Greece: A critical point in its history

Yesterday, December 15, Greece was
shaken by yet another powerful general strike, which saw at least 80,000
workers march through the streets of Athens, with many more
demonstrating in other cities against the latest round of austerity
measures introduced by the government. A very angry mood is developing
among workers and youth, which will inevitably lead to a major
confrontation between workers and the capitalist class.

Students protesting in Thessaloniki in memory of Alexis Grigoropoulos who was killed by police two years ago. Photo: apαsThe
anger of workers and youth was epitomised by the attack on former
conservative minister Kostis Hatzidakis as he came out of the parliament
building. As soon as he was recognised angry demonstrators surrounded
him, physically attacking him and shouting “Thieves! Shame on you!”

In the recent period known politicians, especially government
ministers, have been insulted by members of the public when recognised
on the streets. The comment on today’s news reports was that it has
become so bad that many MPs no longer dress in jacket and tie, but wear
casual clothing to be less conspicuous.

This event is similar to what we saw last week in Britain when Prince
Charles’ Rolls Royce was attacked by demonstrators who were protesting
against the hike in university tuition fees, and it highlights the
growing chasm that is opening up between the classes in society.

The general strike came in the midst of growing worker discontent,
with several groups of workers already out on strike. Bank workers had
already begun a two-day strike on Tuesday protesting against the
government’s austerity measures. Bus and railway workers were already on
strike as they had declared a week-long walk out. They only partially
suspended their stoppage on the actual day of the general strike so as
to facilitate workers getting to the rallies. Now the strike is back on
and is due to end tomorrow, Friday.

State-run hospitals only operated an emergency service on the day.
Doctors have also been organising a series of rolling 48-hour strikes.
Journalists also joined the 24-hour general strike resulting in no news
being broadcast on TV or radio stations. The state TV channels were in
fact completely off the air. Journalists are due to stage a further
48-hour strike on December 17-18.

In the first six months of this year there had already been seven
general strikes as the PASOK government attempted to impose severe
austerity measures on the working people of Greece. However, in spite of
the immense willingness to struggle on the part of the Greek workers,
the government managed to push through its measures.

Biggest crisis since Civil war

This highlights a very important lesson for the workers of Greece,
and of all countries. As in France, a series of one day general strikes
and mass mobilisations – although an important stage in the struggle –
has proven to be not enough to stop the bourgeois from carrying out its
attacks. What determines the ruthlessness of the bourgeois is not any
kind of ideological stubbornness or some innate cruel nature of the
capitalists. It is the logic of capitalism locked in a severe crisis
that determines their thinking.

The situation is so serious that the old game of tinkering with the
system here or there no longer works. Even a social-democratic
government like that of the PASOK, elected with the votes of the
workers, cannot escape the grip of international capitalism. The only
way out is to be found in the socialist transformation of Greece. On the
basis of capitalism, whoever comes to power, unless they are prepared
to take over the commanding heights of the economy, to expropriate the
big bourgeois, will be forced to bow down before the God of capital and
do his bidding.

All activists within the labour and student movement internationally
should study the situation in Greece, for in it they will find mirrored
their own future. As we said, Greece is at a critical point in its
history. It is no exaggeration to say that it is facing the biggest
crisis since the Civil War in the 1940s. According to both government
and EU calculations the Greek economy will have contracted by 9% in the
period 2009-12. This will make it the biggest economic fall since 1949.

The workers and youth have valiantly fought back, but still the
austerity measures keep getting pushed through. As a result the poor,
the working class and the lower layers of the middle class are in a
state of shock. This is expressed in widespread anger, but also a kind
of generalised depression. According to medical statistics a staggering
70% of the Greek population is revealing a tendency to fall into real
depression. Life is becoming very difficult for working people in this
country. There is real suffering behind the walls of many working class
homes as people struggle to survive day to day.

However, it would be wrong to deduce from this that the workers are
in any way on the retreat. After the huge mobilisations of the first
half of this year, there has been no real respite in the class struggle,
except for short periods. One such moment of “calm” was this autumn
when the workers turned to the political front during the administrative
elections. These elections saw a massive turning away from the PASOK as
close to one million of its supporters decided not to vote for anyone.
(See Greece: Recent local elections reveal significant shift to the left for a more detailed analysis of this).

