To the Crucible – An Irish engagement with the Greek crisis and the Greek left | PART 2

By Helena Shehan

Part 1 is here

The unaffiliated left

Another person with whom I had been in ongoing contact for a number of years was Christos Kefalis, who has translated a number of my publications into Greek. He is editor of the journal Marxist Thought and a book called October and Our Age, in both of which my work has appeared. He is committed to work that unites all serious marxists across the various traditions. He is a freelance writer, editor and translator, as well as a committed left activist. He was in the KKE 25 years ago, but is now independent left. He voted for Antarsya in May and Syriza in June. He has a very thorough knowledge of the history of the Greek left. I asked him many questions, which he ably answered, as we walked through Exarchia, settled into a café and then on to a taverna, where the food and wine added to the pleasure of conversation, but got in the way of taking notes. Looking to the present, he thinks that this is the final government that the ruling class can form. He expressed regret that Antarsya and KKE will not unite with Syriza. The KKE has hardened with time, he observed, and they are expelling members. “They are collecting everything obsolete”, he said sadly. They are defending stalinism and even the Moscow trials of the 1930s that sent honest communists to their deaths.

More recently I have formed contacts in Greece through social media and I managed to meet face-to-face at least one of the people who tweet from Greece, who keep me so well informed about what is happening when I am not there. My tweets from Greece brought a message from Damian Mac Con Uladh about meeting, which I was delighted to receive. We met in Syntagma Square and proceeded to a Monastiraki restaurant for lunch. On the way I had my first look at the metro, which is impressive, especially with the display of archeological artifacts unearthed in the building of it. One of the best things to come out of the all the money spent on the Olympics, he commented, unlike the many rotting stadiums. Damian was working as a journalist at Athens News, although he hadn’t been paid in months. He also writes a blog called A Gael in Greece and articles on Greece for the Irish Times. How did he come be in Greece? I wondered. He had been working on his PhD in history and met his Greek wife in a German archive. Although I was keen to draw him out about living and working in Greece, and did so, we spent a fair bit of time talking about Ireland and the GDR as well. His knowledge of all three countries is impressive, as are his insights into the many ironies of life, especially life on the left, in them.

Another person with a connection to Ireland I met in Athens was Eugenia Siapera, a lecturer in Thessaloniki, who would soon be taking up a job in Dublin at DCU as a lecturer in social media. She was sorry to be leaving, but she sees no future for her children in Greece. She spoke not only of the many general symptoms of crisis, but of the decline in the schools. She comes from a communist background and joined the communist youth organisation when she was younger, under the influence of her father, who was arrested and exiled for his activism. She is left, but does not belong to any party. She voted for the Pirate party in May, but switched to Syriza in June. She is incensed by the rise of Golden Dawn. A few years ago people laughed at them, she said, but now the situation is worrying. Lots of threads to be taken up again when she comes to Dublin, I thought.

The once left: Dimar and Pasok

Dimar, Democratic Left, is a breakaway from Syriza in 2010, in the direction of Pasok. Some of their MPs are ex-Pasok. They won 6.3% in the last elections and are now the third party in the present government, implementing the memorandum. Although they abstained on the vote on the third memorandum, they voted for the budget based on it. They lost 3 of their 17 MPs in the process. It is hard to see them as occupying a position on the political spectrum with much of a future, although they are holding steady in the polls.

As to Pasok, it is hard to consider them to be part of the left in any sense any more. The name, Panhellenic Socialist Movement, does not fit it at all. It is the party of the memorandum, which Yiannis Tolios has called ‘a manual of social counter-revolution’.ⁱ The people who have been betrayed have taken their revenge and the party has collapsed, even though it goes sputtering on, particularly in the person of their unattractive and unpopular party leader, Evangelos Venizelos. His tv appearances and parliamentary speeches bring forth waves of revulsion on the social media, especially during his venomous attacks on the left. Pasok is still in government, despite going down to 12.3% in the elections and plunging further in subsequent polls. Many are moving from Pasok to Syriza, which is problematic for Syriza. They need to grow, but not in a compromising social democratic direction. Not that all ex-Pasok people are pulling to the right. MP Sofia Sakarofa, for example, a former champion javelin thrower, is a radical and eminent face of Syriza.

