Daily Times

The European Union (EU) is passing through its most severe crisis since its setting up through the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. In those tumultuous times, when the Soviet Union was collapsing, China had embarked on the road of capitalist degeneration and the Berlin Wall was falling; the bourgeoisie on a world scale was euphoric. The European bourgeoisie in its intoxicated binge thought that they could reinvigorate capitalism and create a monetary and economic union with the political nation states remaining intact.

Now the chickens have come home to roost. The utopia is falling apart. With the biggest financial catastrophe in the history of capitalism in 2008, all the underlying contradictions and obsolete and redundant reality of capitalism have come to the fore. If 2009 was the year of bank defaults, the year 2010 witnessed the beginnings of sovereign defaults in advanced capitalist countries.

Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain were the first countries in line. But no capitalist country has any bright economic prospects and none are immune from the crisis that is affecting the system as a whole. The only answer this system has is to carry out draconian austerity cuts and intensify attacks on the proletariat of the advanced capitalist countries.

Such is the viciousness of these austerity measures that when the Republican budget of austerity cuts was presented, even Barack Obama exclaimed that the passage of this budget would turn the US into a third world country. Later, he went on to sign the very same budget.

What we have to recall is that during this recession and the jobless ‘recovery’ that has followed it, corporate capital made astronomical profits. The Economist admitted, “The benefits of recovery seem to have been distributed almost entirely to the owners of capital rather than workers. Are these trends a belated vindication of Karl Marx? The bearded wonder wrote in Das Kapital that: ‘It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse’.” Fiscal and monetary stimuli and bailouts are only for the rich and the bankers.

The previous bailout by the IMF and the EU was deemed insufficient to get the recession-plagued Greek economy back on its feet. Now the PASOK government is locked in tough negotiations with its European peers. Late on Wednesday, the vulnerable Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou announced a government reshuffle and a vote of confidence to help galvanise support for another round of austerity cuts worth over 28 billion Euros ($ 40 billion), demanded by Greece’s creditors for a new bailout.

This was like dousing a fire with gasoline. The already enraged workers and youth subjected to the brutal cuts, in ferment for more than three weeks of protests, rose up in a volcanic eruption. A 24-hour general strike was called for June 15. The general strike was one of the most successful in Greek history. It brought the whole country to a standstill. The participation of workers from the refineries, shipyards, transport and some other sectors was 100 percent. In steel, construction, public electricity (DEI) and telecommunications (OTE) it was more than 90 percent. Similarly, about 80 percent of the banking, postal and water supply workers took part in this massive general strike. There were also massive demonstrations in about 70 cities and towns across Greece. In Athens, about 250,000 workers gathered in Syntagma Square and besieged the parliament. Another 35,000 came out in Thessaloniki and 10,000 in Patras.

The state reacted with its characteristic brutality. A blanket of tear gas covered Athens and demonstrators were beaten up with iron rods. The police agents’ provocateurs in civilian clothes tried to instigate violence. The other reactionary forces did their part to diffuse and restrict the protests that were peaceful. The television channels did their utmost to confuse and call an early funeral of the movement.

The numbers could have crossed the million mark had these gruesome tactics not been used. But the most striking aspect of this movement is the political insight and advanced level of consciousness that was exhibited by the Greek workers and youth in this struggle.

The Guardian wrote on June 16: “Syntagma’s articulate debates have discredited the banal mantra that most issues of public policy are too technical for ordinary people. The realisation that the demos have more collective nous than any leader is now returning to Athens. The outraged have shown that parliamentary democracy must be supplemented with a more direct version — just as the belief in political representation is coming under pressure throughout Europe.”

The European leaders are in a panic. They are terrified of the events in Greece. They are jostling to find a way out. The shuffling of the regime in Athens is like playing musical chairs on the deck of the Titanic. The offer of Papandreou to form a national unity government with a technocratic prime minister has received a cool response from Antonis Samaras, the leader of the right-wing New Democracy Party. They are afraid of implementing the austerity package being imposed by the “troika”.

But under capitalism there is no other ‘solution’. Angela Merkel and Sarkozy scurried to announce a ‘package’. But this package has not yet been agreed upon by the French and the German governments who were at loggerheads just months ago over the Greek bailout. But the Euro is tumbling and the future of the EU as an entity is being questioned.

It seems that an epoch of relentless struggles has dawned in Europe. The movement of the French proletariat last autumn and later the militant movement of the British students played an important part in inspiring the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings that took the form of the Arab revolution within weeks. The Arab revolution had repercussions worldwide. It was the Greek movement that inspired the recent Spanish upsurge and sit-ins. This marvellous general strike in Greece will have far reaching impacts, especially in Europe. The betrayal of social democracy has been exposed. Reformism is dead and, without the overthrow of this system, there is no way out for the masses. There is still no mass Bolshevik Leninist party in Greece but the relatively small forces of the Marxisti Foni can play an important role in galvanising support to lead a socialist revolution in a situation where the workers in Greece and Europe are rejecting the new social norm being imposed upon them by the rotting capitalist system.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com