Greece edged deeper into chaos as workers brought the country to a standstill with a general strike.

The closure of the entire public sector – from schools to hospitals to government offices – left Athens airport looking like a ghost town and kept museums and archaeological sites shut.

Anger was evident on the faces of the protesters who flooded into the streets. "We have no work, we have no money," they screamed, denouncing the EU and IMF which have propped up the near-bankrupt Greek economy with rescue funds. "Erase the debt! Let the rich pay. There will, there can, be no more sacrifices."

Nearly two years after Europe's great debt crisis erupted beneath the Acropolis, the people on its frontline have clearly had enough. An austerity programme that has begun to resemble a bad dream of relentless wage cuts, tax increases, price rises and pension drops has crushed the middle class and sent poverty levels soaring.

Wednesday's demonstrations, the biggest anti-austerity protest since June, were the "beginning of a battle" to eradicate further emergency belt-tightening measures announced last month.

"The government is behaving as if it has a pistol to its head," said Stathis Anestis, a spokesman for the Confederation of Greek Unions. "It is not just that it is the poor who are forced to carry the burden of this barrage of measures," he insisted, denouncing the terms of the €110bn (£95bn) bailout Greece received from the EU and IMF in May last year.

"It's not just that all our hard-earned rights are being peeled away. It is that we wake up every day to another cut, another tax, another pay rise. No one can keep up!"

The prospect of more public sector strikes in the coming months was as inevitable as the precision with which the austerity measures had failed to solve the country's spiralling debt problem, he added. "None of these measures have been effective. They have only served to worsen recession, miss [budget] targets and deepen desperation and despair worse. We have no choice but to take to the streets."

George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, says nothing short of a revolution can change the debt-stricken country. Since triggering the crisis with the revelation that Greece had clearly cooked the books, hiding a deficit that was three times bigger than originally thought, the ruling socialists have drawn up an array of economic and structural reforms not seen since the second world war.

"The only way that we are going to see real results, real change, is if the reforms are implemented," said a source close to the "troika", which is made up of the EU, IMF and ECB.

Last week Greece acknowledged that it had missed the fiscal goals set out in the 2011 budget, blaming a worse than expected recession. Without the reforms being enacted, the country has been told that it will not receive the next vital €8bn tranche of aid needed to pay wages and pensions in the public sector.

The pressure on a government that is showing all the signs of becoming increasingly shaky is beginning to mount. This week Papandreou admitted that the changes he was being asked to apply were much greater than he would have liked.

"We are forced to take decisions much faster than we would have wished," the prime minister said after his cabinet approved the decision to move 30,000 civil servants into a special labour reserve on reduced pay – the first step towards mass lay-offs in the bloated public sector.

The demonstrations were much less violent than previous protests in a capital that has become increasingly used to toxic chemicals and tears – even if more riot police than ever were dispatched to the city centre.

Instead, it is a new sense of helplessness and hopelessness that is haunting Greece. "We are mourning the loss of our country," sighed Elena Vitali, a national economy ministry employee who, with black flag in hand, joined hundreds of others protesters outside the building.

"The 300 people in that place," she said pointing to the Greek parliament across Syntagma square, "are traitors. They have decided not just to sell our dignity but to sell out our country, to sell assets to privatise the lot. Soon there will be nothing left that is Greek. It will all have gone to those who are supposedly helping us in the EU."