IN all of the Greek cities there were clashes throughout yesterday between workers and youth and the riot police, and other Greek special forces. Everywhere police stations were under attack and being stoned or showered with petrol bombs.
Workers are furious at the state murder of a young 15 year old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, by Greek Special Guard armed policemen.
In city after city, universities and schools have followed the example of the Athens Polytechnic and are occupied and barricaded against the prospect of attack by the state forces.
Today, the Greek teachers are on national strike. Tomorrow, the Greek TUC has called a general strike against the massive cuts that the government is seeking to impose on the working class, along with the huge price rises, growing unemployment and the government’s programme for privatising all state owned industries, and universities.
This government has a majority of just one!
The assassination of the young boy was the detonator that is igniting all of the gunpowder that has been assembled by the way that the government has used the world economic crisis to attack, and pauperise the Greek working class, the middle class and the youth.
Two police officers have been arrested in connection with the boy’s death, but this will not stop the clashes in the streets since these are a reflection of the acute sharpening of the class struggle, as was the state’s assassination of the young boy.
The worldwide economic and financial crisis of capitalism has brought revolution to Greece, and in particular, the revolutionary eruption of workers and youth, and the counter-revolutionary response of the capitalist state.
That a police officer should take careful aim at a young man and shoot him dead in the street is the concrete expression of the stage that the class struggle has reached in Greece.
Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis has written to the boy’s parents, stating: ‘In these difficult moments please accept my condolences for the unfair loss of your son. Like all Greeks I am deeply saddened.’
He said his government would act to stop ‘such a tragedy’ from happening again.
This letter has been condemned as crocodile tears since the young man’s death is a product of the counter-revolutionary policies of the Karamanlis government, especially its organisation and mobilisation of the repressive forces of the capitalist state to force these policies through.
There will be a massive response to the general strike tomorrow.
It must become an indefinite stoppage to bring down the government and lay the basis for a workers government that will smash the capitalist state, disarm and disperse all of its murderous repressive forces, and expropriate the bosses and the bankers.
To guide this movement forward requires the construction of the Fourth International in Greece and throughout Europe.
It must not be forgotten that the Greek workers are leading the way to the barricades but that the workers of Europe and America are not far behind.
All over Europe and the US hundreds of thousands of workers are being sacked as factories are closed and services are slashed.
Everywhere, the purchasing power of wages has been slashed by a massive inflation of the cost of the necessities of life.
Everywhere, the banks are wobbling and demanding that the working class be bled white to sustain them.
Everywhere, capitalism is demonstrating that it is a bankrupt and historically out of date system, in the last throws of its death agony and that the role of the working class is to bury it and go forward to socialism.
The Greek workers are showing the way and the German, French, British, US and the workers of the world will follow them. There is no doubt that this is the time for the building of the worldwide revolutionary leadership of the Fourth international in every country
