Vicky Karafoulidou and Yannis Karliampos, Syriza members, spoke to us in a personal capacity and told us that Golden Dawn is quite strong in Thessaloniki, especially in the peripheral areas of the city where people have never seen an African or Asian immigrant.
Racism in Thessaloniki is not quite as bad as in Athens, but even in Thessaloniki immigrant workers are too scared to take part in neighbourhood assemblies, for example.
Albanian and Russian immigrants to Greece, from the 1990s, have become quite well-integrated; but then many of them are racist towards to the more newly-arrived African and Asian immigrants.
Syriza, said Vicky and Yannis, is for "social defence" against fascism, not "physical defence". Yes, they would support protecting immigrants - and also prostitutes, sometimes also targeted by the fascists - against Golden Dawn attacks, but they didn't want to get into the sort of activity done in Athens by anarchist groups who dedicate themselves to physical combat with the fascists over the heads of the local communities.
Miltos Ikonomou spoke to us more officially, from Syriza in Thessaloniki.
"[In Athens] we have to go into the neighbourhoods, and tell people the problem is not immigrants. It is the government, poverty and so on. We have the same problems as the immigrants.
"Golden Dawn is strong in some very poor neighbourhoods. The problem is that we are absent from those neighbourhoods. We have to explain that Golden Dawn are killers, neo-Nazis".
And of what happened to the Jews? (Thessaloniki is the only city in the world known to have had a Jewish majority for many hundreds of years of the modern era, from about 1500 to World War Two. Few Jews remain there after the Nazi occupation of Greece in World War Two).
"The young people of Thessalonik think that's a big problem. Not just the left, all the people!"
Should the left organise community self-defence against the fascists?
"No. I think that's a mistake. It's wrong to get involved in a street fight with these killers".
But if the fascists attacked the Syriza office, for example?
"That's another case. We are against making counter-demonstrations. Those will make people think we and Golden Dawn are the same. But if it's necessary, yes, we can defend our offices and the immigrants".
Spiros, from OKDE in Thessaloniki, said Golden Dawn is "brutal against immigrants", but what Golden Dawn does against immigrants "is a small percentage of what the police and the state do.
" We want to build self-defence committees against the police, against the army, and against Golden Dawn, but Golden Dawn is the easy part. We want to build solidarity of Greeks and immigrants.
"It is not about throwing stones and bottles, but about solid organisation. In Athens, the main thing is not the anarchist actions featured in the media, but activity in the unions and communities.
" SEK demands that the state outlaws Golden Dawn. Antarsya has no clear view. There is one other group which has a similar position to OKDE, the Network of Social Rights, which came from a split in OKDE in the 1970s and is now in Syriza".
Nikos from DEA said that the issue of fighting fascism was a component of the left's general political tasks within the popular movement and should be understood in that way rather than as a special separate activity.
"The ideological struggle comes first. Neither KKE nor Synaspysmos have taken this seriously. There is a need for a clear statement that all migrants should be legalised, that they are not the problem but that their illegality is the problem.
"If you build self-organisation in the neighbourhoods then the question of self-defence will arise naturally. There is already a move to develop a network of people to physically defend meetings, rallies and so on. So, if you call a rally and 20 fascists turn up, then you will need some people who know what they are doing, otherwise a big rally could simply be broken up. So, many people in Syriza want to see the development of such a mechanism.
"However, such a mechanism would be purely defensive - not offensive. The problem is political, to do with the broad spectrum of people who organise around the fascists, not the core."
I asked Nikos what he thought of the demand recently raised by the SEK that the state should ban Golden Dawn. In the UK, Workers' Liberty opposed a similar call raised by the SWP-controlled Unite Against Fascism campaign, for the government to ban an EDL march in East London - because we say that state repression used against the right can just as easily turn on the left. As we predicted, the ban on the EDL march in East London turned into a more general ban on all protests over a wide area for a number of months.
Nikos was vague in his answer. He said Workers' Liberty's point of view was "interesting", but that calling on the state to ban the fascists was "potentially useful as when the state fails to ban them, that will expose to people the collaboration of the police with the fascists". He said that DEA's slogan was that the offices of Golden Dawn "should be closed" but they were deliberately ambiguous as to who should close them.
For Kokkino, the question had less to do with "exposing" Golden Dawn and more to do with the political struggle to ensure that Syriza was able to fulfill the tasks that the movement had entrusted it with. Xaris explained that:
If Syriza cannot protect people against the state, the police and the fascists, then Syriza will fall from 27% to 2.7%. People want radical solutions and if Syriza cannot provide them, the fascists will... What is particularly dangerous is that Golden Dawn is a party of young men. A common saying among young people is, "who should I vote for, Syriza or Golden Dawn? There is no-one in between.
"Golden Dawn is already intensively organising solidarity food distribution, volunteer healthcare provision, home help for the elderly and so on - but all for "Greeks only"."
"The police's collaboration with Golden Dawn is clear. There are two police unions - one is far right, the other is extreme far right. Almost all the police special forces are in the extreme far right union. Whereas 50% of the police vote fascists, I doubt if 3% of police vote Syriza. They can be no help, no defence.
"We need to fight the facists ourselves - with knives, and maybe soon, with guns. The philosopher of Golden Dawn, Plevris, says that Hitler was wrong because he did not kill all the Jews, and that Golden Dawn can do it better and kill them all.
“They want to kill all the Communists, Egyptians, migrants and so on. If things go badly, perhaps people like us will have to get a passport and flee abroad."
• Abridged from here
