Athens certainly does not look like a city in the midst of great upheaval, let alone on the verge of revolution. We were in a working class district at one point and in another residential area that seemed pretty modest, as well as in the center. Especially for foreign visitor s , signs of economic distress were hard to detect, although we were told that there is great suffering "behind closed doors." We can't recall seeing any begging. Wherever we were, we scarcely eve r noticed political signs or posters or people leafleting. Of course, it was summertime , when things simmer down for a while. Perhaps too we were seeing signs of fatigue after two and a half years of militant protest. On the other hand , steel workers were on strike in an Athens suburb, and there were environmentalist protests against gold mining in Chalkidiki. An d we heard and read about almost daily attacks on immigrants by members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn, Chrysi Avgi (more about which below.)
SYRIZA
Michalis Spourdalakis, a professor at the University of Athens, told us some of the history of SYRIZA. Until now, it has been a coalition of several parties rather than a single organization. The largest by far is Synaspism à ³s , whose older leaders come out of the Eurocommunist current that split with the Communist Party, the KKE, in the 1980s. SYRIZA itself emerged from the Greek wing of the anti-globalization movement about eleven years ago. But it was the great popular upsurge against austerity that turned SYRIZA into a major force. Since the crisis began, the organization has been joined by some of the more leftwing members of PASOK, including a few members of parliament. Its mass support, however, is recent and comes from the streets. Time and again we heard that SYRIZA had earned the respect and loyalty of activists, especially of young people, by its intense involvement in and its "non-hegemonic" approach to the strikes, demonstrations and occupations. SYRIZA, we were told, showed its commitment to listening to and building the movement -- r ather than simply recruiting members, building their own organization, and heavy-handedly insisting on acceptance of SYRIZA's agenda.
Spourdalakis stressed, as did most of the Greeks we spoke to, that SYRIZA is not a typical electoral machine but is instead rooted quite deliberately in mass actions -- strikes, demonstrations, occupations -- in the midst of which its MPs and officials can be found along with rank and filers. SYRIZA people we spoke to seemed acutely aware of the danger of substitutionism, that is, substituting the party for social movements. At the same time, Spourdalakis insisted, having a presence in parliament is essential because that is where so much media attention is focused and where, of course, major decisions are made.
Now that it has achieved a position of great trust and potential responsibility, SYRIZA has decided to transform itself into a unified organization, rather than a coalition of different organizations, and to recruit aggressively. While we were in Athens, SYRIZA announced that it was launching a big membership drive with the goal of growing from the current 15,000 t o a party with many times that number of members. The separate components of the SYRIZA coalition will be able to b ecome tendencies within the party. Recruitment will take place at worksites, on campuses, in the streets and at the local assemblies that SYRIZA has been holding since before the elections. We attended one of these assemblies in an open area in the working-class suburb of Peristeri, attended by around 600 people, according to our estimate. Tsipras gave a rousing speech, and we were told there would have been a discussion period following the talk had it not been so hot outside.
Spourdalakis was cautiously optimistic about SYRIZA's future and said the party's ability to grow depended very much on staying deeply connected to extra-parliamentary struggles. For one thing, SYRIZA is now engaged in organizing unorganized workers -- for example, bookstore employees, couriers, tutors, and other urban service workers -- into new unions. Greece has two main labor federations, one for public employees and the other for private , both of them controlled by PASOK, and a third, smaller but still sizeable federation run by the KKE. Most Greek unions contain caucuses that are linked to SYRIZA and ANTARSYA. We were told by ANTARSYA that their group is especially significant in the teachers' union, as is SYRIZA.
SYRIZA declares that its first act, on winning power, will be to repudiate the memorandum. It will then demand re-negotiation of the debt to write off a major part of it. If that demand is rejected, a SYRIZA-led government will stop debt repayments. The party promises to impose heavy taxation on corporations and the wealthy, to nationalize the banks and re-nationalize those public services that have been privatized, to restore the minimum wage and labor contracts that have been undermined during the crisis, to drastically cut military spending, to emphasize renewable sources of energy, and to construct a strong social welfare state.
Panos Trigazis, head of Synaspism à ³s 's foreign policy section, was our genial host in Athens, introducing us to SYRIZA leaders and intellectuals and bringing us to a press conference, where we met Alexis Tsipras. Panos explained a great deal, including the meaning of SYRIZA's emblem: three superimposed banners, red for socialism, green for environmentalism, and purple for feminism and other social movements. As far we could see, the party's foreign policy is not too well defined at this point. Its printed statements in English are pretty much limited to relations with the EU and to regional disputes. SYRIZA takes the position that Cyprus should be re-united as bicommunal, bizonal federation without foreign armies and foreign bases. It wants better relations with Turkey and a mutual reduction in armaments, and it calls for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. SYRIZA's platform advocates the withdrawal of Greek troops from Afghanistan and the Balkans, and declares "No Greek soldiers beyond our own borders." It calls for the abolition of military cooperation with Israel, and support for the creation of a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders. The platform does call for Greek withdrawal from NATO, but a few people told us that this meant severing the military connection only. In any case, the platform also calls for closing down the U.S. base in Greece.
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