by MICHAEL KARADJIS
A united front of the left and sustained mass mobilisation are desperately needed in Greece.
May 16, 2012 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — This article does not aim to give a full account of the current Greek political crisis. Rather, the crisis will be discussed with a focus on the failure of the Greek left to form a united front in the hour of need of the masses, with a historical look at the nature of the Greek left and the parties involved in it.
The sensational outcome of the May 6, 2012, Greek elections, in which SYRIZA, a coalition of left-reformist and radical left organisations, gained nearly 17% of the vote, second only to the right-wing New Democracy (ND) party, comes on the back of the catastrophe being imposed on the Greek working class as it is forced to pay for the crisis of Greek and European capital.
This catastrophe has resulted in Greek workers and pensioners, already on some of the lowest wages and social security entitlements in Europe, see their wages and payments directly cut by as much as 40% over the last few years. The “debt crisis” which this austerity is supposed to pay for is of course the debt accumulated by their capitalist class enemies and the endemically corrupt state under its twin dinosaur parties of austerity, New Democracy, the major party of the capitalist class, and the one-time vaguely social-democratic PASOK party. One important part of this debt was caused by the state’s purchase of a few billion dollars worth of military rubbish via NATO in recent years.
The key issue has been the “Memorandum”, the brutal austerity and wage- and job-cutting package, imposed on Greece by the ‘Troika’ (the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) to squeeze workers and poor to “pay back” German and French banks. Both of the twin ruling parties have supported and imposed this memorandum, and as a result their votes have crashed from 33% to 19% for ND and 43% to 13% for PASOK, effectively wiping out the entire post-WWII order of two-party trickery.
Combined, the vote for left-wing, anti-memorandum parties was some 27% — 17% for SYRIZA, 8% for the sectarian-Stalinist Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and 1.9% for the Front of the Greek Anti-Capitalist Left (Antarsya), a smaller coalition of radical left organisations. Another 6% voted for the Democratic Left, a right-wing split from SYRIZA that wants to soften the austerity package but believes total rejection will get Greece kicked out of the EU (which they see as a fate worse than death). If these misguided but nevertheless left-leaning votes are also counted, one third of the electorate voted for parties associated with the traditional communist movement in one form or another, a considerably higher result even than the huge 25% vote for the United Democratic Left (EDA, the front group for the then illegal Communist Party) in 1958, which sent shock waves around Western capitals.
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