English
(An English translation of the slightly modified Appendix no 5 of TPTG,# 19-20)
THE “ANTI-AUTHORITARIAN” FRIENDS OF THE STATE AND SCIENCE
“In the face of the continuing horror that has people struggling for breath, many radicals continue to deny the dangers associated with the virus. Contagious diseases differ from other diseases in a very substantial way: they are by definition social. They presuppose contact, co-existence, a community – even an alienated one. What the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has shown us, however, is that we are in a historical period where social relations are perceived as the burdensome void between solid, closed-up and inviolable individuals. Individualities that are self-determined, non-negotiable, non-contagious.”
The above quotation is from the introduction of Antithesi / Cognord’s text, The Reality of Denial and the Denial of Reality (September/December 2021, from now on RDDR). This text exemplifies the ideology of biological reductionism through which many people in the so-called far left/radical milieus perceived the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic the previous years. These people simplistically perceive social relations as physical contact between biological organisms that can cause… infection. This biological conception of sociality and by extension of solidarity -which became a strictly sanitary approach to the social question- constitutes the core of the argumentation on which this still current gem is based. “No one has a personal relationship with a contagious disease”, we are sternly reminded by its authors. That’s not hot news: everything -from human cognition to our constant contact with viruses- is the result of inevitable (material and formal) social metabolism and it includes biological mechanisms of social transmission. Indeed, formal social metabolism is of particular importance since no one in a society dominated by alienated capitalist relations can have “pure” personal/individual or social relationships with anything or anyone avoiding the mediation of the commodity-form, the money-form or the spectacle. And no one can avoid confronting the specifically capitalist distinctions of “contamination” and “purity” these alienated capitalist relations entail. Would it change anything if we said that we cannot have a “personal relationship” to the question of “public security” or “public order”, for example? Aren’t both of these two issues also “collective” and “social” ones? Aren’t both of these two issues, like everything else about capitalist society, also mediated by the divisions and pseudo-unifications imposed by the capitalist social relation? Note also that nowhere in their text one can find the scientific, production and exchange processes of this specific social relation held responsible for the origin and spread of SARS-CoV-2. According to the authors, “mutations of viruses are part and parcel of their natural development as viruses” that simply “land [sic] on a historically contingent period”!
The abstract contrast between “individual freedom” and “collective freedom”/“collective class need” Antithesi and Cognord establish is thus false for the reason that it bypasses the socially imposed mediations in the individual’s relation to herself; we are talking about impositions on the body or freedom of movement and mediations that reproduce the capitalist relation, individualize and subjectify individuals in particular ways, and invalidate antagonistic individuality. The starting point of any movement that aspires to question the capitalist relation starts from the level at which it is first perceived, the individual, since “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. That’s the alphabet of radical theory, if we are not mistaken, or not? But the only individuality the authors acknowledge is the bourgeois individuality. Τherefore, it is no coincidence that despite their collectivist grandiloquence, in a footnote that has been omitted in the english version of their text they introduce the capitalist-inspired notion of “individual responsibility” through the back door: “We have already referred at length to the question of the impossibility of a personal relationship with a pandemic. But this approach should not be understood as a complete elimination of any notion of individual responsibility. The functional use of this ideological approach made by the state apparatus… does not mean that subjects who are ostentatiously indifferent to those around them have no share of responsibility.” The “subjects who are ostentatiously indifferent to those around them” are those who struggled equally against lockdowns, remote education, mandatory vaccination and austerity measures! We do, however, know from the struggles of the proletariat throughout history that the invention of the ways in which antagonistic individuality is articulated in a class community of struggle has as its starting point the resistance to direct or indirect oppression and not the conformity to state and capitalist plans which is served up to us here camouflaged by these “radical” experts as the new “communist” normative gospel.
What we say in the two preceding paragraphs should logically belong to the elementary prerequisites of a critique that wants to call itself «radical». The absence of these prerequisites is not the only problem with RDDR. Even more infuriating is the pompous and authoritarian style with which they wag a finger at anyone who doubts their supposedly self-evident interpretation of concepts such as “public health”, “collective class needs”, “solidarity”, “freedom” and, above all, the one and only practical “truth” that pervades their text, namely that we should scrupulously observe the state sanitary orders which they simply call “effective, protective, horizontal measures”!
The fact that the terms and concepts that the capitalist state itself has used extensively in its propaganda -we could mention, for example, among other things, the state’s substitution of a socially and historically determined multifactorial concept of illness by a mechanistic, virocentric one, according to which a disease has a single cause- were not deconstructed cannot be attributed exclusively to the authors’ inadequate analytical method; the fact that the world is presented by the authors standing on its head, through an arrogant, almost prosecuting, discourse, can mainly be attributed to the retreat of the movement and its recuperation by the state (a process of statisation) even before -let alone after- the election of the Syriza government in 2015. The proximity of parts of the radical milieu to this new type of party and the re-legitimisation of the state and its functions during the Syriza’s term of office played in 2020 an important role for the Left in seeing the state as the protector of “public health”, even the “defender of reason”. How successfully has the state been re-legitimised in Greece is revealed at one point in their text where the authors claim that «the deniers [i.e. those who have doubts about the sanitary party line] have essentially created the space for the state to present itself as a responsible and rational exponent of the “general interest” against irrational individualism”, apparently referring to how the state was presented in their own eyes. Contrary to Antithesi/Cognord’s way of thinking, let us be serious: it is a complete and brazen reversal of reality to say that it is the questioning of the state’s management of the pandemic that has strengthened the state apparatus and not, on the contrary, the trust it has enjoyed by “radicals” like them in practice in the past three years!
