Class struggle in Greece

Greek government mobilizes riot police to break Athens subway strike

By Christoph Dreier

The Greek government has declared martial law and mobilized riot police to break the nine-day strike by Athens subway workers. As of this writing, it appears that subway service has been partially restored and at least some of the striking workers have returned to work under threat of prosecution and up to five years in prison.

However, bus and tram service has been halted by rolling strikes called by unions in sympathy with the subway workers. The subway workers’ union, SELMA, has, according to some news reports, instructed its members to return to work, but it is not clear to what extent such orders are being heeded by rank-and-file workers.

The subway workers, who are resisting massive wage cuts being imposed as part of a restructuring of civil service wages, defied a court ruling handed down Monday night declaring the strike illegal. On Thursday, the coalition government headed by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party invoked emergency powers, in effect declaring martial law and conscripting the strikers into the armed forces in order to force them back to work. The other parties in the coalition are the social democratic Pasok and the Democratic Left, a right-wing split-off from the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza).

Just before 4 AM Friday, some 300 riot police broke into the Sepolia depot in western Athens, which was being occupied by 90 striking workers. Rows of police blocked off surrounding roads to keep hundreds of strike supporters away while other police removed the strikers from the depot.

Although the workers did not resist, at least ten were arrested and one female worker was injured, according to Reuters. The police then locked down the depot, allowing only strike-breakers to enter.

The “civil mobilization” law used to attack the strike is supposedly intended for use only in case of a natural disaster, a massive danger to public health or the outbreak of war. Since the end of the Greek colonels’ dictatorship in 1974, it has been invoked only nine times—including three times in the last three years. In 2010 it was used to force striking lorry drivers back to work and in 2011 it was used against sanitation workers.

The use of dictatorial laws and state violence amounts to the criminalization of any form of collective resistance by workers to the vicious and ongoing assault on their jobs and living standards. This attack, now in its fourth year, is being carried out under the auspices of the European Union and implemented by the Greek ruling class to satisfy the demand of the Greek and international banks that the full cost of the capitalist crisis be born by the working class.

In justifying the emergency measures, Transport Minister Costis Hadzidakis (ND) declared that the strike was “unreasonable.” He said it was “causing difficulties” and “a serious financial problem for the city”. This is a formula for declaring illegal any effective industrial action by the working class.

Prime Minister Samaras has made clear that the strike-breaking assault is directed not only against the subway workers, but against all resistance by workers to the austerity program. On Thursday, he said the trade unions did not have the right to strike in such a way as to “torment the people from morning to night.”

It is, of course, the government, acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie, that is tormenting the people by destroying jobs, wages, pensions and social services. Workers have no right to resist this, according to Samaras, while the government has an unlimited “right” to attack them.

The subway workers’ strike is directed against the fifth round of austerity measures, passed by parliament on November 8 on the orders of the “troika”—the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. The new austerity package includes a further 25 percent public-sector wage cut, on top of wage cuts of up to 60 percent imposed over the past three years.

The subway workers took repeated strike action over a number of weeks until they launched an indefinite strike on January 17. Strikes have also been underway in the health service and on the docks.

There is broad support for the subway strikers in the working class. On Friday morning, when the police attacked the Sepolia depot, hundreds of people quickly gathered at the gates in solidarity with the workers. The police had difficulty preventing the crowd from coming to the aid of the strikers.

Railway workers, as well as bus and tram workers, spontaneously went on strike. Protest actions are reportedly planned for the weekend.

However, the trade unions are doing everything they can to prevent a widespread mobilisation of the working class. They have limited the strikes by rail workers to just four hours and insisted that no strike action be taken during rush hour. The unions have also limited the current sympathy strikes to 24 hours.

Over the past four years, the unions have systematically sabotaged workers’ resistance to the austerity measures. They have coordinated every 24-hour strike with the government and organised protests in such a way as to minimize “financial problems.” When the unions have been unable to direct workers’ anger into harmless channels, the government has declared martial law, as against the lorry workers and sanitation workers. The unions have refused to mobilize the working class to defend these strikers.

The symbiotic relationship between the state and the trade unions is covered over by the various pseudo-left groups such as the Cooperation of the Anti-capitalist Left for the Overthrow (Antarsya) and Syriza. Although both have condemned the declaration of martial law, they are attempting prevent any mobilisation by workers against it.

