A View From The Left -Greece: For Workers Struggle Against Austerity!

Frank Jackman comment:

Usually when I post something from some other source, mostly articles and other materials that may be of interest to the radical public that I am trying to address I place the words “ A View From The Left” in the headline and let the subject of the article speak for itself, or the let the writer speak for him or herself without further comment whether I agree with the gist of what is said or not. After all I can write my own piece if some pressing issue is at hand. Occasionally, and the sentiments expressed in this article is one of them, I can stand in solidarity with the remarks made. I do so here.     

*The situation in Greece is still so desperate for the working class and its allies that calling this article one from the archives is a little misleading on my part. The voting on the referendum, etc. may be over but the struggle to get out from under the debt, the Troika, the imperialists, the Greek capitalists goes on. Probably nowhere in the world are the objective conditions so right for a socialist transformation as in Greece. These moments as we painfully know from the history of the class struggle over the past one hundred and fifty years or so are fleeting so we better take advantage while we can. Forward to a working-class councils ruled Greece.        

Workers Vanguard No. 1077	30 October 2015

Greece: For Workers Struggle Against Austerity!

Part One

We print below a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League spokesman Diana Coleman at an October 10 forum in Oakland, California.

Greece is in an economic and political crisis triggered by the global financial meltdown of 2007-08. Hunger and poverty stalk the streets, from Athens to the rural villages. The working people are being bled white to pay for the crimes of the capitalist class. That’s true everywhere, but in weak, dependent Greece, this crisis has hit with a ferocity that is breathtaking.

Since 2010, the European Union (EU) and the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund have imposed draconian austerity measures on Greece in exchange for a series of so-called “rescue packages.” But those “rescued” have not been the Greek people, but Greek and especially international banks! The imperialist-dominated EU is an unstable consortium of capitalist countries that works to increase profits by squeezing the workers throughout Europe. It also enables the imperialist powers of Europe, led by Germany, to further subordinate poorer states like Greece, not least through the instrument of the common euro currency. We say: Down with the EU and the euro!

The capitalist parties, including Syriza and the new, left split from it known as Popular Unity, have nothing to offer except more austerity. We have opposed voting for any of them! The only way forward is for the proletariat to struggle in its own interests and those of all of the oppressed, independently of and in opposition to the capitalist rulers and all their agents.

In July, the Syriza-led capitalist government trampled on the results of a referendum that rejected the latest EU demands for austerity and agreed to even harsher terms with the imperialists. The ever-worsening economic crisis and the growing menace of fascism pose the vital need to unite the toiling masses against the attacks of the imperialists, the Greek bourgeoisie and the Syriza government. To this end, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece issued a call to the broadest layers of the workers movement to form workers action committees.

Such struggle must go beyond the bourgeois electoral circus and point toward the need for a revolutionary proletarian solution to the crisis. We say that the only way out of the nightmare of recurrent capitalist crisis is to unite the workers throughout Europe in struggle to sweep away the capitalist rulers through socialist revolutions that expropriate the exploiters. For a Socialist United States of Europe! For international proletarian revolution! That’s the summary of my talk, but I’m going to explain some of the concepts behind these points, so don’t leave just yet.

Here in the U.S., we are once again in presidential election season. Fake-socialist organizations continue to flit around the capitalist Democratic Party like moths around a flame. The reformists are debating whether it is best to pressure the Democrats from the outside or to support them explicitly, via the candidacy of purported “socialist” Bernie Sanders, who is running in the Democratic primary (and who has supported nearly every war waged by U.S. imperialism in recent memory). Socialist Alternative is working in his primary campaign, while the International Socialist Organization is trying to pressure him from the outside to become “a genuine independent alternative,” that is, to act as a Democrat without the formal affiliation, as he has done for nearly 25 years in Congress.

It’s an old story: In the shell game of American politics, the Democratic Party is portrayed as the “friend” of black people and labor. In reality, such illusions in this “lesser evil” bourgeois party have been essential to preserving the rule of racist American capitalism. The building of a revolutionary workers party in the U.S. will only proceed in sharp opposition to the Democrats, the trade-union misleaders who preach reliance on these representatives of the class enemy and their left hangers-on.

Looking to putatively progressive parties that are in fact committed to the capitalist system is a disastrous road for working people everywhere. In Greece, much of the reformist left has spent the past few years hailing or tailing Syriza, the supposedly anti-austerity party that was elected in January to run the government. Today, Syriza is enforcing the vicious austerity attacks ordered by the EU rulers.

