For the defence of the Greek proletariat’s living and working conditions against the attack of International capital !

The proletariat must avoid getting drawn into parliamentary games and instead rebuild its own independent class organisations !

On June 15 the Greek workers took to the streets in the third general strike this year to oppose the new austerity measures of the Pasok government, which has been taken by the scruff of its neck by the Central European Bank. The latest austerity plan involves further cuts to salaries and pensions, and massive layoffs in the public sector.

The Greek workers are to be forced to make further drastic sacrifices, to make sure the ‘coupon cutters’ and the banks can go on accumulating profits, and to ensure the bourgeois State can keep on functioning and maintain its machinery of repression and control over the working class; a machinery, take note, which includes trade unions and the so-called left-wing parties, all of whom feature on the list of providers of services to Capital.

During the demonstration in Athens, the anger against the parties of government and of opposition, against the privileged and corrupt politicians, was clearly shown by the attack on parliament. This provoked a harsh reaction from the police, which didn’t hold back in its use of the riot baton and powers of arrest.

The government, forced to accept the conditions set by the European banks, is in crisis. The parties of the parliamentary left, from the KKE (Communist Party of Greece) to SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) and SYNASPISMOS (Coalition of the Left of Movements and Ecology) are calling for early elections, but this is only to divert the proletariat from its struggle and to drive it into the cul de sac of parliamentary games and the trickery of bourgeois elections.

The Greek workers must put their trust in their own independent organisation of the class struggle; they can expect nothing from new elections or from this farcical parliament.

No bourgeois government is going to defend their interests; not even if the KKE, or any of the other parties of the so-called parliamentary ‘left’, become part of it. Indeed, in moments of grave political crisis it is precisely these parties which become the main defenders of the bourgeois regime. This has been historically demonstrated, once and for all, by the role carried out by social-democracy in Germany in the first twenty years of the 20th century, when it was precisely the social-democrats who took the proletariat into the war and then destroyed the revolutionary communist movement.

The general strike on June 15 was the eleventh general strike since the beginning of 2010. However, the bourgeois regime is equipped to resist this limited type of mobilisation by now, on the one hand using the police to contain protesters in the square, and on the other by ‘engaging in dialogue’ with unions and opposition parties, with a view to reaching new agreements only to then regularly question them and water them down as the weeks go by.

The Greek trade unions, whether the Adedy, the GSEE or the Pame, are not class unions prepared to do what it takes defend the general interests of the proletariat. They are instead inextricably linked to the opportunist, bourgeois parties, and rather than stimulating the struggle to defend the proletariat’s living and working conditions, especially of its weakest and most exploited members, it instead contains the struggle and puts a break on it.

What the trade union organisation should be doing is working unreservedly to ensure the unity of the working class, in order to overcome the contrast between workers in the private and public sectors, between permanent and contract workers, between old and young, between those in work and the unemployed, between indigenous and immigrant workers. If the working class rebuilds its unity on the plane of economic defence it can win, if it doesn’t it will lose.

For independent proletarian organisation

The generous struggle of the Greek proletariat against the government’s and bosses anti-proletarian measures will cause the more combative and determined proletarians to reflect that it is not a matter of fighting against one party or one government because the enemy is the capitalist regime, in its entirety; and to do that the first priority is working to forming class organisations capable of ensuring that workers’ day to day interests will be protected. But besides that, they will also have to reconnect with the historic programme of the emancipation of the proletariat from wage labour: the programme of revolutionary and internationalist communism.

The ‘strong medicine’ which the Greek government is trying to get ‘its’ proletarians to swallow, these austerity measures, they are in fact the same being applied in all the advanced capitalist States. Today, the bourgeois is forcing the proletariat to shed more blood, sweat and tears as its tries to cure the malady which, cancer like, is gnawing away at the capitalist organism from within: the world crisis of over production, caused by the falling rate of profit. Tomorrow, it will try and get proletarians to kill each other on the battle fronts, as it attempts to give another, new, horrible lease of life to this decrepit system, as happened before in 1914 and 1939.

There is nothing more that can be done within this system of production; there can be no capitalism which is less corrupt, and more just and more respectful of people and the natural environment: the scrabble for ever greater profits doesn’t tolerate rules and, as it heads blindly into the future, it could end up by destroying humanity itself . . .

The rejection of the capitalist regime has to be total, and it has to be revolutionary.

Proletarians! Reconnect with the genuine programme of revolutionary left communism. Join the International Communist Party !

International Communist Party