[D66] Fwd: Spartacists on Greece

[Antid Oto]

http://www.spartacist.org/english/wv/983/greece.html

Workers Vanguard No. 983, 8 July 2011

European Crisis and the Bankruptcy of Capitalism
Greece: Mass Anger Over Savage Austerity
Workers Must Rule!
For a Socialist United States of Europe!

On June 29, as a two-day general strike virtually shut down the
country and tens of thousands protested outside, the Greek parliament
approved a new round of brutal austerity measures demanded by the
Greek bourgeoisie and its imperialist overlords. The demonstrators—who
included, in addition to workers, a broad range of the population from
students and other youth to professionals and retirees—were viciously
attacked by club-wielding riot police. More than a year of unrelenting
attacks on the living standards of the Greek population has resulted
in seething unrest across broad layers of society. In the last year
alone, there have been at least a dozen one-day general strikes and
massive protests. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost,
homelessness has skyrocketed and many people, especially pensioners,
are reliant on soup kitchens for their survival.

Video footage of the wanton violence meted out by the cops has
provoked widespread indignation, as has another video documenting
collusion between the police and hooded provocateurs who infiltrated
the protesters. Police fired endless volleys of tear gas and stun
grenades and pummeled protesters with chunks of masonry. At least 38
were reportedly arrested in what was blatantly a cop riot. We demand
that all charges be dropped against the anarchists and other anti-
austerity protesters, including those arrested during the earlier
general strikes!

It is clear for all to see that working people are being fleeced to
pay for a crisis they are not responsible for. The economic crisis
gripping Greece—a particularly severe expression of the world
capitalist crisis—was triggered in the spring of last year as global
financial capitalists, fearing that the heavily indebted Greek
government would default on its loan obligations, began spurning Greek
government bonds. The plummeting price of those bonds threatened
European banks, especially in France and Germany—foreign financial
institutions are exposed to some 340 billion euros in Greek public and
private debt.

To try to head off the crisis, at least temporarily, the European
Union (EU) and the IMF agreed last year to a 110 billion euro “rescue
package” on condition that Athens impose draconian austerity measures
on Greece’s working people. The October 2009 elections replaced the
right-wing New Democracy (ND) regime with the bourgeois-populist Pan-
Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) of George Papandreou, with the
bourgeoisie calculating that the masses would more readily accept
“sacrifice” if demanded by PASOK. The PASOK government answered the EU
and IMF’s ultimatum with a year-long campaign of slashing public
sector workers’ wages, gutting pensions and ramping up taxes. These
attacks hit hardest at the poorest in society, including immigrant
workers. In addition, Greek officials, in response to EU/IMF demands
that they raise cash by privatizing a host of state-owned enterprises,
have launched what the bourgeois press describes as a “fire sale,”
auctioning off airports, ports and prime land.

European capitalists fear that a default by Greece could immediately
pose a similar collapse by other heavily indebted countries such as
Ireland and Portugal, which have already received bailouts from the EU
and IMF, and Spain, whose economy is larger than that of Greece,
Ireland and Portugal combined. Fearing the potentially catastrophic
effects of such contagion, the EU/IMF hastily agreed last month on a
second “rescue package” for Greece, amounting to a further 120 billion
euros. Yet hardly anyone believes that these bailouts will do more
than delay the inevitable default.

Everyone can see that the fate of the Greek working class, and much of
the petty bourgeoisie, will be ever more dire without a radical
solution. The working masses have demonstrated their combativity time
and again. But the workers’ leaders, whether the despised PASOK-loyal
tops of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE) and the
Confederation of Public Servants (ADEDY) or the far more militant-
sounding Greek Communist Party (KKE) and its PAME labor front, have
thus far succeeded in channeling workers’ anger into what amounts to
militant parliamentary lobbying. In effect, they appeal to the Greek
capitalists to stand up to their senior partners in Germany and
France. This nationalist class collaboration is a recipe for
demoralization and defeat.

The allies of the Greek proletariat are to be found not among its
“own” exploiters but among the workers elsewhere in Europe and beyond.
A proletarian upheaval in Greece could trigger a wave of class
struggle throughout Europe against the ever more brutal and incessant
attacks of the capitalists against the jobs, benefits and living
standards of all workers on the continent. A workers government in
Greece would immediately repudiate the imperialist debt. Such an act
would require a direct appeal to the proletariat, from Germany and
France to Spain and Portugal, to come to the defense of their Greek
class brothers and sisters against the combined forces of the European
bourgeoisies.

As long as Greek workers are mobilized primarily against the foreign
diktats of the IMF and EU, they will be unable to see that opposing
the imperialists is intertwined with overthrowing the Greek
bourgeoisie. The Greek government is not simply a tool of the European
and other imperialist powers, as some signs in the Athens
demonstrations suggest, but of the Greek bourgeoisie that has always
exploited, suppressed and bled the working class in the pursuit of
profit.

The question that is objectively posed is the need for the
revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment
of working-class rule. Yet there is a huge disparity between the
objective needs of the Greek working class and oppressed on one side
and the political program of their leadership on the other. The
repeated strikes and protests are designed to dissipate the anger of
workers, whose militancy is clearly not the issue. The problem is that
the working class is hamstrung by a leadership that accepts the need
for the working class to bear some degree of austerity to “bail out”
capitalism, while objecting that the terms and conditions dictated by
the IMF and the European Central Bank (ECB) are too severe.

The program of the labor bureaucracy—defined by what is “practical”
under capitalism—has led to disaster for the working class. To
overcome the gulf between the workers’ present consciousness and the
necessity for a workers government based on organs of proletarian
power, a Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard party would put forward a series
of transitional demands, starting from the felt needs of the masses
and pointing the way toward the seizure of state power by the working
class and the expropriation of the rapacious capitalist class.

To combat mass unemployment, it is necessary to demand the sharing of
available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public
works. To protect even their current living standards—already among
the lowest in Europe—workers must demand that wages be indexed to
inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the
industrialists and bankers, workers should demand that the capitalists
open their (real) books. With the imperialists demanding the
dismantling of state enterprises, the proletariat must fight for the
expropriation of the productive property of the capitalist class as a
whole and the establishment of a planned economy under workers rule,
where production would be based on social need, not profit.

Combat National Chauvinism!

Throughout Europe, the capitalist press and politicians have been
whipping up a chauvinist frenzy against Greeks, who are portrayed as
lazy, ungrateful scroungers. Last year the right-wing German Bild (27
October 2010) screamed: “Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks…and
the Acropolis too!” A recent London Financial Times (9 May) editorial
demanded: “Athens must be put under the gun.” For all the talk of
bailing out Greece, the only “bailout” that is taking place is that of
Europe’s banks. Columnist Martin Wolf noted in the Financial Times (21
June): “It is far less embarrassing to state that one is helping
Greece when one is in fact helping one’s own banks.”

With chauvinist arrogance, the European imperialists, led by Germany,
are seeking to impose on Greece, an EU member state, the kind of
diktat they are accustomed to issuing to neocolonial countries in the
Third World. The Financial Times (17 June) reports that officials of
the “troika”—the IMF, European Central Bank and European Commission—
are demanding that “outsiders” be brought in “to make Greece’s
privatization program happen,” adding that “because Greece seemed
incapable of collecting taxes, international experts would come in to
do that, too.” The article further reports that Finnish officials were
insisting that “Athens assets should be securitised so they could be
used as collateral. If Greece defaulted, lenders would gain an airport
or some other utility.”

The imperialists’ dismissive attitude to Greece’s sovereignty has in
turn fueled national chauvinism in Greece. Right-wing opponents of the
EU/IMF’s bailout include New Democracy, Greece’s main opposition
party. ND represents Greek business interests that have no intention
of paying the imperialists’ extortion themselves and fear, as BBC
economics editor Paul Mason put it, “a tax bill the like of which they
have never dreamed, nor indeed paid.” However, ND and PASOK are united
in the determination that Greek working people pay for the country’s
economic crisis.

Recent months have seen the explosive growth of a new movement, the so-
called “indignant citizens” movement. The “Indignados” placed
themselves at the head of the mass mobilizations outside parliament,
where Greek flags proliferated, the Greek national anthem was sung and
anti-American and anti-German sentiment was rife. Protesters have
waved EU flags with a swastika at the center—equating “German” with
“Nazi” and invoking the spectre of World War II, when Greece was
occupied by German imperialism (followed by rampaging British
troops).

In Spain, the Indignados movement arose in response to the austerity
measures that were being enforced by the social-democratic Spanish
Socialist Party government before its huge defeat in the last
elections. In Greece, the petty-bourgeois Indignados emerged in the
context of the abject failure of the trade-union bureaucracy to
present any way forward for the struggles of the working masses. The
two main trade-union federations, the GSEE and ADEDY, representing the
private and public sectors respectively, are controlled by PASOK,
which is imposing the austerity measures. Despite the “socialist”
reference in its name, and the credentials given to it by opportunist
left groups, PASOK is a capitalist party.

