Is the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a democratically planned, socialized economy in Greece possible today? The political and professional representatives of the troika and the Greek ruling class disregard as "impractical" any programme that is directed against the interests of the bankers and other predatory capitalists. Any demand to break the shackles of wage slavery and of the huge army of unemployed, who are being forced to eat the leftovers of society, is dubbed as "populism" and "adventurism" by these good Christian gentlemen.
H) Is the overthrow of capitalism possible today?
Under the pressure of bourgeois public opinion, the reformist leaders over time, particularly when they get closer to power, rush around trying to be “reasonable” in their programme. On the one hand they try to reassure the bourgeoisie that their fundamental interests, namely their control over the economy and the state, will not be affected and on the other, they tell the workers that a fundamental change in society is not yet feasible.
But what really is politically and socially feasible and what is not? A look at the developments taking place around us in the last two years, is enough to radically revise what one considers to be "feasible" and what not. Who would have considered a few years ago a possible bankruptcy of a country of the Eurozone and its call for help to the IMF? Who would have thought it possible that the minimum wage and collective bargaining agreements would have been repealed by a democratically elected government? Who would have believed it would be possible to carry out 18 general strikes in two short years? Who could have imagined PASOK and ND losing three million votes within two and a half years? Who could have imagined the current surge to power of SYRIZA, when just two and a half years ago it was on the verge of political marginalisation due to conflicts within the leadership without clear political principles? Who could have imagined a few years ago that it was possible in a country of the capitalist West to see the rise to government of a party of the communist movement?
What is possible in society and politics is not an abstract concept. It is linked to the objective, material factors that determine the social life and the outcome of the struggle carried on between the two basic classes of society, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and their allies.
The establishment of a democratically planned, socialised economy which would pave the way for socialism throughout Europe is perfectly possible today, because the productive forces in Greece (labour, technical know-how, science, technology, etc.) are sufficiently developed to ensure a decent living for all working people. For example, the GDP of Greece, from 38.6 billion euro in 1990 rocketed to 244 billion euro in 2008. But the current deep crisis of capitalism which has already cut it back close to 200 billion euro, screams out that the developed productive forces are condemned to stagnation within the suffocating shackles of bourgeois property.
It would be impossible to overthrow capitalism if the force which has an interest in and can save the productive forces from capitalist decline did not exist in the Greek society. But this is not only real, it is powerful and objective. It is the working class of Greece, which based on official data from the ESYE (National Statistical Service) is the large majority in the society with 2.6 million employed workers and more than one million unemployed who in the last two years have joined together in common mass struggles. Beside them, we should add as objective, potential allies, about one million self-employed and about 200,000 employed in small family businesses.
Additionally, the working class in Greece now has an incomparably higher educational level than in the past and has strong mass organizations, which can impose their collective will on society. More favourable conditions than this economic and social reality for the beginning of the socialist transformation in Greece could not be imagined.
But is this vital question politically feasible? The political consciousness of the working masses through the experience of mass struggles against the measures of the Memoranda has been radicalised and has moved with unprecedented speed towards the left. In the 6th May elections, all three parties that emanate from the Greek communist movement [KKE, SYRIZA, Democratic Left] gathered a total percentage less than what the polls are now giving to SYRIZA alone. In particular, the huge popularity of SYRIZA amongst the working class, that is revealed by the very high rates of support gathered in the large cities, is an excellent indicator of the revolutionary political possibilities and prospects of this period.
Some decades ago, just the mere prospect of the rise of a party originating from the communist party movement getting into government would have already provoked a coup. Now the bourgeois reactionaries simply note the announcements of SYRIZA about the disbanding of the riot police without being able to do anything about in the short term, postponing the moment of their counter-revolutionary revenge for another more appropriate future moment. Finally, the bourgeois politicians, because of the deep crisis of their system, cannot give to their traditional political social base, the petty bourgeois, even the smallest of promise of a tolerable existence with minimum sacrifices.
All this demonstrates that with the rapid development of the political influence of SYRIZA and the increasing weakness of the bourgeois parties and leaders, compared to their old unchallenged political dominance, the necessary political preconditions for the overthrow of capitalism and the beginning of the socialist transformation in Greece are already present. SYRIZA has become a subjective factor that can make a great political, revolutionary, social change possible. The only thing that this leadership lacks – even as with the tremendous momentum of the masses it is already being pushed into the halls of power – is an adequate revolutionary programme. This, however, is anything but a minor issue. Instead, it is currently the most crucial question!
