Rebels with a Cause: The December 2008 Greek Youth Movement as the Condensation of Deeper Social and...

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Rebels with a Cause: The December

2008 Greek Youth Movement as the

Condensation of Deeper Social andPolitical Contradictions

PANAGIOTIS SOTIRIS

Abstractijur_949 203..209

The events of December 2008 in Greece represent a turning point in social movementsagainst neoliberalism and capitalist restructuring. They were the result of worseningemployment prospects for young people, the aggressive restructuring of the educationalsystem and concern about the effects of the current economic crisis. The originality of themovement lies in its unique scale, in the expression of a new unity of youth in struggle,in the demand for radical change and in its anti-systemic character. It can be viewed asfurther evidence of the crisis of neoliberal hegemony and as a sign of growing hegemonicinstability in European capitalist social formations. For this reason it poses both atheoretical and a political challenge.

Introduction

The explosion of Greek youth in December 2008 has already secured an important placein the history of modern social movements. This has to do not only with the extent of theunrest, but also with the fact that it seemed like the expression of the deeper socialtensions, political ruptures and ideological displacements facing capitalist social

formations amidst a deepening capitalist crisis. That is why it poses not only atheoretical, but also a political challenge.

The degree of mobilization was unique in modern Greek history. A few examples canattest this: mass demonstrations took place not only in Athens but in almost every cityand town in Greece, for the whole stretch of time up to (and including) New Years Eve;towns that had not experienced a mass rally in years saw clashes with the police; inhundreds of high schools some form of strike or other continued for two weeks; themajority of university campuses were occupied up until the beginning of the Christmasvacation; dozens of police stations all over Greece became the target of student rallies,which often ended in rock-throwing; dozens of local radio stations were briefly occupiedin order for messages of solidarity to be broadcast; the studios of the National Television

Company were likewise briefly occupied in prime time; town halls and other municipalfacilities were occupied and housed mass assemblies; theatrical shows, including apremier at the National Theatre, were interrupted by protesting drama students; morethan 180 bank branches were attacked, many of them totally destroyed, hundreds ofstores, ATMs and traffic lights were smashed. The total cost of the damage is estimatedto have exceeded 1.5 billion euros.

Volume 34.1 March 2010 2039 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2010.00949.x

2010 The Author. Journal Compilation 2010 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by BlackwellPublishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA


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An explosion with deep social roots

In light of the above, it is obvious that the killing of 15-year-old AlexandrosGrigoropoulos by a police officer acted as a catalyst for the expression of various formsof social discontent that had been coming to a head all over Greek society. What has been

described as the strategy of capitalist restructuring and the neoliberal turn of the 1990sand 2000s (Dumnil and Lvy, 2004; Sakellaropoulos and Sotiris, 2004) particularlyaffected young people, both as students and as workers or unemployed.

The deterioration of employment prospects

Despite high growth rates from the mid-1990s up to 2007 (INE GSEE ADEDY,2008), high rates of youth unemployment and underemployment have been a constantfeature of Greek society. According to Eurostat estimates, the unemployment rate ofyoung people (1524) in Greece is 22.3% while the Eu-27 average is 16.7% (Eurostat,2009), while Karamesini (2005: 30) estimated the unemployment rate of young peopleaged 1529 in 2005 at 19.1%. Unemployment is not the sole problem young people facein the labour market. Many of them have to wait many years for stable employment.According to Karamesini (2009: 21) 6 years after graduation one in three highereducation graduates, two in three secondary education graduates and one in threecompulsory education graduates have not found some form of stable employment,despite the help offered by the family as a means of social support (Karamesini, 2005: 5).And those who manage to enter the labour market have to put up with low wages,part-time posts, working off the books and harassment by employers. It is also worthnoting that better qualifications do not necessarily lead to better employment prospects.In the 2024 and 2529 age groups unemployment rates are higher among those withbetter educational qualifications, such as university degrees (Karamesini, 2009: 21),following a trend observed across Southern Europe where leavers from upper secondaryeducation and even higher education have at least equal unemployment rates with theleast qualified (Gangl et al., 2003: 282). A large survey of the employment prospects ofGreek university graduates (Karamesini, 2008) has shown that many of them faceflexible working and/or are obliged to accept positions in fields other than those in whichthey have formal qualifications.

As a result a picture emerges of a unity in difference (Karamesini, 2009: 21) amongGreek youth. Despite the differences in employment and social status between thedifferent segments of youth (especially the division between those who leave school atthe end of compulsory or secondary education, opting for vocational training and earlyentry into the workforce in manual or lower clerical posts, and those continuing to highereducation), the common denominator and the unifying element is the deterioration ofemployment prospects. And this is surely one of the reasons for the reproduction of arather unitary identity for young people in Greece, an aspect that was obvious during theDecember movement.

