THE Greek Socialist Party Prime Minister, Yiorghos Papandreou, told his party’s parliamentary deputies last Saturday that ‘no one likes emergency procedures but we are at war’.
Papandreou was defending the huge cuts that he has been forcing onto the backs of the working class and the middle class to pay the bill for the growing EU crisis.
He was also defending the dictatorial means that have been used to force savage cuts through the Greek parliament.
The working class and the youth have been taking to the streets of Athens on almost a daily basis.
There have been fierce clashes with the riot police which indicate that the working class also considers that it is in a state of war, class war, and a growing civil war to defend its jobs, wages and living standards from the rampaging EU bankers and bosses, and their Greek Socialist Party servants.
This revolutionary resistance has provoked a crisis in the Pasok party of Papandreou.
The parliament is set to vote on the budget this Wednesday and already four Pasok deputies have refused to vote for the budget, bringing the Pasok majority down to six MPs.
The revolutionary reality was exposed last Friday when print workers and journalists marched through the capital shouting, ‘We are the opposition.’
In the course of the action, the leader of the Greek journalists’ trade union was injured by the riot police.
In fact, the Transport Unions Co-ordination Committee has called a 24-hour strike on Budget day, while even the passive Greek TUC has been forced to call a three-hour general strike.
Many thousands of workers will be marching on the Greek parliament on Wednesday. They will show the Greek parliament that the days of the bourgeois democratic dictatorship are over, and the day of the dictatorship of the working class is about to begin.
The vital issue in Greece is resolving the crisis of leadership in the working class, through the building up of the leadership of the Revolutionary Marxist League, the Greek section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to mobilise the Greek working class for the taking of power.
The Greek working class is taking the revolutionary road, but the rest of the EU working class is not far behind.
The IMF has just had the colossal arrogance to announce that the austerity measures that the Irish bourgeoisie is forcing through the Dail will not be enough to reduce the state deficit to three per cent of the GDP.
The diktat of the IMF is that further cuts must be made if the Irish deficit is to be cut as required.
Meanwhile, the anger of the Irish working class faced with collapsing living standards, mass unemployment, rising prices, the rising cost of healthcare, and forced emigration is boiling over.
The IMF report says the Irish banking sector is ‘over-sized’ relative to the Irish economy and holds a large number of vulnerable assets.
It adds that the banking problems have eroded the State’s credibility ‘at a gathering pace’. It continues that the banking crisis, low economic growth and concerns about the public finances are feeding on each other.
The IMF says the threat to other eurozone countries from Ireland’s problems is significant, as markets believe other countries face similar vulnerabilities.
Ireland, however, is on the brink of a massive revolutionary upheaval.
Next in the queue is the UK. Its massive student demonstrations were just the semblance of the revolutionary general strike movement that will erupt in the New Year, after 100,000 workers get their redundancy notices on January 1.
Europe’s workers are being driven forward by the world crisis to carry out socialist revolutions.
Building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every EU state, to organise the revolutionary overthrow of the EU and its replacement by the Socialist United States of Europe is the issue.