The irony also played itself out in the imbroglio between the US, on the one hand, and Turkey and Brazil, on the other, over the question of sanctions against Iran. Barely a week after the Israeli assault on the humanitarian flotilla, on June 8, 2010, a vote was taken at the United Nations Security Council on a fourth round of (reinforced) sanctions against Iran and, lo and behold, Turkey and Brazil, rotating members of the Security Council and two erstwhile docile allies of the US, voted against (and the only Arab country on the Council, Lebanon, abstained).

Only three weeks before that, the same two countries, after tough negotiations in Tehran, had signed an agreement with Iran for a swap of Iran’s low-enriched uranium in exchange for enriched uranium to be used for medical purposes, something the Western countries had not been able to convince Iran into last fall. This was seen, as it certainly should, as a manoeuvre by the two countries to prevent the tabling of a motion on a new round of sanctions at the Security Council by the US.

Rise of a Regional Power or Islamic Fundamentalism?

Turkey is the foremost ally, with the obvious exception of Israel, of US imperialism in the Middle East. It is also a candidate for accession to the European Union engaged in negotiations for the last five years, although relations have recently soured between the two sides due to the explicit reluctance of the Sarkozy and Merkel governments to carry the accession process to completion. The country is ruled by the most sophisticated and well-organised capitalist class in the Muslim Middle East. It wields the most advanced industrial production capacity among these countries and has increased its exports from around 30 billion US dollars at the beginning of this decade to more than 130 billion US dollars in 2008, before the onset of the world economic crisis. Moreover, 90 percent of its exports are industrial goods, increasingly focused on such sectors as the automotive industry. It has very recently become a major recipient of foreign direct investment: many multinationals, from Microsoft to Coca Cola, have made Istanbul their headquarters for Eastern Europe, Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Turkey is now seeking to become a financial hub and a business arbitration centre for the entire Arab world, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Balkans. Add to this the fact that it has the second largest army in NATO after the US, which puts it among the three major military powers of Eurasia, along with Russia and Israel.

It is on the basis of this increasing economic and military clout that Turkish governments have, for some time now, been seeking to become a regional power. It was under Turgut Ozal, a staunch ally of the West and in particular the US, that Turkey first started in the early 90s to venture into a pan-Turkic and neo-Ottomanist foreign policy, drawing the conclusion that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant a whole new era of opportunities for Turkey.

A singular product of this new orientation within the ranks of the Turkish bourgeoisie has been the mushrooming network of schools all around the world established by an immensely powerful religious congregation led by a charismatic Imam, Fethullah Gulen, not only in predominantly Muslim countries, but also in such improbable corners of the world as Latin America and the Far East. Fethullah Gulen is not committed to any single political party, but has lately supported the AKP (Justice and Development Party — Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) government and has disciples within the army of AKP MP’s and even within the council of ministers. He himself resides in the United States for fear of persecution by the Turkish secular establishment.

The AKP government has inherited Ozal’s orientation and reinforced it through an immensely active foreign policy that at times veers in directions that are substantially independent of, even runs counter to, US foreign policy. The fact that the government party comes from an Islamist background has raised a controversy within the country’s ruling circles and the US and EU establishments as to whether this new foreign policy implies an ‘axis shift’, i.e. whether the government is moving away from the firmly entrenched pro-Western foreign policy of the traditional wing of the Turkish bourgeoisie in the direction of closer links with the Islamic world. The answer to this question is of considerable importance, since the government formed in the late 1990s by the more fundamentalist predecessor of this mildly Islamic party was toppled by an alliance of the Turkish military, the Westernist wing of the bourgeoisie and US imperialism through brazen military intervention.

Our characterisation of the situation is that the AKP government is simultaneously attempting to cater to the new expansionist needs of the Turkish bourgeoisie and to become a regional power so as to better negotiate with the US and, in particular, the EU. In other words, the simplistic explanation conjured by the Islamophobics of both the West and of Turkey itself – the idea that the AKP is finally revealing its Islamic fundamentalist nature – is false. The alliance with Brazil is not limited to the question of Iran, but extends across a spectrum of areas both economic and political. It seems that these two midsize rising powers are trying to achieve a level of influence comparable to those of Russia and India, if not China, on the basis of a closer alliance.

However, certain objective factors complicate the situation. For one thing, if Turkey wishes to become a regional power, that necessarily implies reaching out first and foremost to Islamic countries, of which there is no dearth in Turkey’s vicinity, not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but also in the Balkans, the Caucusus and Central Asia.

In setting up relations with predominantly Muslim countries, the AKP has a natural advantage over its more secular rivals in Turkish domestic politics, which of course raises certain paranoid reactions from Islamophobics of all stripes. Even more important than this is the fact that Turkey’s rise in the Middle East has coincided with two other developments of substantial import: the conflict over Iranian nuclear efforts and the rise of Hamas as a highly contentious factor in the Israeli/Palestinian drama. These bring us to the second set of contradictions mentioned above.

Turkey Between Israel and Iran

It should not be necessary to delve at length into the series of contradictions between Israel and Iran that make the hostility between these two countries the most burning question of the Middle East at present. Turkey’s special position vis-a-vis this standoff is what complicates the nature of the new Turkish foreign policy. Turkey is, or at least used to be, the most reliable ally of Israel as well as of the US in the Muslim world.  One would expect Turkey to go along with US policy towards Iran, albeit with the circumspection to be naturally expected from a country neighbouring the powerful country that Iran is.

However, the US-Israeli pressure on Iran for its supposed efforts at going nuclear has very paradoxically backfired on Israel by projecting, at least from the Turkish standpoint, the question of the (unacknowleged) nuclear weapons of Israel under the limelight. The Turkish government now insists on a nuclear-free Middle East; and since, whatever its real intentions, Iran, as opposed to Israel, does not yet wield nuclear weapons, this policy implies turning the attention of the region and the world on Israel’s nuclear capability rather than the putative nuclear arming of Iran.

Not without further irony, Turkey is the only other country in the Middle East, apart from Israel, that maintains (so far unacknowledged in this case as well) nuclear weapons on its territory, although these tactical warheads belong to the US and were placed in Turkey during the Cold War as a deterrent to the Soviet Union. All in all, what we are witnessing in the triangular relationship between Turkey, Iran and Israel is the effort of each of these countries to have the upper hand regarding nuclear clout in the Middle East.

It is on the question of Palestine, and in particular the plight of Gaza, that the semi-Islamic nature of the AKP comes into the equation. Since Hamas was elected in a landslide in January 2006 to rule the Palestinian Legislative Council (eventually becoming isolated in Gaza), the AKP has followed a policy that widely diverges from both that of the US and the EU (and of the so-called Quartet that also includes Russia and the UN). This policy also diverges from that which would have been followed by the rabidly pro-Western and Islamophobic secular parties of Turkey. The Western alliance classifies Hamas as a terrorist organisation and rejects engagement with it so long as it refuses (a) to renounce violence against Israel, (b) to recognise the right of Zionist Israel to exist and (c) to abide by the Oslo accords.

The AKP, in contrast, invited Hamas officials to Ankara for talks in 2006 in the wake of the elections, an initiative severely rebuked by Israel and the US. When Israel attacked Gaza in December 2008, the Turkish government unambigously came up against the war drive. During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in the aftermath of this war in late January 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan ferociously attacked the Israeli President Shimon Peres in an incident that captivated Arab audiences and made him a hero in the eyes of Arab masses. Joint military exercises that had been held for many years were later cancelled by Turkey. The Mavi Marmara incident is thus only the latest drama to be played out in the long agony of Turkish-Israeli friendship.

This clearly raises the question of whether, from the point of view of American interests, the AKP is fit to rule a country with which the US has, in the words of Obama, a ‘model alliance’. It is, of course, no secret that the AKP still bears some of the marks of its Islamic origins. The first serious test of the party’s usefulness for the US was tested in March 2003, when scores of AKP MP’s blocked a government motion that stipulated the use of Turkish territory by the US in its attack on Iraq. This soured relations between the two allies for years on end. Having already refused complicity in the US war against the secular regime of Saddam, the more Islamist elements of the AKP may certainly resist, in the case of Iran, the waging of war on a country that calls itself an ‘Islamic Republic’.

The secular opposition in Turkey uses this prospect and the AKP’s sympathies for Hamas to drive a wedge between the US administration and the AKP government. One may even speculate on whether the US has not already turned its back on the Erdogan government, supporting the major left of centre secular opposition party for the general elections, which are to be held at the latest within a year.

Political Civil War

This brings us to a third set of contradictions. The international implications of Turkey’s new foreign policy are intertwined with the domestic struggles between the two major ruling camps of Turkish politics. We have explained time and again in our previous writings that the ongoing political conflict between the AKP government, on the one hand, and the broad array of secular forces, first and foremost the Turkish army, on the other, is an expression above all else of a struggle between two fractions of the bourgeoisie over the division of surplus-value and over political power.

The more traditional and entrenched wing of the Turkish bourgeoisie, the pro-Western, self-styled secular wing, adamantly refuses to contemplate any kind of attempt to move Turkey away from the West, even marginally. This wing owes its rise to the Westernising parameters of the ‘Kemalist republic’ (Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923). As opposed to this fraction, a new wing of the bourgeoisie has risen within the last quarter of a century and is now competing for power through the AKP. There seems to be no easy solution to the internecine strife of the bourgeoisie, a conflict we have been calling ‘the political civil war of the Turkish bourgeoisie’ for many years now.

The new fault lines of Turkish foreign policy interact with this division of the bourgeoisie in domestic political and economic life. Both wings of the bourgeoisie are keen to internationalize the circuits of capital eastward, and extend the country’s political and economic influence toward the surrounding states, but since Islam is the prevailing religious orthodoxy in these countries, the pro-Western wing has a mortal fear that this policy may spill over, under the semi-Islamist AKP, into one of eliminating the Western anchor and becoming an exclusively Islamist one. The AKP government has come under fierce attack by the ideologues of the pro-Western bourgeoisie both for its management of the flotilla affair and its position on the Security Council vote on Iran. As for the masses, these measures of the AKP government are immensely popular, especially but not exclusively with the pro-Islamic electorate of the AKP.

