Note: We are publishing below a statement we just received from Savas Michael-Matsas, Secretary of the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK). We have made corrections in style and grammar for better readability. The statement sheds light on the current situation in Greece leading up to the election this Sunday.
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by
Savas Michael-Matsas
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| Demonstration in Thessaloniki on Sept 5. |
Only a few days remain until the snap elections on September 20 called by
former prime minister Tsipras, after
the implosion and split of the ruling Syriza party that followed his
capitulation to the troika on July 12,
and the vote of the third and worst
“Memorandum” of austerity measures.
The
Tsipras leadership of the remaining Syriza group blames the Left Platform faction
led by Lafazanis, for this action. The
Left Platform opposed the Memorandum and split with 25 Syriza deputies to form a new party, “Popular Unity”, now running independently
in the elections. It is not true at all. There was and continues a generalized shock among the Greek
masses, a deep disappointment, and a deeply felt anger towards Tsipras’s capitulation that ignored
the popular will expressed in the landslide victory of the NO in the Referendum
on July 5. It is the wave of popular revolt about what rightly is considered as
a betrayal of the hopes invested in Syriza
for an end to austerity that led to the collapse of the government.
The
splits in Syriza are not limited to the forces joining “Popular Unity”, they are multiple, and they are all splits from the
left. The most important, potentially, is the split of the vast majority of the
Youth organization of Syriza from the Party, leading to its demise as a youth
organization, with only a small
part moving towards the “Popular Unity”,
and other sectors looking towards the revolutionary left.
The
split of Syriza was followed by a split of Antarsya, the coalition of
organizations in the extra parliamentary left, with a sizable minority
joining “Popular Unity”. The majority of
Antarsya rejected what it considered to be an ultimatum in negotiations with Lafazanis’s new party , which refused to
form a united front between the two organizations, asking instead for a dissolution of Antarsya in
“Popular Unity” and full acceptance of the program of the latter. This program is a replica of the Syriza 2012 program,
including the refusal of any break with the European Union and the bankrupt
capitalist system. There are very few differences from the so-called 'Thessaloniki
program”: an emphasis on the “possibility of a return to the national currency,
the drachma”, a call for workers control
and some other, more or less minor changes, mainly rhetorical, to give
it a more “leftist” outlook. The main call of the national-reformist Popular
Unity, including in its electoral campaign, is to rebuild a “ Syriza consistent
with its origins” to form an “anti-Memorandum, patriotic, democratic
front”, without any class reference and
/or anti-capitalist content.
Although
the polls cannot be trusted, they give to “Popular Unity” only a meager 3-4.5 percent in the coming elections, and some of them
raising the possibility that Popular
Unity will not even enter into parliament. Perhaps
these figures distort reality, as no one can forget that the polls totally
failed to predict the triumph of the NO in the recent Referendum. But it is
true that “Popular Unity” had an ill start, repelling many forces that initially had turned to it by reproducing the bureaucratic,
authoritarian, reformist, electoralist, and programmatic features of Syriza, only
substituting Lafazanis in the role previously held by Tsipras. Lafazanis, is a Euro-skeptic but stops short
of rejecting the EU. His national reformism does not look like and indeed is
not an alternative to the pro-EU reformism that has already capitulated and been
discredited. So Syriza undoubtedly loses some of its best militants and voters in
a non-stop hemorrhage but, until now, it
is neither the Right, or the fascist far right or Popular Unity that wins them.
The
peculiarity of this short pre-electoral period is that all the competing
parliamentary parties are discredited by
introducing, either in the past five
years or now, the austerity
measures of social cannibalism. The electoral competition
between the two biggest parties, the right wing “New Democracy” and Syriza, are
around the choice of “the best manager of the 3rd Memorandum”. Syriza promises a “more humane” management of the “List of
Horrors”, as Der Spiegel has called the 3rd Memorandum, while the
Right a more “responsible” one.
In any
case, no party can win an absolute
majority on Sept. 20, and already
everyone speaks about a “new
national unity” government, a ruling coalition either having as its dominant core Syriza or New Democracy, or both, in a
“Grand Coalition”. It’s (impossible)
mission: to impose the “List of
Horrors” on a devastated, pauperized but still undefeated people,
with a surging, combative young generation of unemployed
workers and a youth without a future
in the forefront of all social struggles.
Greece
has been transformed into a peculiar EU protectorate, where all the main
economic, social, and political decisions will not be taken by any government
elected in the next elections but by the imperialist “institutions” of the EU, the ECB, the IMF,
and now the ESM (the troika has been transformed into a “quartet”) regularly
supervising the implementation of the Memorandum and imposing financial
discipline.
The
elections will only exacerbate a deep
capitalist regime crisis. Whatever the result, class war will
intensify within the conditions of a new phase of the world capitalist crisis,
as a new tsunami already broke this summer from China, having a huge impact on
a stagnating, over-indebted EU economy, and its broken link, Greece.
The old
political system had collapsed already in 2012. The attempts for its restoration by the Right, exploiting
the failure of Syriza as an alternative, is undermined by the insoluble economic bankruptcy and the political
de-legitimation of the bourgeois political system established after the end of
the military dictatorship in 1974. Everything is changing rapidly, all is fluid, particularly on the Left.
To
prepare for the coming battles, the EEK considers it necessary, now more than ever
before, to fight for a United Class Front based on a transitional program in
the struggle for workers power. Unity of
action is urgently needed as well as the largest, open discussion in front of
the people among all the left organization, parties, collectives
of the workers and popular movements, to draw the lessons of the last 5
years and to open a new road , after the
failure of Syriza, towards workers power and a socialist unification of
Europe, on the ruins of the imperialist EU, the prison of the peoples and the
cemetery of the migrants, its victims.
A re-groupment
of the forces of the revolutionary left, first of all, is necessary and urgent.
For this reason the EEK, while keeping its political independence, has formed an electoral bloc with the majority of Antarsya on the basis of a
transitional program against all
austerity measures, for a break from the EU, the IMF, and NATO, for the
abolition of the debt, nationalization of the banks and of the strategic
sectors of the economy under workers
control, against racism and fascism, for
fraternal unity with the migrants, for a break from capitalism, its State and governments, to
open the road for workers power and an
internationalist perspective for Europe and the world in a communist direction.
Athens, September 14, 2015
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