A press spokesman for Antarsya told the World Socialist Web Site that Antonis Stamatopoulos, a subway workers’ strike leader and Antarsya member, had not called for a continuation of the strike, but wanted instead to wait for votes to be held at rank and file meetings at the weekend.

As soon as workers seek to mobilize their industrial strength to defend their basic social rights, they come into conflict not only with the state, but also with the official unions and the pseudo-left allies of the union bureaucracy.

The use of martial law and the brutal attack on striking workers demonstrate that the ruling elite is prepared to use the most brutal methods to suppress growing popular opposition to the dictates of the banks. They make clear that the interests of the corporate-financial elite are totally incompatible with the interests of the majority of the population.

Just as Greece is a test case for the European Union in destroying the social conditions of the working class throughout Europe, it is also becoming a model for the introduction of authoritarian forms of rule.

The only answer to this ruling class assault is the independent mobilisation of the entire Greek and European working class. This requires a break with the unions and the pseudo-left groups and the development of a socialist and internationalist movement to put an end to the European Union and replace it with workers’ governments and the United Socialist States of Europe.

Greek pseudo-left leader Tsipras auditions for State Department, IMF

By Bill Van Auken

With Greece in deepening crisis, Alexis Tsipras, leader of the SYRIZA (Radical Left Coalition) opposition party, came to the US this week to hold closed-door meetings with State Department and IMF officials and make a series of public appearances.

While the Greek government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was employing police-state methods to break a strike by subway workers, Tsipras used his trip to tell US and IMF officials that they have nothing to fear should he come to power.

The latest polls show SYRIZA and the leading party in the existing conservative-social democratic coalition government, New Democracy, in a virtual dead heat. With 27 percent of the vote in the last election, SYRIZA constitutes the main opposition party, and with popular anger growing over unending austerity measures and mass unemployment, there is a real possibility that it could place first in coming elections.

Tsipras used his American tour to reassure the US ruling establishment that if that happens it can count on him and SYRIZA to serve as pillars of capitalist stability, working to suppress the revolutionary strivings of the Greek working class.

“I hope I’ve convinced you that I’m not as dangerous as some people think I am,” Tsipras declared ingratiatingly to an audience in Washington assembled by the Brookings Institution think tank.

On Wednesday, Tsipras held talks at the State Department with US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Eric Rubin, who is responsible for issues related to Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and the Caucasus, as well as Christopher Smart, the Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe and Eurasia.

And on Thursday, the SYRIZA leader paid a visit to the International Monetary Fund headquarters, meeting there with its number two man, David Lipton, the agency’s first deputy managing director.

Following Tsipras’ meeting at the IMF, the agency released a terse statement acknowledging that Lipton and the SYRIZA leader “had a constructive and sincere discussion on the economic challenges that Greece is facing.”

The State Department has yet to issue any statement on its meeting with Tsipras.

For its part, SYRIZA claimed that, while there were “agreements and disagreements,” the meeting at the State Department revealed a “common assessment” that continuing austerity was not the answer to the Greek economic crisis. The party said that Tsipras assured US officials that he believed Greece had “an important role” to play in assuring international stability and would pursue a foreign policy based on “persistence and consistency.” In other remarks, Tsipras upheld Greece’s commitment to NATO.

Tsipras addressed several audiences while in the US. His most significant speech, delivered Tuesday in Washington at the Brookings Institution, was clearly directed to the American ruling establishment. (The full transcript can be found here).

“Is there really a reason for somebody to be afraid of the left in Greece today?” Tsipras asked the audience midway through his remarks on Tuesday. “I heard the person who spoke before me saying that I represent the radical left [the English translation of his party’s name] … But how are we really radical? Those who engage in scare mongering will tell you that our party will come to power, rip up our agreements with the European Union and the IMF, take our country out of the euro zone, break off all of Greece’s ties with the cultured—with the civilized West, and then turn Greece into a new North Korea.”

He assured his listeners that SYRIZA’s “goal is to save the country and keep the country in the euro zone.”

His principal proposal, which he referred to repeatedly in his remarks, was a so-called “haircut” for Greece’s public creditors, principally the European Central Bank (ECB) and euro zone countries, similar to the debt forgiveness imposed upon banks and private lenders in October 2011, which cut in half the amount promised in interest on Greek debt.

Tsipras’ remarks made it clear that SYRIZA has no intention of repudiating Greek debt or ripping up the memorandum of understanding on austerity measures between Athens and the so-called Troika (the European Commission, the IMF and the European Central Bank), but rather merely wants to renegotiate their terms.

