4th BALKAN ANARCHIST BOOKFAIR

(27-31 May 2009)

a report from thessaloniki

As decided at the general assembly of the participants at the 3rd Balkan Anarchist Bookfair in Sofia, the 4th Balkan Anarchist Bookfair was held in Greece. Below is a short report of the first two days in Thessaloniki, where the bookfair was a self-standing event at a public square. (In Athens the bookfair was hosted by the B-Fest, a huge international festival organized by Babylonia newspaper – a report on the bookfair there would be very welcome!)



Wednesday 27th June

18:30, Kamara
More than 30 comrades from Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Poland (some of which had participated at the Occupied Rector’s Office in Thessaloniki meeting two months ago –report), as well as visitors from the States, Australia, and Holland joined Greeks, Turks, Afghanis and Albanians in a propaganda action held in front of the arch of Galerius in Thessaloniki (“Kamara”), protesting the violent arrest of 46 refugees in Athens a few days earlier. The arrests included injured protesters and had followed a huge demo by mainly refugees and immigrants in the centre of Athens, sparked off after a Greek policeman had torn two pages of the Q’uran he’d found in the pockets of one of them during a questioning. The State, as well as the central Muslim organization, tried hard to emphasize the apparently “religious” background of the protest demo in order to downplay the severe injustices, violence and death suffered by immigrants and refugees here. The propaganda action in Thessaloniki, just a few hundred meters from the square where the bookfair was being held, was co-organized by the Antiracist Initiative and the Group of Immigrants and Refugees (whose leaflet on the event can be read here: http://clandestinenglish.wordpress.com)

20:00, Rotunda square

The seasoned London East End anti-fascist anarchist Martin Lux, author of Anti-fascist , stressed the class-based character of British society and its century-long deep divides, talked of the open civil war within the working class that broke out in 1970s London, where white, black and Asian youths fought the fascist groups of the NF and the BNP, preparing the grounds for the 1981 and 1984 uprisings in Brixton and Toxteth. He believes Britain today is facing an unprecedented social crisis and can see new riots underway. Martin concluded: “If the crisis is going to lead to a new civil war, we are ready to fight it!”

A veteran of the Bulgarian revolutionary movement and author of File No 1218 Alexander (Sasho) Metodiev Nakov referred to the long history of the Bulgarian Anarchist Movement since the 1920s: the formation of the anarchist guerilla against the coup in 1923 and the antifascist struggle after 1938, his own incarceration, his escape, his 1948 arrest by the communists and his five years at the Belene “work camps” of the repressive Stalinist regime which had outlawed anarchism, and finally the revival of the Anarchist Federation after 1990. In a moving turn of phrase, he said: “I am 90 years old, and not for a single moment in my life have I ever considered leaving the movement”.
After a short discussion with comrade Sasho, the evening continued with traditional Ottoman music by the 5-member ‘Borderline’ band, who later gave an interview to Bulgarian comrades, followed by an acoustic anthology of protest classics ranging from A Las Barricadas to Nicolas Asimos’ No Matter How Hard They Hit Us by the ‘Vagabonds’.


Thursday, 28th June

19:00, Kamara
After joining a demo with another 300+ people called by the Initiative Against the New Repressive Measures, an initiative formed recently by anarchist and leftist students and activists targetting the wave of repression after the December riots, (from the arrests and excessive charges against protesters to the specific measures that outlaw e.g. wearing face-cover publicly), participants arrived at the already lively venue of the bookfair for a discussion entitled “From the Balkans of exploitation and nationalism to the Balkans of solidarity and struggle”.

20:30, Rotunda square
Loukis Hassiotis offered an overview of the dialectics of the national and the social question in Balkan federalist ideas from the 19th to the 20th century, as well as the positions of socialists and anarchists (read full text here). Spyros Marchetos after him proposed a political analysis of the current situation and a perspective for radical movements. He suggested, using Wallerstein’s concept of “bifurcation”, we see today’s profound crisis of the capitalist system (beginning in the last two years or even in 1989) as leading to either the intensification of authoritarianism, repression and fascism worldwide, or towards a more socially equal and ecologically sensitive understanding of society. This, he insisted, is the time to take sides. One can neither cling to the sectarianisms of the past, nor remain cynically neutral and passive. It is the radical movements’ duty, the duty of the left and the anarchists, to reinvent broad alliances and collective strategies.
Andrej Grubačić continued on the same note, stating that today’s depression (rather than mere recession) calls for a radical rethinking of the concept of solidarity. Solidarity should be created through common struggle, not constructed on the basis of common ideology. To highlight the point, he elaborated on the example of one of the longest prison rebellions in US history, the 11-day rebellion at Lucasville, South Ohio in 1993. When the police invaded the prison to crash the revolt, they saw a huge banner saying “No Whites, No Blacks, Just Blue [the colour of the prisoners’ uniform]”, despite the fact that in that high-security and death-row prison all inmates were organized either in Sunni muslim groups, or in the “black gangstas” or in the “Aryan brotherhood”. The common struggle against the common enemy, the prison system, had brought the prisoners together. Grubasic then referred to a group of anarchists providing effective help and solidarity to workers at the occupied factories in Voivodina in the early 2000s. The workers might have been culturally conservative and ideologically very distant to anatiauthoritarian ideals, yet they were a considerable force against neoliberal privatization. (In the discussion later, he was given the opportunity to confirm that the idea of broad collective movements does not include collaborating with States and multinationals…)


