Bulletins and News Discussion from March 3rd to March 9th, 2025 - Austerity And Its Consequences - COTW: Greece

Image is of a crowd protesting in Athens.

Last week, on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Greeks poured into the streets to strike and protest on the second anniversary of the deadliest train crash in Greek history, in which 57 people died when a passenger train collided with a freight train. On this February 28th, public transportation was virtually halted, with train drivers, air traffic controllers, and seafarers taking part in a 24 hour strike - alongside other professions like lawyers, teachers, and doctors.

The train crash is emblematic of the decay of state institutions brought about from austerity being forced on Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, in which the IMF and the EU (particularly Germany) plundered the country and forced privatization. While Greece has somewhat recovered from the dire straits it was in during the early 2010s, the consequences of neoliberalism are very clearly ongoing. Mitsotakis' right-wing government has still not even successfully implemented the necessary safety procedures two years on, and so far, nobody has been convicted nor punished for their role in the accident. The austerity measures were deeply unpopular inside Greece and yet the government did not respond to, or ignored, democratic outcry.

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Since the megathread is about the greek train scandal and crash i'll maybe make an exaustive post describing how deep the corruption goes but as a note since im seeing again a lot of "omg based" reactions to footage of "protestors" clashing with the police in left twitter and such here is a reminder, especially for the west:
In Greece and in a lot of western countries these "black bloc" violent clashes with the police are very often directly started & instigated or even fully done by some dozens of undercover cops and state paid agent provocateurs to, for one give an excuse to the cops to tear gas and break up the larger crowd of the actual protests and beat innocent people up, to scare everyday people from attending protests in the future ,especially people of older age and families with Kids and of course paint a violent picture of the mass actions later in the media, making it the focal point. Some dumbass anarchists and maybe some other lumpen usualy join the fun and stone and molotov throwing after the cops vs undercover cops etc instigate the party.
So its not "wow based expression of worker and anti-state rage" when you see some dumbass molotov suspiciously always falling short of a cop in some footage from Greece or wherever. In this case it was a gladio like tension stretegy made to ruin a mass protest and strike of a million people in Athens alone, organized and pushed by a lot of communist adjustent unions and worker centers that undermines any possible revolutionary leftist cause. Im not saying its the rule and for example the clashes in the yellow vest protests couple of years ago should be painted with the same brush without analysis. But its something to always have that at the back of your head as a leftists attending protests and observing and analysis mass movements
- We saw, what, 15 percent of the country protesting? Of course the vast majority of it is peaceful. You have basically the entirety of Greece up in arms and most of them lack a molotov arm, so to speak. Even then they need to repeat the same instance of protestor violence over and over again to maintain the illusion that these people are at the margins of society.
- The RCMP in Canada does this, infiltrating protests and acting as agent provocateurs. Most of the stories I've seen about it come from Quebec. For example
  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/01/05/cana-j05.html
- There is interesting tension, that peaceful protest doesn't work, half-way violent paints you as disorderly, full violent successful one puts you in power
  
  Full violent by whom?
  If it's the people in mass who do it, then it has my full support and it's worthy of being called a socialist revolution.
  If not, at best the violent group succeeds and will get a few days of glory until they get violently coup'ed by the ruling class, and mass violence will follow. At worst, they fail, get beat up, put in jail with their names forgotten, nothing changes, an otherwise peaceful protest is painted as violent and has its message altered, and the mass of people will be afraid to act again.
  Also, fucking timing. This happened literally while the hundreds of thousands of people had finished their protest and were packing up and leaving. This not only changed the point of the massive protest, but endangered thousands of vulnerable people, at least more than they would be anyways by the police forces.
  