Broad layers of the middle class that could be rallied behind an
insurgent proletariat struggling for power are instead being drawn
into virulently chauvinist, anti-immigrant and anti-working-class
movements. Displaying overt hostility to the organizations of the
working class and the left, the Indignados present themselves as a
“pro-democracy” movement of all classes. As in Spain, all leftist
political parties and trade unions, as well as red flags and banners,
were banned from the Greek protests at first. Not surprisingly, given
the nationalist fervor whipped up by the Indignados, Golden Dawn and
other fascist outfits have been seen at the protests.

There has been an ominous rise in racist attacks, as desperately
impoverished immigrants are used as scapegoats for the economic
devastation. Earlier this year, fascist thugs rampaged through a
heavily immigrant area of Athens, killing one person and wounding many
more. Golden Dawn got over 5 percent of the vote in municipal
elections in Athens late last year. According to the London-based
Institute of Race Relations, Golden Dawn’s Nikos Michaloliakos,
accompanied by eight apparently armed bodyguards, gave a Nazi salute
at a council meeting in Athens in January.

The fascists are emboldened by the racist policies of the government.
Greece’s border with Turkey is one of the front lines of “Fortress
Europe,” with EU border patrols employed to keep immigrants out. The
Greek government has announced plans to build a razor-wire fence,
equipped with sonar systems and thermal sensors, along the border. The
workers movement must fight for full citizenship rights for all
immigrants and to unionize foreign workers. For union/minority
mobilizations to stop fascist provocations! For integrated workers
defense guards to protect immigrant neighborhoods!

Communist Party: Left Face of Greek Nationalism

The Stalinist KKE adopts a posture of militant opposition to the PASOK
government and promotes PAME as a class-struggle alternative to what
it calls the “government- and employer-led” trade unions. But the
Greek Stalinists present no fundamental alternative to the betrayals
of the GSEE/ADEDY union misleaders. Despite its occasional verbal
radicalism, the KKE is hostile to the program of workers revolution to
overthrow Greek capitalism.

The KKE’s political bankruptcy is evident in regard to the Indignados.
In an article in Rizospastis (5 June), the KKE correctly noted that
“the ‘anonymous’ leaders of the ‘movement of the squares,’ the ‘non-
partisan,’ ‘spontaneous,’ ‘non-politicized’ citizens, appear to be
politicized, declaring themselves ‘anti-left’.” The article adds that
with their slogans “Out with the left,” “Parties out” and “Trade
unions out,” the Indignados are “not that democratic, or, to be more
accurate, they are undemocratic.” What the KKE cannot challenge,
though, is the virulent nationalism of the Indignados, which the KKE
itself shares.

Indeed, the KKE has made defense of “national sovereignty” its own
calling card, and is particularly virulent in espousing Greek
nationalism in relation to Turkey, the traditional enemy of its “own”
bourgeoisie. For example, in a speech last year, KKE general secretary
Aleka Papariga complained that the EU was not taking account of “our
national sovereignty rights” when considering Turkey’s bid for
membership. She went on to chastise Papandreou for “trying to cover up
the issue by dividing the Aegean, something that will have an adverse
effect on the islands’ defense.” Nationalism within the workers
movement is the chief obstacle to constructing a genuine revolutionary
workers party in Greece.

It is a travesty that the KKE retains a reputation as militant
fighters against capitalism based on the Resistance against the Nazi
occupation and the subsequent Greek Civil War of 1946-49. In pursuit
of its program of class collaboration with the Greek bourgeoisie, the
KKE handed power back to the bourgeoisie following World War II. The
working class, backed by the peasantry, was the decisive force in the
anti-Nazi Resistance, mounting massive strikes and demonstrations from
late 1942 until the withdrawal of German troops in 1944. The working
class, arms in hand, had state power in its grasp. But its leaders,
the treacherous KKE, actually welcomed the arrival of British troops
into Greece, enabling the imperialists to stabilize the situation,
bring back the hated monarchy and massacre the workers.

The Greek Stalinists lived up to the terms of the secret Tehran
agreement, whereby Stalin granted the imperialists the “right” to
preserve capitalist rule in West Europe and Greece. Politically
disarming the proletariat, the Stalinists went so far as to join a
“national” government of the bourgeoisie. In February 1945, they
signed the Varkiza agreement, which physically disarmed the KKE-led
Resistance forces as British troops and the Greek National Guard were
preparing to unleash a full-scale wave of terror against the masses.
Only in February 1946 did the KKE finally abandon its suicidal policy
and take up the “armed struggle” again. In October 1949, after
ferocious repression, the Civil War was ended. The KKE ranks had
fought heroically. But needless to say, the KKE learned nothing from
the tragic consequences of its treachery and continues to pursue its
bankrupt program of subordination to the Greek bourgeoisie.

