communist left

 

The Greek crisis: Bosses united, Workers Divided. For How Much Longer?

For the Greeks, who are paying for the economic catastrophe of their country, their enemies have a name and a surname: They are called the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, and together form the so-called troika , the capitalist leadership of the Old Continent that won’t allow any further “autonomy” for the Greek parliament or its Government.

On 21 February, in fact, the troika released the ?130 billion that will go to Greece until 2014. The agreement provides that the Greek government continues to wage war on the working class through:

• a further, radical “deregulation” of the labor market, which will allow massive scope for sackings;
• reduction of 22% in the minimum wage;
• further cuts in pensions and health expenditure;
• reduction in public investment of ?400 million;
• privatisation of oil, gas and water;
• 15 000 redundancies in the public sector to be carried out by 2015.

All this heaped on a proletariat already on its last legs: poverty wages, high unemployment, long lines at soup kitchens and employment. Add to this the arms that Greece is obliged to buy from France and Germany in exchange for European aid, “arriving annually at the equivalent of 3% of GDP ” (see Il Manifesto February 17).

In these two years of frenzied attacks on their living and working conditions, the Greek working class have not just stood and watched: strikes, very harsh fights with the riot police, the creation of local assemblies and committees that decide from the bottom up the forms of struggle that have to be adopted, are all on the Greek agenda. The guerrilla warfare which burned Athens on Feb. 12, when 100,000 demonstrators besieged the parliament as it approved the measures demanded by the Troika, has demonstrated that most combative sectors of the street movement (which the bourgeois papers continue to define in bad faith as the Black Bloc) are by no means isolated and even gaining more and more support from those who are mobilising in the streets.

But how long can the Greek working class stand alone? On one side, the bourgeoisie are advancing together: the European ruling class is closing ranks to save the banks and the Greek capitalists, by continuing their aggression against the world of labour. On the other hand, the proletarians of Europe are divided, they mobilise — in a way which is quite inadequate to the seriousness of the situation — always within a national perspective and thus on the back foot from the start given that it is clear that economic policies that have long been established by the international bourgeoisie, are at the very least on a continental scale.

The attack on the Greek proletariat should be seen as a step in the onslaught that each national government, on behalf of the bosses, is bringing to the whole European proletariat. Why not go on strike in, say, Italy against the attacks on the Greek working class? The answer is all too simple: those who don’t even go on strike against the Monti government are not going to take to the streets on behalf of the Greek workers!

Incidentally, the varied world of the left, from the institutional to the so-called militant, have not proposed anything to promote national initiatives in support of the Greek proletariat: in last few years there have been (quote rightly) large demonstrations against the war, but against this real war on the working class — and, in part, the middle class — in this social and political laboratory of the bourgeoisie, they have not raised a finger: who cares about proletarian internationalism?!

But internationalists have to condemn this great weakness of the world and, in this case, European, proletariat, the lack of unity. Mobilising as a class means fighting in an international perspective, that is to go in the opposite direction to those unions — however they are organised — who ask instead for “the _revival of the country’s economy_”: the maxim of interclass and nationalist servility!

We also run the serious risk that this supranational “interference” exacerbates this nationalism, promoting the false opposition between the treacherous and foreign banking capital on the one hand, and the healthy and productive national capitalism on the other. Fascistic venom is always ready to re-emerge, in order to prevent proletarian discontent from remaining on a class basis.

The letter of one of the main unions of the Greek police, the Poasy, circulated on the internet in recent days, states that

"under no circumstances will we accept orders to kill our brothers…"

 

and says it is ready to issue an arrest warrant for the representatives of the Troika

"for their secret effort to eliminate or undermine our democratic political system and national sovereignty…"

 

is a sign that the crisis in Greece has reached a point of no return. Either the class struggle can get out of the union swamp to go beyond national boundaries and involve other sectors of the proletariat at least on a continental scale, or the nationalist ” anti-European ” drift could become a real threat.

For the Communists the task is to accelerate the formation of a revolutionary party rooted in the working class, without which every revolt, however great, will never find the way out of capitalism.