Tsipras was asked by one member of the audience why the Greek people should expect anything different from SYRIZA than from Prime Minister Samaras “who was initially opposed to the memorandum and now supports it.”

“We have become used to the fact of seeing politicians that say one thing … before they get elected and another thing once they come to power,” he replied. “As you see, we only say things that we believe and that we are going to try to implement. We’re not saying anything that’s crazy.”

In point of fact, SYRIZA won 27 percent of the vote last year based on its promise to reverse all previous cuts made by the Greek government and to tear up the memorandum. As Tsipras’ comments in Washington made clear, it has no intention of doing anything of the kind. The anti-cuts rhetoric is meant merely to divert the anger of the Greek workers into harmless channels.

Within the Washington establishment, there were expressions of approval for Tsipras’ performance in the US, which was greeted as a further turn to the right by SYRIZA.

"This trip shows the ongoing evolution of his political profile towards more of a social democrat," Domenico Lombardi, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and former representative for Italy to the IMF’s executive board told the Wall Street Journal. Lombardi, the Journal reported, said that Tsipras’s American tour “highlights SYRIZA’s shift to a more balanced, politically mature position that could garner further backing in Greece and is more palatable overseas.”

An article posted on the Brookings Institution web site similarly declared: “In a country where leftists have historically been incendiary, prone to violence, and aggressively anti-American, Mr. Tsipras came across as genial, courteous, pragmatic and eager to hear American views … He spoke warmly about President Obama’s inaugural calls for social justice.”

Indeed, in his speech Tuesday, he praised the policies of the Obama administration and the US Federal Reserve Board, while giving a rosy assessment of the social conditions within the US.

“One of the things that I notice these past two days that I’ve been in the United States … is that America is a country that does not find itself in a state of depression as Greece is,” he said. “I have not seen any closed shops. I haven’t seen any sad faces. I haven’t seen any signs of hopelessness everywhere. America avoided misery after 2008.”

In his presentation at Columbia University in New York City on Thursday night, Tsipras presented only a slightly more “left” face, attempting to enlist the support of his audience by stressing the growth of fascist forces in Greece organized in the ultra-right Golden Dawn (Chryssi Avghi) party.

He called upon his audience to join with SYRIZA in seeking “to erect a firewall of democracy over fascism and neo-Nazism.”

The political reality is that the double talk of pseudo-left elements like SYRIZA, which denounce austerity in words while supporting capitalist stability and the European Union in practice, has fueled the growth of Golden Dawn, allowing the fascists to pose as the militant opponents of the EU, the bankers and the political establishment of which SYRIZA is a part.

Pseudo-left conceals refusal of SYRIZA, PASOK and trade unions to oppose Golden Dawn

By Chris Marsden and Christoph Dreier

Media reports estimate that between 3,000 and 5,000 demonstrators turned out to protest against the fascist Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi) party in Syntagma Square in Athens last Saturday. The march was made up of a number of pseudo-left groups and immigrant associations, with scarcely any representation from the trade unions and the main nominally “left” parties, PASOK, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) and the Democratic Left (DIMAR).

The implications of their refusal to mount any defence of immigrants was underscored by the funeral held earlier that day of Shehzad Luqman from Pakistan, killed by fascist thugs. Attacks on foreign workers have increased massively since Chrysi Avgi entered parliament for the first time in the June election, with around 400 cases reported in the last months, including three deadly assaults.

Under these circumstances, the past weeks saw reports that a mass antifascist protest would be held in Greece that had the backing of all the “left parties” and would involve tens of thousands. Many though not all of these reports had as their source the Greek Socialist Workers Party (SEK) and its sister party, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in Britain, as well as various similar currents.

In its January 19 perspective, the World Socialist Web Site described what was called a “united front of the left against the fascist threat” as a “grotesque fraud”, aimed at rehabilitating “the parties that bear the chief responsibility for the rise of Golden Dawn” and subordinating the struggle of the working class against Golden Dawn “to the social democratic PASOK, the trade unions and SYRIZA”.

It is now clear that the proclamations of support by major trade union federations and left parties were largely an invention. In order to drape these organisations in a progressive and antifascist guise, the pseudo-left groups collected signatures and formal endorsements from some union officials and secured a vote in some city councils in support of the demonstration.

