Carrying red flag sticks and wearing helmets, the unionists formed a human chain around Parliament. In the process, however, they ended up defending the state from the angry mob outside. Rather than turning their anger at the politicians, they protected them. Riot police were therefore happy to sit back and let the two sides fight each other. Dozens of people were injured in the clashes. One older man suffered a heart attack after being hit with a stone in the head. He died in hospital.
According to some rumors, police actually infiltrated the protests — either on the communist side or on the anarchist side, depending on whom you ask — to instigate the Leftist infighting. The truth, however, is that the Stalinist Left and the anti-authoritarian Left in Greece have a long history of antagonism. While this mutual distrust is understandable, the division itself remains a highly regrettable impediment to the creation of a united revolutionary front. Now, more than ever, we need to become and stay united.
Towards the end of the second video below, Stalinist union members can clearly be seen talking to police and telling them to attack anarchist protesters. There was a nauseating degree of collaboration between communists and police — a collaborative attempt to defend the last vestiges of the Greek state — that protesters were right to be angry about. But hurling stones and petrol bombs at fellow protesters? Following the death of three people in a bank arson last year and now the death of a communist union member, the time has come for the anarchists to revisit the use of escalating violence as a protest strategy.
In the comment section the editor, Jerome Roos, says throwing molotovs at your own people is not gonna solve a thing.As an anarchist I can tell you that we do not view Stalinists as “our own people.” And the problem predates Stalin, it goes back to Lenin and Trotsky and the latter’s “iron broom.”
While I too am interested in left unity and am currently engaged in such an effort, the differences between the libertarian and authoritarian lefts go to the heart of what proletarian revolution actually is, what its point is. Whatever potential for there is for cooperation is shattered when the authoritarians surround the legislature of a bourgeois government and defend it from democratic revolution. Agreeing with this is an renunciation of all anarchist principle. I have no idea what the Stalinists are thinking (assuming they are not Western intel), but it has no relation to social revolution such as anarchists (or Karl Marx for that matter) understand it. Unity implies a certain measure of common purpose, by protecting the Greek (and European) plutocracy, the communists have demonstrated that their goals are incompatible with ours.
Photos, videos, text and links.
http://roarmag.org/2011/10/anarchists-communists-strike-riots-violence-greece/#comment-6358
