ATHENS, March 29 — The class struggle is raging in Greece, and the working class is beginning to advance against the bosses’ cutbacks. The working class shut Greece down on Thursday, March 11, for the second time in less than a month (see CHALLENGE 3/17). Planes didn’t fly, factories and schools were closed and the Corinth Canal was shut down. TV, Radio, electronic news websites, and the press — the whole country was brought to a standstill. Over 100,000 workers marched, possibly the largest demonstration in 15 years. Some factories that did try to stay open were forcibly shut down by protesters and striking workers, with many scabs being stopped from entering.
Earlier in the week, the striking workers attempted to storm parliament. When one of the major union leaders tried to stop them, they beat the snot out of him. It’s inspiring to see the bosses’ dogs get stomped. A few days later, the union put up wanted posters of the workers who beat him up, echoing one of the Nazi’s favorite tactics.
During an event organized by the Ministry of Education, teachers invaded the conference room while the Minister of Education was speaking. The teachers unfolded a big banner against the measures and chanted slogans against the regime. When a plain-clothes policeman tried to stop them, the teachers surrounded the man, disarmed him, and beat him, culminating with the man crawling on the floor towards the exit. The teachers then continued to chant slogans against the Minister.
Greece is suffering from massive budget cuts being inflicted upon it by the international capitalist class — the bosses. The Socialist government is crying that they must inflict these cuts on the working class and that it’s out of their hands. These bootlickers are not saying that capitalism cannot meet the needs of the working class. They can’t, because they are not against capitalism. They want to control it so that they can continue to sell out the working class for their capitalist masters. Socialists will always betray the working class because they don’t fight directly for communism, even if they pay lip service to wanting to fight for it at all.
The communist movement in Greece has been diverted down two dead-ends: anarchism and socialism. The socialist parties, many of whom call themselves “communist,” are saturated with false ideas that capitalism can be reformed. The anarchists are saturated with the false idea that communism can be achieved without a centralized party apparatus to organize the revolution and society. The anarchists led attacks on police stations, luxury shops, representations of wealth, banks, and the police themselves, and leftists did lead the one-day strike, but it will not be enough to stop the socialist PASOK government from instituting the cuts that the capitalist bosses need.
It is amazing to see the photos of brave workers fighting against the cops. A favorite chant is “Cops are not children of the working class, they are dogs of the capitalists.” It is exciting to see class consciousness inspire the strikes. It should inspire us all to step up our attacks on the capitalist state as they continue to attack us.
Examples of Greek students being attacked by cops on motorcycles trying to encircle them, and then encircling the cops, smashing their motorcycles and sending over 15 of them to the hospital after they beat them up, should inspire us to not fear the state and its armed apparatus. When the working class faces increasing repression, they begin to resist the new social order that the rulers try to impose. But, without communist leadership, that resistance will be co-opted into narrow reform movements and one-day strikes.
It will take a lot more than a one-day strike to stop the capitalists from trying to preserve their profit rate on the backs of the working class, both in Greece and internationally. The same enemy is attacking workers in Haiti with hundreds of thousands dead, and soldiers walking around with weapons instead of food. The same enemy is attacking the workers in Afghanistan with radioactive weaponry and paying for the war by cutting services and education of students from New York City to Los Angeles.
If workers around the world shared the Greek workers’ anger and class consciousness the rulers would be shaking in their shoes. However, we know that anger, militant action and reform demands are not enough to change the system to meet the needs of the working class. We need communist leadership from the PLP to make a revolution to wrest state power from the capitalists.