Τheir misleading reference here and there to state management as “destructive” has only the meaning of a complaint: the state did not apply its mandates with the consistency they would like – and in a magical way, without repression!(1) The capitalist state is presented in their text as the rational power which, despite its U-turns, is obliged, in the interests of a healthy labour force, to take collective protective measures for the “common good”. While they use an analysis that at first sight resembles ours, namely the analysis of the contradictory functions of the state (accumulation and legitimation),(2) and even though they feel obliged to refer -in order not to be considered “Mitsotakis’ minions”- to the disciplining of labour power as a necessary component of these functions, however, they are unable to show us why and in what way disciplining was attempted through the pandemic measures. They think that disciplining and reproduction of the working class “lost its meaning” and this is due to their inability to understand what happened during 2020-2022. First, “proletarians” did not “get sick and die en masse” because of covid 19 as they claim – there was excess mortality only in the winter of 2021-2022 during the period of universal/mass vaccination for reasons that no one has explained convincingly yet. Second, value creation and the reproduction of the working class did not stop completely during those years. There was a phase of devaluation of (constant and variable) capital -which they do not acknowledge- and the slowdown of the economy was carefully handled. The disciplining measures that a phase of devalorisation demands are different from the disciplining measures taken during a phase of expanding valorisation of capital. However, the radical critique, which they slander and distort, has treated and still does treat the proletarian body as a constant field of state policies, and therefore as a battlefield; it has never equated the needs of capital with those of the proletariat and has subjected the capitalist form in which the state reproduces us to the most relentless criticism; radical critique knows that the state always treats us as expendable: either as “contaminated” bodies under the investigation of technoscience and biomedicine, or as bodies and minds to be exploited, or, in certain cases, as cannon fodder.(3)
The authors’ schizoid attitude towards the state, the result of the impossibility of reconciling the necessity of complying with its orders on the one hand with the maintenance of an allegedly radical critical stance on the other, tries to camouflage itself by appealing to an abstract proletarian consciousness which will promote “class and social solidarity” by recognizing that mass/universal/mandatory vaccination “meets a fundamental collective class need”. Τhey expected in vain that class self-discipline would free them from the awkward task of justifying state coercion! Their entire text is reminiscent of decrees of a medical police recruited in the service of an authoritarian, hypochondriac collectivism that many proletarians would gladly choose to remain outside it. Actually, this is what happened in the summer of 2021: proletarian distrust towards the state measures was so widespread that the state had to impose a bill providing that any boss in the private sector could dismiss any employee that failed to display vaccination, paid test or recovery certificates and that’s how the Health Department’s or Antithesi/Cognord’s “persuasion campaigns” ended.
The only activities that expressed “class and social solidarity” in the period of 2020-2022 were activities against the lockdowns, the introduction of a university police corps and mass/mandatory vaccination. It comes as no surprise that these activities (e.g. the class content of the suspended health workers’ movement) are absent from Antithesi/Cognord’s text. Τhey were so busy defending conceptual categories and “truths” used by the state in the pandemic (what constitutes a pandemic, a disease or public health, what it means “to take protective measures including vaccines whose effectiveness against symptomatic infection, hospitalization or death is overwhelmingly proven by the data” [actually it has been disproved by the data and not only due to adverse effects!]) and vilifying anyone who challenged them as “individualists”, “deniers”, “conspiracy theorists”, “reactionaries” and -how consistent for “left-wing communists”!-… “fascists” that it barred them from dealing with class struggle.
State-capitalist rationality (that is, irrationalism and glorification of capitalist science) is legitimized through the tactical sophistry of “yes, but”. Quoted from the text: “the fact that a form of protection against SARS-Cov-2 reduces costs, generates profits and reinforces the legitimacy of the state is not in itself a reason to reject it”; “while radical critique does not celebrate the authority of experts or science in general, let alone when social questions are posed, it does not fall back to endorsing and promoting the position of every non-expert”. Although they confess that they are not “epidemiology experts”, nevertheless they are sure that mRNA vaccines “are more tested and safer than most medicine that people consume on a daily basis”, simply because celebrated experts and the state told them so!
Not only is common sense disdained but even radical critique is systematically distorted and altered in order to be “creatively” adapted to the authors’ views on the necessity of defending state measures (and pharmaceutical companies). E.g. the old left communist critique of the feminist slogan “my body, my choice” is transformed by Antithesi/Cognord from being a critique of the limits of the body’s self-determination -a form of self-determination that was not rejected but considered unable to address the deeper causes of oppression- into an authoritarian denunciation of the right of self-determination of the body and into a justification of mandatory medical acts in the name of “the social character of a contagious disease” and of not letting individual choices work “to the detriment of [their] collective experience»!
They invoke Adorno -Adorno, who declared that “progress occurs where it ends”- to convince us of the usefulness and progressiveness of state measures taken in the name of the “collective”; they even point to Debord’s words, going so far as to distort the meaning of his statement that democracy wants “to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results”. In this famous statement Debord was not referring to the real enemies of bourgeois democracy -the social movements, one of which was, at the time, the anti-vaccination movement- but to the “mysterious” and “invisible enemies” that the state itself constructs -terrorism, or “murderous viruses” in our case- in order to present its declaration of a (protective) state of emergency as a sign of the utmost kindness of the hegemon towards his subjects!
We will not continue analyzing countless other howlers in that text, such as that “central components of global political economy of the last decades [e.g. austerity] have been set aside overnight” to save global labour power or their downright falsified use of statistical data. Even state recommendations for vaccination of health workers for a number of infectious diseases in Greece and other european countries are presented by the authors as “compulsory vaccination” that existed “long before the Coronavirus pandemic”! For the time being we would like our critique to be as short as possible.
