Building solidarity at the grassroots in Greece

ONE OF the goals I had during this trip to the U.S. was to learn about social movements in this country, because as difficult as it is for you to learn about what is really happening in Greece, the same goes for us.

Despite the fact that I had heard two or three years ago about the teachers' strike in Chicago, it was a detail among the many things I was preoccupied with, and it quickly faded in my memory. When I learned how important it was for people in this city, this memory re-emerged.

In the fall of 2012, when we were setting up Solidarity For All, I was contacted by an American activist in New York to see if I could talk to someone in the secondary education trade union in Greece to issue a solidarity message for the Chicago teachers' strike. I always wondered whether the message of solidarity we sent was received, because it had to pass through the hands of three or four different people before reaching its final destination.

When I met Stavroula [one of the organizers of the Chicago event], who was involved in the international solidarity effort around the teachers' strike, she informed me that the message indeed was communicated to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). I was glad, because now that I've heard what Al [Ramirez] said, the linkage between our struggles is even more striking. The process and aims that [Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators within the CTU] set for themselves resemble in key respects the same demands and movements that the Greek people have organized in their effort to confront the economic crisis, austerity measures, bailouts and restructuring programs.

During the last two days in this city, I have learned about the deep cuts that you have experienced, again very similar to what we have experienced in Greece. What is missing in the Chicago case is something that the people of Detroit and the people of Greece have experienced--namely, the intervention of "extra-democratic" institutions, like the "troika" of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Common Bank (ECB) and the European Union (EU), which decide the future of a country, the future of a society and the future of a people.

I think this played a big role in spurring people to rise up and demand real democracy and their sovereignty and to be in charge of what is happening to them. What we are experiencing in Greece more deeply is the complete de-legitimization of the two-party political establishment that was imposed after the dictatorship ended in 1974.

THIS CAME about as the result of a political struggle waged as an initiative of the Greek people, and not of any political party or a trade union. The discourse among the established political organizations, whoever they are, be it a left political party or an anarchist group or whatever, during the first years of the crisis and the troika's "state of emergency" was: Let's go and strike. Indeed, we had 30 general strikes in less than three years. Let's mobilize in order to block the cuts to our pensions, to block the closures of schools and hospitals, to defend our jobs, and so forth.

But the people who intervened en masse in the hundreds of thousands and took the streets and squares of Greece had a different agenda. They said we wanted to oust the Troika, finish the two-party political system and topple the government. The counterargument of the left at that time was: "If we bring them down, who is going to replace them?"

This was a very defensive position given that the Greek people were going to the heart of the matter. They understood that they had the political will to change matters and to shoulder the responsibility to do so--not only to block the generation of capital in their workplace, but to connect all these things by creating a collective desire to organize, so that the people could establish their own methods and processes of participation, decision-making and potentially their own power. This is how the grassroots solidarity movement emerged from the occupation of the squares movement in 2011.

The squares occupation movement was part of a sequence of movements that began with the Arab Spring in early 2011, the rise of the Spanish and Greek indignados in the summer of 2011, Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011 and Turkey's Taksim Square uprising and the Brazilian movement in 2013.

These movements introduced a new type of politics that, in the same way that CORE spoke about clarity and the right of members to take over, was about real democracy being exactly what we wanted: transparency; for somebody to be accountable and to pay for what is going on; for people to decide their own futures; to maintain their sovereignty; and then through this kind of direct democracy and open process to decide what to do about the problems they had to confront.

In this way, the people created a common space, a common "agora" [gathering place] in which everyone was equal to everyone else, a horizontal space where they circumvented what I call the "specialists of resistance." The initial call for participating in the Syntagma square was: Come with your friends and families to discuss what concerns us and what we want to do about it, but please don't come with your party or union banners, and we don't want violence.

This kind of bypassing of the specialists of resistance created a level playing field for everyone to participate. The majority of the left and the radical movements in Greece did not like this, because they thought they knew best how to do all this stuff. But in reality, this movement played a very important role in popularizing the idea of self-organization and making very tangible to people a different way of making decisions and getting things done.

IT WAS also a big point of contention in the political struggle because the parliament had to vote on the bailout readjustment programs. After the Greek parliament voted to accept them, the movement turned to the neighborhoods and undertook a campaign to stop the imposition of an extra household tax--a form of capital tax connected to each household's electricity bill. Since it was a part of the electricity bill, if you didn't pay, you would have your electricity cut.

The movement took the government to court and won a ruling that the tax had to be disconnected from the electricity bill. At the same time, we organized a collective refusal to pay this tax. We found ways to use ATMs to pay only the electricity bills without paying the tax, and we blocked the power company from cutting the electricity to people's homes. Or if they managed to cut the supply, then we had people who would go and reconnect it, even though it was illegal.

This was the transition towards building other solidarity campaigns based on the needs of people in the neighborhoods. We organized solidarity health clinics and solidarity pharmacies. We had solidarity food banks, soup kitchens and the "middleman movement" to directly connect primary producers and farmers with urban dwellers in order to bypass the official market system. This allowed farmers to make more income and consumers to spend less for the same or better quality products.

We had legal support for people who had problems with their debt, a movement that developed into the anti-foreclosures campaign. We developed solidarity structures within workplaces, because trade unions in Greece did not support mechanisms for their membership. In the U.S., one in eight people aren't covered by the health system; in Greece, where five years ago, more people had health care coverage than in the U.S., now one in three people do not have coverage.

We did international work in solidarity with immigrants. This is important to highlight because some of the ideas for solidarity structures came from the antiracist movement that had been built in support of undocumented immigrants, who were excluded from the provision of the welfare system. Lessons learned in that regard became very useful at a time when almost a third of the population is excluded from the public health system.

All of the structures and creativity deployed to help undocumented people is now useful for Greek citizens who are in need of welfare provisions that are shrinking. This movement came out of an apolitical struggle waged by the Greek people, and it is a movement based in necessity. It simply needed to be done. It was a precondition in order to help people to stand on their own feet--to fight back and to continue fighting back.

While neoliberalism sought to destroy the social fabric, this movement was a different way of: 1) grounding the political struggle on the social level; and 2) building relationships and trust among those people wanting to change the system and those people deeply disillusioned by those they had trusted for years, in the political realm and beyond. We had to start by building this other kind of social relationship.

In that sense, we say that we are building a different kind of neighborhood. The aim of these solidarity structures is not only to provide the concrete means to meet the needs of the people, but to create spaces that engage people in need in the kind of practice in which we jointly decide what to do and how to engage people in becoming part of building a solution.

For that reason, these structures are organized through assemblies, various working groups and horizontal decision-making processes. The primary aim is how to reach people in need and how to make them part of the solidarity movement.

From the outset, this movement has tried to avoid using money. This is for many reasons, but it is not because we are the kind of utopians who want a world without money. This came out of necessity. When we started this movement out of the squares movement, people wanted to donate money to us. But initially, we did not trust each other enough to deal with money, so instead we wrote up a list of what we needed and told people to bring us what was on the list.

It also forces donors to be a part of this solidarity action and not merely a philanthropist, to involve themselves in joint activity. In order to break down these differences, we had to organize ourselves differently. A plumber, for example, might not be useful in a solidarity health clinic, but may help fix another problem that a poor person--or even a person who's not so poor--may have.

THIS KIND of collective organization and practice changed the way that we do things, and it changed in a very profound way the consciousness of people. The collection and redistribution of medicine is an example of the Greek solidarity movement's most successful campaigns. One consequence of the crisis was a deep cut in funding for hospitals and a shortage of medication, and a lot of people lost their access to public health care services.

Previously in Greece, we suffered from the over-prescription of drugs by doctors who benefit from their cozy relationship with big pharmaceutical corporations, so we have a lot of medicine in our freezers. This campaign unearthed all these hidden resources.

The solidarity clinics began to collect all this prescription medications and then redistribute them to people excluded from the public health care system. It was so successful that the solidarity clinics began providing medicine to the public hospitals! The previous government, which had a fascist as the head of the public health system, ordered the public hospitals to not accept this medicine, but we smuggled it in anyway, of course.

But our success went beyond the distribution of desperately needed medication--this success created a different kind of consciousness. The people who took their medication from the solidarity clinics, when they no longer needed the medicine, would return what they still had to the solidarity clinics. This didn't happen in the public health care system.

To be sure, we continue to demand and fight for universal access to public health care, but the public health care system doesn't break down the customary assumption that the doctor gives you the medicine in this impersonal relationship, and you keep the medication because it belongs to you. But now, in a solidarity clinic, the doctors speak with you, they learn that this guy who doesn't have money to pay for medication also has his electricity cut off, or he has kids and does not have money to buy school supplies for them.

This creates a different kind of social relationship, through which it's possible to develop a different idea of what it means to self-organize health care, in which medicine moves from a public good to a common good that belongs to the community, that belongs to everyone. So people who may not know the first thing about Marxism see this kind of social organization firsthand, and this consciousness through ongoing practice can then be generalized into policies.

This movement is not meant to provide a substitute for what the state or the public system needs to provide. We want the state to politically safeguard our common properties, but we also want to change how the structures of public welfare systems work by democratizing and opening up spaces where members of the community can have a say and take matters into their own hands.

