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Workers Vanguard No. 1013
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23 November 2012
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Golden Dawn Fascists Feed on Economic Crisis-Capitalists Bleed Greek Working Class
Down With the European Union! For a Workers Europe!
The following article is from a leaflet by our comrades in the
Trotskyist Group of Greece. It was written as an introduction to “Greek
Elections: Workers Face More Austerity” (see WV No. 1005, 6 July). The
leaflet was distributed at events marking the anniversary of the 17 November
1973 suppression of the Polytechnic student uprising by the military
dictatorship, which fell the following year.
Coming off last June’s election, the government alliance of New
Democracy, PASOK [the bourgeois Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement] and the
Democratic Left have worked to deliver a further €13.5 billion [$17.25 billion]
in barbarous austerity cuts to the Greek capitalists and the imperialist
overlords of the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). The
latter demand the most savage deprivation of the workers and oppressed as the
price for so-called “financial aid,” that is, money to keep the bloodsucking
international bankers afloat and rescue the Greek bourgeoisie from a default.
Not content with slashing even more billions from health care, education,
pensions and salaries, the imperialist rulers demand that Greece carry out
“labor reform.” This reform is so vicious that even a toady to the capitalists
like Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis said it would “demolish what is left
of workers’ rights.”
Official unemployment has soared to 25 percent for the population
as a whole, and to over 50 percent for young people. Almost 60 percent of the
unemployed are women. Another 25,000 jobs are slated to be slashed from the
public sector within the next year. Meanwhile, the Greek bourgeoisie has driven
down labor costs in Greece nearly 12 percent in the last year alone while
inflation continues to rise. The Troika [the EU, European Central Bank and IMF]
demands that the national labor agreement apply only to unionized workers so
that the bourgeoisie can starve the most vulnerable workers and further divide
and weaken the labor movement.
In addition to the desperate conditions facing the working class, a
section of Greece’s large petty bourgeoisie faces ruin, especially small store
owners and family businesses. One in four stores around the country have closed
in the last year and in Athens 42 percent have gone out of business. The
all-round social crisis is also reflected in a public healthcare system nearing
collapse, with regular shortages of medicine and basic supplies. Hundreds of
thousands of unemployed people have been left with no health care whatsoever. As
an Athens cancer doctor quoted in the New York Times (24 October) put it:
“In Greece right now, to be unemployed means death.”
In response to the ever worsening conditions of life for workers
and their families, there have been many protest strikes in different sectors so
far this autumn, along with several one and two-day general strikes called by
the GSEE and ADEDY union federations. Large protests during German chancellor
Angela Merkel’s visit to Athens last month made a mockery of the government’s
attempt to ban demonstrations. Despite these displays of working-class anger and
militancy, the imperialists and their domestic lackeys in the Greek bourgeoisie
are determined to use the financial crisis to turn back the clock and destroy
the few remaining gains workers have won from their struggles against unbridled
exploitation.
Nazi Worshippers Feed on Capitalist Reaction
In opposition to a restive working class, the capitalists are
willing to enlist not only the repressive forces of the capitalist state—the
cops and the courts—but also the shock troops of national chauvinist reaction,
such as Golden Dawn. With anger at the governing parties growing every day, the
latest polls show increased support for both the [leftist] Syriza coalition and
the fascist Golden Dawn, who are ominously coming third. The disintegration of
Greek society is fueling a deep political polarization. The atmosphere of
heightened state repression against immigrants, leftists and workers combined
with the lack of a revolutionary leadership to lead the working class out of
this impasse is the context for the growth of fascist reaction.
The rapid rise of the Nazi-loving Golden Dawn is not an
aberration—the capitalists hold the fascists in reserve because they are a
useful weapon against the workers in times of instability. Indeed, the Greek
bourgeoisie has a long history of great savagery against the working class,
resorting to right-wing terror, bonapartist dictatorships and military rule to
smash the workers movement. Golden Dawn is the latest incarnation of this Greek
tradition. In a country where hundreds of thousands perished under Nazi
occupation during World War II, Golden Dawn occasionally denies its Nazi
inspiration and makes a show of handing out food parcels to impoverished Greeks
and “protecting” elderly residents from crimes supposedly committed by
immigrants. But their Hitler salutes and Nazi-inspired insignia and slogans are
unmistakable. Their electoral success in June and growing popularity since have
emboldened these racist terrorists, who regularly carry out bloody rampages
against immigrants and their defenders.
