Greece

We recently received this text from the comrades of the TPTG (‘Children of the Gallery’) in Greece, and are very pleased to publish it, because it represents one of the first clear statements on the ‘assembly movement’ in Greece, written by comrades who have been taking part in the movement.

Banners at protests in Madrid made fun of Greek ‘apathy’ in the face of the austerity attacks they have already suffered and those which are to come. In reality strikes and demonstrations have been continuing in Greece, but a new wave of ‘indignant’ protests was soon ignited, in Athens and in towns across the country, explicitly following the Spanish example. At the time of writing this has been going on for more than a week.

Never has the bankruptcy of the capitalist system been more obvious. And never before have such massive attacks on the working class been planned. What developments in the class struggle can we expect?

This is a report on the struggles against austerity measures in Greece, written by a group calling itself ‘Proles and Poor's Credit Rating Agency', formerly TPTG, whose analysis of the uprising in December 2008 we published in WR 328.

Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, France, Germany, Britain...everywhere the same crisis, everywhere the same attacks. The ruling class is revealing its true colours. Its cold and inhuman language boils down to the same basic message: ‘if you want to avoid the worst, if you don't want total economic break-down, you are going to have to pull in your belts like never before'.

The eyes of the world ruling class are on Greece today, not only because the failure of its economy is a harbinger of what lies in store for the rest of Europe, but above all because the bourgeoisie is well aware that the social situation in Greece is a real powder-keg.

This is an updated version of the article Greece:One Year On.

One year ago, there were three weeks of massive struggles in the streets of Greece over the police murder of a young anarchist, Alexandros Grigoropoulos. This article looks at what has happened since then.  

Ta Paida Tis Galarias is a Greek group that's been around since the early 1990s. They participated in last December's struggles and published a provisional balance sheet of events in February this year. A further analysis appeared on libcom.org in early September. While its language can be occasionally obscure it brings out some important points about last year's movement.

In August 2009, 200,000 hectares of forest burned to the ground across the European Union. These are the figures calculated by the eminent ‘European System for Information on Forest Fires' which stresses that this figure goes well beyond the 20,000 hectares that burned in 2008.

The explosion of anger and revolt by the present generation of proletarianised young people in Greece is not at all an isolated or particular phenomenon. It has its roots in the world crisis of capitalism and the confrontation between these proletarians and the violent repression which has unmasked the real nature of the bourgeoisie and its state terror.

This article has already been published online, here .

The explosion of anger and revolt by the present generation of proletarianised young people in Greece is not at all an isolated or particular phenomenon. It has its roots in the world crisis of capitalism and the confrontation between these proletarians and the violent repression which has unmasked the real nature of the bourgeoisie and its state terror.

We have just received the declaration below, originally posted on libcom by a comrade from Greece. While we don't know the background to these events they seem to us sufficiently important to be given the widest possible distribution. GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers) is the national trade union in Greece. 

Fires aren’t unusual in the summer months in Greece. But this year the area devastated was ten times the average affected over the last 50 years.

In Greece in December 15 men were convicted of the nearly 1000 crimes attributed to the November 17 terrorist group during the 27 years of its activity. There had been 23 murders, dozens of bombings and rocket attacks on a range of targets - typically foreign banks and other businesses, military figures, Turkish and German diplomats, tax officers - as well as raids on police stations to restock on weapons.