It was a misfortune for the youth that their spontaneous rage against the police was soon – that is before it could become massive and be transformed into a movement of the whole people – put into the pocket of a political bloc that has already manipulated it for its own anti-popular intentions. Worst of all, they got involved in a political provocation scheme which included the historical arson of Athens. So, the enraged youth not only failed to raise even the most obvious demands against police fascistization – such as the immediate resignation of the police leadership and of the ministers in charge as well as the dissolution of the brutal Special Guards and OPKE (Criminality Prevention and Repression Team) bodies – but also enabled the most overtly fascist forces to fully strengthen their political might, which would finally mean a more fascist police.
The organized arson and looting of Athens
Today, the struggle against fascistization of the police has a necessary precondition: to expose the political nature of the large-scale provocation, which was the arson and looting of Athens (and partly of Salonica and a few other cities) on 12/8, and then to understand the goals of the political movement that was set up side-by-side and inside it. This provocation by far surpasses the fascistization-of-the-police matter, as it aims at imposing a peculiar political dictatorship on Greece by a virtually unified bloc that would include grey and pseudo-leftist fascists who exploit and represent different parts of the nation being tactically turned the one against the other, but strategically unified under a fascist-state and a pro-Eastern so called national “anti-imperialist” policy.
In the 12/8 arson incident one should detect two key-points that reveal its centrally guided nature. The first one is the political slogan of SYN [2] leadership that the arson and looting were expressions – even negative ones – of a spontaneous people’s riot. The other key-point is prime minister Karamanlis’ decision to withdraw completely the police forces from the center of Athens during the arson and the looting of the night of 12/8, thus granting it to the arsonists and plunderers, while Ermou str. [3] had already being burnt at the evening of 12/7. The prime minister justified that unprecedented in world’s history granting of authority to the penal crime in the name of human life protection. But as everybody knows the destroyed means of production and merchandise are crystallized living labor, and besides the arsonists and looters of that kind never sacrifice themselves for their “sacred” aims.
On the other hand, SYN claims that arsonists and looters always exist in a revolution, not to mention the arsons and looting perpetrated by the spontaneous elements of an uprising against their own oppressors. This indeed happens in real uprisings and revolutions, but the arsons and plundering are not the dominant aspect in a real people’s uprising, they are the overwhelmingly secondary one. Apart from that, the conscious political party in an uprising or in a revolution must immediately denounce every arson and looting so as to protect the revolution from the people’s hatred. If this bears no fruits, it must resolutely clash with the arsonists and with the looters. If SYN were the conscious party of an uprising, rather than the leader of a historical provocation, it would have called upon the rioters to abstain from arsons and from looting, while it would safeguard the shopping malls from the arsonists and looters, as it was having a protest down the same streets during the looting.
Still, the arson of Athens wasn’t the negative aspect of a spontaneous uprising. The smashing of shop-windows, especially of banks, had been by now done at a small-scale by the lumpen and hooligan part of pseudo-anarchism. This had already caused the deep opposition of the masses to the basically anti-police petit-bourgeois Exarcheia [4] anarchism, that has never dissociated itself from those acts, disdainful as it is of the sentiments of the broad masses of the people. So, the anti-police hooded figure, always used by the deep political regime for political purges especially in the police, has gradually put people off and became hated. However, that hooded figure could have never thought of spontaneously concentrating fire on the shopping-malls of Ermou str. and on burning the whole center of Athens the next day without at the same time besieging the police stations downtown Athens, at the very time an enraged part of the youth would side with him after Alexis’ murder, and partly did it at that. This claim of ours is irrespective of the fact that even after Alexis’ murder a brutal attack on the police would be a political mistake, for the masses detest the catastrophic political history of the smashers’ very often unprovoked anti-anti-riot-police violence of the last 20 years, as well as the hood that stands for that kind of violence.
The inconceivable and large-scale smashing of the shopping malls and other buildings was the job of the dissolute criminal lumpen-proletariat that has long been trying to win the status of an “anti-authoritarian” or “anarchist” mainstream “fraction”. This fraction offers an “anti-capitalist”-outlook justification of the arson but also of the expropriation of even the small bourgeois property. In fact, here we have to do with an anti-proletarian and fascist conception of an army of looters, who are alienated from the people and from the country they live in. That lumpen-proletariat has perpetrated the historical provocation it took upon itself and by so doing, within a few hours it slandered and de-massed whatever could be crystallized into a massive and militant protest movement of the youth. After that provocation, the fresh spontaneous stuff of the youth – rallied round the “anti-capitalist” political parties, believing that so doing they would crush police fascism who attacks them in their day-to-day life – has shrinked because of the people’s anger about the damages. So the possibility of a massive youth’s protest against fascistization of the police has been crushed at birth leaving alone a few pupils and the old insolvent armies of SYN, pseudo-CPG[5] and their petit-bourgeois non-parliamentary “revolutionary left” tail in the street, surrounded by the more and more hated Molotov-cocktail-armed occasional allies of theirs. SYN and CPG are now trying – under the applause of the LAOS[6] as well – to set-up a so-called “peaceful” political movement, based however on the “uprising” atmosphere the arson has spread all over the globe. This is the starting-point in the development of an unprecedented opportunistic so called social movement; a movement that has no concrete goals, no concrete demands, no clear slogans, only to portray a general enemy who is simply whoever prevents that army from gaining power. Essentially, we are facing a protracted political coup.