And this tendency must be put in its broader perspective. Worsening of workconditions, higher unemployment and lower earnings for young people have been aconstant feature of European social reality since the 1980s and 1990s, with youngemployees having a stronger presence in sectors with high employee turnover, temporaryposts and part-time jobs (Lefresne, 2003). It seems as if youth is at the epicentre of theexpansion of precarious forms of labour (Castel, 2006). Whether we choose to seeprecarity as the paradigmatic form of labour under capitalism (Neilson and Rossiter,2008) or not, it is obvious that young people are indeed facing a continuous deterioration

of employment prospects.

The restructuring of education

Educational policy has been a highly politicized issue in Greece and attempts ateducational reform tend to provoke controversy and conflict, mainly because education

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students, the grievances at the basis of their discontent had more to do with thedevelopments within capitalist production than with education, a fact that may alsoexplain the solidarity with, and in some cases participation in, the movement ofimportant segments of the workforce.

This sense of an attack on the youth was also intensified because of the economic

crisis. With the Greek economy sliding into a recession (Bank of Greece, 2009), insharp contrast to the high growth rates plus intense capitalist restructuring witnessedfrom the mid-1990s, households are facing stagnant wages, job insecurity and risingindebtedness, compounded by a policy of strict fiscal austerity. The threat of masslay-offs makes things even worse, as does the Greek governments insistence onimplementing highly unpopular reforms in the pension system and on privatizing state-run companies. It is obvious that the prospect of economic crisis accentuated feelingsof insecurity and was surely a contributing factor to the discontent expressed in theDecember movement.

Reaction to police violence in perspective

That is why seeing the December riots simply as a reaction to police brutality can bemisleading and police violence has to be put in the perspective of the above-mentioneddevelopments. It is true that hostility towards the police has a historical and politicalbackground in Greece, due to the long period of state repression from the defeat of theLeft in the Civil War (19469) up to the period of military rule (196774). It is also truethat police violence has increased in recent years, providing the disciplinary andrepressive aspect of the neoliberal agenda (Belantis, 2008). But the main point to bemade is that police brutality worked as a metonymy for all kinds of systemic socialpressure and violence facing Greek youth today.

The fear of the masses

Opinion polls showed that the majority of the citizenry viewed the December events asa social rebellion (Mavris, 2008). In contrast, most mainstream commentators andthinkers have tried to underestimate the social causes of the December explosion, optinginstead to treat it mainly as a case of political violence and delinquency and as evidenceof a deficient political culture. Nikos Alivizatos (2009) refuses to see the economic crisisand the lack of prospects for young people as causes, lamenting instead the lack ofmodernizing reforms. Thanos Veremis (2008), president of the National Council of

Education, attributes the events to a lack of social responsibility. Stathis Kalyvas (2008)insists that we are dealing with the symptoms of a cultural, not a social problem,attributing the December riots to a culture of political tolerance of civil disobedience.Others (Georgiadou et al., 2008) have insisted on the emergence of a nihilistic andviolent political culture.

These positions are symptomatic of a deep ideological unease regarding thepersistence of elements of radicalism in Greece, originating in the radicalism of the1970s after the fall of the dictatorship, but also fuelled by subsequent waves of protest,especially student protest. This has led to enduring social demands for redistributive

justice, widespread acceptance of the legitimacy of actions such as the occupation ofpublic buildings, especially universities, and a defiant stance against forces of order.

Consequently, for many years, discrediting these enduring representations in the name ofmodernization has been a major preoccupation of mainstream thinkers. NikiforosDiamantouros epitomized this negative attitude towards radicalism when he introducedthe notion of an underdog political culture in Greece which comprises a levellingegalitarianism, a compensatory sense of justice and diffidence towards capitalism and themarket (Diamantouros, 1994).

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The originality of the movement

Seeing the December rebellion of the Greek youth as a mere result of rising insecurity,social tensions, growing inequality and state repression can miss important aspects of itsdynamic. however. It was also a highly original social movement.

For the first time it was not just the student movement but the whole youth movementthat dominated the social scene. The December movement united high school students andyouths from vocational training centres, university students and young workers, middle-class youths and youths facing social exclusion, Greeks and immigrants. It was neither aclassical student movement nor an explosion of disenfranchised socially excluded youth,like the 2005 banlieue riots in France. Both the deterioration of employment prospects andthe restructuring of the educational system provided the material basis for this unity.