I) Ten points for a socialised, planned economy and workers’ power
The programme of a government of the Left is not a matter of mere literary interest. It is a matter of life or death for millions of current or prospective impoverished and unemployed workers – the future and present “customers” of the soup kitchens. As such, it should be democratically discussed and developed with the active participation of the most advanced sections of the working class and youth within the ranks of SYRIZA and in addition, it should be moulded and tested within the widest masses of workers to gain active support in implementing it once in power.
Unfortunately, the leadership of SYRIZA is moving erratically under the maelstrom of tremendous pressure from the Troika and the ruling class, and has pushed back this perspective and changed the programme of the Left government to a political plan imposed from above, prepared by "qualified personnel" within the four walls of the party offices. Without the creative input of thousands of SYRIZA activists in a democratic debate, without it being presented in the workplaces and neighbourhoods, the programme announced by the political leadership is inadequate to express the needs of this period.
It is obviously influenced by the pressures of bourgeois "public opinion" that is demanding greater "moderation" and less radicalism. It is abstract and pale in its main points. In political terms, it is not the required revolutionary programme, but a reformist programme, that is built on the dangerous illusion of the "gradual reform" of a sick capitalist economy and of the corrupt and authoritarian state which serves it.
The task of each left-wing person is to fight for this programme to be changed and revised to meet the truly revolutionary tasks of the period. The Marxists of Synaspismos and SYRIZA that produce the newspaper "Epanastasi" and the magazine "Marxistiki Foni” (www.marxismos.com), are contributing to this vital question. We propose a programme consisting of ten points which are able to open the way for the overthrow of capitalism in Greece and the establishment of a democratically planned, socialised economy and a new democratic power of the working people.
1) On the Debt and Memoranda
The impact of the global crisis of overproduction in Greek capitalism led to skyrocketing state debt. This rising debt appeared in all capitalist countries, as a common symptom of the capitalist crisis. The national debt soared worldwide, largely due to the concerted attempt of the bourgeois governments to rescue the banks with huge amounts of state funding. The position of Greek capitalism as the "weakest link" in the Eurozone, meant it was the first to move towards bankruptcy.
The paid ideological apologists of Greek capitalism attribute the massive government debt to the "civil servants" and the so-called "voter-customer" of a “party-political-led" state. But this is a distorted and false picture of reality. In a class society the state is not neutral. It is under the rule of the ruling class. All distortions of the modern Greek state reflect the historically shaped nature and culture of the Greek ruling class.
Even the enlargement of the civil service during the last forty years, ultimately served the need to ensure the stability of capitalism, given the historical reluctance of the Greek bourgeoisie to carry out serious investments that could create new productive jobs.
In fact, the spending on wages for the vast majority of civil servants, was the only part of the Greek taxpayers’ money that had some contributory effect on society. What created the monster of debt is to be found elsewhere.
It can be found in the parasitic economic role of the Greek ruling class. The Greek bourgeoisie became dependent over time on state money far more than the ruling classes in the rest of the developed capitalist world. They always saw the state as the main source of quick and easy enrichment through overpriced large contracts, direct government "investment" subsidies, tax exemptions and a tolerance towards tax evasion.
Also, a number of other parasitic costs reveal the class and vicious character of the bourgeois state, adding over time a large volume of government debt: the overblown wages and "bribery" of a whole army of senior state and government officials, consultants and directors; military expenditure and excessive overpricing and kickbacks to buy expensive equipment; the overall cost of maintaining an army built to deal with the "enemy within" and subordinate to the extravagant imperialist plans of NATO.; increased spending on security forces for the sake of maintaining a numerous and well equipped mechanism of repression of the struggles of working people; the salary costs of the clergy, the various forms of funding, and also a provocative series of tax breaks for the Church; all this created a trend towards increased government borrowing, which in most cases had an opaque and predatory character to the benefit of domestic and foreign banks. All this served to multiply the debt.
But let us give some more specific examples of the operation of the parasitic capitalists and the corrupt and wasteful bourgeois character of the Greek state. To rescue the so-called "problem" industries abandoned in the 1980s by the Greek industrialists offloading their losses onto the state, total government expenditure amounted to 1.3 trillion drachmas in 1990 when the total debt amounted to 11 trillion drachmas.
