The political crisis in Greece

Submitted by Matthew on 22 August, 2012 - 12:02

Two or three square kilometres in northern Athens look like no other place in Europe.

The sidewalks are filthy and the paving stones are mostly broken. The roads are in disrepair. Most walls are wholly covered with graffiti or posters.

Around 10 or 11am, people can be seen climbing down the scaffolding outside derelict or half-finished buildings where they have spent the night. People — and not just the obviously destitute, but tie-wearing OAPs and mothers — rummage through bins for food scraps.

The amount of human misery concentrated here is staggering. Next to the National Archaeological Museum, near the Polytechnic, there are fifty addicts injecting. A hundred metres north of Omonia Square, round the corner from the police station, there are 30 prostitutes. The police themselves are elsewhere, enthusiastically busy carrying out the government’s policy of mass detentions and expulsions of immigrants. Hundreds of cops have flooded the streets, with their riot gear and dogs, persecuting the local Pakistanis, Chinese and Bangladeshis. Half the city’s police voted for the fascist Golden Dawn party at the last election, on 17 June.

The New York Times reports that 4,500 police were used in these raids during the first week of August. Others have been sent to the Turkish border, where people smugglers regularly pass through. Nikos Dendias, the Minister of Public Order, stated that 6,000 people had been detained, of whom 1600 had not got the correct documents. The government had chartered planes to remove the “illegals”. At least one flight took 88 people to Pakistan. Dendias claimed an “unprecedented invasion” of immigrants was threatening Greece’s stability. He stated that the failure to end the influx of immigrants would lead Greece to collapse.

The right-wing politicians who have made immigration a focus are also those that have legislated enormous cuts to public spending. It is a cynical combination which plays into the hands of Golden Dawn.

In the area around Victoria metro station, a little north of Omonia, Golden Dawn is active, attacking immigrants. Although their stunts — handing out food, but only to those who can show Greek identity papers — are relatively infrequent, they have significant symbolic importance. They strike a chord with a section of impoverished Greeks.

During the first election campaign, in May this year, Golden Dawn’s appeal was: “So we can rid this land of filth”. The party won 7% of the vote at the June election and has 18 MPs. One of those MPs is Artemis Matthaiopoulos who fronts a Nazi punk band called Pogrom. Pogrom’s songs include ‘Auschwitz’ with the lyrics, “fuck Anne Frank” and “Juden raus”.

Members of the Greek Trotskyist group Kokkino, a split from the SEK (aligned with the British SWP), spoke to Solidarity about the fascist threat.

“The immigration that happened in London over one century happened here in one decade. In 1990, for example, there were no immigrants here at all. The Greeks used to say: here in Greece, there is something in our DNA that means we are not racist. But in 1990, Antonis Samaras — the current prime minister, who was then Minister of Foreign Affairs — wanted to open relations with Albania, and with the Greeks of Albania. He opened the border with Albania. In two or three years one million Albanians came to Greece. That was a shock for the Greeks — it happened suddenly and they came in huge numbers. After that there was a big wave of immigrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and Bangladesh.

“And this was a big shock for the Greek left too. We had a policy from the years when there were no problems. It was easy in the time when even the reformists were calling for the abolition of all borders. Now it is hard.

“The people in these neighbourhoods have said they are afraid of immigrants who have no jobs and no food. In the past we have answered that the people should not be afraid and that workers should unite. But is no adequate answer to people who are afraid.

“The left has treated the anti-fascist struggle as being identical to the anti-racist struggle. You can find working class people, with left family backgrounds — whose grandfather, for example, fought in the Greek civil war — who are completely against Golden Dawn, who will come with us to smash fascist heads. But they are not very clear on the issues of racism. It is not true that to be an anti-fascist you have to be anti-racist.”

The dire, orchestrated economic collapse is now in its fifth year and the Greek economy is contracting by 6-7% per year. In August the official jobless rate climbed to 23%, with nearly 55% of those aged 15-24 out of work. In fact the position is worse than that, because many people now go to work and are not being paid, or not being paid regularly. A recent poll suggests that 91% of Greek workers feel their job is not secure.

Additionally the minimum wage has been cut by 32% for workers under 25, and 22% for all other workers. GSEE trade union leader Yannis Panagopoulos says government policy has had a “huge impact on wages and employment levels, but has barely affected prices of goods and services,”

Some of the poverty and homelessness is hidden by close family networks that have soaked up a little of the deprivation. People sleep on relatives’ floor space; one wage now feeds six or eight mouths.

The sense of hopelessness, unfairness and lack of control felt by a part of the population has led to a sharp spike in suicides. Since 2010, more than 2,500 people have killed themselves in Greece - occasionally publicly, as an overt political protest.

At the beginning of August the coalition government agreed €11.5bn in new spending cuts in order to qualify for the next €31.5bn instalment of the €130bn loan from the ‘troika’ of international creditors, the EU, IMF and European Central Bank.