Workers back on warpath

Now, with yesterday’s big general strike the working class is back on
the warpath. What provoked the strike was the attack on the workers
employed in the semi-state run companies, those companies that have been
partially privatised and are now being prepared for total
privatisation. These workers have managed so far to preserve some of the
conquests of the past, but now the government wants to destroy all
those gains and is trying to cut wages and jobs.

The
plans are drastic, to say the least. Workers in these companies are
facing cuts of anything between 800 and 1500 euros a month. Most of the
workers earn between 1300 and 2100 euros a month. There is a layer that
due to long service of many years and bonuses, overtime, etc., can earn
up to 3000 to 3500 euros. But all this is now under attack as the
government moves on inexorably.

At the heart of the present attack are the workers in DEI
(electricity company), and the transport workers, both on the buses and
the trains. Yesterday’s general strike had these workers in the
vanguard, but the strike also involved the wider working class as all
sectors are under attack.

On Tuesday, December 14, the government passed a law which allows
bosses in the private sector to cut wages by up to 20-25%. There has
been for some time a national minimum wage in Greece negotiated
centrally by the GSEE (trade union confederation of the private sector
workers). That agreement has now been rescinded by Tuesday’s law as the
bosses will be allowed to negotiate at company level and impose wages
below the national minimum. These measures were part of the conditions
of the €110bn EU/IMF bailout intended to lift Greece out of its debt
crisis. They have now de facto done away with national collective
bargaining agreements and abolished the minimum wage. Thus, it is not
just the public sector that is under attack. Now the whole of the Greek
working class, both in the public and private sectors, is facing a
severe cut in its standard of living.

While the world economy is technically in a recovery, the Greek
economy is still in recession. This year alone GDP is expected to fall
by 4.6%. In the construction industry there has been a fall of 50%.
Industrial production has fallen by 8%. Profits from trade have fallen
this year by between 10 and 15%. Unemployment has shot up, with 850,000
workers losing their jobs this year. Official unemployment stands at
12.5% with one million registered as unemployed; this in a country of
around 11 million people.

Dilemma facing bourgeoisie

The Greek bourgeoisie is very alarmed by this situation. An example
of their concern is the comment of Alexis Papachelas in the conservative
bourgeois daily, Kathimerini:

“Fear, anxiety and uncertainty are starting to surface in everybody’s
eyes. No one believes anything anymore and no one trusts anyone.

“The people of Greece seem to have reconciled themselves to a great
degree with the fact that the cutbacks and sacrifices they are
experiencing are necessary, but they need to know when it will all end,
when Greece will crawl out of the hole that it finds itself in.
Unfortunately, no one can answer this question with any degree of
certainty.”

And while the main line of media propaganda is to try to reassure
people and calm their nerves, in an attempt to convince them that the
austerity measures will get the Greek economy back on track and growing
again, Papachelas points out that:

“One example of how little people know is the fact that at some point
in February, the markets, the International Monetary Fund and the
European Union will realize that Greece is a long way away from its
fiscal targets for 2010. Will the markets turn a blind eye? Will our
lenders recognize the huge efforts already made, or will they impose a
fresh round of measures and cutbacks in the public sector? Furthermore,
how much more pressure can the ruling PASOK party, the government and,
more importantly, society take?”

The fact is that they have no choice but to attack, but they also
know the Greek working class very well with its revolutionary
traditions. They realise there is a limit to what they can impose on the
Greek workers before they rise up against them. The ruling class is
coming to the conclusion that there is a limit to how far they can go on
the basis of the present bourgeois democratic parliamentary set up.

It is the level of Greek debt that determines their thinking. It is
an accepted fact that Greece will not be able to pay back its debts. In
the two years 2014-15 the Government is scheduled to pay 148 billion
euros, but this time with no help from the IMF or the EU. The package
that was cobbled together to bail Greece out runs out in 2012. Thus, all
that the package achieved was to put off the dreaded day of reckoning
and make it even worse than it would have been, as it simply increased
Greece’s overall level of debt.

Total annual government revenue in Greece is 55 billion euros. That
figure alone shows that making the repayments required in 2014-15 will
be an impossible task. This year government debt reached the staggering
figure of 148% of GDP and next year it is expected to rise to 152%. This
means that next year alone the government must cut 13.5 billion euros
from state spending. And in order to pay back the whole debt, serious
analysts have calculated that the Greek economy would have to grow by 5%
per year for the next 20 years, something which is clearly well beyond
the capabilities of capitalist Greece.