The interaction between domestic and international politics may lead to a host of complications. The more popular Erdogan becomes in the eyes of the popular masses (both Turkish and Arab) thanks to his resolute standoff with Israel, the more difficult it is to remove him from power and the more hysterical become his pro-Western bourgeois rivals. Yet,  it needs to be kept firmly in mind, the AKP’s opponents in domestic politics are an immensely strong card up the sleeve of the US should the AKP foreign policy become, at a certain point, a real drag on US interests.

What Internationalist Policy for Socialists?

There is no easy path for socialists in this complicated situation. Any acceptable position should certainly avoid the Charibydis of tail-ending the Islamic movement and the Scylla of capitulating to imperialism in the guise of fighting religious bigotry. A nuanced approach to this complex field of political forces needs, moreover, to be combined with a principled support to the oppressed people of Palestine.

The first thing to be noted is that although the Left should, of course, be sworn enemies of nuclear weapons, there is no logic in denying Iran nuclear weapons when Israel manifestly possesses nuclear capacity (leaving aside, for the moment, the question of total nuclear disarmament). A nuclear-free Middle East, as a step towards a nuclear-free world, is the only policy that can be concretely counterposed to the unwarranted aggressive policy towards Iran followed by the Western powers in alliance with Israel. It should be clear that this means not only full accountability for Israel and destruction of its nuclear arsenal, but also the removal of NATO and US tactical warheads from Turkish territory and the closing down of the US bases in that country.

It is far from demonstrated that Iran is after nuclear weapons. Given its track record in Iraq, it is easy to see that the US is aiming for regime change in Iran under the guise of trying to stop nuclear proliferation. Iran should unswervingly be defended against US and/or Israeli aggression. This has nothing to do with defending the fundamentalist Iranian regime against the opposition in that country. And, in any case, any opposition worth supporting for socialists, in Turkey or elsewhere, should be expected to stand up against imperialist aggression on Iran.

Secondly, internationalist solidarity with an oppressed people should not be predicated upon socialists’ approval of the political nature of the movement that leads the struggle of that oppressed people. It is not because Hamas (or Hezbollah in Lebanon) are Islamic organisations that the peoples in question support them in mass numbers.  It is because they defend, arms-in-hand, their people from colonialist aggression and occupation. To turn one’s back on the people of Gaza on the pretext that Hamas is a defender of religious fundamentalism is to abdicate one’s internationalist duties.

Defending the rights of the Palestinian people, ranging from the simplest demand of the lift of the blockade on Gaza all the way to self-determination and the right of return (‘awda’) is a fundamental task of the international movement, irrespective of the political and ideological nature of the Palestinian leadership. A subsidiary task of international socialism should be supporting those tendencies within the Palestinian Left that work towards a political break with the leadership of the PLO, as this organisation has – probably irreversibly – descended into collaborationism with imperialism and Israel.

Thirdly we should be clear that the Islamic movement cannot achieve the emancipation of the Palestinian people. More concretely in today’s conjuncture, we must make clear to the masses, whether we are struggling in Palestine, in other Muslim countries or elsewhere, that the AKP government in Turkey and Erdogan personally are no saviours. It is true that a grassroots Islam that disregards the niceties of imperialist diplomacy seriously challenges the treatment meted out by Israel to the Palestinians. The IHH, a rather enigmatic humanitarian foundation and the major organiser of the flotilla, probably mobilised people of such orientation.

The AKP, however, is not at all a party controlled by such grassroots people. On the contrary, the AKP is a party of the up and coming fraction of the bourgeoisie with an Islamist orientation: it is bound, hand and foot, to the capitalist system domestically and to imperialism internationally. In effect, it is precisely this contradictory nature of the AKP, divided as it is between a rank and file bent on questioning the imperialist status quo and a bourgeois leadership that is structurally unprepared to break with it, that explains both the vote in parliament in March 2003 that had an important impact on the Iraq war and the ongoing conflict with Israel.

To present Erdogan as a saviour for the Palestinian masses is to disregard a series of contradictions that hold his government hostage to the status quo in the Middle East. The first and most obvious is the utter hypocrisy of the AKP when it comes to the Kurdish question. The historical framework of the Palestinian and Kurdish questions differ considerably, but there is similarity in the way they are subjected to national oppression, by Israel and Turkey respectively (although in the case of the Kurds, there is the additional factor of the fragmentation of this people among many Middle Eastern states). To stand up for the rights of the Palestinians and yet deny the Kurds their most elementary rights is a contradiction in the simplest sense of the term and this is exactly what the AKP government is doing.

Erdogan has recently come out and declared that, having won a lanslide victory in the elections, Hamas cannot be considered a terorrist organisation, forgetting that the legal arm of the Kurdish movement polls more than two thirds of the vote in quite a number of Kurdish provinces! The much-vaunted ‘Kurdish overture’ or ‘opening’ that was launched by the AKP government last fall (and abruptly abandoned only months later) amounted to no more than an attempt to liquidate the PKK’s (Kurdistan Workers’ Party – Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan) influence on the Kurds of Turkey in return for token reforms.  Given the hegemony of the party, it turned out to be a dismal failure.

There is, then, the fact that the AKP government has no intention of breaking with the imperialist system, but is in fact offering its services to this system through the new hegemony it is attempting to establish over the Muslim and, more particularly, the Arab world. Only days after the Israeli assault on the flotilla, on June 8-9, foreign and assorted ministers of 22 Arab countries came together in Istanbul for parallel meetings of the Turkish-Arab Cooperation Forum and the Turkish-Arab Economic Forum, to be treated to sermons regarding the virtues of neoliberalism, privatisation, integration with Western capitalism and flexibility in the labour market by none other than Erdogan and his ministers of foreign affairs and the economy. Erdogan, co-chair together with prime minister Zapatero of Spain of the so-called Alliance of Civilisations, a product of the Bush era, in effect acts as a Trojan horse of imperialism in the Arab world.

The attraction Turkey offers economically to other Muslim countries is heavily indebted to its relation to the European Union. This is a relation that is very advanced due to the Customs Union agreement in effect between the EU and Turkey for the last fifteen years. There can be no doubt that a consistent defense of Palestinian rights requires full-scale confrontation with Israel and, thus, the United States. If Turkish skirmishes with Israel have so far occurred without raising the ire of the US administration, that is only because the Obama administration itself is at loggerheads with the present Israeli government over the so-called peace process. However, this is probably about to change: an entire lobby, from the Zionist think-tank JINSA to the neocon establishment, has started to bombard the Obama administration for a break with Turkey.  This has included such outlandish demands, given its embeddedness in Turkey and vice-versa, as Turkey’s eviction from the security structures of NATO. Things are hardly likely to go this far, but a change of mind on the part of the  Obama administration is probable.

So it is clear that the Erdogan government is constitutionally unfit for a full-scale defense of Palestinian rights. But even if Erdogan himself and his co-thinkers were prepared to break completely with Israel and hence the US, the nature of the Islamist movement in Turkey would not allow them to go forward. In a move of extreme significance, Fethullah Gulen, the leader of the religious congregation that was alluded to above, talked to the Wall Street Journal days after the Israeli assault on the flotilla. Gulen condemned the whole Freedom Flotilla enterprise, and defended Israel’s right to decide what goods should be allowed into Gaza.  And he went on to chide the ‘defying of authority’ on the part of the Turkish actors in the drama (all this in a newspaper controlled by sworn enemies within the US establishment of the AKP). This read as a real cold shower for Islamists of all stripes in Turkey, and clearly implies that Gulen will withdraw his support from behind the AKP should Erdogan and co-thinkers opt for a break with Israel and the US. This would, in all probability, reduce the AKP to a shadow of its former self.

There is finally the indisputable fact that an overwhelming majority of the Arab governments with which Erdogan is planning to work on increasingly closer terms, from the secular Egyptian dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak (complicit in the blockade on Gaza) to the medieval fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia, have for decades remained deaf to the plight of the Palestinians simply because they are servile followers of the US, their great benefactor. The AKP government is itself painfully aware of this situation: one of Erdogan’s ministers has gone on record for saying that even Pope Benedict XVI showed more sensitivity to the Mavi Marmara incident than many Arab governments.

The Left and Solidarity with Gaza

The conclusion to be drawn is clear. It is the international socialist movement that bears the responsibility of building a front against Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, starting with the fight against the blockade of Gaza. The flotilla affair has created a most appropriate moment for this. Israel has probably never been so isolated and so severely condemned among the masses of people internationally. One component is turning to the international working class movement to build solidarity with the Palestinian people. The example of the Swedish port workers’ union, which refused to load or unload goods from and to Israel for a period of around ten days after the Mavi Marmara incident, is a welcome overture.  As are the numerous campaigns for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) that have been endorsed by unions in South Africa, Canada, France, Britain and elsewhere.  These initiatives should be multiplied and sytematised.

The socialist movement should also work hand in hand with the democratic and human rights movements to organise a more independent and unitary international solidarity movement while, at the same time, not refusing to collaborate with the Islamic charity movements when it is a question of enterprises of the Freedom Flotilla type. We should not forget nor let anyone blur the fact that the Freedom Flotilla was by no means an exclusively Islamic affair, that there were, on board the ships in the flotilla, including the Mavi Marmara, clergy from other religions of the Middle East, representatives of secular democratic movements, and, most importantly, socialists and revolutionaries from all around the world.

It is only proletarian internationalism that can put an end to the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, through the establishment, on the basis of a fraternal alliance of the Jewish working class and the downtrodden masses of Palestine, of a democratic, secular and socialist state on the historic territory of Palestine, within the framework of a Socialist Federation of the Middle East, which will also finally bring the emancipation of the Kurdish people form the century-long yoke of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

Written by Sungur Savran
Monday, 14 June 2010

The following is an abrigded version of an essay published on the Canadian web site socialistproject and the web site of Workers Struggle

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

The enemies of the people embrace!

Build solidarity between the working classes of Greece and Turkey!

Greece is in flames. The world economic crisis of the capitalist system has descended upon the country in extremely intensified form and left the economy face to face with bankruptcy.

