On the morning of September 6, as these lines are being written, the employees of Sto Kokino and Avgi have been paid their June salary. If the banking system works quickly, by noon it is likely that our accounts will be credited with 300 or 400 euros, a strike support payment that our unions acquired, allowing us to go to the supermarket. Otherwise, we will have to wait until Monday. There is a reasonable tendency to romanticize struggles: we focus on the morale and dignity of the strikers or the political symbolism of their fight. However, the issue of unpaid workers is primarily a matter of material hardship that turns into psychological exhaustion. This is, in fact, a more straightforward class approach to the issue. Employers, whose class instinct is often more direct and unmediated than that of the workers, understand this well. Forcing workers into financial asphyxiation is the best way to weaken them and make them yield. Reagan and Thatcher, for example, had this in mind when facing the striking air traffic controllers in the U.S. or the miners in the UK. But of course, on the Left, there are no admirers of Reagan and Thatcher, nor would anyone resort to methods of economic asphyxiation to lead the workforce to exhaustion and capitulation.
In Sto Kokino and Avgi, let’s not fool ourselves; it has happened before that we have remained unpaid for some time. What is unprecedented is the combination of things we are witnessing in recent months. Closure of the daily paper Avgi with no planning for the following day, a payment halt at the newspaper and the radio almost immediately after, a decisive refusal to present an operational plan for the Media, layoffs at Sto Kokino, accompanied by management’s threats, abandonment of the radio on autopilot, and even the first attempts at strike-breaking in its 18 years of operation.
The Left has suffered its own “Shock Doctrines” on various occasions since July 2015, and this time it is the turn of the Media. Can the Media truly survive? This question cannot be overlooked. SYRIZA cites low sales, declining audiences, and reduced state funding. The argument “it is not feasible for 3.6 out of the 4 million in state funding to go to the Media” seems logical. However, those of us who are not proponents of economic liberalism know that starting a discussion around an issue from the symptoms rather than the causes is the usual trap of the powerful to shift the burden onto workers. Particularly, the radio station Sto Kokino—and in a different way, Avgi—has not at all been a party outlet for SYRIZA’s positions all these years. For many years, it has been a radio station that gave voice to movements, communicated and gave a platform to society, closely following—if not being a part of—the mobilizational spring that Greek society experienced from 2006 onwards. This was the feeder of Kokino, just as it was, in reality, far from millenarianism and personality cults, the feeder of SYRIZA. Kokino followed the ebb and flow of movements but struggled to maintain its momentum when it lost this characteristic for any reason. That is why it went through difficult times after July 2015, during SYRIZA’s government, and in the last year, although it managed during the immediately preceding period, up to the elections of 2023, to remain unscathed from the collapse of SYRIZA’s influence.
In short, the Left’s Media can survive, and their history has proven this when they place social movement at the forefront, rather than a narrow party line. In fact, only when this happened did SYRIZA, as their owner, gain political added value from them. Until this idea is understood by those currently managing the future of Kokino and Avgi, it is important to reiterate the obvious. The workers at the Media are willing to discuss solutions for their economic breathing space. But only after we are paid. The idea that the Media will be “financially rehabilitated” with unpaid workers, being blackmailed, in asphyxiation, and with threats hanging over their heads may draw on an effective liberal experience in Greece and abroad. But it forgets that Kokino and Avgi are the result of the creative and enthusiastic work of individuals who precisely opposed this experience. Beyond the fact that we have no grocery shopping, not falling without a fight into a liberal narrative is also a vital issue for all of us.