From early 1980 until today, taxation of the big companies gradually fell from 49% to 20%, a period of enormous profiteering for the Greek capitalists. The hugely overpriced public works for the 2004 Olympics cost the Greek government 20 billion euro. During the twenty years 1990-2010, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Greek government spent 21.4 billion dollars on arms imports. The "kickbacks" of the jailed former Defence Minister, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, were estimated at 300 million euro (source “Real”, 3/6/2012). The special parliamentary committee inquiry found that the loss of the Greek state from the illegal activities of the Siemens company in Greece exceeded two billion and the "kickbacks" provided were estimated at over 180 million.
The accumulation of all this, under the impact of the international recession, led the Greek state to the edge of bankruptcy and to the draconian Memoranda. However, to describe this giant monstrosity of debt as “public” is completely false. It was not created by the working class and the poor, but only by big business and the parasitic and corrupt state apparatus that was built to serve it.
With Greece in 2010 having to accept the famous "rescue" mechanism and by borrowing from the EU-ECB-IMF troika, what was rescued was not the people but the banks, who if Greece were to default would simply have gone under. With the introduction of the Memoranda they attempted to offload the heavy cost of debt repayment onto the backs of the poor working masses of Greece with an unprecedented savagery, and all this simply to slow down the movement of Greece towards bankruptcy, so as to avoid a chaotic default which would destabilise European and global capitalism.
The troika loans are now directed almost exclusively at banks and very few go to the day-to-day needs of the Greek state. Based on official data of the Ministry of Finance, the country's total funding from the troika is scheduled to reach almost 245 billion euro by the end of 2014. The amount disbursed until the 21/5/2012 totalled 147.6 billion euro. According to the revealing memo of the economist T. Papadopoulos on the website iskra.gr, of this money only 13 billion euro are covering primary needs of the state, while 75 billion euro cover interest and amortization and the remaining 59.5 billion are allocated to bondholders and to banks for their famous "recapitalization".
From now on, the scheduled loans of the troika will be directed solely to debt servicing, while at the same time charging the Greek state with extra interest. This is evidenced by the memorandum itself, which provides for a primary surplus in 2013, which means that state revenues and pension funds will be able to cover all expenses except debt repayments falling due and the annual interest.
The debt problem is enormous. The tiny haircut of debt carried out through the bond exchange programme is being cancelled out by the rapidly deepening recession. According to the April 2012 IMF report, the debt of the Greek state in 2014 will climb to 171% of GDP. Greece must pay over the next four years for the service of this debt a total of 95 billion euro. In other words, to serve the debt in the next four years, the Greeks must hand over the the tax revenues of approximately two years!
As long as this huge weight on the backs of the Greek people is maintained there is no chance of any real steps towards social progress. The basic task of the government of the Left is to free the working class and the poor from this ghastly burden of parasitic and predatory "obligations" that the bourgeois governments placed on their shoulders.
The Government of the Left should immediately take the following measures:
a) Cancel the debt of the Greek state, while:
Compensating the small bondholders according to their financial situation;
Ensuring adequate funding to Greek pension funds which hold bonds of the Greek state to avoid jeopardising their sustainability;
Promptly paying all debts of the state to the workers, the unemployed, pensioners, professionals and small business people and those associated with the basic operation of the services of Education, Health, Welfare and Social Security.
b) Immediate cancellation through a single Act of the loan agreements with the troika, the Memoranda and any measures imposed by them (tax hikes, wage cuts, pensions, benefits, privatisations, etc.).
These measures would relieve the country of about 13 billion euro that have been budgeted for this year in interest payments, but also from huge parasitic spending over the next several years. This would provide a huge relief for the next generations of working people.
However, as already explained, these measures would provoke the automatic termination of the troika loans, a generalised economic war against the government of the Left from local and foreign capital and the exit from the euro. This war, if not faced up to properly, would inevitably jeopardise the ability to pay for so-called "primary costs", i.e. the expenditure required for salaries, pensions and to run schools and hospitals, which come to a total of 47.7 billion euro in 2012.
Those various reformist analysts, who argue that these costs will be secured for the government of the Left, supposedly from taxation under the state budget, which is 52.2 billion euro, are very wrong. These estimates take into account the tax revenue calculated according to the Memoranda and do not take into account the collapse of revenue and an even deeper recession that will be caused by the war of the local and foreign capital against the new government. More than half of state revenues (28.6 billion euro in indirect taxation) are dependent on the highly volatile levels of consumption in conditions of recession
State revenues to cover essential social costs (wages, benefits, pensions, schools, hospitals), are far from assured. The only way to guarantee them is through the simultaneous implementation of these and other measures that we propose in this programme.