Before I get into the current political situation in Greece, I want to talk about the country itself. In 2005, the first time I visited, I was quite surprised by Greece. I had expected it would look like the advanced industrialized countries of West Europe. It did not. Although Athens had a nice subway system that someone from Los Angeles, like me, could certainly admire, the rest of the country was rural and underdeveloped. And it has a small population. During a chat with a Greek comrade, she asked me how many people lived in the greater L.A. area. When I replied, “Oh, about ten or eleven million,” she laughed and told me that was the population of Greece. Both of us were kind of startled by this fact. And almost half of that eleven million lives in Athens, with the remainder spread out over the rest of the country.

So it’s a small country with a small, but combative, working class. And with the current deindustrialization of the country, the working class is getting smaller. There is some shipbuilding, shipping and longshore work as well as mass transit (the Athens subways), but most of the industry that once existed in Greece has been decimated by the German-dominated EU “single market.” Factories across the country stand empty. If you want to get a sense, you can go to an online Guardian photo collection titled “Modern Ruins: The Ghost Factories of Greece” (15 May). The introduction comments that the pictures “show the remnants of the country’s industrial past.” Those remnants look like Detroit, except that it’s the whole country.

Being from the U.S., where everything is sold by giant capitalist enterprises like Target, Wal-Mart, Kroger, Starbucks, etc., I was struck by the fact that retail shops, coffee houses and food markets all seemed to be run by individual families, part of the country’s large petty bourgeoisie. It is now a large, ruined petty bourgeoisie, as many of these small businesses have gone belly-up. This sort of thing is what fascists feed off. Today, over half of Greek youth are unemployed, some 300,000 people have no access to electricity and 3.1 million (that is, about one-third of the population) lack health insurance. Nearly 50 percent of children live in poverty.

I have family connections with people who come from Greece and often visit the country. Upon returning from Patras, Greece’s third-largest city, earlier this year, they commented that thousands of the under-25 crowd roam the streets with no jobs, nothing to do and nowhere to go. Whole blocks of stores and cafes are shuttered in what was once a booming tourist town.

Immigrants and the Fascist Threat

The crisis in Greece intersects a surge of racist hysteria over immigrants and refugees. Every week, thousands of desperate migrants are arriving in Greece after fleeing military conflicts that have destroyed their countries, particularly Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are the direct product of interventions by the U.S. imperialists. In the process, Washington and its allies have fostered and deepened religious and ethnic antagonisms among the populations of these countries. The resulting tide of human misery is a real indictment of the imperialist system, under which the rulers of a handful of rich countries lord it over oppressed peoples across the globe.

So far this year, some 390,000 migrants have made the crossing by boat to Greece—more than 153,000 of them in September alone—compared to 43,500 such arrivals in Greece in all of 2014. The working class, as an elementary act of self-defense and solidarity with the oppressed, must defend immigrants against the racist frenzy and demand full citizenship rights for everyone who has made it into the country. In the U.S., as in Europe, we in the International Communist League demand full citizenship rights for all immigrants as well as an end to the detention, deportation and persecution of Muslims and other immigrants.

In Greece, the fascists of Golden Dawn are seeking to exploit the crisis. Portraying themselves as saviors of the nation, they are whipping up hatred against immigrants, who have been subjected to violent attacks. Two years ago, a fascist thug murdered an anti-fascist activist in a suburb of Piraeus, near Athens.

Golden Dawn is far from a fringe phenomenon. As an illustration, these fascists finished third in the September elections, with nearly 7 percent of the vote; six years ago they got only 0.3 percent. Notably, Golden Dawn has a lot of support in the ranks of the police and the upper echelons of the army. This is pretty ominous in a country where the 1967-74 military dictatorship known as the Regime of the Colonels was not all that long ago.

Greece is a country where the question, “How can we fight and defeat the attacks of the ruling class?” is urgently posed. The lessons of events there have direct application for those who seek to struggle against the capitalist rulers’ offensive here in the U.S.

Under capitalism, a tiny layer of exploiters owns the factories, transportation systems, mines and, of course, the banks. That ruling class also controls the government, the police, the mass media and the education system. To acquire an understanding of the class nature of the state, one should read V.I. Lenin’s classic work The State and Revolution (1917). The interests of the capitalist class are counterposed to those of the working class, whose labor is exploited by the capitalists for profit. The so-called “middle class” or petty bourgeoisie—professionals, small shopkeepers, farmers and the like—is a heterogeneous and highly stratified social layer that follows one or the other of the main classes.

