The European Union is the Europe of the capital and the crisis!
Papandreou, the Troika[1] foreman who, in less than two years has submitted the Greek people to five successive adjustment plans, each of them more brutal than the previous one, announced on November 02 that he would hold a referendum on the second “bailout” of Greece, approved a few days before in the European summit in late October.
However it did not mean that the “socialist” Papandreou had suddenly become a democracy lover. His real intention was to maneuver in order to facilitate the new “bailout” approval. Being hated by the Greek people, being politically isolated and facing a huge crisis, he was forced to try the desperate measure of proposing the referendum. But political maneuvering in Greece does not happen without consequences. Papandreou’s political maneuvering success depended on the impact it might provoke on European Union (EU).
Panic in the EU
Thus, the mere announcement of the referendum, the possibility that the Greek people could rule and say no to the “rescue plan” (80% of the population is against it), triggered panic in the EU and just put upside down the European Summit’s agreements.
Following Papandreou’s announcement, the EU leaders, beginning with Merkel and Sarkozy, rushed wildly and started to blackmail and threaten Greece. They withdrew the $ 8 billion pledged, threatened to expel Greece from the eurozone and from the EU and announced the worst calamities conceivable for the Greek people.
Moreover, if the bankers, Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy had already decided on the bailout plan, who would be daring enough to imagine that such a plan, which will keep the following three generations of Greek people bound hand and foot, could be decided through a popular referendum?
And to make things even worse, the bad example would also affect not only Greece but also the adjusting plans for Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain.
Finally, based on the enormous pressure, the EU and the IMF ensured that the proposed referendum was withdrawn by Papandreou and it started, in the midst of a huge political crisis, the talks in order to create an uncertain Greek government of “national unity” to implement the measures prompted by the troika.
The EU: antidemocratic war machinery to serve the bankers
The EU has shown once again, particularly in a harsh way, that it is a machine incompatible with democracy and a weapon of war to help the bankers and large capitalists to plunder the workers and peoples of Europe.
The “bailout” is the ruin and the enslavement of Greece
Merkel, Sarkozy, Barroso and Co. (with the support of Rajoy and Rubalcaba) intend to, at the height of cynicism, appear as the “saviors of Greece”, when they are the ones who, in less than two years have devastated the country, leaving it as if it had been a war. They are also the ones who have now approved the second “rescue plan”, which deepens the social and economic devastation of Greece, making the country a colonial protectorate directly managed by the Troika (which is installed permanently in Athens) and enslaves the Greek people for decades.
The Eurozone and the EU are breaking
The burst of speed of EU crisis triggered by the announcement of the Greek referendum has just sunk the results of the last EU summit, which had been presented as “historic” and which had supposedly resolved in a “definitive” way the insolvency of the great European banks, the Greek debt problem and the “euro crisis.”
In fact, we are living the European capitalists’ panic before the collapse of the project that has been built over decades. The G20 meeting in Cannes has shown that all the EU’s problems persist and worsen, that the continuity of the Eurozone and the EU itself is overtly in question and that it’s time to consider the need for a revolutionary socialist alternative to this capitalist Europe that, once in collapse, leads us to ruin.
To reject the “rescue plan”, stop paying the debt, leave the Eurozone and the EU, call for solidarity and take drastic self-defense measures
The second “bailout” of Greece is a sure disaster for the Greek people. A catastrophe that will also end up (no one is deceived about it) with Greece expelled from the eurozone, once all their national patrimony and resources have been looted.
So the first condition to escape from the catastrophe is to reject the “bailout” and stop paying a debt that is completely illegitimate. Needless to say that these measures will inevitably lead to the exit of the eurozone and the EU itself.
But if Greece refuses to pay the debt and leaves the eurozone and the EU, it will be, with absolute certainty, subject to a merciless boycott by the capitalist powers, starting with the EU, in order to sink the country and provide an exemplary lesson.
Therefore, the bailout and the debt payment rejection will be meaningful only if accompanied by two fundamental things: first, the closest solidarity of the European working class with the Greek brothers and against their own governments. The second, taking drastic anti-capitalist self-defense measures, such as: the expropriation and nationalization, under workers’ control, of the banking, the strategic industries, the key services; the establishment of strict controls on capital movements and the monopoly of foreign trade. Moreover, the struggle will not triumph in an isolated country and without the prospect of another Europe, a united Europe of workers and peoples, the Socialist United States of Europe.
Solidarity with the Greek people. Their struggle is ours
The battle of the Greek people is also ours. They depend on the workers and peoples of Europe and we depend on them. You have to bring solidarity to the street. Their struggle is also ours. Their victory is the victory of all of us.
Solidarity with the Greek people against the “bailout”!
No to the debt payment!
Out with the European Union! For a Socialist United States of Europe!
[1] Troika – European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF
