Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (12 page)

But here's the next problem: the system is not in stasis, it is in crisis. After the economic meltdown of 2008 it is highly capable of smashing itself.

5

Greece: The Anomic State? From Austerity to Social Breakdown

Athens, 14 June 2011, 9 p.m.
You can't miss the green dancing dots: laser pens playing across the façade of the Hotel Grande Bretagne as dusk falls. The crowd surging towards the hotel's shuttered doors is chanting: ‘Underneath! Underneath!'

The chant refers to an escape tunnel they believe runs beneath Syntagma Square, connecting the hotel and the Greek parliament: the protesters want the government to use it right away. The laser pens are being shone to try to blind the TV cameras positioned on the hotel roof since 25 May, when thousands of Greek youth occupied the square. Every time some hated figure from the mainstream media is spotted peering through the hotel blinds, the green dots cluster on that window.

Antonis Vradis, an activist and blogger who's been camped here since the start of the protest, explains:

All the media in Greece is corporately owned: people here believe it's aligned to the very same forces that have ripped off the country, so there is total hostility to them. We've even had the anchormen of mainstream networks calling for a military coup—so there is zero sympathy for the media.

In one corner of the square there is a ‘pre-meet' of the politics subgroup—about a hundred people standing in a quiet circle to discuss, as Vradis puts it, ‘the fifty answers you will get if you ask fifty people here what they want'. Above, by the perimeter railings of parliament, are clustered the right-wing nationalists with their blue-and-white flags. Next to them some anti-capitalists have draped an orange banner depicting a helicopter: another invitation for Prime Minister George Papandreou to leave office. Within twenty-four hours he will, in his own way, give it a try.

In the centre of the square, under the ornamental trees, there is a campsite where around 400 people have pitched tents, including Vradis. Various stalls have sprouted among the tents, some organizing a petition, some selling literature or food. At one, people are logging the meeting times and contact numbers for the local assemblies that have formed across Athens.

Once you're inside the encampment, the sky becomes stars and banners; makeshift sheets and posters are everywhere. ‘We're building real democracy'; ‘One solution, revolution'; ‘The dictatorship never died in ‘73 but we will finish it off in this square' …

These are the
indignados
—the ‘indignant ones', a name borrowed from the Spanish youth who occupied their squares in May 2011—and what's new about this protest is that most of those involved were never politically active before. The Greek Communist Party, the KKE, has boycotted the camp; the far-left parliamentary alliance SYRIZA has people here, as do the anarchists, but they are not the majority. Mainly the protesters are just ordinary people. And it's the same elsewhere, in Iraklio, Thessaloniki, Patras and many smaller towns.

‘It's regime change,' says Vradis. Whatever happens in parliament, whatever happens with the new austerity budget due to be introduced tomorrow, whatever happens on the streets, he thinks the rash of protest camps in town squares across Greece signals a big switch-off from traditional politics: ‘In the people's minds the regime is already gone—not just Papandreou, but the whole corrupt mainstream party system.'

Vradis is one of those activists I keep bumping into who've been central to the global upsurge. He started his blog, OccupiedLondon, during the UK student riots in November 2010; now he is back in his homeland, following the trail of mayhem. He also turns out to be one of the horizontalists who are critiquing my ‘Twenty Reasons' blog. ‘I am working on number thirteen,' he warns me: ‘your claim that this generation is picking and choosing its causes.'

As we talk outside the gates of parliament, the government is struggling to survive. Vradis gets an SMS telling him that two more MPs have just resigned from the ruling PAS OK parliamentary group. A cheer goes up. Noticing my camera, people shine green lasers into it.

Now three thousand people sit down cross-legged on the stones of Syntagma—which at this point have not yet been broken up for missiles—and begin a polite mass meeting. There is little rhetoric from the platform; they're beyond the rhetoric stage. It's about the precise tactics and problems of being an unled mass movement in the post-ideological age.

Sitting among the protesters, I am struck by the meeting's atmosphere—similar to that of a music festival, and completely unlike that of, say, a big trade union march or even the UK Uncut groups. One of the Cairo tweeters said Tahrir was ‘like Glastonbury without Bono', and so, in its own way, is Syntagma in June. Rena Dourou, an activist from SYRIZA who, like Vradis, has been camped here since the first night, confirms that for the vast majority of the demonstrators, it's their first protest:

It's attracted young people, and especially young single mothers, who realize that this crisis is going to hit them very hard; also elderly people whose pensions are shrinking. I don't say they're apolitical, though. They're all well aware that only their presence in this symbolic place can change things.

It's not just Greece, either. By the summer of 2011, youth all across Europe were rapidly disengaging from the political mainstream. Maybe it's just a phase—or maybe this is what democracy is going to look like in an age in which politicians have come to be seen as corrupt, technocratic, characterless and inept: repeated standoffs between the masses and the policymakers, with very little left in the way of ‘grassroots' or party command structures.

In Brussels, as the Syntagma meeting begins, Europe's finance ministers have assembled to thrash out their differences over the near-inevitable Greek debt default. But nobody in Syntagma cares. They are busy drawing lots for places on the podium—a practice copied from the
agora
of classical Greek democracy, designed to avoid, or dissolve, fixed power relationships.

Despite the calm, there is a simmering anger across Greece. Many people have lost a third of their income due to tax rises and wage cuts; many young adults have no job and no prospect of one. The green dots of laser light convey a chilling message to the rulers of Europe: we don't want to be on your TV news bulletins; we would rather bust your cameras than accept your austerity.

On the brink of mayhem

15 June 2011, 8 a.m.
The following morning, on a wide, deserted thoroughfare, taxi drivers have parked their cabs in a phalanx and are taping Communist posters to the hoods. Bank workers are standing around in groups, chatting, fingers wrapped around the traditional iced Nescafe that is all you can stomach in this heat. Hospital workers begin to assemble around the banners of the Communist-led trade union PAME. This is one of many assemblies in a city that's rapidly shutting down. Though they stay away from the camp, and later the rioting, the KKE are a massive force. And there is a new urgency for the workers who adhere to the party and its allied unions: they are fighting for their lives. The whole system they've worked within is falling apart.

‘I'm a cardiologist,' Dr. Ilias Sioras tells me. ‘I see every day, in the public hospitals, more and more poor people needing treatment. And they are asking for money, under the counter, to admit people. I believe people will die because of the austerity.'

After the hospital workers, the hotel porters and domestics form up in ranks, wearing their uniforms and name badges. They chant the deep, throaty slogan that has become the song of Greece's revolt: ‘Don't bow your heads, resist!' What they're here to resist is the so-called Medium Term Fiscal Strategy, about to be imposed by PASOK—which began as a left-wing social-democratic party but is now trying to impose one of the harshest austerity programmes ever conceived.

PASOK's misfortune was to win the Greek general election of October 2009. On entering government, they discovered that the outgoing right-wing administration had lied systematically about the state of the country's public finances—despite regular visits from the EU monitoring body, Eurostat, which did not seem to notice. Instead of 4 per cent of GDP, as had been reported, the country's budget deficit turned out to be 12 per cent. Its debt was on course to spiral to 150 per cent of GDP.

In a country with a viable tax system, this would be a major problem, but it would be solvable through tax rises, spending cuts and a swift devaluation of the currency to boost its export industry. But Greece could not devalue: it was trapped within the eurozone. Nor did it have an export industry, let alone a viable tax system. The previous year PASOK's finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, had told me: ‘the country is essentially corrupt. We went to the upmarket district of Kolonaki and found doctors and dentists with a claimed annual income of €30,000, driving cars worth €30,000 alone.'

Papaconstantinou, educated at the LSE and NYU, seemed like the right man to implement the solution: accepting a bailout from the European Union on harsh terms, forcing through tax reforms and cuts to public sector pay, but protecting services for the needy and protecting the jobs of state employees, most of whom traditionally vote PASOK. The problem was the EU's politicians: trapped in a time warp of their own creation, they would spend an astonishing eighteen months struggling to comprehend the scale of the crisis.