To shore up profits, the capitalists cut wages, impose speedup and lay off workers. They produce misery without end. But there is a way out. Thanks to its central role in production, the proletariat has enormous potential social power. If the workers organize collectively, they can stop production, including through strike action and plant occupations, cutting off the flow of profits. By waging class struggle, the working class can throw back at least some of the capitalists’ attacks. But since exploitation is endemic to capitalist production, struggles against the ravages of capitalism must be linked to a broader political perspective: sweeping away the profit system through workers socialist revolution and reorganizing society in the interests of the vast majority. The task of our organization is to forge Leninist vanguard parties—here and internationally—that can make the workers conscious of the need for the revolutionary overturn of capitalism.

Imperialism and Greek Capitalism

All capitalist countries are not “created equal.” On a global scale, the imperialist powers of North America, Europe and Japan retard economic and social development in the poorer countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa. Within Europe, the advanced industrial nations—chiefly Germany—dominate the weaker countries in the east and south, including Greece. There is manifestly an element of national oppression in what the EU imperialists are doing to Greece, which has basically been placed in receivership, with all decisions made by the EU masters.

The dependent character of the modern Greek state did not begin with its joining the EU, but was stamped on it from birth. At the signing of the 1832 treaty that carved an independent Greece out of the decaying Ottoman Empire, no Greeks were present—only representatives of the “protecting” powers of Britain, France and Russia. An absolutist monarch, Otto of Bavaria, was imposed on the new country. I found that amazing; the British just said, “All right, Greeks—here’s this dude from Bavaria, we decided that he’s going to be your king.”

Throughout the 19th century, Greece was a pawn of British diplomacy, particularly vis-à-vis tsarist Russia. In the early 1830s, to pay for the war against the Ottoman Turks, the Greek government contracted loans in the City of London on ruinous terms. British imperialist policy toward Greece was geared to using loans in order to subjugate the country and to bring about its complete financial and diplomatic dependency. Greece remained overwhelmingly agrarian, with its main export being Zante currants—you know, raisins. Still, there developed a wealthy commercial bourgeoisie based on merchant shipping and, later, banking.

Greece has a long history of sharp class struggle. During the Second World War the Greek workers and peasants, under the leadership of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), rose up in revolutionary upheaval against the Italian and German occupation forces as well as Greek bourgeois forces. The Civil War continued after the German withdrawal as the local capitalists—supported by Britain and the U.S.—sought to crush the revolt of the workers and poor peasants. For more on this upsurge and its betrayal by the KKE, I recommend our article “Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed” (Spartacist No. 64, Summer 2014). During the latter phase of the Greek Civil War, the U.S. supplanted decaying British imperialism in Greece, using that country as a testing ground for tactics to crush social revolutions. I thought the U.S. first dropped napalm bombs in Vietnam—no! In 1949, the last year of the Civil War, U.S. planes rained down napalm on Greek guerrilla fighters. The American imperialists went on to use napalm in Korea and Vietnam, which facilitated the killing and maiming of millions of people.

Let me return to the European Union. We used to meet people who would naively ask: “Why are you against the EU; isn’t it good that people can more easily travel around Europe?” The rape of Greece has made the EU’s purpose a lot clearer, illustrating the correctness of our principled opposition to that imperialist bloc and the euro.

The EU is an alliance of capitalist countries seeking to augment their profits and spheres of influence by more efficiently exploiting workers throughout Europe. Its predecessor, the European Economic Community, was an economic adjunct to NATO, the U.S.-led military alliance directed against the Soviet Union. The USSR was a workers state, issuing out of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia that overthrew capitalist class rule. We Trotskyists always upheld the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism, despite its degeneration under a nationalist bureaucracy headed by Joseph Stalin. That’s because the Soviet workers state embodied enormous gains for the workers of the world.

Contrary to capitalist propaganda, the imperialists’ anti-Soviet crusade had nothing whatsoever to do with “democracy” versus “totalitarianism.” The U.S. has long propped up brutal military dictatorships the world over. Greece, a front-line NATO state, under the Colonels is a perfect example. In truth, the imperialists were determined to destroy the Soviet Union because it was living proof that the working people of the world were not forever condemned to be exploited by the capitalists. The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was a terrible defeat for workers everywhere, for which the Stalinists’ betrayals bear a huge measure of responsibility.

Having established a unified Fourth Reich through capitalist counterrevolution in East Germany, the German bourgeois rulers used the EU as a vehicle to further their domination of the continent, while advancing the ability of the European powers to compete economically with U.S. imperialism. The various decrees and regulations imposed by the bankers in Frankfurt and the bureaucrats in Brussels have ruined the lives of millions in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and other poorer countries, while also reducing the living standards of workers in the imperialist centers. Can the EU be reformed or made to be a “social Europe” as the European reformists say? Dream on! No more than U.S. imperialism is going to start spreading freedom and democracy around the world.

