notes on the greek december

Subcomandante Marcos of EZLN, MESSAGE to revolted Greece:
Compañera, compañero. Grecia rebelde.
Nosotros, los mas pequeños, de esta rincon del mundo, te saludamos.
Recibe nuestro respecto y nuestra admiración por lo que piensas y haces.
Desde lejos aprendemos de ti.
Gracias.

Comrade woman, comrade man. Revolted Greece.
We, the smallest, from this corner of world, salute you.
Accept our respect and our admiration
for what you think and do.
From far away, we learn from you. We thank you.

Subcomandante Marcos / December 2008
1st World Festival of Dignified Rage.
MEXICO, December 2008



NOTES ON THE EVENTS OF THE GREEK DECEMBER 2008

December 2008 has been a transition point for Greece. A lot of people positioned in the radical left, autonomy and anarchism say that politics in Greece –and by politics I mean the independent grass root political movement rather than the governmental political parties– will not be the same any more after the youth uprising that took place in December. The murdering of the 16-year-old student, Alexis Grigoropoulos, in the area of Eksarxia in Athens by a special force policeman triggered a spontaneous massive youth revolt in every Greek city and lasted for one month. What was so special about this revolt? And why is the international solidarity towards this movement so crucial in our understanding of its character?

The youth revolt of December 2008 is related with the deep economic crisis and the neoliberal education and labor policies. For the first time in Greece high school and university students together with young workers, unemployed people and immigrants participated in the same protests in the streets of Athens, Thessaloniki and many other Greek cities. The protesters expressed their opposition to the whole political system and the state aiming at the subversion of the government and fore grounding their needs and rights concerning education and labor. The people who participated in this revolt expressed their need to do politics for themselves instead of being represented by a single official political party and they developed various practices of self-organization and action; they occupied public buildings which were transformed to information centers and they did open grass root assemblies functioning in a direct democratic way. These assemblies have been the ‘lab’ of developing and deepening the content of this revolt. The protesters have used massive practices of violence as a sort of ‘counter-violence’ against the institutionalized multilayered violence of bourgeois power. These were practices of symbolic violence against the state and its institutions, such as attacking police stations, banks and multinational companies and burning the Christmas tree in the centre of Athens.


Contextualizing the December revolt

The December revolt is linked with the local and global context of the contemporary economic crisis and this is the reason why it has caused such a great interest internationally. Besides the great number of protests of solidarity that took place in different cities of the world, there has been a high interest on behalf of the international media concerning this revolt. Many newspapers characterized this revolt as the first one to be followed by many others in the metropolises of capitalism within the context of the crisis of the free market causing a rise of unemployment and poverty. In order to understand the reasons that caused this revolt and why so many young heterogeneous people participated in it we need to understand the role of this crisis and its possible consequences.

The economic crisis is actually a deep crisis of the capitalist production relations and it is taking place in the heart of the capitalist world (USA, Great Britain, EU) and the developing capitalist countries (China, Russia). It appears to be a crisis of the symbols of capitalism’s superiority (Wall Street, banks, insurance companies, etc) which were supposed to cover every human need (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were supposed to give loans to the lower classes and help them find a house…). This crisis involves all domains of capitalist economy (decrease of sales regarding cars, goods and houses, decrease of industrial production, increase of unemployment). Apart from the economic aspect, this crisis has particular ideological and political consequences (maybe this is why some people have talked about this crisis as the “1989 of neoliberalism”). It seems that capitalism is not the inevitable destiny of humanity and the history isn’t over as Fukujama would like to believe. For this reason the contemporary crisis constitutes a crucial transition point. The direction that this transition will take is still unclear.

There are two crucial issues at stake here which I want to address from a feminist point of view. First, this economic crisis is followed by a strong ethical crisis of neoliberalism which makes it necessary for us to rethink ourselves and our future(s) and second it raises serious questions about its possible outcomes and the way we, women, will deal with them. Regarding the first aspect, the economic crisis signifies the end of capitalism’s ethical basis; the two basic ethical values for survival and self-progress in the free market world, individualism and utilitarianism, have failed. There is no future of social prosperity any more and social inequalities are getting worse. There is a Fourth World of dominated and repressed others, women, illiterate people, immigrants, refugees and all kinds of sexual, ethnic, racial and class minorities living in the global capitalist metropolises. Regarding the second aspect, one could say that a new social order of horror is arising at an international level. Many national economies are already in recession, announcing a period of increased numbers of poverty, unemployment and homeless people. How will the states deal with this situation? They will probably need to use more repression and adopt more anti-terrorist measures in order to face inside social tensions and conflicts or internal enemies (there is an attempt by the Greek state and the media to categorize anarchists as terrorists). There is always the fear of the development of new forms of totalitarian neofascist regimes, nationalism and patriotism (see for example the high numbers of extreme right wing parties in the elections all over Europe or the rise of neo-nazist movements in Russia). I believe that in this context gender, class and ethnicity differences will be foregrounded as negative categories and they will be colonized and defined in exclusionary terms, following Braidotti’s (2002) analysis. Difference will be a crucial notion in the years to come. Women are expected to be the first victims of this economic crisis since they already constitute the majority of poor people globally.

It is not certain that the defeat of what has been called postmodern capitalism will be followed by a society of equality and fairy tales. It is historically urgent that we, women, start building new narratives about our needs and rights and work on our ‘outopias’ of equality and freedom which seem to be more rational and justified than over. There are no easy answers on how to do this but what the Greek December has taught us, who have participated in the events, is that this is a period of great potential and hope for a different future to emerge. But it will only emerge from us, from the people who do politics for themselves and develop new practices of social organization and relations.


Angeliki