THE GREEK BOURGEOISIE is now pleading for more time to repay its massive loans.
The unelected Prime Minister, Samaras, who was selected for the job by the EU and the IMF, has urged that a little ‘room to breathe’ on achieving the quarterly targets must be granted to a country where 54% of youth are now unemployed and almost 25 per cent of adults.
He also warned that failure to grant that ‘little room to breathe’ – followed by Greece being booted out of the eurozone – would end bourgeois democracy in the country, and see another ‘Weimar collapse’.
Samaras told the German newspaper Bild: ‘We require no additional money . . . all we want is a little room to breathe, to get the economy going and to increase government revenues. More time does not automatically mean more money.’
Samaras met Eurogroup leader Jean-Claude Juncker in Athens yesterday where he requested a two-year extension in order to meet bailout targets set by the EU and International Monetary Fund.
He added to Bild, that a failure to comply with his request would see ‘a nightmare’ and at least five more years of slump that would finish off democracy in Greece and lead to a situation akin to that of the German Weimar Republic, which saw citizens pasting their walls with worthless paper notes, all of the democratic parties discredited, and the scene set, after the betrayals of the Labour and Communist parties, for the rise of the Nazi party and Hitler’s legal coming to power in 1933.
Samaras is warning that the decline in living standards by 35% in the last three years, would see a further collapse by another 70% if there was a return to the drachma.
It is crystal clear that the EU bosses and bankers are not prepared to give Greece any more leeway, and that they will demand their full pound of flesh, or the eviction of Greece from the union.
It is also crystal clear that the Greek working class will not take a further 70 per cent fall in living standards and that the Greek workers and youth will rise up in a socialist revolution to prevent the kind of starvation existence that is being prepared for them.
In fact, Greece does not face Weimar and then fascism, it faces a socialist revolution of the masses, and if that were to fail then the prospect of Weimar and its consequences.
What happened in Germany was prepared by the failure of the March 1923 German revolution when the Third International under the leadership of Zinoviev and Stalin lost its nerve and cancelled the insurrection.
Stalin then continued to split the Labour movement by dubbing the Labour Party as Social Fascists and refusing to ally with them in a United Front to defeat the fascists.
Instead, Stalin put forward the slogan ‘After Hitler our turn’.
In fact, after Hitler took power legally, the CP leadership and many members were put into concentration camps, as Hitler speedily rearmed for war.
Today in Greece, Greek Labour, that is Pasok, has already betrayed the working class, while the Greek Communist party seeks to prevent an indefinite general strike by workers to bring down the appointed Prime Minister and his government.
A further massive fall in living standards will see a socialist revolution erupting in Greece and that revolution will require a revolutionary leadership.
That it is why it is vital that the Greek section of the International Committee of the Fourth International is rapidly built up in this period, to organise the taking of power by the Greek working class.
Only if this is not done will the right-wing get its chance in the way that it did in Germany.
This, however, is not just a Greek question. After Greece comes Spain, Portugal and Italy, and after them France, the UK and Germany. Now is the time to build sections of the Fourth International all over Europe, to replace the bankrupt EU with the Socialist United States of Europe.