Past and present on the streets of Athens

In between all these encounters, I walked and watched and wondered. Why was this country, with its rich history and culture, at the cutting edge of this current phase in the restructuring of capitalism? How far would it go? I was focused on the current crisis, but I tried to conceive it in terms of a longer story. I was thinking a lot about ancient Athens, which lived in my imagination from the time I was a teenager and began studying the history of philosophy. It was outside the curriculum. It even had the frisson of forbidden fruit, because it was venturing outside catholic orthodoxy, which still had such a powerful hold. I was awed by the socratic (platonic) dialogues. Later I was convinced by the marxist critique of ancient Greek philosophy, especially by the work of British marxists Christopher Caudwell, George Thomson and Benjamin Farrington. Thomson’s books The First Philosophers and Aeschylus and Athens had an honoured place on my bookshelves. These analyses showed the relation of abstract concepts to the shifting class structures of the ancient world. This critique did not dim the attraction of ancient Athens for me, but added a complexity that made it all the more intriguing. I taught the history of philosophy for many years and always did so with a strong emphasis on socio-historical context. I tried to make ancient Athens live in the imagination of students as it did in mine.

Adding further to the complexity is the question of the relation of the Greek left to Greek antiquity. It had been the Greek right who had always staked a claim to continuity with the glories of ancient Greece, to the point where the left sometimes rebuffed it. In the schools, the teaching of history has been dominated by a sense that Greeks created an advanced civilization, while the rest of the people of the world were still swinging from the trees. Now GD are taking it up in an even more aggressive way, encouraging students to turn on their foreign classmates as compromising this idealised hellenism.

I discussed the legacy of the ancient world with various people I met, especially historians and philosophers. Kostas Gavroglu pointed out the problematic nature of the continuity asserted by the right. They live in the same place and speak a form of the same language, but there has been much mixing of populations in the Balkans for centuries that modern Greeks are not the direct ancestors of the ancients. The Greek left, he commented, has veered between ignoring ancient traditions and adopting a milder form of the right view. Aristides Baltas said that it has been wrong for the Greek left to be so negative about classical Greece and to leave it to the right. He thinks that a more complex view of it is being taken now. Eugenia Siapera referred me to Cornelius Castoriadis and I found in his work one sort of interaction between past and present that I was seeking.ⁱⁱ

I walked to the top of the Acropolis. I didn’t focus on the exact dates and details and dimensions of it, but tried to imagine how life has flowed through this part of the world over the ages. I thought of those who erected these structures, those who lived and thought through the centuries here. I then visited the new Acropolis museum. It is impressive, but needs more in the way of a history-from-below dimension. I kept reciting to myself the great poem of Bertolt Brecht called Questions from a worker who reads, which begins “Who built Theses of the seven gates? In the books, you will read the names of kings. But did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?” I reached for the lines of connection between the populations of these streets, ancient and modern. I also affirmed a continuity between the discourses of the ancient agora and my conversations with my contemporaries here. I didn’t locate the brilliance of Athens only in its past.

View of Athens from the Acropolis

In my times alone I read novels that I hoped would thicken my sense of Greek history, as I have during all my previous trips to Greece. Some were disappointing, but The Thread by Victoria Hislop and The House on Paradise Street by Sofka Zinovieff definitely added time and texture to my vista.

I also walked the streets and squares of the contemporary city, seeing the homeless carrying all their possessions everywhere they went, people searching bins for food, immigrants scrambling to sell things to passers by, junkies shooting up, rats scurrying across my path. Sometimes I averted my eyes and walked on quickly, because I didn’t really know what to do. There were so many problems I couldn’t solve or even engage with at a close level. As most leftists, I think that my job is to address the nature of the system and to struggle to change it, but sometimes feel at a loss as to how to help the suffering humanity, who cross our path one by one. Once I was sitting alone in a taverna on the street and a man came up and said he was hungry in a shy and shamed way. I gave him a skewer of souvlaki from my plate and offered him bread from the basket on the table. He seemed so grateful for so little. Mostly when approached in cafés I was in company and engaged in conversation and didn’t welcome being asked to buy tissues or flowers or whatever and all involved had a brief, awkward and unsatisfactory encounter.

