The first people we spoke to about the rise of the Golden Dawn neo-Nazis were Vicky Karafoulidou and Yannis Karliampos, in the Syriza office in Thessaloniki.
They stressed that they could not speak as official and accredited Syriza representatives, but they 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.
They reckoned racism in Thessaloniki as 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.
Later, Miltos Ikonomou spoke to us more officially, from Syriza in Thessaloniki.
"It is not enough to make campaigns against the fascists. Here in Thessaloniki the problem is relatively small, but it is worse 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. We are all citizens, with the same problems.
"Golden Dawn is strong in some very poor neighbourhoods. There were people who voted Golden Dawn in the first [May] election, and Syriza in the second [June]. The problem is that we are absent from those neighbourhoods. We have to explain that Golden Dawn are killers, neo-Nazis".
But people know Golden Dawn is violent? They saw the attack on TV by a Golden Dawn leader on two left-wing women MPs?
"There are people who said the attack was good, because those women had been very aggressive. But Golden Dawn is not very deeply embedded in Greek society. Greek people have very deep memories from World War Two [when Greece was under Nazi occupation].
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 that Golden Dawn is "a real problem, an product of the crisis". It has rallied "a layer of the population - older people who supported the dictatorship - also some youth, and scared petty-bourgeois".
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 self-defence of the movement. But that starts not with Golden Dawn but with the squares movement. 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 [where, by all accounts, Golden Dawn is a bigger problem than in Thessaloniki], the main thing is not the anarchist actions featured in the media, but activity in the unions and communities.
"There are some committees, like Popular Assemblies, in Athens, we want to extend that. OKDE also organises to protect its own contingents on demonstrations.
"Discussion with other organisations is difficult. 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".
Sofia, from OKDE in Athens, seemed to oppose the very idea of anti-fascist united fronts, but we think there may be crossed wires or miscommunication there.
She said that whenever Golden Dawn makes an attack, left forces in the neighbourhood gather to initiate a protest, with some hundreds of people from the local community.
For example, there had been a march the day before we spoke, on 5 July, with several hundred people.
With these actions, it is not only an issue of the left, but also mobilises the local community.
"Apart from that, there is so far no central political initiative of the left organisations against fascism.
"Those are the facts. Now I will tell you our position. We are not for a left anti-fascist front. We not for any kind of popular front. We believe that common initiatives, united initiatives, in the movement, for a march or a strike or a demonstration, are one issue. We support those and think those are completely necessary.
"But on the political issue we think there is a huge distance between the reformist left and the revolutionary left. In that sense we are firmly against any kind of political unity of reformists and revolutionary Marxists, against fascism. We think that such left unity, or such popular fronts, are one more step to the defeat of the movement, to the defeat of our socialist goal, and to the defeat of the perspective of the revolution".
So you're opposed to setting up committees in districts, not just to protest after Golden Dawn attacks, but to defend local communities against those attacks?
"Any kind of self-organising in the movement - committee, trade union, march, demonstration, strike - should be united, and we support that unity. That is one thing. In that united movement the current of the revolutionary Marxists should be distinct, with the whole of our programme, with the whole of our criticism of the European Union, with the whole of our criticism of left front government and their results - with Rifondazione in Italy, with the left bloc in Chile in 1973. There is a need for the separate political organisation of the revolutionary Marxists".
So, do any anti-fascist committees exist? "I didn't speak about anti-fascist committees. I talked about committees for cancelling the debt, against the memorandum, against the results of the crisis in total, not only fascism. We do not have a front only against the fascists. We have a front against the social democracy of Pasok and against the bourgeois class as a total, not only the fascists.
"The roots of Golden Dawn come from Pasok and New Democracy. Our front is against the bourgeois class as a total. There is no social democracy as in the 1920s. The recent social democracy of Pasok is a bourgeois neo-liberal party of the European Union, of the memorandum, of poverty, of wars. It is not a social democracy of the 1920s".
What about Syriza? "Syriza, of course, is not a bourgeois party. It is a workers' party, but a reformist one. Of course, nowadays, due to the deep capitalist crisis there is no room left for social-democratic policies - if you won't confront the capitalist system as a total, you cannot guarantee to keep schools and hospitals open - there is no political room for gaining some measures for the rights of the workers - and in that sense Syriza is condemned to prove itself inadequate. It cannot put its social programme into practice.
"If Syriza tries to put its social programme into practice, since it does not confront the capitalist European Union and capitalism itself, it will have to give up its social programme in order to live with capitalism".
How big a threat did Sofia think Golden Dawn is? "It depends on the future of the movement. Nowadays the major current is not the fascist current. The major current in the working class is towards the left, towards struggles, towards demonstrations, towards left policies.
"We have a major duty to help this movement to self-organise, and to build a revolutionary current in this movement, so that we can move from the strikes and demonstrations to a general strike, and from a general strike to a continuous general strike, and after that prepare the socialist revolution in our country. That is our duty.