The political goals of the 12/8 large-scale provocation
The “successful” arson of Athens, and to a degree of Salonica as well as of a series of other smaller cities, offered the basis, that is the ideological foundation, of a political demand the SYN raised simultaneously with the arsons and because of the arsons and which Karamanlis to a large degree satisfied. This was the demand for a trans-party concerted and unified answer to what SYN called a “people’s uprising”. SYN presented this demand by a double institutional claim: the convening of a council of the 5 political leaders of the 5 parliamentary parties for dealing with the so called major political and social crisis provoqued by the “popular uprising”, that would first lead to the formation of a trans-party committee for the “re-establishment and the reorganization of the police”. That means virtually for controlling the police. Controlling the police means controlling the basic state functions, which in modern Greece equals to controlling the political murderous crime, the political provocation, the criminal gangs, and half-controlling the penal justice. All these mean today to a large degree political control over the country. But what is basic in SYN’s demand is the demand that a not formal Council of party leaders be invested with real authority, parallel to such a trans-party authority and among the other trans-party high authorities (such as the radio-TV council). Then, the power exercise on serious matters will pass from the legal governments – so far controlled by the two larger proeuropean parties – through to the 3 smaller parties. These 3 smaller prorussian parties will co-govern the country through their numerical majority in that council of the 5 parties without bearing any government responsibility.
So, hadn’t vandalism in Athens and other cities so dramatically surpassed the limit of “ordinary violence downtown” it would be impossible for Karamanlis to push through to ND party[7] government commission his position on the need for “national unity” before the crisis, that is the acknowledgement that the government could not deal with the huge destruction that entailed the continuation of the “uprising” alone. It’s only grace to the arson that Karamanlis managed to call upon all political leaders to have a consultation for dealing with the crisis on Tuesday. Besides, only because of the large-scale arson the protest was presented as an uprising and at that managed to gain international recognition as such.
At this moment the trans-party consultation hasn’t taken the form of a leaders’ conference around the same table as SYN would wish, but of separate face-to-face discussions of Karamanlis with all other 4 party leaders, that is by granting Karamanlis the mediating role of a national leader. That’s why the president of the Republic, Papoulias, this old experienced Kremlin’s servant and protector of the 3 fascist parties, being entrusted with the role of the national sage by the 5 parliamentary leaderships, has blessed the consultation. Only this way could the representative of the “people’s uprising” Alavanos[8], the representative of the “counter-attacking working class” Papariga [9], and the most enraged “anti-government” Papandreou [10] seek along with the head of the so called “murderers’ government” of ND and with the leader of all fascism and racism Karatzaferis [11] a “consensus solution” without their party bases being annoyed of that settlement.
The 4 opposition leaderships’ support of the “national unity for dealing with the crisis” political line is proven by the fact that they did whatever they could to strengthen the political preconditions of the arsons. On the other hand, we think that it is not at all accidental that the arsons completely and abruptly stopped (that never happens in real spontaneous revolts) and were denounced by the TV right after this face-to-face council of the political leaders took place, without neglecting the fact that the all-people resolute denouncement of the arsons has played the most important role in that shift. Let’s see what the opposition parties’ stance on the arson of Athens really is.
As to the PASOK party: The political assistance offered by the leadership of PASOK to SYN has been tremendous, as from the outset to the very end of their 2-day “heroic” struggle they had been declaring that the primary thing was to seek the social reasons of the “uprising” rather than concentrating on and denouncing its mistakes. This was an indirect but clear recognition of the rioting nature of the arsonists. It is not accidental that even now that PASOK has been compelled to clearer condemn the arsons through pressure by its base, still refuses to condemn the arsonists as fascists and provocateurs, along with SYN. It is even more typical that Papandreou refuses to make the least criticism on the stance of SYN, even after the latter asked for sit-ins to follow the firings and stoning of the police stations by the students. But the basic Papandreou’s contribution to the atmosphere that politically set the fire and boosted the arsonists was that he chose to weaken the government in the extreme by demanding its resignation and elections just as the arsons were taking place.
As to the pseudo-CPG: This party has played an even more stinking and more double-face game than SYN, because it has practically assisted the arsons, that is just as they were taking place, and only afterwards condemned them in words. In particular, the pseudo-CPG called for a demonstration on Monday, after the Sunday arsons of Ermou, without emphasizing on the condemnation and prevention of new arsons that, even for the most ignorant, were hanging in mid-air. So it didn’t do what any party opposed to provocateurs that stroke the people’s struggle would do. If the pseudo-CPG really opposed the arsons it would literally go for the arsonists, it would be on TV to call upon the people to prevent them, and would reveal and denounce SYN as well as its political line at the same moment. The true revolutionaries and democrats have always been stricter towards provocateurs than towards the overt external enemies of the people. However, the pseudo-CPG marched in the streets and indifferently passed by those who had already started setting fire and destroying, and only claimed that, contrary to SYN, its demonstration was safe-guarded. If pseudo-CPG were a basically democratic party, the basic slogan of its 12/8 protest would be “down with the arsonists, down with the provocateurs”. In fact, by its so-called “proper” army, pseudo-CPG has offered more massive dimensions and a valuable political alibi – a justification to the only active political army at the moment: the big SYN-SYRIZA[12] bloc that was launching the slogan that everything was justifiable in a riot. The basic reason the pseudo-CPG blamed SYN for the arsons, afterwards, has been: to prevent itself from losing the sympathy of the petit-bourgeois masses, unlike SYN, and, basically to enjoy the classic ultra-rightist reactionaries’ and the fascists’ confidence. It needs them to achieve its prime target which is to gain firm positions in the police and chiefly in the army, were this party has more politically invested. This is the strategic reason why the pseudo-CPG has virtually condemned every hooded person as a rascal and an agent, thus definitely entrusting SYN with the role of politically protecting them. So, it has deliberately identified the anarchists – that have caused a great damage to the democratic movement but intend to oppose the fascistization of the police – with the lumpen proletariat and the hooligans, while it has identified the latter with the penal criminals and the conscious agents and provocateurs. This equation was of course an easy job for pseudo-CPG (but also for LAOS), so far as the Exarcheian anarchists have never dissociated themselves from hooliganism. Especially they haven’t dissociate themselves from the historical arson of the city, and so they were let being included in the list of the most hated people in the country. That is they’re burdened with the whole provocation the SYN set up for them. From now on, the unprincipled Exarcheian anarchism is about to subjugate to the Anti-authoritarian Movement, this instrument of SYN, eager to politically support the arsons, every atrocity, and lumpen proletariat’s criminality.
