In Red Pepper, Akis Gavrilidis reports on the particularly innovative and disconcerting movement of Greek youth which exploded last December.

Akis Gavrilidis:

“An impressive characteristic of this movement was its creative forms of communication, at every level. In those first few days in December, the demonstrators produced an infinite number of rhymes, slogans, puns, graffiti, paintings on walls, stickers, newspapers, practical and theoretical texts, as well as methods of storming and occupying public buildings, TV and radio stations, theatres, and bureaucratic trade union offices. Most importantly, they displayed a remarkable capacity to subvert the attempts of the state and the establishment parties, including the Greek Communist Party, to marginalise them.

When the traditional insult was thrown at them of being koukouloforoi (‘hoodwearers’ or ‘hooded ones’) with the establishment referring to their demonstrations almost ritualistically as ‘not more than ten hoodwearers’, the demonstrators playfully reclaimed this term, by chanting ‘Eimaste oi deka koukouloforoi’ – ‘We are the ten hoodwearers’. In this way they inverted and obliterated the meaning of the accusation, and indeed went further in making it an image of their own. As the Network for Social and Civil Rights said: ‘When one thousand people put on a hood, then they do have a face.’ Or, as the most famous hoodwearer in the world, Subcomandante Marcos, has remarked, sometimes one has to hide one’s face in order to be seen.

Won in translation
Much of the activity of this movement could usefully be described also as a work of translation, consisting of (but not limited to) the literal translation of leaflets and brochures into Albanian, Bulgarian, and other languages spoken by migrants in Greece. This was a new element too, because until now we had rallies or events in favour of migrants or against racism, but this was the first time migrants participated on the same terms as ‘native’ Greeks in a shared movement.

The translatability of this movement, its ability to communicate with other experiences in several different countries, is striking. In the past, nothing that happened in Greece has had such an international appeal. A regular protest ritual here used to be marches towards the US embassy in Athens, but this was the first time we had marches towards Greek embassies in New York, Washington and other cities in the US and the rest of the world. It has caused a nervousness among ruling elites elsewhere in Europe – something that French president Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have understood when he recently withdrew a draft law to ‘reform’ high school education.

Innovative forms of organisation
The movement in Greece uses communication technologies as a tool in ways that have outwitted the state’s repressive mechanisms. The coordination of high school students, when they simultaneously attacked about 45 police stations in almost all major Greek cities without any central leading body, was a masterful display of organisational skills desperately lacking in most state agencies.

But the question is not just technical. This movement drew on innovative methods of struggle (actions based on ad hoc assembly rather than on permanent organisations, for example) in a political landscape that until recently was dominated by a very traditional version of the left. Most of these methods come from the anarchist tradition, but arguably some could be attributed to an indirect influence of the Social Forum movement – the fourth European Social Forum took place in Athens four years ago.”