[p2p-research] comments on greek movement

[Michel Bauwens]

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/akis-gavrilidis-on-the-meaning-of-the-greek-koukouloforoi-movement/2009/03/01

Dear Vasilis,

I wonder if you could ask our greek friends to comment on the greek youth
movement, it's p2p aspects, and aftermath, to add to the following article
above?


Michel


In Red Pepper, Akis Gavrilidis
reports<http://www.redpepper.org.uk/The-revenge-of-life>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."*


-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
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