Today (October 19), the first day of the 48-hour general strike in Greece was sensational. Apart from the government and public utilities workers that participated in the strike massively, hundreds of thousands of workers from the private sector came out on strike for the first time, and also joining the millions of striking workers were tens of thousands of small businesspeople and shopkeepers who closed the shutters to their shops in solidarity.

As Portugal’s right-wing government announced the harshest austerity cuts in the country’s history, economic forecasts were revised down and the main trade union confederations CGTP and UGT announced the calling of a general strike.

On October 15 Rome saw one of the biggest demonstrations of the last few years in Italy. Up to half a million people flooded the streets of the capital. Not only was this a huge demonstration in terms of the numbers taking part, but even more significantly you could hear the most radical slogans of the last decade. The masses, inspired by Athens, Madrid and New York, chanted “we don’t want to pay the debt”, “No to austerity”, “No to the dictatorship of the ECB and the banks”, etc.

On Saturday, 15 October, in the Paradeplatz in Zürich, the heart of the Swiss banking system, over 1500 people met to express their rage against the power of the banks, against the injustice of the system, against the capitalist crisis. Also in the cities of Basel and Geneva smaller demos of between 100 and 400 people were held.

Hundreds of thousands of people, certainly well over a million, took to the streets of Spain on October 15 to express, once again, their indignation at the crisis of capitalism and the austerity plans which are being introduced to make working people pay for it.

The situation in Greece is becoming more and more revolutionary as each day passes. The country has been paralysed by a wave of strikes centred on the public sector and state owned enterprises, which is the workers’ response as they attempt to ward off the terrible attacks of the government. This wave of strikes was anticipated by the mass occupation movement in the universities and schools in September, which proved once again that the youth is a sensitive barometer of the class struggle.