"If we are defeated in that duty, then of course fascism will strengthen itself. But nowadays that is not the main issue. Golden Dawn, and fascism in general, will not become the majority in Greek society unless we are defeated in social struggles. Now is the time of the social struggle. If we do not fulfill our duty to bring it to victory, then it will be the time of Golden Dawn and fascism".
Discussions with OKDE members in Thessaloniki suggest that (although Sofia's English was generally very good) there were some crossed wires here, some language-gap problem. Spiros and Stefanos, in Thessaloniki, said that OKDE is in favour of united-front anti-fascist defence groups. The problem is that there is not, so far, a consensus for forming them, and OKDE cannot form united fronts by itself.
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."
Nikos seemed to suggest that an "offensive" strategy against the fascists would rely in part on "exposing" them:
"Golden Dawn stood in the May elections as an "anti-system" party. In the June election, a large part of the Independent Greeks and LAOS [two more established right-nationalist parties] voted for Golden Dawn. So this segment of Golden Dawn's vote is more consciously fascist. In the wake of the election there is a periphery of conscious racists around Golden Dawn - racists, but not necessarily fascists. If they are exposed as not being really "anti-system", and if their cinal activities - stabbing people and so on - are exposed, their broader support will waver."
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 fail 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:
"The struggle inside Syriza is currently at a pitive stage. People are hesitating and afraid. 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. Whereas I would say that roughly a third of Greeks agree in some way with their racist ideas, one in six young Greek men vote for Golden Dawn. 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"."
To these issues, political struggle and self-organisation are the way to guard against Golden Dawn's rise and hopefully sweep them away. But the issue of self-defence is, for Kokkino, particularly acute:
"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."
Comrades from the Maoist organisation ARAN also expressed their views on Golden Dawn:
"There are people who voted for Golden Dawn who are not necessarily fascists in a conscious way. But as Golden Dawn held their 7% in the second round, this shows that many Greeks believe that the main problem is foreign workers.
"We want to show people that Golden Dawn is not anti-systemic but a part of the capitalist system.
"After the elections, they will start to his Communists and the left. We want to prevent Golden Dawn from infecting our neighbourhoods. In order to do this we must develop self-organisation in neighbourhoods. Golden Dawn have a strategy of taking over neighbourhoods one at a time. The issue with Golden Dawn will be solved in the streets if the left can provide leadership to the working class and the poor. That will defeat Golden Dawn.
"As for physical self-defence, we disagree with SEK that you can deal with the issue by appealing to the state. In fact, that would help Golden Dawn's "anti-system" marketing strategy.
"Organising physical self-defence is not separate from the question of working-class self-organisation in the assemblies. We believe that we should take initiatives to form an anti-fascist f which is led by the left and is accepted, and participated in, by the working class through unions and assemblies. Self-defence is beginning to be discussed at this level.
"Winning left policies in the movement is the best way to resolve the problem. In neighbourhoods where Golden Dawn are strong there is a myth about them helping grandmothers across the road. We must dispel these myths, and organise assemblies in areas where Golden Dawn are strong."
Giannis from Xekinima said: "Golden Dawn got the same vote in June as in May, 7%, but three fewer MPs. 440,000 people voted for Golden Dawn, but they are not all fascists. They voted Golden Dawn because they are disgusted with the political system, and the left, parliamentary and non-parliamentary, failed to convince them.
"Golden Dawn will do well in the polls for a long time. It must be seriously confed with state rules.
"A Golden Dawn leader said that after the election they would go into hospitals, see if there were any immigrant patients there, and throw out any they found and put Greeks there.
"Theoretically, only Greek citizens or legal migrants should be in hospitals, but doctors don't apply that rule. But the state could say that Golden Dawn people raiding hospitals were acting illegally and should be charged.
"That should be combined with movement action. I don't mean fascist-hunting: that would just make them stronger. But we have to have teams ready in case Golden Dawn carries out actions".
We rehearsed the argument against demanding state bans on fascists: that the bans always turn out fictitious or semi-fictitious, and posed in terms that enable them to be used, and more effectively, to suppress left-wing mobilisations.
Giannis didn't disagree, but said: "All anti-fascist actions in the past have failed. SEK wanted a march in a Golden Dawn area in Athens, but the local people said no. If they went on a march, Golden Dawn would see them and kill them.
"If we had good public services, we wouldn't have Golden Dawn. If there were a state, even a bourgeois state, functioning well, then I don't think Golden Dawn would survive".
Talking, back in Britain, with Theodora Polenta, Solidarity's main writer on Greece, who reads the Greek press regularly, we found she has a different picture. In her observation, Xekinima's strongest point is its sharp and militant stand against Golden Dawn and in defence of immigrants. Its paper has carried exceptionally good exposures.
Maybe Xekinima has some activists in Athens who are exceptionally committed to anti-racist activity, and write well; but in Thessaloniki, where Golden Dawn is not so strong, Xekinima tends to put more stress on legal action and social agitation to answer Golden Dawn? We don't know.
