WORKERS and youth in Greece have spent the last two days outside the Vouli being bombarded and attacked by riot policemen, some on motorbikes and others on foot, using truncheons and firing tear gas, sound bombs and other projectiles.
The endless state violence being used against them was so that Greek MPs could get into the building to vote to sack and pauperise the Greek workers and peasants, and privatise all Greek state industries, as a prelude to a decade of extreme poverty.
All this is so that the vast debts built up by the Greek ruling class can begin to be paid off, and the collapse of the European banks, the euro and the EU be staved off, for the moment.
Greek workers have said that they are being told that 11 million Greeks have got to accept being pauperised and ruined, or else they will have the responsibility for the collapse of the euro, the EU and the world banking system.
It is thus their patriotic duty, to the ruling classes of the world, to be human sacrifices.
The Greek workers will have none of this tripe. They state that they are not responsible for the world capitalist crisis and that such a catastrophic system, in such a desperate crisis, in fact deserves to perish and go under.
It is obvious that the only road for the Greek workers is to resist and to overthrow the capitalists and bankers with a socialist revolution.
Thus the Greek parliament is meeting under the guns, bombs, bullets, clubs and gas of the state forces, in order that it can force the requirements of the IMF and the European Central Bank onto the Greek workers.
What has begun in Greece is the Greek socialist revolution. The ruling class will need to foist another military junta onto the working class in place of a parliamentary government to force the measures through.
The working class must pre-empt this counter-revolution with its own massive mobilisation, for a socialist revolution to overthrow the rule of the capitalists and bankers, and to bring in a workers and small farmers government.
In this period of world capitalist crisis, what is true for Greece is true for all capitalist countries, especially the UK.
Here a government of millionaire capitalists, who have lived off the backs of the working class all their lives, as have their predecessors, is calling public sector workers ‘parasites’, because they refuse to allow their pensions to be smashed, and their wages cut, and their jobs privatised or abolished, and handed over to charities to operate a modern workhouse system of ‘bourgeois care’ under the guise of the ‘Big Society’.
Capitalism can no longer afford a Welfare State so the ruling class have decided to abolish it.
They have also threatened that if the masses do not accept ruin being imposed on them, they will bring in new anti-union laws to make strikes illegal.
The UK crisis and the Greek crisis are part of the world crisis of capitalism. The crisis is not the fault of any sections of workers, yet they have to pay for it so that the capitalist system can stagger on. Very soon the UK state will be employing the same forces as in Greece, or worse, to try to force the majority to accept the austerity measures that the minority ruling class have decided are necessary to save their system.
As in Greece the working class, the youth and the masses will be forced into a struggle that they can only win through carrying out a socialist revolution.
What the working class needs is a new and revolutionary leadership, to overthrow the capitalist ruling class and establish socialism.
Now is the time to build up the WRP and build sections of the Fourth International in every country.