The Greek December 2008 Uprising and the Role of the New Trade Unions (1o) by Athanasios Tsakiris

15th Alternative Futures and Popular Protest Conference
Manchester Metropolitan University
29-31 March 2010

The Greek December 2008 Uprising
and the Role of the New Trade Unions

Athanasios Tsakiris
PhD, Political Science
National and Kapodistrian
University of Athens

On Saturday, November 28, 2009, a journalist of a center-left evening newspaper with high circulation, writing about the December 2008 uprising in Greece, wondering about the impotence of the political parties, either large or small, left or right, "to explain the phenomenon which at that time had involved spontaneously and massively involving young people and teenagers who for the first time had taken to the streets contentiously”; he concluded his article stressing that the political parties were frightened by what they perceived as young peoples’ “deviant behaviour”. By analogy, I would say that the unconventionally unionized new generation of workers, whom in Greece symbolically call generation of “precarious employment”, “700-euro generation” (or even of 600, 500 or fewer Euros), provokes and challenges the traditional trade union leaders of GSEE (Greek TUC) and many large second-degree federations and labour centres. This paper will address the issue of the contribution of new trade unions to the «December 2008 uprising" and the effect that the uprising had on the development of their action.

For some analysts and political cadres the political crisis of December 2008 consisted a 'threat' and for others an 'opportunity', depending on each one’s political targeting. Let us clarify what we mean. In the field of political sociology of social movements, beyond the theories of "resource mobilization" and "collective behavior" that refer to the rationality of accumulation of material and human resources for the organization of the social movement the first and the second to the psychological inclinations of the participants in social movements, there was one more theory formulated, the "political process theory”. This theory seeks to explain and interpret the mobilization of social movements based on the description of the political context and its role. When we speak about political context we mean the "political environment" within which Politics occurs. In other words, we are studying the “political opportunity structure”.[1] The description of the structure shows the circumstances, namely the material components that can be reduced to the underlying intentions of the actors.[2] The structure includes such factors as the nature of the supreme state offices (e.g. presidential nature of the political systems of the U.S. or France versus the prime-minister model as Britain, Italy and other countries), the method of voting for appointing officials at all levels of the administration and the government, the allocation of social skills and status, the degree of social integration or disintegration, etc. All these factors, separately or in combination, facilitate or hinder the social and political action of the people and the achievement or not of their respective goals. Other structural factors encouraging or discouraging the development of social mobilizations include the degree of government’s responsiveness and the level of resources of the community. Therefore, according to this theory, we see that the political behavior of individuals and groups is not simply a function of the quantity of resources they command or of their psychological predisposition but mostly a result of the way they perceive the objective structural opportunities or threats and restrictions.. 

Nevertheless, it is worth going further to examine the elaborations of this theory. The political process theory focuses mainly on the relationship between institutional political actors and protest. By challenging a given political order, social movements interact with actors who hold a firmly consolidated position (“the establishment”) in the political entity we call as the “state”. Peter Eisinger, discussing the issue of the "political opportunity structure", initially focused on the study of forms of protest in U.S. cities trying to explain the differences of the manifestations of protest depending on the form of the local political system and its openness or reticence. Other studies have discovered new data that helped the setting forth of new concepts and dimensions. Francis-Fox Piven and Richard Cloward reflect on factors such as electoral volatility and the role it plays in facilitating the manifestation of the protest. We could see this in the uprising of December 2008 through opinion surveys as well as in the mass participation of broad segments of society in strikes, demonstrations, marches, protests, conflicts and occupations of universities and middle- and high- schools. What’s more, Piven and Cloward indicate that groups which do not have organizational and financial resources use protest in order to create the conditions for more effective collective political action. 