Contrary to the hypocritical pronouncements by the government
against Golden Dawn, these fascist marauders are taking their cue directly from
the Greek capitalist state, which has rounded up over 16,000 immigrants just
since August. The government is completing a fence along the Turkish border to
keep out immigrants, many of them desperate refugees from the hells created by
the imperialists in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya. Golden
Dawn goes one further by proposing to plant land mines along the border. The
capitalists and their Golden Dawn minions try to deflect the blame onto
immigrants for the crisis that the capitalists themselves have brought upon the
masses. In opposition to this, the workers movement must fight for full
citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!
It is no surprise that an estimated 50 to 60 percent of police
sympathize politically with Golden Dawn given that repressing leftists and
terrorizing immigrants are an essential part of police work. A vivid example of
this was the police torture of 40 anti-fascist activists arrested on September
30 and October 1, as publicized by the London Guardian. The first 15 of
these activists were arrested after courageously defending immigrants against
Golden Dawn scum in the streets of Athens, while the other 25 were arrested for
protesting in their comrades’ defense. One of the activists interviewed by the
Guardian explained: “They spat on me and said we would die like our
grandfathers in the civil war.” We, the Trotskyist Group of Greece, demand that
all charges against the anti-fascist activists be dropped immediately! The
Minister of Public Order threatened to sue the Guardian, and two
television reporters, Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi, were summarily
suspended because they had the courage to hint that the minister could not
pursue his threat because the reports of police torture were credible.
Among the defenders of immigrant rights in the sights of Golden
Dawn is lawyer Yianna Kourtovik, whom Golden Dawn attacked with eggs and beat up
on September 25 outside the Agios Panteleimon police station as the police, not
surprisingly, looked on. Well known for her defense of leftists and immigrants,
Kourtovik has been taunted on the street by policemen chanting “Blood! Honor!
Golden Dawn!” It is hardly a secret that the cops and the courts collude with
the fascists—the press reports that residents complaining to the police about
immigrants in their neighborhood are directed to Golden Dawn to take care of
matters.
KKE: Touching Faith in the Capitalist State
The TGG stands against the deadly illusion, spread by the Greek
Communist Party (KKE) and other groups on the left, in the capitalist state and
its police forces. In a September 7 article in Rizospastis, the KKE
reports as positive its participation in a demonstration by the Pan-Hellenic
Federation of Police Employees, quoting the statement of KKE leading cadre
Spiros Halvatzis to the cops:
“We believe that the working people of the security forces should
not allow themselves to be used as the long arm of the bourgeois state to smash
the working-class, trade-union movement. What is needed is unity, rallying,
common action with the rest of the workers.”
This grotesque appeal for unity with the police is the polar
opposite of a Marxist understanding of the state. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin
explained in his key work, The State and Revolution, the capitalist state
is “the ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the
bourgeoisie.” Lenin explained that this state power “consists of special bodies
of armed men having prisons, etc., at their command.” In other words, the
security forces of the state exist for the very purpose of smashing the working
class and the unions when they pose a threat to the capitalist class. Appealing
to the cops to stop being the guard dogs of capital is nothing more nor less
than pleading for the peaceful and democratic reform of the dictatorship of
capital. In doing so, the KKE tops foster the lie that the capitalist state can
be made to serve the interests of the working class.
At the same demonstration, a KKE trade unionist, Ilias Stamelos,
said: “PAME [KKE trade-union formation], with its presence, wishes to express
its solidarity with the just demands of those in uniform, the majority of whom
live on poverty wages.” Far from shedding any tears over the “poverty” of those
whose job it is to attack workers and the oppressed, the TGG calls for:
All cops, prison and security guards out of the unions! As Leon
Trotsky wrote: “The worker who becomes a policeman in the service of the
capitalist state, is a bourgeois cop, not a worker” (What Next? Vital
Questions for the German Proletariat, 27 January 1932). While the KKE
leadership has no problem standing in solidarity with the fascist-infested Greek
police in their demands for better pay, it outrageously smears anarchist
protesters as allies of the fascists: “Let’s not forget that these kinds of
fascist forces acted jointly with para-state, hooded anarcho-autonomes”
(Rizospastis, 16 October).