We will close by mentioning an interesting aspect of the history of Antithesi/Cognord’s text that should not come as a surprise to the reader: the managers of Atlantico (a right-wing French news website whose founder and director does not hesitate to declare that “liberalism and capitalism are not swear words for us” and one of whose owners is the former director of Sarkozy’s election campaign) appreciated from the very first moment the valuable contribution this work from the “radical left” made to the mainstream state propaganda and wanted to publish it, grasping perfectly well its content, contrary to what Cognord said in his negative reply!
NOTES
1. “Anyone who travelled in Greece during the summer [of 2021] saw that there were no serious checks on vaccination, test or recovery certificates, but only its pretence”, write these fans of policing (without repression!). They continue undeterred: “the resulting explosion of cases in tourist destinations thus came as no surprise”. What came as a surprise was the fact that they did not ask for strict checks on certificates in the summer of 2022, nor are they asking for them today, even though the pandemic did not end in May 2022 because their state decided so! A multiple paradox indeed, as they themselves, in their biologized version of sociality that they advocate, do not distinguish either between the phases of a pandemic or between historical social forms: “minimizing social contact during a communicable disease is a reasonable measure, applicable whether we are talking about a modern capitalist state, a feudal society or even communism”, they say without much understanding of the logical consequence of such statements. Let us explain: if the coronavirus is now “endemic, remaining dozens of times more deadly than the flu”, as they continue to claim on their personal facebook profiles, then why have they increased their social contacts by going to events, bars, etc.? But, as we have many times said, the supporters of “responsible stay-at-home-ism”/vaccine worshippers have long since divorced themselves from reason and consistency.
2. All three authors of the text are former members of TPTG who, fortunately for us, have left long before 2020. They still use the basic analyses of our journal (the interpretation of the crisis as a crisis of reproduction of capitalist relations, revolutionary defeatism, the necessity of a proletarian public sphere, the critique of identity politics, etc.) but now embedded in a completely different political context.
3. Much ink has been spilled in the texts of the Assembly Against Biopower and Confinement to analyze disciplining as a condition for the enhanced continuation of the devaluation of labour power after the memoranda period and during the “covid crisis”. A very small sample of these texts can be found here: https://againstbiopowerandconfinement.noblogs.org/post/category/international/
The above text which consists of extracts from the latest issue of TPTG has been written as a reply to Angry Workers’ question which bits of the Antithesi/Cognord’s text we find reactionary. For a more comprehensive critique of their political position during the pandemic, see the Appendix of the publication The Proletarian Body as a Terrain of Political Controversy: moments of struggle against compulsory vaccination in Victorian England in the 19th century, which is a presentation and commentary on Nadja Durbach’s book Bodily Matters. The Appendix is entitled Some Reflections on academic and other “critics” on the movements against compulsory vaccination, it is divided in two parts and can be found on the site of the Assembly Against Biopower and Confinement. These texts include a more extensive critique of both the text referred to here and other views of Antithesi and its allies both in Greece as well as abroad (Karmina, Pasamontana, red n’ noir, etc.) – a critique that also includes reference to their political trickeries with statistical data. Unfortunately it’s all in Greek.
The text in pdf
* AGAINST MANDATORY VACCINATION AND ITS CRUSADERS
On Wednesday afternoon of 14th July, the people gathered in Omonia square began to move gradually from the square to Stadiou St. At first it seemed that there were no more than 1,500 people in the square, but, as usually happens after a demo has started, it was revealed that they reached 4,000-5,000. A lot of youth, families, well-off people but not necessarily posh, a mix of shopkeepers and workers. (According to some information, the initial call was made by a right-wing Facebook group called “Shops without a graft”). People did not seem to have much experience of demos. However, the well-known crackpots were not present (priests, nuns and others who had participated in the demos against the Prespa agreement, had already gathered in Syntagma Square and were waiting for them). You could see some muscular chavs, a few Greek flags (you could not see more than 10) and 2 improvised spray banners (“No to mandatory vaccination, we want freedom”). From the beginning, there was excitement among those gathered about the size of the crowd (many took selfies with Omonia in the background, so that one could see the main body of the rally), enthusiasm expressed at the beginning of the demo with massive applause and shouting, but then there was no particular excitement: 2-3 basic, nationalist, “anti-fascist” slogans (“Greece, Greece”, “fascist Mitsotaki, resign!”, “Down with Mitsotakis’ dictatorship”, “Keep your hands off our children”+ the national anthem). It would not be an exaggeration to say that we witnessed the birth of new right-wing and far-right mini-parties, a revolt on the right, on the basis of an existing social issue that large sections of communists and anarchists refuse to recognize as such. In the Syntagma square next to the Christians there were the Pro Patria neonazis, lined up in military style. At the lower part of the square there was a small crowd gathered under the banner of Contra Dystopia and 4 other democratic, anti-fascist organizations against “discrimination and bioterrorism”. Here they describe the gathering from their own point of view and how they were attacked by the fascists of Pro Patria
https://contradystopia.blogspot.com/2021/07/blog-post_16.html
The truth is that a large part of the anti-authoritarian/anarchist milieu and the left as former consistent adherents of lockdowns and now ardent crusaders of the vaccination movement, not only keeps silent about the issue of mandatory vaccination and its consequences for the working class, but also finds it a lot more interesting to eagerly deconstruct the term “health apartheid”, to idolize science, technology and the technocratic discourse as forms of capitalist relations, to identify any critique of these forms with “irrationality” and “obscurantism”, to do “fact-checking” of any critical approach to state propaganda for the new vaccines in an obsessive way, to relativize and ridicule any reservations/reactions/resistance, to downgrade a social issue to an “individual choice” by downplaying the gigantic dimensions of the state campaign which they legitimize, to be indifferent to the divisions and commands imposed on work and social life. By renaming individual responsibility as social responsibility, they urge people to faithfully follow the measures imposed by the state in the name of some vague “solidarity” and “social conscience”.