Workers Vanguard No. 1078	13 November 2015

Greece: For Workers Struggle Against Austerity!

Part Two

We print below the second part of a presentation, edited for publication, given by Spartacist League spokesman Diana Coleman at an October 10 forum in Oakland, California. Part One appeared in WV No. 1077 (30 October).

Syriza, which came to power in Greece for the first time following elections this January, had been formed some years earlier as a coalition including bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political forces—from environmentalists and bourgeois populists to anti-Soviet splits from the Communist Party of Greece. Syriza’s name translates as “Coalition of the Radical Left,” but don’t be fooled. From the start, it was actually a petty-bourgeois populist party with a pro-capitalist program. In government, Syriza became an outright bourgeois party.

In the January elections, there were real illusions in Syriza among Greek workers and the oppressed. Many thought Syriza would stand up to the European Union (EU) imperialists who were treating the country as practically a German colony. The enthusiasm was huge, including on the left. Numerous pseudo-socialist groups joined Syriza’s big “national unity” rallies in Athens and hailed its coming to power.

Indeed, many of these groups were already inside Syriza, serving as foot soldiers for this capitalist party. Other leftists, including assorted Maoists and pseudo-Trotskyists, were in Antarsya, a coalition that ran its own candidates in the election but sought to be the pressure on the streets that would push Syriza a little to the left. Here are a couple of examples of the left internationally cheering on Syriza. The former United Secretariat, centered on the French New Anti-Capitalist Party, called to elect Syriza under the headline, “On 25 January, A Turning Point for Greece and Europe!” (internationalviewpoint.org, 12 January). The Committee for a Workers International, whose U.S. affiliate is Socialist Alternative, claimed that a Syriza victory “will have a liberating effect on the working class, the movements and society in general” (socialistworld.net, 20 January).

In sharp contrast, our comrades of the Trotskyist Group of Greece denounced Syriza in a leaflet distributed to workers on May Day:

“Syriza has always been committed to preserving the capitalist system and for continuing Greece’s membership in the EU and euro zone. This means submitting to the purpose of the EU, which is to maximize capitalist profit by driving down the working and living conditions of workers and the oppressed throughout all of Europe, including in imperialist countries like Germany. It also means making working people pay for the debts racked up by the capitalists and their bloodsucking banks. It is not only the imperialists, but also the Greek capitalist class who have benefited from the EU’s destruction of labor rights and imposition of austerity.”

— reprinted as “Syriza Is Class Enemy of Workers!” WV No. 1068, 15 May

After the elections, Syriza formed a coalition with the right-wing nationalist Independent Greeks (this coalition is gross, but not really surprising) and began imposing various austerity measures while trying to wheel and deal with the EU. But the European Union wasn’t into making deals. In late June, the “Troika”—the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—demanded even more brutal attacks. Under pressure from the imperialists and the Greek capitalists—who claimed that Greece faced total ruin if it did not get yet another “bailout”—Syriza organized a referendum on the latest austerity package. Syriza called for a “no” vote, with the declared intent of utilizing the outcome to pressure the EU for more favorable conditions. In fact, according to multiple reports from Syriza insiders, the party’s leadership secretly expected, and hoped, that the referendum result would be “yes,” giving them an excuse to implement the austerity while pretending to have a popular mandate. You know, along the lines of, “What can we do? We didn’t like the bailout terms, but the people have spoken.”

But it didn’t work that way. More than 60 percent of the voters, including millions of working people, responded with a decisive “NO!” Naturally, the TGG called for a “no” vote in the referendum, in which was posed a simple question: “yes” or “no” to the Troika’s austerity plan. Not complicated! To do otherwise than to vote “no” would have been a betrayal. The TGG statement on the referendum also called for opposition to the EU and no support to the Syriza government. It should be noted that many Greek people, although angered by the austerity, are reluctant or fearful of leaving the EU, in no small part due to the bourgeois propaganda offensive identifying such a step with even greater disaster.

What was in the austerity package (the Memorandum) that people voted down? Some details are necessary to get a proper picture. It hiked the regressive VAT (sales tax), further slashed pensions and ripped up union contracts. Many more will go hungry as a result of the 23 percent VAT. As for pensions, the bourgeois press is always talking about lavish retirement. What a lie! Pensions on average have already been cut by almost 45 percent since 2008, and now the rulers are going to cut them more! Today, about 45 percent of retirees receive pensions below what is considered the poverty line in a country in which 20 percent of the population is over 65, and by some estimates, half of the households rely on pensions to make ends meet. With youth unemployment so high, that’s not surprising.