The fascist LAOS kept an equally actual, double-face stance in favor of the provocation. This party decided to refrain from speaking before the TV cameras, that is to politically disappear, till Alexis’ funeral, that is till the arsons were terminated, pretending that it respected the dead! By remaining silent, the most typical “law and order” party helped Karamanlis to withdraw the police, and to leave the shopping-malls in the hands of the arsonists and looters, with the so-called purpose of “impelling” Karamanlis to satisfy the demand for “national unity”. It was not at all accidental that the political consultation demand was set by LAOS just on time of the arsons and simultaneously with SYN. After the dirty job had been done, the LAOS became chatty again and started calling upon the nation and the police to crash the hooded and the “state of Exarcheia” that set Athens on fire. At the same time, LAOS supported the movement of the students as they have “soul, live, innocence” (LAOS press release on 12/12). All those flattering words are due to the fact that this movement is totally put in the pocket of the reactionary anti-student platform of pseudoCPG-SYN and totally controlled by them.
Why do Karamanlis and Papandreou undermine their own parties in favor of the 3 small parties?
At this point every good-will person may wonder: What for the leaders of both big parties want to facilitate the three smaller ones’ easy coming to power through all-party forms of government? That is, why do they actually work against the self-reliance of their own parties? Or, to pose it otherwise, why does Karamanlis get out of his party the confession that it can only govern along with the small parties, and especially along with SYN, at a time when the whole country spits on the latter? Why, even more so, does Papandreou support the SYN with such a self-sacrifice instead of claiming the PASOK votes that once were won by SYN, that is self-reliance for his party, at a time when PASOK is rising and SYN is sinking? Why do those both leaders always ferociously strike at the other’s party, but hardly ever do they strike or they simply caress the three small ones, especially the pseudo-leftist ones that have every political activity done in the name of the people, the trade unions, the street etc. at their disposal? In other words, what makes the leaders of the two big parties betray and at that provoke their parties in favor of the 3 small? What is the common strategy that links the three small parties to the two leaders of the 2 big ones?
The common strategy that unites them is the pro-Russian strategy, that is the binding of Greece to the Russia-China-Iran neonazi war axis.
The three small parties openly follow the Russian line in every global, regional, and internal matter. At that LAOS raises the Russian flag next to the Greek one in its rallies.[13] This is the source of their new nationalist-type anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism, their hatred towards the internal and pro-Western market-type capital, the investments of which they systematically sabotage with the pretext of ecology by appealing to the State Council[14], and against which they investigate or invent scandals. This is the source of their vital tolerance towards the pro-Russian state-oligarchs Kokkalis, Bobolas etc. which have been over-developed by inconceivable scandals at the expense of the state; this is the source of their lust for the Russian and Chinese neo-colonialism’s investments, their obsession with the Eastern-type lazy and corrupt state-bureaucratic gangs, that is hidden in the demand for banning on the non-state education and generally on every non-state service and productive activity.
If one took any notice he/she would discover that the same policy is carried out by the leaders of the two big parties behind the back of their supporters. But they constantly encounter big obstacles in imposing it on the governments of ND and PASOK respectively, as their parties back the pro-Europe, relatively independent, Russian-friendly but not totally subjugated to her, march of the country. So, as the overwhelming majority of the ND and PASOK people resist the covert strategic agenda of their leaders, that is the pro-russian strategy of LAOS-pseudoCPG-SYN, both leaders are constantly purging the interior of their parties. Typically, the leader of the one party strikes at the cadres of the other who are about to be persecuted, and the leader of the other party purges them in order to show the people how much incorruptible he is. This is done by the selected and inflated use of scandals. (This was how two pro-Western ministers, Roussopoulos and Voulgarakis, were summarily persecuted. As to the Vatopedi monastery, it has become a target because this central in the Mount Athos monastery has been long resisting to the Moscow Patriarchate and to Putin, who have been overtly coveting it from Vartholomaios who so far controls it).[15] However, at the same time, the two leaders don’t hit at all or slightly hit the three small parties, especially the pseudo-CPG and SYN, and don’t make a move without achieving the so-called “consensus” with them, having first acclaimed them the so-called exponents of the people, of the youth, and of the working class. (See education ministers Giannakou’s decapitation, and the mutilation of her positive reform in education). So, the 3 small parties are becoming politically immune, the true political and ideological modulators of the political life in the country, as both leaders make the two big non-pro-Russian parties go at each other furiously and be eliminated.
They undermine every demand against fascistization of the police. They maintain their movement promoting a list of their reactionary demands.
So, that’s the reason why that pro-Russian five-party summit gang started from the just rage of the youth against the fascistization of the police, in order to attempt a strategic boost of the 3 small parties’ policy to the detriment of the two big ones’ and to the detriment of the people.
So far the gang has made a pace but still hasn’t managed to achieve its basic goal, that is to gain from the government of ND a trans-party council for the police, and generally an open trans-party consultation for dealing with the crisis, that is the recognition of the “uprising” parties as formal modulators of the political power. The chief disability of the gang is so far the tremendous exposure and isolation of SYN within the masses after the provocation. The pseudo-CPG may have managed to survive in the eyes of the bourgeoisie and to gain ground in the people, but its other half, SYN, which is the driving force of the “uprising”, has probably undergone an irretrievable harm. So serious was the harm that it is now difficult for the pseudo-CPG and SYN duet to still go on as a reliable movement. This explains why the pseudo-CPG has lowered the tones of confrontation with SYN.