Every day, sometimes several times a day, I came across demonstrations. If I was free, I joined them and asked them about their grievances and goals. I spoke to occupying factory workers, protesting students, journalists, doctors, pharmacists, lawyers, etc. The protest culture was evident, not only in bodies on the streets, but on writing on the walls. Athens must be the graffiti capital of the world. In Exarchia, there is scarcely a space without it. It is in various languages, although mostly in Greek. When I asked a Greek what was being said on a particular wall, he responded: “Many angry things about troika, government, police.” Perhaps the most striking of what I saw was in English in gigantic red letters on the wall of the Academy of Athens, near the presiding statutes of Socrates and Plato. It read: “Capitalism is killing you. Fascism won’t save you.” At the taverna in Exarchia that I adopted as my local, one wall of it proclaimed “Our Streets”.

There is a strong anarchist presence in Athens. You see their A symbol everywhere. Aristides told me that anarchists are voting now. The communist tradition is ever present too. The hammer and sickle is also everywhere. One day, while walking in Exarchia, I heard strains of Avanti popolo wafting through the air, although I couldn’t locate its source.

One in three shops in Athens is boarded up or burnt out. Of those open, there didn’t seem to be much happening in many of them. I entered the posh department store Attica, although not for shopping, and went up and down the escalator to reach the facility I required, and saw little evidence of shopping on any of its floors. I wondered how many of the workers standing idle would keep their jobs.

The atmosphere in Athens is being compared to that of Berlin during the Weimar Republic.ⁱⁱⁱ The high unemployment, fascist threat, street fighting, political paralysis, personal anomie and so many features of these streets did echo in me what I imagine those other streets were like at that time.

So many sectors are in disarray and decline. Hospitals are running out of crucial medicines and supplies. Universities are in turmoil over new structures of governance, cuts in funding, loss of staff. The neoliberalisation of universities, underway everywhere, is more coercive and more resisted here. That restructuring of Greek debt last spring, which sounded good from afar, meant that Greek public sector institutions, which were required to deposit a portion of their funding with the Bank of Greek in government bonds, had their deposits reduced by 60%. The disarray in the universities is one more impetus to the brain drain, as the society is hemorrhaging its intellectuals and other skilled workers. The mainstream media is controlled by oligarchs and hostile to the left. There is much in the way of alternative media, but the circulation of Avgi is only 3000 a day and the audience of Red-fm is limited. Journalists who try to break stories of scandals and many forms of corruption are fired and even arrested. The Lagarde list of Greeks with accounts in one Swiss bank was suppressed by previous governments and then Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested for publishing it in Hot Doc. Everyone tells me so many stories, with vivid examples from their own sectors, while seeing that parallel processes proceed everywhere, except in the enclaves of the oligarchs. Every day was filled with tales of woe and symptoms of sociocide.

Life has become menacing on so many levels. Even insect bites are not longer just irritating, but now threatening, as malaria has returned to Greece. Although the solidarity networks and protests have brought an enhanced sense of community, there have been countervailing patterns in evidence too, as people push and even trample each other for free food supplies. Desperation surrounds food. People are asked to put stale bread and other still edible food in bags hanging on the outside of bins to save scavenging and contamination. The bags disappear quickly. I was surprised at how many men I saw fingering worry beads. I had associated these with very old men in kafeneions on islands, but saw young men walking the city streets with them, including a riot cop on duty.

So many were so visibly suffering. Yet the Plaka was full of tourists, especially Americans on cruises, who didn’t see it. They spent a few days each in various countries without touching anything real in any of them. The chatter I overheard was about food and shopping. Some remarked that it didn’t really seem so bad. I suppose that it didn’t in their 5 star hotels. Even I had moments, I have to admit, when the crisis seemed at bay. I wore my summer dresses and sandals the whole time I was there, in perfect weather most days. On a Sunday I walked around the national gardens and sat on the grass with hundreds of others listening to a symphony orchestra in gorgeous autumn sun. It seemed idyllic. Looking around, even the homeless seemed briefly released from their burdens.

There is humour amidst all the anxiety too. My twitter feed from Greece is full of ironic observation. One took note of George Papandreou, recently prime minister, now lecturing on crisis management at Harvard, because the captain of the Titanic is dead. Another advised undercover cops that their rayban aviators clashed with their hoodies and black bloc riot couture.

