TENS of thousands of students, teachers and trade unionists are expected to take to the streets of Athens and other major Greek cities on Wednesday and Thursday this week.
They are engaged in a struggle against the right-wing New Democracy government of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis that is attempting to amend Article 16 of the Constitution and pass a Higher Education Bill to privatise education.
The revisions to Article 16 proposed by Karamanlis create the conditions to dismantle and privatise state universities, clear the way to the setting up of private universities and end the ban on state forces operating inside these institutions against students and intellectuals.
Students have been occupying up to 350 of the country’s 456 university departments for the past five weeks and their lecturers have been on indefinite strike for three weeks to defeat the proposed revisions of the Constitution and the Education Bill.
Last week, the OLME secondary school teachers’ union called its members out on strike and they will be out again on February 22, renewing their fight against the Education Bill. They organised a six-week strike last autumn and school students occupied their schools.
Alongside the struggle of students and teachers, workers are occupying a state-owned fertiliser plant in Salonika in a fight against privatisation and sackings, ‘temporary’ workers are striking over low pay and casualisation, and peasant farmers are staging protests against the EU’s low prices for their produce.
A revolutionary situation clearly exists in Greece.
The huge movement of students, teachers and sections of workers has created a split between the two major bourgeois political parties, the New Democracy government and the Social Democratic PASOK opposition.
They had a pact to get the revisions of the Constitution through the Vouli (Parliament), but PASOK broke ranks with Karamanlis two weeks ago, declaring it opposed the revisions of Article 16 and it put out a call for a general election.
The split in the ranks of the ruling class only encouraged the movement of workers and youth. The votes for occupations in the universities grew and the teachers decided on strike action, with their leaders demanding that the GSEE trade union federation (Greek TUC) call a general strike to support the students and teachers.
In their turn to the trade unions, the students come up against numbers of PASOK and Stalinist bureaucrats of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), who are opposed to mobilising the whole working class in support of the education struggle.
The weakness of this present huge movement of students, teachers, other workers and even peasant farmers, is that it lacks a leadership with a clear strategy and the organisation necessary to lead it to victory.
The policy of the leadership of the student movement and the teachers is summarised in the slogan: ‘We will fight and we will win!’ They say that if they maintain their occupations, strikes and demonstrations they will force the Karamanlis regime to drop its constitutional amendments and the Education Bill.
However, because of the crisis of the government, it is not going to back down. It will drag out the parliamentary manoeuvres and organise state provocations against students and strikers.
In this situation, it is urgent that students and teachers step up their fight to force the trade union leaders to call solidarity strike action and organise an indefinite general strike to bring down the Karamanlis government and Greek capitalism.
They must join with local trade unionists and build Councils of Action that will organise strike action and force the union leaders to call the general strike, or replace these leaders.
The general strike must bring down the New Democracy government, and the working class must go forward to establish a workers’ and farmers’ government and a socialist society.
The immediate vital task facing Greek workers, students, intellectuals and youth is the building of a new revolutionary leadership to organise this struggle and ensure its victory.
This means building the Greek section of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International in a struggle against the counter-revolutionary leaderships of the reformist PASOK and the Stalinist KKE.