Having presided over a system that, by its nature, creates crashes and depressions, the rulers of the capitalist European Union and the international capital’s agent of austerity for the masses, the IMF, have decided to wage a savage assault on all the gains and rights of the Greek working class. The Greek “socialist” Prime Minister George Papandreou acts as their hitman. After having been elected last November on a platform that promised exactly the opposite, he has now turned around and attacked the Greek working class and the labouring masses on behalf of the European ruling classes and the Greek bourgeoisie.  Savage cuts in wages and pensions, demolition of what remains of welfare State, of Education and health services, privatizations of public good are on the agenda.

It is right in the middle of this ferocious assault of the Greek government that Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, is visiting Papandreou with a lot of ministers at his side and great fanfare. Nothing could be more fitting! Ever since he came to power at the end of 2002, Erdogan has been faithfully serving the class interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie and attacking the rights of the working class, however limited these are after three decades of the neoliberal offensive. Between 2007 and 2009 he violently repressed attempts to celebrate May Day on Taksim Square and he had the Tekel workers attacked with water cannon, teargas and clubs.

So Papadreou and Erdogan are comrades in arms! They are the enemies of the working people. It is totally appropriate for Erdogan to visit his class comrade in the midst of the fire that has set Greece ablaze. It is totally appropriate for him to have embraced the anti-working class politics of Papandreou

In return, it is incumbent on the working class and leftist movements of the two countries to reach out across the Aegean and create fraternity and solidarity between the struggles of their working classes. And struggle there surely is. These two countries, notorious for the hostility to each other created by bitter historical events and forever fanned by their respective bourgeoisies, have now been united by their working classes in their fight against the onslaught of capitalism.

With five General Strikes in five months, particularly with the General Strike of the 5^th of May, the biggest mobilization in three decades, the Greek working class demonstrated its fighting capacity and its determination to defeat the barbaric IMF/EU measures. The coming General Strike of May 20^th will be another crucial confrontation in this on-going struggle.

And Turkey has been rocked these last months by workers’ struggles as well. The Tekel workers waged a heroic battle for 78 days. One result was the impressive May Day demonstration on Taksim Square in Istanbul bringing together anywhere between 200 to 300 thousand workers and supporters. A general strike is scheduled for 26 May, though the machinations of the bureaucracy will probably reduce its importance.

Let the ruling classes fear the working classes of the two sides of the Aegean! A war has been declared by the international and Greek bourgeoisie on the Greek working class. The Greek proletariat has shown that it is resolved to respond in kind: It is the duty of proletarian internationalists to make sure that this struggle binds the workers of Turkey and Greece in their fight for a socialist world without capitalists, without generals, without bureaucrats..

For permanent revolution against the permanent war fuelled by imperialism!

Out with US, EU, and NATO imperialism and dismantlement of their military bases in Greece and Turkey!

Withdraw of all foreign troops (Turkish, Greek, British, United Nations)  and dismantlement of the imperialist bases  from Cyprus! No partition under an imperialist imposed settlement, for a united, independent, socialist Republic of Cyprus with equal rights of its Greek and Turkish citizens!

For a Balkan Socialist Federation of free and independent peoples! For the United Socialist States of Europe!

EEK and DIP are fighting to form a world party of the working class, to re-found the Fourth International, to march forward to this end. We appeal to the working class of the two countries to join hands against the common enemy, capitalism!

It is the capitalists who must pay for their own crisis!

Workers’ power with a socialist program to solve the crisis is the only solution!

May 12, 2010

More than 300 thousand people demonstrated in Athens in the day of the General Strike in one of the biggest demonstrations ever seen in the Greek capital, comparable only with the mobilizations immediately after the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1974. Despite the divisions within the workers’ movement- the GSEE and ADEDY( the national  trade union federations in the private and public sectors,  controlled by a PASOK majority) had called for a rally in Alexandras Avenue, the PAME, the Communist Party trade union faction has called for a rally in Syntagma Square, and the extra-parliamentary left and the anarchists in front of the Polytechnic- all the streets and public space from Syntagma Square  to Omonia Square  and up to Alexandras Avenue were packed by masses of people, organized and non organized.

When the PAME gathering was ended and the KKE (CP) followers started to disperse, while the other contingents from the Polytechnic had not even started their own march, thousands of non organized, angry people tried to invade and occupy the Parliament shouting “Liars! Thieves! We will not pay for your thefts!” The riot police attacked the crowd. Within the parliament, which was in session, the leader of the far right party Karatzaferis falsely accused the Communist Party for the attack on parliament. The KKE leadership replied by accusing him as agent provocateur, but it denounced also the attempt of the people to occupy the Parliament as “a provocation”.

The demonstration had started to turn into a popular rebellion that the riot police had enormous difficulties to control, despite its brutality and the tons of tear gas thrown against the demonstrators. The specter of the December 2008 revolt, haunting the bourgeoisie the last two years, has returned.

Unfortunately a tragic incident, the death of three employees trapped in a bank put on fire by Molotov cocktails, gave the opportunity to the government, the State repression forces, and all bourgeois parties to use it to slander and repel the mass movement.

Responsible for these deaths as  well as for the savagery of the riot police against the demonstrators( including the brutal attacks on the strong contingent of EEK, a “usual target” of police aggression) are the PASOK government, the IMF and the EU, the police and army of big capital.

Powerful demonstrations took place also in Thessalonica, and all major cites of the country.

No propaganda tricks of the capitalists and their mass media can stop the growing popular anger fed by an unprecedented crisis, a systemic bankruptcy that the capitalist want to make us, the working and unemployed people, to pay for them.

We will not pay for the capitalist thieves! Repudiation of the debt to the international brigands! Out with the IMF, the European Union of big capital and their PASOK government of lackeys! For an indefinite General Strike to open the road for workers’ power and Socialism!

We call the entire international and European working class to join us in solidarity in our common struggle. For an international socialist way out from the bankruptcy of the capitalist system threatening to bury us under its ruins!

Savas Michael, 5/5/10

Kuva 1

Kuva 2

Kuva 3

Kuva 4

Despite the divisions within the workers’ movement in Greece (in Athens 5 different rallies and marches were called by different trade unions, left organizations and the anarchists…) tens of thousands turn to the streets in Mayday 2010 in a powerful demonstration of popular anger for the IMF/EU/ PASOK government’s draconian measures of austerity( in the picture, from the demonstration in Athens, a part of the contingent of EEK; the second banner writes “Out with the IMF, the EU and the government of their lackeys- All the power to the workers!” ; the banner in front says “ Forward for the world socialist revolution!”). In Syntagma Square, in front of the Parliament, in front of the Athens University, and in Omonia square, the riot police attacked with chemical gas the demonstrators, particularly, from the contingents of class struggle trade unions, extra-parliamentary left( including EEK) and anarchists. Dozens of young people were arrested and savagely beaten. Popular anger was targeting bourgeois politicians and parliamentarians as during the revolt in Argentina in December 2001. The former Chairman of the Greek parliament Apostolos Kaklamanis (PASOK) was recognized by the crowd during the Athens Mayday demonstration, and he had to hide himself in the toilets of a coffee shop near by, and to remain there for some time until the riot police comes to “liberate” him from the people who were shouting “Liars! Thieves! Go home!”.

When the new package of anti-popular measures was announced by Papandreou, Sunday morning May the 2^nd, spontaneously many local demonstrations were formed in working class neighborhoods. As in the Parliament is discussed now a new bill of (anti) Education “reform”, in the spirit of  the IMF demolition of all social services, the teachers unions are in  a 3 days strike. On Monday, May the 3^rd, during the broadcasted News of 21.00 pm in the State TV Channel, a group of radical teachers working under conditions of “flexibility of labor” (which means that they will be fired soon) invaded the studio and read their message to the Greek people,  denouncing the destruction of education by the IMF/EU, and calling also for the General Strike of May the 5^th. The previous time that such an invasion of the State TV Channel took place was during the December 2008 youth revolt.

ADEDY, the National Federation of Public Employees, has called for a 48 hours strike on May 4^th and 5^th. Wednesday, May the 5^th, a one day General Strike is called again by GSEE (Co-federation of Labor) in the private sector and ADEDY in the public sector. The hospital doctors union has a two days strike this week, and the local government workers an indefinite strike.  The trade union bureaucracy is terrified and tries desperately to control the situation, which tends to become uncontrollable.

Even the officers of the Army, Navy and Air-force have organized their own demonstration against the cuts in their salaries; but in their ranks   members of the fascist organizations entered turning the event into a nasty fascist gathering that was quickly dissolved.

The crisis within the discredited bourgeois political system and the State deepens. Some sections of the ruling class are pushing for the formation of a “national government” declaring a State of Emergency and “freezing” the Constitution articles on the right for strikes and rallies…. But this is easier to say than to do it; an attempt by the Papandreou government to call today a “national emergency meeting” of all parliamentary party leaders under the auspices of the President of the Republic has collapsed. Not only the parties of the left but even the Right and the far right that previously supported the austerity program to “save the fatherland” have now to retreat and denounce the government, out of fear of the angry masses.

Deep divisions exist within the ruling class first on the question how to repel a social explosion, and secondly how to deal with the debt, the bankruptcy of the Greek economy itself. The “rescue package” of 110 billions euros for three years has as aim only to save the banks of France, Germany etc, holding a big portion of Greek debt, and to prevent the contagion to other Euro-zone countries. But signs of contagion already exist in Portugal, and above all Spain, while Italy is not far behind in the list of “weak links”. Some circles of the ruling classes both in Greece and in Europe find a “restructuring” of the gigantic Greek debt, a polite expression for the “d” word (default), inescapable. In the left there is a lot of confusion: some are speaking for “re-negotiation of the debt”( SYRIZA and the Maoist KOE); the KKE( Communist Party) ignores the issue leaving it for the day in the distant future when an ‘actually existing Socialism” establishes itself in Greece; some organizations speak about a repudiation of the foreign debt in the way that Correa in Ecuador did, and others( the USFI  section OKDE-Spartakos)  preach to solve the problem in the way that  Kirchner in Argentina did!! Our Party EEK calls for the cancellation of the debt to the international usurers, nationalization of all banks and a re-organization of all social relations on new, socialist bases under a workers power.

