<h3 class="post-title entry-title">
AD ATENE È NATA LA DEMOCRAZIA, AD ATENE LA RIVOLUZIONE LA SEPPELLIRÀ
</h3>
<div class="post-header">
</div>
<b>Maddalena Robin- </b>Il popolo greco è di nuovo sceso in piazza. Da
ieri mattina è iniziato l’ennesimo sciopero paralizzante in un Paese
ridotto allo stremo dalle riforme d’austerity decise dal Fondo
Monetario. <br>
Alle 8 di mattina a Syntagma, la piazza del parlamento greco ad Atene,
hanno cominciato a riunirsi i manifestanti, l’afflusso è cresciuto in
maniera esponenziale per tutta la giornata e sono diventati migliaia
,tutti riuniti di fronte al Parlamento per cercare di impedire
l’ingresso dei deputati e la discussione delle misure capestro richieste
dal governo.<br>
<br>
Alle dieci di sera, la protesta coinvolgeva circa 30.000 persone, uomini
e donne di tutte le età disposti a tutto per salvare il loro futuro. La
piazza non ha vissuto in tutta la giornata un secondo di tregua, ma
nonostante i numerosi scontri pesanti che si sono succeduti e nonostante
un lancio di lacrimogeni a tappeto che sarà difficile da dimenticare
sono rimasti lì, perché la lotta per la vita è l’unica che non conosce
paura.<br>
<br>
Il popolo greco, sebbene piegato e stremato, dimostra di avere delle energie che noi ci sogniamo e non intende piegarsi più. <br>
Sono più di due anni che il movimento greco si struttura e si estende:
dal 6 dicembre 2008, giorno dell’assassinio del quindicenne <b>Alexis Grigoropoulos</b>, il livello di consapevolezza, di organizzazione e di scontro s’è alzato vertiginosamente. <br>
Dalle proteste radicali di studenti e migranti, che per un mese hanno
bruciato Atene e Salonicco, le lotte operaie e dei portuali, così come
di molte altre categorie hanno insegnato alla popolazione greca cosa
significa riappropriarsi (almeno) della propria dignità.<br>
<br>
<b>Rabbia e determinazione non si sono fermate</b> neppure davanti alla
repressione più dura. Anche ieri (come succede sempre ad Atene) gli
apparati della repressione hanno reagito con violenza inaudita: normali
reparti celere affiancati ai M.A.T., ma soprattutto al gruppo
DIAS/DELTA, gli scagnozzi in motocicletta, hanno bastonato e caricato in
continuazione e la risposta è stata notevole ed efficace (“ne hanno
prese tante” leggo nei comunicati dei compagni greci).<br>
<br>
La piazza è stata territorio di guerra per molte ore, tanto che anche
dentro la fermata della metropolitana sono stati lanciati moltissimi
lacrimogeni e ancora non si riesce ad avere idea del numero di feriti.
Ma la voce della rivolta non si è mai abbassata e potente urlava :
“PANE, EDUCAZIONE, LIBERTA’: LA GIUNTA NON E’ FINITA NEL 1973″, e ancora
<b>“MPATSI, GOURUNIA, DOLOFONI"</b> (GUARDIE MAIALI ASSASSINI),lo slogan che dal giorno della morte di Alexis non ha mai smesso di echeggiare per le strade greche.<br>
<br>
Le notizie sono ancora poche e frammentarie, ma una cosa appare ormai
chiara e fuor di dubbio: il popolo greco ha voglia di cambiare, ha
voglia di prendere in mano il proprio futuro, ha voglia di parlare di <b>RIVOLUZIONE</b>.<br>
<br>
Il popolo greco ci sta indicando inequivocabilmente la via: una
mobilitazione popolare straordinaria, che unifichi il mondo del lavoro e
della scuola, i giovani i lavoratori ed i pensionati, indigeni e
migranti che unifichi insomma l’intera umanità oppressa dai killer della
finanza globale e dell’imperialismo in generale, in una lotta di massa
continuativa e radicale: che assedi i palazzi del potere sino alla
caduta del governo. <b>Una lotta che dovrà nascere in ogni nazione per diventare internazionale </b>, tesa ad una prospettiva di classe e di alternativa vera: <b>che rovesci la dittatura del profitto e costruisca un altro ordine sociale.<br>
<br><font size="4"><a href="http://pcl-fc.blogspot.com/2011/06/ad-atene-e-nata-la-democrazia-ad-atene.html">http://pcl-fc.blogspot.com/2011/06/ad-atene-e-nata-la-democrazia-ad-atene.html</a></font><br><br></b>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><strong><span style="font-size: 18pt;" lang="EN-GB"><br></span></strong></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;"><strong><span style="font-size: 18pt;" lang="EN-GB">From Syntagma to Puerta del
Sol and back to Syntagma</span></strong><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: 16pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> By
Savas Michael-Matsas *</span></b></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><br>
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<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: 16pt; color: black;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB">As the
preparations for the celebrations of Christmas were well under way, in December
2008, in
Syntagma (Constitution) Square, at the center of Athens, in front of the
National Parliament, the huge Christmas Tree erected by the right wing Mayor of
Athens Nikitas Kaklamanis- who boasted that this monument of kitsch was the
tallest Christmas Tree in Europe- was “<i>burning bright in the forest of the
