.cadtm.org ). See the web site of the
Greek Committee : http://www.contra-xreos.gr/
Notes
[2] See http://www.cadtm.org/Greece-the-very-symbol-of and http://www.cadtm.org/ La-campagne-pour-un-audit-de-la (in French).