This, in the larger political perspective of the current struggle to build alternatives, also has a transformative potential: it can show how a society can learn to organize itself, and if we allow our imagination to flow more freely, it might even teach us something about how this could look in a post-capitalist society. In that sense, this movement is important because it connects individual needs with a collective solution, and at the same time, it breaks down the dichotomy between social movements, political representation and the struggle for political power. It reformulates how we have to think about these issues.

I want to briefly give an outline of this movement and what its potential is. I want to emphasize that Solidarity For All does not underestimate the importance of the political struggle and of overthrowing a political regime in order to create the conditions for the generalization of its practices. Because without this, the best we can end up with is a few pockets that are better off within a generalized system of inequality and injustice. In that sense, we don't want to be an oppositional subcultural force. We want to be the mainstream, and that makes all the difference.

I HAVE been active since the mid-1980s and have participated in more traditional left politics and activism, but I would not be able to say what I am telling you now without the mobilization of the Greek people, who took matters in their own hands and opened up new horizons and perspectives. It's impossible to communicate how transformative this experience has been if you haven't lived through it.

Solidarity For All was created in 2012, after the Greek people had already gone into motion, because we identified a need. This movement started as a mutation of the people's assemblies and the squares occupation movement in a spontaneous and organic way that developed according to whatever was the focus of the political struggle.

But at the same time, each area of work--the health clinics, the food banks, the workplace efforts--was disconnected from the rest. So we said we had to give the movement power and visibility. The first thing we did was create a map of Greece with each solidarity structure that existed at the time--there were about 180 solidarity structures. By mapping this out and holding assemblies in Athens in September and October of 2012, it changed in the minds of the people how they thought about themselves.

They realized they were a part of a larger movement that had a political potential. Since then, we've tried to facilitate the creation of common spaces and common tools so that the movement can come together and develop its own campaigns and structures of coordination. So if people in one working group decide on a particular campaign through an assembly that brings together various solidarity groups on a regional basis, we will stand with them and help them to actualize these plans. So we have a decentralized logic.

At the same time that we have an overview of this movement, we do not coordinate this movement from above. We are not a spokesperson for this movement. We think of ourselves as one of the solidarity structures that has a specific role. We move in the flux of needs and potentials that exist in the space between the solidarity structures that are the real basis of the movement.

This was the need that we identified in order to develop this movement--to serve as a clearinghouse for campaigns underway and to share know-how--and now we have double the number of solidarity groups, nearly 400, throughout Greece. This includes the cooperative economy, such as the factory self-managed by its workers in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece. This was one reason why Solidarity For All was formed and how it came about.

The second reason is SYRIZA. After the 2012 elections that marked a breakthrough for SYRIZA, one of the first decisions of SYRIZA's parliamentarian group was that each SYRIZA member of parliament would donate 10 percent of his or her wage to a solidarity fund that is available to self-organized solidarity structures. So this means that SYRIZA didn't have to develop solidarity structures itself, but it created the means to help the self-organization of people into solidarity structures.

Solidarity For All makes use of this solidarity fund and essentially serves as the liaison organization between the fund and the solidarity structures. At the same time, Solidarity For All--like any solidarity structure--has a weekly assembly where we take all the decisions, practical and political, about this movement and what we are going to do.

The fund itself, which is a nonprofit organization, also has its own decision-making body composed of representatives of the parliamentarian group of SYRIZA and some members of Solidarity For All. We are a minority within this body, but we are trusted by SYRIZA. It took us time to convince the whole of the party that this way of organizing was better than going around and having SYRIZA giving out food, as the fascists for example did in Greece.

I'D LIKE to conclude by saying that the international support that the Greek people have received has been great. There are initiatives and groups to organize solidarity with Greece in many countries around the world, but especially in Europe, where there are dozens, and especially in Germany, which has the majority of those.

Another aspect of this international solidarity is that new practices and structures of solidarity and resistance developed by the Greek people have found parallel organizational and practical expression--for example, with the "marea blanca" (white tide) in Spain or the movement against evictions in Italy or in Ireland with the water. We have tried to establish international networks where we work together on these matters.

The latest development of the Greek solidarity movement is the organization of solidarity campaigns with other peoples in struggle, such as the Palestinian people and the Kurdish people in Rojava. I think it's important not to lose this internationalist perspective because the fight we have in Greece is one that we cannot win alone.

We may be the ones on the front lines, but if we don't have solidarity and there isn't substantial resistance elsewhere, they will be able to unify all the international lenders, the elites and the ruling classes of the world in order to suffocate the alternative to austerity that we are seeking to build.

If they succeed, they will snuff out a tangible example of a different kind of society. They want to crush this prospect precisely because they fear that it could become an example that other people in the world could look to and say to their own governments: "Look, there is another way."

Transcription by Brian Bean