As Greece suffers under the heat of raging forest fires, the government faces the heat of the enraged Greek people. After years of cuts to social services, including the fire services, the state has been completely unable to deal with the crisis, leading to untold damages and the deaths of some 64 people. Similar to other disasters in recent years, these forest fires expose the utter rotteness of capitalism.
Greek capitalism is beginning to give at the seams. The days of relative calm are over. Now there is little room for manoeuvre and the system has no choice but to go on the offensive against the workers and youth. This became evident last week when the police attacked a 30,000-strong student demonstration with a brutality not seen since the days of the hated military junta in the 1970s.
The right-wing ND government is now pressing ahead once more
with its plans to privatise university education. This has reawakened the
student movement which has mobilised on a massive scale. Conveniently for the
right-wing, last week there was a missile attack on the US embassy,
which is now being used to justify greater state repression.