Anyway, the duet is attempting an escalation by organising protracted protests in the center of Athens and sit-ins at schools. Its objective is to occupy the center of the city for as long as it finds it necessary by using the students as a justification force. By this way and by raising the matter high on international level, it wants to blackmail the merchants and the hotel-owners in Athens and the whole country just at Christmas time and during the financial crisis, and threatens to finish them unless there is a government’s consultation “with the movement”. And it is not only them who are being threatened but also the whole trading-industrial bourgeoisie and the whole country, as every day the political crisis scene further on raises the borrowing rate of interest of the country, which anyway heads to bankruptcy more quickly than any other within the Euro-zone.
That’s why the pseudo-CPG and SYN need the sit-ins at schools and Universities to follow the arsons, and that’s why they need to do something unheard-of even for themselves: They’ve organized a political movement, they’ve organized sit-ins at schools, and they’ve been making demonstrations with no specific central slogan (unlike last year’s withdrawal-of-the-context-law slogan, for instance)[16], but instead they pose an endless list of all super-reactionary demands of theirs (ban on technical and all private education), or the roguish, demagogic demands (salary raise from 300 to 700 euros, 100,000 hirings in the state sector that SYN claims). They do this while they have “forgotten” the most obvious and specific demands of a struggle that set off by a student’s murder, such as Pavlopoulos’ and Hinofotis’[17] resignation, the dissolution of the fascist special guards’ and OPKE bodies, and the dismissal of their trainers and bosses. The most serious measure against fascistization of the police, that pseudo-CPG and SYN seem to detest would be the acceptance of an international control body on the matter of human rights respect by the police, in the context of UN Convention against Torture, which our country refuses to ratify, and the punishment of all torturers and murderers of the police, as well as their bosses that have been active for the last 10-15 years in our country, and whom the Amnesty International has been constantly revealing. Those questions have not been touched or raised at all by the pro-police socialfascists of SYN and of pseudo-CPG from the first moment of the youth’s rage manifestation. The refusal to raise those matters proves that they don’t want to reduce the police fascistization but simply to subjugate it to their own policy. That’ s why SYN invited the police syndicalists of POASY in its headquarters to assure them that the “fuzzes-pigs-murderers” slogan, which its youth shouted at them at the same moment in order to lead the students to a stone-throwing battle, was invalid! In fact, this meeting reveals that SYN enjoys the most intimate relations with POASY leadership of any other party, and thus it formally puts POASY forward as the basic interlocutor of the trans-party committee on the police it proposes!!!
The only police body that social-fascists want somehow to clean is MAT. This is because this body has been long used as a pit-bull by the bourgeois parliamentarianism in order to prevent the attacks of the pseudo-CPG and SYN armies against government buildings. These armies negate the bourgeois parliamentarianism from the right, that is from the side of arbitrary fascism. But as they want to get on well with the bourgeoisie they more and more use the anarchists for the anti-MAT assaults, who they afterwards blame for the conflict as provocators. On the other hand, the non-proRussian bourgeoisie deals with pseudoCPG-SYN as though they were the people instead of countering them politically, and so charges MAT with the role of the enemy of the people, a role that the MAT as well as its ultra-rightist leadership are delighted to assume. The equally pro-Russian nazis of Chrysi Avgi have been already prepared by the new regime to provide their ideological and organizational assistance to the MAT. So, grace to Hinofotis, Pavlopoulos, and SYN-pseudoCPG that remain silent on this most crying symptom of police fascistization, this body has become both ideologically and politically brutalized.
However, the generalized police suppression the masses feel today, especially the immigrants, doesn’t lay at the political-protest level, as social-fascism is constantly shouting, but basically lays at the level of violation of their personal rights, their dignity, even their life, bodies such as the special guards, OPKE, boundaries guards etc. are specialized in. Social-fascism, especially the pseudo-CPG, either speaks scarcely or doesn’t raise at all any particular demand on this more basic aspect of police suppression.
In order to preserve antigovernment marches, sit-ins at schools and universities, and new cocktail-Molotov-throwings in the already burnt city, the isolated for the moment SYN and the treacherous pseudo-CPG are obliged to pile up all the problems and the whole disappointment of the poor and petit-bourgeois youth, and place them between their own general political platform by pointing their own enemies out as responsible for that disappointment. That’s why they keep wandering from one channel to the other with texts such as “Alexis friends’ letter”, announcements of the prorussian Archbishop, TV shows and youth’s grievances interviews, having in common a classless refrain amongst a generalized pseudo-class political platform: the classless refrain, that SYN basically uses, is that the world of the parents, alienated by capitalism, doesn’t allow their children to oppose the system, therefore, the latter can only riot, and if necessary, riot against their parents. The pseudo-class political platform is that the uprising must be done against Western capitalism, the merchandise production and the US and EU monopolies, which are the chief responsible for the youth’s illiteracy, low wages, and unemployment.
It is true that Western capitalism, corruption, the merchandise production, and the US and EU monopolies are largely to blame for the situation of the youth and the whole people, but even more the responsibility lays on the patrons of pseudo-left and the leaderships of the two big parties, especially for the fact that the illiteracy, low wages, and unemployment are worse in Greece than in any other EU country. Greece suffers more from bureaucratic and corrupt Eastern-type state bureaucratic capitalism, from sabotage of the modern big industrial production by the pseudo-ecological and other anti-capitalistic SYN and pseudo-CPG movements, from the sabotage in research and education by a new state-sponsored bureaucratic pest of lazy teachers and corrupt “researchers”. In essence, our country suffers from her leaders’ subjugation to the policy of the agents and friends of pro Russian and pro-Chinese state-monopolists during the last decades. It is that policy that has made Greece the most bankrupt country of the EU in all respects, and her people the most impoverished. Contrary to what the foreign news agencies disseminate, it isn’t the European uprising of the poor people that has started from Greece, being the big victim of European capitalism, but a mainstream leftist-faced political coup against the monopolistic but at least politically more or less democratic Europe, which for all the meanness of her monopolies still resists Putin, his fascism, and his militarism.