Although I normally walked, I did take taxis on a few occasions. One day, after walking a lot and thinking that I should save whatever walking energy I had left for the Acropolis, I found myself in conversation with a taxi driver who supported Golden Dawn. He listed crimes committed by immigrants. He admitted that they were not all criminals and insisted that he was not racist. He realised, he said, that they came to Greece for a better life, but they couldn’t have it at the expense of Greeks. There are not the resources now. Scarcity changes the situation. People are living in fear. When people have problems, the police don’t come, but GD do and clean up the mess.

Another taxi driver, who worked for a taxi company, told me that we worked 7 days a week on 12 hour shifts for 28 days a month for €900 a month. He had a job as a salesman for a company that went out of business a few years ago. He got the taxi job then, but it wouldn’t be possible now. His wife works too, but they find it hard to manage. Still he thinks they are lucky, because he sees so much desperation as he drives around the streets of Athens all day and night. He votes Syriza. It offers some hope, he thinks. He supported the general strike the previous day.

A general strike

There have been approximately 27 general strikes in Greece since the start of the crisis. There have been many, very many, sectoral and local strikes. It is hard to think of any sector of the workforce that hasn’t been on strike during the past 4 years. People in Ireland ask what have all these strikes accomplished. It can be argued that that they brought down two governments, although it is true that they have not mitigated any measures decreed by the troika, but the cumulative impact may be more evident eventually. The politics of the street have increasingly converged with the politics of the ballot box, as people see that it will take a new government to set the process along a new trajectory.

There was a general strike on 18 October when I was there. In the days preceding it, trade union posters went up all over central Athens. OXI (No) was the dominant message. That morning the hotel was shuttered down with minimal staff. Shops and factories were closed. Public services were suspended. Schools were closed. Flights were grounded. Little traffic was on the road. Riot buses were outside the hotel, as a contingent of PAME, communist workers, gathered to march to Omonia Square, where they would converge with other PAME contingents for an assembly before marching to Syntagma Sqaure. PAME / KKE always march alone and do not mix with other union and political groupings. I walked to Omonia to take in the atmosphere. It was early yet, so there weren’t many there, but there was a platform erected and red flags flying and militant communist music playing. It is the sort of music that always stirs up my feelings about the communist movement, a mixture of pride and loss. I ran into Damian Mac Con Uladh there. He briefed me on the canon of KKE music, which rejects much contemporary music as decadent, even the GDR version of pop music.

We walked together to the other gathering point at Pedion Areos, where the main trade unions organising public and private sector workers, the ADEDY and GSEE, and left formations, such as Syriza and Antarsya, were gathering. The ADEDY and GSEE, caught up for decades in habits of class collaboration, have become more militant with the severity of the crisis. The atmosphere here was more diverse, more relaxed, less regimented, more new left than old left. I met Syriza comrades, as arranged, in a café by the archeological museum. I chatted to Antarsya comrades as well. I met many new people, although briefly. Eventually we marched. Two comrades, Aliki Papadomichelaki and Lila Mambregianni, were solicitous in looking after me. Aliki has been politically active since the 1950s, speaks multiple languages and seems to know everything about the left everywhere. Lila was unemployed after the company for which she worked for 28 years closed and left her with no pension except what she receives from the state, but puts her energies to good use now in political activism. They interpreted the slogans for me and told me when to smear riopan on my face and when to put on the gas mask they gave me as we approached Syntagma Square. Some of the chants: “We won’t let capitalism kill us.” “History is made by people who don’t obey.” “The time of the left has come.” “Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, all Europe.” No mention of Dublin!

In Syntagma Square, the atmosphere was menacing. Riot police were out in force. The air was full of chemicals. I felt some itching in my eyes, nose and throat, but I didn’t get the worst of it. A bloc of professors had got the worst of it. Enterprising immigrants were selling water, tissues and gas masks. Protesters were being forced to march around the perimeter rather than assembling inside the square.”What now?” I asked. “Nothing”, said Lila, “Two years ago we had mothers and babies and we sang songs. We had concerts when we got to Syntagma Square. Now we just fight.” People with children, home from school, because schools were closed, could not bring them into the chemical warfare and physical aggression of Syntagma Square. There were scuffles, chemical weapons, molotov cocktails, stun grenades, injuries, arrests. One man, a member of KKE, an unemployed seaman, who was marching with PAME, died, apparently of a heart attack. I marched on with Syriza around the square and then toward Omonia.