night</i>”, put in fire by the young rebels during the mass upsurge of that
unforgettable month. It was one of the most spectacular and emblematic actions
of the Greek December Revolt.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> In
May 2011, another unexpected event erupts in the same place: from May 25
onwards, every day, tens of thousands and, latter on, over a hundred thousands
of people, assemble in Syntagma( as well as in most central squares of
the cities all over the country) against the new wave of measures of
social cannibalism that the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF, the
infamous “troika”, want to impose through the PASOK government on the Greek
people; the May 2010 bail out of Greece totally has failed to prevent a
default, despite the extremely savage cuts imposed on wages, pensions, jobs and
living conditions of the vast majority, and the specter of a catastrophe is
hovering not solely over Greece but also all over Europe and beyond…</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
Greek “movement of the squares” or Movement for “ Direct Democracy Now” was
inspired by the Spanish <i>indignados</i>, the M15 (May 15) Movement
demanding “real democracy now” against the existing political system and its
anti-popular measures, and occupying the Puerta del Sol, the central square in
Madrid, as well as the squares in Barcelona and other major cities in Spain. The
Spanish (and Greek) mobilizations followed the example and the organizational
methods of Tahrir Square
in Cairo, the
center of the Egyptian Revolution that has overthrown the dictatorship of
|Mubarak. The worst fears of the ruling classes in Europe, and the predictions
of revolutionary Marxists, including of the EEK, start to materialize: the
revolution is moving from the Southern coast of the Mediterranean
to its Northern coast. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"><br>
</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> From
bankruptcy...</span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB">
</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> When
the tallest “Christmas Tree in Europe” was burning in Syntagma Square during
the December 2008 Revolt, the writing in the wall of the Athens
university appeared with the season greetings of the revolutionary youth to the
ruling classes of the world: <b><i>Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear!</i></b> </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB">The
December Revolt in Greece, in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse and
the meltdown of the global financial system, was rightly characterized by the
head of the IMF at that time (and now ingloriously fallen)Dominique
Strauss-Kahn as “<i>the first political explosion of the current world economic
crisis</i>”. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
international finance capital, and particularly the capitalist leadership of
the core countries of the European Union, knew very well that Greece’s economy
was the “weakest link” in the chain of the Euro-zone, and its darkened future
threatened, in conditions of the global crisis, the future of the entire
European capitalism, first of all of the over-exposed German and French banks
in the hard core of the EU. The evidence that EU authorities knew already the
real situation many months, if not years, before the newly elected “socialist”
Papandreou government announced late in 2009 the “creative accounting” of the
previous right wing Karamanlis government and the danger of a default of the
country’s economy. When the December Revolt was ending, in February 2009, the
German Finance Minister, at that time, and SPD member Steinbrück had communicated
all the evidence of the dire condition of the Greek economy to his “comrade”
George Papandreou, then leader of the Official Opposition party, PASOK. As this
secret discussion took place as the last battles of the December Revolt were
ending, it is obvious that the German and EU leaders, as the total inability of
the Karamanlis government to control an emergency situation has been proved in
action, were worrying about the dangers from a new explosion, produced by an
imminent Greek financial disaster; so, they had to prepare an alternative
government, more acceptable to the people to manage the coming crisis, and the
best available candidate was Papandreou’s PASOK.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> In
July 2009, EU’s Almunia and EU Commissioner Olli Ren, in September 2009, on the
eve of the October parliamentary elections in Greece, they had discussions with
Papandreou warning about the huge deficit and debt problems of the country. Papandreou
knew well the real situation when he pretended, during the electoral campaign
that brought him to power that “there is a lot of money” to finance Keynesian
type of measures in favor of the popular strata. He continued this secret
diplomacy with his masters in the EU and the IMF to implement their orders,