According to Piven and Cloward, the possibility of "pariahs" of the society to promote their views and demands, despite the prejudices of the social majority, depends on their ability to develop a “countervailing power”, i.e., a “dual power” in the streets. This means that developing disorder political strategies for creating a crisis which the political leadership is obliged to manage as well as to respond in some way to the challenge posed by the protesting groups. According to Piven and Cloward, the representative electoral systems cannot meet the demands of socially weak forces which necessarily consider protest as the only effective political action. Cloward and Piven consider the official mass social movement organizations such as the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) as similar electoral representative mechanisms. These SMOs are questioned by a large part of the masses who feel themselves wronged by the system and the political authorities; this part of the masses challenge them and they believe that these SMOs are deep-seated barriers instead of encouraging factors in their action. Given the inertia of the political system in particular of the trade unions and the (conceived as) systemic forces of the Greek Left (KKE, SYRIZA) as seen by a very large proportion of young people, who work under conditions of social insecurity and precarious employment and given the (whether intentional or not) delay in responding to the economic crisis with the implementation of a policy of far-reaching measures favoring the weak working class, the ground for the uprising was filled with “explosives” and ignition only needed a spark, such as the murder of a 15 year-old student from a special guard of the Police The "public opinion" through surveys implicitly but necessarily endorsed the uprising as the rejection of the government policy in view of the crisis. The government of Costas Karamanlis provided the banks with an "aid package" amounting to 28 billion euros making them targets of symbolic and real attacks acts by the protesters.[3]
    

Another factor that enters into the process of social movements is called “availability of influential allies”, as pointed out by Willian Gamson.[4] Often these are allies in the official state institutions, the change of which is a permanent goal of the social movement seek to change their movements. From the voices of support for the movement of students and precariously employed or unemployed young people through political parties, parliamentary staff and trade unions to the judges who make decisions on the legal fate of the insurgents, there is a whole hierarchical chain of command that breaks sometimes since a number of factors related to the position and role in the political system are involved in the shaping of strategies.[5] 

From the perspective of participants in uprising there are mobilization strategy problems that should not be left outside the scope of our analysis. One of the theories that were expressed in the past proposed the view that a contentious situation (riot) presented participants with a constantly changing set of opportunities and that the behavior of participants can be understood in the light of these changing situations of profit or cost.[6] 

ΣΥΝΕΧΙΖΕΤΑΙ (ΤO BE CONTINUED)

[1] Εisinger, Peter (1973) “The conditions of protest in American cities.” American Political

Science Review, 67 (March), pp 11-28. Για εκτενή κριτική παρουσίαση, βλ. Opp Karl-Dieter (2009) Theories of Political Protest and Social Movements: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Critique, and Synthesis. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge, pp 161-203

[2] Lichbach Mark (1997) “Social Theory and Comparative Politics” in Lichbach Mark and Zuckerman Alan (eds) Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 239-276.

[3] “Of course, attacking the arteries of capitalism has long been a favorite symbolic act of hooded anarchists and hard-left protesters, including the dozens of ATMs smashed and banks set ablaze during the antiglobalization uprisings in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001. But Athens 2008 comes as the very words damaged banks have taken on a whole new connotation. Indeed, in the weeks before the violence began, many Greeks had expressed outrage at the government's $35 billion in aid to the nation's lenders at a time when one out of five citizens lives below the poverty line. And so, nearly a week after they began, the Greek riots offer the first tangible sign since the West's financial meltdown of the potential social unrest percolating just below the surface.” Βλ. Israely Jeff, (2008) “Τhe Athens Riots: Fallout from the Financial Crisis?” TIME magazine, 11.12.2008 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1865999,00.htm

[4] Gamson William, (1990/1975) The Strategy of Social Protest. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

[5] Tarrow, Sidney (1998) Power in Movement, Social Movements and Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[6] Vijay K. Mathur (1974) “A factor analysis of the socio-economic structure of riot and crime prone cities “ in The Annals of Regional Science, Volume 8, Number 1, February Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer, pp 1-13. See also, Chalmers James and Shelton Robert,  “An economic analysis of riot participation”,  Economic Inquiry, Volume 13, Issue 3, pp  322 – 336.