The echo in Salonika
THE MURDER of a 15-year-old boy by the PASOK's MAT on the day when the working people and the youth honor the dead of the November uprising did not provoke any reaction from any of the big organizations in Salonika, except from the Regas Feraios [ CP-Interior youth].
It seemed that the portrayal of Athens as in the grip of anarchy suited everyone from the DAP [the youth organization of the right-wing big bourgeois party, New Democracy] to the PSK [the PASOK student organization], which exploited it for a provocative campaign. This hysteria about "anarchy" blotted out the murderous frenzy of the police.
Under the influence of this picture of anarchy, the PhEAPTh [The Salonika branch of the student union affiliated to the SEE, the national trade-union confederation] did not issue any communique, not even about the violation of university inviolability.
The only reaction and mobilization came from the extraparliamentary left and the anarchists. The day after the murder, a march was held in the streets of the city to denounce the state terror and the violation of university inviolability. The march had two main contingents, one of anarchists and one of the far left (with about 400 people). The Democratic Union of the Law School also participated.
The two contingents divided when the anarchists threw Molotov cocktails at the offices of the EPEN [the farrightist student organization] and then started breaking store windows. Symptomatically, the MAT did not show its face during the march in the city, but late in the evening (after the events in Athens), they started to come out.
On Friday, November 21, a new march against state terrorism was organized to demand the release of those arrested. It brought out between 500 and 700 people. The lack of a mass turn out was owing to the change in the climate after the episodes in Athens. The groups participating were the Left Student Regroupments [Aristeres Syspeiroseis Phoiteton], the KKE ML, the OKDE [Greek section of the Fourth International] and groups of anarchists.
Salonika's distance from the center of the events and the small forces that mobilized prevented a sharp clash on the far left between supporters of "forceful" actions and those who insist on an overall anticapitalist policy, who think that forceful actions should be carried out by mass mobilizations and not by "grouplets" of the far left and who believe that in a period such as the one we are passing through forceful actions by small groups lead only to isolation.
The quick ebb of the events in Athens (precisely because of their isolated character) prevented a sharper clash. But it did not prevent a ridiculous row in the middle of the road over whether the far-left contingent should march behind the anarchists or not.
We do not think that the anarchist's sectarian blind alley, with its glorification of small groups and their historic rights, constitutes political action. Moreover, it is politically dangerous for those forces that want to be seen as a credible alternative by the working people and the youth.
International Viewpoint 27 January 1986