The popular wrath against the barbaric austerity imposed on Greece by the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF has exploded in the early parliamentary elections of May 6^th leading into a crushing and humiliating defeat both the ruling bourgeois parties, the right wing New Democracy (ND) and the “socialist” PASOK, as well as all the neo-liberal servers of the troika’s Memorandum. The two parties that ruled the countries for decades after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974, ND and PASOK, have fallen into a pathetic minority, combining together less than a third of the votes. For the first time after more than a half century, a party of the Left, the reformist SYRIZA with his radical anti-Memorandum rhetoric and movementist look, has been catapulted in the second rank, nationally, becoming the Official Opposition in the country and the biggest party in Athens, the capital region, Thessalonica, and the main cities in the provinces. There is an obvious left wing turn of the majority of the people.

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By Savas Michael-Matsas

It is well established, following Edgar Allan Poe and his Purloined Letter, that the better place to hide a secret is the most exposed one. Today’s Greece undoubtedly is the most exposed place in the world to hide the purloined letter containing Her Majesty’s secret confession: the announcement of the bankruptcy of the entire European Union project.

Both the flood of propaganda by the mainstream media or the racist obscenities spread in Northern and Western Europe about the Greeks as “lazy and congenital crooks” cannot convince anybody that the never ending saga of the unresolved Greek debt crisis represents just a “national exception”. If it was so, why the future of a relatively tiny economy representing only the 2.7 per cent of the entire European GDP hovers as a frightening ghost all over the metropolitan centers of global capitalism? Why it pre-occupies so intensively – and unfruitfully- one EU Conference after another, the last two years?

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The Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) held its conference on international work over the weekend of 18-19 February 2012 in Ankara. The conference was part of a series of conferences organised by all the sections and supporting organisations affiliated to the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI) in order to discuss the methods to advance the political work and consolidate the organisational structure of the international centre.

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The General Strike of October 19-20, 2011 in Greece

While the EU leaders, particularly those of Germany and France, divided by their irreconcilable national antagonisms and paralyzed by terror in front of the bankruptcy not solely of Greece but of their banking system and of the entire project of the European Union with its euro,  they had to postpone their Summit, the same days, in the epicenter of the crisis, in Greece, the entire country was shaken by a tremendous mobilization of the working class and the rapidly pauperized popular strata – the biggest from 1974, the year of the collapse of the CIA imposed military dictatorship.

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WORLD CRISIS AND REVOLUTION In February 2011, the US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke was bluntly asked, during a speaking engagement, “whether the central bank was culpable for the revolution in Egypt” (Financial Times, March 26/March 27 2011). Bernanke, as it was expected, denied it. He protested that it’s unfair to blame US monetary policy, particularly  “Quantitative Easing 2”(QE2) launched  by the Fed in November 2010, for the tidal wave of inflationary pressures engulfing the “emerging markets” and  the entire underdeveloped South, rising the energy and food prices and propelling the revolutionary storm in the Middle East. But the question posed it had only touched directly an open wound.

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By Savas Michael-Matsas

The rhythms of History have been dramatically accelerated in early 2011: in January the dictator Ben Ali was swept out by the Tunisian revolution that ignited the flames of revolution in Egypt and in the entire Arab world, from Mauritania, Morocco and Algeria to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

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Statement of the Initiative for the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) of Turkey on the Incidents in Tunisia:

1. The Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) salutes with great respect and joy the heroic struggle of the Tunisian workers and unemployed, braving police bullets to finally overthrow Zine el-Abidin Ben Ali, who subjected the country to a brutal dictatorship for 23 years. What is taking place in Tunisia is a political revolution. Only time will show whether this revolution will be transformed into a social revolution challenging the domination of the bourgeoisie. Given the fact that even the trade union movement does not constitute an independent force in Tunisia, let alone socialist forces, and remembering that imperialism will now step into the scene in order to stop the revolution, this seems unlikely. Lue lisää »

Over one hundred angry workers were marching in the streets of Athens, on December 15, the day of the 24 hours General Strike called by the GSEE (General Confederation of Workers of Greece involving the private sector) and ADEDY (National Federation of Public Employees). It is beyond any doubt now that there is a new upsurge of mass militancy in Greece, after a relative reflux in summer and early autumn.

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The thunderous events set in motion by Israel’s storming of the Mavi Marmara, the lead ship in the humanitarian flotilla challenging the blockade of Gaza, have thrown important light on the overall situation in the Middle East. Turkey has emerged as the major protagonist among the forces that support the Palestinian cause.  This is extremely ironic given that the country has been a loyal member of NATO for six decades and “Israel’s most important friend in the Muslim world” (New York Times, May 31, 2010) for as long as one can remember, markedly so in the post-Cold War period and even under the present government.
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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.

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