More cuts mean more homelessness and starvation. A Guardian article (21 January) on Greece described: “Mamas and papas scavenging through the rubbish bins, the broken pavements and shuttered shops, the abandoned cars and derelict houses, the new poor who mutter to themselves on graffiti-stained streets.” Our comrades reported that in what used to be working-class areas of the port city of Piraeus they now see malnourished old people and a lot of fascist graffiti.

For Workers Action Committees!

Although German chancellor Angela Merkel rants about the Greek government’s supposed profligate spending, there is a whole other side to the matter: the money that German imperialism makes off exports, including arms sales, to Greece. The Guardian (19 April 2012) a couple years ago quoted Dimitris Papadimoulis, a Syriza member of parliament: “If there is one country that has benefited from the huge amounts Greece spends on defence it is Germany.” The Guardian went on, “No other area has contributed as heavily to the country’s debt mountain. If Athens had cut defence spending to levels similar to other EU states over the past decade, economists claim it would have saved around €150bn—more than its last bailout.”

Furthermore, a lot of the military hardware didn’t even work: “The former defence minister Akis Tsochadzopoulos was jailed pending trial on charges of accepting an €8m bribe from Ferrostaal, the German company that helped oversee the scandal-marred sale of four Class 214 submarines to the Greek navy 12 years ago. To date, Athens has taken delivery of only one of the subs after the vessels were found to have technical glitches.” And more: “Speculation is rife that international aid was dependent on Greece following through on agreements to buy military hardware from Germany and France.” In other words, the German and French imperialists make the big money while the Greek capitalists, in pursuit of their own interests, get bribes that they stash in Swiss bank accounts. And through it all, the masses starve.

As part of the punishing “bailout” of Greece, the EU has demanded reorganization of the judiciary and government administration, dictating every aspect of economic, social welfare and labor policy. Public assets are to be placed in a trust fund administered by Greece’s imperialist creditors, with the aim of selling them off mainly to pay debts and recapitalize the banks. Time magazine (16 July) listed some of what is expected to be sold:

“REAL ESTATE: Greece has already begun selling off landmark buildings, including neoclassical Culture Ministry offices in Athens, and has leased two of the capital’s ancient sites to private companies. According to the IMF, Greece has over 70,000 unused properties that could be sold, but Greek officials insist significant treasures like the Acropolis won’t be put on the market.”

We’ll see! Time continued:

“ISLANDS: Greece has anywhere from 1,200 to 6,000 islands, an estimated 227 of which are inhabited...; private islands are already selling for as little as $3 million.

“PORTS: Plans to sell off stakes in the Port of Piraeus, Greece’s largest harbor and its major shipping hub for over 2,500 years, are well under way.... The government is also likely to sell off stakes in 14 airports.”

The fact that German banks will determine what Greek assets will be sold off to repay the debt to German (and French) banks demonstrates that there is an element of national oppression at work here.

The Greek masses voted against such measures in the July 5 referendum, but just one week later, Syriza totally capitulated. Party leader Alexis Tsipras announced the acceptance of even more draconian austerity than was rejected in the referendum—which is fairly hard to imagine. Shock and anger rippled throughout Greek society. The task of the hour was to unite the working masses in struggle against the attacks of the imperialists, their Greek lackeys and the Syriza government.

Seeking to act as a struck flint to ignite proletarian struggle, the TGG issued a call for workers action committees “composed of workers from different tendencies and their allies—youth, unemployed, immigrants, pensioners” to fight to repudiate the EU and euro and to cancel the debt; for workers defense guards against the fascist threat; for workers control of food distribution and prices; to expropriate the banks, utilities, transportation, ports and shipping industry, among other demands (see “Enough!” WV No. 1072, 7 August). On the other side stand the Golden Dawn fascists who, especially in the absence of such struggle, seek to take advantage of Syriza’s sellout to its EU masters with appeals to the ruined petty bourgeoisie and masses of unemployed youth.

The TGG’s call for workers action committees was an application of the tactic of the united front. Appealing for workers from different tendencies to join such committees was an attempt to use our small forces as a lever for broader, defensive struggle by the proletariat and its allies. If formed, such committees would be arenas for vital debates on the way forward involving the different parties that claim to represent the workers’ interests. Such debates are key to forging a revolutionary workers party, the necessary instrument to lead the working class to power.