What the Trotskyists wrote at the end of World War II holds true for
the role of the Stalinists throughout the Civil War:

“The Greek masses were burning with revolutionary determination and
wished to prepare the overthrow of all their oppressors—Nazi and
Greek. Instead of providing the mass movement with a revolutionary
program, similar to the Bolshevik program of 1917, and preparing the
masses for the seizure of power, the Stalinists steered the movement
into the blind alley of People’s Frontism. The Stalinists, who enjoyed
virtual hegemony of the mass movement, joined with a lot of petty
bourgeois politicians, lawyers, professors, who had neither mass
following nor influence, and artificially worked to limit the struggle
to the fight for capitalist democracy.”

—“Civil War in Greece,” Fourth International, February 1945

The social-democratic reformists in Greece—such as the Socialist
Workers Party (SEK), which is affiliated to the British group of the
same name, and Xekinima, the Greek affiliate of the Committee for a
Workers’ International (CWI)—stand to the right of the KKE in their
enthusiasm for the anti-Communist, anti-working-class Indignados. For
example, Xekinima calls to “Extend the movement to all work places,
workers’ neighbourhoods, and the youth” (socialistworld.net, 27 June).
The notion of classless “democracy” that these groups promote has long
been an anti-Communist code word that actually means support to
bourgeois class rule. Thus, both the SEK and Xekinima supported
capitalist restoration in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92 and
hailed counterrevolutionary forces such as Polish Solidarność and
Boris Yeltsin’s Russian “democrats.”

For Workers Revolution!

The Trotskyist Group of Greece fights to forge a Leninist-Trotskyist
party capable of leading the working class to power. Above all, this
means breaking the workers from nationalism and winning them to a
revolutionary internationalist perspective. During Round One of the
present crisis, the TGG issued a 28 April 2010 leaflet that opposed
the widespread Greek nationalism as “poisonous to class
consciousness.” Any effective struggle against the bosses’ attacks
must begin with the understanding that the workers have no country,
until they seize the one they’re in. Our comrades insisted: “What is
needed is international workers solidarity across the EU against
capital” (see “Down With PASOK Government’s ‘Stability Program’!” WV
No. 959, 21 May 2010).

The Greek financial crisis has increased the seething national
antagonisms in Europe, as seen in the diplomatic spats between France
and Germany. German chancellor Angela Merkel, unpopular at home and
with a shrinking majority in the Bundestag (parliament), has clashed
with French officials and with the ECB over whether the bankers have
to accept some losses. Following pressure from the IMF, Merkel agreed
to a new bailout package while the French banks have offered to roll
over Greek debts for 30 years. Whatever divisions there may be within
bourgeois circles over how to deal with the catastrophic financial
situation, in Germany, France, Britain and Europe as a whole, each
government is determined to make the working masses pay for a crisis
that is caused by the capitalist system itself.

The EU is an imperialist trade bloc, centered on a pact between the
French and German capitalist rulers to ratchet up the exploitation of
the working classes at home while trying to gain advantage over their
imperialist rivals as well as the smaller European states. At the same
time, the EU is an unstable formation that intensifies national
antagonisms and fuels chauvinism.

We Marxists oppose the EU from the perspective of proletarian
internationalism. The comrades of our German section, the Spartakist
Workers Party, last year published an article titled “Solidarity with
the Greek Workers! For Class Struggle Against the German
Capitalists!” (Spartakist No. 183, May 2010), which noted:

“The chauvinist campaign against Greece is being set in motion so as
to prevent the German working class from hitting on the idea of
placing blame for the crisis at the feet of the capitalist system and
its own rulers. The workers movement in Germany must mobilize in
solidarity with Greek workers and all the other victims of the EU
imperialists—after all, they’ll be confronted with similar attacks in
the immediate future. The witchhunt against Greece also serves to
split and weaken the multiethnic working class in Germany.”

Today, despite the relentless bleeding of the Greek working people,
the country remains mired in deep recession. The bankrupt capitalist
class manifestly does not have any crumbs that it is willing to throw
to dampen workers’ anger. Short of a struggle for working-class power,
the workers’ struggles will continue to be frustrated. The perspective
for Greek workers must be that of common class struggle with their
class brothers and sisters—from Turkey to Germany and elsewhere around
the world.

As the TGG wrote in its leaflet: “What’s needed is a socialist
revolution to overthrow the capitalist state and replace it with a
workers state that will lay the basis for building a socialist
society. For that, you need to build a revolutionary workers party—a
party like Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolsheviks—which will fight for a
workers government. The TGG, Greek sympathizing section of the ICL,
seeks to build such a party” (our emphasis).