MERKEL, Sarkozy and Cameron are all united on one central issue, the Greek workers must not have the slightest ‘democratic’ say over the draconian austerity programme that the EU and the IMF are imposing on Greece.
This programme is to rescue the international bankers and bosses, and to maintain the bourgeois order by pauperising the workers, farmers, the poor and the youth of Greece, destroying every advance that the working class and its allies have made.
The dictators of the EU, Merkel and Sarkozy, representing the German and French ruling classes, and their little helper Cameron, were furious when the Pasok leader Papandreou, driven into a corner by the workers, declared last week that there would be a referendum on the austerity programme and that the Greek people would decide.
Almost immediately there were rumours of a Greek military coup in the making, as the bankers’ men and women declared that giving the workers the chance to vote on the austerity measures was to incite armageddon.
The democratic poseurs decided that this appearance of democracy must be crushed – it must not be allowed to happen.
Papandreou was made to drop the referendum and then to declare that a general election would be a disaster.
The EU dictatorship continued to get what they wanted: the formation of a new coalition government with the right wing New Democrats, and with the weak Papandreou being shown the door.
This right wing, unelected coalition regime, has been formed against the wishes of the electors.
It will be a Bonapartist regime based on the army, and the police – the state power – and its role from day one will be to take on the masses head on, and with blood running in the streets, to try to starve the masses into submission.
With this regime the parliamentary veneer will be very, very thin, to the fore will be the bayonets of the colonels and the torture chambers with which they will be forever associated.
The directors of this situation will be the bosses and bankers of the EU.
That the Greek working class will not accept this arrangement is obvious. There will be a whole series of uprisings.
The key issue is the building of the revolutionary leadership in Greece and throughout the EU to organise the Greek socialist revolution and its spread throughout the European Union.
In countries like the UK no workers should think that they are immune from the Greek experience.
The capitalist crisis is deepening and the British ruling class is just as determined as the Greek to impose the entire burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working class and the poor.
As Danny Alexander made clear yesterday the coalition is out to crush the trade unions that take strike action over the issue of pensions on the 30th, and to seek to organise mass strike breaking to defeat it.
What is being made clear is that worldwide the deepening of the world capitalist crisis has created a situation where the ruling class has to draw the sword, even against bourgeois parliamentary procedures, and where the working class has to defend itself.
Successful defence cannot be carried out unless the working class is prepared to defeat the enemy, get rid of capitalism and bring in socialism, and is led by a party that has the knowledge and the audacity to lead such a revolutionary change.
This is the struggle that is erupting in the EU, in the UK and also in the US. It is the opening of the last chapter of the world socialist revolution that was begun in Russia in February 1917.
