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

Unfortunately, social misery, polarization of inequalities, and national humiliation-not to mention the political blindness and electoralist complaisance of the reformist, Stalinist, and centrist Left- became also a fertile field  for far right nationalist demagogy leading to a spectacular growth not just of the far right “Independent Greeks”( a split from the ND) but above all of the openly neo-Nazi party of the “Golden Dawn”, which jumped from a few thousands votes in 2009 into nearly a half a million in 2012, entering for the first time in Parliament.

In general, apart from the electoral triumph of SYRIZA, there was a relative increase of the vote for most of the parties of the Left. The Stalinist KKE, although winning a few thousands more votes, lost its hegemonic primacy among the parties of the Left, and it has fallen from the third rank that traditionally it occupied among all the parliamentary parties to the fifth rank. The biggest losses for the KKE were in the proletarian areas in the Athens region and in Thessalonica.

First, the Stalinists paid the price for their crude sectarianism and vulgar hostility against every other left wing force and against every social movement and popular rebellion that they cannot put under their bureaucratic control (for ex. they have  denounced the December 2008 revolt as a…CIA conspiracy; they played the role of the police guarding the parliament from the popular anger in the October 2011 General Strike; they separated their forces from the major rally of a million people protesting against the second Memorandum in Syntagma Square in Athens, on February 12,  2012 etc.)

But there is another, very important reason for their defeat in relation to SYRIZA. In defaulted Greece, the regime crisis has put on the agenda urgently the question of power. The KKE advanced vaguely the slogan for a “workers’ popular power” and “socialization of the monopolies” but as a remote possibility in the far away future, “because, now, the objective conditions and relationship of forces are not yet mature”, as the Stalinists claim. On the contrary, SYRIZA has raised the immediate need for “a government of the Left” (although without a revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois regime and State). The slogan for “a left government” had received a great popular response, despite its vagueness and covering up of the class nature of the State power (Tsipras, the young leader of SYRIZA, even mentioned as an example to follow the tragic precedent of the Allende government in Chile, defending also the Popular Front line of the Komintern in the 1930s). Nevertheless, as previously with the demand for a direct democracy regime during the occupying the squares movement in 2011, the popular response to the prospect of a government of the Left does not reflect only a dangerous illusion but also the ripening of the subjective conditions in the mass social consciousness for an alternative power of those from below against those ruling from above. It is a contradictory, distorted reflection of the immediate need for a struggle for working class power.

The Trotskyist EEK, while criticizing sharply the popular front line in the “left government” slogan and pointing out the dangers, precisely from the tragic precedents in Spain, Chile and Greece, insisted on the urgent need for a revolutionary socialist way out from the capitalist crisis, with the overthrow of the capitalist regime and the establishment of a revolutionary workers government and workers power, as a step towards a United Socialist States of Europe to be build on the ruins of the imperialist EU.  Our Party increased modestly its vote in every electoral district all over the country, particularly in the proletarian areas of the capital and of the main cities; but more importantly it developed further its political influence and organization among advanced workers and youth.

The Maoists of the KKE ml and of the ML-KKE, although they joined this time after decades their forces in a common bloc, they received less votes than the sum of the votes of both parties in previous elections. The moderation of their political program, restricted just to a defense against the austerity attacks and in defense of national independence, failed to arise much of response in a social milieu very radicalized the last two years.

ANTARSYA, the “broad anti-capitalist Front” of ten centrist organizations, increased its vote in relation to the previous 2009 parliamentary elections but retreated nationally in relation to the 2010 regional elections, falling from above 2 per cent to just above  1 per cent. As the leaders of ANTARSYA have  cultivated the most wild illusions about their “certain entry into parliament with eight anti-capitalist deputies”, campaigning against their competitors in the far left, presenting as “a lost vote” any vote to the EEK, following the worst traditions of electoralism, now they are deeply disappointed from the results, plunging again in crisis. Some of the organizations of this anti-capitalist Front are already looking towards SYRIZA, while others, particularly in NAR (New Left Current) speak about their “deficit in strategy and program” as the reason of the defeat of their electoral expectations. This “deficit” was already pointed out by the EEK: ANTARSYA and NAR call for the overthrow of the bourgeois government but they find “immature” the conditions to advance a call for workers power; it calls (as the EEK does) for an withdraw from the EU and the euro but it returns to national isolation by rejecting the alternative advanced by the EEK for a revolutionary struggle for the socialist unification of Europe. More than 20 years after their split from the KKE, the NAR remains prisoner of the Stalinist legacy, particularly in relation to the Popular Front and the nationalist outlook.

It is noteworthy that most of the central strategic problems that counter-posed Trotskyism and Stalinism in the 20^th century- permanent revolution versus socialism in a single country, united workers front versus popular front of class collaboration, the struggle against fascism, the decline of bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the need for a revolutionary International, the question of the State, the dangers from bureaucracy etc.- have found now urgent actuality in Greece and they are discussed among the most militant sectors.

As it becomes extremely difficult even the formation of a coalition government in Greece now, and eventually new elections very soon could not solve the problem of power, the political crisis is escalating in the country and all over Europe. The questions of revolutionary strategy and tactics, of a program for the systematic mobilization of the masses in preparation for the seizure of power by the working class supported by the pauperized masses, of organization of the revolutionary vanguard are more urgent than ever.

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Savas Michael-Matsas

May 8, 2012

By Savas Michael-Matsas

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

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

The high degree of interconnectedness developed under the conditions of globalization of finance capital became, after its implosion in 2007-2008, the Nemesis of the global system itself. “The strength of a chain depends from the strength of its weakest link” said a Goldman Sachs’s official interviewed by the Greek newspaper Vima [2] in relation to the financial and banking crisis in Europe. Greece is the weakest link in the international and European capitalist chain.

For this reason, the Greek tragedy was soon followed by the similar fate of Ireland and Portugal that have to accept similar bail outs under similar draconian austerity terms, and later by the far more dangerous sovereign debt crisis of Spain and above all of Italy. Furthermore, the downgrading of the creditworthiness of a large number of EU countries, including the loss of the triple “A” position of France, demonstrated that no more the periphery but the core itself of the EU, the French-German axis of the European economy is hit.

From the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the US authorities and the US banks over-exposed to Europe cannot hide their growing worries. It is no more a taboo for State officials, financiers or mainstream analysts to speak openly not solely for a default of Greece but for a real break up of the entire Euro-zone provoking a global financial meltdown, and accelerating an already worsening global Great Recession or, rather Long Depression. In such an apocalyptic view, Greece’s default will play the catastrophic role of a Lehman Brothers II.

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The split over the second Greek bail out

During the long debates leading to the last  crucial episode in the protracted Greek debt saga, the second bail out of Greece, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and his co-thinkers in Germany, Netherlands and Finland, opposed the apocalyptic scenario and promoted the case in favour of a Greek default. They were claiming that the EU is now much better armed to face major repercussions and contagion risks, thanks to the workings of the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF) and the forthcoming European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The firewall was further strengthened apparently by the European Central Bank’s policy to provide low cost liquidity- more than one trillion euros to be paid in three years with an interest rate of just one per cent- to banks by the Longer Term Refinancing Operation (LTRO). According to the memorable words of Her Schäuble, to provide a new “rescue package” to Greece means “to throw billions of euros in a bottomless pit”.

The Schäuble line was strongly opposed by a bloc of EU member States, which have lost their triple A credit rank, and stressing the enormous dangers of such an “un-orderly” or “orderly” Greek default: the peripheral EU countries, and above all Sarkozy’s France and Monti’s Italy, first candidates to fall victims of a contagion tsunami after a Greek bankruptcy. Even Germany’s Prime Minister Angela Merkel had to take her distances from her Finance Minister’s positions, revealing that the existing deep split among the European ruling classes extends within the German bourgeoisie itself[3].

In a sense both opposed lines are partially right – and equally wrong. The new deal reached finally, after an agonizing process in the Eurogroup meeting on February 19-20, can show it.

It involves a 130 billion euros package to bail out Greece linked with an agreed PSI (Private Sector Involvement) of the private bondholders, a 53 per cent “haircut” of the nominal value of the Greek state bonds.[4] It is tied with a Memorandum of devastating new “austerity” measures of social cannibalism to be imposed in a society already devastated by the previous Memorandum of the first bail out in May 2010.

The previous Memorandum was a catastrophe in social terms (more than third of Greeks now are surviving under the poverty line, and half of the youth is unemployed) and a miserable failure in economic terms. In 2010 the debt stood at 120 per cent of the GDP; in 2011, one year after the “rescue” operation, it has increased into an unsustainable 169 per cent. The goal of the new bail out is to shrink the magnitude of the debt at 120.5 per cent in 2020, slightly up from the level of the starting point in 2010.

Schäuble, from his side, is right to speak, with his usual Teutonic elegance, about billions of euros thrown into a bottomless pit. The entire second “plan of rescue” of Greece is totally unrealistic, if we look the figures in the IMF debt sustainability analysis, which calculates the level of the Greek debt in 2020 to be at least 160 per cent.

The impossible goal of 120.5 per cent has as a precondition, according to the Memorandum, a constant increase of the annual primary surplus (after the payment of the debt obligations) of the Greek economy, starting from 2013. How this could be possible with the introduction of the most savage recessionary measures- a 22 per cent cut to all wages, a cut up to 20 per cent to pensions, a cut of 15 thousand jobs in the public sector until April 2012 and a total of 150 thousand jobs of civil servants until the end of 2014, closure of more hospitals, schools, and universities etc. – in an economy where recession hit a 7 per cent in 2011 and another 6 per cent fall is expected in 2012?

From the other side, the opponents of Schäuble’s line are right to insist to the horrifying consequences of a Greek collapse on a Euro-zone crashed by an unbearable mountain of debts, with an extremely fragile banking system, and an economy in contraction. The total resources of the EFSF and ESM combined- a sum between 750 to one trillion euros- are unable to confront an inescapable contagion to Italy with a national debt of 1.9 trillion euros, and filled with Spanish toxic bonds as well as to crumbling.

Spain filled by Portuguese toxic bonds, while Portugal itself already asks for a haircut of its sovereign debt and to be bailed out again.

The Institute of International Finance (IIF), which has waged the PSI negotiations on behalf of the private bondholders, in an internal document dated February 18, 2012 and later released by Reuters[5], the losses from a Greek default would be around one trillion euros and an emergency bail out both of Spain and Italy would be necessary.