Samaras, the New Democracy (Tory) prime minister, is now asking EU leaders for more time to make cuts. Samaras came to power following the 17 June general election heading a three party coalition. The smaller two parties in the coalition are PASOK and New Democracy, both nominally on the left. The government is supported by 179 MPs in the 300-seat parliament.

The coalition is weak and has been shaken by open squabbling. PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis of the Democratic Left have objected to proposals to cap pension payments at €2,200-€2,400 a month, and slash healthcare spending to €1,500 for each person registered with the state system.

Senior members of the coalition have already voted against attacks on education. Former prime minister George Papandreou and five other PASOK MPs voted against it — against a relatively minor reform, given the scale of the austerity the government is seeking.

The bulk of the new cuts will come from state salaries and pensions, and up to 40,000 public sector sackings.

PASOK, one of the two big mainstream post-military dictatorship (1967-74) parties, was put into government with 44% of the vote in 2009. However it cut jobs, wages, pensions, health care, put up taxes on workers and privatised state property.

PASOK's attacks on the working class were met by wave upon wave of mass, street opposition, twenty general strikes, and innumerable grass-roots committees, initiatives and self-help organisations. PASOK suffered an electoral meltdown this year.

Panagiotis Sotiris, from ARAN (Left Recomposition), one of the groups in the revolutionary left, 3,000-strong, Antarsya coalition explains: “For 30 years PASOK actually represented the majority of the working class in a very strong way. They seemed impregnable. This is an earthquake to see PASOK at 12%.”

Antarsya is a gathering of revolutionary groups. The three largest are ARAN, influenced by Maoism, the SEK, and NAR which was formed from a large left split from the Communist Party (KKE) when it entered the government in the late 80s.

Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left), led by Alexis Tsipras, rose spectacularly (to 27% and 71 seats in June) taking not just PASOK votes, but those of the very strong Greek Communists (KKE), too. As Syriza's vote went up rapidly, Antarsya's fell (from 1.3% at the May election, to 0.3% in June).

Panagiotis explained why people voted Syriza: “Over the past two years we have had an enormous sequence of mass strikes, street protests, occupations — perhaps the biggest period of sustained struggles in recent European history. Syriza realised that many people didn’t want another opposition, they wanted their own government. People were saying they had tried everything else, now they wanted their own political power.”

Syriza is an open, rapidly growing left party. At the core is Synaspismos, a reformist left-Euro Communist organisation.

Vangelis, from Kokkino explains why his group is in Syriza. “There are a lot of platforms inside the organisation. From Trotskyists on the left, over to people who believe capitalism can be peacefully reformed and transformed. Synaspismos has 16,000 members, although I have never seen more than 5000 — a lot of their members are not active.

“Syriza had about 25-30,000 members. But membership has exploded. There are many, many thousands of applications to join.

”Syriza is now in the process of changing — becoming one party from a coalition of groups. Now local branches are being formed. Normally a Syriza branch has between 50 and 120 members, in a small area. These are now all over Greece. In Athens there are about 100 branches of Syriza.”

Kokkino also say that their rationale for working in Syriza is also that the Communist KKE is so sectarian and closed it is impossible to enter or easily work with their members.

Despite losing votes to Syriza (they were down to 4% in June, which came as a serious shock to their party) they still have a formidable grip in the Greek working class. Vangelis says, “If they chose to they could put 30,000 workers in Omonia Square tomorrow afternoon.”

Panagiotis is a thoughtful, interesting comrade who is right when he says that, “the political and strategic choices made by the left, here, now, will affect the course of European history.”

He adds, “We have an organic political crisis. And we have a particular quality — almost insurrectionary — set of expectations here. People are willing to consider ideas they would have found unthinkable even a few years ago — this is as far as things have got, in Europe, for many years.

But he is unconvincing when he makes the case to stay outside Syriza. His focus is on developing a left programme and maintaining a rigid focus on opposition to the EU. But one place to fight for a left programme is inside Syriza.

In fact Syriza's refusal to go along with standard anti-Europe 'leftism' is one of it more encouraging features. It is not the left's job to attempt to destroy capitalist progress — and the integration of Europe and European capitalism is, in general historical terms, progressive. Moreover 80% of Greeks oppose this sort of anti-Euro policy, rightly assuming it will impact badly on them.

It is now very important that the Greek left intervenes in Syriza. The outcome of the political struggles inside Syriza could be the difference between victory and defeat in the big battles that are coming.

Is workers’ revolution on the agenda? Perhaps. The conditions are being prepared. But there is still some way to go. The classes polarising and parties are assembling: on the right around New Democracy, on the left Syriza.

The questions now are: can the Greek far left help to prepare the ground for the emergence of workers’ committees which can act as the basis for a workers’ government and their future power; can the workers defend their movement from fascist and state violence by developing their own militias?

These are the questions in the background of every struggle in Greece, now.

• For a longer version of the interview with Panagiotis Sotiris, see here

• For a longer version of the interview with the comrades from Kokkinho, see here

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