Lessons and wrong trends


We return to the social situation in Greece to comment on the so-called 48 hour general strike of the 28th and 29th June 2011 which was called by the three main trade unions, namely, the GSEE, which organizes workers in the private and state sector, the Adedy, which organizes public servants, and the Pame, the union linked to the Greek ‘Communist’ party, the KKE.

The strike was called to prevent Parliament from voting through the new austerity plan, imposed by the European Union as the condition for obtaining a new tranche of the famous maxi loan, which will supposedly prevent the Greek State from going bankrupt but which will not only force the Greek workers, after the major sacrifices it has already made, to accept a further worsening in its living and working conditions, but also entail a further rise in the already high levels of unemployment, mainly amongst young people, and hit pensioners, the majority of whom are already only just surviving on the miserable amounts they are getting now.

During the two-day strike various demonstrations in cities throughout Greece were scheduled to take place, above all in Athens. Processions in the capital were expected to converge on the Piazza Sintagma, just across from Parliament. Here, for over a month, there has been an encampment of a few hundred “aganaktismeni” (“indignants”), who have been calling for “real” or "direct democracy" and are rebelling against the rule of the banks and the impositions of the European Union. Within this setting the parliamentary majority (Pasok) and opposition (Nea Dimocratia) are accused not only of being dishonest, and of using their public powers to line their own pockets, but of being traitors (of wanting to sell the country to foreigners); this “anti-Europeanist” stance is shared not only by “the indignants” (who refuse to be identified with the political parties and demand an impossible autonomy) but also by a section of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary right, along with the KKE, SYRIZA and the other small parties that orbit around it as well.

Despite the widespread discontent in the country about the Government’s new restrictive measures, and despite the proclamation of strike which should have allowed workers to take part in the demonstrations, the mobilisation, considering that the numbers taking part in the demonstrations were less than previously, must be counted a total failure.

This failure would have been more visible if the special police corps, the hated MAT hadn’t organised during those two days an out and out and indiscriminate war against the demonstrators. They fired so many tear gas canisters into the crowd that the air across the whole of the Piazza Sintagma was unbreathable, and deployed squads of motorcycle cops to rough up the few thousand demonstrators who had dared to take to the streets, and who for their part were completely disorganised.

Using the excuse of wanting to clear the few thousand demonstrators out of the Piazza Sintagma, the police used highly excessive force, deploying at least 5,000 officers and Inundating the city centre with toxic gases. The only opposition they met with was from some small, well organised groups of anarchist, who equipped with masks and sunglasses, and batons as well, tried to hold their positions as well as from some other demonstrators who were trying to reacted against the police brutality. On Wednesday alone 2,200 tear gas canisters were discharged and on the following day they were forced to obtain further supplies from Salonika. Over the ensuing days, with money suddenly no object, the arms manufacturers received an 800,000 euro order for more canisters, showing that the police are expecting further, and more serious, demonstrations to come. Agents provocateurs were also clearly in evidence, i.e., police officers dressed as rioters busily going around smashing things up. Among them were some fascists who pretended rioters. Some film clips, a few actually televised, would catch these “awful” protestors sidling over and quietly chatting to the police before then heading off to chuck stones and break windows.

What was clearly evident was that the two main trade unions, along with the KKE and its union (Pame), were working to ensure the demonstrations failed; on the second day of the strike the Pame withdrew from the rally at Syntagma square and melted way as soon as the police fired the first volley of tear gas, whilst the other unions didn’t even take part. What is more, all the means of public transport apart from the tube were closed down during the two-day strike, and this meant many workers, who mainly live in the outskirts of the city, were prevented from reaching the city centre.

If, as the KKE maintains, there was collaboration between the police and groups of “extremists”, there was also, and much more seriously, collaboration between the higher echelons of government, the repressive apparatus of the State, and the unions and the parties of the so-called opposition, to ensure that the social protests didn’t surpass certain limits. This has become clear from how the Pame and the KKE behaved over the course of the two day mobilisation.

These two days are the umpteenth proof of what democracy is really like under a State that still declares itself to be democratic and which is led by a centre-left government: no toleration of any organised opposition against key decisions of the State, a State which, never so much as now, represents, in a society divided into classes – as Karl Marx wrote – nothing so much as the repressive machinery of the ruling classes. The State has in fact enormously increased its repressive apparatus over recent years. It has extended its control over the parties and trade unions and attentively monitors the press and the other main means of distributing information. And it tolerates dissent only to the extent that it serves to disguise its actual, totalitarian nature.

The Greek State in particular, from the early 1900s onwards, has shown that it will always take the side of the bourgeoisie and the landed proprietors against the working class and its organisations; even the brief “democratic” parenthesis following the dictatorship of the colonels has been merely a collective illusion provoked more by the opening up towards Europe and the sudden increase in family income than by any real change in the relations of power within the State.

The call for “direct" democracy, advanced by the ‘indignants’, is thus a mere illusion and serves only to demonstrate the primitive and reactionary nature of their ideology. In the bourgeois State, particularly during a period of global economic crisis like the one we’re going through at the moment, any “real” democracy is impossible since only the dictatorship of the iron laws of Capital can exist. The elections, the parliamentary game of majority versus the opposition, the so-called “freedom” of the press and of association, all of these are just a farce to delude the proletarian about its real situation: living in a state of subjection to the possessing classes.

The 28th and 29th June will certainly not be remembered in Greece as historic dates: there will be more “plans”, more “measures” and further parliamentary elections. The austerity measures, approved by the small majority at premier George Papandreou’s disposal, are part of the 78 billion euro plan (of which 50 billion euro is to be derived from privatisations and 28 billion from cuts and tax measures) which needed to be approved to allow 12 billion euros to be transferred from the European central bank to the creditor banks of the Hellenic national debt; but we’re talking about only the fifth tranche of a new loan to a country that is on its knees. As the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera, of June 30, put it: “The fact of the matter is the Greeks are trying hard but the Europeans persist in putting forward a solution which hasn’t worked up to now: lending more money to those who are in debt and have less and less income with which to repay it”.

There will therefore be other occasions on which the intentions of the trade unions will be to put to the test, but one thing is for sure, the days of the 28th and 29th June, which were billed as the occasion for a test of strength, have instead revealed the weakness of the trade union movement, and indeed the weakness of the so-called “extreme” left.

These recent days have served as further evidence that even if the proletariat is strong numerically, even if it displays considerable strength and determination, it is nevertheless nothing unless united in organisations which are completely independent from those of the bourgeoisie, in class organisations with a clear programme which is rigorously adhered to.

The proletarian revolution will be impossible without genuine trade union organisations to muster the strength of the proletarian majority and without proletarian political organisation; without a party which stands by the historical programme of left revolutionary communism. The revolution, therefore, is not imminent, and the proletarian vanguard in Greece is still faced with the difficult and long task of trade union and political reorganisation. The fact is it will be necessary, both inside and outside the trade union organisations, to engage with the task of forming groups of workers for the creation of a single trade union front based on class positions; a front prepared to put up an intransigent defence of the general interests of the working class and fight against not only the bosses, the State and the opportunist leaders of the present trade unions, but also the particularist views, and corporative and partial interests, that exist amongst workers.

It will also be necessary for a significant proletarian minority to reconnect with the positions of revolutionary left communism; that current which, during the tempestuous revolutionary decade of the 1920s, during the early years of the Third Communist International and of the Communist Party of Italy, reached its historical apogee, and whose work is continued today by the International Communist Party today.

International Communist Party
 http://www.international-communist-party.org/CommLeft/CL31.htm#Greece2