Our call provoked real debate and interest, even though it was somewhat slow going into August when many people left Athens and other cities to go on vacation in the countryside. Some Greek Communist Party (KKE) members argued that they were already handing out free food in poor areas, i.e., interpreting the TGG call as an appeal for social work. In fact, our call for workers control of food distribution and prices goes far beyond social work; it runs up against the limits of what is “legal” under capitalist rule. As my mother always told me, “The best things in life are illegal, immoral or fattening.” And when it comes to unions and class struggle, everything effective is usually illegal. Many of the demands we put forward cannot be met under capitalism—we want workers to learn in struggle that capitalism must go.

The KKE’s Class Collaboration

I want to spend some time on the KKE, which supported the Stalinist bureaucracy who ran the Soviet workers state after usurping political power from the proletariat beginning in 1923-24. The bureaucratic misrulers betrayed the liberating and internationalist goals that animated the October 1917 Russian Revolution, which was led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky. Instead, they pushed the bankrupt idea that there could be socialism in a single, relatively backward country, combined with “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist-imperialist world.

These class-collaborationist politics led to defeat of the Communist-led workers and peasants in the Greek Civil War of the 1940s. The KKE had established itself at the head of Greece’s anti-Nazi resistance, which had the run of the country when the German forces withdrew. But like Stalinists elsewhere, the KKE leadership sought to subordinate workers’ struggles to the “progressive” bourgeoisie, joining the capitalist government and, in February 1945, signing the Treaty of Varkiza that disarmed the resistance fighters and handed power back to the miserable Greek bourgeoisie.

Believe me, the Civil War still looms large in Greece today. If you go to a bar and begin talking about the war, people will start to lecture you about what happened to their grandmother, etc., etc. And heaven help you if you bring the subject up at a family dinner—the war divided families and is an issue that arouses screaming and stomping out of rooms. Besides our article “Greece 1940s: A Revolution Betrayed” (Spartacist No. 64, Summer 2014), which provides a revolutionary Trotskyist analysis of the Greek Civil War, there is a worthwhile documentary available on YouTube titled Greece: The Hidden War. The video includes interviews of Greek KKEers, some of whom are critical of their leadership.

To this day, the KKE is a mass party that has the allegiance of a crucial core of the Greek working class. When I saw the KKE marching through Athens with the unions that they lead, tens of thousands of workers were in the streets, and they had marshals around the perimeter of the march. Impressive looking, but they don’t use the evident power of these workers, refusing, for example, to mobilize the workers to stop the fascists.

As the TGG wrote in a leaflet explaining our critical support to the KKE in the 2012 elections, “Vote KKE! No Vote to Syriza!” (printed in WV No. 1005, 6 July 2012), “Rather than mobilizing workers and immigrants against Golden Dawn, which represents a threat to the whole of the organized working class, the KKE appeals for votes from among the same backward layers of the population who voted for the fascist scum, demanding: ‘The working people who voted for Golden Dawn must correct their vote’.” Such statements are revolting, especially coming from a group that has the social weight to spearhead struggles to stop Golden Dawn. Sometimes, the KKE argues that fascism will only finally be gotten rid of after the revolution. Well, true enough, but that does not mean that you shouldn’t mobilize against the fascists now. History has shown that you better stop the fascists when you can.

Today, the KKE fights not for socialist revolution but for “people’s power,” which disappears the centrality of the proletariat, which uniquely has the social power to wage the necessary fight against capitalism. It obscures the fact that the central class division in capitalist society is between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie and not between the “people” and the “monopolies.” The American variant is the “anti-monopoly coalition” pushed by the Communist Party USA and endorsed by most reformists. It’s simply a disguised way of saying that you should unite with everyone who is to the left of Donald Trump and the piggish owners of Wal-Mart. Once leftists start talking about “the people,” watch out—it’s the open door to opportunism.

Macedonia: Litmus Test for Greek Left

The KKE is also profoundly nationalist, viewing as sacred the Greek borders, which were extended a hundred years ago through a series of wars. Echoing the Greek bourgeoisie, the KKE last year railed against “a conscious effort to promote Turkish national consciousness in the Muslim minority and a so-called ‘Macedonian’ national consciousness among a section of the Slavic-speakers.” In 2013, the KKE newspaper ran an article calling to strengthen the war industries in the name of national defense.

I want to tell a story from my second trip to Greece, in 2010. There had been something like eight general strikes that year—two happened while I was there. Since general strikes in the U.S. are very rare (to put it mildly), I was eager to attend one of the strike marches and went to observe it at Syntagma Square, the plaza in front of the Greek parliament. At first, the demo proceeded as I expected. Mostly male, middle-aged trade unionists filed in to the square with banners showing they were electrical workers, postal workers and so on. Suddenly, a man was chasing another man, knocking him roughly to the ground and kicking him. Then, an older woman came running by with blood streaming down her head. There was a lot of running hither and thither. Cops on motorcycles and in riot gear with clubs out began to arrive en masse. The petty-bourgeois people who had been sitting in the nearby cafes began to throw money down on the tables and quickly leave the area.