Deadly Threat to Immigrants, Gays, Workers
Golden Dawn has lately joined forces with reactionaries of the
Greek Orthodox church, a central pillar of the capitalist order in Greece which
fuels all-sided social reaction and national chauvinism, in particular against
Turkey and Muslims, in order to tie the exploited to the Greek bourgeoisie. In
Athens on October 11, Golden Dawn members and a religious rabble wielding icons
and crucifixes terrorized patrons and performers of a play depicting Jesus and
the apostles as gay men. A journalist was brutally assaulted by Golden Dawn
members shouting anti-gay and racist epithets in full view of the police.
Lately, there have been a number of attacks on gay men. It is in the interests
of the working class to defend gay people against this poisonous reaction, as we
wrote in “The Founding of the Trotskyist Group of Greece” (November 2004):
“A Trotskyist group must be a Leninist ‘tribune of the people.’
And for Greece, where the ultra-reactionary Orthodox church has enormous
influence, the oppression of women is extreme. The Greek ‘holy trinity’ of
‘homeland-religion-family’ which the capitalist state promotes is strongly
connected with the national and the woman questions. A central issue for
Trotskyists must be the fight for the liberation of women through socialist
revolution and opposition to women’s oppression. We fight for full democratic
rights for homosexuals, in opposition to the male-chauvinist, homophobic Greek
society and the Greek left. We are for the separation of church and state.”
Our call for the separation of church and state is underscored by
the recent arrest of a man from the island of Evia on charges of blasphemy. Due
to a protest in parliament by a Golden Dawn MP, this man faces charges that can
result in up to two years in prison for the “crime” of satirizing a famous monk
as Elder Pastitsios [a pun on a popular pasta dish] on Facebook!
For Workers United-Front Mobilizations Against the Fascists!
While Golden Dawn currently aim their attacks primarily against
immigrants, gays and leftists, their ultimate purpose is to crush the
organizations of the working class in order to save the capitalists, as
Mussolini’s forces did in Italy in the 1920s and Hitler’s in Germany in the
1930s. Having led the October Revolution alongside Lenin in 1917, Leon Trotsky
sought to bring the lessons of that struggle to the German proletariat in the
early 1930s as they faced the rise of the Nazis. In What Next? Vital
Questions for the German Proletariat, Trotsky explained the social roots of
fascism:
“Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses
of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized
lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings whom finance capital itself
has brought to desperation and frenzy....
“The gist of fascism and its task consist in a complete
suppression of all workers’ organizations and the prevention of their revival.
In a developed capitalist society this goal cannot be achieved by police methods
alone. There is only one method for it, and that is directly opposing the
pressure of the proletariat—the moment it weakens—by the pressure of the
desperate masses of the petty bourgeoisie.”
Trotsky consistently warned that the reformist misleaders of the
Social Democratic Party (SPD) and of the Stalinist Communist Party (KPD)
downplayed the danger represented by the fascist menace and urged the KPD to
initiate mass united-front actions jointly with SPD workers to defend the
workers and the oppressed against the Nazi stormtroopers and to destroy them
while they were still small.
Central to the fight against fascism then and today is an
understanding of the centrality of the working class. As Trotsky pointed out in
1931:
“The main army of fascism still consists of the petty bourgeoisie
and the new middle class.... On the scales of election statistics, a thousand
fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Communist votes. But on the scales of
the revolutionary struggle, a thousand workers in one big factory represent a
force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their
wives, and their mothers-in-law.”
— “Germany, the Key to the International Situation”
The recent brutal abuse of anti-fascist protesters by the Athens
police underscores that the strategy of small groups of leftists mobilizing to
defend immigrants against fascists, while courageous, is not an effective means
of destroying the Golden Dawn menace.
