In Athens, from Syntagma Square in the city centre, Martin Thomas went to the Anti-Racist Festival, a now-traditional annual gathering of the left in a park further from the centre.
When he arrived at 7pm - a bit later than the time he'd promised to activists he was meeting, because earlier discussions had run a bit late - the festival seemed scanty, with many stalls not yet set up and only a few people around. He left at 12:30am because the comrade (from OKDE) putting him up overnight and offering a lift on his motorbike was leaving. (Motorbikes are the most common form of transport for not-very-well-off Greeks, although public transport in Thessaloniki and Athens is good. Greece has the highest rate of road-traffic deaths in Europe outside some of the ex-Stalinist states, more than three times the EU's lowest rates in Sweden and the UK).
By 12:30am others were leaving too, but the event was near its peak. Many thousands were gathered round the music stage, and for the most part much younger than the crowds that left-wing events in Britain usually get. Around each of the stalls in the corner of the park allocated to the revolutionary socialist organisations were gathered half a dozen or a dozen people (again, mostly young, except maybe at the OKDE-Spartakos stall), eating, drinking, and chatting. The Greek word equivalent to the English "comrade" is "syntrophos", literally, one who eats together.
The stall of the Trotskyist organisation OKDE (to be distinguished from OKDE-Spartakos) had a better display of books than the others, and the OKDE members were alert and energetic. At one point they fanned out across the festival to collect money for an industrial dispute which OKDE is working round, at Hatzis bakery. Distracted from time to time by tasks of organising the stall, or by mobile phone calls, an OKDE organiser, Sofia Theodoropoulou, spoke to Martin Thomas.
She said:
There is no major change in our activities before and after the election. The major issue is what the result of the election means, and how we explain it.
We interpret the electoral result as a consequence of the two years of consecutive social battles in workplaces and neighbourhoods and in the city squares.
Huge social and political movements and changes have taken place in the Greek working class and youth. All those changes have been expressed in the election result.
It is a huge turn to the left. It means that the majority of Greek society will wage even tougher fights in the months to come.
The Syriza result expresses the turn to the left. Yet it doesn't mean that the masses are dedicated to the programme of Syriza or to reformism. People are looking for answers.
The left turn means more power for the movement, more people ready to be mobilised, more people politically interested in several different programmes and answers and open to revolutionary answers even if they voted for a reformist party like Syriza.
As regards the bourgeois parties, the 17 June result is a little bit different from 6 May, and has made it possible for New Democracy to build a bourgeois coalition government. But New Democracy did not attract new forces. It just gathered together the support of several smaller bourgeois pro-memorandum parties that had stood separately on 6 May.
With Syriza, it was not just that they took support transferred from Antarsya or other groups of the far left. They also gained forces from other parties.
Despite the fact that the whole Greek, European, and global bourgeois class - from Obama to the Chinese leaders - tried to blackmail the Greek working class not to vote for the anti-memorandum programme, Syriza managed not only to assemble the previous voters of the left on 6 May but also to increase the left percentage.
The Greek working class has understood that the blackmail - if you say no to the memorandum, you say no to the European Union, and then you will be bankrupt - is not true. They understand that bankruptcy is what is happening right here and right now in our everyday lives. They do not accept the blackmail.
Politically, the Greek working class is becoming more mature. It is beginning to put into question what the European Union is, and what the European Union programme stands for. Although Syriza defends the EU as a totality, still, as far as working-class voters are concerned, we understand that they have started putting the euro and the European Union into question.
Many people say that the issue is to save our lives, our jobs, our standards of living, our schools, our hospitals, and that comes first. The European Union and the euro come second. If the European Union and the euro cannot guarantee those things, they are worthless for us. They understand that if we say no to the memorandum, then most likely we will be expelled from the EU, and still they stand for that no.
Our effort is to build a revolutionary Marxist party, which means to strengthen a revolutionary Marxist current in a united workers' movement.
We do not build separate trade unions. We stand for united trade unions. We stand for united committees in neighbourhoods, united strikes and marches, but in that united movement we build a strong current of revolutionary Marxists.
We spend a lot of our time and effort on the self-organisation of the workers' movement and the youth. We build new trade unions where there are no unions, for example in most of the private sector. We reform trade unions where they have become dormant due to social-democratic or reformist leadership.
We build committes in the neighbourhoods under the slogan "Cancel the Debt! Reject the Memorandum!", and with the duty to intervene wherever there are social problems arising at local level from the memorandum, for example closing a school or a hospital.