Insofar the LTRO by the ECB is concerned; it represents a kind of Quantitative Easing in disguise, “a useful fiction” to use the words of James Mackintosh[6] with some very short term results. By printing money and providing liquidity to the European banks in December 2011 and February 2012, the ECB under the leadership of Mario Draghi took an emergency measure against the frozen inter-bank market and an extremely dangerous credit crunch. But a short term policy to deal with lack of liquidity is   inefficient to solve a generalized insolvency problem. Europe’s banks remain among the world’s riskier assets and the debt crisis is exacerbating by the recession in the Eurozone. The LTRO is unable to break the debt-recession vicious circle, as most of the newly provided money remains inside the financial sector, circulating between banks, government debt, and the ECB, and it does not reach “real economy”, the productive sector itself.

The central problem is not lack of liquidity but a historic crisis of over-production of capital. “The enormous pile-up of money which remains uninvited is doing so because there is no place to invest with a reasonable hope of return”, Hillel Ticktin rightly stresses[7].

The strong medicine provided by the ECB can have some palliative effects but its side-effects can be proved extremely dangerous, if not lethal.

The general euphoria following the LTRO was broken by the criticisms expressed by the Bundesbank and Standard Chartered stressing the danger to have in three years time, one trillion euros of bank funding all maturing within barely two months in late 2013/early 2015 and triggering panic.[8]

Jens Weidemann, president of the Bundesbank, in a letter to Mario Draghi, emphasized the dangers for Germany coming from the ECB’s easier collateral arrangements in the LTRO and the ballooning imbalances in the euro-zone’s payment mechanism known as Target 2. Germany’s Target 2 claims stood at 498 billion euros in January 2012, the largest item in Bundesbank’s balance sheet, equivalent to 20 per cent of the German GDP. In other words, a break up of the euro will cost immediately to Germany the loss of 20 per cent of its GDP…[9]

In the case of the break up of the eurozone, produced or not by Greece’s or another peripheral European country’s default, Germany is “the country which will lose more, apart from Greece “, as Hillel Ticktin rightly pointed out.[10]

Both lines towards Greece’s default, Schäuble’s as well as of his opponents, are short term attempts to win time, and they do not provide any real solution to the crisis. As a matter of fact, the divisions and bitter infighting among the ruling classes of Europe, including the split in Berlin, the most powerful centre of the EU, reflect the lack of any coherent long term strategy to solve the systemic crisis. The strategy of neo-liberalism imploded in 2007 and no return to the Keynesian strategy of the post war expansion (which has collapsed in 1971-73) is possible. There is a strategic void, expression itself of an historical impasse in which is irreversibly trapped the declining capitalism in Europe. The growing impossibility for a mediation of the driving contradictions of the system defines precisely what decline is.

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The decline of the Nation State

Greece’s undeclared bankruptcy and the failure of the EU to deal with it or even to control the implications of its default, despite numerous Summits, interminable deliberations and two bail-outs, are a manifestation of the historic incapacity of the European bourgeoisie to overcome the crisis of the Nation State and unify, economically and politically, the Continent.

In an early period of the imperialist epoch, when the universal development of the modern productive forces already had started to suffocate in the straitjacket of the national borders, Briand expressed the need of the ruling classes by raising the goal of a “United States of Europe” on the basis of capitalism. A century later, either by the barbaric means of two world wars or by sixty post-war peaceful years of efforts by the Western European governments to integrate European capitalist economy, the goal proved to be beyond reach.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the European Union project based on a common euro-currency established by an agreement between German and French imperialisms, first in the Maastricht Treaty, had as aim to make an integrated capitalist Europe, under the French-German condominium, a powerful competitor for world hegemony in the post-Cold War chaotic world.

Twenty years later, despite the extension of the EU in 27 members States and a common currency in the Euro-zone, the whole project falls apart. The future of the euro itself and of the Euro-zone is rather bleak, and all the old national imperialist antagonisms and nationalisms that had often transformed Europe into a hell are coming back, with German nationalism, playing again the fatal role of the protagonist.

Germany is too small to play a global role and, at the same time, more powerful from any other European country, although not from all European countries put together. Twice, the historically delayed German imperialism tried to establish a German Europe as a Lebensraum, a living space for its capitalist development by military means and failed. Now, as the most powerful economic engine of Europe, it retries to establish a German European Union based on its traditional Ordo-liberalismus, functioning with an iron fiscal discipline imposed by Berlin through Brussels, and ejecting from the Union or reducing into the status of protectorate over-indebted peripheral countries like Greece. It will fail again, as it fuels all the centrifugal forces that are breaking apart the Euro-zone, its real Lebensraum that permitted the export economy of Germany to accumulate enormous surpluses thanks to the deficits and encouraged indebtedness of the now demonised European South.

After the Second World War, Ordoliberalismus was introduced in Germany but within an international Keynesian framework of capitalist expansion, not in conditions of global recession, as today. It cannot be but catastrophic for Europe and suicidal, at the last instance, for Germany itself.

The second bail-out of Greece represents, as Wolfgang Münchau has written, its transformation into “the eurozone’s first colony”[11]. It is true that the terms for the new package are of a colonial type, eliminating any trace of economic sovereignty.  An escrow account is created to depose the loaned sums for the lenders to be paid any moment, bypassing Athens. The proposal by Shäuble  to appoint a fiscal Kommissar on the Greek government with the power of veto economic policy decisions – a provocative proposal  that produced  voices of indignation in Greece and internationally – was withdrawn only to be accepted and extended into a task force of EU Kommissars surveying  the finances of  all Greek ministries. A special article will be included in the Greek Constitution making mandatory all the payments to the foreign lenders. The pusillanimous Greek bourgeoisie and all bourgeois parties of the country accepted these terms of total submission.

As other countries with sovereign debt crises such as Portugal, Spain, and Ireland fail to meet the targets put by Brussels and Berlin, similar Kommissars are prepared to take charge of their finances. It is quite understandable that furious national reactions are ignited everywhere in the imperialist European “Union”.

To speak for “Eurozone’s colonies” like Münchau is to use a good metaphor, which is just that- a metaphor with all its limitations. The Eurozone is not an Empire, even less a German Empire under a unified imperial political power. It is a Union of dominant antagonistic European imperialisms, which proves now to be temporary, disintegrating and passing away. “Europe’s ‘proud empire’ ” remarks a title of an article by Andrew Roberts, “is entering a cul de sac of history”. And the article concludes: “…Europe’s fire has gone out”.[12]

To remain in the iron cage of the EU is unviable. But also a return back to the National State and national currencies in today’s conditions of advanced capitalist globalization is no solution. A nationalist turn inwards is a blessing for the growing far right and a recipe for economic and political disaster.

Greece and the other over-indebted countries in the EU cannot make any step out of the current impasse without cancelling the foreign debt without compensation to the international usurers. But such a step has its own necessary logic: the first step cannot be taken without a break from the EU and the Eurozone and immediately it has to be linked to a series of other absolutely necessary measures: nationalisation of the banks and all strategic key sectors of the economy under workers control, a re-organization of the entire economy on new socialist bases. The political precondition for such a revolutionary change is the overthrow of the capitalist government and repressive State apparatus by the action of the masses themselves, organized in their own independent organs of struggle, which will become the organs of a new power- workers power. The consolidation of the power of the working class and of its work of re-organization of the ruined economy is possible only through the extension of the social revolution all over Europe and internationally.

The historical material basis for this epochal change in Europe is much more mature than in 1917. The interconnectedness of the social economic processes determines, not in a linear way but through unevenness and contradictions, the combined international character of the coming European social revolution. Revolutionary developments can spread all over the Continent much more rapidly than in the past. The key question is again the timely subjective preparation and organization of the revolutionary vanguard within a combat Party of the working class,   armed with an international perspective and program- a party of the Permanent Revolution.

The fundamental driving contradiction is between the universal development of productive forces and declining capitalism, the barriers of capitalist relations and its necessary basis, the Nation State. The working class should not count into the social democratic fallacy of a “reformed”, democratized” EU nor into nationalist isolation and exclusiveness. The only road forward is the common struggle of all European workers and impoverished masses for a socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist EU and build a United Socialist States of Europe.

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The decline of bourgeois parliamentary democracy

It is noteworthy that the new, vicious, anti-working class, anti-popular Memorandum with the EU, the ECB and the IMF, was signed by a non elected Greek government under the technocrat, banker, and former vice-chairman of the ECB Lucas Papadimos imposed by the EU in November 2011. At the same time, the same forces imposed in Italy a non elected “government of technocrats” under Mario Monti. Both events mark not the triumph of technocracy but the death agony of parliamentary democracy.

The political framework, which is the most adequate to the needs of capitalism, is liberalism, bourgeois parliamentary democracy.

A purely technocratic rule is a fiction: even the Monti government, composed exclusively by technocrats, needs to be supported by the center right party of the PDL and the center left PD, although this parliamentary majority does not anymore reflect the current social political reality or the will of the voters.

In Greece, as usual, “technocratic rule” is a farce: the government of the technocrat Papadimos stands or fall on the support in parliament of the discredited bourgeois parties of the “socialist” PASOK and the right wing “New Democracy”, which repetitive polls show that they currently represent only a shrinking minority, less than 30 per cent of intentions of vote. In other words, a fictitious technocratic rule stands on a fictitious parliamentary “majority” totally discredited, hated and openly challenged by the huge majority of the people rebelling against its savage measures.

It is not accidental the fact that the movement of the Greek indignados that occupied Syntagma Square and other squares in the capital and all over the country in 2011 overwhelmly asked not parliamentary but “direct democracy”, democracy from below. Despite the vagueness of the call, it represents both a critique of the actually existing bourgeois parliamentary democracy and a demand, although abstract, for a democracy of the self-organized popular masses. It is not yet a call for a seizure of power by the working class. It finds itself in a crossroads: either the mainly petty bourgeois forces demanding direct democracy will  be won in the struggle for workers power or they will re-turn to the cage built for them by the bourgeois politicians of the parliamentary fraud.

Greece shows, at that level too, the road to be followed by all other European countries, which as well face, in one or another degree, a deep crisis of bourgeois rule. It is the decline of capitalism, globally and particularly in the Continent that was its own birthplace, the driving force of the decline of parliamentary bourgeois democracy.

The Parliament is reduced into a rubber stamp for decisions taken behind the walls by EU bureaucrats, IMF directors, bankers, finance investors, the so called faceless “markets” and their subservient political personnel. All the dearly acquired democratic gains and social rights of the working class, (the right to collective bargaining is formally abolished in Greece in the second Memorandum), are destroyed. State repression escalates at levels not previously seen as social despair and mass anger become uncontrollable and explodes in occupations of public buildings and squares, street fights, riots, and popular revolts from Athens to Madrid, Rome, Lisbon and London.

