Defend Savas Michael Matsas against the Golden Dawn fascists!

Note:
We are reprinting below a translation of a press release about the upcoming trial   of Savas Michael Matsas, a long time leader of the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK).  We urge all left and labor groups in Greece and internationally to express their solidarity with Savas Michael and oppose the vicious attempt to silence the voice of anti-fascists and socialists in Greece.  It is obvious that this case, initiated by the Golden Dawn fascists,  would never have gone to trial without the complicity of the right wing Samaras government and their "left" allies in the coalition.              

Savas Michael Matsas

A trial organized by the Nazi “Golden Dawn” in Greece

                    Savas Matsas, a Greek Jewish Marxist intellectual, and Secretary General of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (EEK) of Greece, will go on trial on September 3, 2013. He is being accused of “defamation” against the Greek openly Nazi party, the infamous “Golden Dawn”, for “instigation of violence and chaos” and “disruption of the civil peace” because, four years ago, in May 2009, the EEK issued a leaflet calling for participation in an antifascist demonstration protesting against a murderous attack by the Nazis against the immigrant communities in Athens that was made possible through the covert assistance of the local police in Greece.

         The events leading up to this trial are noteworthy enough to be described in more detail.

         In December 2008, an important youth revolt had shaken the entire country following the murder of a 15 years old adolescent, Alexandros Grigoropoulos by two police guards. The revolt continued for nearly two months, in what Dominique Strauss Kahn, head of the IMF at that time, had rightly described as “the first political explosion of the current world financial-economic crisis”. In the spring and summer 2009, the right wing Karamanlis government had launched a counter-offensive  to check the social unrest by organizing continuous pogroms by the police  assisted by the Nazi “Golden dawn”( then still a marginal far right  extremist group) targeting the immigrant communities  and the left. In the December 2008 revolt the immigrant workers played a rather secondary if not a marginal role in the events, with one great exception: during the revolt, on Christmas eve in 2008, a gang of thugs hired by the bosses – and never punished to this day – attacked a Bulgarian immigrant with acid, resulting in serious injuries to the woman, Konstantina Kuneva. She was apparently singled out for being an active trade unionist. Kuneva went on to become a symbol of the revolt and of the unity of all workers regardless of their national or ethnic origin. 

      It is not an accident that other female trade-unionists coming from abroad, like the Polish Monika Karbowska, were targeted later in 2009, arrested and made the subject of show trials.

        The police pogroms against immigrants reached a climax in the spring of 2009, in Athens, in the neighbourhood of Aghios Panteleimonas, where the “Golden Dawn” murder squads terrorised immigrants with the protection and collaboration of the local police. Left organizations had called for anti-fascist demonstrations. The EEK joined this mobilization and issued a leaflet calling for mass participation.  The leaflet signed by the EEK as a party was also published in the party newspaper NEA PROOPTIKI and featured on the party’s web site. This is the “crime” for which the General Secretary of the EEK is accused and put on trial.

      In May 2009, leading members of  the ‘Golden Dawn”, including Ilias  Panagiotaros, now a member of the Greek Parliament, and Themis Skordeli - a woman with shadowy connections to the underworld, accused of a murderous attack on an Afghan immigrant but who to this day has never been brought to trial - initiated a lawsuit against the entire spectrum of the Greek left, from the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and SYRIZA to the extra-parliamentary left, ANTARSYA and EEK, all the immigrant associations, and independent personalities like the Dean of the National Technical University of Athens Constantinos Moutzouris.  The charge against Moutzouris was that he allowed an alternative web site, Athens.Indymedia, to broadcast from space on the campus.

      The lawsuit remained in limbo until late 2012, after the Greek elections of May and June 2012, when, the Golden Dawn was catapulted to Parliament from the margins of political life and the shadows of the State repressive apparatus. In November 2012, at the day celebrated nationally  for decades now as the  anniversary of the  1973 youth revolt in Athens National Technical University (the “Polytechnic”) against the military dictatorship of the colonels, the Greek Police, after  receiving orders from the judiciary,  began interrogations of all those accused in the Golden Dawn lawsuit of 2009. By June of 2013, from the dozens of the accused in the legal action of 2009, and interrogated in 2012, only Savas Michael(Sabetai) Matsas of the EEK was called to trial on September 3, 2013, together with the former Dean   C. Moutzouris.