The movement accelerated the re-articulation of a collective identity in the Greek youththat comprises struggle, solidarity, hostility towards authority and the traditional politicalscene, and a deeply anti-systemic demand for radical change in all aspects of social life. Itwas a true movement, not a blind social explosion. As Psimitis (2009) showed, the

emergence of a collective identity, the anti-systemic confrontational attitude and therefusal to negotiate, provide ample evidence of the emergence of a social movement.The movement was based on various forms of often informal coordination and

self-organization, and used the internet and new communication technologiesextensively, following the pattern observed in other recent youth movements. The appealof the movement was not limited to students alone, or to left-wing or anarchist militants.It also attracted various segments of the workforce, who found a way to express theirdiscontent, including young workers and unemployed youths, teachers and professors,people in precarious posts doing intellectual jobs. It also acted as a catalyst andaccelerator for all forms of social and political activism, the best example being theimpressive movement of solidarity with Konstantina Kuneva, a Bulgarian janitor who

was attacked and nearly died because of her union activity against precarious labour.The movement had elements of an anti-systemic political orientation. One could sensethis not only in tracts by leftist or anarchist groups but also in the way students expressedtheir rage against what they called the policies that kill our dreams and the popularityof slogans such as down with the government of murderers. Even the mass destructionof banks and retail stores in the centre of Athens on December 8th, was directed mainlyagainst symbols of economic power, and even youths that opted for more peaceful waysto demonstrate experienced rioting as a necessary aspect of a collective effort to makethemselves heard. The political dynamic of the movement, in contrast to othermovements that tended to focus on concrete policy changes, represented a moreprofound demand for radical social change.

However, it can be misleading to treat the movement as the expression of a post-proletarian precariat (Xydakis, 2008), or as the rising of the multitude (Gavriilidis2009) in the sense proposed by Negri, Hardt and Virno (Hardt and Negri, 2000; Virno,2004). Concerns about working conditions, job insecurity and the privatization of socialgoods, demands for better public education and more stable and decent jobs combinedwith a deep distrust of the political establishment make this movement much less anomadic multitude and much more a view in advance of a possible future popularalliance or a potential counter-hegemonic bloc.

Conclusion: hegemonic instability

The erosion of the ability of neoliberalism to function as hegemonic discourse, growingdisenchantment with the market as social regulator, the reversal of any aspirations toupward social mobility not only for working-class strata but also for great segments ofthe new middle-class strata, the new appeal of social protest and collective struggle, haveled to cracks and fractures in the articulation of the neoliberal hegemony, a tendencywitnessed also in other European social formations, France being the first to come to

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mind (Kouvlakis, 2007). The authoritarian turn of the Greek government after theDecember movement, when it resorted to law and order rhetoric and proposals for newanti-riot legislation, accentuates this hegemonic instability.

In this sense, the December rebellion of the Greek youth presents a challenge that isnot only theoretical but also political. And this has to do not only with its scale and

dynamic, but also with its deeply political demand for radical social change. Taking intoconsideration the deepening global economic crisis, one might expect more suchexplosions in other social formations. The insistence of capitalist elites on a fuite enavant tactic of even more flexible labour markets, harsher fiscal austerity and moreprivatizations can only aggravate social tensions and deepen the crisis of the neoliberalhegemony. It is in this sense that the December movement was indeed a picture from thefuture. However the possibility and extent of such a possible crisis of the ruling bloc(Kouvlakis, 2007: 254) will not depend solely on the scale of social discontent butmainly on the degree of re-politicization of the popular masses. This, in its turn, willdepend on the collective elaboration of a true strategic alternative to actually existingcapitalism that will go beyond both fantasizing about a possible left-wing governance

and anti-capitalist verbalism.

Panagiotis Sotiris ([email protected]), Department of Sociology, University of theAegean, H. Trikoupi at Faonos, Mytilene 81100, Greece.

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Rsum

Les vnements de dcembre 2008 en Grce marquent un moment dcisif dans lesmouvements sociaux contre le nolibralisme et la restructuration capitaliste. Ils sontns de laggravation des perspectives demploi pour les jeunes, de la restructuration enforce du systme ducatif et de linquitude sur les effets de la crise conomique actuelle.

Loriginalit du mouvement tient sa dimension particulire, lexpression dunenouvelle unit de la jeunesse en lutte, la demande dun changement radical et soncaractre anti-systmique. On peut le considrer comme une preuve supplmentaire dela crise de lhgmonie nolibrale et comme un signe de laccentuation de linstabilitdominante au sein des formations sociales capitalistes europennes. Aussi constitue-t-ilun dfi la fois thorique et politique.

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