Greek protests mark a new high in mass radicalization
2010Gerry Foley 2010-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 1 →
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The furious and massive protests against draconian austerity plans in Greece undoubtedly represent the biggest social explosion in Western Europe since the French May-June revolutionary crisis of 1968.
Greece, of course, is a relatively small country. It accounts for only 2 percent of the GNP of the European Union. But given the fragility of the international credit bubble, the threatened bankruptcy of the Greek state was sufficient to send tremors through the entire international capitalist economy, and particularly the economy of the European Union, the world’s second largest.
In a May 20 statement, the Greek section of the Fourth International, the worldwide grouping of revolutionary socialists supported by Socialist Action, noted: “For some months now, the economic crisis has impacted the social and political situation in Greece in an unprecedentedly violent way. At the very time when international ruling circles and the mass media were systematically cultivating hopes about at least a weak recovery of the capitalist economy in 2010, the Greek drama suddenly demonstrated how fragile such hopes were.
Phoenix immigrant rights march — 6 Rand Paul & Tea Party — 7 Gulf oil disaster — 8 Crisis slams mass transit — 10 “Even more glaringly, the Greek crisis demonstrated the absolute domination of finance capital, which dictates the guidelines of the government’s policy on the basis of its immediate interests and thereby accelerates the blind rush of capitalism toward an uncontrolled swelling of the ‘bubble’ of state debt and a general world crisis.”
The statement noted the extent of the worldwide financial crisis: “To bail out the banks over the past two years, unimaginable amounts have had to be diverted from the state budgets, in all, 25 percent of the world GNP—that is, 14 trillion dollars. And at the same time, state revenues have declined owing to the recession.”
The European Union and the international capitalist financial institutions have imposed limits on the extent that states are allowed to resort to deficit financing. But the Greek crisis re(continued on page 5, in “Greek workers pay for Europe’s capitalist bail-out”)
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Commentary by Mumia Abu-Jamal Korel Navarro / AP (Left) Lori Berenson appears before Judge Jessica Leon in a
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