Greece approaches a turning point

The downfall of the viciously right wing Greek government, after its failure to get its candidate for president elected, was met with celebrations by workers on the streets of Athens last month.

New parliamentary elections set for 25 January could prove to be a vital turning point for a country ravaged by an economic crisis as severe as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Greece’s GDP declined by nearly 30 percent between 2008 and 2013, and the lives of a generation have been destroyed by capitalist austerity measures.

Official unemployment is more than 25 percent, and almost half of the population is living below the poverty line. Yet the European bankers, backed up by EU politicians and their Greek counterparts, continued to force through more mass sackings of public sector workers, more privatisations, more government spending cuts and further increases in regressive taxes.

Greece has been turned into a testing ground for the type of brutal neoliberal policies that the rich and powerful would like to impose everywhere.

Greek workers have not taken the destruction of their livelihoods lying down. Over the last six years, there have been more than 30 general strikes, workplace occupations, occupations of the squares in Athens, mass protest marches and street fighting with police.

The radicalisation of the Greek working class has fuelled the rise from virtually nowhere of SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left, which is now favourite to win the 25 January elections. The prospect of the election of a left government that has promised to reverse the austerity measures of the right wing coalition government has sent the financial markets and the powers that be across Europe and the US into frenzy.

An orchestrated media campaign is proclaiming that a SYRIZA victory would lead to a Europe-wide financial crisis and Greece’s complete economic collapse – unless SYRIZA is “realistic” and abandons its anti-austerity program.

There has been a wave of sell-offs of Greek stocks in an attempt to intimidate the Greek population from voting for SYRIZA. Greek workers are being told that they have no right to have a democratic say over the economic policies that determine their futures. How dare mere workers question the priorities of the markets or the sacred right to boost profits at their expense?

The Wall Street Journal has called SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras “the Hugo Chavez of the Balkans”, saying that his economic program will set him on a “collision course with the rest of Europe”. Bank of America Merrill Lynch described the SYRIZA economic program as a “Greek Tragedy”, and a senior analyst with the Capital Group, a fund with US$1.4 trillion in assets, described SYRIZA’s program as “worse than communism” and “total chaos”.

SYRIZA then is under enormous pressure to soften its opposition to austerity, and the moderate section of the SYRIZA leadership is wavering. The only way to hold the line against this right wing intimidation and blackmail is by ongoing mass working class mobilisations.

Antonis Davanellos, a member of Internationalist Workers Left (DEA), a revolutionary socialist group that co-founded SYRIZA 10 years ago, argues that the left within SYRIZA must keep up the pressure for an election campaign based on mass action:

“We will raise the need to go into the elections with people in the streets protesting, not with an electoral campaign that seeks to appease the middle classes and win over the middle ground. We are calling for mass political discussions organised by local branches of SYRIZA, for rallies and demonstrations and so on.”

If SYRIZA wins the election and is able to form a government, that approach will be even more necessary because it will face relentless ongoing attack from every establishment force. Workers can’t just rely on MPs in parliament to turn the tide against austerity.

They need to take the inspiration of a SYRIZA electoral victory as a spur to raise the level of struggle to new heights to repel every right wing attempt to sabotage the progressive policies of a SYRIZA government and to prevent any backsliding from the SYRIZA leadership.

The outcome of the struggle in Greece will have enormous ramifications for the working class movement and the left across the whole of Europe.

A defeat in Greece would be highly demoralising and discrediting of the left and open up a larger space for far right parties such as Golden Dawn – particularly if it is a defeat caused by the leadership of SYRIZA succumbing to “realism” and in government implementing austerity policies, even if of a milder form.

On the other hand, a victory in Greece that turns the tide against austerity will fuel the confidence of workers in country after country facing similar austerity measures to step up their resistance to the whole agenda of neoliberal capitalism. There is everything to fight for.