http://socialistaction.org/greek-syriza-folds-to-eu-demands/
Greek Syriza folds to EU demands
Published July 22, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Aug. 2015 Tsipras sleepy
By MARTY GOODMAN
The new $93 billion (86 billion euros) economic bailout deal in Greece
is a shameless act of international capitalist piracy. The July 13
proposal—approved by the Greek parliament two days later—wielded cuts to
pensions, including special aid to the poorest; a hike in taxes on food
and other goods and services; a “liberalizing” of the labor market (that
is, voiding labor protections and job security); and perhaps the most
odious, the privatization of Greek public institutions, with the
proceeds (50 billion euros) to be hijacked off to Luxemburg banks, out
of reach of the Greek people.
And, that was only the beginning. On July 22, the Greek parliament, by a
230-63 vote, approved a second set of cuts demanded by international
creditors.
A quickly organized government referendum on July 5 of an earlier
version of the “memorandum” of agreement resulted in a heroic vote of
61% of Greek voters who said “NO!” to more misery by the European banks.
That historic “no” was turned into a “yes” by a government unwilling to
fight. The Syriza government agreed to an even more punishing bailout
than the memorandum the Greek people had rejected. One TV commentator
quipped sarcastically when news of the deal emerged, “Why not auction
off the Parthenon?”
Indeed. The middle-class Syriza leadership, headed by Prime Minister
Alexis Tspiras, calculated that, while promising to not to leave the EU
(“Grexit”), they could outwit and shame the billionaire leaders of
European capital and bend them to the will of the Greek people. But, the
bloodsuckers who rule Europe would have none of it and imposed their
will on the long-suffering Greek masses.
Despite the continued personal popularity of Tspiras, disbelief at the
results of patient negotiations turned to anger at what is now the third
and most punishing bailout for Greece in five years.
On July 15 unions called for a one-day general strike and demonstration
against the memorandum. The action was called mainly by ADEDY, a union
representing public workers who are facing layoffs and wage cuts under
the terms of the agreement. The march was led by women cleaners and
hospital workers, followed by transit workers who had shut down trains
that morning. Street protests that day amounted to about 15,000
memorandum opponents.
That evening some 15 protesters were arrested, many of whom had been
savagely attacked by police in front of the parliament building. The
arrested demonstrators included two members of OKDE-Spartacos,
supporters of the Fourth International and co-thinkers of Socialist
Action in the United States. Protesters say that the previous government
had removed confinement barricades for protests in front of the Greek
parliament—only to have them replaced by police clubs and teargas. An
international campaign for their release has been mounted. Go to:
https://www.change.org/p/alexis-tsipras-abandonnez-toutes-les-poursuites-pesant-sur-les-manifestants-contre-le-nouveau-mémorandum-arrêtés-ce-mercredi-15-juillet-à-athènes-drop-all-charges-against-the-activists-arrested-in-the-anti-memorandum-demo-in-athens-on-july-15th.
The Greek debt of $330 billion (300 billion euros) is currently 174% of
the country’s Gross National Product (GNP), up from 134% GDP in 2010.
The European Union (EU) lenders have refused a “haircut,” meaning the
kind of debt reduction that is offered to some countries by big lenders
for mostly strategic political reasons, such as the recent write-off of
a 13.5 to 18 billion euro loan from the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) to the CIA-backed Ukrainian regime.
The major financial institutions that are strangling Greece, nicknamed
the Troika, are the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF),
the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Commission (EC). On
July 20, a 7 billion euro EU bridge loan and an emergency bank credit
got the bank doors reopened in Greece. Banks had been closed since June
29, except for ATMS, where customers were limited to withdrawals of 60
euros per day. Capital controls on large withdrawals are still in place.
Clearly, the EU’s hard line is meant to punish Greek workers for daring
to defy capitalist diktat by electing an ostensibly “leftist”
government. Since Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) took power in
January with 36% of the votes, Greece’s corrupt elite have removed
hundreds of millions, if not billions, of euros from the country and
deposited their booty in foreign European banks, depriving Greece of
taxable wealth.
Greece’s debt crisis is only one of several scenarios of the worldwide
debt and economic crisis, one that includes Puerto Rico, a colony of
U.S. imperialism. Many nations are still reeling from the capitalist
crisis of 2007-8 and drowning in debt to international banks,
particularly the U.S.-dominated World Bank and its austerity enforcement
arm, the International Monetary Fund. In Europe alone unemployment
remains high: The youth jobless rate is still 42% in Italy and 49% in
Spain despite mass emigration.
The fate of the proposal is now in the hands of Germany, the
acknowledged financial and political leader of the 28-member EU.
