(en) Greece, Building the Revolution in Greece in ROBERT GRAHAM'S ANARCHISM WEBLOG

The New Anarchism ---- Below I reproduce excerpts from a recent report at Truthout by 
Joshua Stephens on the constructive efforts by Greek anarchists to create alternatives to 
capitalism and the nation-state. The approaches they have been developing since the 
uprising in 2008 are similar to those proposed by Alexander Berkman based on his 
experiences during the Russian Revolution. Directly democratic popular assemblies formed 
the basis of the anarchist collectives during the Spanish Revolution, and were later 
championed by Murray Bookchin. Stephens refers to Colin Ward, whose ground breaking 
article on anarchism as a theory of organization is included in Volume Two of Anarchism: A 
Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. Anarchist alternatives to capitalism and 
hierarchical organization are well documented in all three volumes of Anarchism: A 
Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, now on sale at AK Press.

Joshua Stephen?s on the situation in Greece:

?On the first day of the uprising, we smashed the police stations,? an anarchist in 
Thessaloniki told me last spring. ?On the second, we smashed the banks. On the third, 
there was nothing left to smash, and we were suddenly faced with the fact that we didn?t 
really know what to do.? It seems to have been a widespread frustration. The occupations 
of academic and political institutions that occurred amidst the uprising gave way to what 
are called Popular Assemblies in some 70 neighborhoods across Athens.

About half of these are still operating, composed of an often unlikely spectrum of 
participants. Anarchists, local workers, even municipal employees and officeholders all 
collaborate off the political grid in democratically administering needs, redistributing 
available resources and bolstering existing struggles against both austerity and the 
steady creep of fascism.

Their strategy can be read in a short 1958 article by Colin Ward in the British anarchist 
journal Freedom, entitled ?The Unwritten Handbook?: ?The choice between libertarian and 
authoritarian solutions occurs every day and in every way, and the extent to which we 
choose, or accept? or lack the imagination and inventiveness to discover alternatives to 
the authoritarian solutions to small problems is the extent to which we are their 
powerless victims in big affairs.? When a round of austerity measures included a new and 
often unaffordable property tax in electricity bills, many Greeks saw their power abruptly 
cut. Popular Assemblies began compiling lists of households without power, ranking them 
based on vulnerability (age, the presence of infants, etc.), and deploying qualified 
people to restore electricity, illegally.

On a cool April evening in the neighborhood of Peristeri, assembly participants debated 
models for localizing economic transactions through alternative currencies and 
non-monetary programs like time-banks. Over drinks following a talk I gave last spring, 
the bulk of the questions from local anarchists known the world over for bravado and 
street warfare were about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs, an 
overwhelmingly liberal phenomena back home, hardly considered political (much less 
radical). In Greece, however, forging direct relationships with the agricultural sector 
amounts to a fuck-you to the International Monetary Fund and its threats of import 
cutoffs, issued to leverage passage of austerity measures.

During my few days on the ground in Athens this trip, I was invited to an anti-fascist 
march organized by the Popular Assemblies of south Athens. It marked what felt like an 
expansion of their role into directly confronting Golden Dawn, where the state has proved 
either unwilling or unable to tread. ?If we don?t resist in every neighborhood, they will 
soon become our prisons? could be heard reverberating off the facades of buildings.

Counting by tens, I estimated roughly a thousand marching from the commercial plaza 
adjacent to the Dafni Metro, winding through a number of its various neighborhoods before 
reaching a former military installation occupied and renamed Asyrmatos Greek for 
?wireless,? referring to the towering antennas jutting out of what is now a sizable 
community garden and community-managed conservatory.

In the adjacent neighborhood of Aghios Dimitrios, where much of the march was organized, 
the Popular Assembly meets weekly in theatrical space of a local municipal building. On 
the surface, it appears quite innocuous, as though it?s scheduled through an arrangement 
with the local government. I was surprised to learn that each week?s meeting is a sort of 
micro-occupation; participants simply walk in and seize the space, with zero visible 
pushback from employees, and no police response. ?In 2008 (during the uprising), we 
seized the building for a month,? one local told me. ?So, I think that, for them, two 
hours a week is a bargain.?

The oldest Popular Assembly in Athens operates in the neighborhood of Petralona, the site 
of a recent, widely publicized murder of a Pakistani man at the hands of fascists. When I 
visited with them last spring, they were opening a kitchen and cafe space for educating 
people about nutrition and food production, and operating an extensive calendar of 
peer-led health and mental health events, inspired in part by Mexico?s Zapatistas. Today, 
they operate medical, dental and eye clinics in coordination with other Popular 
Assemblies, based on non-monetary mutual aid.

As we weaved through commercial corridors and narrow neighborhood arteries last week, all 
of this seemed to be shifting from a sort of quiet mode of survival into an overt 
assertion of power. Scattered action commanded the attention of onlookers. Quarter-sheet 
fliers were tossed into open bus windows, open supermarkets and even into the day?s light 
breeze, scattering like ticker tape. Two masked young women darted out of the crowd 
periodically, spray-painting a stencil onto walls featuring a sort of close-up frontal 
image of a boy with his fist forward, reading ?The sons of Adolf will receive a red and 
black punch? (a reference to the colors of the traditional anarchist flag).

The smell of fresh spray paint hung in the air, the fire to its smoke appearing on walls, 
the sides of buses, and a newly favorite target in the country?s crisis establishments set 
up to buy people?s gold. These entrepreneurs are referred to as mavragoriters a 
termcoined during Greece?s years under Nazi occupation. ?They were Greeks, usually friends 
of or sympathetic to the Nazis, and they took advantage of the crisis and the starvation 
that existed all over the country,? explained a young woman, who asked not to be named. 
?It reached a point where they were buying houses in exchange for two bottles of olive 
oil, or quantities of rice.?

The subtext of the young woman?s description seems the soul of the Popular Assemblies: 
dignity. She later pointed me to a communique posted at Indymedia Athens, in which 
anarchists in the city set about countering the neoliberal mantra heard around the 
country, and the ethics of the mavragoriters ?No job is a shame.? The Popular Assemblies 
appear to operate from the inverse that appears in the communique ?Shame is not a job.? 
Surviving merely to revive histories of foreign occupation or homegrown fascism, for them, 
is a path without hope.
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Joshua Stephens is a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies, and has been 
active in anti-capitalist, international solidarity and worker-cooperative movements 
across the last two decades. He currently divides his time between the northeastern US 
and various parts of the Mediterranean.