by SAMIR AMIN
Anti-austerity protesters attend a demonstration in Athens on Friday calling for a ‘No’ vote in the upcoming referendum PHOTO/ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images/Slate
The Greek People are an example to Europe and the world.
With courage and lucidity the Greek people have rejected the ignoble diktat of European and international finance. They have won a first victory by affirming that democracy cannot exist unless it knows how to put itself at the service of social progress. They have unmasked the farce of democracy that accepts submission to the degradation of social conditions demanded by the dictatorship of finance.
Social progress is illegal in Europe.
Europe has been constructed systematically to reduce “the danger of democracy” to zero. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States, Jean Monet, and Robert Schuman (two Vichyites) have initiated the preparation to restore the legitimacy of the political forces that were compromised through Europe’s collaboration with the Nazis. The construction of the European Communities, and later the forced adoption of a constitution, despite being rejected among others by the French referendum (an unparalleled denial of democracy), has enabled the rise of a dictatorship of finance capital. Deceived by the systematic brainwashing by media pundits in the service of the financial oligarchy, the European peoples fed on the illusions that still remain powerful enough to destroy their capacity to respond to the challenge. They must “save Europe and the euro from the debacle,” they still largely believe (now a little less so in Greece and Spain). Europe as it is — and it cannot be other than what it is so long as it is imprisoned within the fetters of its institutions — has declared illegal any attempt to question the odious established order. The Greek people, by their choice, became outlaws.
The euro is not viable.
The subsystem of the euro violates the elementary rules of a sane and feasible management of the currency. It imposes common rules of so-called “competitiveness” on economies too unequal to bear the consequences of them. The euro has made it possible to wipe out the progress made earlier within the context of the emergence of productive systems composed largely of small and medium enterprises in order to open up a restricted market to raids by financial monopolies. Spain is a tragic example. Others — Finland and even France — in turn are victims of it. The euro is now only the tool for a rerun of the German Europe.
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