Germany’s parliament should vote on the proposal within the next month,
agreeing thus far only to discuss terms. The remaining EU parliaments
must also vote on it. The draconian austerity guidelines of the bailout
are to be monitored by the IMF, whose trickle-down, starvation policies
have left hundreds of millions in poverty and misery.
Fifty billion euros of the Greek loan is to be used for bank
recapitalization, i.e., private profit, 25% toward internal
investment—mostly capitalist profit—and 25% to pay debt, mostly to
bankers. Greece needs $7.7 billion currently and over $5 billion in
August alone. Already implemented are cuts to pensions and added taxes
on items, such as food.
Further austerity measures will wreck an already imploding economy.
Unemployment in Greece is 26%, U.S. Great Depression levels; for youth,
60%. Some 800,000 haven’t been paid in weeks or months. Pensions have
been slashed in half, and wages and jobs have been massively cut since
the capitalist crisis began and austerity measures imposed in 2010. The
Greek economy has shrunk by 25% since that year. The suicide rate is up
35% since the crisis began.
During the early 2000s, the U.S. investment bank of Goldman Sachs played
an important role in helping to unleash the Greek crisis, masking
Greece’s true debt while raking in a cool 600 million euros in profit
from a shady $2.8 billion deal with the corrupt Greek government.
The managing director and vice president of the European branch of
Goldman Sachs in 2010 was Mario Draghi. Draghi was previously the head
of the Bank of Italy and involved in the privatization of public
utilities there. In 2011, Draghi was made the head of the European
Central Bank and today negotiates directly with Greece over the debt.
Socialists say, “Not one penny to the banks! Cancel the Greek debt and
nationalize all financial institutions in Greece under workers control!”
Syriza: What went wrong
The proposal passed in the Greek parliament on July 15 with 229 “yes”
votes to 64 “no’s”; 123 members of SYRIZA or its right-wing governmental
partner ANEL supported the bailout. Thirty-two “no” votes came from
Syriza MPs, most of whom are in Syriza’s “Left Platform,” while seven
other Syriza MPs abstained or were absent. The Left Platform makes up
about 30% of Syriza’s Central Committee. Former Greek Energy Minister
Panagiotis Lafazanis, a leader of the Left Platform, said that the
memorandum was “incompatible with Syriza’s program” and added that the
EU had “acted like cold-blooded blackmailers and economic assassins.”
The “leftist” Syriza government was elected on a promise to refuse the
austerity that came with loans accepted by the former PASOK
(social-democrats) and center-right governments. Most of Syriza’s major
“red lines” that it pledged to workers that it would not cross were
swept aside to maintain the euro-banksters’ choke hold on Greece.
Since the July 15 parliament vote, some 10 Syriza top government
officials who did not back Tsipras have been removed and replaced with
mostly conservative MPs. Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis was
dismissed from his post, but even so, the “leftist” pledged his support
to the Syriza government. There is talk of another election in the autumn.
This was not the first Syriza betrayal. The vote for Syriza in January
2015 was a major rebuke to capitalist rulers—the first electoral revolt
in some years by the working class of a so-called advanced capitalist
country. Syriza’s slogan was “no sacrifice for the euro,” but just a
month after forming the government the SYRIZA leadership betrayed its
supporters by brokering a four-month bailout extension with the
Troika—much as the previous capitalist government did when it negotiated
a two-month extension.
Syriza Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras himself called the recent deal “a
bad agreement.” Even the IMF referred to the Greek debt under the
proposed deal as “unsustainable.” Nevertheless, Greek President Prokopis
Pavlopoulos, in an April interview in Spiegel Online, pledged to pay off
the banks, saying, “We will pay back our debts to the last euro.”
Pavlopoulos is a member of the conservative New Democracy party and was
elected president by the Greek parliament in February with Syriza’s votes.
Syriza began in 2004 as a fusion party of reformist ex-Stalinist
“Euro-Communists,” like Tsipras, from the Greek Communist Party (KKE)
but also included independent leftists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and later,
Greek Occupy activists. Its leading lights, like Tsipras, are
middle-class intellectuals, many of them centered in universities. The
organized working class within SYRIZA is small, around 10% to 15%,
according to estimates earlier this year. Despite a vote of 2,250,000
votes in the January election, only 35,000 voters were Syriza members at
that time, a sure sign that it is a movement based on elections, not on
mass struggles in the streets and in the factories (see the March 2015
Socialist Action newspaper).
Earlier Syriza platforms, such as the 2014 Thessalonki Program, called
for radical reforms such as nationalizing the banks (the Greek
government already holds most of the major banks’ shares), public
services, railroads, and airports, and saying “no” to the Troika
memorandums on jobs and wages. It promised democratic, not top-down,
decisions. However, since SYRIZA took office, there have been few
meetings of its decision-making Central Committee; the leadership turned
its back on its previous platform, ruling by decree and photo-ops.
