From the very start of the Greek crisis, the theory of this black Goebbels-type front has been of the following rationale: Through cut in salaries and pensions as well as overtaxation imposed by the memorandum the purchasing power of the masses goes down, and thus domestic trade and domestic production of consumer goods drops too. As a result, the unemployment rises, so consumption falls even more, so production drops even more as well as does the taxable material. This way both unemployment and debt rise in the extreme, production is crushed until complete disaster and unsustainable bankruptcy are brought about. On the contrary, they claim that the growth would also come without salary curtailments and without overtaxation upon consumption and with the simultaneous financing of investment, which Samaras and Kouvelis interprete as additional “development” financing by the EU and Tsipras as payments suspension (which is the open declaration of bankruptcy and redistribution of the produced wealth).
But while our “Keynesian” economists do condemn curtailments in salaries and pensions and overtaxation so that development is assisted and new investments are found, they persistently sabotage these investments. Tsipras is a well-known saboteur and there is no reason for our dealing with him3. Samaras and Kouvelis, much more devious, have supported the sabotage of tens of billions’ worth investments that Papandreou’s government cancelled by decisions at all levels in the last two years: land-planning, ESPA investment financing program, state industry, private industry, agriculture, transports, tourism, research etc.
These gentlemen keep talking about investments and development but conceal the fact that, despite the more and more low salaries, domestic industrial production, which should have this way become cheaper, hasn’t displaced imports and hasn’t caused a rise in exports. In 2008 exports amounted to 19,8 billions and in 2010, not only did they refrain from raising, despite curtailments in the salary cost, but dropped towards the 17,08 billions. Besides, but for the vast drop in the purchasing power of the population, imports remained high, so trade deficit, which amounted to 44 billions in 2008 remained as high as 28,27 billions in 2010. At the same time, and this is typical, both native and foreign investments – which always seek countries that go bankrupt, when they produce exportable goods, as it is there that wages are crashed – are in fact non-existent, as they are practically forbidden. This production vacuum which keeps today the country indebted is the same that has brought about bankruptcy.
That’s why, despite salaries of starvation and vast unemployment, the country keeps running into debt so as to buy products of 28,27 billions worth in order to survive. This alone refutes the theory that bankruptcy was caused by the law domestic consumption level and the subsequent low demand of industrial goods, as the economists of the regime claim. The fiscal deficit and thus bankruptcy are been caused by the CAB (Current Account Balance) deficit, in the final analysis by the deficit in domestic production.
It is the excessively negative CAB that has been raising public deficit and has been amassing for decades public debts that along with the interests equal to the total public debt. So, the fiscal deficit has been grown for years not because of the state income through taxation which wasn’t high enough or because of the expenses for public servants salaries, for unemployment pays and for insurance funds were too high, but because we lacked industry in the most broad meaning of the term. One may understand this empirically, too. When an individual along with the tax-collector steal the state, the stolen money goes either to bank accounts, or to the thief’s personal consumption, or goes abroad. In China, a country as much corrupted as is Greece, the stolen money is transformed in a large degree to productive capital. In Greece, where the bank deposits become productive capital to a very low percentage, everything is been transformed mainly into individual consumption except for the bank accounts in foreign countries that become productive capital of those countries. The same thing happens with the public servants, the unemployed and the pensioners. Their money becomes pure individual consumption. Finally, the whole country and basically the state runs into debt, because the individual consumption goes to a large degree to imports of industrial products as we lack industry. It’s not because of stealing or being lazy that we are going bankrupt. We’re running bankrupt because we demolish our factories and live by the factories of other countries. If factories were allowed to exist the Greek and migrant workers, who are the most hard-working ones in the EU and work in the backward small-scale production, could feed a double number of parasites, thiefs and lazy people than they’ve been doing so far. This would bring about unendurable inequality and perhaps could bring revolution but not bankruptcy. That’s why the more corrupt China doesn’t go bankrupt but just the opposite.
The great fraud of Samaras, Tsipras, Kouvelis, the PASOK “leftists” and their economists has been the following: They conceal, and never talk about, the real deep and unquestionable to every serious bourgeois economist abroad – either liberal or Keynesian – cause of the Greek bankruptcy, which was the huge deficient relation of our country with abroad. Our difference with those Western economists is that they attribute the deficit to the high salary expenses of the private sector and of the state, that is, basically to the over-consumption of the population, while we attribute it politically to the sabotage in production or economically to the chronic underproduction. By that we mean the 30 years long political-economic war, at times also military (assassinations of the “17N” terrorist group, many forms of the so called mass political violence against ministries, politicians etc, big fires of forests, buildings and especially factories). The continuous political annihilations of the pro-western politicians through selective economic “scandals”, waged by the greek agents of the Russian social- imperialism, are also part of this war.
Contrary to those serious bourgeois economists that don’t know greek politics, the pro-Russian4 economists who know politics but not economics do the following: So as to prove that the western lenders are to blame for the Greek bankruptcy they consider the country as if it doesn’t participate in the international market, as if it turns in on itself and as if the salaried employees only consume the products they themselves produce rather than the imported ones. In this fictitious isolated economy of theirs, just as the salaries went forcefully down because of the lenders memoranda, the purchasing power of the salaried would also go down, and so their consumption would fall. As demand would drop this way, so would production, trade, and therefore the laborers would be fired while through raising taxation all those would drop even the more so, leading to a new turnover with new firings, new underconsumption, new drop in production, until total starvation and the death for the country.
But this is only a vulgar fairy-tale, that is completely detached from reality, because a) all countries in modern capitalism are open to the outside world rather than being isolated and left to starve when some foreign countries-lenders constantly cut the salaries of their workers. At that in such countries no lender arrives to cut the salaries due to a debt, simply because they cannot be indebted as they have no transactions with abroad. Especially Greece is not at all such an isolated country as, on the contrary, it is a model one of vital foreign productive dependence. And for that, if the EU stopped lending us money we would suffer a great ravage and would undergo a Somalia-type rather than a China-type hunger. And of course this hunger would have nothing common with the one in Argentine, which had a trade surplus when it went bankrupt mainly due to its delicious meat that could feed the Argentine people for years even under a state of a boycott. b) because nowhere has ever happened that the laborers salaries go down without the capitalists increasing their personal consumption, or turning their bigger profits due to fall of the wages into accumulation of more modern means of production, and finally not exporting more intensly than before the cheaper products they could now produce since the wages have gone down, that is without the given country finding its way out of the debt crisis due to this cut in salaries. What happens with the large scale reduction of salaries in an overindebted country is not bankruptcy but social imbalance, over-exploitation and over-accumulation of capital. The over-indebted country could die by a forceful reduction in salaries only if the lenders demanded that the borrowed money be paid back very soon. But neither the IMF has done this during the last 15 years after the protest of the Third world countries, nor has the EU today in the greek case. That’s why the Greek debt has increased after the actual bankruptcy of our country. That is the saboteurs continued to do their job and so again the country borrowed a lot of money for imports, because despite its greater poverty it kept consuming more than the lesser it could produce.
In fact, the lenders have done in our country, and at that in a much more favorable way, what they do to all countries with big trade deficits when they go bankrupt because of those deficits. They curtail the salaries through internal devaluation or through currency devaluation so as to make their products cheaper and so that their capitalists invest in bigger and more modern mechanical equipment. This is the typical “starvation of the laborers in favor of the export capital” method so that someday the trade deficit is brought to zero. We are here reffering to the export capital in the wider sense, including the one that makes products in the overindebted country that replace other imported products. This is the method of IMF, the EU and other international lenders. Finally, this method becomes effective after imposing big burdens to the peoples that become poorer so that the exporters and other potent capitalists of the given country become stronger. Of course it becomes relatively effective within capitalism because a new bigger debt crisis will soon explode in another country or group of countries where the trade deficit will have been increased due to, among other factors, the strong competitive character of those having just gone out of bankruptcy. But in Greece this method hasn’t become effective neither temporarily nor in the long run for the simple reason that apart from the laborers and the unemployed that have become poorer according to this method, an overwhelmingly great bulk of the old productive capital has been reduced towards bankruptcy as well, while every new one has been prevented from being productively invested.
It is above all the sabotage in production that makes salaries go down and much less the “troika”
The liberal economists in the EU and partly in our country quite understand, as we have stated, that it’s virtually the current account deficit that heads to the big fiscal deficit and finally to the vast public debt. However, they facilitate the saboteurs covering up their sabotage when they find out that this current account deficit is, to a large degree, rooted in salaries. Of course they don’t view salaries as the mere cause of the deficit. They view as the main cause what they use to call “structural problems of the Greek economy”, in which they also include salaries. But structural problems for them have mainly to do with a secondary part of the production sabotage, such as the closed professions that hinder the concentration and centralization of capital, or the bureaucratic corruption and waste that are the most direct forms of the sabotage etc.
But in the long run, the EU doesn’t even actually persist on those non-salary “restructuring changes” so as not to clash with the Greek pro-Russian parties5, which threaten EU with an open bankruptcy and blasting of the Euro if they come under hard pressure by it. So, it almost exclusively takes it out on the salaried workers and the productive capital through over taxation (in a first phase). And as the greek people see and feel that the wages have in fact plunged, they become more and more enraged with the EU and go over to the pro-Russian parties of the so called “left” and fascist right that celebrate this coward and at the same time over-interventionist European policy.
