This must be the choice and response of the people today to the crisis which is expanding and deepening, to the developments in the EU and the debt, to the fierce anti-people offensive.
The government of ND-PASOK-Democratic Left expresses and unwaveringly promotes the demands of the business groups in Greece and the EU. The prospect which is being set out for the people is dramatic; it is forcing even the unemployed to pay taxes if they have a house, the sick to be deprived of medicine, children to be excluded from nurseries, and so many other things that the people are being called on to fight against decisively, to break the chains which tie them to the various forms of the political management of the capitalist crisis, to advance to a pro-people way out, for the satisfaction of their needs.
Whatever form of management is imposed, whether it be elongation of the implementation of the memorandum or a new “haircut,” new loans and Eurobonds, or a return to the drachma, or some other related variation, will not free the people from the consolidation of the losses in salaries, pensions, social services, from a new offensive, unemployment. No proposal for the management of the system answers the problems of the working class and popular strata, whether it be the proposal of today’s government or the proposal of SYRIZA, as they are incorporated in the pro-monopoly and pro-EU strategy. The one-sided criticism of Germany and the Greek governments that agreed to the proposals of the EU-IMF-ECB, the so-called troika, the cries about national betrayal and subservience, have nothing to do with the real interests of the people. They express disagreements about the management of the crisis, camouflaged by allegedly pro-people slogans, so that the people do not turn against the exploitative system itself but so that they alternate their preference from one to the other manager of the system.
Of course the extremely reactionary and anti-communist “Golden Dawn” acts demagogically in an attempt to exploit the confusion, utilising the complex and extremely serious issue of immigration. It is preparing and training for its most basic mission by practising organised violence and murderous attacks against immigrants. Their mission is to play the role of the contemporary “security battalions” at the expense of the labour and people’s movement, with the aim of breaking it and defending the interests of the system in this way.
The people today possess all the proof they need that a compromise between the people and the monopolies and between the forces of capital and labour is impossible. The negative correlation of forces, which is even more unfavourable today after the people’s vote in the June elections, can change; it is up to the people, and from today they must start to change it. No progress can be made without a strong KKE [Communist Party of Greece], without a change in the correlation of forces, first of all in the labour and trade union movement.
In the elections the majority of the people voted for parties of the “EU one-way street,” for Greece to stay in the EU and Eurozone at all costs, with the fraudulent slogan of renegotiation, which was supported from the beginning by the three parties of the coalition government and was adopted by SYRIZA in the second elections, abandoning the slogan regarding the abolition of the memorandum and the loan agreement.
Despite the negative election result, with as its basic feature the significant electoral reduction of the KKE, no worker must feel bound by the electoral support which they gave to the parties of the “EU one-way street,” expect something positive from the three-party government, or even wait for its bankruptcy and try out some governmental formation for the management of the system, like SYRIZA. The participation and the role of the Democratic Left in the government demonstrate in its entirety the bankruptcy of the “governmental left.”
The people cannot play the waiting game any longer. They have already gone bankrupt, while the sword of Damocles of the new measures will hang over them for many years. They cannot pay the taxes, the emergency levies; they must not harbour illusions that there will be no further cuts in salaries, pensions, medicine, and hope that the 1.2 million unemployed will be given jobs by an anaemic capitalist development possibly in energy and green development, which has been promised by the government, or by the renegotiation of SYRIZA. The level of unemployment will further increase in 2013.
The KKE discussed and discusses its difficulties and weaknesses and those of the movement and how it improves its activity in order to rally the people and youth and in the organisation and struggle of the people. There is a pro-people solution.
For these reasons we call on the working class and the popular strata, regardless of how they voted, to an open discussion and to organise the joint struggle against the anti-people measures, so that we can rid ourselves of the nightmare of bankruptcy, the yoke of the dominance of the monopolies and their power, so that we can free ourselves from the choices and commitments of the EU.
We call on the hundreds of thousands of people who say “something must be done” to organise together with us the people’s counter-attack.
The pro-people way out of the crisis must become the people’s slogan, which means the struggle to create the preconditions for a development path without monopolies, class exploitation, with socialisation, central planning and workers’-people’s control, with disengagement from the EU and unilateral cancellation of the debt.
The elongation of the memorandum proposed by the government and the negotiation of SYRIZA so that the payment of the debt may be postponed for one or two years or for it to be reduced by an appeal to the international organisations and negotiations, or a return to the drachma, are different versions which will bring new woes for the people, while capital will once again benefit.
The theory of SYRIZA cadres that bankruptcy is a weapon of the weak is equally damaging for the people. In Argentina there was a cessation of payments, the currency was de-linked from the dollar, after years there was a new negotiation and an annulment of a part of the debt, but unemployment and poverty increased despite the capitalist development. In no instance can the people benefit within the framework of the EU and the system: the situation today entails internal devaluation in the euro zone and constant cuts in salaries, pensions, and social spending. The bankruptcy and the exit from the euro will be accompanied by a sharp price increase in the huge influx of imported products, a huge loss in the workers’ buying power. And in both instances the common elements are the tax raids and the deep undermining of the existing development potential of the country.
Sections of capital want and will benefit from Greece’s exit from the euro zone, as they will be able to invest with less capital in a country with a devalued currency and salaries at a Bulgarian level.
The choices of the bourgeois class and the EU are inexorable. They want cheap and subdued labour power, now and in the future, the crushing of radical class-oriented labour and people’s movement. For this reason we insist that the workers turn their backs on the recipes for the management of the crisis by the government and SYRIZA, that the people must chart a course for their own power and government, which will free them from the crisis and bankruptcy once and for all. The way out of the crisis in favour of the people, for the achievement of the prosperity of the people and society, are today fully linked to the demand of disengagement and the unilateral cancellation of the debt, with the people becoming the owners of the wealth they produce.