That is why a call from the left or the anti-authoritarian/anarchist milieu would not gather so many people. We say this because we consider mandatory vaccination as the latest episode of the bio-political management of the pandemic, against which the resistance has been minimal throughout the pandemic.
Mandatory vaccination is yet another (emblematic) measure of the imposed “state of emergency”, the continuation of lockdowns, fines, the capitalist ideology of individual responsibility, the reduction of state reproductive health expenditure, the reduction of wages and the increase in redundancies, by other means. Vaccines are currently the cheap and advantageous solution for capital to the issue of maintaining the health of the labour power under its command. Foucault’s analysis of bio-power is well known: all medical and other disciplining anatomical-political and biopolitical techniques aim to increase the health and the productive capacity of the labour force, the long duration of working life and the vigour of soldiers in the service of the nation. This does not mean, however, that investments in the reproduction of labour power must also be expensive, that is, harmful to the profits of capital, particularly at a time when the permanent crisis of capitalist relations requires a large amount of devaluation of productive and reproductive capital. Hence, the cheap solution of vaccines, which on the one hand are launched as a panacea for the pandemic, on the other hand turn the public debate on the satisfaction of proletarian needs away from the necessary, under the control of its users, support of health services under the control of their users in general; in financial terms this would require an increase in the taxation of capital profits and in terms of its content it would require a practical questioning of the alienating capitalist form of medicine.
The left (and a large part of the anti-authoritarian milieu) mutter some objections to the lay-offs, but having prioritized adherence to the state “safety measures”, such as lockdowns, masks, social distancing measures, all these vaccines of dubious quality and safety with extraterrestrial names, etc., they do not call for any resistance to mandatory vaccination. As they did not call for any resistance to distance tele-learning, remote tele-work, the months-long confinement that led 1/5 of the population to depression, to the systematic violation of individual, social and labour rights. Not to mention that in many cases, such as that of distance learning, it has already spearheaded their violation, allowing the state to turn irregularity into law.
However, the repercussions of disobedience to government measures of mandatory vaccination of public and private sector workers in the context of the steady enhancing of management rights from March 2020 onwards could be nightmarish. The blackmail to be imposed on both public and private sectors workers who do not choose to be vaccinated has already begun: in the public sector they try to circumvent even the standard “disciplinary” authorities through fast-track procedures so that workers could be directly sanctioned with forced job transfers or even layoffs. Just imagine the consequences if such a situation gets generalized, i.e. in the case of refusal to do distant learning. Already with the extra powers given to the head teachers of school units those teachers who resist the evaluation process are about to have their salaries cut off! Whoever refuses either getting vaccinated or getting evaluated or something else later on … will risk their salary or their dismissal!
At the same time they intend to introduce redundancies without compensation in the private sector, if a non-vaccinated employee is considered to cause harm to the profitability of the company. And before they fire us, they will initially suspend us without pay just in case we show some signs of cooperation.
When the working class is faced with a problem that needs to be solved immediately, such as health care (and we do not mean simply covid-19) and the protection of its direct and indirect wages, it must rediscover its political and intellectual weapons, the life forms that will keep it ready to fight. We, the rank and file, should put pressure on the unions to take decisions against mandatory vaccination and to support those who choose not to be vaccinated, and at the same time to form a non-corporatist, outside the unions, proletarian community of struggle that not only will stand in solidarity with those who refuse mandatory vaccination but which will also break these divisions in the context of the total denial of the state management of the pandemic.
If the relevant announcements of the unions follow the logic of POEDIN, as it is reflected in its recent announcement, “The medical staff participates en masse in the vaccination process, but it is victimised with inaccuracies and distorted data. We are against the mandatory vaccination of health and care workers because it violates constitutional liberties and individual rights. All health workers will be vaccinated by use of persuasion. Coercion or imposition of disciplinary measures lead to the opposite results “, then we are screwed.
With similar “persuasion” measures the teachers’ unions led their members to compulsory distance learning! On the other hand, fortunately, the decision of the Workers’ Union of the AHEPA hospital, which opposes mandatory vaccination and the penalties of dismissals and salary cuts, calls for a work stoppage on the issue. (https: //www.grtimes.gr /…/ poedin-4ori-stasi-ergasias …)
So, let’s keep clear away from pseudo-imperatives like the ones put forward by the current pro-vaccination demonstration of “struggle” by the CP which allegedly calls for measures to support the public health sector but at the same time demands a “global program of free public vaccination” – as if the government offers something else!
Let us break the divisions defined by the state and capital even with individual risk, by refusing to demonstrate certificates of illness and vaccination (those of us who were vaccinated for individual reasons) in order to get access to places where the unvaccinated are not allowed to enter, in solidarity with them (as a form of a consumer strike).
Because only a real STRUGGLE, which will attack the state management of the pandemic as a whole and in all its forms, distance learning/remote tele-work, constant lockdowns, violation of labour rights under the pretext of the pandemic and the medicalization of social issues can create real ruptures leading to proletarian self-determination and the questioning of the dystopia we have been experiencing for 1½ years now.
HALVE WORKING HOURS! DOUBLE OUR SALARIES!
THIS WILL IMPROVE OUR HEALTH!
20 July, 2021
Assembly against bio-power and confinement
* Our intervention in the workshop Mass protest and the future direction of anti-authoritarian internationalism at the FAST FORWARD FESTIVAL of Plan C, September 2017
We would like to thank you for the invitation to your festival, which will give us the opportunity to elaborate a bit on the subject of internationalism and mass protest against capitalist targets.