The question of democracy and of its relation to the struggle for Socialism is posed again in a form even sharper than in the 1930s. The experiences, and bitter theoretical and practical lessons of that period, incorporated first of all in the struggle between Stalinism and Trotskyism, have the most urgent strategic actuality.

Sectarian dismissal of the relative differences between democratic and openly dictatorial forms of bourgeois rule, in the name of an abstract propagandist appeal for a socialist future, could be disastrous and should be opposed.

But, from the other side, any subordination of the political independence and  activity of the working class to blocs with bourgeois liberal and petty bourgeois democratic forces, in the name of defence of bourgeois democracy , and “of European liberal democratic values”, as we often hear in our days, is suicidal. It could lead to a tragic-farcical repetition of the “Popular Fronts” of the 1930s that paralyzed the revolutionary masses, betrayed the Spanish Revolution, and precipitated the victory of fascism and the descent into the abyss of the world war.

The defence of freedom has to be advanced by revolutionary means, in a united front of the working class and all the deprived people against capital’s rule, in a struggle for workers’ power and Socialism.

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Towards a European Spring

When Schäuble again, this living embodiment of Ordoliberalismus, proposed to postpone indefinitely elections in Greece until the terms of the new bail-out are fully implemented, he does not solely showed his cynical disdain for parliamentary or any other democratic decision making; he expressed also his deep fear that the rebellion of the masses is far more powerful than the extremely weak bourgeois political system of the country, which despite the State brutality, could be wiped out.

In the polls, a strong and growing majority of the people are turning to the parties of the Left to fight back the Memorandum and the troika of EU/ECB/IMF. In the streets, above all, non-stop mass mobilisations of workers and from the rapidly impoverished popular strata, despite the obstacles put by the trade union bureaucracies, the reformists, the Stalinists and the centrists, represent a growing threat to bourgeois rule. General Strikes, mass rallies and occupations of squares, particularly in the Syntagma Square in front of the Parliament, occupation of Ministries and other public buildings, popular assemblies formed as rallying points of deliberation and struggle in every popular and working class neighbourhood, make clear that “those below cannot be ruled as before and those above cannot rule as before”, according to Lenin’s famous definition of an emerging revolutionary situation.

The German Finance Minister may do not fear anymore the economic contagion risk of a Greek default; he is terrified, nevertheless, by the risk of political contagion after a revolutionary explosion in Greece. It could put in flames the entire Continent, initiating, as the Tunisian and Egyptian rebels did in the Middle East last year, a Spring of revolutions, in Europe this time.

As in the 1848 European Spring of the peoples, our battle cry should be: Revolution in permanence!

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February 22-24 /March 8, 2012

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[2] To Vima, 15 January 2012

[3] Berlin split on Greek bail-out by  Gerrit Wiesmanm and Quentin Peel, Financial Times, February 17, 2012 p.2

[4] Eurozone looks to pare back 170 bn euros cost of second Greek rescue package by Peter Spiegel and Alan Beattie, Financial Times February 20, 2012 p.1

[5] www. kerdos.gr/Default.aspx?t=print.aspx&aid=1691273&ant=103,  on 6/3/2012

[6] See The Short View, Financial Times  February 17, 2012 p.13

[7] Hillel Ticktin Critique Notes in Critique 59 vol 40 number 1 February 2012 p.8

[8] Patrick Jenkins, Banks must beware the side-effects of ECB magic medicine Financial Times March 6, 2012

[9] See Wolfgang Münchau, The Bunbdesbank has no right at all to be baffled, Financial Times March 5, 2012, and Simon Nixon, Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2012

[10] Hillel Ticktin, Critique Notes, Critique 58, vol. 39, no 4, December 2011 p. 481

[11] “Greece will have to default if it wants democracy” by Wolfgang Münchau, Financial Times February 20, 2012  p.7

[12] “Europe’s ‘proud empire’ is entering a cul de sac of history”, Financial Times, February 17, 2012.

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

However, DIP benefited from the occasion to further raise the internationalist consciousness and knowledge of its rank and file members and militants. The conference was organised as part of a more extensive weekend of activities. The weekend was dubbed the Mariano Ferreyra Internationalist Winter Camp (MAFEKK for short in its Turkish abbreviation) and included an intensive educational course on the history of working class internationalism, as well as the conference proper. Mariano Ferreyra was a metal worker and leading youth member of our sister party in Argentina, the Partido Obrero (PO), and was assassinated in October 2010 by an armed gang of the trade union bureaucracy during an action against severe attacks on labour rights in the railroad industry of the country. DIP offers comrade Mariano as a role model to its young militants, especially the workers in the party from different industries such as metallurgy, construction, energy, tourism, as well as office workers, teachers, and other public sector labourers.

Not only was the whole activity dedicated to our Argentine comrade Mariano as a token of our internationalism, but the decoration of the meeting hall was also testimony to the deep political and ideological commitment of DIP to internationalism. The banners of the Italian Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (PCL) and the Greek Ergatiko Epanastatiko Komma (EEK) adorned the hall alongside that of the PO of Argentina. Facing the ever present image of Comrade Mariano was a portrait of Muhammed Bouazizi, the hero of the Tunisian revolution, and by extension of the Arab revolution at large, the young graduate streeet vendor who protested the assault on his dignity by the officials of the Tunisian dictatorship of Ben Ali through self-immolation, thus setting on fire the whole Arab world. The slogan “Long live the World Revolution!” was inscribed on the wall in the four major languages of the Middle East, Arab and Farsi as well as Turkish and Kurdish.

The education involved an overall survey of internationalist organising activity on the part of Marxists in the political sphere from the time of the First International to the present. The first session took up the first three internationals and left off where the Stalinist bureaucracy destroyed the Comintern. The second session started out by explaining why Trotsky conceived the struggle to found the Fourth International as the most important work of his life. The speaker of the second session then went on to recount the divisions that arose within the rank of the Fourth International in postwar period and the ultimate programmatic liquidation and political demise of the International through the class collaborationist policies of the United Secretariat in Brazil and Italy. The sectarian nature of other “Trotskyist” international organisations, almost all of them generated through a cloning process of a national organisation, was then exposed. The final presentation then took up the formation of the CRFI from Genoa 1997 onwards and presented it as an answer to the problems that beset the revolutionary Marxist movement internationally.

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Resolutions of the International Conference of DIP

Bringing together delegates from twelve provinces, among them the biggest of Turkey, the Conference deliberated on the problems of the international working class and communist movements, the situation created by the Great Depression that world capitalism is going through and the rise of revolutionary movements on the opposite coasts of the Mediterranean with Egypt and Greece as the respective focal points, the opportunities and the difficulties faced by the CRFI, and the ways to move ahead in this overall situation.

The Conference reaffirmed the key nature of the crisis of leadership in determining the future of class struggle worldwide and the indispensability of the refoundation of a world party of socialist revolution on the programmatic bases of the Fourth International and the organisational principles of Bolshevism. It also underlined the unique importance of the CRFI as a transitional stage in the struggle for the refoundation of such a world party.

Under its first major agenda item, the Conference ratified the Programmatic Theses for the Refoundation of the Fourth International, the programmatic document that forms the basis of the CRFI. It situated the Programmatic Theses in “ a world conjuncture in which the international left, including that which originates in Trotskyism, has drifted entirely away from Marxism” and “taken as a whole” characterised the “general orientation of the text with respect to its analysis of the world situation and the political position it adopts vis-a-vis a series of issues as a document in its overall orientation that provides the CRFI with a revolutionary Marxist basis for the construction of and the tasks facing a world party.”

However, the resolution on the programme went on to raise a number of caveats on certain specific political issues, note the dated nature of some of the analysis, advance a series of issues on which a future programme has to dwell, and, most importantly, assert the need for a more concrete programme that delimits political currents on the basis of political attitudes rather than analysis and in some cases theory, as the present Programmatic Theses do.

The second major item on the agenda of the conference related to the construction of the CRFI and the work to be undertaken by DIP in this respect. On the first question, the Conference explicitly tied organisational questions to those of a political nature and stipulated an organisational leap forward on the basis of clear political initiatives. There were two political initiatives that were clearly formulated for the near future, both focusing on what DIP has characterised as the “revolutionary basin of the Mediterranean”.

One was a concrete recommendation for Europe, the epicentre of the Great Depression and of class struggles at least for the moment. Parallel to the discussion in the International Secretariat, the resolution proposed that the CRFI approach the left in Europe on the basis of an appeal for a “European General Strike” on the basis of the principal watchword of “Let the bosses pay for the crisis!” and the ultimate perspective of working towards the United Socialist States of Europe.

On the question of the Arab revolution, which DIP has saluted from day one and supported in its propaganda and in action, the resolution clearly posed as a priority the effort to establish sections of the CRFI in the Arab world and beyond in this region on the basis of a political orientation that stresses permanent revolution.

Although the resolution on the construction of the CRFI adopted a viewpoint that tied progress on organisational issues to political initiatives, it nonetheless did not neglect purely organisational questions as a specific area of intervention. There were many different organisational recommendations and measures that were advanced in order to move forward in the task of constructing the CRFI.

The Conference did not only pose tasks for the CRFI. It also adopted a special resolution to define new and more concrete tasks for DIP in the arena of international work. The overall orientation of the resolution in question may be summed up by saying that it requires DIP to adopt an incomparably higher level of activity and initiative in the field of international work. This includes the work that DIP is determined to undertake in the construction and consolidation of the CRFI and in the propagation of the perspective of permanent revolution in the Arab world and the Middle East at large.

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A new stage in the development of DIP

The Conference comes at a stage in DIP’s development process in which the party finds itself standing confidently on its two feet. The Conference convened exactly a year after the Founding Congress of the party, which itself had been held in February 2011 in Istanbul. Since the Founding Congress, the party has been growing perceptibly.

The International Conference has given an added impetus to the determination of the cadres, members and sympathisers of DIP to overcome the problem of revolutionary leadership faced by the working class internationally and at the domestic level. One of its most important gains has undoubtedly been the strengthening of an internationalist attitude to revolutionary politics and the extension of this to the rank and file level. Given the passionate allegiance to internationalism expressed by many grassroots level comrades at the end of the Conference, there can be no doubt that each militant of DIP will in the future act with the utmost determination in building not only a party of the proletarian vanguard in Turkey, but also reconstructing the World Party of Socialist Revolution that was and continues to be the gift of the efforts of such historic leaders of revolutionary Marxism as Lenin and Trotsky.

