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| Aerial view of the huge NO rally at Syntagma Square |
By Savas Michael-Matsas
Day
5. Friday July 3, 2015
The biggest mass rally that Athens has
known since the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, took place today, the last
day of the political campaign for the Referendum of July 5, in defense of the
NO to the ultimatum of the troika. It was comparable, if not larger than the
mass rally in February 12, 2012. That earlier rally was called against the PSI,
the so-called ‘Private Sector Involvement’
- the “haircut” of foreign debt, particularly to private lenders, combined with
new draconian measures of austerity - carried out by the extra-parliamentary
Papadimos government that had been arbitrarily imposed on Greece by the EU in
November 2011.
In 2012
about one million people assembled in
Syntagma Square and all the
streets leading to it but it was dispersed
early, by about 6 pm, through an
unprecedented and brutal offensive of the repressive force of the riot police using a gigantic
quantity of chemicals. This time
new masses of people, the great majority youth, continued to come nearly up to
midnight. To go from the exit of the Metro Station of Syntagma to the point in
the Square where the contingent of the EEK was assembled, a distance of no more than a hundred meters, took
about an hour. At the same time, the
gathering of the reactionary pro-EU forces of the Greek “EuroMaidan” in the Stadium
was at least 15 times smaller, a fact that even the German State Radio Station Deutsche
Welle
had to admit. It was an enormous
blow to the vast counterrevolutionary “united front” built by
the imperialist troika, the international mainstream mass media, and nearly all
the bourgeois forces in Greece itself, including
all the failed prime ministers of the last 20 years (Kostas
Mitsotakis, Kostas Simitis, Kostas Karamanlis, George Papandreou, Papadimos). Gigantic
resources are being used in a propaganda campaign for a victory of the Yes and
the overthrow of the current government to be replaced by a servile “national
unity” government of stooges.
Various reasons prevented me from going to Patras today to another meeting of the EEK in defense of the No (another comrade replaced me as a speaker). Thus, I could participate personally in a historical experience unique in the decades of my personal involvement in the workers movement and the Left, including my 45 years in the EEK.
It is not only the impressive magnitude of the rally but above all its political quality,
which show its importance in the
battle for the Referendum, and for its
aftermath, whatever the result.
Until yesterday night everybody thought
that the unprecedented international and national campaign of intimidation and
disinformation had finally achieved its goal:
a majority for the Yes, at least according to the polls. Even within Syriza and the right wing
Independent Greeks there were movements of renegades to impose a cancellation
of the referendum, as all the leaders of
global finance capital demanded.
Why they were so afraid of an electoral procedure taking place quite often in a dying European parliamentary
democracy?
They were not afraid of the always
vacillating and weakened Tsipras government, which, until the last moment, is
begging for an agreement on austerity terms. What the imperialist institutions
and the ruling classes in Europe and in Greece do fear is that this particular
referendum, in open defiance of the
troika, could initiate a renewed eruption of the Greek popular masses
themselves in the arena of history. Anyway,
just one week before, Tsipras had declared that he opposed a referendum or early
elections. The referendum was not primarily a maneuver from above but a result
of pressure from below; it was imposed , not by the so-called left wing in Syriza's Central Committee, but by
the popular discontent and anger against the continuous concessions of the
Greek government and the increasing
arrogance of the IMF, the ECB, and the EU.
The Greek government, of course, says
that it will use a victory of the No
for new negotiations that already are rejected out of hand by the troika. The unpredictable factor was again the
fighting masses as protagonists of historic change.
From the times of Baruch Spinoza, we
know that fear is an indispensable essential method of class rule. But this
method has its own limits as many dictators found out, above all the Czar
Romanov. The first and most powerful weapon
of intimidation was the closure of the banks after the blunt decision of the
ECB to cut the life line to the Greek banks (the ELA), a
decision that was directly responsible for the long queues of pensioners in
front of ATMs.
There are still some petty bourgeois
strata that are frightened of losing the little that remains to them and have a
superstitious faith in the fallen gods of the EU and the Euro. They are abused
by the ruling class, which has revived all the old anti-communism and the spectres
of the civil war, while they prepare for
a new civil war. They are blaming the ‘communists’
in the government even as they are pretending that they are trying to avoid a new civil war and secure social peace and “national unity”
between the butchers and their victims.
But there is a huge part of the
pauperized Greek people that has nothing to lose anymore. Not by accident, yesterday, our
comrades of the EEK in Larissa organized a powerful 5,000 strong march
in the streets. Working together with others from the Caravan of Struggle and
Solidarity (an organization initiated by
the workers of the VIOME factory and radio and television station ERT 3, both occupied for 2 years and run under workers
control) they marched with an EEK banner at the front calling for “all production and all power to the
workers” and also displaying the famous dictum by Walter Benjamin “Hope was given to us for all those who lost hope”.
Fear cultivated by the rulers can sometimes
be transformed and act as a boomerang against them. After five years of descent into a hell, the
most oppressed and most combative layers of workers, both employed and
unemployed, and above all the young
generation are entering into
a path of new rebellions, a transition towards social revolution.
The great majority attending today's
huge rally in Syntagma were
youth, mainly without a job and without
hope of finding a job. A sign for a revolutionary future that arrives always
unexpected.
La luta continua!
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| Crowd in Syntagma listening to Tsipras' speech |
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| Syntagma NO rally: View from top of stairs earlier in the evening |
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