So, the banner with which SYN and pseudo-CPG go down on schools, apart from being abstract, apart from being a banner of all problems rather than one of concrete propositions, is totally reactionary and at that anti-youth, especially whenever it tries to describe the chief enemy. Under other circumstances the students could rise up. They’ve been doing it many times by taking part in reactionary anti-reform movements, such as the one against evaluation of the educational bureaucracy, for the only enemy they know is the one the pro-Russian regime determines for years now, the liberal bourgoisie. But the SYN-pseudoCPG have so much discredited the most radical forms of struggle, such as the sit-ins, and even more, they have brought so much rage against every form of struggle after the arson of the city, that they are for the moment compelled to restrict to marches of their political armies downtown Athens. It is a matter of concern whether the 5 leaderships can raise and facilitate the manifestation of a somehow massive anti-European social-fascist movement, and we’re not in a position to know what kind of provocations they are going to think of in order to raise it. In any case, they repose much trust to the financial crisis that’s getting worse, and so they have shifted the balance to the 700-euros matter in order to mobilize the urban youth, and to the low prices of agricultural products to mobilize the peasantry. Besides, they are ready to mobilize the pensioners, while from the start of this set-up uprising of theirs, they’ve been trying to involve GSEE and ADEDY [18] in their plans.
In other words, the red-grey fascists anticipate that the financial crisis will generate the proper circumstances for the success of their political coup as the latter has already strengthened to a degree the destructive results of the financial crisis.
The certain thing is that they won’t stop. For they know that if they will stop with no tangible political victory this would be their destruction. If they stopped with no “all-party” solution in whatever level, they would become weak, apart from hated, and the weak fascism usually dies. That’s why they schedule street-blockades in Athens and Salonica, but also the blockade of national roads by their peasant political armies so as to keep the communication of persons and merchandise as hostage and to force the people and the government to choose: either financial death or political subjugation to Alavanos, Papariga, and Karatzaferis.
The 3 mutually covered fascisms.
The forms the three fascist leaderships and the two leaders will use are unknown to us. At that, they continuously reshape their common tactics. As far as we are concerned, the matter is how to stand as a proletarian organization in front of the new political and ideological stage that is set after the large-scale provocation.
The great difficulty of this phase lays generally on how to deal with the fact that the most radical dispositions and the most radical resistance of the masses have for long been “distributed” virtually between the three fascist parties. These parties lead and channel towards their Eastern policy, with the help of the pro-Russians inside the two big parties, any kind of disappointment and any ideological and class mainstream may arouse in the country. This activity became clearer than ever on the large-scale December provocation, and the difficulty lays in revealing their coincidence so that a true democratic and people’s pole could be able to stand altogether against them.
But let’s see how do the three small fascist parties intertwine in the current crisis.
The leading and active role in has been played by SYN, as we’ve seen above. This party has generally taken upon itself the policy of breach and violence against the national and pro-Western bourgeoisie. It magnifies this policy by working basically inside PASOK, which is the party of a new state and middle-class bourgeoisie, as its “left radical” guide with the help of Papandreou-Laliotis clique.
SYN hegemonizes over some other ideologically alien to it mainstreams, such as a radicalized youth, a part of the democratic left, as well as the unemployed proletariat. In true class terms, it expresses a large part of the corrupt and lazy state bureaucracy – that has already the real power in education – the rather well educated petty-bourgeois youth that wants a better future, and a part of the urban lumpen proletariat. Now, it is betraying the progressive youth by channeling their rage against young Alexis’ murderer towards an alliance with the state bureaucracy and the lumpen proletariat, and yielding whatever rebellious existed in them to the big provocation. This process would be impossible hadn’t the SYN been the leader of a political spectrum that stretches from trotskyism and the m-l trotskyism, goes to anarchism, and then, via hooliganism arrives to the gang penal crime. The latter has been recently dressed in the veil of anti-authoritarianism and revolutionary expropriation of bourgeois property. The SYRIZA with its “component parts” allows the SYN to be as much of a bully and as much brutal as he likes, by shifting the responsibility from itself and its proper intellectual civil servants to the “revolutionary” components of SYRIZA. The Anti-Authoritarian Movement (A.K) is the most important of those components but also the only non formal one, in order to save SYN as, for as far as we know, it is the only political organization in the country that took upon itself to politically support not only the arsonists but also the arsons themselves and the damages as a revolutionary action.
Grace to this political spectrum, the SYN made it that a large part of its base conceive the real historical burning of Athens as a small collateral casualty of an historical uprising. The whole regime, the international “revolutionary” agencies of social-imperialism and the uninformed foreign analysts that understand nothing of the Byzantine intrigues, the hidden violence and the provocations of the Greek political stage, are talking about a Greek uprising and automatically help to pass it as such in the Greek society. Inside the country, the PASOK, functioning as a front organization of SYN, will continue to talk about “rage” etc. and thus it will take upon itself to heal the wounds the general outcry of the overwhelming majority of the people has caused to SYN.
LAOS works in the right opposite social and political pole which SYN seeks to fascisize. The LAOS leads the “law and order” pole. This party wants to represent and channel to fascism the most conservative, the most religious aspect of the bourgeoisie and pettit-bourgeoisie (that instinctively view the cosmopolitanism brought about by the Western monopoly, especially the trading and stock market one, as their chief enemy), and then the proletariat that is feeling crushed the most by its rivalry with the cheap migrant labor. In fact LAOS wants to politically express the worst vehicles of state suppressive violence in the country and the most chauvinist army officers, and lead them to an alliance with Russian social-imperialism by making them cherish the illusion that Russia will grant them Konstantinoupolis, Cyprus etc. The hardcore detachment of that kind of fascism is the LAOS small branch among the most enraged petit-bourgeois nationalists and the racist lumpen proletariat, which is the fanatically pro-Russian nazi Chrysi Avgi. Chrysi Avgi is for LAOS what the AK is for SYN. When it supported Alexis’ murder, Chrysi Avgi did for LAOS what the AK had done for SYN by openly supporting the arsons. The common irrefutable sign of their fascism is the anti-Semitism.
