French students in militant protest

Genevieve Dupont
IMT
February 24, 2009

French students are out of the classroom and back on the street. On Thursday, 29th January, students and teaching staff joined in the national strike that had an estimated 2.5 million French workers marching in the major cities to prove to President Sarkozy that his provocative remark in the summer of 2007- ‘These days, when there’s a strike in France, nobody notices,’ was as wrong as it was rash. In the afternoon of the same day 53 out of France’s 85-odd universities voted to continue their own strike indefinitely. Ten days later they show no signs of backing down, with up to 74 universities now affected and the action due to carry on until at least the 11th. French students are angry, and they’re determined that this year, everyone will notice.

On January 29, students and teaching staff joined in the national strike that had an estimated 2.5 million French workers marching in the major cities. Photo by yupa on Flickr.

There’s nothing new about the universities going on strike. In November and December 2007, students also joined the wave of national strikes, and many universities were blockaded for up to four weeks to stop plans to fund universities privately. In March 2006 many students occupied their campuses as part of national protest against the proposed ‘Contrat Première Embauche’, the ‘First Employment Contract’ that threatened young workers’ rights. ‘We’re used to it,’ says Louis, a third-year music student at Université François Rabelais, Tours. ‘Last year the strikes led to my university being blockaded and disrupted weeks of class. But I’m here today because we have to draw a line somewhere.’

So what makes this year different? The reforms now on the table are named after the Minister for Higher Education, Valérie Pécresse, and they will primarily affect students on France’s prestigious teacher training course, the CAPES [Le Certificat d’Aptitude au Professorat de l’Enseignement du Second degré, the teacher-training programme for secondary-level teachers]

The Pécresse reforms plan to reduce CAPES funding significantly, by shortening the two year programme to one year, stopping the year’s paid work experience, and forcing CAPES students to share lectures with Masters’ students of their discipline in order to reduce teaching time.

French students are angry, and they’re determined that this year, everyone will notice. Photo by yupa on Flickr.

These measures will bring an estimated 900 job losses in the higher education sector, and threaten the status of the researcher/lecturers who remain. Many will have to give closer accounts of the way their research time is spent, and could face increased teaching time of up to a hundred per cent. ‘They’re not just threatening our positions as researchers, but the capacity of the university to give all students an education backed up by up-to-date, fresh research,’ says L.R., Professor of Sociology, Aix en Provence.

The longer-term effects of the Pécresse reforms will be to devalue teachers in secondary education. The CAPES has always made sure that only the number of teachers needed in schools pass the course each year. The reforms will turn this carefully controlled system into a free market, with some teachers worse qualified than others and therefore more vulnerable to attacks on their job status by the state, which will surely be the government’s next move.

Teachers and students have come together with unprecedented solidarity to oppose the Pécresse laws. Since November 6th, one-day walk-outs and demonstrations across the country have shown an unusual level of inter-faculty and inter-university cooperation. Teaching staff in many universities voted through an administrative strike, meaning marks are withheld from students. The movement has been reported widely in both local and national press, but the government has shown no recognition and until now university presidencies have remained equally unhelpful.

On 10 February a massive demonstration was held in Paris in protest against the French government's plans for education. Photo by ptit@l on Flickr.

Now general assemblies in every university have voted to up the ante. Around 50% of university-level classes were cancelled in France last week. And this year the dominant aim is to spread the word. Meetings in Tours’ Université Francois Rabelais, where every faculty except music and medicine is on strike, tend to focus on methods of gaining support and ensuring eventual victory, rather than on just stopping the university from working. Although the main student unions such as UNEF and SUD Etudiant are clearly present, and the campaign has the support of France’s 5 main union confederations, every decision is taken by a general vote by students and staff, usually following, but not necessarily in agreement with, a teaching staff vote.

Last year, even in this traditionally very radical university, the only way to make the strike effective was to block the entrances to university buildings. This year many teachers and students are supporting strike action for the first time, and general assemblies are filling 1000-capacity auditoria to bursting point. Everyone wants to be involved in voting through actions, distributing leaflets or just finding out up-to-date news on the movement’s progress across the country.

Also new this year is the involvement of the Tours Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT) in the movement. The IUTs, French technical and vocational universities, not unlike our old polytechnics, face having their entire budget diverted into the ‘real’ universities to allocate as they wish, a move that is certain to leave them out of pocket. Although they rarely strike, they are currently joining many university protests and look likely to schedule strikes for one or two days next week in many cities.