As it was coming up to 3pm and I had an appointment at the Plaza Hotel, I left them when we got to the university and headed back to Syntagma Square. I was to meet Giorgios Ayfantis, diplomatic advisor to Alexis Tsipras. The road into the square was blocked by riot police. I always make a point of arriving at appointments on time, so with normal determination and surprising calm, I walked right through them. I got away with it, presumably because I didn’t look very combative. When I got to the hotel, it was shuttered down and a concierge said that I had better come inside, because there was trouble brewing just outside it. Then they shut down completely, meaning that I was locked in and he was locked out, ascertaining each other’s position by mobile phone. Being a wily Athenian, however, he found his way in through the back and we had an enlightening conversation. He is a career diplomat. He was born into the Greek elite. His father was a judge. He attended an American school in Greece. He joined the KKE when younger, but was expelled from it. He listed his postings in the diplomatic service, but didn’t spend long talking about the past. He spoke more of the future. There will be much tension between the EU and a left government in Greece. Angela Merkel will find summits where Alexis Tsipras will be there as prime minister to be a nightmare, he predicted. There will be problems at home too. “There will be no velvet revolution in Greece”, he said, repeating a sentence that I heard many times in Athens. The Greek oligarchy will not give up lightly. However, the oligarchs no longer control the military. The police would be more of a problem. He spoke of submarines and prisons and trade relations and natural resources and many other matters, where I can’t recall details, but formed an impression that there is much concrete and sober strategic thinking at play here.

The party leader

Speaking of Alexis Tsipras, I was struck by how proud Syriza people are of him without any trace of personality cult. He is young, attractive, intelligent, even charismatic. He became a global superstar in the international media between the May and June elections. There were attempts in mainstream media to undermine him, concentrating on his youth and inexperience. Reuters revealed to the world that he was ‘no working class hero’. Why? Because he has a postgraduate degree in engineering. In August Der Spiegel listed him as among ‘the 10 most dangerous European politicians.’ In Greece, the right cast him as irresponsible and inexperienced, while the left (outside of Syriza) accuse him of being too compromising. Some compare him to the young Andreas Papandreou and imply that he will disappoint accordingly. He will almost certainly be the next prime minister. It is true that he is inexperienced in governance, but many Greeks want someone not tied into the experience of what governance has been in Greece until now. Syriza people point out that he is intelligent and he listens. They say that he is modest and he learns quickly. One criticised a speech he had given recently as too technocratic, but amended this with an account of a press conference he gave the next day where he dealt with political economy in a most astute way. Even those who hold positions to the left of him within Syriza think that he is the appropriate leader. I asked Nikos Potamitis if he is as impressive as he seems. “Even more so” he replied.

A number of the criticisms of Tsipras are made against Syriza itself. People say that they have moved to the right with the prospect of electoral success. “They water their wine “, several people said to me. “They want to manage capitalism, not to create socialism”, others added. When I put these criticisms to Syriza people, they reject them firmly. They insist that they have not moved to the right, that they are not watering their wine, that they do want to create socialism. Yes, they want to manage capitalism in the interests of working people in the immediate aftermath of forming a government, but they want to do so in the direction of moving toward socialism. It is not possible to do everything at once, but they will institute a radical democratic transformation from the very beginning, combining forms of direct democracy with representative structures. They will reverse the austerity cuts, restore wages and pensions, and redistribute wealth and power in a way that is not yet socialism, but is intended to open a new path to socialism for the 21^st century.

The EU and the euro are problematic areas between Syriza and others on the left. Even within Syriza, there are those who are for exiting the eurozone. The KKE opposes the EU itself as imperialist. Syriza sees the EU, as the state itself, as a site of struggle in relation to the euro, debt and much else. They are aware, however, that they will face serious opposition from the EU and may be forced out of both the EU and eurozone. There is much plan b thinking about such scenarios.