With the help and the absolute political protection of Karamanlis, LAOS has been working in the base and inside ND, which is the party of the classic big bourgeoisie. Inside that party LAOS is the “vanguard” of the anti-Western populism and pro-Russianism. In other words it’s been working for the purpose of “Russianization” and fascistization of ND, such as SYN has been working like a guide for the “Russianization” and socialfascistization of PASOK.
From the December provocation and for a long time to come after that, LAOS will rally around it the hatred of the destroyed shop-keeper against the radical youngster, and will turn it into sympathy towards a more and more fascist police. Even worse, it will rally and politically lead the hatred of the shop-keeper and the unemployed proletariat against the immigrants because some of them, the most marginalized, entered the looting. This was the greatest victory of racism and of the LAOS-Chrysi Avgi bloc in the December large-scale provocation. Alavanos himself has confirmed the racists by claiming that it is the financial oppression by the capital that made the immigrants enter the “uprising” and loot.
If the two opposite forms of fascism, the grey classic fascism represented by LAOS and the radical “red” social-fascism represented by SYN were left alone, they couldn’t prevent the spontaneous social and political poles they want to represent from mutually colliding, being crashed, exposed to the people, and internally disintegrating, under the pressure of their spontaneous antithesis. This counter-balancing and uniting role, or better this umpire and leading role over both spontaneous blocs is played by the pseudo-CPG, which hegemonizes over LAOS and SYN. The pseudo-CPG is generally somewhere between LAOS and SYN, that is at the core of the so-called center between ND and PASOK. It is the libero football player of the fascist triad and of the whole Greek political life.
The pseudo-CPG owes this role to its being the chief and unified in its leadership Russia’s political agency, and for that, the organizationally largest, richest and more centralized party of the country. Its dominant role in the whole fascist bloc is also organizationally achieved. SYN is led by the “leftist mainstream” leading cadres who once were members of the leadership of pseudo-CPG and the strategic line of whom has not shifted an inch from pseudo-CPG’s, while they always seek for unity with it. As to LAOS, few people know that many pseudo-CPG cadres have recently entered that party in order to provide its rather inexperienced and typically petit-bourgeois nationalist cadres with the wide organizational and political experience of pseudo-CPG as well as with the “proper” antiimperialist and anticapitalist line. Karatzaferis’ praise for the pseudo-CPG reveals this relationship of subordination.
The fascism of pseudo-CPG is the absolute and suzerain fascism. It isn’t exercised by the security policeman, the informer, the sergeant, or the fascist judge, as is the fascism of LAOS, nor by the lumpen proletariat and the lumpen university teacher, as is that of SYN. It is exercised right by the “party”. Whereas the “party”, in order to exercise it, claims to represent the proletariat, the only class that doesn’t feel guilty as everyone oppresses it. So, all other classes are guilty before the working class, and as a result, they feel guilty before the so-called party of that class. This means that the “party” could exercise its dictatorship over all the other classes of the nation, that is it could be the only party that has the right to exist for the nation, as it is supposed to be the only one with no selfish motives. The right of the pseudo-CPG’s total dictatorship is based on a caricature of marxism-leninism; that is the right to exercise its dictatorship as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The big fraud lays in that the pseudo-CPG despises the working class more than anything else, for that class is the more bound up with modern industry and research, and above all with the human liberation, than any other. But this party hates them both the most, because it is the political instrument of a super-power that despises every form of development and every sort of social liberation of a country to be subjugated. From the working class, the pseudo-CPG has borrowed whatever more bullish and narrow-minded exists inside it and made it syndicalistic oppressive bureaucracy at the expense of the working class. That’s why it is the weakest of all parties in the industrial syndicalism and only thrives in sector unions where the workers are distributed to many alternate bosses whom the pseudo-CPG does business with and blackmails: ship-repairing zone, construction workers, sailor workers. The political army of the pseudo-CPG is basically composed of conservative, ambitious petit-bourgeois elements, such as these of SYN.
The pseudo-CPG seeks to achieve the unity of both other disguises of fascism so as to supposedly unite the people and the whole nation against Western imperialism, against Western capital, and against the Jews as so-called Zionists. In fact, it wants to rally everyone around Russian social-imperialism. That’s why it looks like both nationalist LAOS and “internationalist” SYN. It is both “anti-capitalistic” as an ally of the state bureaucracy and also friendly to Kokkalis and Co., the pro-Russian so-called “national” capital.[19] It is both for the army and for the people. It is both for the police and for the revolution. It is the incarnation of the perfect hypocrisy and opportunism, but it’s being all the time praised for its “principles”, that means by its anti-occidentalism, by the greek bourgeoisie!!!
It achieves all this by launching its arbitrary “dictatorship of the proletariat” under the conditions of today capitalism, and by exercising it whenever and against whoever it wants: in one moment for example it imposes dictatorship on the MAT in alliance with the anarchist for the needs of the “education movement”. The other moment it imposes dictatorship on the anarchist as a hooded agent of imperialism, and hands him over to the MAT because he has spoiled its “anti-imperialist” march of November 17 every year.
