2 Greeks anarchists are making a molotov cocktail. One asks the other "so what are we throwing this at then?" To which the the second one, looking confused, replies "what are you, an intellectual?"Ok, it's about as funny as most old political jokes, but reflects the confrontational habits of our Greek comrades, who are a commendably throw first, ask questions later sort of bunch.
Aside from being more numerous than most European anarchist movements (maybe the Italians and the Spanish could plausibly claim to be stronger), I think there might be other reasons why they've just found themselves at the head of a two week orgy of youth rebellion, mobilising students, workers, unemployed and migrants in a slightly inchoate uprising against well... pretty much anything they've got.
Yes, there's a few thousand of them, with little strongholds dotted about the country, and there's more than a little long term sympathy in Greek society for this sort of tning.
But why now? What's going on? Why are liberal newspapers muttering darkly about everyone else catching 'Greek syndrome'?
There's a po-faced explanation. There's an economic crisis on and obviously people at the margins of the society are becoming more combative, and people with radical messages are finding greater sympathy for their ideas. Economic and social suffering may find itself expressed as violent street protest.
I'm not really convinced by this, well, I might be, but I don't really like it as an explanation. My preferred idea is this...
We've just been through a very long economic boom ... prior to this year, the UK had gone for quite some time with consistent, if moderate growth. And yet, did anyone really feel like we were living through good times? I mean, we were mostly pretty gloomy throughout weren't we? We spent the entire time complaining that society was falling apart (even those on the right) and that everything was getting worse. If you weren't part of the London financial or media elite, you more or less experienced better times as ... (a) real wages that more or less stayed the same (b) pressure on all the public services you depended on (c) steadily increasing costs for everything necessary (d) racking up massive debts (e) doing as you're told forever more with no prospect of anything changing ever.
It's a long time since we've had anything that resembled social hope round here. So for a while we've had 2 things as a substitute - (a) buying stuff and (b) hoping we might get famous or rich or both. It's hard to remember a boom time that had less to offer people in terms of improving our lives. I mean in the early 20th century a boom might mean economic security, temporarily at the beginning, then more or less permanently by the 1960s.
So, here we are afterwards. They've given us the grand sum of fuck all for a decade or so, and now they're telling us (whilst they give lots of money to the perpetrators) for the next few years there'll be a bundle of people out of work, the rest of us will have to put up with "belt-tightening" (ie. being poorer).
Mind you, if you're just entering the world of work, it's worse than this. New jobs these days are fucking shit. They're just a boring as ever, but they're worse paid and less secure. More than ever you're somebody's little bitch for an increasingly large proportion of your life. That is if you happen to have escaped the fate of people in those communities where there is basically fuck all work and has been throughout the boom times. So if you can get a job, it'll be rubbish, and if you can't you probably wouldn't want to anyway.
So what happens when we get to a recession? What's Greek syndrome really? A riot for fairness? For jobs? For prosperity and social justice? Not in my book. I don't think people are demanding a return to fairer capitalism.
Young people are bored of this shit. We're bored of shitty work and shitty unemployment. We're bored of a lifetime of obedience, bureaucracy and tedium. Of every little thing taking a chunk out of us. It's the street protest equivalent of throwing your hands in the air and yelling "FUCK THIS FUCKING BOLLOCKS. IT'S FUCKING SHIT".
And the Greek anarchos are at the forefront of that kind of rage. More so than their more sensible-sounding red and black flag waving cousins. Still, it might start there. But you wait til the Summer!
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