On May 20th, the fifth General Strike in five months took place in Greece against the IMF/EU draconian measures and the new bill destroying the pension rights introduced by the Papandreou government Participation in the strike was 80 to 100 per cent, greater than in the previous General Strike
of May the 5th.
Powerful demonstrations took place this time too in Athens, Thessalonica and all the main cities of Greece. Eighty to a hundred thousand workers, pensioners, youth marched in Athens, despite the lack of any public transport (the bureaucracy of the transport unions took deliberately this decision; in the previous General Strikes the rule was to have public transport from 10 am to 16.00 pm to permit workers from the working class neighborhoods, living far away from the center of the capital, to come to the demonstration.) The government tried unsuccessfully to intimidate people to join the demonstration both by “black propaganda” on violence, using cynically as pretext the tragic death of three bank employees trapped in a bank put on fire on May the 5th, as well as by preventive arrests of 98 young people, and a nearly state of siege imposed in the Exarchia area (where the revolt of December 2008 started).
The main rally and march was called in Athens at 11.00 am by GSEE and ADEDY, the trade union federations in the private and public sectors in Pedion Areos (in front of the headquarters of GSEE.) But the hated archi-bureaucrat Chairman of the GSEE Yannis Panagopoulos did not dare to appear and speak to the rally. The last time that he did it, on May the 5th, he was stopped by the angry demonstrators. In a previous occasion, he was nearly lynched by workers. So this time, he escaped to…Germany for “an official visit”.
The class struggle unions, the far leftist and anarchist organizations assembled independently near by, in the National Museum and the Polytechnic and joined the common march. PAME, the trade union organization of the Communist Party (KKE) has called, as usual, its own separate rally one hour earlier at 10.000 am in Omonia Square; this time the PAME did not march towards the Parliament as on May the 5th, obviously to avoid the kind of popular attacks against the parliament that took place in the previous General Strike, and they were denounced by the KKE as “provocations”(The far right party LAOS had accused the KKE for the attack on parliament). On May the 20th, the KKE/PAME “marched” in the opposite direction, a few hundred meters near Omonia Sq. to the Ministry of Labor, blocked its entrance “symbolically” and then it was dispersed in the direction of Theision, near Acropolis, far away from the Parliament… Young KKE supporters, angry with this decision, joined our march towards the Parliament.
In front of the Parliament, in Syntagma Square, the massive demonstration stayed for more than an hour shouting “Thieves! Thieves!” Our slogan for an indefinite General Strike becomes more and more popular among the unions and the demonstrators.
The fighting capacity of the Greek working class remains intact and its militancy is growing. The popular anger against the government, the bourgeois parliamentary parties, the IMF and the EU, far from being dissipated, is building up into apolitical crisis without precedent.
Our Party, the EEK, held an Emergency Congress on May 15-16 to discuss the explosive situation and issued a Manifesto widely distributed in the mass demonstrations of the General Strike. Our agitation is focused on the call for an indefinite General Political Strike to defeat the IMF/EU program and to overthrow the PASOK government implementing it, for a break from the EU/EMU, cancellation of the debt to the international usurers, nationalization of the banks under workers control, expropriation of the capital in the strategic sectors of the economy, a re-organization of all social relations on new socialist bases under a workers power, and expansion of our revolutionary struggle all over Europe, for a United Socialist States of Europe.
Venceremos!
Savas Michael, 21 may 2010
