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“Communists supposed it… but Syriza surpassed their expectations…”

This joke could very well summarize the programmatic lessons to be drawn from the situation that proletarians in Greece, our brothers and sisters of misery and struggle, are subjected to. Indeed since always or at least since the great campaigns of Social Democracy in the early 20^th century for the establishment of universal suffrage, which aimed at nothing else than the containment and the destruction of the proletariat’s energy developed to put an end to misery and exploitation, the communist critique (whether the latter expressed itself under the “anarchist” label, the “revolutionary socialist” or another one is not what we are interested in here) has always denounced the electoral circus, parliamentarianism, governmentalism, collaboration with bourgeois institutions, and the almost religious belief that reforms could improve the lot of our class…

In this short contribution we will not further talk about the “Greek sovereign debt” or the rescue of the “euro zone”, and even less about the “Grexit”, so fashionable these last weeks in bourgeois media. We are not going to develop the different strategies of Syriza government to “defy” the financial institutions of the European Commission and the Troika. We leave all these “details” to the fervent followers of political economy. For our part, we consider that the communists do not have to wallow in the biology of Capital, while our task is fundamentally to participate in its necrology! We will also not turn our attention to the Prime Minister Tsipras’ “psychology”, to what he hoped or intended to do, we will not take into account the media show and the incredible statements of his Finance Minister the foppish playboy Varoufakis (self-proclaimed “libertarian Marxist”!) and his gang of leftists, just able to snivel about the “denial of democracy” vis-à-vis the July 5^th referendum results and about the “diktat of the euro zone”. What the communists are interested in is not what people say about themselves but what they do and assume in their social practices…

So what’s going on in Greece is just the antepenultimate episode of the always sad and lamentable story of the historical Social Democracy, that is to say the bourgeois party for workers and proletarians, this social force in charge of emptying our movements of struggle from their subversive substance, of diverting their perspectives of radical transformation of the world onto a simple reform, and finally of making us falling back into ranks of social peace. The camp of Social Democracy materializes at two levels: by setting up a militant structure external to our class, a structure directly stemming from leftist and progressive factions of the bourgeois class on the one hand, and by development of a reformist ideological corpus generated within our class and based on the weaknesses, limitations and illusions of the struggle on the other hand, all that in a dialectical back-and-forth movement between both.

So what’s going on in Greece is nothing very different from what the very “radical” Workers Party of Brazil (led by the reformist Lula da Silva and the former “guerrilla” Dilma Roussef) achieved in recent years in terms of attacks on proletarians’ living conditions; what by the way provoked the June 2013 revolt against austerity and misery.

Historically we got used to the “betrayals” of Capital’s left and far left (even if only gullible fools believing that any bourgeois alternative will solve the fundamental problems of our class, of humanity can consider themselves to be “betrayed”)… Already in 1871, during the significant proletarian movement known as the “Paris Commune”, the left and the far left took over its leadership and set up a government that had never taken any revolutionary measure to counter the bourgeois forces of Versailles or to internationally extend the militant efforts underway. All the measures of this “Paris Commune’s government” had resulted to only one thing: disarming (both military and programmatic) of our class confronted with our historical enemy that could after it had been defeated for a short time, reconstruct itself…

Going back to 1914, we can notice the same phenomenon when leftists, who had declared to be openly opposed to war, changed the side before you could say knife. For example, the French “revolutionary socialist” militant Gustave Hervé who had originally written in the newspaper “La Guerre Sociale” (“The Social War”) that we have to “plant the national flag on the dunghill” quickly joined the defense of “the country in danger”… Ditto for the French anarcho-syndicalist CGT which after years of antimilitarist propaganda joined in serried ranks of war supporters and sacred union, allowing thus the feasibility of general mobilization or at least contributing to its smooth course…

In 1917, while soldiers were getting increasingly angry on all fronts against the capitalist slaughter, the “Bolshevik Party” went at the head of the war refusal movement in order to better bring it in the dead end of a “radical” change of government, toppling the reign of the millennial Tsar, and it ultimately participated in the reconstruction of the capitalist State in Russia, roughly shaken by our class in struggle, what resulted in Stalinism and its “socialism in one country”…

In 1918 in Germany, after several years of open collaboration with the headquarters of the imperial army, which resulted in the mobilization on the front as well as in the participation of industrial workers in the war effort, a significant faction of Social Democracy (the SPD) was directly called to the political management (and thus set up a government), and it was militants of the left who directly participated in crushing of the proletarian struggle while forming of “Freikorps” under the aegis of the “worker” and “socialist deputy” Noske…

Finally, to conclude here this non-exhaustive list, in 1936 in Spain it was thanks to the “critical support” and the votes of the CNT militants that the Popular Front won the elections. It was thus able to develop an “antifascist” republican politics which practically opposed the proletariat’s boosts in its struggle for social revolution, all that with an active help of the CNT-FAI’s “comrades-ministers”. Once again, the revolution was sacrificed on the altar of the defense of one bourgeois camp considered as a “lesser evil”!

