IN GREECE AND SPAIN
Workers, youth resist bankers’ assault
By
John Catalinotto
Published Jun 22, 2011 10:18 PM
Barcelona, Spain, June 19. Banner in Catalan reads: ‘The street is ours;
We won’t pay for their crisis.’
Photo: desrealitat.blogspot.com
|
Workers and young people in Greece held a general strike and mass
demonstrations June 15 to put up the strongest resistance so far to the
relentless offensive by European bankers and billionaires against the working
class on that continent. In Spain, too, more than a half million took to the
streets on June 19.
Greece’s left-wing labor confederation PAME held the third general strike
of 2011 on June 15, protesting the government’s newest plans to cut
another 6.4 billion euros from the already existing austerity budget. PAME,
which marched in 67 cities, represents about half the organized workers and has
led the workers’ struggle against the Troika.
Strikers encircled the presidential mansion, the premier’s office and
Parliament to stop the representatives from reaching the building to open
debate on Prime Minister George Papandreou’s new cuts.
A movement something like the one that recently occupied the central squares of
cities in Spain was also in the streets with less clear political demands but
still opposed to austerity. Communist Party (KKE) representatives left the
debate in parliament to join the demonstration.
PAME Secretariat Member Alekos Arvanitidis told the crowd in Sytagma Square,
“We refuse to recognize any debt.” (www.kke.gr, June 16)
The PASOK regime, led by Papandreou, announced a shuffle of positions in the
cabinet that same day, presenting it as a change. Though it showed the
government felt mass pressure, the change was barely cosmetic.
The next day, the KKE held demonstrations in cities across Greece to show its
complete lack of confidence in the government, to expose the
“change” as meaningless and to insist that the working class had
the right to refuse any sacrifice to help solve the bankers’ debt
crisis.
KKE Secretary General Aleka Papariga told the thousands rallying in Athens,
“We must highlight what the business groups, monopolies, the EU and NATO
owe to the people as do the bourgeois parties of ND and PASOK ... the people
must not pay anything. The people must with their own hands take back what they
are owed and what belongs to them.” (www.kke.gr, June 17)
Banks wage class war against workers
The corporate media misrepresents the European capitalist offensive as an
effort to discipline countries that allegedly “spend beyond their
means” on social services and thus defend the common European
currency.
It is true there is a financial and economic crisis that has brought massive
unemployment. But the “austerity measures” are the major European
— and U.S. — banks’ strategy not to end unemployment but to
collect payments on public loans and assure profits for finance capital. To do
this, the European bankers have three instruments: the International Monetary
Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank. Popular
organizations fighting to defend the social programs call these three bodies
“The Troika.”
The Troika has threatened the governments on Europe’s economic periphery
— Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Iceland especially — that it
will withhold loans unless the governments severely cut social programs.
The Troika is a threat first and foremost to the working class but also to the
very sovereignty of the countries it moves in on. It imposes austerity. It
forces privatization of state-owned industry. The Troika serves banks located
mainly in France and Germany, the dominant imperialist powers in the
Eurozone.
Last year’s austerity program in Greece did nothing to resolve the debt
crisis and only increased the unemployment rate, now officially at more than 16
percent. Spain’s is 21 percent.
This bankers’ attack in Europe has similarities to the one against U.S.
cities and states, where local public budgets are being cut to the bone while
money is used first to pay banks for bonds. In both places, the bosses and
bankers are aggressively waging class struggle through an austerity program
that makes the workers pay the costs to bail out the banks.
The attack is also similar to the Structural Adjustment Programs that the IMF
and World Bank imposed on countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia during
the 1980s and 1990s after financial crises that hit hardest outside the
imperialist centers of the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. These programs often
threw the most vulnerable sectors of the indebted societies into hunger and
misery.
In Europe, this offensive is most brutal in the periphery, and the resistance
too is strongest there, right now in Greece and Spain.
Hundreds of thousands march in Spain
Somewhere between a half-million and a million people demonstrated in more than
50 cities in the Spanish state, in every region, on June 19 to oppose the
regime in office and its version of austerity and to demand a future for the
youth.
Starting May 15, a youthful movement including many young workers and
unemployed — along with anyone who wanted to struggle — grew up
outside the major unions and parliamentary political parties. The role of the
union leadership in Spain differs from that in Greece. After one general strike
last September, the leaders of the two major union confederations in the
Spanish state made an agreement with the government and have deserted the
struggle.
Disgusted with nearly all political leaders and distrustful of most union
leadership, young people — who face official unemployment of about 45
percent — occupied the main squares of dozens of cities, staying there in
many cases for three to four weeks. Participants made organizational decisions
in popular assemblies held in these squares. Their final meetings called for
massive mobilizations on June 19, with demands that added up to “Let the
rich pay for their crisis,” “No cuts to pensions” and
“We want a future.”
Six separate marches came from different neighborhoods in Madrid to gather for
a massive rally in Neptune Square. Marches also joined to fill Plaza Catalunya
in Barcelona, and there are reports that another 80,000 people marched in
Valencia. Significant protests also took place in Gijon in Asturias, Bilbao and
Donastia in the Basque Country, Seville in Andalucia, Vigo and Coruña in
Galicia — to name a few. (diagonalperiodico.net, June 20)
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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