In fact, it’s not completely accurate to say that pseudo-CPG stands right in the middle of the two forms of fascism. For its strategic target is to win or neutralize a large part of the military. It knows that the pro-Russian forces will only come to power in Greece through domination over the military, which means through cooperation with the most fascist and chauvinistic elements of the army. That’s why the pseudo-CPG is strategically for nationalism and for the police. In other words, the task of pseudo-CPG is to constantly appease the state of organized violence and to sail together with LAOS, the approach of which to the old-rightist anti-communists is much more convincing. But all 3 fascist “components” know that this state – the army and the police included – can only be conquered through external force, through weakening and liquidation, and basically through terrorization of the rest of the bourgeoisie that economically and thus instinctively remains pro-Western. That’s why the brutal aggressiveness of the SYN’s lumpen army as well as its “anti-nationalism”, which is an anti-nationalism from the side of social-imperialism, are so indispensible to the pseudo-CPG. Therefore, it is necessary that SYN plays the role of the unyielding anti-state anti-private-capital revolutionary, while the pseudo-CPG just gives it a “gentle” backing with its pseudo-labor petit-bourgeois army. But it has to give it moderately and always by dissociating itself from SYN. This has also happened in the current attack. The pseudo-CPG is marching among the fire by the side of SYN, carrying the same “anti-capitalist” platform that the petit-bourgeois and lumpen arsonists present to set the malls on fire, a few meters away. But afterwards, it fiercely denounces the arsonists in order to win the trust of the bourgeoisie, inside which it has applied its anti-Western anti-monopoly tactics. At that, it accuses arsonists of being US agents, such as LAOS does.
Both LAOS and pseudo-CPG, as well as Laliotis’ Avriani,[20] put the blame for the arsons on the West, though the chief responsibility, in pure political terms, lays to SYN. But SYN is anti-Western and pro-Russian to the marrow in all matters. Only a jerk would claim that the US or the big malls have set Athens on fire, as LAOS, Avriani, and pseudo-CPG claim, while not a single pro-Western fraction of the bourgeoisie is involved in the preconditions of the arson, but only the pro-Russian ones.
The double-face pseudo-CPG has been fiercely attacking the MAT those days, but has replaced SYN in the school protests after the arsons to offer to the police flowers instead of stones. At the same time it encircled GADA[21] to continue with flowers the “uprising” of SYN. Simultaneously, the pseudo-CPG made a demonstration of its own hitlerite-type “dictatorship of the proletariat”: it occupied Panteios University and refused access to the other companions of the “uprising front” by invoking a resolution of the CC of the CPG! The rioters swallowed this peak of fascism because they are to a large degree subjugated to SYN, the other “protest” head of the same fascism.
How to stand before the provocateurs
The great difficulty that every people eager to resist this three-head monster has to face, is that if they resist the one of the three heads without resisting the other two, they will be swallowed up by them or they will be irretrievably exposed to the people.
But let’s deal with the current large-scale provocation.
The democrat youngsters that wanted to resist the police fascism basically entered the bloc of SYN, and it’s true that many of them threw stones at the MAT through instinctive rage without having any experience or tradition of anarchic stoning. Finally they were morally and politically crushed by the arsons and the looting in which they hadn’t taken part. The worst is that, after the arsons, the wide masses, especially the most conservative part, shifted in favor of the police and against its true enemy, the democratic youth, which means that it is the latter that will undergo their fiercest revenge in the future.
On the other hand, the merchants of Patra, who tried to repel the arsonists and looters, were humiliated by the accusation of having formed an alliance with the nazis. What really happened there was: Chrysi Avgi mobilized in Patra in order to help the MAT against the hooded, as usually with the purpose of agitating for nazism among them. Patra’s radio stations transmitted that some citizens threw stones at those who set the malls on fire. Then the merchants of Patra took heart and went down on the street to save their shops. Finally they became thousands, chased away the arsonists and saved their shopping-malls. It is all-apparent that the nazis didn’t want to provoke the mass resistance of merchants, while Karatzaferis has publicly condemned Chrisi Avgi for mobilizing with selfishness in Patra (12/12). Besides, it’s the nazis themselves that deny any presence or any participation of theirs in a citizens’ movement, through their website. The line of LAOS and pseudo-CPG, constantly expressed in the media, has been that the merchants of Athens must for no reason “resort to violence” by copying the Patra incidents. But the pole of SYN-PASOK, by equating the spontaneous movement of the merchants of Patra to the Ch.A., has slandered their activity, while the pole of LAOS-ND has slandered the youngsters that threw stones at the MAT as arsonists.
On the other hand, if a more politically conscious youngster wished to express his/her opposition to the police and at the same time didn’t want the stoning and the alliance with the so-called “mess-doers”, the bloc of pseudo-CPG was there for him/her. Those who entered it may have escaped political booing, but have done the worst, because they enabled the most fascist party to strengthen the large-scale provocation and at the same time to present itself as the only force of justice and normality inside the country. In other words, the “neither arsonists, nor police” line of the pseudo-CPG seems to close fascism’s door for the formation of a true people’s resistance against both the arsonists and the fascistization of the police.
Before those three forms-whirlpools of fascism, the working-class vanguard must juxtapose its own line of struggle and unity. What will that be? We believe that one should start from the interests and of the disposition of the great majority of the people and unite them in a common front. Those days, fascism has dealt the people two great blows. The first one is the murder of a youngster by police fascism. This murder wasn’t systematically organized by fascism. What fascism really organized has been a police that hates the people, especially the democratic and leftist youth, and deals with them in a fascist manner. So it was actually a matter of time that a blow like this or even worse would happen. Fascism is evident in that blow and this is proved by the special guard’s stand after the murder, irrespective of where he pointed at with his gun. It is the abysmal hatred for the victim-youngster the defense has revealed.
The second blow fascism has dealt was the arson and looting of downtown Athens. This blow has been a conscious mass blow organized by social-fascism, which used the criminal lumpen and dragging a part of spontaneous hooliganism. In political terms, this has been the greatest blow of the same fascist center that killed Alexis, because it slandered the anti-police-fascistization movement, and directly and brutally was sent to hit the middle and small merchant bourgeoisie, the thousands of employees in those shops and the people that wished to celebrate Christmas in their city. From this viewpoint, this was a casual cannibalistic fascist attack on the masses, who were to be punished because they supposedly live a life of “consumption and alienation” and submit themselves to alien needs imposed by the bourgeoisie. For that reason, the social-fascists burnt the Christmas tree at Syntagma square, and in order to show that they even oppose every enlightenment, they burnt the University library as well.
