What has been happening in Greece in the past few months (and in a way, extending from December 2008 to present) is simply phenomenal: deep changes, one after the other, in the social backbone come at breakneck speed. This fluid landscape has found us, the wider social antagonist movement (anarchists, anti-authoritarians, the libertarian left) numb – and worse even stuck with our conceptualisations, our beliefs and readings of social reality as it stood only a little while ago.
But so much has changed, so fast.
Do we possibly have the luxury to dismiss the strike of the lorry-drivers as somewhat “reactionary” or “conservative” because they aim at protecting the reserved benefits of their trade? (it is true that this, along with a few more trades, is one of the so-called “closed” trades, requiring licenses of 200K upward, which often pass on via family, political and other often dubious connections). Can we still keep reading developments in this way? Lorry drivers “are protecting their closed trade”; dockworkers are “driven by the Communist Party”; peach producers “only rise up when their profits sink”. Of course, there is some truth in all these statements. But this is no Colonial India, nor should we ever allow it to come to this… To divide and conquer is the oldest trick in the book. Our position as anarchists, as libertarians, as people in the grassroots struggle, must be on the side of those who fight from the grassroots, from the wider working class – with all the past wrong-doings of some of its parts. Our aim, to strengthen their struggle with that powerful bond of solidarity – this, which could ensure that next time they don’t get into another dog-eat-dog situation, that they don’t turn against each other, that their aim is where it truly deserves to be, against state and capital intervention in our lives.
These are unprecedented moments when enormous ruptures open up and where the potentials are high. We either seize the day or let everything and everyone around us crumble fall, one by one._