Continuing engagement

There was much to think about as I returned to Dublin after eleven intense days in Athens and continued my engagement with Greece from a distance. In fact, the next day a Syriza MP gave a talk in Dublin. It was an ill-fated event, organised by the ULA, in which nothing went right. The time, date and venue had been changed several times over. The speaker missed his flight. A poster for it had cropped the KKE logo from the iconic photo of protesters at the Acropolis calling for peoples of Europe to rise up, which caused controversy first in Dublin and then an attack on Syriza by the KKE translated into multiple languages, despite the fact that Syriza has no part in the design of the poster and the ULA had apologised to both Syriza and KKE. ^iv It was farcical. The speaker Ioannis Stathas, an industrial worker who came from Pasok, was first elected to parliament in May. He spoke of the crisis and the necessity to resist. Having seen monuments of the Easter Rising and other such events in Irish history that day, he told us that we were not living up to our revolutionary history. The Irish left needed less beer and more history, he preached. He was asked serious questions about unity amidst diversity in Syriza, about issues of sabotage and security if they came to power, about what intellectual resources were being drawn on, on which he failed to shed much light. He showed little regard for theory and indicated that praxis was all. He did feel he had to say that revolutions were not made by people with grey hair. I felt that I had to stand up for the role being played by critical marxism in Syriza, as well as for its exponents with grey hair. The encounter did underline for me the diversity of Syriza, which includes attitudes I contest.

During the following days, I kept up with what was happening as best I could through the internet and telephone. I frequented various Greek portals using computer translations, which were sometimes enlightening, but sometimes bewildering. I was continually grateful to those blogging and tweeting from Greece in English. I followed the general strikes and big marches via live stream video in one window and the twitter feed in another. I was riveted to it on 7 November, as the third memorandum was being voted on in parliament and massive crowds gathered, shouting and singing, with much drama both inside and outside the parliament. At one stage Syriza MPs came out of the parliament and stood with a defiant banner above the square, while the crowd down in the square went wild with affirmation. Despite the fact that the supreme court ruled the latest austerity measures unconstitutional, the parliament passed them anyway, although in a close vote, losing MPs on the government side along the way.

I learned the important days on the Greek protest calendar: 28 October is Oxi day, a national holiday to mark the day Greece said no to Mussolini in 1940, but is now a big day to say no to the troika. 17 November celebrates the Polytechnic uprising of 1973 that led to the end of the junta. 6 December commemorates the death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008, which led to a youth-initiated uprising. This year Exarchia was in flames once again. In between, there were many protests and sectoral strikes and occupations of factories, town halls and universities. Left students at University of Athens occupied the central IT system for several days in November. Not much of this made mainstream international news. When I heard people saying that things had gone quiet in Greece, I knew that it was only because they were not listening.

Left intellectuals in London

On 8 November I went to the 9^th annual Historical Materialism conference in London, for a very intense 4 days. Most of those participating in it were both academics and activists, combining critical thought and research into the historical process with as sense of responsibility for moving history forward. There were more questions than answers and openness to a variety of positions. The atmosphere of orthodoxy and denunciation that once characterised the relations of different factions of the left was absent here. There were 10 simultaneous sessions going on through the days and packed plenaries in the evenings. The 800+ people were from all over the world, various political traditions of the left and different stages of the life cycle. In my own presentation, I attempted a historical materialist analysis of the occupy movement. There were people at it who participated in this movement elsewhere and it once again became clear that the same patterns played out in many parts of the world. The relationship of the occupy movement to the movement of the squares in Spain and Greece and the protest movement in Russia was a theme across various sessions. Another big theme of the conference was interrogating the history of the communist movement, although the central focus was the current crisis and the left’s response to it.

I had occasion to speak with comrades from all over the world, as well to further my engagement with the Greek left through Greeks presenting at it. Most of them seemed more inclined toward Antarsya than Syriza, but I found them well worth hearing. Eirini Gaitanou gave a paper on feminism in Greece and highlighted the effects of the crisis on the lives of women. Giorgos Kalampokas gave a very gramscian analysis of the struggle for hegemony in Greece, arguing the need to set in motion institutions for transforming everyday life and for providing counterpower, even to a left government. Other Greeks too spoke from platform and floor on crisis, resistance, alternatives. I was pleased to meet Panagiotis Sotiris, who has been assiduous at informing international audiences of the struggles in Greek universities, especially through edufactory. He has noted a new flourishing of theoretical debate and production by students and academics being forged in the combination of political activism with theoretical work.^vI was very happy to meet Michalis Spourdalakis again. It was as if we were old friends already. We spoke at various intervals and then had a long talk on the tube before exiting for different terminals at Heathrow to return to Athens and Dublin. He spoke at the conference on the strategy of Syriza that accounted for its rise and its potential to bring real social transformation to Greece and to Europe.