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

The General Strike called by the GSEE (General Confederation of Labor) trade union bureaucracy initially for the 19 |October was transformed by the pressure of the ADEDY{ National Federation of Civil Servants} and by rank and file trade unionists into a 48 hours General Strike on October 19-20, against the new package of measures of social cannibalism imposed by the troika of the IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank and rump-stamped by the thin parliamentary majority of 153 deputies sustaining in its death agony the PASOK government.

Participation in the Strike was unprecedented: between 80 per cent to 100 percent of workers and employees both in the public and private Sectors, in factories and in public services took part. The shopkeepers closed their shops in solidarity and in protest against the austerity and tax burdens that condemn them to bankruptcy. Taxi owners and drivers, joined the strike action of the workers in public transport and the sailors that paralyzed all the ships in the harbors. Even in the Central Prisons of Korydalos, in Athens, the external patrol of guards in the morning of October 19, transformed their patrol into a demonstration against the government and the troika…

Nearly all the Ministries, town halls and other public buildings were under occupation- a totally new fact in the social life in Greece.

All the rallies and marches during the two days of the General Strike were massive and impressive. On October 19, in Athens more than a half million of workers and popular masses demonstrated. Tens of thousands demonstrated in all the cities and towns all over the country, even in places where never before a demonstration had taken place.

On October 20, a similar number of people was assembled in the Syntagma Square, in front of the Parliament where was voted the infamous new bill with new cuts in wages and pensions of workers, new taxes for the lower middle classes, and condemning hundreds of thousands of civil servants to unemployment.

It was very clear to everybody-including those in the Parliament and in power- that the angry masses are moving far beyond the limits imposed and guarded by the PASOK majority of the trade union bureaucracies of the GSEE and ADEDY. So, in a tacit, informal but obvious deal the KKE, the Stalinist party of Greece and its trade union faction, PAME, took in charge the protection of the bourgeois Parliament from the assembled masses in rebellion. The guard of PAME/KKE formed a chain around the |Parliament, armed with globs and flags with huge sticks to be used like globs, preventing anybody- not only the non controlled by the KKE unions  or other political organizations or citizens committees  but also simple non organized citizens, old or young- to approach the Parliament.

At some point a group of anarchist youth clashed with the PAME/KKE guards who after a failed counter-attack that was repelled by a body to body fight with the anarchists, they had to retreat under a flood of stones and cocktails Molotov. The riot police did not intervene until the clash was generalized and then they used massively tear gas, transforming the Syntagma Square into a big gas chamber.

VASTAHYÖKKÄYS

A victim of this police brutality was a 53 years old militant of PAME who died by a heart tack provoked by police tear gas.

The Police, the bourgeois State, the PASOK government are the only responsible and guilty for this crime. But the death of this worker was again used both by the KKE and by the government to blame the anarchists but also all the other left organizations as “provocateurs”. The right wing press (for ex. P.Mandravelis, a right wing journalist of the daily paper Kathimerini and notorious propagandist of the troika), even some far right fascist deputies of LAOS have praised the KKE and its general secretary Aleka Papariga for their “responsibility” and “civil spirit”! This is not a first: during the December 2008 youth revolt, the right wing Karamanlis government and the leader of the far right LAOS Karatzaferis had praised the KKE and Papariga for their “responsible stand”, when they opposed the revolt and slandered the revolted youth as provocateurs. From the other side, the Maoist KOE, the centrist coalition ANTARSYA and its main components NAR (a group that split from the KKE in 1989) and SEK (sister organization of the British SWP) joined the campaign against the anarchists as “agents provocateurs”, flattering the Stalinists without any criticism for their disgusting political protection of bourgeois parliament and bourgeois legality.

The Trotskyist EEK, in its press release, attacked first of all the police and the |PASOK government for the State repression that led also to the death of the PAME militant, expressing our condolences to his family and comrades. We criticized the anarchists, stressing that political differences within the workers movement had to be resolved by political means of struggle and not by physical violence. But we criticized sharply as well the political role of the KKE acting as a Guard of Parliament and a political police to check the legitimate anger of the people against those who transform his or her life into a hell by the IMF/EU/ECB diktat.

If in 2010, there were still illusions about the possibilities for a rapid way out from the crisis and they were used by the trade union bureaucracy to defuse mass discontent through ineffective 24 hours protest General Strikes, 2011 was the year of the grand disillusion. The emergence of the movement of the “indignant citizens” in May 2011, despite its strong petty bourgeois limitations, gave a new impulse. Very soon, particularly during the General Strikes of June there was a convergence between the “indignants’” movement and the workers movement; the barbaric police brutality unleashed by the government in the General Strike of June 28-29 contributed a lot to that convergence. But most of all the dramatic deterioration of the social economic situation in Greece and internationally the last three months, the total impasse in the EU, the  international banking crisis, and the  acceleration of the slide into a world slump worst than that of the 1930s’,made all the conditions of social conflict uncontrollable. After the failure of the trade union bureaucracy to act as a brake to the mass movement, the bourgeoisie had to turn to that political bureaucratic force, namely Stalinism, which saved its rule in 1944-45 with the accords in Lebanon, Gazerta and Varkiza that disarmed the communist partisans and betrayed the Revolution born out of the anti-Nazi Resistance.

It is not accidental that one of the main slogans of the 2008 December Revolt was: No more Varkiza!

The historical conditions today have totally changed. Not only Stalinism had collapsed leading to the demise of the Soviet Union and the open turn to capitalist restoration, but also world capitalism has plunged into an abyss. The younger generations, with strong anti-bureaucratic tendencies, lead the fight against the system that condemns them for a life   in misery, without any future. There is still a lot of immaturity and a persistent lack of the necessary mass revolutionary organization of the workers vanguard on national and world levels. But we are confident that we can rapidly overcome these serious limitations.

The eruption of the masses in the streets of Athens and all over Greece is the picture of the future of all European countries. Let’s prepare ourselves politically, programmatically, organizationally for a life or death battle, for a permanent revolution to win a future of freedom for all the oppressed and of justice for all the exploited and destitute of the world: for a world communist society.

Savas Michael-Matsas

22 October 2011

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

The “wound” in this case is not limited to the recent US Fed monetary policy but it refers to the world capitalist crisis itself that has exploded in 2007, and the consequences of the emergency measures taken by all central banks and States in the advanced capitalist countries, after the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in 2008, to halt the meltdown of the world financial system. by unleashing a flood of liquidity.  This is the material historical ground out of which emerged the revolution shaking now the Arab lands, the Maghreb and the Mashrek, in the southern coast of the Mediterranean, at the doors of Europe.

The essential relation between world crisis and revolution, it is what all the apologists of Capitalism, right and “left”, ignore /and or try to keep in the darkness.

After the first shock following the unexpected revolutionary events in Tunisia and Egypt, the mainstream discourse in the West and in the bourgeois mass media exhausts itself into a rhetoric about democracy or on the peculiarities of each Arab social formation in the region, obfuscating the fact that “the key-factor of the movement is the economic crisis” (Le Monde arabe dans la crise, Maghreb Machrek No 206, winter 2010-2011).

It does not mean that we have to replace the concrete analysis of a concrete situation by an oversimplifying vulgar economicism. The conditions of possibility of a revolutionary Event, of a break in the historic continuum, should not be conflated with the Event itself, which it is neither identical nor exhausted to its material conditions; it has its own life, dynamics and dialectical logic. But if the revolutionary Event is cut off from its conditions of possibility, from its material base, its “event site” (“site événementiel” to use Alain Badiou’s terminology) with all its elements and their mobilization, then it appears as a metaphysical miracle that fell from the sky. The recent revolutionary developments could not be isolated from or reduced mechanically to their crisis matrix.

In the crisis matrix dialectic of the universal and the particular is involved. Some analysts tend to ignore that dialectic and focus exclusively on what they consider as peculiarities of the Arab social formations. But these regional and national peculiarities are not fixed; they have risen and developed historically in constant interaction with the dominant trends of world development, particularly with the ascent and world domination of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism. In the first place, the archipelago of States, statelets, emirates etc. in the Middle East emerged out of the break up of the Ottoman Empire by the imperialist expansion of Western capitalism and the division of the region among the leading imperialist powers of Britain, France and Italy.

Their fate has changed with the discovery and the role of oil in the world economy, from the 1930s but particularly after the Second World War.

James Petras, insists, in his approach to the recent events in the region( in Roots of Arab Revolts and Premature Celebrations), on the  character of these states as “rentier States” providing a rather small part of their revenue from oil (or tourism) to their citizens:  “ Neo-liberal privatizations, reductions in public subsidies (for food, unemployment subsidies, cooking oil, gas, transport, health, and education) shattered the paternalistic ties through which the rulers contained the discontent of the young and poor, as well as clerical elites and tribal chiefs.  The confluence of classes and masses, modern and traditional, was a direct result of a process of neo-liberalization from above and exclusion from below”.

In that framework, the main antagonism, which has emerged is located between the rentier State and the “street”, where is mobilized the amorphous “modern and traditional” social strata, and not between capital popular democratic revolution” in Petras terms.

Social amorphousness of the Arab rebellious “street” is not an amalgam of disparate elements, modern and traditional, in any kind of equilibrium. It expresses a combined and uneven development of an ensemble of “contemporary” and “non contemporary” contradictions (to use the very actual dialectic notion of Ernst Bloch), where the modern, not the traditional, the contemporary capital/labour contradiction, globally and locally, not the non contemporary contradictions of anachronistic elements is the determining, at the last instance, pole within the fabric of the complex ensemble of social relations.

“Rentier rulers govern via their ties to the US and EU military and financial institutions”, Petras correctly writes. But these ties and the entire network of relations between the imperialist countries and the “rentier regimes” are evolving historically and are determined by world trends in capitalism.

The quadrupling of the oil price after the 1973 war in the Middle East and in the context of world crisis after the collapse of the Bretton Wood framework in 1971-73, had as consequences not only growing budget deficits, recessions and growth of external debts, but also the process of “recycling of petrodollars”, which played an important role in the transition to finance capital globalization and neo-liberalism from the 1980s onwards.

During the decades of finance globalization, the rentier regimes, particularly khaledji capital in the Gulf, were deeply integrated within the structures and networks of flow of global finance capital-not despite but because of the archaic structure of the local societies. The oil-producing countries in the Middle East were not transformed into “sub-imperialisms” as the claim was raised (for example, by the late Ernest Mandel). The historical inability of the belated and subordinated to the West Arab bourgeoisie to fulfil an effective modernizing role in the epoch of imperialist decline of capitalism, and lack of local outlets for investment in the non-oil underdeveloped production sphere, has driven the accumulated wealth of the ruling regimes to turn outwards to the globalized markets dominated by Western finance capital,  and to all sorts of extravagant schemes of decadent nouveaux riches, an emblematic example given by the kitsch skyscrapers of Dubai.

