Greece on Strike Against Greek, European, and Global Capital

As predicted, the economic situation in Greece is getting worse and worse. According to the GSEE trade union, in 2012 the latest government measures will cause unemployment to rise to a massive 30%, meaning more will be unemployed than in work!

Due to the lowering of average income, many are already unable to pay the new tax on property, which is very high (for an old apartment of 55 square meters in a cheap area of Athens it is around 350 euros per annum). Around 90% of Greeks own their own house. If you are unemployed or retired you can try and rent out your property but most of the income will be taken by the State in taxes. Sooner or later many will be forced to sell up in order to survive. Many young people are going abroad to find work, others have started to head back to the country from the city. An overriding sense of melancholy and fear, especially in Athens, is spreading throughout the country and the suicide rate is mounting rapidly. And this is only the beginning.

For years the government has been pushing through a series of measures designed to cut public spending, which it justifies as necessary to obtain a new loan. But of course it is impossible for Greece to reduce the deficit and pay off the debt, and it is sliding further and further into a massive economic depression.

Now even harsher measures, and the placing of the country’s finances directly under the control of the credit institutions, are anticipated. This is seen as the only way of avoiding a declaration of bankruptcy by the Hellenic State, which would impact severely on the system of European finances and in particular the French and German banks, which are in a critical state and risk dragging all of the creditor countries into the abyss.

Therefore, on 3 October, in order to obtain further loans from the ‘troika’, composed of the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF, the government initiated a series of new measures which, as always, will hit workers and the petty bourgeoisie. Indeed it has been decided to reduce the threshold of untaxed earnings to 5,000 Euros, and to impose a tax on first houses as well (to be collected via the electricity bill: those who don’t pay get cut off). By the end of the year, 10,000 state employees will have been made redundant and 20,000 more put in cassa integrazione (with paid leave set at 60% of basic pay for a year; then if the worker isn’t required to work during this period he is sacked). The aim is to sack 200,000 public employees, both those on short and long-term contracts, by 2015. And not only this, they also want to abolish national contracts and replace them with local agreements.

Obviously such an accord will be of no advantage either to Greek workers or those in other European countries who are paying for the crisis with their lives.

The workers’ reaction

The Greek proletariat is responding to this ferocious attack with mass mobilisations and strikes, but finds itself faced with many enemies; not just the bosses and the government but also the opportunist trade unions and parties which have sold out to the class enemy.

On October 5, the GSEE, a trade union which organises public employees and workers in enterprises controlled by the State, called its 24th general strike. Given that 30,000 demonstrators took to the streets, the demonstration in Athens was relatively successful.

On October 19 and 20, another general strike of the public and private sector was called. This time it was for 48 hours and was called by the GSEE, by the ADEDY, which also organises public employees, and by the PAME, the trade union linked to the Stalinist ‘Communist’ Party, the KKE. The aim was to demonstrate outside parliament at the same time as the anti-worker measures instigated by the government on October 3 were being ratified.

These trade unions however do not want to organise the proletariat from a class struggle perspective. Instead they oppose the state and bosses’ attack from a narrowly nationalist, parliamentarist and social-democratic point of view, and as each day goes by they give more and more evidence it is they, in fact, who are the regime’s main instruments used to control and repress the workers’ combativeness.

This was evidenced in the demonstration on 20 October in Athens. Here the demonstration took place in a particularly tense atmosphere because the city council workers had already been out on strike for a week. Indeed the government had earlier resorted to calling in the army to clear up the uncollected rubbish piling up in the streets. More than 150,000 demonstrators turned up in the capital. The government mobilised thousands of policemen and also, yet again, the special forces, the infamous MAT which intervened to break up the demonstration making liberal use of toxic gases; the use of which, incidentally, is forbidden in the international conventions that govern war between states, but evidently allowed when it’s a matter of class war!

The open betrayal of the PAME

On October 20, the day of the vote of ratification on the anti-proletarian measures, the PAME trade union, controlled by the KKE, got its militants to occupy the access roads around Parliament. The objectives were to prevent the strikers, gathered in Syntagma Square, from disturbing parliament’s ‘work’, to hold back the furious workers back from the area around Parliament, and to avoid clashes with the police and allowing the parliamentary deputies to have a nice quiet vote.

The leaders of the two main trade unions, the GSEE and the ADEDY, are no longer trusted by the strikers who they can no longer control. Only the organised force of the PAME, which poses as the most radical of the trade unions, was capable of guaranteeing protection to Parliament, which in fact over the last months has often been a target for the demonstrators. Therefore it was only a few anarchist groups, a few hundred people in all, who attacked the PAME activists and fought with the police protecting parliament.

Indeed it is now almost expected that the anarchist groups will attack the police, who then ferociously attack all of the demonstrators and break up the processions. It is similar to what happened in Rome on October 15. Pitch battles then took place between the Stalinists and the anarchists which lasted for hours. When the latter finally managed to break through the line of PAME activists the police attacked, trying to separate the two sides. Just before the vote was due, the PAME moved out of the area in front of the parliament building and the riot police cleared the strikers, now divided and disorganised, from Syntagma Square.

During this intervention a member of the PAME, a builder, died. The leaders of the ‘communist’ party immediately announced he had been killed by the anarchists, and continued to assert this even after the hospital declared that the man had died after a cardiac arrest brought on by exposure to a tear gas canister hurled by the police. Even the right opposition went along with the Stalinist party’s version and congratulated the KKE, the protector of parliament.

For the rebirth of the class union, for the strengthening of the revolutionary communist party

Faced with this difficult situation, the parties of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Left as well have called for new elections: this is the classic stratagem deployed by social democratic opportunism to derail the class struggle.

In periods of economic crisis such as the current one, which objectively weaken the working class by subjecting it to the blackmail of unemployment and hunger, it is an ever more pressing necessity to organise the workers in a class union which is genuinely committed to defending the proletariat; a class union outside and against those unions which are clearly hand in glove with the capitalist regime, such as not only the PAME, but also the GSEE and the ADEDY.

The workers’ struggles in Greece over the last two years are yet more evidence that the working class will only be able to protect itself under a decadent capitalism by rediscovering its own unity and strength through action and struggle, and first of all by creating its own class organisations and freeing itself from the opportunist leaders who have sold out to the bosses.

It is also more and more important that the party that lives in the tradition of left revolutionary communism gets stronger; the party, which is the indispensable organ needed to prepare the overthrow of this system of production; a system which continues to sacrifice the lives of millions of proletarians to ensure its survival.