I felt like I had been transported into that classic Costa-Gavras movie Z. Not able to get to the Metro station because there were so many cops blocking it, I just began to walk away from the demo. Parenthetically, according to later news reports, this incident apparently involved an attack on Pakistani immigrants, which some trade unionists stepped in to stop.

In any case, I found myself walking next to a guy in his late 20s or early 30s. He spoke English and told me that he was from Skopje, which is how Greeks refer to the existing country of Macedonia. Knowing that, I said, “Oh, Macedonia.” He was greatly impressed and began telling me about the oppression of the Macedonian minority within the borders of Greece today. He spoke about how it was once illegal for Macedonians in Greece to speak their language and how his family had been forced from its home and lost its land. He also spoke about how the Greek government had moved Greeks into certain areas of Macedonia (that were incorporated into Greece a century ago) because they would be more loyal to the government. He told me that Macedonians were Slavs and that he could always tell the difference on sight between Greeks and Slavs (which I certainly couldn’t).

Finally, he gave me a capsule summary of the Greek Civil War from the Macedonian point of view. He said that the Macedonians supported the KKE in the Civil War and that the Greek ruling class has never forgiven them and never will. I found the conversation interesting and, in a small way, a vindication of our position in defense of the national rights of Macedonians in Greece. At the end, he escorted me to the Metro station and we shook hands.

For the ICL, the fight against national chauvinism has always been key. As noted in the 2004 “Agreement for Common Work Between Greek Comrades and the ICL (FI)”: “A Trotskyist group in Greece must fight against Greek chauvinism and defend the rights of national minorities.” This understanding is central to our fight for a socialist federation of the Balkans as the only way to resolve the many national questions in the region.

The KKE’s Referendum Betrayal

Despite its name and some of its rhetoric, the KKE manifestly does not have the program and perspective needed to lead the workers to sweep away capitalism. There is a profound contradiction between its nationalist, reformist politics and its working-class base. Authentic Marxists seek to reach out to these workers with the objective of forging a revolutionary party through a process of common struggle, political debate, splits, fusions and regroupments.

During the 2012 elections and again in January this year, the TGG gave critical support to the KKE. Why? Because the Communist Party opposed forming a coalition with Syriza or any bourgeois party, while also opposing the EU. Our critical support allowed us to underline the need for class independence from all capitalist forces. And it also allowed us to gain a hearing for our views among the ranks of the KKE.

But in the referendum this July, the KKE committed an outrageous betrayal, calling on working people to throw away their votes by casting invalid ballots. The party leaders claimed a “no” vote would be an indirect vote for Syriza’s alternate austerity plan, but that was completely false. The ballot simply said “yes” or “no” to the EU Memorandum. The “no” vote was nothing other than a slap in the face to the EU and IMF imperialists. The KKE leaders’ refusal to champion a “no” vote stood in total contradiction to the KKE’s declared opposition to the EU. In fact, many KKE militants didn’t listen to their leaders and voted “no” anyway, which is a good thing.

The overwhelming “no” vote on the referendum and the Syriza leadership’s subsequent sellout served to destabilize the Greek government. Tsipras resigned as Prime Minister and called new elections for September 20. Syriza was re-elected, but with the lowest ever voter turnout.

The TGG wrote an Open Letter to the KKE explaining that we weren’t going to give them critical support in the September election unless they repudiated their wretched position on the referendum. The letter stated: “We wonder comrades, have you considered that the victory of the ‘no’ vote weakened and irreparably exposed Syriza in the eyes of the masses who had in fact been deceived before the election? Is this fact not in the interests of the working class? Have you considered comrades that had the ‘yes’ camp won, Syriza and the EU would have had a mandate to devastate the working class not only in Greece but throughout Europe?” (icl-fi.org, 13 September). I consider this letter a very effective piece of propaganda.

While the KKE’s percentage of the vote did not change much, the high level of abstention meant it lost considerable electoral support—more than 35,000 votes—compared to January. As the only mass working-class alternative to Syriza, the KKE could have capitalized on the widespread disillusionment with the government. Instead, it reaped what it sowed with its referendum betrayal.

The September elections also saw the emergence of a split from Syriza called Popular Unity. This latest bourgeois-populist front is trying to salvage the anti-austerity banner that Syriza so quickly trampled on. The future leaders of Popular Unity stayed inside the Syriza government until Tsipras stepped down, showing that they are devoted to maintaining capitalist stability and that their vote in parliament against the latest “bailout” terms was just for show. We, of course, opposed on principle any vote to Popular Unity, which did very poorly in the election, falling below the 3 percent threshold necessary for parliamentary deputies.