       Simultaneously with this preposterous “legal” action, the Nazis have intensified a non-stop, vicious anti-Semitic and anti-communist campaign against the Secretary of the EEK, accusing him of being “an instrument of the World Jewish Conspiracy to foment civil war among Greeks to impose a Judeo-Bolshevik regime in Greece”.  Pictures of Savas Michael are presented combined with anti-Semitic insults and open death threats: “Destroy the Jewish vermin!”

       Although there is a powerful wave of solidarity for Savas Michael both in Greece and internationally, including the support of many Jewish people, the “official” leadership of the Greek Jewish community, the Central Israelite Council of Greece(KISE) has so far refused to make the slightest public statement on this vicious attack on a Greek Jew. The reason is obvious: they disagree with his political views. Even more sinister, the current Chairman of KISE, in a recent interview in the Jerusalem Post, defended the credentials of Adonis Georgiadis,  a vicious anti-Semite and  a fascist well known in Greece, who after being for years a leading member of the far right LAOS party, has jumped to the right wing New Democracy party and became a minister of Health in the Samaras government (where other notorious fascists are included: like Makis Voridis, personal friend of Jean Marie Le Pen and former  leader of the youth organization of the dictator Papadopoulos)! The “Judenrat” mentality and practices did not finish with the Third Reich.

       On August 29, a press conference is scheduled in the headquarters of the Union of Journalists in Athens (ESHEA) to present the facts behind this case, the political implications of this trial, and the solidarity campaign  that is gaining an increasing hearing throughout the world.

                                                                       August 2, 2013

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Left Forum: Hegel's Philosophy of History and its legacy for the Left

Postage stamp commemorating Hegel

We are posting below the talk given by Alex Steiner for the panel sponsored by the permanent revolution web site at the recently concluded Left Forum.  Steiner's talk had the title,  "Does Reason Govern the World: A reflection on Hegel’s philosophy of history and its legacy for the Left".

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An edition Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History

Marx

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Left Forum: God as the mob - right wing representations of Hegel

We are posting below the talk given by Harrison Fluss at the panel hosted by the permanent revolution web site at the recently concluded Left Forum. The title of Fluss's talk is, "God as the Mob: Right Wing Representations of Hegel from Schelling to Alex Jones".

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Right wing conspiracist Alex Jones

Schelling

Hegel

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Reading Marx in Teheran

Note: The following statement appeared in the New York Times Op Ed page on Friday, June 14.  It is an important statement by a leader of the struggles of the Iranian working class against the theocratic dictatorship of Khamenei.  It also represents a pointed criticism of those left groups in the West who,  in the name of defending Iran against imperialism, have turned a blind eye to the crimes of the Ahmadinejad regime.

Readers may wish to review our previous comments on the repression of workers and artists in Iran. See
A Savage Sentence for Iranian Filmmaker Panahi ,
Iranian Filmmaker Panahi's Court Statement,
An Exchange with a Reader,  and
A Case of Political Hypocrisy

Mansour Osanloo

Reading Marx in Tehran

By MANSOUR OSANLOO

IRAN'S presidential election on June 14 will be neither free nor fair. The candidates on the ballot have been preselected in a politically motivated vetting process that has little purpose other than ensuring the election of a compliant president who will be loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Regardless of the outcome of the vote, the most urgent challenge for both the next president and Ayatollah Khamenei will be to confront a rising tide of discontent resulting from a rapidly deteriorating economic situation.

The outside world is primarily focused on whether the election will signal a shift in the Iranian regime’s stand on the nuclear issue. But for the average Iranian the most important issue is the impact of this election on her pocketbook — especially for the hardworking masses, whose purchasing power has drastically decreased as they struggle to provide the most basic necessities for their families.

Iran’s industrial workers, teachers, nurses, government and service-sector employees have been hit hard. The profound mismanagement of the economy by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government, coupled with stringent international sanctions, has made these workers’ plight the most important aspect of Iran’s domestic politics.

