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SYRIZA Occupies Greek Finance Ministry Office
http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013...nistry-office/
By Andy Dabilis
Angry over his statements that the Greek minimum wage is too high and should be further reduced despite a 22 percent previous cut, demonstrators took over the office of Finance Ministry General Secretary Giorgos Mergos on the morning of Feb. 14, media reports said.
They were identified as members of the youth organization of the major opposition party Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), which is opposed to ongoing austerity measures being imposed by the government.
Mergos later said his comments were misinterpreted and that he didn’t say what he said. The protesters didn’t buy the backing up. “The only answer to those who are planning to impose new measures designed to impoverish workers and young people is collective and defiant struggles to overturn the government and the memorandums,” they said in a statement. Riot police, the government’s tactic against protesters and strikers, were sent to the scene.
Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias ordered an administrative inquiry into allegations that two SYRIZA Members of Parliament were beaten up by police during an anti-austerity protest outside the finance ministry building. SYRIZA MPs Kostas Barkas and Vangelis Diamantopoulos claimed they were attacked by members of the MAT riot squad and would sue, Kathimerini reported.
SYRIZA issued a statement defending what it said was “a symbolic protest” against the government’s austerity drive and slamming alleged police violence. (The government) seems to think that by using force and state oppression against those who resist it will be able to ensure the continuation of the barbaric austerity policies of the memorandum,” the statement said.
Government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou said the protesters damaged Mergos’s office after storming the building and accused SYRIZA chief Alexis Tsipras of “duplicity.” Invading an office, stealing and damaging property, Kedikoglou said, “is perfectly in line with the strategy of tension that Tsipras purports to condemn.”
In an interview with BBC’s Paul Mason, Tsipras accused the Greek government of operating a strategy of “blackmail, terrorism and tension.” The Greek Communist Party (KKE) issued a statement expressing its support for SYRIZA’s protest.
Earlier, SYRIZA leaders said Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is intent on reducing wages to the level paid workers in Romania and Bulgaria. The storm of criticism over Mergos’ comments led Finance Minister Yiannis Stournaras to deny there are no plans to further reduce the minimum wage, which is now 586 euros ($782) per month, or $195.50 per week ($4.88 per hour) although SYRIZA said the government will later proceed to do so.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Is there any information about which section of that party did this action? There are a few genuinely revolutionary tendencies of that party and the fact they managed to pull this off without being condemned by the main party suggests that there is a possibility it might be radicalized. I've heard that the Communist Organization of Greece is doing some principled revolutionary work within that party but then again most of my information on them comes from Kasama and they are known as the Brezhnivites of the Maoist movement.
Men vanish from earth leaving behind them the furrows they have ploughed. I see the furrow Lenin left sown with the unshatterable seed of a new life for mankind, and cast deep below the rolling tides of storm and lightning, mighty crops for the ages to reap.
~Helen Keller
To despise the enemy strategically is an elementary requirement for a revolutionary. Without the courage to despise the enemy and without daring to win, it will be simply impossible to make revolution and wage a people’s war, let alone to achieve victory. ~Lin Biao
http://commiforum.forumotion.com/
Per the article, it's the youth section. It did what the KKE didn't have the spine to do at the height of the anti-austerity protests, when they refused to "Occupy" the Greek parliament.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
you people are seriously messed up in your head. FOR REAL!
The main SYRIZA organization is as reformist as they come but it seems the youth branch has some potential.
And for Delenda Carthago what has the KKE done that deserves to be called revolutionary ?
I will freely admit that as far as the KKE goes news of their actions is extremely scarce here but what i do hear is nothing to be celebrated.
So please tell me what the KKE is up to these days.
You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, or some kind of weird mirror...
You know, boring stuff. Organising strikes, fighting to level up the organisasion level of the working class, passing the propaganda as much as we can in wider audiences, getting arrested every once in a while, clashing with the cops every now and then. All that stuff that I know they make you get bored.
You have to wait a litle longer to see us pick up the guns again after 1949. Perhaps not very much longer, but for sure not yet.
But whenever it is, we ll try to entairtain you the best we can, you can count on that. Cause thats what its all about after all...riot and war porn.
Didn't PAME occupy(or try to) the Ministry of Labor at the end of January? I mean if we're saying what SYRIZA did was "revolutionary" surely we could point to many times the KKE and it's affiliates have occupied governmental buildings in protest.
We claim to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want this real equality or death; that’s what we need.
And we’ll have this real equality, at whatever price. Unhappy will be those who stand between it and us! Unhappy will be those who resist a wish so firmly expressed.
The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, one that will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last.
-Gracchus Babeuf
Except they didn't. They refused to "Occupy" the Greek parliament when they had their chance, and comrades should note that this is the cops controversy I alluded to. In the height of the Occupy protests, the sloganeering atop the Parthenon, and so on, they had their chance.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
Of doing what exactly? Starting a civil war on a period the working class movement was far, far from ready for it? Are you serious?
It only shows how lucky the Working Class is that the Conservatives won over SYRIZA in the last elections. And what is better, there are three more years of Rightist Bourgeois governance bound to continue increase class antagonisms, heightening the class struggle and producing more tensions like this that can boil over into revolutionary action. But here I agree with what I believe Comrade DelendaCarthago was trying to say, that the Greek Left needs to build more infrastructure and organize deeper into society the next weeks/months. The only hope is that Greece stays away from Bourgeois Martial Law the next months/years!