Anyway we could fill up in this way dozens of pages with the horrors that our class has experienced in diversion of its struggles and in deepening of its weaknesses. As we can see, the left and the far left (all factions taken into account) have always been and will continue to be predominant elements in structuring and maintaining the capitalist dictatorship. The proletariat is historically forced and determined to fight against them in the same way as it fights all the other factions of the bourgeoisie if it wants to put once and for all an end to misery, exploitation and wars…

But let’s come back to the present events and to how the current leftist managers of our misery claim to solve the problem… All those who criticized (rightly so moreover) the referendum organized by Tsipras’ government missed the whole point: their critics did not go beyond the endless sniveling according to which the “Yes” would mean a tough austerity and the “No” a less harsh austerity. In fact, and what followed proved it, (anyway could it be otherwise?), the “No” has never meant anything else (as in every election) than giving to the government a “free hand” and letting it to develop an austerity even stronger than the one originally imposed by the European authorities and their capitalist gangsters. You would really have to be a first-rate “useful idiot” to believe for a single second that the election or referendum show can be anything else than a farce which the proletarians fool themselves with… Capital’s far left historically accustomed us to its leftist policy, which is never anything else than a facelift more or less “radical” according to the circumstances and needs of the moment, the whole finally being only a red-painted version of the same capitalist dictatorship. In this case of Greece, there is an “originality” – a leftist party and government apply word for word the structural adjustment plan and the relentless austerity measures concocted in the headquarters of what people call decision-making centers of capitalism’s liberal policies. But finally beyond the differences of forms and speeches, all that directly and intrinsically partakes in the very logic of the capitalist system. Or, better said, it is not Syriza which is the actor of history but the history of capitalism that finds in Syriza an actor up to the task, an actor able to perform its dirty work, that is to say to frontally attack the proletariat in its means of existence and struggle.

Because what is the principal point in the “Greek crisis” is not the “debt”, which anyway amounts “only” to € 324 billion (more than three-quarters being repayable in only several years); for comparison the debt of France is € 2,089 billion, that of Italy 2,194 billion and 9,293 billion for the “euro zone”, not to mention that of the largest debtor nation-state in the world and in history: the USA with a colossal and abyssal debt of $ 18,152 billion! Capitalism clearly needs to produce the debt, anyway it cannot do anything else than to race out of control and to always more rest its expanded reproduction on fictitious capital, on a not yet produced value which will probably never be realized… No, what’s really the point is the practical implementation of a program to contain the proletariat, not only in Greece but also in other parts of Europe where Capital needs to hit even harder and to discipline a surplus labor power, to always more divide proletarians into different categories, whites and “darkies”, nationals and migrants, the good hard-working citizens who accept the austerity without too much fuss and those who raise their heads, those who show their teeth and organize, struggle, revolt… And in this sense, Greece is a social laboratory for the bourgeoisie and its far left servants!

The proletariat all over the world is condemned to always get its face smashed…

If the law-abiding and pacified proletariat in Europe and North America, addicted to always more terrorist State campaigns of citizenship attitude development, believe to escape its fate without struggling, it is kidding itself as never before…

We will have to put an end to all these illusions about the parliamentary circus, about the game of political parties, but also that of trade unions which do nothing but saving social peace and negotiate the sale of our labor power to the highest bidder.

We have nothing to gain either in new beliefs that would guarantee the “purity” of our struggles against the scoria of bourgeois politics: self-management (that is to say the management of our own misery), “popular assemblies” open to all and where everyone can speak freely (including “scabs”, strikebreakers, “moderates”, good citizens…), production cooperatives where the essence of Capital (money, exchange and therefore the value!) is never eliminated…

In a declaration issued on July 1^st an “Antiauthoritarian Movement” from Thessaloniki says seriously: “We do not care about the currency that will be part of a national reawakening and we cannot support of course a currency that is part of the financial intrusion into every aspect of our lives. We prefer to think of the currency in its normal dimension as an instrument for exchange with its main function being social needs and facilities.” Pitiful leftism and its lack of understanding of what capitalism is!

In short all this fashionable democratic jumble that has never ever been any guarantee for the development of our struggles and the deepening of our ruptures with the society of Capital and its staunch defenders.

Comrades, against the capitalist catastrophe made of more misery, austerity, repression and wars, against the environmental destruction of the planet generated by a social relation that does not care about humans, there is no other alternative but the revolutionary struggle to the death for the destruction of what destroys us…

The only alternative is as follows: either communism or the end of humanity! In between, there is nothing!

# Class War – July 2015 #