The Rage in Greece

Assassins, Murderers!

This is the cry which rings out in the protests of students and the unemployed in Athens, Salonika, Patras, Corfu and in many other cities of democratic and republican Greece.

On Saturday December 6, in the Exarchia district of Athens close to the Polytechnical school, Alexis Grigoropulos, a fifteen year old youth (from a well-off family), was struck down by a bullet fired in cold blood by a cop on patrol in this district known for its spots frequented by young people, artists and intellectuals, and as a multi-ethnic stronghold of the so-called far left.This is the spark which detonated a long pent-up anger which has put Greece under pressure for several days .

The social situation has long been unstable; unemployment increases from one month to the next, for the youth, in Greece as throughout Europe, the prospect becomes more and more precarious and the uncertainty of life complete. After having given the illusion, during the time of expansion, of being able to guarantee a future of prosperity and well-being to the younger generation, capitalism has shattered all expectations: the economic crisis which led the banks to close the purse-strings overnight, was added to a generalized corruption among those in control and to a budget which promises only sacrifices.

At all times the police have used the most expeditious and brutal methods towards the “young rebels”, within the context of a blind and contemptuous policy of a dominant bourgeois class which has persuaded itself that it can control the pockets of rebellion and ensure the support of public opinion thanks to “zero tolerance”with respect to those who are called in turn “insurrectionary anarchists”, “the black block”, “misfits”, “squatters”, “rabid”, “vandals”, and so on.

The social unrest which the capitalist crisis causes especially among the proletarian class and including petit-bourgeois youth also hit by economic difficulties and fearing a difficult future, is without any doubt the cause of an anger which is ready to explode on any occasion, with more or less of violence according to the quantity of accumulated explosive matter. The Greek government has to seek to extinguish the raging fire of the last several days in one way or another, perhaps by sending the police officers “culpable” in the murder of the young Alexis to justice. And it will inevitably find indirect support in the leftist or so-called far left parties always ready to whine about “democracy denied”, the “infringements of human rights”, to speak about a climate comparable with that of “the dictatorship of the colonels” in the name of a true democracy, including the problems of young people and attentive to the future of new generations.

But it is under democracy that the workers are exploited to death and that youths are murdered by the cops!

Anger, and the combativeness of the young unemployed and students can only find an orientation and a solid objective for which it is worth the hardships of fighting back, than in the class struggle, the struggle of the proletariat because it is the only social force which can ensure the future: the proletariat is the only class which in periods of expansion as in times of crisis, has no interest in the preservation of capitalist society; a society where all the wealth produced is monopolized by a small bourgeois minority, while the proletarian majority of the population which is exploited by capitalism to produce this wealth, is condemned to fall periodically into misery and starvation, when it is not thrust into the horrors of war.


– For the Resumption of the Proletarian Class Struggle!

– For the Unity of Employed and Unemployed Workers, Young and Old, Immigrants and Natives, in the Struggle for the Intransigent and Exclusive Defense of the Living and Working Conditions of the Proletariat !

– May the Murder of a Youth by the Cops Not be Added to the Hundreds of Deaths at Work Caused by Capitalist Greed Without a Response !

– May the Revolt Not Only be the–More than Justified–Demonstration of Anger and Social Tension, But Become a First Step Towards the Resumption of the Proletarian Struggle Organized Against All Bourgeois Interests, Both Now and in the Future!

International Communist party, December 10, 2008