Having learned nothing at all, the reformist left groups that so recently hailed Syriza quickly turned to hailing Popular Unity. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) ran an interview with one of its Greek co-thinkers under the headline “The Struggle for Syriza’s Soul.” Typical! The Greek supporters of the ISO (the DEA) and other pseudo-socialist groups simply decamped from Syriza to join Popular Unity. To paraphrase a comment made by Trotsky in a different context, this isn’t just a betrayal; it’s a farce.

The EU is happy with the September election results. The Guardian (21 September) commented:

“EU officials reacted to the news with thinly disguised comfort. Tsipras, for so long the bad boy of European politics, had only reluctantly accepted the excoriating conditions attached to the financial assistance programme. Before what is expected to be an explosive winter, EU sources said it was better the leftist was in government, applying policies, than potentially rabble rousing on the streets. ‘There is a certain amount of relief in that,’ said one EU insider.”

This appraisal reminds me of the famous statement by New York City’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, who said of the workers and black people facing massive cuts to social programs, “They’ll take it from me.” The EU hopes the Greek workers and oppressed will take it from Tsipras.

But as the Guardian (20 September) also noted: “The turnout was low and the mood sullen.” Our comrades reported considerable frustration and disillusionment with all the existing parties, frustration that could be channeled in any number of directions. A common refrain was, “Why bother voting when all the decisions are being made in Germany and Brussels [where the EU has its headquarters]?” There is, for now, an ebb in struggle, but new rounds of popular resistance will erupt once the latest EU-imposed starvation diktats begin to take hold.

For a Socialist United States of Europe!

Recent events have made completely clear that it is impossible for Greece to break the spiral of debt and imperialist pillage so long as it remains within the EU and its eurozone. Twice in the past century, in the interimperialist World Wars I and II, Germany’s capitalist rulers sought to “unite” Europe under their dominance through force of arms. They failed. Today the goal hasn’t changed, only the means: they seek dominance through economic levers, including by controlling the common European currency.

A debtor country can sometimes gain some breathing room and establish a modicum of economic competitiveness by repudiating its debt and devaluing its currency. But there is no such option under the euro. The European imperialists, echoed by the Greek capitalists, say: if you try to leave the eurozone, then Armageddon awaits. In fact, there are examples of debt default and currency devaluation that have not been disasters (Argentina and Iceland come to mind). Going this route did not free those countries from the ravages of the imperialist global order—which cannot happen within the framework of capitalism—but it did eventually allow for something of an economic recovery.

More importantly, Greece leaving the EU and the eurozone would create better conditions for the working class to struggle. Our opposition to these institutions is based on the interests of the international working class. If Greece left the EU, it would be a blow to the very existence of this reactionary bloc. It also could make it clearer to the Greek workers that their most immediate enemies are their own capitalist rulers, not Brussels or the German bankers.

As I said earlier, our perspective is that of the class struggle, including common class struggle of Greek, German and other European workers against their respective capitalist rulers and the EU. Since the destruction of the Soviet Union, the consciousness and level of struggle of the working class internationally has taken a big step backward. But this situation will not last forever. The workings of capitalism don’t just produce daily misery; they will spur further working-class combativity. Greece today is a weak point in the global capitalist order. The stakes there are high: the next round of grinding austerity could well push the fascists to the fore, as happened in Germany in the early 1930s. But if the working class takes the lead, breaking with all the parties of the capitalist class, its struggles could serve as a beacon for the proletariat worldwide. Socialism or barbarism are the choices, as Rosa Luxemburg so famously commented.

Sixty years ago, American Trotskyist leader James P. Cannon noted that we are living in “a transition period of the history of humanity.” Cannon observed:

“It is a mere interlude in the long evolution of the human race, but it has encompassed all our lives, and the lives of many generations. In this historical interlude, mankind, losing even the memory of its communal solidarity of earlier millenniums, has descended into the underworld of competitive class society in order to forge there the weapons for its liberation from helpless dependence on nature, and to create the material conditions for its re-emergence in the communal solidarity of classless society in the future.”

— “Joseph Vanzler,” speech delivered in Los Angeles, 25 June 1956, printed in Speeches for Socialism (1971)

Only the struggles of a working class conscious of and confident in its historic tasks can give humanity such a future. From Greece to the U.S. and around the world, the goal of our organization is to re-implant the liberating ideals and the scientific program of communism among working people and the oppressed. We urge you to join us in this fight.