Posted by John, May 17th, 2010 - under Socialism.

Tags: Greece

What a bloody nerve! The very banks that have been bailed out with billions of dollars of taxpayer money and the very businesses that grew fat from government stimulus spending are now demanding that governments slash their spending in order to rein in the public debt that resulted from these measures.

Widespread attacks on the working class – cuts in social spending, lower wages and reduced pensions – are the order of the day across the world. Today the debt crisis has struck hardest in Greece. Tomorrow it will be Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain; the day after, Britain and the USA?

The debt crisis, currently centred in Southern Europe, tells us so much about the rottenness of capitalism. It’s a system where the very wealthy gamble their money but we end up paying their debts. “Heads they win, tails we lose.”

After North America, Europe is the world’s wealthiest continent, but what do we see? Workers tossed onto the scrap heap; elderly people who worked for 30 or 40 years having their pensions ripped away from them; high school and university students facing the prospect of never holding a steady job; and the unemployed having to pull their belts in another notch.

The international banks, the IMF, and the EU all say that the Greek working class, students and pensioners are in for unprecedented hardship. Greece will be hit by depression; national income will fall by 10-15 per cent in the next two years.

And, even after the three year EU/IMF bailout comes to its conclusion, even in the “best” possible circumstances, Greek indebtedness will be higher than it is today because this “bailout” has to be repaid at commercial rates of interest at the very time that the economy will be shrinking rapidly.

The Greek bailout is all about protecting the profits of the German and French banks that hold billions of dollars in bonds issued by governments from Southern Europe. When all is said and done, “rescuing Greece” consists of yet another monstrous give-away of taxpayers’ money to the banks.

Had Greece defaulted, something it may yet do, the German and French banks would have seen 30 per cent or more of their loans wiped out. With the bailout they are secure for now.

But the crisis is far from over. The speculators who brought on the crisis by refusing to buy any further Greek bonds unless they were offered 10-20 per cent interest are now casting their eyes further. Like wild dogs, they roam in packs trying to detect signs of weakness in the financial markets of particular countries.

For the capitalists, enough is never enough. They are always driven by the competition between themselves for more. And every “solution” they conjure up only points the way to fresh problems.

The activities of the speculators are only the surface of what is a much deeper and more intractable crisis of world capitalism. The capitalists have no solution to the debt crisis other than to attack the working class.

Meanwhile the rich Greeks are hanging onto their wealth. They’ve paid no tax for years. They’ve bankrupted the national treasury. Now that the shit has hit the fan, they’re scuttling for a safe bolt-hole.

Some are taking their money and running overseas. Others are staying at home but sending their ill-gotten money to Swiss bank accounts. The country is being drained of yet more billions.

None of these thieves will see the inside of a jail cell. The capitalists are protected by the courts and the politicians with whom they work hand in glove. They live secure in their mansions while unleashing the police against ordinary people protesting against the looting of their country.

The rich decry the “violence” of the mass demonstrations, strikes and riots in Athens, but their violence is systemic, daily and reaches into every corner of society.

It’s not just the tear gas, the capsicum spray, the rubber bullets and the riot cops that they deploy in the streets. They also use the violence of unemployment to boost their profits; they use the violence of racism against Roma and Albanians to deflect attention from themselves as the cause of unemployment and housing shortages; and they use the violence of cutting health services to enable the government to pay back the banks.

The Greek bailout has demonstrated the power of the capitalist class to bring even a democratically elected government to heel. Last October three million voters supported the Socialist Party (PASOK), smashing the incumbent conservatives who polled less than two and a half million votes. PASOK won on a platform of rolling back the conservatives’ attacks on the welfare state and defending the rights of workers and pensioners.

Those three million votes count for nothing compared to the demands of the banks. Within three months of winning office, PASOK went on the attack. We live under a dictatorship of capital, no matter the parliamentary façade.

The capitulation by the PASOK government is a stark reminder that labour parties can never be trusted. Because the social democrats want to run the capitalist state and manage the capitalist economy, they take responsibility for them in good times and bad. The Greek and European capitalists are demanding that the working class pay for the crisis. The Greek social democrats are obliging without demur.

Governments are using the crisis to whip up national chauvinism against their rivals and the weaker states. German newspapers have been saturated with articles slamming the Greeks for their “extravagant” welfare state, the better to corral German workers behind German capitalists and to justify attacks on their own welfare state. Capitalism tries to turn the animosity between the classes into hatred between peoples.

This is the future for workers across Europe if the capitalists have their say: In a continent of plenty, austerity and misery; in the ancient home of democracy, the will of the people trashed at the behest of the banks.

Working class resistance

But, as successive general strikes and mass demonstrations this year have shown, the Greek workers are determined not to let the capitalists have the last say. They have demonstrated some crucial points about the power of the working class.

They have shut down the country. They have for a day or two at a time stopped the wheels of profit making in their tracks. They have made plain without them, business stops. The Greek workers have got a taste of their own power.

Their actions have terrified the speculators, the bankers, the EU and the IMF. They know what’s at stake. If they can crush the Greek workers, workers all over Europe will be more vulnerable.

But if the Greek workers can stand firm and send the IMF packing, it will be a victory for the entire European working class. Indeed, not just Europe but all over the world. Union and student activists facing massive public sector cuts in California are closely following events in Greece. Our struggle is international.

So, if the capitalists are riven by divisions and competition, the working class is united through struggle. Within Greece, the impetus behind the strikes is always for maximum unity. It’s not enough that the public sector workers take action; the private sector unions have to come on board. It’s not enough that the workers go on strike; the students and the pensioners need to rally too.

It’s not enough that the “native” Greek workers strike, the immigrants have to join in with their demands. And when through stupid sectarianism the Communist Party calls separate marches and rallies in competition with those called by the main union federations, the tendency amongst the workers is simply to link arms and march together.

The Greek workers have occupied numerous government buildings in protest at the attacks. Workers who have been retrenched have occupied banks and government offices to demand employment and compensation.

At the initiative of the radical left, workers, students and working-class neighbourhoods have begun to form struggle committees. In one working-class suburb of Athens, a struggle committee has been established that now includes the local high school teachers union, workers at the local hospital, the local chapter of an immigrant solidarity campaign and many residents (see SA #153).

By engaging in these kinds of struggles and by linking up in this way, the working class learns basic lessons of solidarity and gets an appetite for more.

The struggle in Greece also demonstrates the centrality of politics. No matter the desire of workers to vent their rage against the thieves who are looting the country, the established leaders of the Greek union movement want to cut a deal with the Government.

It has only been pressure from within the ranks of the unions – spearheaded by the radical left – that has made the general strikes happen. The stakes are so high that some “compromise” outcome engineered by the established union leaders can only take the form of a sell-out.

The working class needs a revolutionary, not a reformist, leadership if it is to decisively push back this latest round of attacks. Such a leadership has to be based amongst the most radical sections of the working class.

But more than that is needed. The attacks levied as part of this debt crisis will be the pattern for world capitalism for years to come.

Capitalism has demonstrated that it is unfit to rule. The Greek workers’ struggle points to an alternative to a future of hardship and escalating nationalist tensions.

That alternative is socialism, where the workers will not just resist this or that attack, but will destroy the whole rotting edifice of capitalism and the misery that it brings.

This article by Tom Bramble first appeared online at Socialist Alternative.