Greek workers show the way

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Socialist Action march 2010 7 Workers in Greece are not silently accepting demands for austerity, nor do they believe the rationales given by their rulers for it. During a three-day strike of public workers, a “river of fury” poured down the streets of Athens, said the Guardian newspaper, in a “seemingly endless flow of Greeks who marched over the ­government’s painful fiscal policies.”

“We are at war with the government because it is clearly at war with us,” said former Communist Party MP Dimos Koumbounis. “The working class will respond with ever greater force and intensity to overturn these unjust and antisocial policies.”

Socialist Prime Minister George Papandreou said he had no choice but to implement the “painful but necessary” policies,” including public-sector pay freezes, raising the retirement age, job cuts, slashing bonuses on salaries, fuel price increases, and tax hikes. Papandreou pledged to trim the deficit from 12.7% to within the EU’s permissible 3% limit by 2012. European finance ministers meeting in Brussels warned Greece it would have to prepare tougher budget cuts.

EU countries have pledged to help Greece if it makes big spending cuts. There are fears a Greek default could spark a wider European debt crisis.

These austerity measures come in the face of Greeks’ vote last fall by a large majority for Socialist candidates promising to make the rich pay more taxes, to award above inflation pay raises for government workers, and to provide more support for the low-paid and pensioners.

During the strikes workers made clear that their desires as expressed in that election would not be flouted: “There should be no sacrifice for the plutocracy,” said union leader Vasiillis Stamoulis. “Those who are responsible should pay for the crisis: the bankers, industrialists, ship-owners, big merchants, the oligarchy of this country.”

“It’s a war against workers and we will answer with war, until this policy is overturned,” said a union member affiliated to the Communist Party.

(It must be noted that among the culprits in the Greek crisis was U.S.-based Goldman Sachs, which helped the government temporarily adhere to EU rules on deficit ceilings with a shady derivatives deal involving fictional currency exchange rates. And on Feb. 25 The New York Times reported that Greece is finding it increasingly hard to get bank financing—because those very banks are enticing investors into credit-default swaps which pay off if the country defaults on its debts!)

Again and again, protesters said they believed Greece would set an example for others in Europe to follow. “The mobilization of anti-capitalist forces here has already begun to spill over into other parts of southern Europe and it will spread even more,” said former Communist MP Dimos Koumbounis.

Some Greek public-sector workers extended the strike beyond the initial three-day plan so it would merge with the countrywide general strike planned for Feb. 24. On the 24th, private-sector workers joined public-sector workers who had already launched a general strike on Feb. 10. Airports, schools, rail, government offices, and other institutions were completely shut down on both days, and hundreds of thousands took to the streets.

On Feb. 23, hundreds of thousands struck in Spain against government spending cuts and threats to raise the retirement age. In February, airline workers struck in the UK, Germany, as well as in France—where oil workers also struck. Earlier in the month, workers shut down Turkey in a Feb. 4 (Left) African migrant worker shakes fist during Dec. 17 protest by Communist-linked unions in Athens against government spending cuts.

general strike against privatization. And textile workers in Egypt continued their years-long series of strikes, rallies, and sit-ins against privatization.

The bosses in the U.S. draw a parallel with Greece’s fiscal crisis to argue for more cuts at home. We argued in the accompanying article that workers in the United States can only solve the problems of pension and health-care market fragmentation by unifying and socializing these sectors. A similar approach is needed for the crisis in Greece and its continent-wide spillover.

European bosses want to drag Greek workers down as a prelude to cutting standards across the continent. We say that the solution instead is to bring all workers up to the standards of EU’s most developed countries.

U.S. commentators from Krugman to Johnson say a common EU currency is to blame, and argue for a regression, or at least postponement, of EU unification plans. Socialists, in contrast, say the way forward is not just currency unification, but a genuine, thoroughgoing economic, social, and political integration through establishment of a United Socialist States of Europe under workers’ control. n