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Greek workers are the vanguard of resistance

League for the Fifth International

Resolution of the International Secretariat on the Greek Crisis

The Greek economy is in serious trouble and it threatens the whole of the EU. Workers are staging massive strikes and protests to defend their jobs

If anyone thought that the days of IMF-imposed austerity programmes were over, then events unfolding in Greece should disabuse them. Greece’s national debt of 300 billion euros ($394 billion) is bigger than the country’s economy, and estimates predict it will reach 120 percent of gross domestic product in 2010. On 27 April, the New York-based ratings agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded Greece’s sovereign debt to junk status, effectively shutting down its access to private capital and sending shock waves through financial markets around the world.

A huge proportion of Greece’s has been incurred to service the existing debt levels – much of it owed to German and French banks. Far from “the Greeks taking our money”, as the vile western media keep repeating, it is the western banks that are taking over Greece. Now they want to put its working people on starvation rations. Greece is in a “debt trap” similar to those that ruined many Latin American countries in the 1980s and African countries in the 1990s. But Greece is a member of the European Union and the Eurozone.

This crisis, and the way the biggest imperialist countries have used it, potentially threatens the common currency and the stability of the EU itself. Dragging out the negotiations, and thereby fuelling the speculation frenzy till it cut off all other options for the Greek government, is designed to force the Greeks to accept the full neoliberal medicine or, rather, poison.

Germany and France, and their banks and industrial corporations, have a twofold purpose in putting Greece on starvation rations. First, to warn the other workers of Europe to make ever more drastic concessions and, above all, not to fight back. But, second, the other purpose is to show the smaller “peripheral states” of the EU who is the boss, whatever it might say in the European Treaty. Not only are their banks and industrial corporations using the crisis to gobble up their smaller rivals and to take over their markets but they are trying to establish de facto a powerful central political authority, that is able, on a world scale, to compete with the US, Japan and China, for markets, raw materials and sources of cheap labour.

In 2008-9, leaders like Obama, Brown, Merkel and Sarkozy in 2008-09 justified their enormous state-funded bailouts to their banks and car industries by the need to avoid a 1930s Great Depression, whatever the cost. Now, however, they are arguing, in best neoliberal fashion, that Greece must impose a slump of unprecedented severity and long duration on its workers and small farmers. Deutsche Bank experts predict a recession of minus 7.5 per cent of Gross National Product (GNP) lasting till until 2012 and 20 per cent unemployment or about 1 million people.

The April crisis was triggered by financiers speculating on the possibility that Greece would default on existing debts. Even before that, however, the Greek capitalists, the western European rulers of the EU and the International Monetary Fund had been piling up pressure on the PASOK government that was elected only six months ago on a programme of resisting austerity programme. The government gave in to that pressure and proposed what it called, with breathtaking cynicism, a “Stability and Development Programme”.

This dictated 10 per cent cuts in public employees’ incomes, an increase of 2 per cent in VAT, 10 per cent cuts in public expenditure, 2 more years of work before pension and a cut of 100 million euros in education spending. There is to be a 35 per cent cut in central government funding of services such as after school care for children and programmes that help elderly people who live alone. In all a “saving” of more than 4 billion euros, that was intended to send a reassuring message to the EU and international markets. But this satisfied neither the speculators nor the major powers within the EU, and particularly Germany. A combination of rampant speculation and delay after delay in agreeing any EU backing for Greece forced up the cost of Greek government borrowing to the point where it could no longer borrow enough to service its debt.

A tripartite commission of experts from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund descended on Athens to force even greater cuts out of the Greek government, Now there has to be a 15 per cent cut in wages and salaries for both private and public sector workers, a rise in the retirement age to 67 year and a cut in the pension levels, even more job cuts in the public sector, abolition of collective labour agreements between trade unions and employers, abolition of any legal restriction on job cuts in the private sector and more cuts in education with increases in class sizes.

Yet, even now, the European leaders are driving Greece to the very verge of state bankruptcy. EU President Herman Van Rompuy has called a conference of the Eurozone heads for May 10, the day after key regional elections in Germany and only nine days before Athens has to find nine billion euros ($16 billion) for debt repayments.

Greek workers have been fighting back. Public transport workers, dockworkers, teachers, museum workers struck and demonstrated when the Three Proconsuls of Capital arrived to demand the cuts. There have been two 24-hour strike general strikes and a third is planned for May 5. Greek public and private sector workers will take part. The civil servants’ union, ADEDY, and the General Confederation of Greek Labour (GSEE) will call out their 2.5 million members, half of Greece’s workforce.