There is a Syriza branch in London. Among their other activities, they have seminars, which are made available on video, which I watch with appreciation. There was one on 7 December, where speakers included Stathis Kouvelakis and Costas Douzinas. Douzinas, professor of law at Birkbeck, memorably said “You’re never ready to fall in love or have a revolution.” He described an emerging scenario where popular will, political agency and catalyst were coming together, bringing Syriza to a rendezvous with history.^vi

PIIGS

On 14 November there was a day of co-ordinated general strikes and protests in Europe, organised by the trade unions, which was a big step forward for the left. There were massive turnouts elsewhere, but not in Ireland. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), when asked, said they supported it, but had nothing planned for the day, but they were mobilising for 24 November. The ICTU has failed to organize appropriately during the crisis, particularly since the Labour Party entered government. The Dublin Council of Trade Unions (DCTU), with a more militant history, did get 20,000 out on the 24 November. The ULA organised a demonstration in solidarity on 14 November, which I attended. It was sad to see so little from Ireland on this day. In the evening I gave a talk on Greece at a ULA meeting. The big question on everyone’s mind was: How can we build a Syriza here?

On the day someone tweeted: “This little piggy didn’t come out to strike.” I had been noticing that PIIGS was increasingly being spelled PIGS. It seemed that the narrative of Irish exceptionalism, promoted both by our government and the troika, was prevailing, even among the international left, who sometimes don’t rate us as part of a common struggle. We are trying, even if we fail to mobilise in such numbers, partly because our fellow citizens do not see that what is being tested in Greece is what is in store for the rest of us. The lowering of wages, the shrinking of social welfare, the privatising of public assets are not meant to be temporary measures. They are core to the restructuring of capitalism well underway in Ireland and elsewhere.

I have noted for some months the call from Alexis Tsipras for solidarity of the southern periphery. More specifically, he has put forward a proposal for an EU conference on debt calling for write down for south.^vii Why does he never mention Ireland? What about our debt? Our debt is perhaps the most unjust of all, as it based on forcing private debts on to us as public debts. In fact, Ireland, while only 0.9% of the EU population, has paid 42% of cost of the European banking crisis.^viii

The Syriza conference

On 30 November and 1-2 December, the Syriza conference was held in the Peace & Friendship Stadium in Athens to move forward the re-foundation of Syriza as a unified party. Prior to this, some 30,000+ registered as individual members and elected 3000+ delegates in sectoral and thematic areas. There are now around 500 branches in localities and workplaces. Previously unaffiliated members now form the majority of Syriza. Alexis Tsipras addressed the conference saying “History is calling us to be the new party of 21^st century socialism… All of Europe is looking to us to be the spark that starts the fire.” Aristides Baltas presented the manifesto he had been drafting while I was there, which had been subjected to widespread discussion, which was passed ‘almost unanimously’.

I followed it all as best I could through skype, texting, web portals, etc. I especially enjoyed a slideshow of the conference showing formal speeches and informal conversation, of pensive faces and happy faces, of male and female, young and old, participants. On the soundtrack was Bob Dylan singing “The times they are a changin”, setting off strong resonances of the convergences of old and new in a left fit for these times.

There were two lists for the 300+ central committee, a left platform and a heterogenous other list. I recognised names on both. The left platform articulated a left critique of the majority position gathered around Tsipras. Names associated with the left platform are: Panayiotis Lafazanis, parliamentary spokesman, Yiannis Tolios, marxist economist, Grigoris Kalomoiris and Despoina Spanou, trade union representatives, Stathis Kouvelakis, marxist theoretian based in London, Nikos Potamitis in Zakynthos. Also in London is economist Costas Lapavitsas, who co-operates closely with Syriza, whose writings are influential for left platform. This trend considers that no viable solution will be found with the foreign lenders and so a Syriza government should be prepared for a break with the EU when the circumstances make it appropriate and necessary.

The result was 25%-75%in favour of the Tsipras majority. Despite some readings of this on social media, it is my understanding that relations between the left platform and the rest are characterised more by healthy debate than by hostile contestation. The left platform puts a strong emphasis on seeking allies to the left, specifically KKE and Antarsya, and not to the right, and on reversing austerity by all means necessary.

