It was exciting to learn from the Greek comrades during Marxism 2008 about the strike wave that is engulfing their country at the moment, and exchange stories and experiences about what’s going on in Egypt and Greece in terms of the industrial action… The workers, students and civil servants on both sides of the Mediterranean are raising hell… Below are excerpts from an ISJ interview with Comrade Panas Garganas, the editor of the Greek newspaper Workers Solidarity…

The government then called a snap election in September 2007 because it thought a new mandate would help it, but it was wrong. There was a discussion on the left about whether the resistance would decline after the election. But when the re-elected government tried to push through the pension reform a strike by journalists started a new wave of struggle, and the unions were pushed into calling a series of days of action, which were massive. We had days of action on 12 December 2007, 13 February 2008 and 19 March 2008. These days of action came together with all-out strikes by energy workers, local government workers and bank workers, including those at the Bank of Greece.
These were the most advanced strikes we had seen since the 1970s because they were all-out actions. There was mass participation and there were pickets to stop any strike-breaking. They were also in defiance of the law, something which had not happened in a very long time. Not since the 1970s had people ignored court orders and refused to provide staff for “essential” services—the bank workers shut down the stock exchange for a few days, energy workers shut down power stations, and so on.
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To get some idea of the radicalisation we have to look at the students. The occupations were run by coordinating committees that were elected in general assemblies in the faculties. In most of the faculties the leadership of these coordinating committees was to the left of the Communist Party and of Synaspismos. That gives an indication of the extent of the radical left milieu that exists in Greece.
There are similar developments within the strikes, although not to the same extent. We have not yet had any strikes that were run from below, with coordinating committees like the students. But the presence of a left milieu among striking workers is fairly visible when it comes to the demonstrations, the picket lines and so on. So, for instance, on the demonstrations, the Communist Party marches separately from the unions. The main bulk of demonstrators may be influenced by the Pasok leadership of the unions, but there are whole sections of the strike rallies where the far left dominates, with its own banners, its own slogans and so on. There are real pressures to the left of Synaspismos.