At the beginning of the second-week of strike action the movement is becoming more and more organised. Alternative classes in activism and discussions on how the universities can be improved are taking place in university class-rooms. ‘We’re not just fighting a reform but a whole system,’ explains Clarisse, 19, a first-year psychology student. ‘A huge accumulation of frustration has contributed to a universal rallying of students right across the country. We’re fighting a type of politics that tries to conquer by dividing people, but last week was the beginning of a inter-union movement.’

The power of the strike is already beginning to show its effects. Many university presidencies have now declared their opposition to the Pécresse reforms, despite most not giving their formal support to strikers. Photo by farfahinne on Flickr.

The power of the strike is already beginning to show its effects. Many university presidencies have now declared their opposition to the Pécresse reforms, despite most not giving their formal support to strikers. In Tours the President has consented to a formal day of protest for Tuesday 10th February, when massive crowds are expected to rally in Paris. Surely the government will soon be forced to admit that strikes in France do not go unnoticed- in the past they have brought down governments.

Sarkozy has received at least one message he can’t ignore - the national newspaper Libération reports that on Monday, 2nd February in a private meeting with heads of Paris universities, the president was addressed by Axel Kahn, president of Paris V University and well-known scientist: ‘Mr. President of the Republic, you will not succeed in passing this decree.’ Sarkozy has already proved himself a slow learner when it comes to listening to the French public- meanwhile, university activism is just getting more organised and more powerful.

Tours, February 9, 2009

Uprising in Greece: Protests, Riots, Strikes

Democracy Now online Radio
December 11, 2008

Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken Greece for the sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy in Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday’s massive general strike over pension reform and privatization shut down the country, more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen university campuses remain occupied by student demonstrators. A major rally is expected Friday, and as solidarity protests spread to neighboring Turkey, as well as Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands, dozens of arrests have been made across the continent. We speak to a student activist and writer from Athens.

Guest: Nikos Lountos, Greek activist and writer. He’s with the Socialist Workers Party in Greece and a graduate student in political philosophy at Panteion University in Athens.

Rush Transcript.

AMY GOODMAN: Protests, riots and clashes with police have overtaken Greece for the sixth straight day since the fatal police shooting of a teenage boy in Athens Saturday night. One day after Wednesday’s massive general strike over pension reform and privatization shut down the country, more than a hundred schools and at least fifteen university campuses remain occupied by student demonstrators. A major rally is expected on Friday. And as solidarity protests spread to neighboring Turkey, as well as Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands, dozens of arrests have been made across the continent.

On Wednesday, two police officers involved in Saturday’s shooting were arrested, and one was charged with murder. But anger remains high over the officers’ failure to express remorse at the student’s death. The police officers claim the bullet that killed Alexandros Grigoropoulos was fired in self-defense, and the death was an accident caused by a ricochet.

The unrest this week has been described as the worst since the end of the military dictatorship in 1974 and could cost the already weakened Greek economy an estimated hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s also shaken the country’s conservative government that has a narrow one-person majority in Parliament. The socialist opposition has increased calls for the prime minister to quit and call new elections, ignoring his appeals for national unity.

I’m joined now on the telephone by a student activist and writer from Athens. He’s with the Greek Socialist Workers Party. He’s a graduate student in political philosophy at Panteion University in Athens.

We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you lay out for us exactly when this all began and how the protests have escalated and what they’re about right now, Nikos Lountos?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yes, Amy. I’m very glad to talk with you.

So, we are in the middle of an unprecedented wave of actions now and protests and riots. It all started on Saturday evening at around 9:00 p.m., when a policeman patrolling the Exarcheia neighborhood in Athens shot and murdered in cold blood the fifteen-year-old schoolboy Alexis.

The first response was an attempt to cover up the killing. The police claimed that they had been attacked. But the witnesses all around were too many for this cover-up to happen. So, all the witnesses say that it was a direct shot. So even the government, in just a few hours, had to claim that it will move against the police, trying to calm the anger.

But the anger exploded in the streets. In three, four hours, all the streets around Athens were filled with young people demonstrating against the police brutality. The anti-capitalist left occupied the law school in the center of Athens and turned it into headquarters for action. And on Sunday, there was the first mass demonstration. Thousands of people of every age marched towards the police headquarters and to the parliament. And the next day, on Monday, all this had turned into a real mass movement all around Greece.