Now the government is in negotiations with the IMF, the EU and the
European Central Bank (ECB) to see if the repayments can be delayed.
This, however, would come at a cost with a higher rate of interest. The
overall IMF/EU/ECB bail-out came to 110 billion euros. If an extension
of the repayments is granted, Greece would have to pay back 200 billion
euros over a longer period. Without an extension it would have to pay
back 130 billion.

Neither of these two options is going to be very palatable to the
Greek workers. No extension means immediate sharp pain; with an
extension it means even more severe cuts over a slightly longer period.
In reality, whichever agreement they reach, Greece is, sooner or later,
destined to default on its debt. That explains why now the government is
desperately trying to get some of its debt cancelled and is in
negotiations with the lenders with this aim in mind.

Euphemistically, they call this “reconstructing the debt”. As always,
they invent new terms to describe what is happening in an attempt to
camouflage reality. But reality has a stubborn way of forcing its way
through. The government is naked and is attempting to hide behind a very
small fig leaf!

Default inevitable

No one now seriously believes Greece is going to pay. The discussion
now is about whether they can cobble together the conditions for a
“controlled default” or whether it will be an uncontrolled sudden
collapse.

The first of these two scenarios involves an agreement to cancel a
part of the debt, but Greece would have to leave the euro, or at best be
part of a two-tier euro together with the weaker EU economies. This
would also apply to countries like Ireland and Portugal. Such a scenario
would drag the whole of the eurozone and the EU into a severe crisis.
For if Greece and other countries prove incapable of paying back their
debts, it would be the banks of countries like Germany who would feel
the full brunt of all this. And this is considered the best case
scenario.

The second option, the uncontrolled collapse, would materialise
should the European economy fail to grow sufficiently or enter into a
new recession, the famous double-dip. In such a situation Greece would
face even worse problems and would be thrown into an even deeper and
longer recession. This could happen either before or after being pushed
out of the euro by the EU.

It is this economic impasse which is dictating the policies being
pursued by the Greek bourgeois. And this means the struggle between the
classes will be forced onto a much higher level. Yesterday’s general
strike was a confirmation of this. In spite of the cold and rain there
was a big turnout of around 80,000 on the rally in Athens. How deep the
feeling of resentment is, was confirmed by the presence of retired army
officers concerned about cuts in their pensions and even sections of the
police were out protesting against austerity!

Police brutality

Of course, not all the police were in that mood. The special riot
police was out in force yesterday and were in no mood for routine
service. In the recent period the behaviour of the police has been
increasingly provocative and violent. Workers and youth who turn up at
demonstrations these days are more likely to be brutalised by the police
than in the past. This is something we are seeing across Europe, and
for a very good reason: the bourgeois, no longer able to concede
anything concrete, want to force the workers and youth to accept their
policies. Youth are in fact being picked up, arrested and put on trial
after having participated in protests, almost as if they were
terrorists.

It is clear that the police have received instructions from the top
to terrorise the movement. Recently the police even attacked the
headquarters of the Youth wing of the Synaspismos party, and the next
day during a protest picket outside the courts, where Synaspismos Youth
members were on trial for having taken part in clashes with the police,
the general secretary of the organisation was beaten over the head by
police officers who were also shouting fascist slogans. The
Synaspismos is a party with parliamentary representation, regarded as a
traditional party of the left. It is in no way an anarchist or terrorist
grouping, but this is clearly a way of sending a message on the part of
the police to the radicalised youth of the party!

The ruling class is facing a big dilemma. They would like to have a
solid and stable parliamentary majority with which to push through their
austerity measures. But no party is emerging that can do the job for
them. The PASOK was voted in last year in protest at the outgoing New
Democracy’s programme. Very quickly the PASOK leaders have thrown much
of that support away. As we have seen, in the recent administrative
elections close to a million PASOK supporters decided to abstain. The
PASOK government is in fact in crisis and may possibly have only a few
months of life left in it. The paradox is that the New Democracy in
opposition is not growing; far from it, for it too is in crisis. It also
suffered from the effects of mass abstentionism, with 500,000 of its
supporters not bothering to go and vote.

A wing of the bourgeois organised a split from the New Democracy
around Dora Bakoyani, but the opinion polls indicate that this party
would only get around 2.5% in elections, not enough to get into
parliament. Thus open direct representatives of the bourgeois would fail
to get elected!

Something similar has happened to the right-wing split away from the
Synaspismos, that also seems to be stuck at 2.5%. This split was
organised to come to the aid of the PASOK government should it need it,
but at such a low vote it also would fail to get into parliament.

