I also agree that the invocation of the Third Reich by anti-’austerity’ protesters is unhelpful and offensive.

However, I would like to contest your representation of the whole political conflict in Greece as an abandonment of ‘mainstream politics’ in favour of ‘extremes’. The danger of this argument is that to continue to talk of left and right as equal and opposite ‘extremes’ is, on the one hand, to ignore or gloss over the substantive normative differences between socialist/anarchist theory and the fascist/racist project and, on the other hand, to implicitly paint liberalism or the institution of the liberal democratic state as the ‘middle ground’, the ‘mainstream politics’ to which you refer. This is to imply that liberalism or liberal-democracy is somehow ‘neutral’ or non-ideological.

Yet it is precisely liberalism that got us into this mess – in the neo-liberal variant that has come to dominate Western societies (and beyond) since the latter part of the last century. It was the lack of regulation of financial markets (on neo-liberal principle) which caused the massive international financial crisis of which the problems in Greece are epiphenomenal.

The neo-liberalism that shapes and constrains ‘mainstream politics’ in liberal-democracies today is far from ‘neutral’. It is a partisan theory, indeed it is ‘extremist’ – but it advocates not on behalf of a privileged group (the nation, the race, the rulers, the workers etc.) but rather on behalf of the circulation and accumulation of capital itself. And it is neo-liberalis policy that not only resulted in the crisis, but is now being applied as the remedy, in the shape of programmes of ‘austerity’. The Papademos government’s bragging to the IMF in the Memorandum of Understanding that it has already ‘reduced the minimum wage as a prior action for this program’ and that it remains ‘committed to our ambitious privatization plans’ are further evidence of a strategy for dealing with the crisis of neo-liberalism with more neo-liberalism (the displacement of risk from the social to the individual and the privatisation of all spheres of social life are central to the arguments of neo-liberal theorists like Hayek and Friedman, and were already in practice both in Greece and around the world before the onset of crisis).

The ‘austerity’ measures being imposed are simply unacceptable, and popular resistance to them is not only inevitable, but should, as far as possible, be supported by anyone concerned with social justice, equality and protecting quality of life.

Furthermore, I would suggest that you might find that some of the ‘civil society’ you want to see in Greece is already emergent, though not, perhaps, in the form you might anticipate. Alliances of socialists and anarchists (and let’s remember, for most anarchists, the term refers to radically democratic forms of self-organisation, not simply ‘smashing’ the state) and other anti-’austerity’ activists are precisely the location that organic and democratic ‘civil society’ organisations are likely to emerge from. On such forms of radically democratic self-organisation, the work of Dimitris Dalakoglou, an anthropologist at the University of Sussex, is particularly interesting – especially the co-edited volume ‘Revolt and Crisis in Greece’ (2011).

It is worth bearing in mind that the ‘left’ today is not the left it was during the previous era of major ideological conflict in Greece. It too has evolved, and the globalisation of the ‘Occupy’ movement is but one example of how, with the demise of Soviet and party-based hegemony over left-wing thought and activism, socialisms and anarchisms have been reinvigorated as emancipatory theories and practices that are more open and participatory than before. To tar left-wing resistance to ‘austerity’ in Greece with the same ‘extremist’ brush as Golden Dawn strikes me as an unfair assessment.