The KKE responded to the declaration by accusing Syriza of taking positions and even terminologies of KKE, instead of recognising their common traditions and positions. In his conference speech, Tsipras expressed what many expressed to me, that this hostility from forces of the left was hard to understand and caused them grief. This is especially the case with those who have come from the KKE, as Tsipras and many others have. I watched most of a three hour video of an event celebrating the 94^th anniversary of the KKE. There were lots of red flags waving and thousands singing the songs of Theodorakis. There was a rousing rendition of the Internationale at the end. I was moved by it all and felt such a longing for them to step up to play the historic role that they could play now at this crucial conjuncture in the history of the great Greek left.

Into 2013

It is 2013 now. The year began in turmoil with police raids on squats and fire bombings and shootings, whether in retaliation or distraction from ongoing debate on the Lagarde list and from legislation enabling public property to be seized by the nation’s creditors. On 19 January 2013, there was an international mobilisation against fascism initiated in Athens, where there was a march from Omonia and a big concert in Syntagma Square. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the artists and intellectuals sponsoring the call for it. Dublin was among the cities that answered the call. We marched from Stephen’s Green to the Greek embassy. I spoke there, connecting the rise of fascism to the global economic crisis.

What next?

What will be the next act in this consequential drama? Greece will continue to be a caldron of class conflict, for sure, but will it climax in a breakthrough in this high stakes struggle for power? Will it move on from critique and resistance to transformation? How long will the present government last? Will a left government succeed it? Will it be able to withstand the monumental, even terroristic, pressures that would be brought to bear upon it? Will it be able to stand against the global plutocracy? Will it be able to resist the cyclone ripping through our world? Will it be able to break the power of t-i-n-a and bring forth a real alternative? Will it be able to forge a new path to socialism, not only for Greece, but for us all?

Greece is a crucible, where the best and worst of our civilisation are in high energy collision with each other. This is not some local battle. These cuts to pay, pensions and public services, this privatisation of public property, this redistribution of wealth from below to above: these are not temporary contingent measures. These are integral to a systemic restructuring of capitalism. It has advanced through Europe already from east to west. Where there were once experiments in socialism in the east, there are now oligarchies. Now advances achieved by the labour movement in the west are to be stripped.

Greece has shown where the process is going, but it also offers an alternative: an example of critique, resistance and preparation for reconstruction. We need to stand with them for their sake, as well as ours. Haris Golemis, elected to the central committee of Syriza, puts it to us: “No political success in a single European country can be sustainable if it is not followed, within a short time, by similar successes in other countries. A progressive island in a reactionary archipelago is a thing of the past”.^ix It has echoes of the socialism in one country debate all those decades ago. The tasks seem monumental, both for them and us. Yiannis Tolios, an economist, also elected to the central committee, articulates the problem starkly: “If having socialism in a single country is considered hard, having socialism is all countries at the same time is nearly impossible.”^x Greece needs to forge ahead, whether the rest are ready or not, but it is a perilous path.

In Athens I felt at the edge of history. I see Dublin more clearly as a result. It is time for a new initiative on the left here in Ireland and I feel a responsibility to pursue that. The ULA is unraveling. There is need for something broader and better than anything we have created so far. Let’s see if we can rise to that. I’ll return to Greece to continue to feel the pulse of the global process and to try to convince others in Ireland and elsewhere that we cannot continue to live as we are. Capitalism is killing us. Only socialism can save us.

Notes:

Thanks to everyone who spoke to me in Zakynthos and Athens, not only those named above, but to those unnamed too. Thanks to all who talked politics to me in all of my previous times in Greece. Sadly Thanasis Anapolitanos has passed beyond where I can thank him. When I first went searching for Synaspismos in the early 1990s to write an article on Greek society and the Greek left, Synaspismos in Athens put me in contact with him in Rhodes and he received me most hospitably. He was a most impressive activist. He died on 8 January 2013. Thanks to all who have written about Greece in recent months, especially to tweeps who have kept me right up to the moment: @irategreek, @teacherdude, @inflammatory, @asteris, @keeptalkinggr, @northaura, @yiannisbab, @damomac, @veriasa, etc. Thanks to Christos Kefalis, who looked over this article before publication and made suggestions. Thanks to Donagh Brennan for the excellent work he does at Irish Left Review.

Helena Sheehan is professor emeritus at Dublin City University. E-mail: helena.sheehan@dcu.ie. Open access publications at: http://doras.dcu.ie/view/people/Sheehan,_Helena.html and http://webpages.dcu.ie/~sheehanh/ .