The Greek workers, after an initial shock, start now to mobilize against the brigands of capitalism, and their policemen, the IMF, the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the Greek PASOK government. It is important to note that mobilizations of solidarity to the Greek working class take place these days throughout Europe, from Berlin to Lisbon.

In this 140^th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, we live the birthpangs of a new stage of the European social revolution!

Savas Michael, May 3^rd 2010

]]> http://mtl-fi.org/2010/05/05/greece-in-bankruptcy-2/feed/ 0 http://mtl-fi.org/2010/04/28/greece-in-bankruptcy-a-new-stage-of-class-struggle/ http://mtl-fi.org/2010/04/28/greece-in-bankruptcy-a-new-stage-of-class-struggle/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:02:25 +0000 MTL http://mtl-fi.org/?p=381 Traumatic memories of History never die.

On April 23, 1941, the Greek government of Tsolakoglou had surrendered the country to the German Occupation Army and transformed itself into the first “government” of Nazi collaborators.

On April 23, 2010, the Greek government of Papandreou officially activated the so-called “rescue mechanism” for a bailout to avoid an official default, agreed with the European Union dominated by Germany, surrendering the country to the grips of the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF.

Many Greeks, including the Press, particularly of the Left, draw the parallel between the two surrenders.

It is the fist time that a Greek government calls the IMF to intervene in its debt crisis, and it is the first time that the Washington based IMF is called to intervene in a country member of the Eurozone.

While the “rescue” operation can not stop the State bankruptcy of Greece, it will produce a real social catastrophe. Even the mainstream Press writes that what happened in Latvia after the IMF intervention is nothing in comparison to what would take place in Greece.

Apart the austerity measures already decided by the government in its “Stability and Growth Program” of March the 3rd, 2010, the IMF demands new draconian attacks on workers both in the public and private sectors: more pay cuts on wages and pensions, mass sackings above any limit established so far by labor legislation,, abolition of collective contract bargaining between trade unions and bosses, destruction of what remains of Health and Education services, destruction of the pension rights system.

The announcement for the activation of the EU/IMF “rescue” operation was made by Prime Minister George Papandreou from Kastelorizo, a tiny rocky island in the most remote southeastern corner of Greece, producing actually a theatrical effect of farce in the tragedy for millions of people. And the people, obviously, became furious.

In the same evening of Friday, April 23, a few hours after the Kastelorizo announcement, thousands of workers and youth spontaneously filled the streets of the center of Athens and marched towards the headquarters of the European Union to be repelled by riot police and mass use of chemical gas.

On April 27, again thousands of people demonstrated in protest in the streets of Athens and other cities called by class struggle unions and the ADEDY (National Federation of Public Employees). The KKE (Communist Party of Greece) trade union faction PAME organized its own separate rallies and other activities, as usual.

The coming Mayday rallies and demonstrations all over the country will be the next important step as well as another 24 hours General Strike already called for May the 5th. In that General Strike participates even the GSEE (General Confederation of Labor) controlled by a PASOK bureaucratic clique with the collaboration of the right wing and the complicity of bureaucrats of Synaspismos (former “euro-communists”).

Class collaboration exposes the bureaucrats as open agents and policemen of capitalism within the workers’ movement. The Chairman of GSEE, Giannis Panagopoulos, a leading member of PASOK, met with the troika of the IMF/ECB/EU Commission supervisors of the Greek economy despite the opposite decision taken even by the other members of the GSEE leadership… Thus it is not a surprise that a few weeks ago Panagopoulos was physically attacked in front of the parliament by an angry crowd of demonstrators.

The crisis affects the entire bourgeois political system. The previous right wing government party Nea Demokratia(New Democracy) is considered as directly guilty for the State bankruptcy, massive corruption and “creative accounting” of public finance statistics. The PASOK government looses its legitimacy not only because of the rejection of its fraudulent pre-electoral promises and because of its own economic sins when it was in power for two decades but first of all for its current anti-popular policies and its complicity with the IMF/EU barbaric deflationist offensive. Internally, splits are proliferating in PASOK and their only unifying force is participation in the benefits of bourgeois government power.

As both bourgeois parties that traditionally govern Greece are discredited, it becomes popular among the workers and other popular strata the slogan well known from Argentina in 2001 “que se vayan todos”- “all have to go”. The bourgeoisie worries very much and among ruling circles are discussed alternative scenarios for an emergency “national unity government” either combining PASOK and Nea Demokratia or a “government of technocrats”.

The official Left proves to be far behind the demands of the historical moment. The KKE from the one side uses a left wing rhetoric up to the point to raise the possibility and necessity for a struggle for a “popular- workers power” and from the other side limits its action to controlled protests on a reformist program, exclusively of its supporters, rejecting any idea of united front or united action with other forces of the left. SYRIZA, the coalition of Synaspismos with some far left groups is in a deep internal crisis and fragmentation that paralyze it and make its political influence to drop.

In the radical left, the situation is no better. ANTARSYA, a front of a number of groups of the extra-parliamentary left is active in the mobilizations but with a completely centrist, confused perspective making some participants in that front to criticize the KKE from the…right, blaming it for “ultra-leftism”(!) by raising the dilemma “bourgeois or workers power”.

Our Party, the EEK, is active in all mobilizations throughout the country. It fights for an indefinite General Strike to defeat the EU/IMF program, and to overthrow by mass action the PASOK/EU/IMF government opening the road for workers power and a socialist way out from the crisis through the repudiation of the external debt to the international usurers and speculators, and a re-organization of all social relations on a socialist basis: nationalization of the banks and all strategic sectors of national economy under workers control, a break with the imperialist EU and the European Monetary Union, a fight to extend the revolutionary “contagion” all over Europe, from the South to the North, for a Socialist United States of Europe.

From many sides, particularly among forces who had participated in the December 2008 revolt, the call is raised for Committees of Action and for a rank and file self-organization against the GSEE /ADEDY trade union bureaucracy. Such Committees and Initiatives of Struggle already are emerging in various areas.

The capitalist State tries to prevent the growing threat of a popular revolt by the usual means: building up of repression in the name of combating “terrorism”. A number of arrests of “usual suspects” from the anarchist milieu were over-publicized by the Police and the mass media as the dismantling of the “Revolutionary Struggle” group that had in the past, among other operations, attacked with a rocket the US Embassy in Athens. The police-orchestrated anti-terrorist hysteria campaign by the mass media misfired; the majority of the people are convinced that the “antiterrorist” offensive by the State is just a diversion to cover up the role of the real terrorists of the finance capital, the IMF and the EU. The real threat for the rulers is mass revolt by the ruled, not minority violent actions.

Greece is in transition from the December revolt of the youth to a Spring of mass workers revolts.

Savas Michael, 28/4/10

A Greek tragedy? “All the world’s a stage”

After the October 4, 2009 parliamentary elections in Greece, it was publicly admitted the farce of the “creative accounting of the Greek statistics” and revealed the fiscal tragedy of the country crashed by the twin unsustainable burden of debt and deficit. The impeding catastrophe was described by Giorgos Papakonstantinou, the finance minister of the newly elected Papandreou government, by the metaphor of the legendary “Titanic” sailing in a fatal collision course towards the iceberg.

But is the ship in that metaphor, representing Greece – or, rather, the entire system of globalized capitalism? Or, looking from another vantage point, isn’t Greece just the most visible part of the hidden gigantic iceberg responsible for a generalized shipwreck of capitalism sinking now in an ocean of debts?

The implosion of the US sub-prime mortgage market triggered, in summer 2007, the eruption of an unprecedented world crisis and credit crunch that took dramatic dimensions with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the meltdown of the entire global financial system, and the plunging of the world economy into a global Great Recession. It followed a State intervention in all the main capitalist countries, in 2008-2009, to halt the fall into the abyss. But, in turn, the ballooning of the State deficits and sovereign debts opened a new phase in the deepening crisis. At the end of 2009, Dubai was the first symptom of a globally propagated disease. Shortly it has been followed and superseded coming into the center in the world stage by what it has been called the “Greek tragedy”, the impending default of over-indebted Greece.

Commenting on the case of Greece, board members at large western banks rightly predicted that “after two years of worrying about mortgage and corporate risk, sovereign risk is going to be the big debate for 2010- both for banks, and the wider investment community”.

Sovereign debt was normally considered as risk –free. “It is the touchstone by which other riskier financial assets are priced”, David Roche and Bob McKee write. “A repricing of sovereign debt as dangerous debt would be an earthquake for financial markets. It would blow a hole in the balance sheets of previously safe financial institutions. That would be a new chapter in the credit crisis.” This new chapter is a logical progression in the current world crisis, according to these authors, and it has been already opened. The manifestation of a series of sovereign debt defaults as “black holes” in the space of globalized capitalist relations is threatening the entire system.

Sovereign debt in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries has, after 2007, exploded by nearly 70 per cent from 44 per cent of GDP in 2006 to 71 per cent. The critical point for sovereign debt, according to studies by the IMF and by Reinhart and Rogoff, is in the area of 60-90 per cent of GDP. Sovereign debt in the US, the UK, and the Euro-zone has already risen far beyond, and in Japan is more than twice that level.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, has warned that public debt in the advanced economies will rise to about 110 per cent of the GDP in 2014. He called that “a tremendous challenge” and he predicted that “for the next decade or two, cyclical upswings should be used to reduce public debt than finance expenditures or tax cuts”.

The Greek case has to be situated in this global, peculiar and complex framework of a world capitalist bankruptcy. “Greece”, Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, writes, “is part of a wider, and historically unfamiliar phenomenon-that of a simultaneous and large disruption to the balance sheet of many industrial countries. Tighten your seat belts.”

Warnings for the global implications of a fiscal tragedy not to be limited to Greece nor to Southern Europe are issued by the neo-liberal Niall Ferguson as well, who sees a Greek crisis coming to America itself: “It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies [...] it is a fiscal crisis of the western world.”