2) Taxation
Taxation of profits and the wealth of the capitalists, the big rentiers and holders of large fortunes, is an important and direct means for the government of the Left to find quickly the funds required to meet the "primary costs", but also to begin to improve from the very first months in office the standard of living of the masses.
But even these measures in and of themselves are not sufficient. The bourgeoisie will proceed in a multifaceted economic sabotage (closures, flight of capital and deposits, etc.) to avoid fair and heavy taxation. The reduction of the terrible social inequalities and the financing of social needs can be achieved in a stable, safe and long lasting manner, only through the taking over of the wealth concentrated in the hands of the rich through the establishment of a socialised, democratically planned economy.
Greece has the lowest tax revenues of all the developed EU countries and can be compared only with the most underdeveloped countries in Eastern Europe. Tax immunity for big business and the rich are the cause of this situation. At the same time, this is one of the most decisive factors that have led to the indebtedness of the Greek state. This can be demonstrated by taking a quick look at the official statistics of "Eurostat" and the Finance Ministry.
The tax rate on corporate profits from 49% in 1989 fell to an insignificant 20% in 2010. Now New Democracy shamelessly proposes a further reduction in this tax rate to 15%. For example, between 2000 and 2007 there was a fall in revenue from taxing businesses from 4.1% to 2.6% of GDP at a time when corporate profits had taken off in Greece, becoming the highest in Europe.
Tax evasion by the rich is more than provocative. According to official data of the Ministry of Finance tax returns for those with incomes over 95,000 euro barely reached 35,000 or 0.6% of all tax returns, while those with incomes over 300,000 euro were only 1395 in all.
According to the "Global Tax Justice Network", Greek-owned “off-shore” companies surpass the 10,000 mark and hold about 500 billion euro. The powerful Greek ship owning industry in March 2012 had a stock of 3,760 ships, i.e. 15% of world tonnage, but for reasons of tax avoidance, only 862 of them carried the Greek flag (Kathimerini, 15/04/2012). And during this whole period there have been introduced 58 different tax cuts for the Greek ship owners.
On the other hand, Greece has one of the highest levels of indirect taxation – weighing mainly on the workers and the poor. Indirect taxes represent over 60% of overall tax revenue, while the average of the Eurozone is only 36.2%. In contrast, revenues from direct taxation in Greece as a percentage of GDP are about half of the respective figure in the EU.
While thousands of workers, in the name of the crisis, pay one "tax-hike" after another, the Greek capitalists and high-income earners react very "patriotically". They have smuggled large deposits abroad and have started investing in real estate in cities like London. According to reports by the German magazine Der Spiegel, the amount of deposits by Greeks in Switzerland reached the astronomical level of 600 billion euro. This is more than three times the amount of private deposits in Greek banks, and almost three times the GDP of the country. Finally, according to the British authorities, the number of Greeks seeking homes in the British capital has tripled in the last two years. The properties acquired by Greeks in London are worth more than one billion euro.
The question of all this huge wealth must be addressed by the government of the Left as it is wealth that comes from the brutal exploitation of and blatant thievery against the working people of Greece. The government of the Left should take all necessary steps to return the largest possible amount of this wealth to Greece and its people.
The most urgent tax measures that should be taken by the government of the Left are the following:
a) In order to reclaim what has been stolen from the Greek people through tax immunity and tax evasion of big business and big property owners, a necessary method of retroactive taxation needs to be put in place. According to Article 78 of the Constitution, retroactive imposition of tax is prohibited. However, one also has to quote fundamental articles of the Constitution, such as Article 4, which states that "Greek citizens contribute to public costs according to their wealth".
So, specifically in order to find an amount equal to the primary deficit resulting from the abolition of the tax burden according to the Memorandum (tax increases, reductions in tax-free income, etc.) the following should be imposed:
- A single extraordinary retroactive tax on the total volume of profits of the 200 major active companies in the country, from the date of entry in the Eurozone to the beginning of the recession (2001-2008).