Nostalgic and wild Balkan tunes by ‘Yarim Baildsa Kokorec’ and a long, more-than satisfying oriental jazz set by the ‘Ensemble Minoria Grande’, a 7-piece band formed especially for the occasion of the Bookfair, again provided a perfect and neighborhood-friendly accompaniment to the post-panel chats and discussions.



The bookfair brought together publishers of books, mags and brochures from Greece, from Bulgaria (the largest foreign section), Slovenia, Croatia (and the Kate Sharpley Library in London!) and, though the exhibition / vending space was quite limited in size, it went extremely well, since it sold political literature beyond all expectations and aroused great interest in focused visitors and hundreds of passers-by alike. Most expenses for the bookfair (including the soundsystem, the posters and the banners) were covered by income from the books sold rather than the bar and grill - to our pleasant surprise.

A note on the place
Thessaloniki is a student town with too many bars and cafes, a tragically severe traffic problem, and pollution way beyond most European city standards. Entertainment and use of the public environment are extremely commercialized, but on the other hand, in the last decade there have been considerable moves to reclaim public spaces. Now some local initiatives (a legacy of the December riots) are expanding this principle beyond the broader centre of the town. In any case our guests told us they had plenty of time to visit the squats and social centres.
The Rotunda square was chosen for the bookfair as a lively, friendly, yet hitherto not much used place, relatively protected from the din of the cars. It is frequented by neighborhood children and -at certain times during the year- filled with the often annoying noise of football finals coming out of large TV screens in nearby cafeterias. The cafeteria owner realized we would not tolerate the sound for the two days we were occupying the square. On both evenings, our interaction with the children was quite straightforward: On Thursday, we couldn’t have them scream and pass the ball while old comrade Nakov was speaking. They understood. On the second day (when one of them said: “this is our park, you can’t drive us out!...) it somehow happened that the discussion and the ball-playing rolled quite naturally side by side, with mutual respect, despite a light shower that for a moment seemed to threaten both parties…







Text: Lia
Photos: Lubo, Dimitra, Lia
With comments + feedback from: Andrej G, Lubo, Nikos

Balkan Federalism

The social question and the national question in the idea of Balkan federalism

from the 19th to the 20th century: a short survey

Loukis Hassiotis

Modern Balkan history has often been presented as a sequence of nationalist conflicts, cultural and social backwardness, bloodshed and barbarism. This impression has been created partly by the West, by North American and Western European media, politicians, diplomats and academics, who traditionally portrayed Southeastern Europe as something “alien”, completely foreign to the values of Western civilization, in other words approached them through an “orientalist looking glass, to use Edward Said’s famous term. But this impression has been partly a product of the Balkans themselves, particularly of social and intellectual elites, who used these negative stereotypes for their enemies in order to present themselves as the true Europeans, the true agents of culture in the Orient.
This has been one major trend. A second, parallel one has developed over the ages as a kind of counter-narrative to the first one. This counter-narrative stressed social and cultural affinities, as well as common customs and beliefs that were the result of long inter-ethnic coexistence, a coexistence that was severed through the intervention of the Great Powers and their representatives in the area. This counternarrative, stemming from the romantic tradition, belongs primarily, yet not exclusively, to the Left and continues to this day to present itself as the alternative to official historiographies of Balkan states.
The political motivation behind this narrative is usually the support of a federalist reconstitution of Southeastern Europe and the unity of Balkan peoples with an aim to fend off foreign control and live harmoniously in the region.
It is clear today that both these narratives are equally imaginary. Not because they do not correspond to a certain aspect of reality, but mostly because they both reproduce the stereotype of “Balkan particularities”. Indeed, nationalism dominated the region and often led to bloody interethnic and interstate conflict, but this is also true of other European countries. On the other hand, there were definitely commonalities as well as differences between ethnic groups and languages, but again, this is true of the whole of Europe. But there is a further reason why both these narratives are ideological constructs: They present federalism and nationalistm as two opposing political programmes. Well, that is not precisely true.