For the unfolding Greek tragedy “All the world’s a stage”. And all the players, all conflicting social forces, classes, and States are acting and clashing in “this wide and universal theatre”.

Capitalist globalization in crisis

The danger of a default of a Greek economy representing only 3 per cent of the European GDP never could reach such importance without a danger of a destructive “contagion” not solely to the peripheral countries of the Eurozone but to the hard core of the European Union itself, and even beyond it, affecting all the lenders of Greece, first of all the French, Swiss, and German banks.

The centrality of the “Greek question” would be inconceivable without the high degree of interconnectedness of all parts of the world economy reached by the capitalist globalization of the last three decades, including the contradictory process of European capitalist integration, advanced particularly by the Maastricht Treaty after the demise of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the so-called “actually existing Socialism” in Eastern Europe.

Globalization and European economic and monetary unification under capitalist conditions do not abolish unevenness of social economic development in different countries; on the contrary exacerbate it, strengthening all centrifugal forces. With the post 2007 implosion of global finance capital, unbalances and contradictions emerged violently not between an “austere”, “disciplined” Germany accumulating surpluses at the center and a “profligate” peripheral Greece ridden by deficits, debts and corruption, nor solely between the strong European North and the weak Mediterranean South of the arrogantly denigrated “PIGS” (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) but in the German-French central axis itself of the Maastricht project and of the European Monetary Union. 20 years after its re-unification, and following an austerity straitjacket imposed for decades to the German workers, thanks to Schröder and Social Democratic bureaucracy, industrial Germany is a major export country, second to China globally, confronted to a declining, des-industrializing as most other European countries, parasitic French capitalism. The specter of a default in a country-member of the Eurozone like Greece threatening a devastating contagion in other EU countries put the first major danger to the existence of the EMU, and a deadly challenge to the entire European imperialist project of integration of the Continent.

Commenting on the rising sharp antagonisms, tensions, and hollow compromises among the major countries of the EU core manifested before, during and after the Summit on March 25, 2010 in relation to a “rescue package”, a bail-out urgently needed to prevent an official declaration of a Greek default, George Soros rightly warned that the EU is “at the brink of disintegration”.

This process has not stopped by the shaky and vague compromise in the March 25, 2010 EU Summit for a “rescue mechanism” including the crucial role of the IMF to avoid a Greek default – a decision which do not halted but exacerbated the crisis raising  the spreads of the Greek State bonds  and the CDS’ to astronomic heights. Even the attempted concretization of that vague “mechanism” by a EU promise of 30 billion euros as aid of last resort at the usurer’s rate of 5 per cent interest, in the tele-conference of the EU finance ministers on April 11, 2010 could not solve the solvency problem of the Greek economy nor to overcome the historic impasse facing the EU. On April 15, the Greek government started the formal procedures to activate the process of a bail-out, which involves new draconian austerity” measures demanded by the IMF.

The official call to the US-led IMF to participate in a rescue operation in Europe involving this time not Latvia or Hungary but a serious crisis internal to the Eurozone itself demonstrates not simply the narrow mind of Chancellor Angela Merkel but the impotence of European imperialism to challenge the world hegemony of its transatlantic antagonist, US imperialism, even if the later is in advanced decline and crisis.

The huge obstacle for a bail out of a Eurozone member like Greece reflects the absence of a common fiscal policy, which is possible only through a political unification. The historical verdict is clear: throughout a century, the European ruling classes failed to unify the Continent under their iron heel despite the barbarism of two world wars, a Cold War and more than 50 years of efforts to establish a common economic and monetary space. The historical task of European unification can be fulfilled only by the European working class by revolutionary means in a United Socialist States of Europe.

It is the crisis of finance capital globalization that erupted in 2007, a global crisis having as its center the United States that brought forward all the internal contradictions and weaknesses of European capitalism.

At the same time, it demonstrated the failure of three decades of finance capital global expansion and of the so-called neo-liberal strategy to give a sustainable solution to the tremendous crisis of overproduction of capital produced by the “Thirty Glorious Years” of post war capitalist development in the Keynesian framework of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. It is this crisis of capital over-accumulation in the productive sphere, and the law of the falling rate of profit, the “Nemesis” of capital, the driving force both for the expansion of finance capital as well as for its current implosion-

Keynesianism and anti-Keynesian neo-liberalism, the two economic strategies developed by advanced imperialist capitalism to confront its systemic contradictions and historic decline as a mode of production, have failed. The crisis of overproduction of capital prevents a return to the Keynesianism of the post war period because it will intensify the falling rate of profit and it will fuel inflationary pressure. From the other side, the globalization of finance capital and its policy, “neo-liberalism”, led to the worst crisis in the history of capitalism; its uncontrolled continuation of bubble creation will produce more uncontrolled catastrophes of fictitious capital deepening the world depression. This strategic impasse opens a protracted period of convulsions and disruption of all social and international relations where the questions both of imperialist wars and civil wars, all kinds of revolts, social and anti-imperialist revolutions are on the agenda.

The nature of our epoch of capitalist decline as an epoch of transition to world communism comes forward negating all the bourgeois illusions for an “end of communism” prematurely celebrated in 1989-91. The diagnosis and prognosis made by Karl Marx in the Grundrisse and in Capital are historically vindicated. The “universalizing tendency of capital”, developed to its extremes in the epoch of imperialism, particularly in the last decades of finance capital globalization, drives it to its dissolution, “ finally to its violent overthrow”  and transition to a new mode of production in a classless society : “this[universalizing] tendency- which capital possesses, but which at the same time, since capital is a limited form of production, contradicts it and hence drive it towards dissolution-distinguishes capital from earlier modes of production, and at the same time contains this element, that capital is posited as a  mere point of transition ”.

The current world systemic crisis not solely accelerates all processes of dissolution (mass destruction of surplus capital, mass chronic unemployment and misery); it drives the transition as well beyond capital.

The Greek December: a message from the future

Prominent leaders of international capitalist institutions or of leading EU countries, like IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and French President Nicolas Sarkozy rightly characterized the popular revolt led by the youth in Greece in December 2008, following the murder by police of a 15 years old schoolboy, as the first political explosion of the current world economic crisis.

The December revolt came indeed in the aftermath of the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, the meltdown of the international financial system and the panic produced by it. All the class conscious sections of the capitalists all over the world clearly saw in the events in Greece a message from the near future of world capitalism for social and political upheavals to come.

Comparisons were and still are made between the Greek revolt in December 2008 and the Argentinazo, the mass revolt in Argentina in December 2001 following the default of that Latin-American country. There are obviously similarities between the two popular revolts but more instructive are the differences.
In Argentina, the default preceded the revolt; from the other side, the Greek revolt was the first manifestation of a deep, on-going crisis, which will bring the over0-indebtedcountry in 2009-10 in a dramatic situation of social economic catastrophe and default.

Differences do not stop here. Argentina’s default in 2001, the bankruptcy of a country considered until then as the “success story” of neo-liberalism and “the jewel in the crown” of IMF, was indeed, in a sense, an announcement that the period of finance globalization and neo-liberalism has exhausted its dynamic- a fact that dominates reality after the 2007-2008 meltdown of the world financial system. But Argentina’s default had come at the completion of a full circle and in the opening of a new one.

It was the culmination of an international financial hurricane that started with the crash in Asia in 1997, and spiraled internationally, with Russia’s default in 1998, the Long Term Capital Management collapse, the bursting of the bubble of the US “dot.com” economy and recession in 2000-2001, the Enron debacle, the crises in Turkey and Brazil.

The Argentine default triggered the popular revolt. In Greece, the revolt foreshadowed the default to come.  But the global economic environment has completely and dramatically changed between the two revolts.

Immediately after the Argentinazo, more precisely during the period 2002-2007, a weak world economic recovery followed. The financial maelstrom was contained by means applied also in previous major shocks and crashes during the decades of finance globalization (for ex. after the 1987 international crash). Interest rates everywhere, following the leadership of the US Federal Reserve, were kept extremely low providing cheap access to liquidity lifelines. Finance capital turned massively to all kinds of exotic financial instruments-later to be proved to be “toxic”, explosive mines hidden everywhere in the globalized financial system. Derivatives permitted an extension of credit on a colossal scale as banks could “securitize” their loans.  Combined to this world “bubble” economy, growth of military expenditures linked to the imperialist “war on terror”, particularly the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, contributed to a short-lived recovery on a world scale.

The backbone of that weak recovery of the world capitalist economy was the US-China axis. The huge deficits of the strongest and more over-indebted capitalist power in the world were financed thanks to the enormous reserves that the export-led hybrid economy of China accumulates, after its turn to capitalist restoration. It could not be more evocative image of the decline and parasitism of an economy representing the highest point of world capitalist development…

Professor Robert Skidelsky summarizes the web of Sino-American relations as follows: “Instead of having to borrow from the American public to finance its fiscal deficit, the US government could borrow Chinese savings by issuing Treasury bonds that were bought by the Chinese. Therefore federal deficits did not raise the cost of domestic borrowing, which they would have done had the government had to borrow American savings rather than selling debt to China. […] With Chinese savings available, the US government could run a deficit without crowding out private spending. This allowed the Fed to establish a  much lower funds rate- the rate at which banks borrow from the Fed and one another- than it would otherwise have been able to do, helped in this by the downward pressure on prices exerted by the import of cheap Chinese goods produced by cheap Chinese labor. Cheap money, in turn, enabled banks to expand their deposits and their loans to customers more than they could otherwise do. In short, it was via their impact on the financing of the federal deficit that Chinese savings made it possible for the US consumer to go on a spending spree. ” […] Capital over-accumulation in the productive sphere, and the fall of profitability, oriented the spending into speculative activities. Skidelsky continues: “The lack of opportunities for profitable investment determined the pattern of American spending. Americans borrowed not to invest in new machines but to speculate in houses and mergers and acquisitions. The resulting growth in paper wealth triggered a consumption boom. The situation was unsustainable because no new resources were being created with which to pay back either domestic or foreign borrowing”. The immense pyramid of paper wealth could not but to collapse, starting from the sub-prime mortgage market in 2007 and leading to the world financial meltdown and recession.