while lying to the people, before and after the eruption of the debt crisis, up
to now. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> In
May 2010, it was introduced the 110 billions Euros bail-out of Greece by the
European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF, sealed by the
infamous “Memorandum” with the Papandreou government with draconian measures
against the wages, pensions, jobs, social services labor conditions. The
Memorandum spread misery to the people but failed itself miserably to its
pretended goal, the rescue of |Greece from State bankruptcy. Anyway, the architects
of this monstrosity knew very well that the Greek debt is unsustainable, and
the deep recession produced in this economy tied with the euro by the forced
“internal devaluation” would make far worse an already desperate situation.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
May 2010 bail-out had as aim not to avoid the Greek default as such but to save
the European banking system, in the first place, the French and German banks
overexposed to Greek debt, and to create a “fire zone” protecting from
contagion the European periphery and the entire Euro-zone. When in November
2010, Ireland
had to ask urgently for a bail-out, it was already obvious (and our analysis,
at that time, in the EEK spelled it out loud and clear) that the preventing
operation with the Greek bail-out had failed, and the Euro-zone debt crisis
re-emerged more vigorous than ever. Portugal’s
bail-out followed, and Greece
insolvency came again to the center.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> “<i>In
May 2010<span style="font-style: normal;">”</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> Aline van Duyn writes in the Financial Times “</span>the
euro-zone debt crisis exploded and markets plunged. A default by Greece, Portugal,
Ireland and even Spain on their government bonds was feared</i>
[…]<i> indeed the impact on the post-2008 recovery was so severe and global
that the Federal Reserve decided to spend an extra $600 billion to prop up the US economy. Is
this happening again in May 2011?</i>”(FT 25 May 2011, p.16) </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> What
is happening is the failure of the unprecedented interventions by governments
and central banks, after the Lehman Brothers collapse and the global financial
meltdown, injecting trillion of dollars, a flood of liquidity with “stimulus
packages”, “rescue packages”, “quantitative easing” etc to stop and
reverse the fall of the system to the abyss. All the attempts were not only
futile but they turned into boomerangs. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
holding operation by transforming private debt to public debt produced gigantic
deficits and an unprecedented sovereign debt crisis both in Europe and America. Greece is the
microcosm of what happens to global capitalism. The flood of liquidity failed
to produce any sustainable recovery of the US and world economy. On the
contrary, the latest evidence shows that unemployment continues to grow in the US and Europe, a slowdown of the American
economy is under way while China
intensifies fiscal tightening to fight inflation and a hard landing of its
growth. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
massive State intervention were ineffective to re-invigorate a capitalist
economy in an over-accumulation crisis; it has mainly produced more speculative
bubbles both in the North and especially in the global South, where
inflationary pressures exacerbated the social contradictions leading to the
explosion of social revolution in North Africa and the Middle East- a new phase
of the world revolution, which already changes dramatically the geopolitics of
the most strategic region in the planet, and it reaches now the northern,
European shores of the Mediterranean . </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB">\
Greece became again the starting
point of a new phase of the European and global crisis, raising the specter of
a new Lehman Brothers world-wide financial catastrophe. A year after the first
Greek bail-out, all the fiscal targets of the Memorandum had failed to be met,
the debt to GDP ratio jumped from 110 percent into near 160 percent, the
economy, plunged in a deep recession, dying from asphyxia, and the Greek
government had to ask for a new bail-out to avoid an imminent forced default. A
sum of 60-70 billion (according to Fitch about 100 billion) euros is needed
until the end of 2013, half of it to be collected by a vast privatization
program of the state assets and half from the EU and the IMF.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
renewed and aggravated Greek and Euro-zone debt crisis revealed both the global
dimensions of the problem as well as the deep divisions existing between the EU
and the IMF, between the European Central Bank and the European political
leaders, particularly of Germany,
among the EU ruling classes and within the Greek bourgeoisie itself. One