All this means that no single party would emerge today, if elections
were held, with a majority to govern the country. That explains why they
are trying to get the two main parties, PASOK and New Democracy, to
“cooperate”. Kathimerini commented positively on recent signs of a
preparedness on the part of the leader of New Democracy to cooperate
with the government on changes to the Constitution and on economic
policy:

“Prime Minister George Papandreou and the leader of the main
opposition New Democracy party, Antonis Samaras, yesterday [December 14]
proved that they can agree, if only on a few points, when it comes to
policy that will affect the entire nation. The fact that they agreed
there was a need to review the Constitution, (…) is a big deal and may
prove to be important if it goes beyond just words and is actually put
into practice. (…)”

New Democracy has been demagogically voting against the government’s
measures, the very same measures it would implement if it were in
office. Therefore this recent spirit of cooperation is seen as a step in
the right direction. The same article explained that:

“Some may argue that this rudimentary level of consensus is nowhere
near enough, considering the challenges that Greece is facing. But
Samaras certainly showed himself to be more responsible than the chief
of the Communist Party, Aleka Papariga, who all but declared war on the
government in what is an obvious hint that her party is poised to test
democracy’s tolerance of mass protest action.”

Bonapartist temptations

This comment on testing “democracy’s tolerance of mass protest
action” is an indication of another idea that is starting to grow among
the serious strategists of capital in Greece, who are in fact
considering some kind of Bonapartist measures. The above quotes indicate
they are working towards achieving some changes to the Constitution
that would give more power to the executive that would thus be less
constrained by the niceties of a democratic parliamentary procedure.

An open military option is out of the question for now. Greek workers
and youth still have the memory of the 1967 Colonels’ coup and how it
ended. The bourgeois are well aware of the fact that if they tried such
an option it could provoke open conflict between the classes, and even
civil war.

However, many articles have appeared in the serious bourgeois press,
such as Kathimerini, which discuss the option of a so-called government
of “technocrats”, which means no politicians directly from the political
parties, but economists and all kinds of experts would be ministers.
Last month Alekos Papadopoulos, the ex-Minister of Finance, gave a
speech in which he raised this idea. He said it should be a government
made up solely of technocrats and he added that instead of the present
four year legislature it should remain in power for five years. Of
course, all this he says should be with the common agreement of all the
parties, and it should be independent of parliament itself. This amounts
to a kind of “government of national salvation” that would remain in
power to impose the emergency measures.

Dora Bakoyanni has even raised for the first time the idea of taking
away from the trade unions their right to organise strikes. She said
that unless a majority of the workforce (members and non-members of
unions) expresses itself in favour of strike action through a referendum
(ballot) the unions should not have the legal right to call its members
out. In her speech she also added the fact that 130,000 public sector
workers must be sacked.

An influential top bourgeois journalist has even posed the question
of abolishing certain articles of the constitution which would allow the
government to govern by decree, by-passing parliament.

Added to this, the idea was raised that all these measures would be
implemented in “consultation with the people” through referendums. This
amounts to government through plebiscites. What they really want is a
free hand to do whatever they want, but because of the balance of class
forces the Greek bourgeois are forced to tread carefully, very
carefully.

In the long run, some sections of the army and the police could move
to “restore order”. The bourgeois have no real alternative, as what they
are asking the Greek workers to accept is more than can be achieved
through normal democratic bourgeois methods. However, before such a
stage is reached the working class will have many opportunities to
mobilise and to take power. But all these discussions among the
bourgeois for a curtailment of certain democratic rights is a warning to
the working class of what could happen should they fail in their
attempt to transform society.

Yesterday’s general strike was a confirmation of the power of the
Greek working class. It was not a general strike the leaders of the
unions wanted, but they were forced to call it because of the mounting
pressure from below. Recently Panagopoulos, the president of the GSEE,
held secret talks with the bosses in which he negotiated cuts in
workers’ wages. This has enraged the workers against him and is leading
to opposition currents within the unions.

A process of polarisation has begun within the trade unions, which is
also having an impact on all the left parties and groups in Greece. We
will return to this question in another article. Suffice it to say for
now, that after the initial struggles against the austerity measures
earlier this year, we have entered a new phase in which the seriousness
of the crisis and the degree of severity of the measures being imposed
are now seeping into the consciousness of the workers preparing the
ground for a struggle on a qualitatively higher level.

Athens, December 16, 2010

Website of the Greek Marxists:Μαρξιστική Φωνή (Greek)