Europe’s rulers press demands on workers as debt crisis deepens

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The May 6 vote in Greece, which placed the leftist coalition SYRIZA a close second behind the conservative New Democracy, with the possibility that the former could take first place in June’s runoff, has the ruling classes in Greece and throughout Europe shaking.

They have demanded that SYRIZA’s leaders drop promises to renounce the anti-working-class “memorandum” agreed to with Europe’s bankers. And the rulers’ steely eyes look past SYRIZA to the millions of Greek workers—and the millions more throughout the continent inspired by Greek resistance—with a threatening glare that says, “nothing has changed, you will continue to give us our pound of flesh!”

The rulers’ fears are compounded by the multiple levels on which the deepening crisis plays out, making it more difficult for them to manage it. First, the global depression that began in 2008 is steadily worsening. Second, the disparate levels of productivity and market domination within the European Union have its poorer countries resisting efforts by the stronger to make them pay a disproportionate share of the crisis.

Third, the Eurozone as a whole is engaged in heightened competition with the U.S.—as well as Russia, China, India, and other countries—in the context of a deepening worldwide downturn. Fourth, within each country—especially the poorer ones, but increasingly the richer as well—workers, youth, and immigrants are once again riding the wave of strikes and huge protests that has crested repeatedly since the crisis began.

What’s more, within each country there are also differences in the economic strength of various regions and as a result in the type and size of demands placed on them by the bosses. Thus, in a Forbes story titled “Local debt is the big untold story of the Euro crisis,” Haydn Shaughnessy wrote of the debt problems of local governments in Spain and even Germany—partly a result of national governments foisting off their own debt and deficits onto local shoulders (a phenomenon that should sound all too familiar with our U.S. readers), and partly a replication on a smaller scale of the continental and worldwide uneven development that is inherent in capitalism.

Such uneven development on a world scale, and the centuries-long efforts by imperialist countries to take advantage of it, brought millions of immigrants to Europe. These immigrants are now threatened by government officials such as Britain’s Home Secretary, Theresa May—who threatened recently to curb immigration if the euro collapses via the exit of Greece or other countries and as a result workers from poorer countries looking for work seek entry into England. They are also menaced by fascist parties gaining strength in the streets and in the continent’s parliaments.

But for the moment, Greek workers are the main targets of angry European officials. Thus on May 25, (Above) November 2011 general strike in Lisbon.

(Left) Student in Naples, Italy, protests austerity cuts in education.

though it’s not an EU member, the country’s Office for Budget Responsibility said a Greek exit from the euro would “plunge Britain into a second recession equal in ferocity to the record postwar slump of 2008-09. The OBR’s chair said that such a scenario in a country still not back to pre-2008 economic levels presented a risk that “you go down and you never quite get back up to where you started.”

After the Greek elections German officials launched a campaign, both in public and behind the scenes, demanding that Greek workers abandon their resistance. For instance, an official in German Prime Minister Angela Merkel’s government proposed a plan to force Greece to carry out a new round of massive privatizations of public assets, slashing job protec(continued on page 5, in “Syria massacre heightens danger of imperialist intervention”)