section of the capitalist class in the EU, in the Anglo-Saxon countries among
those who betted on Greece’s default, and in Greece is demanding a
restructuring, an orderly default combined with a break from the Euro and a
return to the drachma, apparently with the aim to break the vicious circle of
debt and deficit by raising Greek competitiveness and exports- a rather dubious
aim in today’s bleak conditions of falling demand in the world market. Another
section headed by the ECB opposes any idea of restructuring fearing that any
form of default will spill over into a contagion in the other bail-outed
countries, Portugal and Ireland, but above all in Spain, the fourth biggest
economy in the EU and even Italy, the third biggest economy, recently
downgraded from AAA into “negative outlook” by Standards & Poors, giving a
tremendous blow to the fragile European banking system and to the core
countries, Germany and France.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> Lorenzo
Bini Smaghi, ECB board member and its future President warned: “<i>a debt
restructuring or exiting the euro would be like the death penalty</i> […]<i>
the destabilizing effect could be dramatic. Economists who imagine the impact
would be containable are like those who in mid-September 2008 were saying the
markets had been fully prepared for the failure of Lehman Brothers.</i>” (FT 30
May, 2011, p.3)</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> It
is undoubtedly the EU that faces most dramatic consequences of the renewed debt
crisis. “<i>Events in Greece have brought the euro area to a crossroads</i>”
Jens Weidmann, Bundesbank president and European Central Bank governing council
member, said in Hamburg on May 20 ( Financial Times, May 25, 2011 p. 9) “<i>the
future character of European monetary union will be determined by the way
in which this situation is handled</i>”. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
choices are “intolerable” as Martin Wolf wrote: “<i>The euro-zone confronts a
choice between two intolerable options: either default and partial dissolution
or open ended official support </i>[of Greece and other defaulting
Euro-zone members]” (FT June 1, 2011 p.9).</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> Wolfgang
Münchau put it bluntly: “<i>Either the EU/IMF continues to bankroll Greece for as long as it takes, or Greece will be
forced into a hard default.</i> […]<i> The price for continued support from the
EU and the IMF is quasi loss of economic sovereignty on the part of Greece </i>[…]<i>
The real choice boils down to a reduction of the eurozone to its Germanic core
or a political union</i>” (FT May 30, 2011 p.9) The first option is suicidal,
not solely for the entire EU project, but also for Germany itself, which will
lose its export advantage; the second has been proven, during all the post-2008
crisis, as a reactionary Utopia. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> A
Vienna-style agreement (as it was earlier the agreement reached in the Austrian
capital for the Eastern European debt crisis) to rollover the Greek debt,
replacing maturing securities without reneging on commitments to investors, is
apparently the compromise to be taken for the time being to avoid a Greek
default next July.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> But
the new “rescue package” is accompanied with “<i>an unprecedented outside
intervention in the Greek economy, including international involvement in tax
collection and privatization of state assets</i>” (FT 30 May, 2011 p.1). Any
kind of sovereignty becomes a mockery and Greece is downgraded openly into
the position of a protectorate under the direct rule of the EU and the IMF, in
conditions far worst than what happened under the hated troika so far. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> But
this easier to say than to materialize<b>: the most important factor is the
intervention of the masses in the arena determining their fate</b>.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"><br>
</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> <b>…
to the upsurge of the masses</b></span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"><br>
</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> </span></b><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB">The
December 2008 Revolt was just the prelude. Before and during a year of
implementation of the IMF/ECB/European Commission Memorandum with the PASOK
government in 2010-2011 the combativity of the working class was demonstrated –
but also restrained – by a dozen of 24 hours protest General Strikes
organized by the trade union bureaucracies of the PASOK-led GSEE and ADEDY. Frustration
was increasing among the people as illusions faded that a simple demonstration
of strength could be victorious as in previous times, for example with the one
day General Strike of 2001 that defeated the previous attempted attack on
pension rights. The separate, sectarian, bureaucratically controlled but