Integration into global finance capital produced not solely tremendous corruption on the privileged few on the top but also a growing misery to the broad popular masses below that pay the high social cost for the implementation of neo-liberal policies. Unemployment became chronic especially among the youth, the overwhelming majority of society.  Globalization and its new technologies (Internet etc.) had opened to a significant section of that youth (not necessarily only to the petty bourgeois sector) new international horizons and demands, beyond local limitations and the weight of conservative traditionalism.

Combined and uneven development made the Arab world the “weakest link” into the international chain of the global finance capital system into which was deeply integrated during the previous decades- in a similar way that Greece, integrated in the EU and joining the Eurocurrency revealed, at the end, became the weakest link in the Euro-zone. When the global financial system imploded, the youth revolt in Greece in December 2008 was the first political explosion of this unprecedented world crisis in the European Continent, preceding the official revealing of the State bankruptcy of the country and foreshadowing the “youth revolutions” in Northern Africa and the Arab East. In both cases, to use Trotsky’s metaphor, the powerful electric charges unleashed by the globalized contradictions of capital erupting in 2007-08 have short-circuited and melted down the weakest parts of the global network.

The arbitrary separation of world crisis from revolution plays a pernicious ideological function: it hides from the eyes of those directly affected- the exploited, the victims of the capitalist crisis- the revolutionary implications of the current crisis as well as the historical way out from the systemic impasse that threatens humanity with catastrophe.

The world capitalist crisis, now in its fourth year, after leading to the abyss banks, financial giants like Lehman Brothers and sovereign States as in the periphery of the Euro-zone, has reached the point that creates conditions for revolutionary situations, uprisings and social revolutions. Nobody expected that decades long established dictatorships, strategically vital to world imperialism and under imperialist protection, like Mumbarak’s and Ben Ali’s tyrannies, could collapse in a few weeks under the revolutionary wrath of the mobilized masses.

The ruling classes have the most immediate political interest to cover up ideologically the fact that the same world crisis, which is driving the revolution in the Arab world, could produce similar revolutionary events in their own countries. They are actually terrified by the prospect of an international expansion of the revolution not solely in the Middle East but also beyond it, in the core metropolitan countries of the North, first of all in neighbouring imperialist European Union as it is entangled in an insoluble sovereign debt, monetary and banking crisis, combined with a deep crisis of legitimacy of the existing political system of rule and growing social unrest.

For decades the dominant discourse of the dominant class was preaching as a dogma that “the historical circle opened by the 1917 October Revolution in Russia has been definitely closed”, that “the epoch of revolutions has been ended for ever”; even self-proclaimed “communists” or “Marxists” were unshaken in their belief that decades or centuries separate us from a revolutionary upheaval in the remote, indefinite future. Everybody now can see real revolutions in the real world taking place not in a far away exotic point in the planet but in our neighborhood, in the opposite side of the Mediterranean, a few miles in the south of the Greek island of Crete.

BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALIST WAR

Like the world crisis that erupted in 2007-08, its new born legitimate children as well, the revolutions of 2011(and previously the Greek revolutionary youth revolt of December 2008) fell like an unexpected thunder in a clear sky over the heads of the think tanks of economists and political scientists in the service of the bourgeoisie.

A few days before the Tunisian revolution, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF was praising Tunisia as “a model for the entire African continent”, and Anthony Giddens, the spiritual father of the Blairite Third Way described it as the “Norway of Maghreb”!!(Their comrade, “Socialist” too and chairman of the “Socialist International”, George Papandreou had promised to transform Greece into a “Denmark of the South”, before announcing to the Greek people in a televised speech from the most remote small |Greek island of Kastelorizo that the country is bankrupt as well as enslaved to a Memorandum signed by his government with the EU, the ECB, and the IMF for a bail out…)

As far as Mumbarak’s Egypt is concerned, some “specialists” were hurried to include it into the emerging bloc of the BRICs with pretensions for an international hegemonic role.

But it would be a serious error to underestimate the world bourgeoisie. After the initial shock, Western imperialists, although split among themselves and weakened, started to develop a counter-revolutionary strategy, combining repression and concessions, promises for political reforms,  invasions(Bahrain) and imperialist war( Libya).

Imperialism, after supporting for decades the dictatorships, belatedly tries to co-opt “democracy” and organize “orderly, peaceful transitions” to new forms of subjugation and social control, based upon and reproducing the pro-imperialist forces within the old tyrannical regimes, within their armies, police and CIA-trained secret services, in the various elites, old and new, among tribal chieftains.

This is the role played for example by the military council in Egypt that held a fake referendum introducing fake “constitutional reforms” to enable in a few months to transfer power to the organized forces of the former party of Mumbarak and their willing collaborators in the |Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunisia, the continuing mobilization of the masses  has obliged the “transitional” government to apparently yield to the popular political demand calling  for elections for a Constituent Assembly on July 24- as the “lesser evil” as the current prime minister Essebsi (a former collaborator of Ben Ali cursing now the same Ben Ali) has said. In Jordan and in Morocco, the promises are to “extend the powers of the people without restraining those of the monarchy, which is the symbol of national unity” etc. etc.

From the other side, as in the case of Libya, where Gaddafi had established a hermetically closed, family-centered dictatorship, preventing a Mumbarak like replacement, imperialist war came into the agenda. After leaving the Gaddafi military forces to massacre the military untrained and lightly armed insurgents and to come to the gates of Benghazi, then, the imperialists of France, Britain and the US, under the cover of the UN Security Council 1973 decision, intervened pretending to be the “saviors of last resort” and arbiters for a “post-Gaddafi transition”, following a stalemate in military operations between rebels and pro-Gaddafi’s forces. Apart from their supporters among the Transitional National Council in Benghazi, the imperialists are multiplying their calls for collaboration towards the inner circle around the Libyan dictator, including to such persons as the defector to London Mussa Kussa, former Foreign Minister and former chief of the Libyan secret services or Gaddafi’s corrupt and murderous sons like Saif al Islam al Gaddafi.  The main aim of imperialism is to transform Libya into a NATO/UN protectorate, and a crucial strategic military stronghold against the Arab revolution, first of all the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.

The counter-revolutionary strategy of “democracy and/or war” is unified in its differentiation as well as the popular revolutionary process from the Atlantic to the Gulf is one single process despite the peculiarities, different social political configurations, different tempos, different levels of confrontation and relationship of social forces in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Syria.

Grasping this unitary nature both of revolution and counter-revolution is essential for revolutionaries to smash both tentacles of the counter-revolutionary monster, the pacifist bourgeois democratic “transition” to save the status quo under a different façade, and imperialist war.

The struggle to defeat the “democratic” traps does not mean any rejection of the legitimate popular democratic aspirations of the masses, which are deeply rooted not only to their bitter experience  of decades long repression, torture, and extermination by the hated  tyrannical regimes, but also they are interconnected with the social demands at the heart of the popular revolution. In this framework, the transitional demand of a sovereign Constituent Assembly can play an important role, without forgetting the traps set by rulers to hijack such a demand( as in Tunisia). The emphasis has to be given to the self-organization of the revolutionary masses into soviet-type grassroots organizations (committees, councils, etc.), which already had emerged although in an embryonic form in Egypt and Tunisia, and to the struggle to smash the repressive State apparatuses, to take power by the workers and the poor popular strata, to confiscate the wealth usurped by the dictators and their acolytes, to expropriate the expropriators, local and foreign, kick out imperialism and re-organize the entire Middle East( including a liberated Palestine) on new socialist bases.

In other words, the historical task is to make the revolution permanent, defeating all its foreign and internal foes.

The social revolution cannot be advanced without fighting imperialism, its “democratic” traps as well as its war aggressions, and imperialism cannot be defeated without deepening and expanding the social revolution.

ON LIBYA AGAIN

On this basis, our Party, the EEK, in the case of Libya, fights uncompromisingly the imperialist aggression, and at the same time, supports the popular revolutionary struggle of the rebelled “shebab”( youth) against Gaddafi’s tyranny, warning about the reactionary role of the Benghazi self-appointed “government” of former Gaddafi’s officials and other willing collaborators of imperialism. We say “Imperialists out from Libya and the Middle East”, and at the same time, “Down with Gaddafi and all tyrants! Victory to the revolution!” You cannot fight Gaddafi without fighting to defeat imperialism, and you cannot fight imperialism without fighting to overthrow Gaddafi.

It is totally counter-revolutionary a position of support to the UN Security Council 1973 Resolution giving the green light for imperialist intervention in Libya like that taken by all the liberal “left” in Europe but also by sectors of the “radical left”, expressed in a very clear way by Gilbert Achcar (the Lebanese left economist, politically close to the former ‘United Secretariat of the Fourth International”. See Gilbert Achcar, “A Legitimate and Necessary Debate from an Anti-Imperialist Perspective”, ZNet, 25 March 2011). Later, Achcar opposed the NATO bombings although still defending his initial position of support to the1973 SC resolution, and presenting the Transitional National Council as a carrier of a “program of real democratic change”. Alex Callinicos, the leader and theoretician of the “radical left” British SWP, although rejecting Achcar’s position and opposing the imperialist intervention, was careful to keep a friendly, soft attitude to this openly pro-imperialist position, writing in a comment in “Socialist Worker”, the paper of the SWP, on April 2: “The most intelligent case for supporting the intervention has been made by my old friend Gilbert Achcar. A consistent opponent of Western imperialism, Gilbert argues that this is an occasion when anti-imperialists should be willing to make compromises” etc. etc. How you can describe in the most friendly and even flattering way as “intelligent” an unashamed defence of imperialist aggression?

We have to make very clear the following: the popular uprising against the dictatorship of Gaddafi, the ally of the US in the terrorist “war on terror”, and friend up to recently of Tony Blair, of Berlusconi, and of Ben Ali up to the last moment of his overthrow( the Libyan services had  actively helped the repression of the Tunisian revolution) is an inseparable part of the Arab revolutionary process and not a “conspiracy” organized by imperialism, as claim many self-styled “anti-imperialists”, ALBA in Latin America, Chavists everywhere or neo-Stalinists, including, in Greece, the “libertarian” Takis Fotopoulos of ‘Inclusive Democracy” or the neo-Stalinist George Delastik, chief editor of the weekly paper PRIN of the New Left Current( NAR), unashamedly supporting Gaddafi.