Predictions are widespread of major social unrest when the new austerity measures are announced, exceeding that witnessed in December 2008. In fact, Greece has already, as in 2008-09, entered into a pre-revolutionary situation. Greek workers can indeed block the imposition of the starvation package but to do so they must go beyond the limitation of their actions to one-day strikes. The only way forward is an all out general strike of both public and private sector workers, drawing in the pensioners and the rural population who will also be ruined by the cuts.

A long-term problem facing the Greek workers is the lack of fighting unity in their mobilisations. The largest union federations, those close to PASOK, the GSEE-ADEDY (General Confederation of Greek Workers and Civil Servants’ Confederation) have often refused to combine their actions with the union tied to the Stalinist Greek Communist Party (KKE) – PAME (All-Workers Militant Front) and vice versa.

Workers in the larger federations should fight for their leaders to break with PASOK, which has proved in practice to be an agency of the Greek and EU bosses. Workers in PAME should demand a break from the nationalistic policies of the KKE and its stubborn refusal to call for an all-out indefinite general strike, which the leaders justify with the excuse that, since the USSR disintegrated, the balance of forces do not favour the workers. In fact, there is no choice since only an all-out strike can break the government’s resistance – backed as it is by the EU and the IMF. Nor is getting out of the EU and “restoring the drachma” any kind of solution. Under capitalism, it would mean an even worse crisis; a collapse in trade and hyperinflation whilst, at the same time, cutting Greek workers off from their brothers and sisters in the rest of Europe.

Greek workers, then, must demand united action from their leaders. But, since the leaders so often refuse to unite at the top, rank and file members should start to do so at workplace and local level. The formation of local and regional councils of action can achieve this. They should draw in delegates from all the trade unions, the students’ organisations, and the organisations of the small farmers, too.

Given the brutality the Greek police have often shown, it is essential for workers and youth to organise a powerful defence militia. This can also focus the courageous militancy of the youth, seen in 2008, away from the dead end anarchist/black block tactics of burning shops and cafes that unnecessarily alienate the lower middle class and hands them to the right as an anti-working class force.

Which way forward?

But, without clear objectives, without a plan of action, unity alone will not be enough to meet the combined attacks of the EU-IMF, the Greek bosses and the government.

Central to an effective action programme must be a rejection of ALL the cuts: ALL wage reductions, ALL increases in the pensionable age, ALL job losses in either the public or the private sector. Action councils should draw in private sector workers by helping recruit them to unions and fighting for wage increases. They should also fight for the small farmers – not only defending their grants but also increasing them and demanding their debts and mortgages be cancelled.

In this way, the whole working population and a large part of the middle class can be rallied around the strikers. At the same time, the unemployed and youth can be won by calling for work or full pay: jobs or decent benefits for all. Taking over the banks and big companies, without compensation to the former owners, and running them under workers’ control can pay for this.

Thousands of rank and file members of the larger parties of the Greek working class – the KKE and SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left) plus the smaller far left groups in ANTARSYA – are at the forefront of the resistance; now pressure needs to be put on the official leaders of these parties to form a united front of resistance. They need to come together in building action councils for the general strike and a defence militia, preparing, by these measures, for the revolutionary struggle for power.

Indeed an all-out general strike clearly poses the question: Which class shall be the master of Greece? The militant vanguard must take up the political tasks needed to answer it. These include the call for a workers’ government to reverse and resist all the cuts, to take over the banks and the big corporations and run them under workers’ control and workers’ management, developing a plan or production. A workers’ government must have as its central tasks the dissolution of the armed repressive forces of the capitalist state and their replacement with the armed masses, the workers and small farmers and the expropriation of the big capitalist businesses and banks.

In the midst of an international capitalist crisis, of historic dimensions, in a country where there are tens of thousands of revolutionary workers and youth, the far left groups and rank and file movements in the workers’ parties and union federations should combine forces to issue a call for the formation of a new, anticapitalist revolutionary party.

This can be achieved by unity around a new action programme, linking today’s resistance to a fight for socialist revolution and a workers’ and small farmers’ government based on action councils. It must work within an international framework, fighting for a socialist United States of Europe. It should be the Greek section of a new, Fifth International. A revolutionary unity conference should convene to draw up, debate and adopt such a programme.

The actions of the IMF and the EU are not only for the “benefit” of the Greek workers. Their aim is to teach a brutal lesson to the workers of the whole of Europe: Greece today – YOU tomorrow! If they succeed, and the Greek workers are forced to submit to the barbaric cuts, similar programmes will be rolled out right across Europe.

Internationally, the call must go out for solidarity action with the Greek resistance. And the best way to provide this is to imitate their actions – to take to the streets with their slogans: We will not Pay for their crisis, Enough is Enough! Workers – Rise Up!

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