Diary of new class struggles in Greece
“We are in a state of war” declared pompously the Greek Prime Minister(and President of the “Socialist International”) George Papandreou on March 3, announcing a second wave of draconian measures against the working people and pensioners, demanded by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF “advisers” supervising the Greek economy. But the working class defies the bellicose rhetoric of the head of the PASOK government and the instructions of the EU by declaring its own state of class war.
The first package of austerity measures, at the end of January 2010, transformed Greece into a EU protectorate under the strict supervision of its implementation by the Commission, the European Central Bank and the “know how” of the IMF. It had produced the national strike in the public sector on February 10 and the General Strike on February 24. The announcement of the new package on March 3 provoked a thunderstorm that continues: a mass demonstration in Athens on March 4, a generalized mobilization and strike action on March 5, the day that the new emergency measures were voted in Parliament by PASOK (and the far right LAOS). The Parliament was put under popular siege and the riot police tried to repel the crowd by its usual brutality and the vast use of chemical gas, injuring even the 88 years old hero of the anti-Nazi communist Resistance and former MP Manolis Glezos (the man who put down the Hitlerite flag from Acropolis during the Occupation).
On March 11 a new General Strike has been called by GSEE( the General Confederation of Labor) and ADEDY( National Federation of Public Employees) dominated by the PASOK bureaucracy. Rallies are called in the center of Athens and in all main cities. PAME, the organization of trade unionists led by the CP of Greece (KKE) has called also for the Strike and for its own gatherings, separated from the rallies of GSEE/ADEDY, joined by independent unions and other organizations of the Left (SYRIZA, extra-parliamentary left, Anarchists etc.)
The first package of measures aimed to a 4 per cent reduction of the deficit, from 12.7per cent of the GDP to 8.7 per cent in a year. The additional measures of March 3 aim to reduce the State deficit for another 2 per cent, a total of 6 per cent or 4.8 billion Euros, by freezing pensions, massive wage cuts in the public sector and increasing the Value Added Tax. It is the most savage deflationary offensive against wages and pensions from the end of the Second World War and the civil war in Greece in the ’40s.
But the new package is not the end of the descent into the abyss: a new tax reform is following and then, above all, the “Pension System Reform Bill” against all the pensions rights of the workers to be presented in the next weeks until the end of March. Later in the year, new austerity measures are expected.
Greece has entered in a protracted period of social convulsions, political crisis, and a new stage of class struggle fuelled by the world capitalist bankruptcy. The 11 March General Strike is an early battle in a class war. The ruling classes both in Greece and in Europe are afraid for a contagion not only of the sovereign default but of the revolutionary fermentation as well into other “weak links” of the Euro-zone chain, all over the European South and the European Union as a whole.
Savas Michael, 10/3/10