Fotopoulos attacked the EEK and personally the author of this article as “agents of the transnational elite and of Zionism” because we have said the obvious by calling the Libyan dictator “a man of imperialism”. According to his opinion, the Gaddafi regime has to be supported because it remains “anti-imperialist”, “not a client State”, and it is connected not directly but “only indirectly to the West by the internationalized market”. Only indirectly?

It was long ago when the former admirer of Nasser was in conflict with the imperialists, demonized by the West, and winning the sympathy or the support of anti-imperialist and left wing forces (among others, of the International Committee of Healy-an international Trotskyist current, with which the EEK has split in the 1980s- that had manifested a crude form of opportunism towards the so-called |Libyan “Jamahiriya’). After the collapse of the USSR, capitulating to imperialism, the Gaddafi regime started in 1999 its collaboration with the  CIA; from 2003 became openly subservient to the West, giving shelter in Libya for special torture center for people accused to belong to Al Qaeda, betraying to the British MI6 the IRA and providing information on every connection, real or fictitious, with anti-imperialist movements and revolutionary organizations internationally; it  gave the oilfields of the country to the British ,Italian, French and US companies( in a deal very profitable for the Gaddafi family itself and its friends); on this basis, the Libyan tyrant was transformed from a pariah to a valuable friend praised by all the Western rulers.

But the political problem is not the pro-Gaddafi guru of a self styled “anarchist” sect called ‘Inclusive Democracy’. In Greece, as well as in Italy and in other countries, a kind of Stalinoid, hollow “anti-imperialism” came forward in defence of the Libyan butcher of his own people.

Some of the consequences of this stand, we saw in a demonstration in Athens, on March 22,( and in which the EEK too has participated) originally called against the much publicized  EU Summit of the 24/25 March to finalize the “grand bargain” to deal with the crisis in the Euro-zone at the expense of the European working class. The NAR and its coalition of centrist organizations ANTARSYA are very proud (as they write in the paper PRIN on 27/3/11) that through the coordination of a number of rank and file unions that they control they succeeded to “re-orientate” (?) the demonstration, taking with them also the small group around the trade union bureaucracy of GSEE and ADEDY, and substituting the demonstration against the EU by an anti-war demonstration against the imperialist intervention in Libya.

There is no doubt that a mobilisation against imperialist aggression in Libya was (and is) necessary and timely.  But it was a disorientation (not “re-orientation”) to cancel an anti-EU mobilization and substitute to it a (small in numbers) anti-war demonstration, where the majority of the organizations manifested a (not so) “critical”| or even quite unconditional support to Gaddafi.

What was-and is- absolutely necessary to do was and is to connect the struggle in support of the Arab revolution and against the imperialist aggression in Libya with the dramatically deteriorating crisis in the European Union and the prospects of a social revolution in Europe itself.

THE EU SUMMIT FIASCO

War and revolution in the Middle East coincide with a resurgence of the aggravated sovereign debt crisis in the Euro-zone and political crises all over the EU. What unifies all theses developments is the world capitalist crisis, now in its fourth year.

From November 2010, Sarkozy and Merkel were supposedly working on a scheme, nicknamed later as “the Grand Bargain” to impose German anD French interests on the entire EU as a “long term solution to the crisis”.

The plan was nearly agreed in its final form on March 11, 2011 and it was presented for ratification in the EU Summit in Brussels on March 24-25. Precisely on the eve of the Summit, the Grand Bargain proved to be a Grand Fiasco. The Euro-zone sovereign debt crisis was exacerbated with the downgrading of Greece, Portugal, and of 30 banks in Spain, the fall of the Portuguese government putting on the agenda the bail out of the country and complicating the implementation of the EU decisions, the bank crisis in Ireland and the refusal of the newly elected Irish government to accept the German-French blackmail. But above all, the architects of the “grand bargain” pretending to be the united leadership of the European Union, Sarkozy and Merkel, fighting each one for his or her political-electoral survival, split ranks: the French President put the uniform of Napoleon to wage war against his old friend in Libya, and his German counterpart refused categorically any involvement in the military campaign in the North African deserts were the German general Rommel was defeated long ago. Despite the split, both of them suffered devastating defeats in the March local elections in their respective countries.

Sarkozy pompously presented himself in 2007 as the “new Thatcher to burry definitively the May 1968 legacy”. Now who really buries whom? Insofar the so-called “Iron Lady of a German Europe” is concerned, she suffered a humiliating defeat as her Party, Christian Democracy, ruling Baden-Württemberg for 58 years, saw its Walhalla collapsing in the elections of March 27. Not only the German-French axis proved to be less than resilient but political regime crises are rapidly deteriorating in both countries, at the hard core of the EU.

The “Grand Bargain” was formally ratified on March 25, but as the Financial Times has written in an editorial on March 26 “What was agreed will not help, what helps was not agreed”…

The next day of the Grand Fiasco, only a few months after a rebellious youth, during a massive mobilization against the increase of the high education fees, had burned the headquarters of the ruling Tory party,  half a million British workers flooded the streets of London in opposition to the draconian cuts that the Tory/Liberal government wants to impose.

The simoun, the wild wind of the Arab desert, starts to blow in the European Metropolises.

FROM THE GREEK DECEMBER TO THE ARAB SPRING, AND TO A HOT EUROPEAN SUMMER

The European Union has Greece not solely as a most problematic member, the weakest link in the sovereign crisis in the Euro-zone, but also as its geopolitical link to the Middle East in revolutionary turmoil.

On the eve of the “Grand Bargain” EU Summit turned into a Grand Fiasco, a flood of articles in the Western European Press reflected the growing anxiety of the European bourgeoisie for the short term future of a Greece in undeclared State bankruptcy despite the bail out of May 2010 and the enormous sufferings imposed on the Greek people by the measures by the troika of the IMF /EU/ ECB faithfully implemented by the PASOK government.

A worst case scenario published by Standard’s and Poor’s warned that the Greek public debt, already now an unsustainable burden calculated  as 143 per cent of the GDP, could jump to an astronomic  330 per cent of the GDP in 2015! (Le Monde, 24 March 2011)

Despite the fantastic lies of the government and of the mainstream mass media in Greece, the Greek and the European ruling classes are trembling. Only the eternal sceptics of the bureaucratized and even the so-called “anti-capitalist” Left, continue to underestimate the revolutionary potential of the Greek workers’ and popular movement.

The specter of the December 2008 youth revolt is still here terrifying the forces of capitalist social order. This revolt – “the first political explosion of the current world economic crisis” according to the correct and unforgotten assessment, at that time, by the IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn- is the prologue, connection, and transition to today’s revolutions in Maghreb and |Mashrek, which, not accidentally, were called “youth revolutions”.

Many of the questions of the Greek December that have remained open up to now, they can find answers if we study the development of the Arab revolution, which actually changes the map of the region and of the world. A revolution, which includes in itself and simultaneously supersedes (as an Aufhebung in Hegel’s dialectical term) the revolutionary experiences of the 20^th century, is neither simply a national democratic nor an Islamic one but a social revolution.

The face of this revolution of the 21^st century has paradoxically the innocent features of the face of adolescent Alexandros Grigoropoulos (the 15 years old young boy killed by the Greek police in 2008 igniting thus the December revolutionary fire), a face very similar to that of the youth in the banlieu of Paris, in the villas of Buenos Aires, in Istanbul, Cairo, Aden or Manama.

Many people speak about an Arab 1848 to emphasize not only its international expansion all over the Middle East but mainly its democratic character. But the 1848 European revolution itself was characterized not solely by the national and democratic awakening of the European peoples but, essentially, by the exhaustion of the 1789 French Revolution and of the historical mission of the bourgeoisie, by the betrayal of the revolution by the German bourgeois and petty bourgeois democrats, the revolutionary ascent of the working class, the massacre of the heroic Parisian proletariat by the democratic bourgeoisie in June 1848.

Drawing the lessons of the 1848 revolution, Karl Marx, in the famous Appeal of the General Council of 1850, re-elaborated and re-formulated, on a new class basis and with a new historical content, the old radical Jacobin slogan for a Revolution in Permanence.

The Spring of the peoples of Europe in 1848 marks the apogee of capitalism and the beginning of its slide into historical decline, in which entered at the end of the 19^th century-early 20^th century. The Arab Spring, on the contrary, comes in an advanced point of capitalist decline, in the middle of the unprecedented crisis of capitalist globalization.

The working class played and still plays a crucial role in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, even Saudi Arabia spreading shock and awe not only to the threatened ruling regimes but also to the bourgeois and Islamist oppositions, who give solemn oath to democracy and repeatedly call for an end of the workers strikes, and for “self-restraint” of the radical, uncontrolled youth.

But the Djin is out of the bottle, and came to stay free for a long period of time. In front of us opens not a “new stage of bourgeois democracy”, as the Stalinist Nayef Hawatmeh of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine claims (in an interview in the Greek paper Avgi, March 20, 2011). On the contrary, the unfolding revolution clashes with the historical inability and failure of Arab bourgeois and petty bourgeois nationalism to achieve freedom, national unity, and independence for the oppressed Arab people; it is in collision with former anti-imperialist regimes, institutionalizing national liberation struggles( as in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Syria), and degenerating into pro-imperialist corrupt despotisms.

The current revolution also goes beyond the manipulation and frustration of the messianic expectations of the deprived masses by the theocracy of the mullahs, of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists, who, for an entire period, tried to occupy the void left by the bankruptcy of the secular nationalist movements and regimes, and by the collapse of the Stalinist Communist Parties of the region that tail-ended nationalism.

The revolution of unemployed youth in the Middle East defies all the established norms – as the rebellious youth of the Greek December did, to be classified, by the “politically correct” conservative minds in the Right and in the Left, under the oversimplified category of “anarchists”.

Only a libertarian revolutionary Marxism that continues from the point that Lenin has stopped in the “State and Revolution” in 1917 and renews the theory and practice of the Permanent Revolution of Trotsky could speak a common language  with that young generation of the world revolution and build the revolutionary International of its victory, the Fourth International.

As the future of the Russian Revolution depended from the victory of the German Revolution, the victorious future of the revolution in the Middle East is situated in the European coasts of the Mediterranean. The responsibility is ours!

Paris, March 29-April 3, 2011

_Savas Michael Matsas

By Savas Michael-Matsas

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

Even after the departure of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators, the masses do not stop the revolutionary struggle. It is clearly shown in the 100.000 strong mobilization in Tunis, the bloody clashes and the resignation of Ghanoussi, and in the powerful strike movement of the working class in Egypt defying the military orders.