The government of people’s power will transform the current ownership of the big business groups, of the capitalist businesses, the infrastructure, the means of land, sea and air transport, and the land into people’s property.
It will promote productive co-operatives of the small and medium-sized farmers and self-employed and guarantee what is only a dream today for the majority of the people:
• Work for all, eradication of unemployment.
• Food self-sufficiency for all the people.
• Public, free health care, welfare for all, abolition of commercial activity in these sectors.
• Education for all. Utilisation of scientific manpower, research and technology.
• Free care of children, the elderly and people with special needs by the state.
• Cheap and good-quality housing, with electricity, heating, and running water.
• Sports, culture, holidays for all, with organised infrastructure.
It will play a leading role in international economic relations on the basis of the peoples’ mutual benefit. With a sovereign and strong people that struggles for its prosperity, the country will be able to liberate itself from the imperialist agreements and NATO, from its involvement in imperialist wars.
The workers’-people’s power provided a great deal to the people in the countries where socialism was constructed. It provided solutions to problems which the workers in capitalist countries could only dream about. We draw lessons from the mistakes and the deficiencies that led to the counter-revolution and the overthrow of socialism. The struggle for a new type of power remains necessary and relevant.
Now the people must take their matters into their own hands with generalised social-political struggles. These struggles must unite the working class—both in the private and the public sector—the poor farmers, the self-employed, the women, the young people, in a single direction and stable alliance.
No sector or group of working people can ward off the relative and absolute destitution by demanding to be excluded from the generalised measures, since the attack has a unified character and purpose. On the contrary, the demands of each sector, of each group of working people, of the unemployed and the pensioners, can bring results only if they are fought for with appropriate demands and positions and at the same time support the joint nationwide demonstrations. The working people should not accept the struggles of the various sectors being posed in opposition to each other, the slandering of advanced forms of struggle, of the strikes which are decided on by the working people and respond to the intolerable problems they face. At this stage the fronts of struggle and resistance in work-places, in sectors and neighbourhoods must become streams that will merge together and strengthen the general demand of the people for a pro-people way out of the crisis, with militant mass demonstrations and the corresponding combative forms of struggle. The struggles must be based on mass participation in the decision-making process and in their organisation. The struggle requires mass participation, organisation, and a political direction for rupture with the interests and the choices of the monopolies at the national and the European level.
The announcement of the measures of the government that will seize $23½ billion from people and is preparing for a new round of measures is the first confrontation of the people after the elections. The new attack must meet the appropriate response in form and mass participation, e.g. a general strike which under certain conditions can become a starting point for the escalation and the stable strengthening of the people’s struggle.
In this phase the people must prove that they have the courage, that they can liberate themselves from the illusions which are fostered by the political forces that support the participation of Greece in the EU, and turn their back on the blackmail and the intimidating dilemmas.
Today there are two paths of development which come in conflict: on the one hand, the path which is determined by the monopolies and their parties, and on the other, the path of the struggle of the resolute and unwavering masses that leads to rupture, to the overthrow of the monopolies’ power.
There is no way out as long as the working people, the unemployed, the pensioners are influenced by the various formulas for a liberal, socialist or “left” management of the system; as long as fatalism and defeatism prevail, the mistaken perceptions that the people cannot win, cannot wage effective struggles, that the radical change will never take place and belongs to the “Second Coming.” The people must not passively wait on the various networks, which are hypocritically called networks of solidarity and charity, which are set up in a planned way so that the people will get used to the idea of managing poverty.
The KKE will take initiatives at a nationwide, sectoral and local level so as to strengthen the mass class struggle, the people’s initiatives and solidarity in the partial fronts of struggle and at the general political level. It calls on the people to support politically as well as through their struggles the initiative of the KKE, which tabled a draft law for the abolition of the memoranda, the loan agreements, and the anti-people measures as a whole.
The KKE will be at the forefront of the struggles regarding the people’s income, collective bargaining agreements, social benefits and pensions, jobs, the rights of the unemployed and their families, public works for social infrastructure and housing programmes, for education, health care, and welfare, against the privatisations, against the mergers of banks that lead to dismissals and reductions in salaries, against the dismissals in the public sector, regarding the specific acute problems of the youth and women, the problem of drugs, which is on the rise, to ensure medical treatment and medicine for all, for the salvation of the social security funds and the payment of salaries and pensions.
Down with the taxes and the unjust levies. No repossessions and auctions for the indebted families of the popular strata.
The trade unions, the mass organisations, the people’s committees must strengthen their solidarity while at the same time they should make demands and adopt militant forms of struggle.
No-one should be abandoned to the claws of the tax department and the other state mechanisms, homeless, without food or medicine, with their children being driven to malnutrition. No-one should be left alone against the repression and the authoritarianism of the state.
The KKE with its proposal for the way out will be at the forefront of all these struggles along with the working people, the unemployed and poor who have gone bankrupt and cannot shoulder new burdens.
We must reverse defeatism with the power of our proposal and by placing trust in the working people. We should contribute decisively so that the immense power of the people will be liberated from the bonds of the intimidating dilemmas, anti-communism, the intimidation and the authoritarianism of the employers and the state.
The consciousness of the people must be liberated so that the correlation of forces changes in favour of the people’s interests.
The KKE calls on the workers to take part in the 38th festival, the major event organised by KNE [Communist Youth of Greece] and Odigitís [KNE newspaper], to participate actively in the mobilisations that will take place over the next period throughout the country and in Thessaloníki. The members and the friends of the KKE and KNE must be in the front line of the struggle with a spirit of self-sacrifice in order to pave the way for the victorious course of the people.
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