fruitless mobilizations by PAME, the trade union faction of the Stalinist KKE
(the Communist Party of Greece) added to the popular frustration, and the
Stalinist public rallies started to be depleted, as it became very apparent in
March 2011. Blind violence by isolated elements, as in the tragic events of the
May 5, 2010 General Striker when three employees were suffocated in the Marfin
Bank after a cocktail Molotov was thrown or in the attack on popular market in
Kallidromiou Street, in Exarchia, early May, led the anarchist movement to
paralysis.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> State
repression escalated from General Strike to General Strike reaching its climax
in the orgy of the riot police violence on May 11, 2011, when a young man was
nearly killed, dozens were sent to hospitals with serious injuries, and the
center of Athens was transformed again into a gas chamber by the massive use by
the police of huge quantities of tear gas. At the same time, the neo-Nazi group
of “Golden Dawn”, under police protection, launched a real <i>Kristallnacht</i>
on May 12,<i> </i>attacking the immigrant communities and their shops, killing
a Bangladeshi immigrant worker and lynching many other immigrants, especially
“colored” or “black”, in Omonia
Square, at the center of Athens.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
first two weeks of May 2011, State terror and State protected fascist gangs
dominated the scene, while most of the people remained plunged in a deep social
despair and anger.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> Suddenly,
unpredictably, as in the Arab countries or in Spain, the entire political
landscape dramatically changed in the last weeks of May and early June,
with the powerful emergence of the “movement of the squares”, following
the example of the May 15 movement in Puerta del Sol and other Spanish squares.
</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> Tens
and later hundreds of thousands of people assembled, many of them for the first
time in their life, in Syntagma and the other central squares of the main Greek
cities, in Thessalonica, Patras, Volos, Khalkis,
Lamia, Preveza,
the Cretan cities and all over the country. For the first time from December
2008 such a mass movement- but with very different characteristics from the
previous youth revolt- emerged on a national scale.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> In
December 2008 it was a young generation without future, working in precarious
labor or unemployed and under constant police harassment that revolted. It was
a revolt of those pushed to the margins of social life by a social system in
decline and crisis, the rebellion of “outsiders”- not of an isolated minority:
without mass popular support by a majority in growing social economic
difficulties and increasing conflict with the right wing government’s policies,
the rebelled youth could not continue its revolt for many weeks, even months,
all over Greece, attacking policed stations and banks.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> But
in May 2011, it is not the “<i>outsiders</i>” of the ruling social order who
rebel but the so-called “<i>mainstream</i>”, most of them from the middle
classes that mobilize en masse, peacefully, independently or even in open
hostility to all political or trade union organizations, using the Internet,
the Facebook and other means of social networking to assemble in squares,
following the examples of the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and of the Arab Spring.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
bourgeois mass media, the right wing Opposition, the ultra-conservative and
chauvinistic Church, various nationalist groups in the area of the far right,
even the PASOK government itself initially tried to highjack this movement by
praising its “national”, “non violent”, and above all anti-Party and anti-trade
union stand: the first day of the mobilization, on May 25, when the
workers strikers of DEH, the national company of electricity now under
privatization, came to Syntagma, the assembled “|Indignant Citizens” ,
shouting against the “new arrivals”, they repelled them from the square). </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
ruling circles and their media deliberate tried to counter-pose the peaceful
May 2011 to the “violent December 2008”,
in the same way as the French bourgeoisie had counter-posed the “ugly
revolution” of the Paris proletariat in June 1848 to the “nice revolution” of
February 1848, when all the classes, the bourgeois and petty bourgeois
democrats and the working class were united against the old regime. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> But
the “nice” May 2011 turns more and more to become “uglier” according to
bourgeois standards. As more and more people have started to join the Indignant
Citizens, and the rally in Syntagma became permanent day and night, the
on-going radicalization of the entire movement became more and more pronounced.