We also work for the self-organisation of the unemployed. We intervene for the right for free public transport and so on.
On the ideological and political level, we have our publications. Our paper is monthly and will be fortnightly from January 2013. We have published many books and pamphlets. And we organise Marxist schools.
OKDE has grown in the last six months by 50%, and in the last year and a half it has doubled. Everyone has grown, of course!
Antarsya, let's say? Of course they have strengthened themselves. It is the social situation. But they have not managed themselves to strengthen themselves in a significant way because of the problems of their policy.
In the unions, first of all we form trade unions [i.e. first-level unions, organisations in workplaces or firms]. In the private sector, 90% of workers are not organised.
For example, I work in Vodafone, a major firm with 2500 workers. There was no union at all. One was started from scratch. Now there are 550 members. [See http://www.pasevodafone.gr/index_en.php].
The second thing to do is inform our workmates, with assemblies, with local meetings, and so on, about their rights and the political situation. Every second week we have an assembly or a local meeting.
When we have incidents of lay-offs, we start mobilising our workmates, which means calling an assembly, deciding to have a strike, closing the firm during the strike, distributing leaflets to workmates but also in society, on the streets and so on. And we have managed to stop some layoffs. We have got a collective contract, which did not exist before.
The main industrial areas in which we are active in Athens are mobile telecommunications, a metalworking factory, Carrefour supermarkets, education (public and private). Of course we are also active with the unemployed.
In some union elections in recent months, Pasok have not even managed to put up candidates. I think more or less every left force can gain influence in the coming union elections. Ordinary workers who up to now were influenced by Pasok in the unions will now, even though they vote for Syriza, be open to new political ideas, programmes, and solutions.
Of course, Syriza will gain. Any left force which has an intervention in the working class and the trade unions will gain.
If we as revolutionary Marxists prove ourselves able to apply our programme in practice, we can gain the leadership of more trade unions than we have now.
There are a lot of new unions. Our organisation alone has built, in the last years, five or six new unions. In Athens there are maybe 30 new trade unions, in several sectors.
But the federation [of unions] in Athens is almost dead. Since we had our elections last October, and elected our representatives [from the first-level unions] to the Athens federation, we have been calling for a meeting of the federation, but there has been no meeting.
There isn't a lot going on at the level. The only thing is that when the movement pushes them very hard, they call a strike. They don't organise for the strike, or prepare the strike.
On the initiative of the representatives of the first-level unions themselves, without any help from the federation, if in Athens for example we have a big strike, we call all the first-level trade unions for a common meeting, or at least all with whom we have contact. This is informal.
It is not constant. It happens whenever there is an open front - a certain problem, a certain fight, as a basis. In the last year I have participated in about seven meetings of that sort. About ten to twelve trade unions participate. About thirty people. It depends. In large part the same people each time. People from Syriza, anarchists, Antarsya...
To call a strike in our firm, we have an assembly of the trade union which decides on the strike. Then we send a formal notice to the bosses. The decision depends only on the vote in the firm.
If it's a strike over several different unions, then only the federation can decide.
In Vodafone, we have different workplaces. But the assembly is an assembly of all the workers in the firm. The union pays the money for workers from outside Athens to travel to take part in the assembly if they want to. We call the assemblies at times when workers can participate.
We always prepare our assemblies. Two weeks before we go to every town where there are Vodafone workers, and we go through the offices distributing trade-union leaflets. We organise local discussions - five people here, five people there.
We do local assemblies, in Thessaloniki, for example. And then we go to the final common assembly which decides on a strike.
When we had a strike a few weeks ago for the collective contract, we had two or three different assemblies and 30 or 40 local discussions. About 200 to 250 workers participated in those meetings. The final assembly had about 50 or 60 workers. Although there may be few members in the final assembly, many more workers participate in the discussion.
It's not like that in all unions. Similar work is done in about ten trade unions in Athens, I think.
But strikes in education - they are not organised at all. The federation calls for a strike, and anyone who has the political sense tries to go from school to school to discuss it, but it is not organised centrally.
We have picket lines in every strike. Most unions have picket lines.
The strike covers all the workers in the firm, whether they are union members or not. Over the last two or three years, we have almost never had incidents on the picket lines of workers trying to go in.
In education, I think there are never picket lines. In big strikes, 80% will go on strike. In others, less.
