"The message to us from Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Spain, and England  is simple: join in! Rise up! Our answer to them has to be yes. And it has to be yes to each other.

The follow piece first appeared in the Occupied Wallstreet Journal

photo credit: Jim Weill

by Eric Ribellarsi and Jim Weill

We arrived in Greece this summer just as street-fighting broke over Athens. For days the police rained tear gas on the people who occupied the capital’s main Syntagma Square.

People would disperse and reform right on the steps of the parliament. The subways were turned into medical centers for the wounded. There is a worldwide movement of rebellion and resistance building. What started in Tunisia and Egypt has shaken and overthrown governments, then jumped to Spain to Greece to England — and now to New York City and across the United States.

In Greece a generation is waking up. They call themselves the Indignant. They reject old politics and the old parties. They refuse to accept the cutbacks and austerity measures imposed by the global banks and the European Union. They are determined, angry and righteous.

They had challenges in Greece. Right-wing ultra-nationalists tried to infiltrate the movement. Police attacked. Some tired left parties condemned the movement saying it’s not focused on elections or minor reforms.

One popular symbol is the helicopter: the people want the Greek government to leave, resign, fly into exile. Or just get the hell out.

And why not here? If the people of Egypt can run out Mubarak, why can’t we run out the American politicians who serve the banks and brutalize us?

The banks are global. They have globalized their sweatshops and cutbacks. We are globalizing the rebellion.

A young woman who is active in this Greek movement of the squares told us:

Add a comment Read more...

photo credit: Jed Brandt

Winter Has It's End is a blog of revolutionary journalism. We aim to give on the ground reporting, telling the story of the people who are fighting for a better world. We want to provide a picture as their struggle to realize their aspirations unfolds: Who are these people? What drives them to fight? What kind of world are they trying to bring into being? What stands in their way?

We have already given eye witness accounts from Nepal and Greece where people are struggling, living, dying to change everything. We intend to draw lessons from these movements. Our rebellions and our revolution will have much to learn from their trials, obstacles, and triumphs.

We write this as the occupations movement picks up steam in the U.S. It is a shocking, but fledgling movement. It is unclear how it will evolve and where it will go.

But it is something extraordinary.

Read from some of our top stories below for coverage, and lessons, from Nepal and Greece. Stay tuned for eye witness reports and analysis of the uprisings in the U.S. as they unfold.

 

Eyewitness to Greece: Arriving into a Whirlwind

By Eric Ribellarsi

“I arrived twelve hours ago in Athens, and rushed to find the crowds of street-fighters. The police tear gas has already hit around me about twenty times. Athens’ Syntagma Square has for weeks been the site of the People’s Assemblies, huge rallies that challenge the government’s plans. Tonight this Square, the very heart of Greece, is a battleground where the police and resistors have been fighting face to face, line against line.”

“And even despite all of this, the word is that the austerity measures and budget cuts were passed anyway. People say that tomorrow, they will attempt to storm the parliament.”

Add a comment Read more...

Photos and report by Jed Brandt.

The Thessaloniki Expo is Greece's equivalent of the US State of the Union speech. The Prime Minister retreated behind barricades for the first time, as he is universally despised for selling the country to European bankers and the International Monetary Fund, and imposing austerity. The current ruling party, PASOK, is nominally social-democratic, but just as Obama is imposing austerity in the US — the "left" face of the ruling class always knows who butters its bread.

These are the first significant protests since the Squares movement of the early summer. The traditional left parties, some unions, the Squares movement, and thousands of indignant Greeks showed up to convergence points around the city to challenge the Prime Minister. They were met with walls of police. Half the cops in Athens were trucked up to Thessaloniki, and the week leading up to the Expo saw the mainstream media hype fear of "violence." A 2.5 kilometer zone was put around the Expo, banning vehicle traffic. At least 5,000 riot police were deployed.

Add a comment

By Eric Ribellarsi

I arrived twelve hours ago in Athens, and rushed to find the crowds of street-fighters. The police tear gas has already hit around me about twenty times. Athens’ Syntagma Square has for weeks been the site of the People’s Assemblies, huge rallies that challenge the government’s plans. Tonight this Square, the very heart of Greece, is a battleground where the police and resistors have been fighting face to face, line against line.

And all the while, people are singing and dancing and debating about revolution.

Add a comment Read more...

A KOE demonstration against the International Monetary Fund

by Eric Ribellarsi

We in Kasama, and many others, have been engaged for several years now in trying to imagine new ways to fuse revolutionary ideas with the popular discontent of the people. It is part of what drew our Winter’s End reporting team to Greece and what draws us now to discuss the Communist Organization of Greece (known as the KOE, and pronounced ‘Koy’).

All around the rim of the Mediterranean Sea there has been an eruption of massive anti-government movements. Many people in the U.S. know about the “Arab Spring” that swept North Africa – starting in Tunisia, then Egypt, and Libya – and erupting in nearby Yemen and Syria. Meanwhile, similar mass movements also filled the city squares on the European, northern side of the Mediterranean – though these movements in Greece and Spain have been much less well known than eruptions on the southern, North African side.

Among the common features of these “movements of the squares” is that they have drawn large numbers of youth into political life – often with a sweeping sense of rejecting previous politics (both existing governments and the oppositional parties). There is a sense that everything “before” is corrupt, complicit and exhausted, and everything “after” must now make a break. And while there are obviously deep concerns and frustrations that drew people into the squares, it also stands out that the politics of these eruptions were extremely unformed: People have had only a vague sense of what they wanted to put in the place of current politics.

Great and energetic hopes often masked underlying naiveté and fracture lines that would inevitably come to the fore: how should these popular movements view the existing army (in Egypt), or the intrusive Western powers (in Libya), or problems of defining specific solutions, or the organizational problems of creating political instruments?

A Legacy with Real Strength and Real Baggage

In Greece, much more so than in North Africa, the country’s politics have a strong, historic and diverse set of communist currents. And so the question was sharply posed from the beginning: How will the various parties of that older left engage Greek’s new popular movement of the squares? What will they propose? How will they present themselves? Will they allow themselves to be transformed?

Obviously, our own primitive communist projects in the U.S. have a great deal to learn from such experiences. We too hope to create new politics in the context of great eruptions, and we hope to approach such movements with some clarity of purpose and creativity of method.

Add a comment Read more...