What was the most striking was that in literally every neighborhood in every city and town, school students walked out of their school on Monday morning. So you could see kids from eleven to seventeen years old marching in the streets wherever you could be in Greece, tens of thousands of school students, maybe hundreds of thousands, if you add all the cities. So, all around Athens and around Greece, there were colorful demonstration of schoolboys and schoolgirls. Some of them marched to the local police stations and clashed with the police, throwing stones and bottles. And the anger was so really thick that policemen and police officers had to be locked inside their offices, surrounded by thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys and girls.

The picture was so striking that it produced a domino effect. The trade unions of teachers decided an all-out strike for Tuesday. The union of university lecturers decided a three-day strike. And so, there was the already arranged, you know, the strike you mentioned for Wednesday against the government’s economic policies, so the process was generalizing and still generalizes.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, when you have this kind of mass protest, even with the beginning being something so significant as the killing of a student, it sounds like it’s taken place in like a dry forest when a match is thrown, a lit match, that it has caught on fire something that has been simmering for quite some time. What is that?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yeah, that’s true. Everybody in all of this, that even the riots, the big riots—you may have seen the videos—they are a social phenomenon, not just the result of some political incident. There were thousands of angry young people that came out in the streets to clash with the police and smash windows of banks, of five-star hotels and expensive stores. So, that’s true. It was something that waited to happen.

I think it’s a mixture of things. We have a government that’s—a government of the ruling party called New Democracy, a very right-wing government. It has tried to make many attacks on working people and students, especially students. The students were some form of guinea pigs for the government. When it was elected after 2004, they tried—the government tried to privatize universities, which are public in Greece, and put more obstacles for school students to get into university. The financial burden on the poor families if they want their children to be educated is really big in Greece. And the worst is that even if you have a university degree, even if you are a doctor or lawyer, in most cases, young people get a salary below the level of poverty in Greece. So the majority of young people in Greece stay with their families ’til their late twenties, many ’til their thirties, in order to cope with this uncertainty. And so, this mixture, along with the economic crisis and their unstable, weak government, was what was behind all this explosion.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos is a Greek activist and writer. Nikos, the protests have been picked up not only in Greece, but around the world. We’re talking about the Netherlands, talking also about Russia and Italy and Spain and Denmark and Germany. What does it mean to the workers and the students in Greece now? How significant is that? Has that changed the nature of the protests back in Greece?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: It’s very good news for us to know that many people around the world are trying to show their solidarity to us. And I think it’s not only solidarity, but I think it’s the same struggle against police brutality, for democracy, against war, against poverty. It’s the same struggle. So it’s really good news for us to hear about that.

I think you should know that the next Thursday will be the next day of action, of general action. Every day will have action, but next Thursday will be a day of general action. The students will be all out. And we’re trying to force the leaders of the trade unions to have a new general strike. So I could propose to people hearing me now that next Thursday would be a good day for solidarity action all around the world, to surround the Greek embassies, the consulates, so generally to get out in the streets and express your solidarity to our fight. And I think workers and students in Greece will really appreciate it.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the issue of civil liberties overall in Greece? Has this been a matter of controversy over time?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Yeah. This government has a really awful record on civil liberties. It all began during the Olympics of 2004, aided also by the so-called anti-terrorist campaign started by George Bush after 9/11. During the Olympic Games, we had the first cameras in the streets of Athens. And there are now proofs that many phones were tapped illegally at that period, among them the phones of the leaders of the antiwar movement here in Greece, such as the coordinators of the Stop the War Coalition.

And then came the biggest scandal of all. In 2005, tens of Pakistani immigrants were abducted from their homes by unknown men. They were hooded and interrogated and then thrown away after some days in the streets of Athens. The Greek police, along with the British MI5, had organized these illegal abductions in coordination with the then-Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf.

During the student movements and the workers’ strikes all these years, hundreds of beatings and more police brutality have covered up. Just one month ago, a Pakistani immigrant called Mohammed Ashraf was murdered by riot police in Athens when the police dispersed the crowd of immigrants waiting to apply for a green card. And the immigrants in Greece in general are mainly from regions hit by war—Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan. And they are treated in awful conditions by the Greek state and police. Many people have died by shells in the borders or in the DMZ, trying to get into Greece and then Europe. So it’s really an awful record for the government on civil liberties.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, finally, as we travel from Sweden to Germany, one of the things we’re looking at is the effect of the US election on the rest of the world. In a moment, we’ll be joined by the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, the largest magazine in Europe. When President-elect Obama was elected, their headline was “President of the World.” What is the effect of the election of Barack Obama on people you know in Greece? What has been the reaction?

