Greece can do without crocodile tears

Greece can do without crocodile tears

by Elisseos Vagenas

The capitalist crisis in Greece has been accompanied by an unprecedented assault on the rights of the working class and its allies and a correspondingly intense sharpening of the class struggle.

This has caught the attention of workers in other countries. Within this framework even bourgeois political forces that bear enormous responsibility for this anti-people offensive claim to “sympathise” with the Greek people.

But they take good care to conceal the true causes of the problems people are experiencing – capitalist crisis, the entrapment of the country in imperialist bodies such as Nato and the European Union and capitalist exploitation.

Representatives of the “new left” are making statements within this context. The letter published in the Morning Star on February 21 from European Left Party (ELP) president Pierre Laurent, who is also general secretary of the French Communist Party, is a case in point.

In reality the problem the working class and its allies face in Greece is not a problem of “democracy” – that is, it isn’t due to the imposition of anti-people measures from outside by “European leaders and the International Monetary Fund” as Laurent writes.

That would imply that the coalition government of social-democratic Pasok (the Socialist Party) and the liberal New Democracy Party is a “victim” of these outside forces.

The truth is that the “austerity” measures taken under the pretext of reducing public debt have the goal of strengthening capital’s profitability in Greece through the dramatic reduction of the price of labour power.

We should not forget that at this very moment €600 billion – almost double Greece’s public debt – can be found deposited by Greek capitalists in Switzerland’s banks alone.

The government’s policies fully correspond to the interests of capitalists in order to foist the crisis onto the people, so that Greece can enter a course of capitalist development and the capital which has been accumulated in the previous period can find a profitable outlet.

They are measures jointly agreed within the framework of the EU by the Greek government and the bourgeois class which is served by both governing parties. They were not imposed by “some European leaders and the IMF.”

All of them existed to a greater or lesser extent in the programmes of Pasok and New Democracy and moreover they were timetabled by EU treaties beginning with Maastricht.

This is why the working classes of Greece and Britain – and of course others – have amassed such a negative experience of the EU and its anti-people role.

The ELP representative in Greece, the Coalition of Left Movements and Ecology better known as Synaspismos, voted for the Maastricht Treaty.

It has always fostered and continues to systematically foster illusions regarding the EU – presenting Greece’s participation in the EU as the only possible path, in opposition to the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) which struggles for the disengagement of the country from the EU and people’s power.

The ELP president talks of Greece being “supervised” by the “troika” – the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. But Greece’s bourgeois class has consciously preferred active participation in the imperialist unions of Nato and the EU for decades.

This participation and the interdependent relations which result provide for the cession of sovereign rights to the EU and Nato.

For example, the common agricultural policy (Cap) does not leave any room for developing the agricultural sector of the economy in the people’s interests.

Before it joined the European Economic Community which turned into the EU Greece had a trade surplus in agricultural products, while today due to the Cap it even imports those agricultural products that are cultivated in Greece.

Hundreds of thousands of small and medium farmers have been added to the army of the unemployed.

The ELP avoids mentioning the accession of Greece to the EU and chooses to blame “some European leaders” in general terms.

Along with exorbitant military spending on Nato and the policy of tax exemptions for capital to make the country “competitive” – both followed by Pasok and New Democracy governments – it is the source of inflated public debt and deficits for which the Greek people bear no responsibility.

The ELP president’s oversight is not surprising, since the ELP swears allegiance to the EU and is generously funded by it as a “European party,” that is to say a party which accepts the principles of capitalist exploitation that distinguish the EU – a predatory alliance of the monopolies.

The ELP has even made commitments to the alliance in its statutes and founding documents.

The ELP proposals regarding “development,” an allegedly “pro-people social fund,” do not call capitalist power into question at all.

In fact the ELP and international opportunists play the leading role in creating illusions by prettifying imperialist organisations such as the EU and the Central Bank and claiming that they can become “pro-people.”

But more and more workers, not only in Greece, understand that capitalism cannot solve the basic problems of the people.

By supporting the EU and the exploitative system, the ELP has chosen sides. The Communist Party of Greece believes that it constitutes a tool for the mutation of communist parties and the eradication of their communist characteristics. It does not challenge the opponents of the working class and the poor in Greece, however many appeals it may make.

Nevertheless the experience and course of the working-class struggles in Greece – at the forefront of which are the communists and the class-oriented trade union movement Pame – highlight that more and more workers are being radicalised.

They are bypassing the sermons of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists who preach class collaboration and “social cohesion” and learning to ignore their crocodile tears at the burdens shouldered by the working class.

It is on this path that the working class can achieve the ultimate goal of its struggle – the abolition of capitalist power and the construction of socialism.

Elisseos Vagenas is the KKE central committee member responsible for international affairs.