Our group, TPTG, has been active for years, however, as it is a tiny one, we cannot seriously claim that our own resources and organizing efforts alone could disrupt capital’s infrastructure through mass protest. In the over two decades’ period of our existence, we have mainly tried to be part of the real movement going on in a critical way, that’s why we have been involved in strikes, demonstrations, local assemblies, riots or other kinds of mass protest, in both workplaces and non-workplaces, that is to say, in the production and the circulation sphere.
It is possible that anti-authoritarian internationalism, as you put it, at least in its current form as counter-summits, may provide a very useful network of comrades around the world through which insights, experience, practical proposals and theoretical analysis can be exchanged. However, it has certain limitations. It has been commonly acknowledged that such events usually exhaust their importance by the end of the respective summits, thus their duration is by their nature pretty short. Therefore, they cannot be the basis for any long term struggle, even though they can cause considerable disruption for a certain and rather predictable period of time, like the shut-down of the port in Hamburg, as it is mentioned in the workshop title.
We also share with you the concern on the more and more scientifically elaborated state management of crowd protests and the advanced repressive techniques the cops have been using. We have dealt with such matters in the recent past when class struggles and mass protest in the streets in Greece had reached an unprecedented level and we were confronted with the need to exchange insights with international comrades on our enemies’ renewed repression techniques. For this purpose, we had started an inquiry on the subject which was triggered off and affected by the Aufhebengate.
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Our contribution in pdf
* The Social Crisis in Greece, The social crisis in Greece, pdf
INTRODUCTION: The Capitalist Crisis in the European Union
Before discussing the conditions in which the social crisis in the South of Europe has been developing, we should refer first to the more general context of the crisis in the EU itself.
For us, the global “economic recession” and the “financial” crisis of the recent years are only forms of appearance of the permanent crisis of capital reproduction which started in the early 70’s, that is, the crisis of reproduction of capitalist social relations. Despite the fact that there were periods of “recovery”, e.g. the partial restoration of non-financial profit rates in many major capitalist economies from 1982 to 1997, no long-term solution to the crisis has been found.
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1. THE SO-CALLED “DEBT-CRISIS” UNFOLDING IN GREECE
Coined in bourgeois mystified terms as a “crisis of competitiveness” and a “crisis of sovereign debt”, the crisis of capitalist reproduction in Greece led to an explosion of all its contradictions with the global recession in 2008.
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2. RESTRUCTURING THE REGIME OF ACCUMULATION IN GREECE
The implementation of “internal devaluation” politics has partially re-shaped the local regime of accumulation, by accelerating the restructuring of both the labour market and production base of the Greek capitalist state.
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3. CLASS STRUGGLES AGAINST THE POLITICS OF “INTERNAL DEVALUATION”: New forms of struggle and their effectiveness/limitations in counterattacking capital’s restructuring
After the implementation of the devalorization policies in Greece, the working class moved to a wide range of forms of struggle from traditional ones, like strikes, demos or occupations of public buildings, to more or less new ones, like the occupation of open public spaces, self-reduction of prices and the constitution of “popular assemblies” in the cities’ neighbourhoods.
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4. Lack of an internationalist direction
Overall, the previous cycle of struggles was, unfortunately, almost completely confined within national and sectoral borders as it was predominantly waged either in isolated workplaces or against the results of the so-called “debt crisis” in Greece, without any substantial links with similar struggles abroad.
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5. ΤΗE EFFECT OF “DEBT CRISIS” AND CLASS STRUGGLES ON ALL MEDIATIONS: The legitimation crisis and how they got over it
To sum up: As the Greek political personnel has made the strategic choice of remaining within the Eurozone and under the constant pressure of the debtor-states, the radical and violent restructuring of the productive and reproductive mode of accumulation, the gigantic devalorization process is getting deeper and deeper.
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6. THE STATE MANAGEMENT OF THE REFUGEE-IMMIGRANT INFLUX: Recent struggles and their limits
Let’s start with some necessary general remarks first: the capitalist state ensures the subjugation of workers in general to capital in general. The capitalist state protects and develops productively both capital and labour power, in general, or at least it is forced to do it. Capitalist accumulation is therefore dependent on the abundance, mobility and availability of labour power, while, on the other hand, during crises of reproduction of capitalist relations that end up in the devalorization of surplus capital, labour power may be made redundant to a large extent. Migrant populations, whether they are refugees or not, or whether they have left a middle class life behind or not, are part of the global working class, driven away (mainly) by local or global devalorization policies. Therefore, an analysis of their use or non-use by capital should be placed within a broader analysis of global, supra-national and national processes of capital accumulation. Consequently, any analysis which is dominated by a discourse on “anti-immigrant” or “pro-immigrant” state policies is quite misleading and irrelevant – in the same way that it would be misleading and pointless to claim that the state could be either “anti-worker” or “pro-worker”.
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* The big deception, deception.pdf
* 60 days older and deeper in debt. Postscript to «SYRIZA and its victory in the recent general elections in Greece», 60days.pdf
* On SYRIZA and its victory in the recent general elections in Greece, on_syriza.pdf
* Counting Defeats: Internal devaluation, the failure of working class struggles in Greece & the Sino-Greek «success story», counting_defeats.pdf
* An interview, interview_en.pdf
* Burdened with debt reloaded, reloaded.pdf
In Greece, the initial austerity measures developed into a full blown shock policy of devaluation of capital, which has deepened the recession and increased public debt. A main ingredient of the politics of devaluation of capital is the depreciation of labour power which aims at the weakening of the power of the working class by establishing permanent austerity and disciplining mechanisms, and by the creation of a large reserve army. Furthermore, this depreciation of labour power is facilitated by the institutional abolition of collective bargaining agreements, a process which, to a great extent, undermines the very function of the labour power representation mechanisms…
…The extremely volatile and explosive situation does not allow any safe conclusions for the time being since the inability of the proletarian struggles to have any real and persistent effects (in the production and reproduction spheres of the capitalist totality) is accompanied by a deep, generalized and amorphous despair and anger precipitated also by the destruction of any safety valves for their containment. Therefore, the widespread prospect of a rather prolonged dead-end period looming ahead could be easily reversed by a social explosion that will change more deeply the balance of forces.