The situation inside Iran may appear calm, because of the government’s harsh repression, but there are widespread workers’ protests. Dissidents from all walks of life, including educated but unemployed young people and women, are searching for any opportunity to express their grievances peacefully. Just last week in Isfahan, during the funeral of the prominent dissident cleric Ayatollah Jalaledin Taheri, thousands chanted “Death to the dictator” and “Political prisoners must be set free.”

The authorities in Iran are aware of the time bomb that the impoverishment of large segments of the population is creating. During a recent meeting of Iran’s National Security Council, high-ranking officials expressed their concern about possible uprisings of “the hungry.”

I know how far the authorities will go. I spent more than five years in prison for my labor-organizing activities. I was physically and psychologically tortured and threatened with rape. My interrogators also often threatened to detain, torture and rape my wife and children.

My son Puyesh was imprisoned and severely tortured. The authorities expelled my other son, Sahesh, from his university. Intelligence agents kidnapped Sahesh’s wife, Zoya, three times. She was beaten and threatened, and during one of these episodes, she miscarried. Tehran’s notorious prosecutor, Saeed Mortazavi, threatened my wife many times simply because she was pursuing my case with the judiciary. And my interrogators constantly harassed her with threatening calls and vulgar text messages.

For the slightest protest against my treatment, I was held in solitary confinement — once for 7 months and 23 days. Interrogators often threatened to kill me, telling me, “No one knows you are here, we can easily kill you with impunity.” They would remind me of the massacres of political prisoners during the 1980s and the many killed in detention since then.

But I was fortunate enough to have widespread international support, especially from international labor unions and human rights organizations. News about my case had an effect on my relationship with the prison guards. They were exposed to the news about my activism and reasons behind my imprisonment through satellite television channels and the Internet. As a result, their attitude toward me changed over time. I even forged friendships with some of my prison guards, themselves from working-class backgrounds, advising them on how to pursue work-related grievances against their employer.

I recently left the country because of death threats. But Iranian workers in many sectors are still organizing; some are publicly known, others remain under the radar to avoid the sharp sword of repression. Intimidation, prosecution and imprisonment of labor activists are rampant, but unions in Iran haven’t been fully silenced, and some have even had some limited success. My colleagues in the Tehran Bus Drivers Union managed to win an 18 percent wage increase, despite the imprisonment and firing of several of its members. Widespread unemployment, runaway inflation, shortages of essential goods and a precipitous decline in the value of Iran’s currency have had such a debilitating impact on workers and wage earners that they can’t afford to remain silent and indifferent.

In the face of this economic crisis, none of the current candidates on the ballot has put forward a tangible economic plan that addresses workers’ concerns. They have made references to difficulties and criticized the Ahmadinejad administration’s mismanagement and corruption, but they have not proposed or discussed any solutions to the workers’ plight.

We welcome international support from all those who care for our struggle. The American left has rightly opposed military adventurism against Iran, but it should also oppose sanctions that hurt ordinary Iranians and back our struggle to gain the freedom of speech and association, as well as the right to bargain collectively and advocate for workplace improvements. Those basic liberties are essential for our dignity — and for the future of genuine democracy in Iran.

Mansour Osanloo, a former president of the Tehran Bus Drivers Union, was imprisoned by the Iranian government from 2006 to 2011. This essay was translated by Hadi Ghaemi from the Persian.

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Left Forum presentation: Too long in Lincoln's Shadow

The permanent-revolution web site hosted a panel at the just concluded Left Forum in New York. We are posting below the audio of Frank Brenner's presentation, "Too long in Lincoln's Shadow".

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Iconic image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator

Scene from Lincoln movie showing Lincoln as the pragmatic politician

Obama capturing Lincoln's shadow

Poster portraying an anti-corporatist Lincoln

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Human Science

We are reprinting an essay by the great anthropologist Marshall Sahlins that was originally published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 35 No. 9 · 9 May 2013. Sahlins provides a classic statement of the difference between human science and natural science, a theme we have discussed previously although in a different context than Sahlins' discussion of symbolic representation in human culture.  For instance in the series Downward Spiral we critiqued the work of evolutionary psychologists such as Stephen Pinker who would reduce human culture to their genetic heritage and physical substratum in much the same way as the physical anthropologists critiqued by Sahlins. (See Downward Spiral Chapter 7, page 183 and following, http://permanent-revolution.org/polemics/downward_spiral_ch07.pdf). We hope that reprinting Sahlins' essay will generate more discussion on this important topic.