"It is necessary for Communists to enter into contradiction with the consciousness of the masses. . . The problem with these Transitional programs and transitional demands, which don't enter into any contradiction with the consciousness of the masses, or try to trick the masses into entering into the class struggle, create soviets - [is that] it winds up as common-or-garden reformism or economism." - Mike Macnair, on the necessity of the Minimum and Maximum communist party Program.
"You're lucky. You have a faith. Even if it's only Karl Marx" - Richard Burton
You know what amuses me the most? The guy calling for anarchists to be handed over to the fucking cops and being almost more vocal than Delenda in defending the KKE over the events of October 20th 2011 now giving them a hard time because his favorite social democrats decided to occupy something else than a place in the bourgeois pantheon.
"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree..."
- John Milton -
"The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh"
- Amadeo Bordiga
Yes, I agree with you very much. DNZ was very wrong during that incident. Molotov-hurling thugs that attack KKE rallies should be punished more severely, handing them over to the cops was far too merciful. They actually take pride in being arrested, how is that punishment at all? Shame on you, DNZ.You know what amuses me the most? The guy calling for anarchists to be handed over to the fucking cops and being almost more vocal than Delenda in defending the KKE over the events of October 20th 2011 now giving them a hard time because his favorite social democrats decided to occupy something else than a place in the bourgeois pantheon.
Is this thread seriously about a symbolic office occupation?
Did somebody actually just posit a symbolic office occupation as "genuinely revolutionary"?
What the fuck is this board coming to? What next?
CFS members attend peaceful Idle No More rally - ANTICOLONIAL STRUGGLE IS EXPLODING IN CANADA.
gtfo.
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
You make my case against left-unity and 'one big movement' so much easier
"Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree..."
- John Milton -
"The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh"
- Amadeo Bordiga
Uh, maybe my memory is foggy, but wasn't there something behind the KKE?
Like, I think I remember something about anarchists attacking some building.
I dunno, maybe it reflects the backwardness of struggle here, but usually, when there's a tactical disagreement between anticapitalists in this sort of situation, it gets critiqued after, with words. I would have thought that physically attacking anarchists in defense of whatever building* was probably not a good way to begin a discussion on strategic considerations. Maybe Canadians are just too polite. Next time somebody does something I don't like at a rally, maybe I'll punch them in the face, and it will help us - the radical left generally - develop a better line.
ANYWAY! Why are we talking about KKE/Anarchist punch-ups? Isn't this thread about how awesome it is when SYRIZA do stoopid liberal media stunts and get beaten up by cops? If we're going to talk about KKE or anarchists, let's talk about how they should do some banner drops, or maybe a die-in.
*A KKE office? an immigrant's small shop? Surely, given the KKE response, it must something that would be deeply unprincipled to throw molotovs at!
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
Who said that "occupying" the Greek parliament would be tantamount to civil war? The "symbolic office occupation" that VMC downplays is political action designed to achieve a specific political result. If I were a Greek political organizer, I'd coordinate multiple "symbolic office occupations" with a distinct Occupy theme, not just the Finance Ministry or the Greek parliament itself.
"A new centrist project does not have to repeat these mistakes. Nobody in this topic is advocating a carbon copy of the Second International (which again was only partly centrist)." (Tjis, class-struggle anarchist)
"A centrist strategy is based on patience, and building a movement or party or party-movement through deploying various instruments, which I think should include: workplace organising, housing struggles [...] and social services [...] and a range of other activities such as sports and culture. These are recruitment and retention tools that allow for a platform for political education." (Tim Cornelis, left-communist)
I don't mean to "downplay" it. It's fine. I've occupied many offices. Probably I'll do it again. The thing is, it's not a big deal. It doesn't even sound like it was pulled off well. They got dragged out and beaten by police, without even defending themselves, and the whole thing lasted . . . the length of a protest? So, an hour or two? Does that even count as an occupation? I bet it sets an example of political action that others are just itching to follow.
Further, strategically, what purpose does it serve? What message does it send? As far as I can tell, it makes the left look like defenseless losers with martyr complexes. Like we needed to demonstrate that for the public. Some "political result".
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
Have you ever heard of testing the foundations and strength of the bourgeois State? A demonstrative action against the arrogant child-lunch-butchers like this can inspire countless of people to join sides with the Socialists and Communists, making the Bourgeoisie sweat severely and possibly grind on any division they might have.
"It is necessary for Communists to enter into contradiction with the consciousness of the masses. . . The problem with these Transitional programs and transitional demands, which don't enter into any contradiction with the consciousness of the masses, or try to trick the masses into entering into the class struggle, create soviets - [is that] it winds up as common-or-garden reformism or economism." - Mike Macnair, on the necessity of the Minimum and Maximum communist party Program.
"You're lucky. You have a faith. Even if it's only Karl Marx" - Richard Burton
Good demonstrative actions end in victory, not getting dragged out by the cops after failing to hold the space for even a day.
If you want to "inspire" people, self-sacrificial masochism is not a good means.
So, for example, occupying a landlords office to win a victory for a tenant is likely to win something for that tenant. Occupying an MPs office to get a law changed? Probably not going to get a law changed. That's fine - there can be other victories within that - say, holding the space and demonstrating some sort of power. Or stealing documents and releasing them to the public. Or, or, or.
Getting pummeled, then whining about it and threatening to sue (ha!), is not inspiring.
The life we have conferred upon these objects confronts us as something hostile and alien.
Formerly Virgin Molotov Cocktail (11/10/2004 - 21/08/2013)