NIKOS LOUNTOS: Well, you know, all these years we had a slogan here in the antiwar movement and the student movement that George Bush is the number-one terrorist. So, many people were happy when they learned that these will be the final days of George Bush and his Republican hawkish friends like John McCain. But, of course, people in Greece have experienced that having a different government doesn’t always mean that things will be better. If the movement doesn’t put its stamp on the changes, changing only persons will have no meaning. But people have appreciated the change in the US administration as a message of change all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Nikos Lountos, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Greek activist and writer. He’s with the Socialist Workers Party in Greece and a graDemocratic Struggleduate student in political philosophy at Panteion University in Athens.

Greece: massive school student attack against police stations all over the country!

Editorial Board of "Marxistiki Foni"
December 10, 2008

On Monday morning we witnessed a phenomenon that we have not seen in Greece since the uprising of December 1944. In every town of Greece a total of about forty thousand school students, young 15-year old teenagers, attacked the police stations. In Athens, Thessalonica, Patras, Larissa, Corfu, Komotini' and in many other towns across the country the attack of the school students pinned down the heavily armed and well-equipped police officers inside their stations simply with the use of small rocks, tomatoes and yoghurts! Without any fear whatsoever, thousands of teenagers gave an example of heroic struggle against police brutality.

The Karamanlis government took immediate measures to close the schools for one day in the name of "mourning for the young student". In reality what he was aiming at was to stop the students from occupying the schools. On Monday night the government met behind closed doors and as the media reported, some ministers went as far as proposing calling in the army to maintain "public order"! The government has officially announced that it has rejected any such suggestions and is insisting on the "democratic road", while at the same time Karamanlis has announced a series of discussions with the opposition political parties with the aim of creating a common front of "national unity".

In spite of the final outcome and the official position taken, these discussions among the government ministers is a serious warning to the workers and the youth of Greece of what can happen if in the next period they do not build a socialist alternative to the present rotten and barbaric bourgeois power.

The government is desperately seeking points of support in society and on the same night, they found a very useful ally among the desperate and semi-lumpen elements who oblige the government with their blind methods. These groups, with about 2000 people in total, mixed with anarchists, hooligan elements and also infiltrated by police provocateurs, in reality destroyed from the very beginning the massive demonstration of 25.000 people on Monday evening which had been called by SYRIZA, the KKE, University Student unions and school teachers. Without any political logic these elements went on the rampage, smashing small shops together with banks, burning "luxury" Mercedes but also scooters, burning kiosks (small newsagents and tobacconists) and ordinary residences, and they also looted shops, stealing mobile phones, watches and other things.

Yesterday, the school students and thousands of people demonstrated all day long in the centre of Athens and after that they attended en masse the funeral of the young Alexandros who had been killed a few days earlier. But the police, not happy at having killed one student, provocatively attacked the demonstrators outside the cemetery. One team of police officers tried to terrorize the demonstrators by shooting many times in the air with live ammunition. All these scenes were broadcast on the TV channels, provoking a new big wave of anti-government feelings throughout Greek society.

The government has tried to exploit this mood of "tension" in society to get today's general strike called off. Karamanlis in fact made an official request to the union leaders to cancel the strike rallies. However, under the pressure of the working class the union leaders have had to reject the government's request. So as we write this short report the working class in Greece is mobilising in yet another general strike, the 10th since the ND formed its government.

The atmosphere in Greek society is electric. The Marxists believe that only the working class in a united class action with the youth, strictly separate from the criminal methods of the lumpen and hooligan elements, can defeat the government and its bosses. All the conditions have been laid for a big victory of the movement and the fall of this government. The forces are gathering whereby a radical transformation of society would be possible. This explains the growth in popularity of all the left parties.

What is missing is a leadership with a clear political perspective, a genuinely socialist perspective for putting an end to the present system which is the cause of growing poverty and with it increasing state violence. The Greek Marxist Tendency is intervening in the movement and raising demands that correspond to the needs of the movement. There is a vacuum on the left and what is required is a clear orientation for the mass left parties of the Greek workers and vanguard youth. The calls must be one for a united front of the left parties, in alliance with the trade unions and youth organisations, whose aim must be to bring down this hated reactionary government and usher in a genuine workers' government based on a programme of expropriation of the capitalist class. That is the only serious answer to the present brutal methods being used by the Greek ruling class.