Alex Steiner

Human Science

Marshall Sahlins

In late February I resigned in protest from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) on two grounds. The first was the academy’s recruitment of anthropologists to do research designed to improve the combat performance of the US military. One project would study the tactical operations of small units and their leaders in a variety of contexts including ‘major combat operations’; a second would develop methods for predicting individual and collective performance with a view to drawing up research agendas for the US Army Research Institute.

It turns out that in objecting to the complicity of the NAS in the operations of the US armed forces – which had inflicted so much harm on Iraqis, Afghans and Americans themselves over the past decade – I was naive. The only research under NAS aegis I had ever participated in concerned the fishing rights of native Alaskan communities. I didn’t learn until recently that the research arm of the academy, the National Research Council (NRC), had been established by Woodrow Wilson in 1916 to study military preparedness.

The second of my grounds for protest was the election to the academy of Napoleon Chagnon. The serious harm Chagnon’s research has inflicted on native peoples of Amazonia through his discriminatory dealings with them and distorted representations, as well as his baseless claims that he practises a scientific ethnography, made my membership in the academy an even greater embarrassment. Chagnon has asserted that belligerence among the Yanomami is evidence of primordial human nature, a biological disposition of the species. In a notorious article published in Science in 1988, he set out to demonstrate the existence of natural selection for lethal aggression by showing that Yanomami warriors who had earned the coveted title of ‘killer’ had more offspring than those who had never slain an enemy. Among several methodological flaws invalidating this conclusion, Chagnon had omitted killers who were no longer living from his sample: the fact that, as he himself noted, killers are ‘prime targets’ for revenge means that their reproductive careers are often cut short. In any event, his claim that the Yanomami exemplify the original condition of mankind is preposterous. The Yanomami mode of existence in settled communities practising a mixed economy of agriculture and hunting is one or two million years removed from human cultural origins – though not altogether removed from the more recent influences of Andean and European civilisations. One could have chosen any number of equally bad examples, including Australian Aboriginals, Kalahari Bushmen or Malaysian hunters, for whom as it happens, killing is not an estimable value.

Marshall Sahlins

Apparently unrelated, the two reasons for my resignation are in fact profoundly connected, insofar as Chagnon’s sociobiology of the selfish gene and the American global project of making the world safe for self-interest would impose cognate versions of Western individualism on the rest of humanity.
Chagnon poses as a champion of science and contemptuously dismisses his critics as ideologically driven. It’s once more to the epistemological breach: as they have periodically since the inception of their discipline, anthropologists are again abusing one another over whether or not they practise a natural science like physics or evolutionary biology. Those who believe they are engaged in a rigorous quest for objective truth accuse colleagues who think otherwise of indulging in postmodern babble or some other variety of soft-mindedness. The truth is, however, that the supposedly idealist anthropologists are just as committed to empirical investigation and to conclusions that will stand up to it, but their methods differ insofar as the cultural practices they study are different from the brute objects of the natural sciences.

When native Australians or New Guineans say that their totemic animals and plants are their kinsmen – that these species are persons like themselves, and that in offering them to others they are giving away part of their own substance – we have to take them seriously, which is to say empirically, if we want to understand the large consequences of these facts for how they organise their lives. The graveyard of ethnographic studies is strewn with the remains of reports which, thanks to anthropologists’ own presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact, were content to ignore or debunk the Amazonian peoples who said that the animals they hunted were their brothers-in-law, the Africans who described the way they systematically killed their kings when they became weak, or the Fijian chiefs who claimed they were gods. We have to follow the reasoning of those Australian Aboriginals for whom eating their own totem animals or plants would be something like incest or self-cannibalising, even as they ritually nourish and protect these species for other people’s use. We thus discover a society the opposite in principle of the bellicose state of nature that Hobbes posited as the primordial condition – an idea which is still too much with us. Of course the native Australians have known injurious disputes, most of them interpersonal. Yet instead of a Hobbesian ‘war of every man against every man’, each opposing others in his own self-interest, here is a society fundamentally organised on the premise of everyone giving himself to everyone.