It was expressed particularly in the self-organization of the people in the Syntagma Square as
well as in the proceedings of the open and massive General Assembly that takes
place from 9 pm to 2 am in early morning with thousands of participants. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
anti-trade union slogans were dropped, actions of solidarity to workers in
strike ( for ex. for the Dockers in the harbor of Piraeus under
privatization) or in occupations( for ex. in the Post bank) are decided
by an overwhelming majority, racist anti-immigrant or far right elements are
booed and rejected by the assembled Indignant Citizens. The slogan and banner
for an indefinite General Political Strike to overthrow the government and kick
out the “troika” of the IMF/ECB/EU was voted by a vast majority in the General
Assembly. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
repudiation of all the foreign debt as central objective of the movement of the
Indignant was accepted by an overwhelming majority, defeating the proposal by
the reformist “left economists” for a repudiation only of the so-called
“illegal” part of the debt, following the Ecuadorian example. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> A
crucial vote was taken to have as a main slogan “Real Democracy Now”, as in
Puerta del Sol, or ‘Direct Democracy, now”. The majority voted for Direct
Democracy, and even a non negligible minority (not only the EEK supporters)
demanded “workers power”.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> Despite
the fact that Party banners or press are still banned from Syntagma, it is
ludicrous to call this mass movement “non political” as the Stalinist KKE
claims. The most politicized people assemble in the lower level of Syntagma, in
front of the exit of the metro, in the space of the permanent General Assembly
while the less directly political section and the nationalists with Greek flags
and slogans are assembled on the higher level of the square, in front of the
Parliament. There is a contrast and osmosis, in other words a dialectic between
people in the two levels, a process of common radicalization and unification,
particularly in direct actions (when, for ex. the exit of the Parliament was
blocked and the MPs had to escape from another door through the National
Garden!)</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> It
has to not be forgotten that in every genuine popular movement, the masses
enter the battlefield with all their prejudices and superstitions. Not everyone
with a Greek flag in his or her hands is a nationalist right winger. Without
capitulating to obscurantism and reactionary chauvinistic prejudices, we have
to grasp the contradictions driving this unprecedented mass movement. International
finance capital and its institutions (IMF, ECB, and EU) are turning the country
into a subservient protectorate and they debase the Greek people into a nation
of destitutes. There is a difference between a nationalist, anti-immigrant
pogromist of the far right with a Greek flag, and a pauperized petty bourgeois
or worker raising the same flag while seeing that his personal disaster is
combined with the loss of any dignity for the Greek people imposed by the
foreign usurers and their local collaborators as during the Nazi Occupation of
the country in the 1940s. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
“anti-Party” stand is not solely “conservative and a-political”, as Papariga,
the general secretary of the KKE said in an interview. We have to grasp the
contradiction in it. From the one side, there is no politics, of course,
without the open debate and conflict between various political programs, different
political perspectives, and inescapably between opposed or allied political
collectivities, organizations, parties, including the revolutionary party
regrouping the most combative and conscious elements of the vanguard of the
proletariat. From the other side, “parties” in mass social consciousness today
are identified with the corrupt party political system responsible for the
destruction of their lives as well as the political failure of the official
bureaucratic Left, tied to the parliamentary system and responsible for many
tragic defeats in the past, to present a plausible alternative. A real workers
revolutionary Party is not a self-appointed leadership of the class, worst
imposed on the class, but a party which, as Trotsky had said in his articles on
Germany, fights among the masses, not to substitute them in their historical
emancipatory role, but to prove in practice every moment and convince the
masses for its right to lead them in a revolutionary road. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
measures of social cannibalism introduced by the ‘Socialist” government with
the open support of the far right LAOS, and, despite the populist demagogy,
with the support by the right wing New Democracy of Samaras,
destroy the jobs and the lives of millions, both in the middle classes and
in the working class. The generalized destruction of the vast majority of the
people, with the open complicity of the corrupt bourgeois parliamentary system,
of the bourgeois parties alternating in power for decades, with the complicity
of the trade union bureaucracy, with a reformist and/or a Stalinist Left