The violent racist attacks on immigrants and others by mobs of
Golden Dawn fascists pose the urgent need to mobilize contingents of workers,
based on the trade unions, to defend immigrants and sweep the fascist vermin off
the streets. What is necessary is to fight to remove the political obstacles to
mobilizing the power of the trade unions against Golden Dawn. The KKE has the
social weight in the trade unions to take the lead in doing this, but its
promotion of illusions in bourgeois democracy and its nationalist populism are
barriers. The reformist organizations that compose groups such as Antarsya also
reinforce the political obstacles, in particular by tailing the pro-EU Syriza
coalition, which promises to provide immigrants more “humane” conditions of
imprisonment and to put more cops on the streets to fight “crime.” While groups
in Antarsya may claim to be against the EU (or for Greece to get out of the EU),
their preference for a “left” capitalist government headed by Syriza and
aspirations to pressure such a government show how hollow their anti-EU posture
is. In an interview with International Viewpoint (June 2012), Dimitris
Hilaris of the OKDE-Spartakos (part of the Antarsya coalition) stated: “Syriza
has been able to provide a credible solution to the situation, through the
slogan of a left government” (“Toward a Government that Will Break with the
Troika?”). Given that the EU is responsible for driving down the conditions of
life in Greece and fueling the growth of the fascists, you can’t lead a struggle
against fascism without trenchant opposition to the capitalist EU.
The leadership of the KKE has lately argued that a front against
fascism is not needed and that Golden Dawn merely needs to be “exposed.” In a
speech to the European Communist Meeting in Brussels on October 1-2, KKE general
secretary Aleka Papariga acknowledged that Golden Dawn is developing along the
lines of the “hit squads of the Hitler period” and that cells of the security
forces of the capitalist state work with them. However:
“It cannot be dealt with on the basis of an anti-fascist front or
a front against violence in general whatever its source, because such a stance
will lead to an attack on the movement itself. Golden Dawn must be dealt with by
the organized movement itself, in the workplaces, the sectors, in the popular
organizations, by exposing its role as a supporter of the system, and dealing
with the criminal offences they commit with their murderous attacks which they
name as taking the law into their own hands.”
What the KKE means by “dealing with the criminal offences they
commit with their murderous attacks” is to rely on the capitalist state to
prosecute them. An example was the demand by PAME leaders on the Minister of
Public Order, Nikos Dendias: “We call on you to take measures for stricter
control for the safety and protection of all citizens, Greek and immigrant”
(Rizospastis, 18 July). In fact, the biggest danger of “an attack on the
movement itself” comes from believing in the democratic pretensions of the
capitalist state, which is exactly what the KKE misleaders do when they beg the
minister to send forces of repression to “defend” immigrants. Mass proletarian
united-front mobilizations against the fascists are the only way to ensure that
the fascists cannot continue to grow and attack the organized workers
movement.
Because it is capitalism that gives birth to the scourge of
fascism, the struggle against forces like Golden Dawn must be linked to the
fight for the overthrow of capitalist rule in Greece and internationally.
Indeed, the working class can only win the ruined petty bourgeoisie to its side
and away from the fascists by fighting for a socialist solution to the
capitalist crisis. It must fight to combat mass unemployment by demanding the
sharing of available work, with no loss of pay, and a massive program of public
works. To stop the decline in living conditions, workers must demand that wages
be indexed to inflation. To unmask the exploitation, robbery and fraud of the
industrialists and bankers, workers should demand that the capitalists open
their (real) books. The proletariat must fight for the expropriation of the
productive property of the capitalist class as a whole and the establishment of
a planned economy under workers rule, where production would be based on social
need, not profit. This struggle must extend from the countries most severely
ravaged by the crisis in Europe so far like Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain
and from the superexploited proletarian masses of neocolonial countries like
South Africa and India, to the imperialist powers like the U.S., Germany and
Japan, where workers are also under the gun.
The capitalist European Union serves to pit workers of different
countries against each other. In opposition to the national chauvinism whipped
up by this capitalist crisis, we understand that the fight for international
socialist revolution and a Socialist United States of Europe is key to leading
the Greek working class out of its desperate situation. As Trotsky noted in
1930, “the slogan of the proletarian unification of Europe is...a very important
weapon in the struggle against the abomination of fascist chauvinism” (The
Turn in the Communist International and the Situation in Germany, 26
September 1930).
The
AFL-CIO is organizing State Federations and Central Labor Councils across the
country in a national day of action. Join the Greater Boston Labor Council and
MoveOn.Org on International Human Rights Day to send Congress a
message:
