By Charles-André Udry | THE GENERAL strike on February 4 in Greece was the most important social mobilization since those that took place at the end of 2011. Its main characteristic was that there were strikes and mobilizations in all the major cities and town, both big and small, adding up to some 111 demonstrations.

On islands such as Rhodes and Corinth, as well as smaller ones, the mobilizations were broader than we’ve seen in the past, including a growing radicalism among the farmers, which should not be discounted. The Thessaloniki Fair, a major yearly agricultural exposition, was not business as usual. Security forces were overwhelmed as the fairgrounds were occupied by outraged farmers. According to various reports, the police themselves were less than enthusiastic about keeping order.

More generally, according to a union research institute, the rate of participation in the strike itself for teachers and municipal workers was between 50 and 55 percent, which should be compared to the 10 to 15 percent that took part in the January 2016 movement. In Athens, between 60,000 and 80,000 people joined in. The PAME, the Greek Communist Party’s (KKE) mass organization, demonstrated separately, as is its custom, but brought together something in the neighborhood of 20,000 people.

The makeup of the demonstrations indicates the emergence of a social bloc opposed to the government’s measures. The forces of the right will do everything they can in order to put an end to this—to block this dynamic. But for whole sectors of society, their very survival is at stake. The determination showed by the farmers, who will see their monthly pensions reduced from 1,000 to 600 euros, is only growing stronger.

Certainly, the trajectory of these protests will not be the same as those in 2011 because those could look to a perspective of a future government of the left.

And this is where the social and political questions converge: that is, the development of a credible transitional program, starting from social necessities, that articulates them in terms of rights and their political expression, and which must, necessarily, be of a negative character. This means that it must set as a goal the reversal of the second Tsipras government (meaning the one that took office after the September 20 elections) that presented itself as a mediator in applying the third Memorandum.

This negative phase is not understood by the partisans of social autonomy, who disparage politics. Yet this is an integral part of the dialectic of the class struggle itself and is critical for the construction of a social bloc based on political initiatives from organizations that are able to resonate with the various impulses arising from a brutalized society.

Creating this social bloc necessitates movement activists forming alliances through new experiences because the political context is new, both in terms of its unprecedented temporal features and its current constituent forces. We cannot understand this process in terms of historical inertia. The left’s intervention can, at least in partial ways, help coalesce its forces in order to organize a grassroots challenge to the laws and decrees which are the fruit of the third Memorandum, both those already put in place and those being proposed. This implies directly destabilizing the positions of the “national” and “international” agents enforcing austerity. According to a recent poll, Tsipras can count only 15 percent of the vote, which only goes to show his weakness.

Next, we must add in strategic debates about “what to do tomorrow” in order to block the application of the Memorandum while elaborating an urgent plan based on this sort of resistance that lays out clear lines of action integrated into the overall context. We must keep in mind that this situation includes a multifaceted institutional and economic crisis at the European-wide level, all in a context of war.

This last term, and its reality, carries a particular resonance in Greece, where it isn’t necessary to refer to long-past history, because extremely sharp conflicts can be recalled in living memory. Today, they are playing out in the tragedy of the immigrant crisis, which poses the basic right to live, as well as the role Greece plays in the mechanisms of NATO and its alliance with the Zionist state, sponsored by the Panos Kammenos, the conservative ANEL party minister of defense.

At the same time, the construction and development of Popular Unity (PU) continues by internalizing these experiences of struggle, by assessing these struggles (inside organizing assemblies that both prepare and assess mobilizations, analyzing the situation and looking to future challenges), and through the necessary internal debates and discussions pertaining to the reconstruction of a form of political representation of the political objectives that go beyond simply defeating the second Tsipras government. That reconstruction points to the beginning of the disintegration of Europe’s central institutions.

This raises the importance of the practical convergence of the radical Greek left—in particular, of PU and its component parts—with analogous (not to say identical) forces in numerous other European countries that are prepared to actively participate in today’s social and political conflicts.

We are not talking here about academic debates, but of a confluence of reflexive praxis—to reclaim a popular term which is often used to neutralize ideological-political points of view—on the part of collective and organized actors. This interaction must lead to an elaboration that gives meaning to action and the representation of an image that can be built “by those from below” in their struggle for a different future. This cannot be merely a repeat of the “horizon of the possible” formula that has flourished since the 1990s.

It will be through these steps, which present themselves as permanent challenges, that it will be possible to continue raising class consciousness, a consciousness that will be forged in confrontations with the ruling class and its political and governmental expressions, as well as its program and projects.

The ruling classes in Greece are attempting to respond to the open crisis of leadership they have faced since 2011-12 by putting forward Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who was elected president of the conservative New Democracy party on January 10. The future of the second Tsipras government will be in large part determined by the re-composition of the leadership of the ruling classes, and the various fractions of those classes in waiting—a re-composition that will be carried out under the fire of multisided battles.

Charles-André Udry