- Extraordinary, retroactive taxation on those who in the same period acquired a large property.
b) Restore the tax rate of big business to 45% and abolish any tax relief for large enterprises.
c) Imposition of a progressive income tax rate from 40% to 75% on incomes of 40,000 euro or more per year.
d) Imposition of a tiered rate of property tax on homeowners with a value of €400,000 and above, as well as properties that appear to belong to “off-shore” companies on a level which will be decided annually on the basis of the needs of the state housing construction programme.
e) Abolition of indirect taxes (VAT, excise tax, etc.) on basic foodstuffs, household energy bills, water and telecommunications, and heating fuels.
f) Increase the tax-free threshold to 40,000 euro for each couple, plus an additional 5,000 euro for each child.
g) When tax evasion is disclosed:
-Large companies should be expropriated without compensation.
- Those with high incomes and large property owners should be charged with full confiscation of their assets.
- For other categories of taxpayers penalties must be imposed ranging from heavy fines to confiscation of assets, depending on their financial situation.
h) It is unrealistic to believe that widespread tax evasion, fraud and other manoeuvres of capital can be dealt with purely through the "political will" of the Left Government. Also, no practical step will be achieved by trying to persuade the corrupt tax officials to "work properly".
The government of the Left needs immediately to introduce workers' control. In every large company a thorough management audit by elected committees of workers should be carried out, with the help of dedicated specialists in the labour movement. These committees should have access to a single central computerised system for recording and cross checking elements, which requires the immediate creation of a “wealth” database.
3) Workers’ control
Tax evasion, social security payments evasion, fraud and other big business scandals, which are allowed to take place in perfect harmony with the bourgeois technocratic experts in deception, the high-ranking bourgeois politicians and senior officials of the state apparatus, must be immediately exposed and targeted by the government of the Left.
The existing "audit" mechanisms of the bourgeois state are operating in a bureaucratic, opaque and unaccountable manner in order to protect the "secrets" of the large industrial and commercial enterprises. The financial accounts of the capitalists are kept legally secret. The owners of the social means of production are allowed undisturbed to hide from the consumers the machinations of exploitation, robbery and fraud.
The government of the Left should give the workers directly the right to reach this "inner sanctum" of the companies they work for in order to reveal any "secrets" of these firms, groups, industries and ultimately the national economy as a whole. The means by which this vital task can be carried is workers' control.
The government should take the following measures on this crucial question:
a) Elimination of "trade secrets" and "banking secrecy" through which the capitalists conceal their fraud and greed, not from their competitors, but from society itself.
b) Workers’ control should be introduced in all major businesses. Workers' control committees should be the elected with the right of recall, and these should be backed up by dedicated specialists within the labour movement and by scientists, but as advisers, not as "technocrats".
c) Workers' control must extend to all the decisive levels of operation of the company, such as the procurement of materials and raw materials, the managing money (Loans, Investments, Profit), processing products (Design and Production), to prevent overcharging and under-pricing.
d) Workers' control can give significant results in eliminating the scourge of capitalist levels of pricing. While the standard of living of the working class is falling sharply, prices remain unchanged as a result of the strict control of key sectors of the economy in the hands of the monopolies and oligopolies.
The corrupt, bureaucratic and unaccountable bodies of the bourgeois state cannot set an effective control on prices. It is crucial for the workers to have access to the source of this price fixing, i.e. the large industrial monopolies, to be able to expose capitalist speculation. Thus, workers' control should be the basic method of price control.
Substantial price controls over the cartels can only be guaranteed by elected committees of workers in the factories, coupled with special price control committees made up of all those who suffer the effects of this price fixing as consumers, i.e. the workers, peasants, artisans and small shopkeepers. In this way, the workers would be able to demonstrate to the other poor layers that the real reason for high prices is to be found in the excessive profits of the capitalists and the wastefulness of capitalist anarchy (such as advertising, and so on).
e) To be effective, workers' control panels must extend from the individual firm across the industry and to national level. The committees of individual companies should elect delegates to a group committee during the course of a conference and finally to form a nationwide workers' control committee. The nationwide committee must inform the people of its findings, outlining the income and expenses of society, and the share of national income appropriated by the capitalists as individuals and as a class. Such a committee must expose the fraud of the banks and large capitalist groups and present its findings in public, which should be binding for the government of the Left.
The implementation of genuine and democratic workers' control would inevitably reveal the role of parasitic capitalists, helping thus the broad masses to understand the need for another economic model, based on conscious planning and control of the economy. Also, genuine workers' control is the most valuable means of training workers in how to manage a democratically planned, socialised economy.
[To be continued...]