OVER 30,000 workers, unemployed, youth and students, lawyers, small shop keepers and poor farmers filled up the large square in front of the Vouli (Greek parliament) building in Athens on Sunday evening in a militant and angry protest against the government’s Pensions and Tax Bill.
The GSEE (Greek TUC) and ADEDY (public sector trades unions) called a general strike for Sunday in commemoration of May Day. Outraged lawyers and poor farmers pushed right in front of the Vouli’s unknown soldier monument shouting with their loud hailers ‘Tsipras you are a traitor’, ‘Get out, get out’ and ‘Down with the austerity measures’.
Trades unions’ and students’ banners proclaimed ‘Out with the government, the EU and the IMF!’ This was a rally where workers, the unemployed, women, lawyers and middle class professions, poor farmers and students were once again united in a struggle for the defeat of the austerity measures accords imposed by the EU and the IMF, and the hated coalition government of Alexis Tsipras the leader of SYRIZA (Coalition of Radical Left party).
At the same time as Tsipras’s 153 parliamentary deputies (a majority of just three in the 300 seat parliement) were voting in the Bill, the Greek armed riot police squads launched a vicious attack with CRS tear gas and truncheons against the mass rally outside.
The leader of the Popular Unity party ex-Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis condemned the violence of the riot police which sent two of his party’s cadres to hospital hit in the head by CRS grenades. Cynically both the SYRIZA party and the Interior Ministry issued statements saying that the riot police action was unnecessary!
There were sporadic clashes between youth and riot police during Sunday night in Athens. Police announced 14 arrests, only three of them Greek nationals the rest of European nationalities. Early on Sunday, in a general strike by GSEE, some 5,000 workers, trade unionists and youth participated in three different May Day marches in Athens. Rallies were held in all Greek cities.
The bookshop workers trades union, in co-ordination with several trade union branches (communications, transport) and local Anti-Austerity committees, organised a massive picketing of the main Athens shop area with about 50 banners stuck in front of shops demanding an end to Sunday working.
For the last few years a number of small trades unions have taken up a struggle against the GSEE and ADEDY reactionary bureaucratic leaders as well as against the policies of the Stalinist leaders of the KKE. Although GSEE and the KKE declared their support for the shopworkers’ fight, neither of them joined the pickets on Sunday.
Both the GSEE and the ADEDY had called a 48-hour general strike for Friday and Saturday and Sunday’s May Day general strike. In effect a three-day general strike. But the strikes were called by the GSEE leaders at the very last minute on Thursday, after Prime Minister Tsipras declared that a vote on the hated Pensions and Tax Bill would be taken on Sunday night. What’s more, the GSEE leaders did not organise a single event during the Friday-Saturday general strike!
Only on midday Sunday did they put on a miserable 1,000-strong May Day march, an insult to the workers’ day and the thousands of workers shot by police in the 1936 Thessaloniki uprising and by the Nazis on May Day 1944. The GSEE leaders did their utmost to keep workers at home in the midst of a grave political crisis of the Tripras regime and of the Eurozone-EU as a whole.
As Tsipras, on EC-IMF orders, was destroying the state pensions system and imposing 5.4bn euros in cuts, the GSEE’s banner begged for the government to top up workers’ Pensions Funds! They couldn’t even call for the withdrawal of the Bill!
All this was not lost on workers, youth and the middle class professionals on Sunday’s marches and the evening’s rally. They also noted the reactionary policies of the KKE (Greek Communist Party) whose policy is to ask workers to ‘pressure the government’ into withdrawing the Bill!
The KKE leaders refused to call for the overthrow of Tsipras and exit from the EU-IMF claws because, as they themselves state, workers are ‘not ready to overthrow the government and capitalism’. However on Sunday, for the first time, sections of workers and students took up the demand and shouted for an ‘indefinite strike’ and some for an ‘indefinite political general strike’ to smash the austerity accords and the Tsipras regime.
The anti-capitalists of ANTARSYA again refused to support such demands. Tsipras, with great help from the trade union bureaucracy, may have passed the Bill through the Vouli as demanded by his overlords in Brussels and Washington. The Eurogroup (Eurozone ministers), who on Monday were to discuss Greece, may have ordered Tsipras to impose the additional 3.6bn austerity measures, but the anger of the workers’, youth, poor farmers and the middle class in Greece has passed the critical point of explosion.
The urgent necessity is for workers and youth to build a mass revolutionary party to politically smash the KKE and the trades union bureaucracy and go forward to overthrow Tsipras and capitalism.