The armed clashes in Libya and the massacres of the Libyan people by the   disintegrating regime of dictator Gaddafi, the friend of Tony Blair and Berlusconi, as well as the threat of an imperialist military “humanitarian” intervention in the region cannot be separated from the unfolding Arab Revolution, despite all the existing differences.

Libya

The revolutionary process anyway and always is uneven, non linear. Revolution never is uniform; it takes different forms in different social formations, including in those of a region sharing common historical background…

The post –Ottoman Arab world was deliberately fragmented by British, French and Italian imperialism and later by the local feudal-capitalist and military ruling elites. The historical task for an Arab political unity rose by the Nasserites and Baathists it could but fail to be fulfilled by them and by the belated Arab bourgeoisie linked with a thousand ties with world imperialist capitalism. What it is unfolding now is the rising of the Arab masses against not only monarchs and emirs but first of all, regimes that emerged in the anti-colonial awakening in the 1950s and 1960s and then capitulated to imperialism to serve their own greedy interests.

The brutal demise of Arab nationalism takes a particularly violent form in Libya because of the archaic structures of a tribal society preserved by the Gaddafi regime. The development of a local working class was deliberately prevented. The workforce was imported from abroad and now it is evacuating the country. On the contrary, in Tunisia the proletariat plays a decisive role from the beginning of the revolution and in Egypt it had prepared its soil and intervenes from early February. The brutality of the civil war in Libya, reminding tribal wars in Africa,  and the existence of  a strong Islamist element, crashed in the mid-1990s but never extinguished reflect the primitive conditions that the so-called “Third Universal Way” of Gaddafi  kept intact. The Libyan dictator, for an entire period, played the role of a Bonaparte balancing between the conflicting interests, at home between the different tribes and clans, abroad between imperialism, the Arab masses and other anti-imperialist forces, particularly during the Cold War period and the resurgence of the national struggles in the periphery.

The margins of this balancing act have been exhausted by capitalist globalization and its crisis, the demise of the USSR, the re-assertion of the aggressiveness and the war drive of imperialism and Zionism in the Middle East and Central Asia.  The Gaddafi regime, lacking a real social popular base, capitulated to imperialism in the most obscene manner, particularly the last decade. While in the first period the US base in Whilas was kicked out and the oilfields were nationalized, now, Gaddafi and his corrupt clique sold out the oil producing country to big companies of Britain and Italy at the first place. The old “demon” of the West was transformed into a darling of the rulers in London, Paris, and Rome.

It is a shame, an unequivocal symptom of political and moral bankruptcy the fact that Chavez and his “Socialism of the 21^st century”, or, in Greece, the “libertarian” Takis Fotopoulos and his “Inclusive Democracy” give support, hardly “critical” or covered under the veil of “neutrality between the two  civil war camps” in the name of anti-imperialism. Radical “socialist” or “anarchist” anti-imperialism that does not challenge capitalism shares now the fate of radical bourgeois nationalism in its inglorious but bloody fall.

Gaddafi is the man of imperialism, even if now hypocritically it abandons him. There is no doubt that imperialism has its own supporters in the opposition camp( among ex-Gaddafi officials,  Islamists or bourgeois émigrés)  and prepares its intervention in this neuralgic strategic region against the Arab Revolution and in defense of the Zionist State in crisis. But to actually fight imperialism in the region we have to support the just struggle of the Libyan people to crash its tyrant. Already, rebels in Benghazi speaking to Al-Jazzeera (and shown also in Greek TV) denounced “the West that wants to intervene only for the sake to steal Libyan oil” and insisted to be let alone to deal with their own means their own enemy.

The working class, first of all in the NATO countries, has the duty  to stop any imperialist intervention and stand by the side of revolutionaries, opposing pro-imperialist forces and  calling for a program of Permanent Revolution in the country, in the region and internationally.

Revolution and Crisis

While millions of oppressed in the region and all over the world but also the ruling classes, recognize the revolutionary character of the events in the Maghreb and the Arab Peninsula, some professional pessimists in the Left (including the so-called far or radical left) try to deny that what is evolving in front of us is a revolution, either because it does not comply to their schema what a “real” (?)Revolution should be or because it is not led by a Communist Party.

The Stalinist KKE in Greece, taking out of context and distorting the well known quotation by Lenin that a revolution is characterized  by the “transfer of power from a class to another class”, omits innumerous texts of Lenin speaking about a protracted revolutionary process of deep social transformation, never “pure” in its composition, always  with a lot of political and ideological confusion,  leading either to victory- the transfer of power from one class to another( social revolution for ex. the October 1917 Revolution) or of one section of a class to another section of the same class( political revolution, for ex. February 1848 in France)- or to defeat ( for ex. the Greek Revolution of 1941-49). A defeated revolution, when the ruling class remains in power, remains, nevertheless a revolution (for ex. the Russian revolution of 1905)

Others (see article by Petros Papakonstantinou in NAR’s paper PRIN, on February 20) “deplores” that still in Egypt what we have is “ at the most” a revolt, not a revolution. The same author, in another article as correspondent of the bourgeois Kathimerini, correctly stressed that the first word that you learn arriving in the Middle East now is “thawra”, revolution…

Revolutionary Marxists have not any vacillation: as we have stressed in an article published in our paper NEA PROOPTIKI, on February 19, not solely we are confronted with an Arab Revolution; the revolution in the Arab world knocks the doors of Europe. The Greek 2008 Revolt was the prelude – the “first political explosion of the current world economic crisis” according to the famous words of the infamous Dominique Strauss-Kahn- announcing the coming revolutionary explosions. We have entered into a new phase of the world revolution fuelled by the deepening of the world capitalist crisis that erupted in 2007.

It is important and vital to recognize the revolutionary character of the upheavals in the Arab world; but it is not enough: we have as Marxists to establish the dialectical connection of these political events of first historical order and their material conditions of possibility in the current world crisis.

After the Lehman Brothers collapse and the immediate threat for a meltdown of the world financial system in autumn 2008, the attempts by the capitalist States and Central Banks to halt it by injection of enormous liquidity and “rescue packages”, a process exacerbated further by the so-called “Quantitative Easing 2” decided in November 2010 by Bernake’s Fed in the US, produced a gigantic speculative and inflationary tidal wave towards the so-called BRICS and the countries of the South. The result is a new leap in energy and food prices that put fire in the already accumulated social dynamite in the Arab countries with huge impoverished and very young populations suffering from chronic unemployment.

The same process of post 2008 expansion of deficits and debts produced the nightmare of the European sovereign debt crisis and the unsustainable US fiscal crisis.

The CRFI has closely followed, analyzed, and made the right prognosis step by step during this process.

General Strike in Greece

The new massive General Strike in Greece on February 23 was not a repetition of the previous ten that took place last year. Not only the number of the participants in the demonstration in Athens on the day of the Strike was bigger even from the enormous mobilization in the previous General Strike on December 15, 2010  but the state of social consciousness has changed. In 2010, there was the illusion that with an expression of combativity like that manifested previously in the General Strike of 2001 against the first attempt to introduce an anti-pension Law, could be sufficient to halt the catastrophe. Then, disappointment grew as these methods and their manipulation by the treacherous bureaucracies of GSEE proved to be totally ineffective. Now everybody lives in the catastrophe and see that it will continue ad infinitum according to the will of the PASOK government and the troika of the INMF/EU/ECB. The slogan for their overthrow was the central and universal slogan of the demonstration. But an alternative strategy and tactics how to proceed are still lacking for the majority of the people

The Stalinists of KKE with their separated,disciplined, but innocuous for the government, mobilizations present not an alternative. On February 23, the section of the mass march that gathered under the banners of the class struggle unions, social movements and the organizations of  far left was impressively bigger than the section of the separate march organized by the KKE in Omonia Square at 11.00 am and dispersed peacefully in Syntagma Square at noon, after an hour. On the contrary, very violent clashes between the riot police and the demonstrators took place all the day until night, particularly around Syntagma Square, which was transformed by the police into a gas chamber. The British BBC covered live the conflict under the headline “Athens like Cairo”.

Despite the clumsy use of the slogan “to transform Syntagma Square into our Tahrir Square” by the ex-chairman of SYRIZA Alavanos, the truth is that both the deep and explicit fear of the ruling class and the hopes of the most combative sections of the workers and youth was to see an extension of the Egyptian Revolution in Greece. Already, during the recent strike of the doctors  who occupied for 11 days the Ministry of Health against its privatization plan launched the slogan “ George (Papandreou) take the helicopter and go away together with Ben Ali”

The General Strike coincided also with the dramatic hunger strike of 300 immigrants of Arab origins fighting for their rights. A representative of the hunger strikers addressed the meetings of the Greek Strikers underlying objectively the unity of the struggle.

Our Party participated actively in the Strike and the march, fighting for the overthrow of the Government and the troika, the cancellation of the debt and for workers power, receiving as usual its own share from police brutality. This time our class enemies are worrying because our role in struggles like the recent occupation of the Ministry of Health by the doctors, the non stop strikes in Transport, and the social movement “not pay the tolls in the motorways” that was able for the first time to organize a 3000 strong public rally in Syntagma Square in front of parliament, on March the 1^st.

From Athens to Wisconsin

It is not by accident that the Tea Party Republican governor Walker of Wisconsin condemned the hundreds of thousands of American workers that mobilized and occupied the local Capitol in defense of union bargaining rights, as repeating the actions “of the Greeks”. Rightly too the workers have called him “Hosni Walker”. Revolutionary Cairo and Athens in revolt is transferred into the American  Metropolis!

The world capitalist bankruptcy, the same driving force in different manifestations- US states bankruptcies and fiscal crisis, Euro-zone debt crisis, disastrous inflation on food prices and unemployment- affects now directly the class struggle and the consciousness of the masses.

In such revolutionary conditions we see the nationalist “socialists of the 21^st century” and fake “anti-imperialists” exposing themselves as a fraud; the Stalinists to turn their back or to stab in the back the masses; the centrists paralyzed and shrinking crisis (see last Congress of the French NPA). It is true, as Trotsky had said, that the irruption of the masses in the scene of history refresh the air, and destroys all fictions.

We have to take initiatives and re-group by active interventions and debate all the most combative proletarian and revolutionary elements, coming from different traditions, under the banner of the Fourth International that has to complete the work that the 1917 October socialist revolution had started: the victory of the world socialist revolution!