In other words, one could say that nationalism and federalism (or generally the idea of Balkan brotherhood and unity) often converged and worked together. This is true primarily of the 19th century, which was crucial for the birth and development of nation-states in the region. Indeed, most 19th century movements that supported Balkan solidarity were fighting at the same time for national sovereignty and the liberation of “unredeemed” brothers under Ottoman or Habsburg rule. This phenomenon is hardly a Balkan peculiarity. The coexistence of national and paneuropean political programmes until the end of the century was a trait shared by all radical antimonarchists, like Giuseppe Mazzini, who believed that independent and unified national-states, legitimized through the votes of citizens, could cooperated easier with each other than authoritarian multinational monarchies. Mazzini’s ideas influenced a lot of European dissidents, amongst which many Balkan radicals who in 1865 established the Democratic Eastern Federation with an antimonarchist orientation, enriched with socialist ideas and influences from Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin – the syncretic mix of democratic, socialist and national ideas is evident in a broad spectrum of Eyropean radicalism from the blanquists to the anarchists (while in SE Europe there are influences from Russian Narodniks and Nihilists). Socialists and anarchists took part in the revolts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and of Bulgaria (1875-78), featured prominently in the movement for Macedonian autonomy (Boatmen, Revolutionaly Macedonian Organization), as well as in the anti-Ottoman revolts in Crete, even the interstate Greco-Turkish war in 1897 (w. Italian and Southern Slav volunteers). Their stance should not be confused neither with the official state position, nor with the dominant nationalist or irredentist ideologies, yet it does point to a certain combination of ideas of liberation at once social and national. Some of them (like Markovic or Botev) supported a Balkan federation that would be the result of social revolution and not interstate arrangements and would be based on the confederationist organizing of traditional Southern Slavic agrarian communities. Others were redesigning the political map of the peninsula by dividing it – as arbitrarily as the generals or the diplomats- into autonomous units and regions, often providing indirect support to the official claims in their countries (like Plato Drakoulis or the “Narrow Socialists”). Here we must note that there were also certain far more consistent positions on the national question, those for instance of the anarchists of Peloponnisos. In the newspaper Νέον Φως (New Light) of Pyrgos we read in an article on Crete (1899): We, the revolutionaries of the future, should not be patriotic and religious revolutionaries, we should be social and international revolutionaries. Our only enemies are the economic and authoritarian tyrants of any religion. Enough with fighting for flags and symbols. It is time we fought for our political, economic and social freedom in general.
We do not know to what extent such ideas had an impact on the local community of Pyrgos, let alone the rest of Greece, we do know however that they were short-lived.
On their part, the Balkan states and the established political and cultural elites never ignored the claims of federalism. The fact that this was almost always in the service of political and diplomatic manoeuvering hardly cancels the impact of federalist slogans on certain parts of society – basically the bourgeois, since the agrarian classes rarely took such matters seriously, and the working class was too small to play a significant role. Conservative and liberal politicians, even kings (like King Otto of Greece and Milan Obrenovic of Serbia) briefly and randomly presented themselves as supporters of some kind of federalism. Especially at times of national crises, insecurity for the future of the nation, for national stability or for the socio-economic status, the idea of Balkan cooperation could easily accompany the chauvinist nationalist rhetoric only to be abandoned for new strategies of power. The same fluctuation can be observed in the 20th century: Periods of nationalist competition and war are followed by phases of interstate rapprochement and calls for Balkan federation, most important federalist efforts being the Balkan Conferences in the interwar period and Tito’s federalist plans right after WWII.
The Left’s position on nationalism was largely determined by two significant factors: the experience of WWI and the creation of the USSR. The first showed up the contradictions of patriotic politics and social democracy. The second led to the domination of Marxism-leninism in the European revolutionary movement and the subordination of a great part of it to Moscow orders. The Bolsheviks supported national sovereignty as a necessary stage in social liberation. They also supported national liberation movements in order to undermine the imperialist powers. At the same time, their proposals for the arrangement of national issues in Europe corresponded completely to the strategic claims of the Soviet State, according to which some ethnic groups were more important than others. During WWII, this policy was adapted to the needs of the struggle of the Soviet State against Nazi Germany: The Communist Parties should first liberate their own nations and fight the conquerors – in other words, class analysis was downplayed in favour of a more patriotic dimension to the controlled national-liberationist fronts (the National Liberation Front in Greece and the Partisans, who by the way, had extremely limited contacts with each other). And because the politics of the Stalinist communist parties could not allow for opposing views within the Left, the dissident internationalists, i.e. the anarchists and the trotskyists, were their primary victims. The Cold War and the breakup of the Stalin-Tito alliance rendered practically unthinkable any return to the idea of Balkan federalism. It would be fair to say that the end of Balkan federalism was finalized with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, save for a few marginal federalist voices.