It is this entirely new world situation, recognized even by the capitalists as the worst in the history of their system that produced the Greek December and initiated a qualitatively new period of social conflicts and political explosions not solely in Greece but also in Europe and internationally. There cannot be a return to the status quo ante. The massive State intervention in 2008-2009 was not limited to monetary policies, combining extremely low interest rates with enormous rescue packages, superseding in scale everything experienced in the past, after the 1987 or the 1997 international crashes. The fact that this kind of unprecedented intervention led at the end of 2009 to a non-sustainable gigantic public debt burden all over the capitalist world indicates the inadequacy of the old means to solve the current historical problem of world capitalism.

Greece, thus, is not an exception but a microcosm condensing in a peculiar, original way the main characteristics of the world process.

Why Greece?

Greece is considered as the weakest link in the international chain of the EU member states, the weakest even amidst the despised by the European center “PIGS” of the European periphery. The empirical data come to corroborate this observation: the combination of a staggering deficit of 12.7 per cent of the GDP for 2009 and of an enormous public debt of 113 per cent of GDP (about 300 billion euros) to be raised to 120.8 per cent in 2010, according to the forecast of Bank of Greece, make Greece more vulnerable than any other country of the European Union.

But empirical comparisons are not sufficient and do not reveal by themselves the structural-historical reasons that made Greece the “privileged” locus of the first political explosion of the current world economic crisis and of an impeding default threatening the entire Eurozone.

The accession to the European  capitalist integration process, and above all the integration ton the European Monetary Union in 1999 produced the appearance, accepted by the global  markets, that Greece made its exit from the ranks of “emerging countries” to join the “advanced economies”, in OECD language. Becoming a pole of attraction of surplus financial capital after the 1997 Asian Crash because of the creditworthiness given by its integration to the Eurozone, the Greek bourgeoisie attempted to realize its old ambition to transform itself into the regional hegemonic power by investing massively and controlling the banking system of the Balkans, and extending its economic influence in this vital geopolitical area, in the soft underbelly of Russia and in the front door of the Middle East.

Ten years after the introduction of the euro, the EMU and the EU are confronted now with their worst crisis and the danger of dissolution while Greece is under the shadow of a State bankruptcy. The centrifugal forces of capitalist integration intensified combined development but the centripetal forces of its historically established inner contradictions deepened uneven development as well. The moment of truth came with the crisis: misleading appearances are shattered when essential contradictions explode.

“Greek capitalism was born already old”, as Pantelis Pouliopoulos, the founder of Greek Trotskyism rightly has written. The belated historical development of bourgeois Greece, with absence of a strong industrial base and an over-extended, bureaucratic public sector supervising and giving fiscal and financial support to local capital, determined a debt-led growth of the economy that made it dependent from and extremely sensitive to the flows of foreign capital and of world trends in capitalism, particularly in its imperialist stage.

Foreign loans and inroads by the international financial capital, to which   Greek capital linked its own accumulation and survival, played and still play a determining role in the course of the economic and political history of modern Greece.

In one sense, the history of Greek capitalism is the history of its bankruptcies.  These bankruptcies, in turn, coincide with the crisis moments and Great Depressions in the history of world capitalism: the Great Depression of 1873-1896 led to the State bankruptcy of Greece in 1893; the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s led to the 1932 Greek default; the current crisis at the end of the fist decade of the 21st century put again on the agenda a third State bankruptcy of the country. Each of these bankruptcies is connected with major political upheavals and new chapters in the history of class struggle.

To understand the nature of the debt crisis behind each of these State bankruptcies it is needed to situate it in the proper historical framework as it’s is shaped by social struggle.

The historical background of the current impeding default involves the development of the class struggle, after the betrayed by Stalinism and defeated by imperialism Greek revolution of 1941-49, including, as a major milestone, the fall of the CIA imposed anti-communist military dictatorship of 1967-74 and its implications. The youth uprising in Polytechnic University in Athens in 1973, precipitating a crisis that the military junta could not, finally, survive, was, as a matter of fact, the last battle of the previous civil war putting an end to the post-civil war authoritarian regimes.

The inglorious collapse of the dictatorship in 1974 revealed a vacuum of power, which together with the political radicalization of the people produced the greatest threat to the power of the ruling class from the time of the civil war. To defuse the revolutionary potential, channeling it into a revived bourgeois parliamentary system, it was necessary to introduce political and economic concessions to the workers, peasant, and urban petty bourgeois strata.

At the same years when  the post war Keynesian edifice  was dismantled all over the capitalist world  after the collapse of the Bretton Woods Settlement in 1971( the collapse of the Greek military dictatorship itself was part of the international upheaval and revolutionary tide engulfing the entire planet from the late ’60s to the mid ’70s), in Greece, a reverse process took place:  immediately after the fall of the junta and particularly  after the 1981 ascent to power of the populist PASOK of Andreas Papandreou, were introduced Keynesian type of measures (nationalizations, growth of the State sector enterprises, raise of the popular income etc.) in order to check the re-affirmed militancy of the working class and diffuse a potentially revolutionary political crisis.

These measures were taken on the basis of a growing foreign debt. Greece’s over-indebtedness is due not solely to the corruption of its ruling class and of its politicians but also to their deep fear for the post-1974 popular pressures from below.

Greece was not immune to its global environment sinking into a crisis of overproduction of capital. The industrialization period of 1963-1973, due in a great measure to the penetration of multinational companies taking advantage of the absence of trade union activity under the military regime, has been halted and a so-called industrial “investors strike” followed. Industrial investment remained weak. Traditionally competitiveness of Greek products was based on high tariff protection and low relative labor costs.  Both factors were eroded from the mid-seventies; labor costs increased and tariff protection has been phased out after the 1981 entry in the EEC. “Furthermore”, Takis Fotopoulos remarks “the erosion of the Greek comparative advantage in terms of labor costs and the failure of free-market economic restructuring to change the export pattern implied a very weak response of exports to the continuous expansion of imports”.

The traditional agricultural sector based on small land property, despite the inflow of European subsidies, was drastically shrinking.  The agricultural population dramatically declined from 31 per cent of the active population in 1981 to 13 per cent in 2006.

As the productive tissue of the economy both in industry and agriculture was decomposing, the declining occupation found as a relative way out only to the over-grown services and public sectors. Clientele networks tied to corrupt political personnel of the parliamentary system and a State bureaucracy both intimately connected with foreign and local capital proliferated precipitating the decay of bourgeois parliamentary democracy restored in 1974.

Social inequalities in income distribution supersede by far the EU average, with the 20 per cent of the poorest receiving less than 7 per cent of income, while 20 per cent of the richest receive almost 42 per cent.

From the 1990s chronic unemployment was combined with the introduction of “flexibility” in labor relations, hitting particularly the younger generations. On the eve of the 2008 December youth revolt a quarter of the unemployed was youth, and one in two unemployed youth has a university degree.

Cheap labor by over-exploitation of foreign immigrants working under the most barbaric conditions became the basis for the preparations of Greek capitalism to join the EMU, as Yannis Papantoniou, then finance minister in the neo-liberal PASOK government of Costas Simitis, had cynically boasted.

The structural weaknesses of the Greek capitalist social economic formation, integrated now as a metropolitan knot in the plexus of globalized capitalist relations, were manifesting themselves into a growing deficit to be confronted by increasing foreign lending, and through the growing payments for debt servicing to a vicious circle of accumulation of debt.

Since the 1980s both the public debt and the external debt have increased three times, and according to the Deutsche Bank, the external debt today has reached the 150 per cent of GDP mark.

Finance globalization with the protracted over-extension of credit sustained the growing mountain of public and private debt –until its inescapable implosion after 2007.

Wither Greece?

From early 2010, a de facto bankrupt Greece has been reduced into an EU protectorate with its fiscal situation and economic policies put under the official “surveillance” of the EU Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. The government abdicates national economic sovereignty, and the country is reduced to the same quasi-semi-colonial position that it faced more a hundred years ago, in 1897, when, after the default and a disastrous Greek-Turkish war, an “International Economic Control” (DOE) of the foreign banks was imposed on Greece.

The introduction by the “Socialist” Papandreou government on March 3, 2010 of a misnamed “Stability and Growth Program” of drastic cuts of public social expenditures, wages and pensions, agreed with the EU to accomplish the impossible mission to cut the deficit from near 13 per cent to 3 per cent of GDP. This was solely the prelude of the drama, the entrance to “Wolfgang Schäuble’s torture chamber”, as aptly was called by Gideon Rachman referring to the name of the German finance minister. This austerity program was followed by an anti-popular tax “reform” benefiting only the richest sections as well as money laundering of all kinds of Mafiosi and crooks, a new neo-liberal counter-reform in Education, and at the end of April 2010 by a new legislation smashing all pension rights.

The EU led by Merkel’s –Schäuble’s Germany with the assistance and “technical know how“of the IMF are “turning the screw” on the Greek working class and popular masses. It is an attempt not only to face the danger of  Greece’s State bankruptcy and its implications for the Eurozone but also a barbaric social “experiment” using the Greek people as a guinea pig, a frightening example for the entire European working class.

The call to the IMF ands its active involvement in Greece means further “turnings of the screw”, new draconian cuts to impose the kind of IMF plans already applied, with disastrous results, in Hungary, Latvia and Romania. Dominique Strauss-Kahn prescribed a massive deflation of wages and prices for an indefinite period as a condition to a bail-out.

Apart the enormous social catastrophe and mass sufferings of the people, could this deflationary offensive against the workers provide any real solution to the systemic crisis both of Greece and of the Eurozone?

“A Greek bail-out at last but no real solution”, Wolfgang Münchau had remarked. “As a member of a large monetary union Greece can improve its competitiveness only through relative disinflation against the eurozone average, which in effect means through deflation. But as the French economist Jacques Delpla has pointed out, this will invariably produce a debt-deflation dynamic in the Greek private sector of the kind described by the economist Irving Fischer during the 1930s […] the really treacherous aspect about the Greek crisis is that the country’s liquidity position is better than its solvency position. Insolvency is a gradual, invisible process. The negative effects of debt-deflation dynamics have not yet begun, but will become inevitable as the Greek public and private sectors go through a simultaneous debt reduction process”.