In the earlier Germanic version of the natural science controversy, this human science alternative was called ‘understanding’, the implication being that the subject matter at issue was meaningfully or symbolically constructed, so that what was methodologically required was the penetration of its particular logic. The human scientist is not in a relation of a thinking person to a mute object of interest; rather, anthropologists and their like are of the same intellectual nature as the peoples they study: they are our alters and interlocutors. Indeed, inasmuch as these peoples are meaningfully making their modes of life, and inasmuch as we share the same capacities of symbolic invention and understanding, we have the possibility of knowing the cultures of others in ways that are in some respects more powerful than the ways natural scientists know physical objects. Radical as this claim may sound today, it goes back at least to the early 18th century, to the principle of ‘the reciprocity of the made and the true’ as formulated by Giambattista Vico: what humans have constructed they can know truly, as opposed to natural things that are the work of God and are his alone to know. Or as Lévi-Strauss put it for his own discipline, ‘Of all the sciences, anthropology is without a doubt unique in making the most intimate subjectivity into a means of objective demonstration.’

By contrast, the more the natural scientist discovers about things, say the table at which I am working, the less such things are like anything in human thought or experience. Physics shows that there are spaces within and between the molecules of which it is constituted; and beyond that, at the level of quantum mechanics, our knowledge of things defies all common sense of space and time and can be expressed only in complex equations. We must accept, to take an elementary example, that the same object can be in two different places at the same time. ‘If you are not shocked by quantum physics,’ Niels Bohr is often quoted as having said, ‘you don’t understand it.’

I don’t really understand it. Yet I do know that many peoples consider that brothers and sisters are composed of the same ancestral being. Actually, given our symbolic capacities, it’s easy for us to be in two different places at the same time. All you have to do is daydream. You could even share substance with or be related to yams, supposing, say, that they were growing in the same place as your ancestors were buried.
Natural science starts out with what is familiar and ends with something altogether remote; human science works the other way around. One may well begin with something so distant or unpleasant to us as cannibalism in the Fiji Islands in the 19th century, yet end up finding it ‘logical’ – which is, after all, a mental state of our own. In 1929, the British anthropologist A.M. Hocart recounted the formal speech of a Fijian chief presenting a reward to the carpenter who had built him a fine canoe. The chief apologised that he could not offer the carpenter a ‘cooked man’ or a ‘raw woman’, for Christianity, he explained, ‘has spoiled our feasts’. The ‘cooked man’ refers to an enemy cannibal victim, the ‘raw woman’ to a virgin daughter of the chief offered as a wife. One immediate anthropological question this poses is why the woman should be equivalent to the cannibal victim? The brief answer is that they have the same end or function, which is the beneficial reproduction of the society: the woman directly by bearing children, the cannibal victim as a sacrifice whose consumption in concert with the god procures divine benefits, notably in agricultural and human fertility. But then, the canoe for which these are appropriate payment is itself a sacred (taboo) vessel, carrying a temple on board as it is sailed in quest of foreign bodies in war or prized valuables in trade. Further, given the relationship of raw women to cooked men, one can understand why in some parts of Fiji a fine war club is a mandatory betrothal gift, in effect compensating the family for the future loss of their daughter by the anticipated gain of an enemy victim. Enough said? This cannibalism is becoming logical, and logic is something going on inside ourselves. A custom that at first seemed strange and remote has been assimilated and internalised, as our own good sense.

Since cultural practices are meaningfully constructed, and since we too are symbolising beings, we have the privilege of knowing others by reproducing in the operations of our own mind the ways they are culturally organised. The method and content of investigation are one: the most intimate subjectivity becomes the means of objective demonstration. Of course, this is not the only way of knowing others. We can also use our symbolic capacities to treat them as physical objects; and, as in archaeology, we can know them by their physical works. But we won’t get the same knowledge of the symbolically ordered ways of human life, of what culture is, or even the same empirical certainty.

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May Day 2013 in Athens

Today the traditional May Day demonstration was held as usual in Syntagma Square even though the official holiday was postponed till May 7 to follow the Greek Orthodox  Easter weekend. The demonstration was quite small by Greek standards. Virtually no union members turned out although the demonstration did receive, if only reluctantly, the official backing of the Communist Party backed trade union federation, PAME as well as that of the General Confederation of Greek Workers, GSEE and the union of public sector workers, ADEDY. The unions officially sanctioned the day as another 24 hour general strike although participation was much more limited than in the past. Still, public transportation came to a standstill in much of Greece. The demonstration in Athens consisted largely of members and supporters of the various Left groups. The official 'Left' opposition party, SYRIZA, made an appearance but generated little enthusiasm.

