#Greece - A left that carries the state inside it
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/11/18/a-left-that-carries-the-state-inside-it/
The assault on
#Athens #anarchists belongs to a longer cycle of disillusionment, repression, and political decay. A generation came of age after the 2008 youth revolt—a moment that terrified the political class—only to watch the long disillusionment of the
#SYRIZA years unfold: hope evaporating, movement energy betrayed, and ‘left government’ shrinking into technocratic management. What followed was the right’s triumphant return, armed with a violently enforced TINA (‘there is no alternative’) and a counter-insurgency posture aimed squarely at the movements that shook the country in 2008 and during the memorandum years. In recent years, police authorities have increasingly attacked political squats—including inside university campuses with the cooperation of academic administrations.In this climate, authoritarian and patriarchal patterns have reasserted themselves not only from above but also inside the political field, with remnants of the left acting as buffers and internal counter-insurgency, absorbing anger and blocking the emergence of genuinely autonomous social alternatives. ARAS’s attack was a re-enactment of this broader tendency: the internalisation of state logic by a leftist formation desperate for recognition and power. The attempt to secure relevance and organisational survival in a landscape reshaped by the slow asphyxiation of the movements culminated in a grotesque rupture with the spirit of the Polytechnic—an authoritarian spectacle that mimicked the very forces the anniversary is meant to defy. Movements have a lot to fear when actors legitimise these formations in the name of ‘unity’ and thereby help them secure moral cover.Moreover, the attack’s brutality revealed more than a sectarian and authoritarian ambush; it exposed a hierarchical political culture shaped by patriarchal command habits—festering across parts of the Greek left (and the political spectrum more broadly)—and now emboldened under a government that fetishises discipline, punishment, and obedience.