The debt-deflation spiral will depress further the economy and depression will increase again the deficit needing to be covered by the accumulation of more debt.

Arguing about the inevitability of a Greek default, Münchau stresses: “It is hard enough to imagine how Greece can get out of a simultaneous debt and competitiveness crisis without falling into some vicious circle- debt deflation, for example or just extreme public hostility that will thwart the government’s reform efforts. But it is impossible, at last for me, to imagine a situation in which Greece can manage to extricate itself from appending catastrophe without some debt restructuring”.

It is noteworthy in this statement not solely the pessimistic, from a bourgeois standpoint, prediction of a debt-deflation vicious circle but also the fear for an “extreme public hostility”, in other words, an “extreme” workers’ resistance to a barbarism that is more than extreme!

Furthermore, it is not only Greece caught in this vicious circle but the Eurozone as a whole. The danger of contagion remains hovering, first of all, over Portugal (already pressurized by Brussels for a new “fiscal adjustment’), and Spain, the fourth largest economy in the Eurozone with an annual GDP of more than a trillion euros, and whose hypothetical bail-out cannot but explode the entire difficult and unstable compromise, up to now, within the Eurozone, between Germany and France.

Proposals are put forward for a way out for the EU from this vicious circle by the reformist European Left party and Synaspismos in Greece, a asking for a radical restructuring of the Stability Pact, and of the EMU, putting the ECB under the “democratic” (?) control of the European Parliament, asking from the ECB for cheap credit to countries on the brink of default, and form the EU amore re-distributive budget. Apart from revolutionary Marxists, Costas Lapavitsas and his research team have showed the futility of such wishful thinking for a “good euro”, for “a reformed EMU” in a ‘reformed EU’. Leaving aside the tremendous political obstacles, these reforms are also economically utopian as they do not resolve but exacerbate the contradiction between the euro as a simultaneously international and national currency and the fiscal independence of the States-members of the Eurozone with final result the collapse of the EMU itself and the disintegration of the EU; last but not least, these reformist proposals are socially reactionary, misleading the workers’ movement into a blind alley, and tying its fate to the demands of a crumbling imperialist European Union of big capitalists.

It remains as an alternative solution, the exit from the Eurozone and from the EU. Lapavitsas makes the distinction between a “conservative” and a “progressive” exit, with the later necessarily connected with major transformations in the economy and society such as nationalizations of the banks, controls on capital outflows, nationalization of strategic sectors of the economy, a program of industrial revival, public works etc.

The terms of these measures are not clarified, and above all, the transformation of social economic relations seen by Lapavitsas et al. is separated form its central presupposition: a radical overthrow and transformation of existing class power relations in Greece, in Europe and internationally.

The Gordian knot of the debt and of debt servicing indeed has to be cut by class mass action, rejecting strangulation in the hands of the international usurers, of the EU/ECB and of the IMF policemen of finance capital. Exit from Schäuble’s torture chamber is a question of life or death.

A unilateral repudiation of the foreign debt to the international usurers, and a radical break from the EMU and the EU necessitate not solely a change in relations of distribution of social wealth but a radical break from the capitalist production relations, a re-organization of social relations on new, socialist bases; hence they raise the central question of a revolutionary confrontation with bourgeois rule and its State, the struggle for workers’ power,  and furthermore, the impulse to an international dynamics of extension these social revolutionary changes in Europe and world wide.

“Socialism in a single country” proved to be a tragedy that ended without a catharsis, ingloriously, at the hands of capitalist restoration. A repetition in today’s conditions of advanced interconnectedness of all parts of world economy, or reactionary nationalist dreams of autarky in “capitalism in a single country” could be only a short-lived tragicomedy.

The Greek tragedy –tragedy for the people, and a piñata of super-profits for financial predators- has as stage the entire world. The denouement will take place in this universal theater, where the Hubris of capital will be punished. The exit from the capitalist vicious circle of destruction cannot be but an exit from the system, a socialist revolution on an international scale, towards a new world to come, Communism without borders, bosses or bureaucrats. This is not the best alternative; it is the only solution.

April 15, 2010

[1] Financial Times, December 21, 2009

[2] David Roche and Bob McKee “ Watch out for sovereign debt black holes” Financial Times March 31, 2010

[3] Op. cit.

[4] “IMF warns high public debt ‘tremendous’ challenge” Reuters, April 10, 2010.

[5] Mohamed El-Erian, “Why the reek rescue isn’t going to plan”, Financial Times April 7, 2010

[6] Niall Ferguson, “A Greek crisis is coming to America”, Financial Times February 10, 2010.

[7] William Shakespeare, As you Like it, Act 2, Scene 7

[8] Jorge Altamira,  Una piñata que no es sólo griega, En Defensa del Marxismo  No 37, Buenos Aires, 5-3-2010

[9] Gillian Tent and Chris Giles, “Soros warns Europe of disintegration”, Financial Times April 11, 2010

[10] Kerin Hope, “ Athens admits defeat in crisis”, Financial Times April 15, 2010

[11] See George Economakis, Alexis Anastasiadis and Maria Markaki, US economic performance from 1929 to 2008 in terms of the Marxian theory of crises, with some notes on recent financial crisis, Critique (under press).

[12] Marx, Grundrisse-Introduction to the Critique of Political economy, translation M. Nicolaus, Penguin 1973 p. 750

[13] Op. cit p. 540.

[14] See Le Monde, December 13, 2008

[15] See, Savas Michael-Matsas, The Greek Revolt, the World Crisis and Freedom of Expression Critique, vol.38 No 1 February 2010 pp.54-55

[16] Hillel Ticktin, Critique Notes, Critique vol.38,No3, December 2008 p.338

[17] Robert Skidelsky, The World Finance Crisis and the American Mission, The New York review of Books, vol. LVI, No12, July 16-August 12 2009, p.32

[18] David Oakley and Kerin Hope, “Greeks set ECB tone”, Financial Times November 23, 2009

[19] P. Pouliopoulos, Democratic or Socialist Revolution in Greece? [1934, in Greek] Difros 1963

[20] An overview of the role of foreign capital and foreign loans in Greece from formal independence to World War II is given by the communist leader Nicos Beloyannis                   (executed after the civil war by the bourgeois Plastiras government in 1952 under the orders of US imperialism) in his book written in prison The Foreign Capital in Greece [in Greek, republished by Agra Publications in 2010). Despite the distortions of an interpretative schema imposed by the Stalinized Comintern to the Communist party of Greece in 1934 presenting Greece dominated by a “bourgeois-feudal bloc in power” and facing tasks of an “unfulfilled bourgeois democratic revolution”, Beloyannis goes beyond this arbitrary pseudo- theoretical straightjacket and brings forward some essential features of the Greek bourgeois formation. The debates in the 1920s and 1930s on the nature of Greek society and the strategic tasks of the coming social revolution acquire a new actuality and need a re-working in the light of the current explosive developments

[21] Takis Fotopoulos, Economic restructuring and the debt problem: the Greek case, International Review of Applied Economies, Vol.6 No 1,1992 see www.inclusivedemocracy.org/fotopoulos/english/bravarious/re…

[22] Op.cit.

[23] Takis Fotopoulos, Greece: the implosion of the systemic crisis, Inclusive Democracy vol.5, No 4/vol.6, No 1( Autumn 2009/Winter 2010) in www.inclusive democracy.org/journal/vol5/no5_no4

[24] Op.cit. See also Wolfgang Münchau, “Greece can expect no gifts from Brussels”, The Financial Times November 30, 2009

[25] Jorge Altamira, “Grecia convertida en protectorado”, Prensa Obrera February 18, 2010

[26] Gideon Rachman, “Wolfgang Schäuble’s torture chamber”, Gideon Rachman’s Blog/FT.com, March 12, 2010.

[27] Wolfgang Münchau, “A Greek bail-out at last but no real solution”,  Financial Times April 11, 2010

[28] Wolfgang Münchau,  “Greece will default, but not this year”, Financial Times April 4, 2010

[29] Wolfgang Münchau, “A Greek bail-out at last but no real solution” op.cit.

[30] See C. Lapavitsas et al., Eurozone Crisis: Beggar Yourself and Thy neighbour, Studies of Research on Money and Finance (RMF), March 2010, www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/media/reports/eurocrisis/fullreport.pdf

“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

The timing of the struggle helped raise the solidarity action of the rest of the proletariat. For one thing, public employees (who are organised in union confederations of their own) had staged a sector-wide one-day strike at the end of November. Since public employees have no right to strike under Turkish legislation, the state tried to persecute some sectors, but especially state railroads employees started to fight back militantly in action that coincided with the beginning of the Tekel struggle. Other sectors of workers and public employees, especially firemen in Istanbul, also joined this new wave of militancy. Soon, unions and workers across the spectrum were displaying solidarity with the workers of Tekel. Even Türk-İş, whose leadership is divided between a strong right-wing faction and a minority soft left tendency, had to pay lip service to the heroic fight of the Tekel workers, declaring, but not consistently implementing, one-hour work stoppages every Friday.

The government’s intransigent attitude in the initial phase played into the hands of the Tekel workers. The ferocious attack by the police (using tear gas, pressured water and clubs) on the workers on the fourth day of the struggle created a backlash not only within the working class but also among the people at large. In the face of growing support for the workers, the government felt it had to make some concessions, but these were definitely of a token nature. The semi-Islamist (and entirely neo-liberal) AKP government feels it cannot yield to the demands of the Tekel workers simply because this will have repercussions in other sectors, such as sugar and energy, where privatisations are in the pipeline.

Workers revolt against the Türk-İş bureaucracy

The quasi-unanimity of the workers in the referendum gave a clear mandate to the union to step up the fight. Thus began the second stage of the struggle. The entire work force of twelve thousand was brought to Ankara along with their families and held overnight vigils throughout 72 hours, culminating in a demonstration organised by the Türk-İş confederation. Close to 100 thousand workers participated in the march and demonstration, the biggest such event since 1999. The crowd frequently chanted slogans that supported a general strike. The President of Türk-İş, a certain Mustafa Kumlu, catapulted into this position by the governing AKP, made an anodyne speech, saying nothing concrete about the way forward, simply lamenting the situation the entire working class finds itself in.