* Down with the Stalinists! Down with the Bureaucrats, down.pdf
As the capitalist attack deepens, this Greek style of ‘self-policing’ of ‘problematic’ crowd events has signaled the comeback with a vengeance of the left political parties and the left unionist bureaucracy against a proletarian crowd that had managed to escape their mortal embrace last June in the squares movement (albeit in a very contradictory way). We can’t say whether this concerted public-order policing by the KKE and the professional police with the approval of most of the left and leftist organisations and unions is the visible part (in the streets) of a deal for a national unity government, but it certainly revealed very dramatically that the capitalist state has a lot of left-wing reserves as well as alternative police methods against us…
* Second Open Letter to those concerned with the progress of our enemies (including some necessary clarifications and refutations of the cop consultant’s defence team’s claims), open_letter_2.pdf
* Open Letter to the British internationalist/anti-authoritarian/activist/protest/street scenes (and to all those concerned with the progress of our enemies), open_letter.pdf
* Preliminary notes towards an account of the «movement of popular assemblies», prel.pdf
This volatile, contradictory movement attracts the attention from all sides of the political spectrum and constitutes an expression of the crisis of class relations and politics in general. No other struggle has expressed itself in a more ambivalent and explosive way in the last decades. What the whole political spectrum finds disquieting in this assembly movement is that the mounting proletarian (and petit-bourgeois) anger and indignation is not expressed anymore through the mediation channels of the political parties and the unions. Thus, it is not so much controllable and it is potentially dangerous for the political and unionist representation system in general.
* Burdened with debt, burdened.pdf
Greece has been located at the heart of the continuing global capitalist crisis during the last months. The outbreak of the “debt crisis” and the implementation of a “shock-therapy” by the PASOK government in cooperation with the EU and the IMF have drawn an international attention: certainly, the outcome of class struggles in Greece will greatly influence the outcome of the crisis on an European level. The following text tries to put the developments in Greece into a broader framework of analysis of the capitalist crisis and attempts to give an explanation for the fragmented and inadequate so far ongoing struggles against the harshest class attack since the end of the 2nd world war called “austerity measures”.
* The ivory tower of theory, ivory.pdf / ivory.doc
One of our first priorities, after the first week of the December 2008 rebellion had passed, was to record its most important events so that comrades abroad could have some first-hand information. The recording took the form of a rough chronology of the events in Athens, supplemented with a chronology of what had happened in Thessaloniki which was written by the Blaumachen group and other comrades. Later, in the end of January 2009, we attempted a first analysis of the rebellion which was the text Like a Winter with a thousand Decembers (co-written with Blaumachen) –a text that, as the Chronologies before it, was sent to numerous comrades abroad.
The above-mentioned texts, as well as an older text of ours, The Permanent Crisis in Education, constituted part of the primary material used by Theorie Communiste to write The Glass Floor in 2009. They are all included in the book they published on the December 2008 rebellion in Greece, Les Émeutes en Grèce, Senonevero, April 2009.[1]
What we have in common with TC, as expressed both in The Glass Floor and in their theory in general, is the view that social movements reveal a deep crisis of the reproduction of the capitalist relation, the definition of communisation as the abolition of the value form, the critique of unionism and democracy.
The text we are criticizing here differs from many others that were written on the December rebellion in the sense that it is not a usual descriptive presentation of events. On the contrary, it is one of the few attempts to analyze the rebellion within a theoretical framework and the fact that it came from outside Greece makes such an attempt even more interesting.
Among what we consider important in this text is the presentation of the social category of youth as a part of the proletariat, the recognition that the movement of December was not self-complacent and self-referential (that is to say, it did not promote an alternative lifestyle), the critique of militantism (whether of a unionist or a political type). However, since even those elements are seen by us from a different angle and since our disagreements with TC’s historicist, structuralist, objectivist, immiseration theory are a lot more than our partial agreements, we had to write the critique that follows. We will show that despite a few good insights their analysis both of the December rebellion and the world present moment is ultimately flawed and inadequate.
[1] Le Plancher de Verre, translated in English as The Glass Floor, is the introduction to this book: Les Émeutes en Grèce. Unless it is stated otherwise, all the quotations in italics are from the English version of the text.
* In critical and suffocating times, suffocating.pdf
Although in a period of acute fiscal terrorism escalating day after day with constant threats of an imminent state bankruptcy and “sacrifices to be made”, the proletariat’s response on the eve of the voting of the new austerity measures in Greek parliament was impressive. It was probably the biggest workers’ demonstration since the fall of the dictatorship, even bigger than the 2001 demo which had led to the withdrawal of a planned pension reform.
