In less than a week, Greece will hold a referendum on the European Union’s demand that more austerity be unleashed in the country as a condition for continued financial support.
The left wing Syriza government, led by prime minister Alexis Tsipras, is urging the population to reject the bullying of Greece’s creditors and vote against a Eurogroup draft agreement that would inflict even more pain on the country’s workers, pensioners and poor.
The following is a statement released by the Red Network in Syriza, outlining the situation and the tasks of the left and the party. The network is a section of the Left Platform and brings together two revolutionary organisations – the Internationalist Workers Left and the Anti-capitalist Political Group.
----------
The government’s decision to reject the ultimatum of the lenders – to declare that it will not sign a new Memorandum of hyper austerity and instead defer to the will of the people by referendum on 5 July – is a decision that changes the situation.
It proves that the crack that was opened by the social struggles of resistance and the elections on 25 January [after which the left wing party Syriza formed government] is deeper and more durable than anticipated by the local and international supporters of neoliberalism.
It releases Syriza, and popular hopes, from the swamp of the negotiations with lenders and the impasses of the agreement of 20 February [the first agreement between the Syriza-led government and the European finance ministers].
It proves what we (even the most “critical” voices inside Syriza) said in the months that have passed: Syriza is not (and will not easily be turned into) an austerity party.
From the moment that Alexis Tsipras announced the referendum, a battle of extreme importance started:
· The lenders, the “institutions”, the euro leadership, threaten openly the economic strangulation of the left government, but also the workers and popular forces in Greece.
· Their local partners – the “internal troika” of New Democracy, Pasok, POTAMI – watch on in panic at what has been thrown into question: their guardianship of the memorandum, the international protection of the hyper austerity that they imposed all these years on behalf of the bankers, industrialists and ship-owners.
Everything indicates that in the coming days a furious battle will commence.
The workers and popular forces have every reason to enter this battle aiming for a clear victory. To defend the NO: no to memorandums, no to austerity, no to debt, no to the blackmail of the lenders.
Winning this battle will renew the dynamics of the labour movement and the left, seen during the January elections. It will show that the political and social correlation of forces in Greece have changed.
Victory will not bring back, certainly, the developments at the time of the collapse of the negotiations with the despicable ultimatum of the lenders.
It will bring to the fore, more urgently, the need to advance – concretely, quickly and unilaterally – the minimum anti-austerity program that Syriza promised in Thessaloniki: stopping the payments to moneylenders and measures to challenge or cancel the debt; measures to improve the lives of workers and the poor; and financing these measures through heavy taxation of capital, the recovery of privatised large public enterprises and organisations and banks.
It is a policy which should be supported by all necessary political, diplomatic, monetary measures. The blackmail of the lenders provokes – and it must – a response: our struggle against austerity has no limits and will not be restricted by the strength of the euro and the wishes of the euro leadership.
In the days ahead, two distinct worlds will collide. On one side are the local winners of the memorandum brutality during the crisis, together with their international patrons and partners. That world will try to provoke a chaotic crisis.
On the other side are the workers and the poor, who have no time to rest and must use their social majority developing their parties and unions.
The victory of one will be a defeat for the other. Therefore, no force on the left has the right to hesitate: all together we owe it to rapidly set up the “no” front – the front of victory of the workers and popular forces.
Regardless of the mistakes made since January (and without underestimating the unprecedented difficulties of the moment), now is not the time for academic debate. It is time to fight. It is time to claim a great workers’ -popular victory.
That can significantly change the existing state of affairs.