3-3-11

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

1. The Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) salutes with great respect and joy the heroic struggle of the Tunisian workers and unemployed, braving police bullets to finally overthrow Zine el-Abidin Ben Ali, who subjected the country to a brutal dictatorship for 23 years. What is taking place in Tunisia is a political revolution. Only time will show whether this revolution will be transformed into a social revolution challenging the domination of the bourgeoisie. Given the fact that even the trade union movement does not constitute an independent force in Tunisia, let alone socialist forces, and remembering that imperialism will now step into the scene in order to stop the revolution, this seems unlikely. On the other hand, the fact that the working people of Tunisia, old and young, male and female, have begun to arm themselves, albeit with nothing but plain sticks, in order to protect their neighborhoods and establish self-defense committees can be considered to be a nucleus of workers’ power at a very early stage. In any case, supporting the Tunisian working class and youth in order to save their insurrection from being forced to stop halfway is an urgent duty for the whole international working class and the world revolutionary movement. The most important task of the moment is to struggle against the interruption of the revolution by a pro-EU, globalist “democracy” in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its allies. Since this kind of regime will in no way eradicate or even alleviate the poverty of the Tunisian workers and unemployed youth, it would not be worth either the self-immolation of the revolution’s great martyr Mohammed Bouazizi or the death of over 100 workers and poor people during the incidents.

2. The Tunisian revolution is so far the most important consequence in the area of class struggle of the Great Depression that has hit the entire world since 2008. The immediate cause of the one month-long struggle that has led to the revolution was the rise in unemployment to an unbearable level as a result of the blow dealt by the economic crisis that has spread around the world and shaken Europe, Tunisia’s rich neighbor, to tourism, the main source of income for the Tunisian economy. In addition, the harsher measures imposed by the European Union to prevent labor migration in the context of the crisis have destroyed the North African youth’s hope for individual salvation. In this sense, the Tunisian revolution has been marked by the same dynamics that led to the Greek rebellion of 2008 and the formidable class struggles during 2010 in this country, the Tekel struggle in Turkey in 2010, the general strikes and student rebellions that took place throughout 2010 in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Britain. Echoing the accumulated contradictions and class struggle traditions of the European countries of the Mediterranean coast, the working class, the unemployed, and the poor of North Africa have now risen up. The Mediterranean is becoming a basin of revolution.

3. Imperialism’s reaction to the Tunisian revolution has been an example of hypocrisy par excellence. Having pontificated on the importance of democracy against nations they consider enemies, the USA and the EU have taken a totally different approach towards Tunisia. The EU and in particular France, the ex-colonial power in Tunisia, did not utter a word for a whole month concerning the incidents that took the lives of more than 50 young people. Having itself remained silent for a long time, the USA, sensing earlier than the EU the impending catastrophe for Ben Ali’s regime, maneuvered to distinguish itself from the old regime. Obama, a hero for many, finally brought himself to “applaud” the Tunisian people, but only after the overthrow of Ben Ali! Having reported the incidents in Iran after the elections last year day in and day out and constantly harped on the killing of Neda, one of the few victims of the mullahs during those incidents, the media of imperialist countries simply looked away as Tunisian (and later Algerian) youth were being slaughtered. Both the USA and the EU remained silent until the very last day because they considered the pro-imperialist Ben Ali, who even genuflected before Zionism, useful for their interests. Moreover, France fears a revolutionary victory of the masses in Maghreb like a plague because this is likely to provoke the Beurs, the youth of North African origin in France, the recent rebels of the French cités, into another round of revolt. This population factor is another tie that binds the two coasts of the Mediterranean to each other.

4. This is the first time that the working class and the large laboring masses have overthrown a despot in the Arab world. This is bound to have repercussions so resounding as to be even unimaginable today. Imperialist plunderers (in Iraq and Lebanon) of the great Arab civilization and their lackeys! Kkings, sheikhs, emirs (of the Gulf countries)! Dictators (of Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Sudan, and Libya) and bureaucrats (of Palestine)! Tremble you all! The Arab working people are preparing to take their destiny into their own hands! Your days are counted! In all the Arab countries, the masses are watching the unemployed youth and the poor people of Tunisia with uncontainable admiration. Already, the Tunisian incidents have led to big demonstrations in Algeria and Jordan on class issues. However, its main impact will unfold during the coming years, even decades. At the same time, the Tunisian insurrection creates a great opportunity for socialism to rise as an alternative to Islamism, perceived for the last three decades as the only opposition to imperialism and the despotic regimes of the Arab world. The duty of the proletarian revolutionaries of Turkey and the world is to provide an unwavering and indefatigable support to the emancipation of the Arab world.

5. The Tunisian revolution has also exposed the hypocrisy of all bourgeois forces in Turkey. Tayyip Erdogan, fortune’s hero in the Arab world, did not open his mouth for a full month to condemn the criminal regime of Ben Ali. In line with the pseudo-democrats of the EU, the liberals did not even lift a finger to support the masses against the despotism in danger. Both the secular and fundamentalist media committed a conspiracy of silence against the struggle of the Tunisian masses. The Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) appeals to the working people of Turkey, of Sunni, Alawi and other creeds, to opt for the Tunisian path: this path has once again demonstrated that not only bread but also democracy can only be attained through the struggle of the working class! The Tunisian path shines in contrast to the “bringing of democracy” to Iraq by the imperialists! Shame on those who no longer believe in class struggle and revolution, who have for years ceaselessly hammered in the idea that “the working class is becoming less and less organized and hence can no longer rise in struggle”, who nonsensically have argued that “Muslim populations are sheepish and never rebel”! The proletariat is adding another page of pride to its long history of international struggle! And this in an overwhelmingly Muslim society!

Long live the struggle of our fellow Tunisian workers and youth!

For permanent revolution that leads the workers to take power without stopping at the stage of “democracy”, in Tunisia and everywhere!

Long live the Socialist Federation of the Middle East!

Long live the world revolution!

The Initiative for the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP)

16 January 2011

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

Against all those skeptics who were ready to spell the “defeat of the  masses”, or to deplore their “passivity” in front of the IMF/EU barbaric measures imposed by the PASOK government, a new wave of radicalization and unprecedented  mobilizations  is growing: in the recent regional elections , the existing bourgeois political system was repudiated by the mass abstention of the large majority of the voting population; tens of thousands demonstrated   on November 17, the day of commemoration of the 1973 Polytechnic uprising against the military dictatorship; tens of thousands were  marching in the streets all over Greece on December 6, day of commemoration of the assassination of the young student Alexandros Grigoropoulos that led to the December 2008 rebellion; the  General Strike of December 15 was a tremendous success both in participation in the strike and in the demonstrations; and the non-stop strikes of the transport workers and in the public enterprises, under immediate threat of privatization, paralyze the country because of the strategic nature of these sectors.

All these mobilizations turn, in general, into violent street fights against the escalating State repression.  The brutality of the riot police reaches new records, in the long history of barbarism of the repression forces in Greece. The previous months, there were special military exercises of the repression forces in sport stadiums to train them how to repress urban uprisings. Now, they put these “lessons” into practice, using new and old techniques as well as an incredible quantity of chemical gazes launched against  everybody in sight,  against demonstrators but also against old people passing by or even children, who had to be hospitalized with respiratory and cardiac problems. But in the hospitals too the injured are persecuted by police making interrogations and arrests despite the strong protests of the doctors.

The utter hypocrisy of the bourgeois media in Greece and in Europe is that they totally ignore the extreme police brutality, operating under the orders of the “Socialist” Papandreou government, while they had over-emphasized a minor incident: Costas Hadjidakis, the ex Minister of the previous right wing government, who personally was responsible for the privatization of Olympic Airways leaving thousands of workers without a job,  was physically assaulted, when he was recognized walking near the parliament,  by an angry crowd of middle aged demonstrators, many of them jobless after the sell out of Olympic. This expression of popular anger demanding justice was  vehemently denounced and condemned not only by the bourgeois media and parties but as well by the trade union bureaucracy and the Stalinist Communist Party( which denounced, as usual, those  who attacked the ex-minister to be “police agents” and “suspicious anarchists”).

One important characteristic of the 100.000plus demonstration in Athens on December 15 is that the large majority marched independently from the small GSEE/ADEDY contingent, behind the banners of the Coordination of class struggle unions and the far left organizations. The Stalinist PAME, as usual, did its own separate rally in Omonia, strictly with its supporters, in distance from the main demonstration.

It is not accidental that this time, it was not the anarchist youth groups or the EEK the only target of police brutality: the Coordination of the class struggle unions became the target of a vicious attack by the riot police near the Parliament.  A similar attack was launched against a group of class struggle trade unionists, who, after the end of the main demonstration, marched to the GSEE headquarters to demand a continuation of the strike action. A section wanted to occupy the headquarters in protest against the treachery of the GSEE bureaucracy. The bureaucracy took the side of the police and the parties of the parliamentary Left denounced the “extremists”, i.e. the most combative elements of the movement.

As the militancy of this combative section grows, the confusion spread by centrism intensifies. The propaganda of the so-called “platform of the left economists” asking “for a moratorium of the debt, a public accounting inquiry, on the lines of Correa in Ecuador, and a renegotiation to cancel the illegitimate debt partially or totally” is widely promoted. The EEK organizes public meetings all over the country presenting the analysis of the world crisis, based on the last two Statements of the International Secretariat of the CRFI, criticizing the centrists, reformists and Stalinists, and advancing a revolutionary program for a socialist answer to the challenge of the evolving systemic bankruptcy.

The general line of the EEK in the mobilization of December the 15^th was to call for an indefinite General Political Strike to smash the government and its measures, to kick out the EU and the IMF, to cancel the foreign debt, and to establish workers power. Behind  our banner with this line, hundreds of workers and youth rallied, many of them for the first time, including the most militant wing of the Metro workers, of workers recently fired form their jobs, and of the popular movement against the payment of tolls in the privatized motor ways.

The most urgent political question is now unifying the entire workers and popular movement all over Greece on a central plan of action on a program of transitional demands. The organization and political training of the growing forces defying capitalist barbarism and the bureaucracies, the re-groupment of the vanguard in the revolutionary Party is the most crucial task.

The new upsurge is immediately connected with the upsurge all over Europe, from Britain and Ireland, to Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. As a matter of fact, the “Memorandum”, the program imposed on the Greek people by the EU, the ECB and the IMF in May 2010, had as a target not to avoid  the unavoidable Greek default but to create a protective “fire zone” in this part of Europe to stop the expansion of the fire of the Greek capitalist collapse to the entire Euro zone. The Memorandum has failed in every aspect. It made the life of the Greek people a misery but the wild fire of the capitalist bankruptcy is spreading now all over the Old Continent.

We have to prepare ourselves for revolutionary situations in the birthplace of world capitalism.

Savas Michael, 20 December 2010

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