Martin Suchanek
The “Spanish revolution is spreading to Greece. At the end of May, the central squares of the Country were occupied by tens of thousands of people.
“In Athens, an estimated 20,000 gathered in Syntagma Square, in Thessaloniki, an estimated 5,000 in front of the White Tower in the city. Thousands gathered in Patras, Volos, Chania, Ioannina, Larissa and other cities. “(Indymedia Germany)
The solidarity of these protests with the occupations in Spain and the inspiration they have taken from them are obvious. The central slogan of the movement – “They should all go” – comes from a Spanish source.
But why is the protest movement in Greece taking this form of action now? Haven’t Greek workers developed far more radical forms of action in the past?
Since the beginning of the financial crisis in Greece there have been nine general strikes, two of them this year alone. The last was only a few weeks ago, on 10 May. Like the others it crippled the public life of the country. The ferries, railways and airports came to a standstill. Once again nothing moved.
Work stoppages, strikes, protests are a permanent phenomenon of everyday life in Greece. Individual sectors are repeatedly on strike for several days – recently 2,400 employees at the Hellenic Petroleum refinery struck from 3-19 April and then went on strike again from 19 – 23 May. And these will probably not be the last. On public transport, it has become now common practice for the passengers not to pay because employees no longer check tickets. They realise that if they did the money would simply go to paying the endless debts to the IMF or the ECB.
Everyone in the country knows that there are more cuts to come that will make life hell.
Disintegration of the working class
The crisis has already led to an enormous impact on the working class. The official unemployment rate has risen to 15 percent. In the public service, the salaries of all employees have been reduced by 25 percent while the working week is to be increased from 37.5 hours to 40 hours. At the same time, the rate of inflation, which was already almost 5% last year, is set to rise still further.
In addition, the Greek economy has continued in free fall. In 2011 there will be an overall shrinkage of the Gross Domestic Product – and the draconian cuts and more privatisation will make that worse..
This progressive decline will necessarily lead to an impoverishment of ever-increasing masses of the population, the working class as well as large parts of the petty bourgeoisie and the middle classes.
Youth are particularly hard hit. In the present situation, most of them have abandoned any hope in the government promises to “save” and “renew” the country and then to bring it forward.
However, and the most recent general strikes should not be allowed to obscure this, many have lost their hope that the labour movement, the trade unions and leftist parties, can offer a way forward.
Part of the population is demoralised or threatens to become demoralised. The rise of radical right and fascist forces – who staged the first witch hunt of immigrants at the beginning of May – is an alarm signal that a reactionary mass movement is being formed in the face of the crisis, the disintegration of the working class and the political weakness of the left.
The weakness of the labour movement is reflected in several ways:
a) In their political divisions. Even during the general strike on 10 May the ADEDY unions (public sector) and the GSEE unions (private sector) who are close to the governing party, PASOK, demonstrated separately from the PAME unions that are close to the Stalinist KKE.
b) The tactic of the one-day general strike is becoming less and less relevant. It is clear that the government, EU and IMF cannot be influenced by this tactic of restricting the fight to 24-hour demonstrations.
Without the threat of an indefinite general strike, therefore, the mobilisations will become weaker, as can be seen from the numbers on the demonstrations.
c) The political perspective of the leading forces of the movement cannot give an answer to the policy of the government. The main trade union federations, ADEDY and GSEE, rely on social partnership, on a “compromise” with the government, even though their “partners” bring only cuts and poverty. The KKE and PAME see the solution in the ultimately illusory idea of an independent capitalist Greece, with a return to the Drachma and an imaginary “golden age” outside the EU. Such a programme is as utopian as it is reactionary and ultimately plays into the hands of the arch-reactionary nationalists and racists because genuine patriots will always prove to be better at this than the “communist” KKE.
The reformist majority of SYRIZA relies on individual reform measures such as the deletion of part the national debt and the establishment of a “Committees to Control Debt” .
What alll these have in common is that they do not correspond to the objective reality that the country is in a revolutionary crisis period. In Greece, it is clear that even the government cannot go on as before.
The decay is permanent. A new round of even more violent attacks, including selling off a large part of the state’s assets, preferably to imperialist capital, is coming up.
The impoverishment of the population will go on.The attacks by the government and the imperialist financial institutions like the IMF and ECB can only be averted if the working class itself takes up, and answers, the question of power.
The one-day general strikes were, and still are, impressive demonstrations of anger and hatred of the Government and of the willingness to fight.
The numbers who took part in Syntagma Square also show that many are looking for a different way of fighting. However, just as the one-day general strikes did not go beyond assembling the forces, so too the several weeks of blockading the central squares might not.
Instead, they need to become assembly points for an unlimited political general strike. Such a general strike would inevitably raise the question of power – in Greece, probably more acutely than elsewhere.
It would need to organise protection of the strike against police brutality and rightwing and fascist gangs – by forming armed pickets as an embryonic form of a future workers’ militia.
This would have to be combined with the building of action councils in the workplaces, in the public sector as well as in the neighbourhoods and villages to create organs of working class control that could be the basis for a Workers’ Government.
Ultimately, this is the only way in which an emergency programme to combat the crisis in the interests of workers, youth, peasants, and even the middle class and to stop their impoverishment could be implemented.
Such a programme would need to include renunciation of the public debt, expropriation without compensation of the banks and big business, both domestic and foreign, the confiscation of large private capital and the establishment of an emergency plan for the reorganisation of the Greek economy under workers’ control. It would mean the introduction of a minimum wage and fix social benefits, such as pensions and unemployment pay, at a level decided by the labour movement and include a programme of socially useful public works.
These are just some of the most urgent measures of a such an anti-capitalist workers’ government. The struggle for such a government could also become a beacon for a broader response to the crisis that goes beyond the orders of a single country, the fight for the United Socialist States of Europe. But for this is something more is necessary. The quite numerous “Radical” left in Greece has set itself the task of building a revolutionary workers’ party that can fight for this programme.
The urgency of this task is obvious. If one thing is certain in Greece it is that the context in which the struggles and one-day general strikes have taken place in recent years cannot last for long. The PASOK-led government will sharpen its attacks in cooperation with the EU and IMF.
These will be met by resistance but, if the working class is not in a position to enforce a fundamental social alternative and establish a workers’ government then, “at best” there will be a further decomposition of Greek society, leading to a radicalisation of reaction on two fronts; more repression and brutality from the state and the growth of a reactionary, (proto) fascist and racist mass movement.
The threat is barbarism – and against that there is only one alternative: socialism.