Those two blows are bound to each other because fascism that wants to suppress the masses as police fascism, also wants to terrorize them, degrade and financially weaken the country, so as to subjugate it.
The conclusion is that the left and the democrats must unite and crash both arsonists-looters and police fascists within the same movement. Only that way will they be able to unite the people and crush all three heads of fascism. Today, there can be no democratic political movement against fascistization of the police that doesn’t unite with a political movement against the arsonists, which politically means basically against whoever, led by SYN, think of the arsonists as part of the people. On the other hand, there can be no true democratic movement against the arsonists that fails to resist the fascistization of the police as well, that fails to raise particular demands against it, and that fails to denounce whoever support that fascistization, and first of all LAOS.
The actual political problem is that the left democratic and radicalized youth has been enraged and mobilized against the first form of fascism. But as to the second blow, no mass movement of resistance and protest has yet been formed, as all trends of fascism and the leaderships of the two big parties remain united. The biggest problem is that the left, that ought to resist the arsonists too, is organizationally bridled inside the arsonists’ bloc. If they were politically and organizationally independent, they would have stayed in the streets till Monday with serious slogans and demands against police fascistization; on Monday evening they would have guarded the shops of the center along with the employees and the shop-keepers; the following days they would protest both against the arsonists and against the police. This is the political line that attacks both of the phenomenally opposite faces of fascism, as the police is also to blame for leaving the shops to the clutches of the arsonists. This line has nothing to do with the pseudo-CPG line of so-called equal distance (between the police and the hooded). The difference lays in that the pseudo-CPG refuses to put the political denouncing of the arsons at the banner of its mobilizations as a basic precondition for the people’s unity against fascistization of the police.
Only by starting from this particular political line and by uniting the people, will the working class be able to further unfold its specific demands for financial struggle on the crisis, its slogans against the sabotage of the economy, its slogans on the revolutionary unity of the working class and for the workers’ control in the factories, under the conditions of the approaching storm. Only this way could the labor movement combine the struggle for political democracy with the fincancial and political struggle of the proletariat. This way could the people be united and not with abstract words about hunger, unemployment, illiteracy and rage, nor with demands that will lead to more hurger, unemployment and illiteracy. If now the revolutionary and democratic vanguard fails to unite towards that direction, it will unite tomorrow. If social-fascism wins now its political stake, the people and the weak remaining democracy will be fatally injured. But in a later phase, all the fraud and fascism hidden behind the faces of the “uprising” leaders will be revealed before the eyes of all well-intended people that believe in and follow them now. We have to do nothing more than agitate for the line of the true people’s democratic unity. And the time will come when the deceived and provocated people will understand, for they will find themselves before an unprecedented brutality and dirt. And then, they will unite with all those who are now watching, concerned, confused and enraged, the police and the arsonists, the physical and political murderers of the people, in a true people’s uprising.
Athens, 12/16/2008
Article of “Nea Anatoli” the newspaper of OAKKE (Organisation for the reconstruction of the Communist Party of Greece)
[1] On Feb. 2, 2008, “Chrysi Avgi” (Golden Dawn) – an overtly hitleric gang – had scheduled a rally in Athens. The police anti-riot squads (MAT) co-operated with them in order to attack and disperse a counter-rally of anarchists.
[2] “Coalition of the left and progressive forces”: a prorussian party which presents itself as an anti-capitalist, antineoliberal and ecological parliamentary party.
[3] The most frequented shopping street of Athens.
[4] A district of Athens and stronghold of anarchism and especially of the smasher-typed pseudoanarchists.
[5] The also pro-Russian social-fascist parliamentary party that replaced the old heroic Communist Party of Greece, after the banishment and finally killing of its leader N. Zachariadis in Siberia by the Breznief regime.
[6] “People’s Orthodox Rally”: a small pro-Russian, chauvinistic and fascist parliamentary party.
[7] “New Democracy”: the governmental party, traditionally expressor of the pro-Western big bourgeoisie.
[8] The Leading figure of SYN.
[9] Leader of the pseudo-CPG.
[10] Leader of the “Pan-hellenic Socialist Movement” (PASOK), the social-democratic parliamentary party.
[11] Leader of LAOS.
[12] SYRIZA (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) is a party being set up by SYN in order to rally the radical anti-capitalist anti-nationalist pettit-bourgeoisie round it.
[13] As did at a Salonica demonstration on March against Rep. of Macedonia’s accession to NATO.
[14] The high administrative court, an organ responsible for the systematic annulment of investments and the dismantle of industry in Greece. It was formerly headed by a pseudo-CPG member and former friend of the ’67-’74 dictatorship Dekleris.
[15] The Vatopedi monastery has been accused of illegally possessing land that belongs to the state.
[16] A draft law initiated by the Minister of Educational & Religious Affairs, M. Giannakou, that among other things, provided for the evaluation of the educational personnel by the state, the weakening of parties-control at the election of professors etc. The protest movement against it, incited by the social-fascists, finally led to the mutilation of the educational reform and the Minister’s decapitation.
[17] Interior Minister and Vice-Minister respectively.
[18] The Greek General Confederation of Labor and the High Administration of Civil Servants’ Unions, respectively.
[19] A new oligarchy bound with Russian and Chinese capital that developed and started dominating Greek economy with the help of political power.
[20] Avriani is a crypto-fascist newspaper that belongs to the body of PASOK social-fascist leading cadre Laliotis, Th. Kouris. The day after the arson it called upon the pseudo-CPG to impose its law and order, in the frontpage.
[21] The General Headquarters of the police in Athens.