[…]
In hindsight, such tragic incidents with all their consequences might have happened in the December rebellion itself: what prevented them was not only chance (a petrol station that did not explode next to buildings set on fire on Sunday the 7th of December, the fact that the most violent riots took place at night with most buildings empty), but also the creation of a (though limited) proletarian public sphere and of communities of struggle which found their way not only through violence but also through their own content, discourse and other means of communication. It was these pre-existing communities (of students, football hooligans, immigrants, anarchists) that turned into communities of struggle by the subjects of the rebellion themselves that gave to violence a meaningful place. Will there be such communities again now that not only a proletarian minority is involved? Will there be a practical way of self-organization in the workplaces, in the neighborhoods or in the streets to determine the form and the content of the struggle and thus place violence in a liberating perspective?
Uneasy questions in pressing times but we will have to find the answers struggling.
* There’s only one thing left to settle: our accounts with capital and its state, debt-strikes.pdf
[I]n a climate of fiscal terrorism that has been orchestrated for some months now by the media, a state of emergency has been called in Greece in an effort by international capital and the greek state to turn the country into a laboratory of a new shock policy. The huge ”public debt” and the ”imminent bankruptcy of the country” are the mottos used as efficient tools to terrorize and discipline the proletariat and legitimize the decrease of the direct and indirect wage and thus curb its expectations and demands in an exemplary neoliberal fashion of international proportions.
The mobilizations have been rather lukewarm so far and certainly do not correspond to the critical situation and the ferocity of the measures. There is a generalized feeling of impotence and paralysis but anger as well that cannot find a proper outlet. Certainly, there is a real discontent for the shock policy that the PASOK government is promoting (cuts on wages, cuts on benefits, more direct and indirect taxes, extension of retirement age, intensification of police control etc.) One can trace that discontent in the every day conversations in the work places, however, there is a prevailing fragile silence facing the dictatorship of the economy and the omnipotence of the “markets”. The “national unity” mantra is one of the government’s favourite tools, as expected in such times, however, it has not reached yet a dangerous point.
* Questions & Answers from the conclusion of the 56a Infoshop publication «Everyone to the streets», Q&A.pdf
* The rebellious passage of a proletarian minority through a brief period of time, rebpas.pdf
The December rebellion and the post-rebellion developments as aspects of the crisis of capitalist relations in Greece.
* Like a Winter with a Thousand Decembers, LIKE-A-WINTER-e.pdf
Last December, the wind of insurrection blew over the cities in Greece. The joyful and festive atmosphere of Christmas was set on fire together with the Christmas tree on Syntagma square. The assassination of the 15-year-old student Alexis Grigoropoulos by a special police guard on the 6th ignited the spark. In general, the social unrest of December can be characterized as a violent proletarian rebellion which had a sudden, mass and wild burst that gradually gave way to less violent, more imaginative and more political acts but with less people involved.
* An updated short presentation of the recent riots in Athens and Thessaloniki through the eyes of some proletarian participants, CHRONOLOGY.pdf
Shooting by police on Saturday 6th of December has triggered off in cities all over Greece the fiercest riots in decades. What follows is a first –and incomplete– presentation of the recent riots in Athens based on our own experiences and on what we have heard of. On the one hand, the fierceness of the riots and the determination of the rioters and looters and on the other hand, the unfolding strategy of the state certainly need more time and closer attention to be adequately estimated, something that we are honestly not in the position to do at the moment, because we still participate in several local activities, demos and assemblies.
* Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas.pdf
“No one has the right to use this tragic incident as an alibi for brutalities”.
Statement by prime minister K. Karamanlis, one of these days
“There is no question of ‘violence’; there is just a side being attacked during a war already in progress and thus the question of the means sufficient for victory”.
Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile, Paris, June 2006
“VIOLENCE means working for 40 years, getting miserable wages and wondering if you ever get retired…
VIOLENCE means state bonds, robbed pension funds and the stock-market fraud…
VIOLENCE means being forced to get housing loans which finally you pay back as if they were gold…
VIOLENCE means the management’s right to fire you any time they want…
VIOLENCE means unemployment, temporary employment, 400 Euros wage with or without social security…
VIOLENCE means work ‘accidents’, as bosses diminish their workers’ safety costs…
VIOLENCE means being driven sick because of hard work …
VIOLENCE means consuming psycho-drugs and vitamins in order to cope with exhausting working hours…
VIOLENCE means working for money to buy medicines in order to fix your labour power commodity…
VIOLENCE means dying on ready-made beds in horrible hospitals, when you can’t afford bribing.”
Proletarians from occupied GSEE, Athens, December 2008
* The permanent crisis in education, permanent crisis.pdf
Capitalist development in Greece during the 60’s meant the growth of the secondary sector, namely construction and manufacturing (mainly based on the low cost of labour and not on big investments in fixed capital), the corresponding influx of peasants in the towns and the erosion of local subsistence economies. Gradually, this development created the need for a more skilled and diversified labour power. As a consequence, public education expanded, basic education became obligatory and the population of university students started to rise. Wildcat strikes were on the daily agenda, campaigns on welfare, housing or local issues were organized in almost every neighborhood. This was also the time when struggles for a «free and public education» began.
* A brief outline of the student movement in Greece, A brief outline.pdf
On the 28th of April, the Greek ministry of education published a draft proposal for a bill regarding the reform of university education. The key points of this proposal are the following ones: Specific regulations for the expulsion of ‘inefficient’ students. This category includes students failing to complete their studies after n + n/2 years, where n is the scheduled duration [a two year course must be completed in three years, a six year course in nine years], as well as students failing in a main course more than three times. It must be noted that the state had repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to introduce such regulations since the beginning of the 80’s. Economic ‘rationalization’ and cutting down on expenses by appointing financial managers, putting an end to the provision of free textbooks for university courses, as well as establishing ‘retributive scholarships’ for poor students. Setting university spaces practically open to police raids through the abolition of ‘academic sanctuary’. Student mobilizations and university occupations will be more difficult to take place in the future since prosecution will become possible. At the same time, there is an ongoing process for the revision of the constitution which will enable the establishment of private universities. This proposal, which was to be voted during the summer in the parliament, is the last one in a series of laws passed in the previous years considering the alignment of university education with the imperatives of ‘lifelong learning’, quantification, standardization and evaluation of academic labour, but which have not been implemented yet. At this point, it must be emphasized that these policies conform to a broader initiative in the context of the European Union referred to as ‘Bologna Process’.