The latest edition of Socialist Worker boasts, “The main organisation behind the Athens protest was the Movement Against Racism and Fascist Threat (KEERFA)” and that its “national organiser is Petros Constantinou, a member of the Socialist Workers Party’s sister organisation SEK.”

KEERFA’s greatest success was in securing the endorsement of the Athens City Council, where the two parties that sit in national government with the Conservative New Democracy, PASOK and DIMAR, voted to support the demonstration along with SYRIZA. The value of this endorsement was nil, given their collusion in anti-immigrant measures and their role in imposing the savage cuts against working people, which Golden Dawn exploits in order to whip up nationalism.

None of this stopped the propaganda offensive mounted by the pseudo-left, which not only provided an apologia for SYRIZA et al in Greece, but for equivalent forces in the UK.

The SWP was able to amplify its voice through its leadership position within Unite Against Fascism, which is funded by Britain’s Trades Union Congress. The SWP has a decades-long history of utilising antifascist rhetoric as a means of urging support for the Labour and trade union bureaucracy, stretching back to the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s. Since then, however, it has successfully integrated itself into the highest echelons of the trade union bureaucracy, assuming leading positions in a number of unions. In line with this, in 2003 the SWP liquidated the ANL into the UAF, whose primary goal is to promote tactical voting against the British National Party. Its co-chair is Weyman Bennett of the SWP.

On December 20, UAF issued a statement centring on the assault on SYRIZA MP Dimitris Stratoulis by Golden Dawn at a football match. “This attack on an MP of the main left opposition party should sound alarm bells,” declared Bennett, pledging “a massive campaign to get the BNP and far right out of the European parliament at the elections in 2014 and to prevent racism and xenophobia polluting politics here.”

The statement made great play of citing the support of Dimitris Tsoukalas, the SYRIZA MP formerly of PASOK and ex-leader of the bank workers union, before asserting, “The aim of Golden Dawn is to suppress any voice fighting against the politics of the Troika and the austerity Memorandum, against the policies that demolish the political, labour and democratic rights of the Greek People.”

The UAF/SWP statements are designed to conceal the fact that no national endorsement for its initiative was won from SYRIZA or any trade union, while concealing the role of these organisations in helping the Greek bourgeoisie impose the dictates of the troika. Just three days after Saturday’s demonstration, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras was speaking before his real constituency when making an address to the Brookings Institute in Washington.

“Is there anything to fear [from] the left wing in Greece? In what way are we radical?” he asked rhetorically. “Scaremongers will tell you that our party, if it comes to government, will scrap the loan agreement with the European Union and the IMF, will lead the country out of the euro zone, will interrupt Greece’s ties with the civilized West, and that Greece will become a new North Korea.” “I hope to convince you that I’m not as dangerous as some are trying to say,” he continued. “Let me say this clearly: SYRIZA will keep Greece in the euro zone.”

It is precisely the pro-capitalist, pro-European Union stand of the so-called “left” and the demobilisation of opposition by the trade unions that is responsible for the growing prominence of Golden Dawn, which portrays itself as an opponent of austerity, the EU, the bankers and the establishment parties such as SYRIZA.

A January 14 UAF statement made explicit how the SWP wished to benefit from the political initiative of its Greek co-thinkers and will help foster the same political dangers everywhere. It declared: “The coalition calling it is exactly of the kind that UAF has built and encourages here—the trade unions, progressive politicians and parties, immigrant, Muslim and black organisations, LGBT groups, intellectuals, writers and so on.”

The failure of their demonstration to attract significant support has not deterred the SWP from pursuing this agenda. Its report proceeded as if a triumphant success had been recorded, citing “25,000 people” having taken part in “the biggest mobilisation against fascism in living memory,” one that was “With the exception of the influential Communist Party” supported by “all the left parties”.

“There were over 25 solidarity protests across the globe on Saturday, from Moscow to Chicago,” it continued, without citing any other than an exaggerated claim that 500 rallied outside London’s Greek embassy under the leadership of the UAF. The only other report available anywhere cites “More than 60 people” gathering outside the Greek Consulate in Chicago—an indication of the true scale of the antifascist mobilisation of the “pseudo-left”.

Greek workers and youth must reject all such attempts to dragoon them behind the parties of the Greek bourgeoisie and the trade union apparatus in the name of “Left unity.” That will only hand the initiative to Golden Dawn and its ilk. They must instead take up the fight against the fascists as part of an industrial and political offensive to overthrow capitalism in Greece and throughout Europe and establish socialism.