Notes on the Crisis from Greece

 On February 12, 2012, just days before the eviction of Occupy London, Athens was in flames. The majority of over 40 buildings that were set ablaze by angry crowds were banks, government offices and branches of commercial chains – but not only. Similar scenes were seen across the country.

Why so much anger? That Sunday the Greek parliament was to vote for another austerity package which will, amongst other things, further cut pensions and make it possible to reduce the minimum monthly salary to €400. The 600-page document was given to MPs with 24-hour notice with the recommendation to start and end the parliamentary “discussion” and voting before Monday morning, when the European stock markets would open. The 199 Greek MPs who obeyed and voted for the austerity package slept safely within the walls of their guarded villas. That Monday, stock markets around the world reacted positively and profits were recorded, especially in the banking sector. Meanwhile, homelessness has seen at least a 25% rise in Greece in the last few months, and – according to Eurostat– 27.7% of Greeks live with the risk of poverty.

That same Sunday, 12th of February 2012, police were waiting in front of homes of known activists, and detained them before even reaching the rally in Syntagma Square. Police blockaded most roads leading to the city centre and ordered metro stations around central Athens to shut, so demonstrators would not be able to reach the place of the protest. Riot police were waiting from the early morning in front of parliament, and attacked in the early afternoon, aiming to disperse the demonstration before the scheduled time of the rally. This led to full scale clashes all around Athens, as hundreds of thousands tried to make their way to Syntagma square to protest, whilst those present refused to leave despite unprovoked and extreme police violence.

But people in Greece do not resist the new capitalist regime on the streets only. At the moment of writing, several buildings that used to house public or state organisations are occupied by anti-austerity protesters. Town halls, local prefectural buildings, the hospital of Kilkis, the building of the Social Housing Organisation and the ground-floor of the Ministry of Health are just a few of the buildings occupied by people who are trying to create the material infrastructures of a world of solidarity, mutual aid and freedom, in the opposite direction of the social cannibalism that the government, IMF, EU and ECB are pushing.

The social struggle in Greece raises many questions. First of all, why do people rise up and fight? It is because the rapid impoverishment is felt by almost everyone in the country. But even before the crisis, things were not that good; extreme inequality, police brutality, and exploitation were already firmly established, prioritising capital and state at the expense of the freedom and wellbeing for the majority. However, never before have so many people been so much and so rapidly affected by this regime. The slogan “we are the 99%” makes absolute sense in Greece today. But this proverbial 99% extends well beyond Greece and gradually includes people in Britain and other “privileged” countries. Admittedly, if a substantial proportion of Western Europe’s residents could claim in the recent past that poverty and suffering is something that stays abroad and does not reach them, this is no longer the case.

The Greek case has its own particularity, but is indicative of what is coming. The local version of Occupy: the Syntagma Square movement started in summer 2011, after more than a year of an experiment in capitalism. This started in May 2010, when the Greek government arranged for a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the EU and the European Central Bank (ECB). The loan was accompanied by a dismantling of public social provisions and dramatic decrease of wages, combined with over-taxation of people and under-taxation of big business. The Greek example became paradigmatic when the joint IMF/EU/ECB enterprise went on to contaminate Portugal and Ireland. The established model that emphasises the wellbeing of financial institutions at the expense of human health and happiness goes further and faster than ever before. Its violence is too explicit to be ignored; this system kills. The Lancet – a medical journal – recently published two research articles confirming links between the new loan-related policies, a rapid decay of general health in the population, and an enormous increase in suicide rates.

However, this is not the first time that such a version of extreme capitalism has been applied. The majority of global inequalities arising in the last decades are based on interventions by the likes of IMF, World Bank, WTO and collaborative governments, which in the name of so-called post-crisis economic recovery, growth, development or competitiveness of a country’s economy, decrease the value of human life and dignity to degrees that may shock even the most fanatic fans of neoliberalism. This very same recipe of extreme austerity with respect to wages and social public provisions, combined with generosity to big corporations, was first applied to so-called developing countries, and later to former socialist countries in Europe. Gradually it expanded to the global West, dismantling slowly a series of gains achieved through revolts, protests and revolutions over the last 150 years. Today the pace of this dismantling has been stepped up.

So the reason that occupied squares in Egypt, Spain and Greece were followed by Occupy movements in the UK or the US is because economic and political elites – elected like some European governments or unelected like Mubarak of Egypt –  repress people in substantial parts of the world in increasingly similar ways. This similarity is achieved through pushing down the historically more privileged parts of the world population. After everyone else has been squeezed to the limits of human existence, the great majority of people living in the peripheral Euro-zone countries are next to join the global poor and repressed. Very soon the majority of Western and Northern Europeans will follow. It is worth noting that the main reason for the situation, is because that privileged part of the world population did not react against that condition, or when it did, usually the demand was to reform the established system towards a more fair deal. The deal never came, because justice does not go together with the predominant economic system. So the question posed as a slogan in Athens applies very explicitly to all of us: “if not now, then when, and if not us then who” is going to rise up and overthrow such a system?

Dimitris Dalakoglou is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Sussex University and co-editor of the book ‘Revolt and Crisis in Greece’, he is member of the collective Occupied London that maintains the web-blog ‘From the Greek Streets’.