Electoral strategy and trying to outfox the Troika at negotiations drove
Syriza strategy—not mass mobilizations, strikes, occupations, let alone
nationalizations. A July 13 radio interview with former Syriza Finance
Minister Yanis Varoufakis illustrates in starkest terms the middle-class
mindset of the party’s betrayers. Varoufakis related the details of his
personal meeting with Tspiris, as giant crowds surrounded the parliament
in celebration of the “no” vote: “I sensed immediately a sense of
resignation, a negatively charged atmosphere. I was confronted with an
air of defeat, which was completely at odds with what was happening outside.
“At that point I had to put it to the prime minister, ”If you want to
use the buzz of democracy outside the gates of this building you can
count on me. If, on the other hand, if you feel you cannot handle the
big interest in ‘no’ to the rather irrational proposition from our
European partners then I am going to simply steal into the night.
“I could see that Tsipris didn’t seem to have a positive attitude,
didn’t have what it took sentimentally, emotionally to carry the ‘no’
vote to Europe, to use it as a weapon.” To hear the interview, go to:
Yanis Varoufakis on Greek crisis – Late Night Live – ABC Radio National
(Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Modern capitalism is adept at co-opting forces that have the attention
and loyalty of the working class in order to corrupt, mislead, and
derail any serious fightback against deteriorating conditions. At these
times, reformists masquerading as “socialists” have shown themselves to
be reliable allies of the super-rich and capitalism.
In that role, the non-revolutionary Syriza fits the bill. Syriza has
organized few, if any, mass mobilizations against the 1%. Instead, it
has focused attention on the negotiating table, not even employing the
essential union tactic of supplementing talks with a display of labor’s
power in the streets or in the shops. Without it, the struggle is thus
reduced to a few elite members on both sides of the table. And when that
happens, the ruling class always wins.
Syriza’s services to imperialism
Syriza is also rendering its services to international imperialism. In
June 2013, The New York Times published an op-ed titled “Only SYRIZA Can
Save Greece.” The piece was co-authored by future Finance Minister
Varoufakis, who wrote that if Syriza took office, “Syriza doesn’t intend
to leave NATO or close American military bases.” The ever-expanding
U.S.-led NATO forces are poised squarely at Russia, elevating the war
danger.
A further example was Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias’ recent tour
of Israel. Kotzias stated in a joint press conference with Israeli
Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, “We must learn to love Israel.” Kotzias even
claimed that Israel is part of a “line of stability in this area,”
despite the atrocious bombing of Gaza last year, resulting in 2200
deaths, mostly civilians. Hypocritically, the SYRIZA 2012 platform calls
for the “abolition of military cooperation with Israel.”
Since the introduction of the Syriza-proposed memorandum, there is the
growing danger that the fascists of the Golden Dawn party, who won 6.3%
of the votes in the January election, can steal the mantle as the
opponents of the Troika. On Greek TV, a Golden Dawn parliamentarian
ripped-up the memorandum. Without a sharp challenge to capitalist misery
from the left, the violent anti-immigrant racists of Golden Dawn could
make substantial gains.
The left must be in the streets to pose a revolutionary alternative to
capitalism and smash the fascist threat.
Capitalism is a brutal system that defends its wealth at any cost. The
left cannot fool capitalism with clever arguments and slogans. Only the
working class has the power to defeat the Troika. What’s at stake in
Greece is an historic battle between its working people and a capitalist
system gone mad in a worldwide war over shrinking profit margins. Only a
revolutionary strategy based on working-class mobilization can defeat
the Troika. Only an overthrow of capitalism can save Greece.
Since the “no” vote victory, Greece has seen terrible setbacks to the
struggle to shake off the Euro-Banksters, but the spirit of the July 5
referendum must be nourished and strengthened as Greek workers face even
bigger challenges.
A united workers’ front of all labor and socialist organizations against
capitalist austerity can and will be built, although it will not happen
overnight. Such a united front must take bold action that cuts into the
very fabric of capitalist privilege, with not only mass protests but
also prolonged general strikes and occupations that can lead the way to
the overthrow of capitalism once and for all. Building a revolutionary
party in Greece that can lead these struggles remains a top priority.
For a government of workers, not capitalists!
No to austerity and privatizations! Break with the EU!
Nationalize the banks! Occupy the factories!
Revolution is the only solution!
Photo: Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras at late-night session in
parliament. Alkis Konstantinidis / Reuters
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Posted in Europe, International. | Tagged Greece, Syriza, Tsipras.
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