Greeks – beware of bankers bearing loans!

Vanguard September 2010 p. 11
Nick G.

The punishments currently being imposed on the Greek working class and people contain great lessons for the Australian people.

Having tottered on the edge of financial bankruptcy as a nation, Greece has been occupied and reduced to semi-colony status by an Axis of imperialist financial institutions dominated by the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Important rights of the Greek people won through years of struggle were abolished on July 8 at the dictate of the imperialists.

The great protectors of the interests of the city workers and the village poor, the social democrats under Prime Minister George Papandreou, have extended the retirement age for all to 65 (up from 55 for women and 60 for men), cut pensions and removed their fully guaranteed status and reduced the number of occupations classified as “hazardous”, thus adding 5-8 years of additional labour to those jobs.

The pension bill also incorporates clauses that make it easier and cheaper to fire workers and allow firms to pay young first hires less than the minimum wage. And this is with youth unemployment standing at around 30-35%!
"Young people who have just started working have no hope," said 24-year old unemployed protester Melina Panagiotidou.

In response to the new legislation, Greek workers held their sixth 24-hour strike for the year.

These strikes are made possible because the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) has the ability to call all workers of the private sector on strike in case the need arises.

However, as a peak body for private sector unionists, the GSEE is thoroughly saturated with the bourgeois ideology of trade unionism, which seeks to confine the struggles of workers within limits that ensure the survival of the capitalist system.

Thus, this same GSEE signed an agreement, on 15 July, with major employers' groups to freeze salaries this year, and then raise them -- depending on inflation in the Eurozone -- in 2011 and 2012. The deal affects all workers in the private sector, roughly 2 million people. The first planned salary raise, a year from now, is expected to be around 1.5%. The second one, about 1.7%, is due in July 2012. And even these piddling increases are conditional on an improved capitalist economy!

So long as a nation is subjected to the pressures of imperialism, the situation of its working people is precarious at best.

Even before the outbreak of the great financial crisis, Howard’s Liberal government had proposed extending the working age of Australians. Following the GFC, Rudd articulated a strategy for a social democratic response that saw government stepping in to fill the void of a private sector retreat, to be followed by a retreat by government once the private sector had recovered. On July 25 last year, he was frank enough to admit that his “plan to return the budget to surplus…will mean tough decisions, unpopular decisions and budget cuts”.
He may just as well have said, “For a taste of things to come, stay tuned and watch how my social democratic colleagues in Greece deliver tough decisions, unpopular decisions and budget cuts”.

It is essential that Australian Communists agitate around the minimum demands published in last month’s Vanguard and bring to the forefront of people’s expectations issues such as the defence of medical care, of public education, of better public transport and all the other demands we have raised.

Into the struggles around those issues we must inject a revolutionary consciousness for anti-imperialist independence and for socialism.