The indignation this created pushed the Tekel workers to mount on the stage built for the purpose of the demonstration. From that moment on, for close to an hour, there ensued a tug-of-war between the thousands of Tekel workers and the thousands of members of socialist groups, on the one hand, and union bureaucrats of different ranks, on the other. The workers repeated unceasingly a slogan that had originally borne the mark of the socialist left: “General strike, general resistance!” The bureaucrats, for their part, tried to bring the workers down from the podium and get them to disband and go home, alternatively cajoling and threatening them. Finally, a unionist from the Türk-İş leadership promised to take the demand for a general strike to leadership bodies, to which the crowd duly replied by another slogan: “Kumlu has to come and promise us a general strike!” This paralysed the bureaucrats. But in the end, a clever bureaucrat had the idea of threatening the workers with a police attack—after all the “official” demonstration was over and the police disposed of the legal right to disperse the crowd. Thus came to an end this unusual public revolt of the workers against the union bureaucracy. Whatever the outcome in the coming days, this single episode has placed the Tekel fight in the annals of class struggle in Turkey. This was the first time when workers openly revolted against the bureaucracy during mass action, which of course will send shivers through every bureaucrat in future actions of a similar dimension.

This revolt heartened workers in other sectors and widened the fissure within the confederation bureaucracy. Now, bureaucrats of all stripes are talking about a general strike. (It is perhaps in order to point out that general strikes are outlawed in Turkey, a country that has almost no established tradition of this kind of action. So a general strike is a much more explosive event in the Turkish context than in many other countries.) As of the 38th day of the struggle, Türk-İş has today come together with other workers’ and public employees’ unions to issue a warning to the government: Either do something by Tuesday the 26th or we will have to go on a “solidarity strike”.  It seems we are finally on a descending slope towards a general strike (by whatever name it is eventually called), a very radical move by Turkish standards.

Currently some 140 of the workers are on hunger strike, with thousands more wishing to join in but prevented from doing so by the unionists and sympathising doctors, who fear that, after close to 40 days of exhaustion in the freezing cold of Ankara, many a worker might already be in bad health.

DIP totally immersed in Tekel workers’ struggle

The Initiative for a Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP), Turkish section of the Coordination for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, has been part of the Tekel workers’ struggle at an ascending level. From day one, the Ankara organisation joined all the action undertaken by the workers themselves. Three bulletins were printed in the thousands and distributed among the workers. Comrades literally spent day and night with the workers. Given the limited resources of the Ankara organisation despite selfless efforts, teams were sent out to Ankara from other cities in the wake of the referendum, doubling the number of militants on the ground.
DIP participated in the demonstration in Ankara with militants and sympathisers from all over Turkey in a remarkably spirited and disciplined manner. Despite the modest size of its column, DIP played an important part in the tug-of-war between the workers and the bureaucrats: It was DIP that first launched the slogan “Kumlu has to come and promise us a general strike!”

It was also intellectuals sympathising with DIP who launched the “Intellectuals’ Platform for the Tekel Struggle”. The petition for the Platform was signed by close to 400 academics, writers etc. Our comrade Sungur Savran was invited on a national TV channel to talk about the Tekel struggle. Without mincing his words, Savran staged a frontal attack on the right-wing bureaucracy of Türk-İş, differentiated his position from those who simply work for a face-saving concession to Tekel workers by advocating the generalisation of the struggle to all sectors of the class and clearly defended a general strike.

Savran’s line was indeed representative of the audacious line the party has pursued from the very beginning. The editorial of our paper published during the first days of the struggle was titled: “Either with the AKP or the Tekel workers”. (This is a reference to the fact that Kumlu, the president of Türk-İş, is a protégé of the AKP.) The party then consistently made an intervention along two axes in all its bulletins and leaflets: The demand for a general strike and a recommendation to the workers to create a “Resistance Committee” made up of representatives democratically elected by each of the 43 workplaces, a recommendation that no other socialist party has put forward. (The importance of such a committee was, unfortunately, confirmed by what happened at the demonstration: Not wielding a centralised body, the workers had no authority to rely on. Hence, the most backward elements decided the outcome.) Not one single party has dared to name Kumlu by name and tried to push him into the corner by saying (as our latest leaflet has): “You’re either with the AKP government or with the Tekel workers”

The fourth dimension

Turkey has lately been shaken by powerful contradictions that have almost brought the country to the edge of the precipice. Three major contradictions tear the country apart. On the one hand, the ongoing struggle for the repartition of surplus-value between the two wings of the bourgeoisie, the dominant Westernist-secular wing and the ascending Islamist wing, has reached the proportions of a political civil war, bordering, in recent months, a military conflict on several occasions. On the other hand, the quarter-of-a-century old Kurdish war has now apparently entered a new stage. All throughout the years of guerrilla warfare waged by the PKK against the Turkish army, relative calm reigned within society itself. But now evidence mounts that there is a growing danger that Turkish chauvinism against the Kurds, fanned consciously by the state and all of the bourgeois political forces, may result in the lynching or wholesale massacre of Kurds, possibly leading on to ethnic civil war, this despite the so-called “Kurdish overture” of the government or perhaps because of its restricted nature. And in the background lurches the prospect of Turkey becoming more closely a part of the US war drive, be it in Afghanistan (where Turkey already has troops, but no combat mission), Iraq (where some of the former duties of the now withdrawing US troops may be turned over to Turkey), Iran (whose alleged nuclear armament efforts seriously disturb the secular Turkish army) or Georgia (in its conflict with Russia). This prospect has direct bearing on Turkish domestic politics and is conditioned by the other contradictions in its turn.

Under the stress of these three sets of contradictions, Turkey has become a powder keg. It is in this bleak context that the awakening militancy of the working class should be situated. We have been saying all along that it is a new class struggle front that alone will create the potential to resolve in a progressive direction the many contradictions that beset Turkey. This claim seems ripe for testing.

The most encouraging sign in the Tekel struggle is the fact that Turk and Kurd are struggling together in comradely fashion. For Tekel has factories both in the Turkish dominated Western part of the country and in the tobacco-rich Eastern part populated by the Kurds (properly speaking Turkish Kurdistan). At the beginning, the Turkish workers were as infested as the rest of the Turkish people with hostility against the Kurds. It was precisely for this reason that many leftists under the effect of identity politics originally kept their distance from the Tekel struggle. We unswervingly defended the idea that under the transformative impact of militant class struggle, the Tekel workers were bound to shed this attitude in favour of a “fraternity of peoples”, as the left in Turkey calls solidarity between Turks and Kurds. This is precisely what is slowly happening. An abundance of evidence gathered through the experience of DIP militants on the field clearly shows that the attitude of even the most right-wing Turks, including some who used to sympathise with the openly anti-Kurd fascist party, has changed radically. It is now commonplace to hear many a Turkish Tekel worker say, “Were it not for the Kurds, we couldn’t have come this far!”

The Tekel struggle also reorders society along class lines. Up until very recently, Turkish society (excluding the Kurds that is) was divided in its sympathy clearly between the two camps of the bourgeoisie. Now a distinct working class position is overtaking these two allegiances.

Turkey seems to be entering a new and promising stage. If the Tekel struggle can be generalised, and it now seems there are distinct possibilities for this, a very different conjuncture will be born. If, on the other hand, the bureaucracy betrays the Tekel workers into defeat, the working class as a whole will stand to lose from this.

__21 January 2010

There is no doubt that in the mobilization of thousands of youth and women, genuine demands for democratic freedoms against the ruling theocracy are expressed. But that does not mean that “The revolution has begun” as pompously Alan Woods, the ideological guru (after the death of Ted Grant) of the misnamed International Marxist Tendency has declared. Popular discontent against theocratic oppression is manipulated by a section of the bourgeoisie, including by a powerful wing of the theocratic regime itself, with the support of the imperialists.

The French NPA remains totally blind in front of this fact. In its Communiqué of June 16 declares its support to “all those who want to finish with the Islamic Republic”:

Le NPA dénonce la répression qui frappe les manifestants, exigent la libération de ceux qui ont été arrêtés et soutient toux ceux et toutes celles qui veulent en finir avec la République Islamique.

The repression launched by the theocratic regime has to be denounced and opposed. But that does not mean that we support ALL those without exception who want to finish with the Islamic Republic, because are included the liberal pro-imperialist forces and imperialism itself.

Behind Moussavi, the former prime minister of the Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq war who disappeared politically for two decades to re-appear now, stands, not only ayatollah Hatami, the former “reformist” right wing President but also one of the pillars of the theocratic regime, Hodjatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani, who amassed enormous fortunes from his position in power and push, together with  an  elite of nouveaux riches towards a liberalization of the economy and an accommodation with the US and the West. The Islamic regime is internally split and the world capitalist crisis deepens its internal divisions which are now exploding.

It is not by accident that the current Czech Presidency of the imperialist European Union, Germany, Britain and above all Sarkozy of France and the Zionist leader Ehud Barak came strongly in support of Moussavi. The US President Obama, for the moment, remains more restrained, despite the pressures by the right wing of the Democratic Party, the Republican neoconservatives and the Zionist lobby. For the most aggressive sectors of imperialism, the post-electoral upheaval in Iran, following the recent electoral victory of the pro-imperialist coalition in Lebanon, is a great opportunity for a pro-Western “regime change” in Teheran.

The populist wing of the Islamic regime around Ahmadinejad not only is totally unable to defeat the imperialist threat but, defending with its own reactionary means the capitalist order, theocratic obscurantism and oppression, it opens the gates to a complete liquidation of the anti-imperialist resistances in Iran and the Middle East generated by the 1979 Iranian revolution. The Iranian masses have to mobilize independently of the two wings of the regime, liberal and populist-obscurantist, and fight for democratic freedoms, for social justice and social emancipation of the Mustazafin(Destitute), against imperialism and capitalism, under the banner of the Fourth International and of the permanent revolution.

June 17, 2009

Savas Michael-Matsas