The interconnection of the national and the social question in the Balkans was probably historically inevitable. Today, however, it is very hard for the “nationally sovereign” Balkan peoples to feel particularly liberated! Will the 21st century indeed be less nationalist because of immigration and “globalization”? This is what part of our struggle and our anti-nationalist solidarity is about.

27 March 2009: International meeting

HOW TO CONTINUE WITH THE STRUGGLE OF SOLIDARITY
WITH THE IMMIGRANT TRADE-UNIONIST KONSTANDINA KUNEVA

27 March 2009: International meeting at the Occupation of the Rectorate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for the Abolition of the new slave-labour of subcontracting companies


An assembly of students, anarchists, workers and unemployed people occupied the administration building of the University of Thessaloniki on Monday the 16th of March 2009. The occupation aims to draw pubic attention towards the new slave-trade business of worker-subletting companies operating in the public sector (hospitals, public transport, universities) and controlling several thousand cleaners, janitors and secretaries. This new slave-trade, whose primary victims are the refugees and the poorest workers, is the most extreme aspect of precarity and flexibility in the labour market today. This situation was made clear to all when a wave of resistance flooded the country in solidarity with Konstandina Kuneva, a Bulgarian immigrant cleaner and combative trade-unionist at the Cleaners’ and Janitors’ Union of Attica, after she was attacked with acid in her face by the subcontractors she had been brave enough to challenge in order to demand minimum rights of workers. Konstandina Kuneva is a symbol of struggle and has inspired a new movement of unmediated trade-unionism and solidarity, against precarity and the exploitation of workers. The central demand of the occupation is for the rectorate of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and the ministry of education to throw out the subletting-subcontracting companies and hire all workers directly under new permanent contracts, guaranteeing decent wages and working conditions.
The first week of the occupation was a lively week of discussions, direct actions and a demo, all focussing on flexible and precarious working conditions, on grassroots trade-unionism and on the need for common struggle of Greeks and immigrants. There has been an ongoing effort to keep in contact with the people working for subletting companies (about 700 at this University). This has not always been easy. Part of the problem of rent company terrorism is that workers’ unions are often controlled by the employers, and at the moment the fact that certain workers have chosen to speak up is already a great step forward.
On the 27th of March, at the occupied rectorate’s offices at the University of Thessaloniki, Greek, Bulgarian, Slovenian and Polish people exchanged their views and experiences in struggles in their countries. People from three different Bulgarian groups, who had jointly organized a picket at the Greek embassy on womens’ day in solidarity with Konstandina Kuneva told us of the problems of struggles against humiliating working conditions of workers in Bulgaria, often in Italian- and Greek- owned companies ( the foreign direct investment so strongly desired and promoted by the Bulgarian state), as well as in companies in Greece, where there are now over 20.000 Bulgarian workers. An ongoing problem in Bulgaria is the dangerous appeal of neonazis, as seen for instance in their participation at anti-NATO or environmental struggles.
In Poland, after the total decline of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, when former Marxists turned prophets of neoliberalism and the Communist Party sought to hold on to power through undercover alliances, certain things are looking up again in the movement against the expoitation of workers. A Polish comrade talked of the anarchosyndicalist trade-union, the Workers’ Initiative, gathering momentum since 2003 not only among anti-authoritarians but also among workers disappointed with corrupt and bureaucratic official syndicates. The new grassroots unionism is spreading in many towns and different sectors, private and state-owned companies, hospitals, retail stores, and notably the post office, where a combative campaign by postmen to defend a colleague who had been sacked, lead to a series of small but important victories.
A comrade from Slovenia informed us about an autonomous initiative in Ljubliana which started one and a half years ago with the aim of raising public awareness about and fighting on the side of Bosnian migrant workers, who work mostly in the construction sector under terrible living conditions, no social security and very little money. After setting up a squat, where these workers could meet and socialize beyond the workplace (which is often where they slept after a 12+ hour-workday), the initiative encouraged them to discuss their rights as workers and collectively organize their demands. Migrants now have their own programme on the Radio Student station, a 40-year-old independent radio station that played an important role in the alternative and autonomous milieu during the 1980s. Despite threats from employers and criticism from the official trade-unions, as well as a few recuperating moves (that claimed, for example, some improvement in the workers’ sleeping arrangement as a victory of the official union rather than of the workers themselves), the initiative behind the Invisible Workers of the World (IWW!) is still alive and strong.


LET US ALL MEET IN SOFIA FOR A STRONG, UNMEDIATED, ANTIAUTHORITARIAN, INTERNATIONALIST 1st OF MAY DEMO