  I just vaguely point out dichotomy (trichotomy?), I don’t doubt there are infiltrators in black block or whatever to start shit. It just always I guess felt kinda strange to march in giant crowd with sliver of cops around and knowing that jack shit would change, but at the same knowing that doing stuff will immediately fold, disperse and get beaten in stranded groups
  
  For a communist movement "peaceful protests" like these ,especially when tied to mass labour actions offer some great opportunities. They dont work only in the immediate sense of overturning the government and taking power but when you are far from that goal they do work in testing you organization strength and capabilities, how far the various union arms of a communist movement can apply pressure to their respective fields and guide th overall actions, how effectively the communists can direct the conversation and energy of the crowd towards their messaging and narrative instead of "non partisan" or reformist forces. Even to assess how and when people in a majorly resigned and beat down population can come out on the streets . The fact that communists and their aligned unions, their youth and college leagues and various aligned local worker groups and centers did a lot of the heavy lifting in the background to organize and materialize the largest protests in Greece in modern history is a important milestone even if those parameters arent widely and officialy recognized, which is part of the point at this stage because at this point it would have been a mistake to try and lead or define these protests openly along ideological lines and from the front
- The movie Z by Costa-Gavras is a wonderful demonstration of exactly this dynamic, where the government of Greece hires fascist thugs to pose as protestors to instigate political violence as an excuse to crack down. Crazy that this has been the working strategy for at least half a century and shows no signs of stopping.
- Is this comment about black blocs in Greece specifically or in the West more generally? I'm far from a Greece Understander© but I was under the impression that Greece has more of a history of this than in somewhere like the US and that their black bloc style protests tend to be relatively more organic given the larger public presence of leftist groups of various ideologkes.
- Thanks for bringing attention to this. I see a lot of foreign media focus one these images and it troubles me how much it really changes the real scale and message of the protest.
  These people, paid by police or not, do not represent the masses.
- I mean, if cops are encouraging people to be violent against themselves, then good for them, I guess.
  This whole "It's anarchists' fault that the cops decided to be violent toward people, and are therefore ruining our Peaceful Protest™," is gross and reactionary and extremely tainted by liberalism, TBH. It doesn't matter what excuses cops drum up to be violent; that is ALWAYS on them.
  You should be ashamed of yourself.
  
  It's not the anarchists' (not really anarchists, but probably a mixed group of ideologies as well as infiltrators) fault that cops will be pigs and attack the people, but it is their fault that they decide to do that in the middle of the largest protest in decades, where there are kids, old people, disabled people, sick or vulnerable people, that only wanted to participate in a peaceful protest.
  You want to throw rocks and molotovs at the cops (or, to be precise, at a safe distance away from the cops), power to you and I wish you better aim in the future. But choose a time and place that doesn't endanger thousands of people whose opinion you did not care to ask.
  
  If the liberal peace police want to ensure the safety of vulnerable individuals, they should instead honor diverse tactics like anarchist organizers literally always do: by managing risk levels and acting to protect and have solidarity with all participants. You create zones away from the front lines, and act to make the vulnerable people (or anyone who doesn't want to engage with violence) even safer by separating them from the front lines by people who ARE willing to take greater risk. Literally a peacenik protest surrounded by and directly exposed to cops is far, far, FAR less safe than when risk-adverse participants have a buffer zone of community defense. Because the former get their shit kicked in when the cops choose to use violence, whether or not there are defenders between them and the cops.
  No, it is not those who violently resist the (inherently violent) police who are at fault if cops send agent provocateurs, it is not their fault if the cops choose some other excuse to become violent whenever and wherever they will, and it is not either just agent provocateurs or "outside agitators" (or even ideologically committed anarchists) who choose to do more than wave signs, actually.
  Again, you are promoting both liberal propaganda that serves to disempower individual and community autonomy, and also trying to infantilize and make this into a sectarian issue. You're both wrong and reactionary, and you need to fuck off and/or rethink how you talk about these things. Been through this for a full fucking year of liberal reaction during BLM, not to mention countless other times both before and after. Don't need it from supposed "comrades" on Hexbear. It's not a "Western leftists" issue. It's a leftists dealing with liberals issue, and it occurs globally.
  
  If the liberal peace police want to ensure the safety of vulnerable individuals, they should instead honor diverse tactics like anarchist organizers literally always do: by managing risk levels and acting to protect and have solidarity with all participants. You create zones away from the front lines, and act to make the vulnerable people (or anyone who doesn't want to engage with violence) even safer by separating them from the front lines by people who ARE willing to take greater risk.
  I think we're talking about different things here, because NONE of this happened, not even a little. This literally happened right next to people who had no idea what was about to unfold next to them and could do nothing to escape faster because of the number of people trapped there.

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