alienated from the majority of the people appearing rightly as a part of the
problem, not its solution, creates the conditions for the present Great
Refusal.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
nature of the global crisis, the impasse and bankruptcy of capitalism is the
source of this generalized attack of “those above” and of the generalized mass
refusal of “those below”, both petty bourgeois and proletarians. This prevents
the rulers to find a mass basis in the middle classes against the proletariat,
as it was the case with Thatcher or initially with Pinochet. Not only this
PASOK government but <b>any</b> bourgeois government like those that the ruling
class discuss as alternatives (a national unity government, a coalition
PASOK-New Democracy government, a government of technocrats, even a “government
of popular unity” that remains on a capitalist basis) cannot be a stable
government, precisely because of the capitalist bankruptcy preventing to make
any substantial concession to a sizeable section of the population.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> This
weakness of bourgeois rule is paradoxically but dialectically its strong point
too. The heterogeneous popular mass revolting against the rulers cannot open a
socialist way out from the current impasse without working class hegemony,
armed with a transitional program and an internationalist communist
perspective. It would be disastrous if the proletariat and its vanguard dismiss
the petty bourgeois masses, their social demands and democratic sensitivities;
the working, unemployed and precarious proletariat as a “universal class”
raising itself above all sectional limitations has to become the
political leadership of the nation of destitutes fighting for social justice,
freedom and dignity, putting “universal human emancipation as precondition for
any partial emancipation” according to the immortal first definition of
the Permanent Revolution by Karl Marx. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> To
achieve this workers hegemony, we cannot bypass party politics and the struggle
to clarify the political objectives of the mass movement. Despite the
legitimate anger of the Indignant Citizens against the existing party system, a
Party of the Permanent revolution is needed not as a self-appointed “savior”
and future dictator but as an instrument of the socialist revolution, an
ideological laboratory of the liberating movement. Direct democracy has a
future only through social revolution. It needs as its instrument a combat
Party of world permanent revolution built among the masses, by the masses, for
the self-emancipation of the masses. This is the goal and raison d’ être of the
Trotskyist EEK and of the Fourth International.</span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> There
is no electoral solution to the current crisis as the reformist SYN/SYRIZA of
Tsipras demands. Even the insistence on the demand for direct democracy reveals
the exhaustion of bourgeois parliamentarianism. The perspective of the seizure
of power by the working class supported by the pauperized masses of the cities
and the countryside cannot be postponed to the indefinite future, to the Greek
Calendae, as the Stalinist KKE does. Both parties of the official left but also
the centrist coalition of ANTARSYA is tied to electoralist perspectives,
considering elections as “the central political scene”. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> As
these lines are written, news coming from Athens
say that today, May 6, more than 200 thousand people converges in Syntagma Square
probably in the biggest demonstration after the fall of the military
dictatorship 1974. A
pre-revolutionary situation has emerged in Greece. The indignant proletarian
and popular masses, with the youth up front, are already on march, in different
speed, all over the Old Continent. As we had written elsewhere (see our article
on <i>The Arab Spring</i> now under press in the journal <i>Critique</i>), the
Simoun, the wind of the Arab deserts, is now blowing in the squares of the
European Metropolis. </span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> The
old specter of social revolution, exorcized by capitalists and bureaucrats, has
come back. It spreads fear to all the rulers and hope to all those deprived from
any hope. The old battle cry of the European Revolution of 1848 becomes today
more actual than ever: <b><i>Revolution in permanence!</i></b><i> </i></span><span style="" lang="EN-GB"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="" lang="EN-GB"><br>
</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;" lang="EN-GB"> </span></i><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;">4-5 June 2011<i> </i></span></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><i><span style="font-size: 14pt; color: black;"> </span></i></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"><b><i style=""><span style="font-size: 16pt; color: black;">*(direzione
del EEK – partito rivoluzionario dei lavoratori greco)</span></i></b></p>
<p style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; text-align: justify;"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<a href="http://www.eek.gr/default.asp?pid=6&id=1329"><font size="4">http://www.eek.gr/default.asp?pid=6&id=1329</font></a><br>