Some of the demonstrators marching in Athens

There is little mystery about the relatively low turnout on May Day compared to some of the massive demonstrations Athens has seen in the past few years. The Greek working class have rightfully concluded that one day general strikes and marches of hundreds of thousands have not changed government policy one iota and they have seen all the parties of the Left that claim to represent their interests capitulate before the demands of the European bankers. Therefore they have become wary of engaging in further protests. Just the other day the right wing coalition government approved another round of massive job cuts in exchange for a new installment of bailout funds. A demonstration in front of Parliament called to protest this action attracted just a few hundred participants. Although the coalition government headed by Antonis Samaras claims that things will improve and that this year is going to be the last year of 6 successive years of recession and austerity, the great majority see little cause for optimism. Unemployment has reached an unprecedented 27% including almost 60% among young people. Meanwhile practically all the remnants of the welfare state have been dismantled while taxes have risen astronomically, as wages and pensions have been cut. There is no precedent for such a massive assault on the living standards of the working class and middle class in a modern industrialized society. While liberal Keynesian economists in the U.S. such as Paul Krugman see the austerity measures adopted by the Europeans as an example of irrational policies based on false assumptions, it would be more apt to view Greece as a test case organized by the European capitalist class. (In an opinion piece published in the New York Times a few months ago he described the destructive policies forced on Greece and Spain as "Europe's Austerity Madness", http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/opinion/krugman-europes-austerity-madness.html?_r=0 )
The thinking among ruling circles in Germany and elsewhere is that if they can successfully transform Greece from a modern industrial society with relatively high wages and benefits into a source of cheap labor and minimal operating costs and regulations for foreign capital, then the same can be done in the rest of Europe. Although these policies are irrational and destructive in a very fundamental sense, there is a logic behind them that that the liberal economists, ideologically tied as they are to the capitalist system, fail to register.

It would be a mistake to see in the relative quiescence of the Greek working class a sign of apathy or defeat. Rather the working class is biding its time. Having lost confidence in the old forms of struggle and having been repeatedly betrayed by those they looked to for leadership, particularly the trade unions and the Left parties, they are increasingly looking for an alternative. The fascists of the Golden Dawn have exploited this situation by presenting their anti-immigrant, racist and ultra-nationalist politics as the alternative to the impotence of the traditional parties. In the last election they received close to 8% of the vote and at one point polls recorded them as having the support of 13% of the population. There are signs however that this was their high water mark. Recent polls have seen a gradual decline in their support, though the danger they represent should not be underestimated. Still another sign of disenchantment with traditional politics has been the increasing prominence of anarchist groups at demonstrations. It is safe to say that beneath the surface the political situation in Greece remains explosive and has the potential to ignite a great conflagration that would be echoed throughout Europe and beyond.

That the struggles of the Greek working class are not isolated to the unique situation facing Greece but are part and parcel of the situation facing the international working class as capitalism heads into the sixth year of the global economic crisis was underscored by May Day actions in other countries. Turkey witnessed clashes in Istanbul between police and leftist demonstrators. Water cannons and tear gas were employed by police to prevent demonstrators from massing in Taksim Square where they sought to commemorate 34 people that were killed there in a May Day demonstration in 1977. Spain, another target of austerity, and which, next to Greece, has the highest rate of unemployment in Europe, saw large demonstrations in more than 80 cities. In Bangladesh, protestors who were angered by the recent collapse of a building that claimed over 400 lives, marched through the streets of the capital, Dhaka. Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, saw 55,000 marchers protesting against low wages and outsourcing. Other Asian cities that saw significant May Day actions were Phnom Penh, Manila, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

AP photo of protestors battling with police in Istanbul

From our vantage point in Athens on this May Day of 2013, it is hard not to notice just how much the workers of this country have in common with their brothers and sisters throughout the world.

Alex Steiner
Athens, May 1, 2013

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