* Developments and workers’ struggles in the Greek textile industry, textile.pdf
* Bank clerks and dockers on month-long strikes in Greece, bankdock.pdf
* War, Peace and the Crisis of Reproduction of Human Capital ( part B) , War, peace2.pdf
The term “reproduction of human capital” does not refer to the simple reproduction of labour power but to its expanded reproduction. It refers to the production of a disciplined, enhanced, qualified labour power, through productive investment in the quality of education, in health, in family planning; that is, in the formation of social capital. Falling (or rising) birth-rates, student riots and welfare demands can lead to a “crisis of reproduction of human capital”. This, when combined with workplace struggles, leads to a general crisis of exploitability of labour. That was the case in the late 60’s-early 70’s in the “West”. Today, as we show in this article, the crises of reproduction of human capital in the 70’s and 80’s in the “West” and in the so-called “Third World” have been aggravated by the violent politics of deregulation which tried to confront the results of the previous social conflicts. All this has led to a generalized crisis of reproduction of capitalist relations, which appears as an “economic crisis” and is dealt with, unsuccessfully, through the use of more violence.
* TPTG’s Conversation with George Caffentzis, caffentzis_interview.pdf
* War, peace and the crisis of the reproduction of human capital in former Yugoslavia (part A), War, peace1.pdf
If one leaves aside the left patriots (CP, various marxist-leninist organisations) who used the anti-war demonstrations, which they organised and led, as a vote-hunting tactic, all the «well- intentioned» anti-war protestors who dragged themselves to the spring demonstrations in Greece, failed completely. They failed, not in the sense of stopping the war- that was impossible and, anyway, it was primarily the duty of the Albanian and Serbian proletariat, who in the best of cases would have had the help of the proletarians of the countries which the mercenaries of NATO came from. They failed, and this is most important, to ask the fundamental questions about this war, which, we should not fool ourselves, has been going on in Yugoslavia for the last ten years. Questions like:
– What is the function of war in promoting the larger aims of a globalized economy?
– What role does it have in maintaining/ restructuring the dominant mode of production and the consumption of ideologies?
– In what way is it a means for the production and reproduction (i.e. the organisation and control) of labour power?
– How can we, as a class and not in disarray, react in such a way so as to create a community of struggle?
* A heavy burden on young shoulders, A heavy burden.pdf
The educational law 2525 laid the foundations of the enterprise school which seems to be the future type of what we used to know until now as elementary and secondary education. If we go only 8 years back, in the early 90’s, we will find out that a similar law was under way. Some of its provisions the right wing government tried to pass then (leaving the fundamental ones temporarily aside) aimed at restoring discipline at state schools through uniforms, morning prayers, a point-system evaluation and a decrease in the number of absences from classes allowed. A vigorous school occupation movement followed which, to some extent, had the silent support of the socialist party. Soon the provisions were taken back, the minister of Education retired and no government had dared to impose large-scale reforms until 1997.
* Days of June 98: Days of class struggle in Greece, daysofjune.pdf
What follows is an estimation of the moments we experienced around the 18th high school of Patisia in Athens, which was used as an examination centre. We talk neither about victory nor about defeat. From our proletarian point of view we would like to shed light to those sides of theory and practice that led to this explosion of struggle, thus contributing to its continuation.
* Upheaval in the land of the eagles, Upheaval.pdf
In the beginning of 1997, the «criminality of Albanian immigrants was, once again, the prevailing issue in Greek media and reached its climax when some burglaries took place in east Attiki. However, a few months later the image of the «Albanian criminal» gave way to that of the «Albanian rebel». Greek media made a spectacle out of the rebellion and the Greek government supported Fatos Nano and even allowed his pre-election campaign among Albanian immigrants in Greece. How come that the cheapest labour force in Europe armed themselves with Kalashnikovs, how did things come to a rebellion? To answer these questions we had to go back in the past and follow the history of antagonistic social relations in Albania.
* Mexico is not only Chiapas nor is the rebellion in Chiapas merely a Mexican affair, Mexico.pdf
In January 1994, in the south eastern state of Chiapas in Mexico, news of the Zapatistas armed revolt composed mainly of Indian peasants, travelled all over the world bringing about an explosion of interest and information on Mexico because the rebellion was automatically connected with the Mexican revolution. In this text we undertake an analysis of the class struggles in Mexico since the beginning of the century up till now, which includes a critical presentation of the guerilla movement of the Zapatistas.
* If you want peace, prepare for class war, peace_class_war.pdf
During the last year there was much political debate between Greek and (Slav) Macedonian bureaucracies upon the name, the constitution and the symbols of the new Macedonian state. Two large nationalist demonstrations were held by the major political parties in Greece in order to put pressure on EEC bureaucracy to stop backing our neighboring nation-state’s claims on the name »Macedonian«. The first one took place in February 92 in Thessaloniki and the second one in Athens last December. Over one million people took part in them (that is one in ten Greeks) and apart from the Trotskyists and some other Leninists who opposed the demonstrations, agitating for »the right of (Slav) Macedonia to self-determination « – a bourgeois statist concept derived from Lenin, which cost them harsh persecutions on the part of the Law – few »anti-authoritarian« groups managed to confront nationalist propaganda, at least on theoretical terms.