How do ordinary Athenians remember the overthrow of the Greek Colonels?

Forty-five years ago last weekend, an armoured tank crashed through the gates of the Athens Polytechnic. It was deployed by the Greek military junta to disperse student protesters who had occupied the university, calling for an end to the US-backed dictatorship of Georgios Papadopoulos. Dozens of civilians were killed in the ensuing crackdown and martial law was imposed throughout the country. Yet the democratic energies released by demonstrators were impossible to contain. They caused panic and division in the regime, precipitating its collapse in 1974.

Today, the Polytechnic Uprising is celebrated as the event which restored Greek democracy. November 17 has become a holiday in which inheritors of the Polytechnic legacy take to the streets in a display of solidarity, marching on the American Embassy whose onetime occupants abetted the military government.

The democratic message of the Polytechnic remains resonant given the forfeiture of Greek sovereignty to the European Union, which now controls the country’s fiscal policy after the 2015 Memorandum – a document which commits successive Greek governments to a programme of spending cuts, deregulation and privatisation.

The leftist administration which signed up to this reform package, Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza, was once a stalwart presence at the commemorative protests. But its concessions to the EU mean that it is no longer welcome. On Friday, several Syriza MPs attempted to lay wreaths for the 1973 protesters at a memorial inside the Polytechnic. Although some of the politicians were personally involved in the struggle against the junta, their passage was blocked by over 200 students who guarded the university entrance until the delegation was forced to turn back. One demonstrator told me that, if a Syriza bloc dared to attend the march, they would be met with Molotov cocktails.

Resentment at the capitulation of these former comrades – and a resultant contempt for electoral politics – is palpable in the crowds gathered near Syntagma Square. Yet the protest’s main concern is not the current political situation in Greece, but the timeless example of its student insurrection. “This is not about Syriza”, I’m told by a lifelong Trotskyist whose father served in the junta’s army. “It is more celebratory than that. This is our ‘68”.

An elderly woman marching with the communists is similarly emphatic that she has come to voice a democratic ideal which transcends finite political formations. “I was on the frontline in ‘73”, she says between deep drags of her cigarette. “We called it the rocking revolution. I used to listen to Led Zeppelin and then go out to fight the junta”.

If there is any Syriza policy which attracts sustained criticism from the protesters, it is the decision to remain in NATO. Large banners recall how the Western military alliance helped to suppress political dissent and support the post-war tyranny in Greece. Their sprawling, paragraph-long slogans are more sophisticated (and less catchy) than anything produced by the British Left. When I asked activists for a translation, they usually spent minutes puzzling over the English word for an obscure neologism lifted from Foucault or Althusser.

That such mottos can galvanise so many people – over 15,000 this year – speaks to a thriving intellectual inheritance which is largely absent from the Corbyn movement. Yet there is nothing exclusively Greek about this anti-NATO sentiment. The recent influx of refugees from across the Mediterranean has diversified the November 17 protests such that they are now attended by Kurds, Afghanis and Syrians who blame US foreign policy for the disintegration of their homelands. Many of these undocumented migrants live in constant fear of police raids, and reside in illegal squats alongside Athens’ anarchist population. This creates an affinity between refugees and leftists in their shared opposition to American intervention and hostility to the security services. One man of Algerian dissent tells me that socialists and migrants recently joined forces to expel members of the far-right Golden Dawn party from a street in central Athens. For him, the march is a rare opportunity to foster and promote this kind of cross-community organisation.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic about the commemoration, however. A Greek postgraduate student describes it as a “distraction” from the real issues affecting his country. “The institutions of the state were necessarily more fragile back in ‘73’, he says. ‘But now, in the age of digitised capital, these large demonstrations are just performances. They don’t have the same power to change things”.

The word “performance” is used by several others to describe the actions of the anarchist bloc. Every year, as the march draws to a close, about 300 masked demonstrators confront the assembled riot squads in Exarchia – the home of Athenian anarchism – which usually functions as a no-go zone for police. The fighting has become so routine and ritualised that, for many protesters, it is at best an infantile outpouring of frustration and at worst a senseless flareup which undermines community relations.

As I walked down Athens’ main thoroughfare at 7pm, the police threw flash grenades into the crowd behind me, splitting the protest in half and driving its participants into the side streets. Anarchists responded by throwing rocks and petrol bombs at officers outside the police headquarters, who proceeded to arrest eight suspects. Clashes continued into the small hours, with police and protesters holding standoffs on opposite sides of Exarchia’s streets, many of which were suffused with tear gas and engulfed in flames. Shops and houses had their windows smashed, and witnesses reported indiscriminate violence from both sides.

The most striking feature of these riots was their predictability. Those who had attended the rally in previous years knew exactly what to expect. They could describe when and how the chaos would erupt, and preempt the form it would take. One feels, for this reason, that contemporary Greco-anarchism is more stagy than subversive. But whether this applies to the November 17 protest as a whole is questionable. To its detractors, it is a spectacle of solidarity which masks the disenchantment created by Syriza’s betrayal. But to its advocates it articulates a utopian instinct which has coloured Greece’s history, and which could yet transform its future.