By 4 May 2010, the eurozone was on the brink of chaos. It took French President Nicolas Sarkozy's threat to quit the euro, and urgent calls both from the White House and the International Monetary Fund, to convince Europe's leaders to launch the first Greek bailout, of €110 billion. A few days later, together with the IMF, the EU created the European Financial Stability Facility, armed with €700 billion—more than enough to prevent crisis in Greece and to revive Portugal and Ireland, whose fiscal lungs had been punctured in the post-Lehman decompression.

But things spiraled out of control. By May 2011, Portugal was bust, Ireland bust several times over, with its banking system on life support—and Greece was in need of a second bailout. The reason for failure was obvious to all except the pallid bureaucrats who run the European Union and the European Central Bank: the medicine was killing the patient.

Free-market economics, written into the constitution of the European Central Bank and hard-wired into the brain of every mainstream politician, demanded that countries embark on a programme of self-imposed austerity in return for financial bailouts. It prescribed what neoliberalism always prescribes: privatization, wage cuts, pension cuts; cuts in benefits, the minimum wage and social services.

The problem is, if you impose austerity on a country already in the grip of recession and which cannot devalue its currency, that recession merely gets worse. The country's tax revenues do not rise and soon it needs another bailout—on even harsher terms.

That's what had brought such huge numbers of Greeks onto the streets in June 2011. The terms of the proposed second bailout, as dictated by the EU, would reduce the size of the state from 53 per cent of GDP to 44 per cent in just six years. The austerity programme would take one euro in eight out of Greek spending power, in the form of tax rises and public-spending cuts. It would cut the public wage bill by a third. And it would sell off every state-owned national asset that it could: airports, ports, the motorways built with EU subsidy, even some of the smaller Greek islands were mooted for sale—all at knockdown prices, at the bottom of the market.

The potential consequences were clear to anybody who has studied the 1930s: the austerity programme would suppress growth for half a decade, sink the prospects of an entire generation of young people—already facing youth unemployment of 26 per cent—and in the end could only lead to a third bailout. Except there could be no third bailout: the country would default on its debts—the only question being, in the end, by how much and how chaotically.

On the streets of Athens, in the hot dawn of 15 June 2011, they had decided not to wait. If Greece was to be forced into self-imposed recession as a prelude to default, better to default now: better to reject austerity and impose another solution, from below.

‘I am sixty-seven years old and have sailed the world,' said a man with white stubble, clutching a plastic bottle full of home-made hooch. ‘Once I was poor and broke: I would rather be poor and broke again than take another bailout from the EU.' His spindly arms were shaking, his body tense inside his shabby t-shirt. He sounded like a man trying to warn of imminent disaster: ‘You must let me make these points: if Greece dies, Europe dies, America dies, we all die.'

At that, another old man leaned over and blocked my camera lens. ‘Don't you want the world to hear your story?' I asked. ‘No,' he said quite calmly as he waved his hand in my face. ‘It's too late for that.'

A taste of tear gas

Not long after, the tear gas started. There was no warning—though standing close to a bunch of protesters who were throwing bottles at the riot police should, I guess, have been warning enough.

When a tear-gas canister explodes in mid-air it spews a thick cloud the colour of 1970s furniture. Those nearest to it run; everybody clutches their t-shirt to their face. Then, like a football crowd leaving a game in the days of terracing, we crush together, shoulder to shoulder, everyone in their little bubble—fighting that little bit of panic that starts inside when you cannot breathe.

Then you daub Maalox on your face, a milky balm that staunches the burning, which as it dries gives the whole crowd the air of a troupe of clowns who have been disturbed while putting on whiteface.

After the first tear-gas canister is launched, another tribe emerges from the side-streets: hundreds—later swelling to maybe thousands—of Black Bloc youth. Their body language, dress and demeanour are completely different from those of the communists. As in London, they go in for bare midriffs, black fabric, dreadlocks and jerky movements. They make a simultaneous surge towards parliament from three assembly points, coordinated by SMS. Riot police—clad in plastic and Kevlar armour from shin to collar-bone, wearing gas masks and armed with tear gas projectors, stun grenades and metre-long batons—go into action.