But let’s return to the economists of SYN and Tsipras and say that, with such low salaries the domestic production should have started replacing imports and even the more so raising exports. But this hasn’t happened because, quite simply, all non-Eastern investments6 in our country have been politically forbidden, that is the laborers are not allowed by the state to enter into productive relation with the means of production, that is they aren’t allowed to earn wages, and the non-Eastern capitalists aren’t allowed to gain profit. The shortage of productive capital and the abundance of laborers automatically mean a great fall in wages. And this is exactly what has been happening during the last two years. By wanting to cut dow the established minimum salary “troika” could only facilitate the pro-Russian pseudo-leftists, who are champions in the production sabotage through which they have inflated the reserve army of labor and thus objectively made the wages go down. At that, they have augmented this army and further reduced the salaries through the massive import of migrant proletariat in combination with the undeclared labor, which they have everywhere promoted supposedly for the sake of “anti-racist and anti-xenophobic struggle”, in the purpose of strengthening both racism and xenophobia, and also pro-fascist and pronazi sympathies among young workers. (fascist and neonazis are strongly pro-Russian) Even at that, the regime preserved the minimum established salary in the private sector not out of pro-labor sentiments but only to sustain the relatively higher cost in the somewhat bigger enterprises that apply some kind of proper account keeping and labor law, contrary to the medium-small enterprises, and thus the capital concentration and centralization to be relatively delayed which is another means of production political sabotage. It is quite typical that the pro-Russian top strata of the regime, led by the “class-conscious” pseudo-left, doesn’t scruple to bring even lower the already miserable undeclared wages and the undeclared overtime in the small-medium enterprise where the great bulk of the salaried is being employed. They do so because they are not politically afraid of the extension of the small-medium enterprise, as the employers are politically very weak there and the proletariat is completely unorganized and politically totally absent.
So the explanation for the intensely shrunk production doesn’t lay in under-consumption of the salaried, as argue the economists of the dirty hard core of the regime. It lays in the ongoing sabotage of productive capital, that is in the sabotage of the productive capacity of society rather than in the reduction of its purchasing power through the austerity measures imposed by the EU. And this is obvious at the core of the fiscal deficit and debt, which remains, despite the overall actual fall of the salaries, the ongoing vast current account deficit of our country.
The European deadlock before the pro-Russian provocateurs and its historical basis
That’s the reason why the greek foreign debt keeps raising instead of dropping, unlike what everyone abroad expected. That’s why Samaras, Papariga7 and Tsipras have been challenging all prime ministers of the EU and the top Western economists since last year, and predicted that the memorandum as well as the other programs would definitely fail and that the country would go bankrupt if they cut down on salaries or unless they gave it more money. They have of course made things happen according to their own predictions, that is, they became murderers so as to prove that they are prophets, having rightly predicted that their victim would die. In other words, while the Germans transfused blood into the patient in the morning, after compeling him to follow a strict regimen according to the well-known capitalist recipe for all the bankrupt countries, our local prophets played the role of the night-shift nurse that hypnotized it and bled it at sleep. Then they blamed Merkel of killing her patient through this regimen. For the time being the whole world and unfortunately the Greek patient has seen the regimen but nearly nobody has yet seen the draining. The problem is that while the Western lenders have been surprised at Greece, they keep up following the same “recipe”: transfusion against a more and more strict regimen, that is they carry on lending the country but on the condition that the salaries be curtailed. However, in the case of sabotage, the reduction in salaries accelerates the result that the murderer has pursued. By now, by curtailing salaries, the EU and the IMF have hastened the crime of the Greek saboteurs and the worst is that they have also assumed the political responsibility for it. At that, as Germany cannot in any way deal with the bankruptcy blackmail of the Greek regime and as it shudders at the prospect of an overall crisis of the Euro, it has proposed the economic governing of Greece by the EZ, so it was led to political panic as it did away with the basis of democratic state voluntarism upon which the whole European building relies. Of course, everyone in the EU laughed at Germany, which is already isolated as everyone has been asking that Germany pays and saves Greece and the Euro. This enabled the “night-shift murderer” (the greek governing system) to shout for democratic rights while everyone stood in support of it and against the doctor that recommended the transfusion and strict regimen.
That’s why we insist, that under these circumstances it’s only the Greek people that can wage the battle against the saboteurs. That’s why the only thing the EU can and should do is to give them this chance without reducing them to utter poverty, by pursuing the consensus withdrawal of Greece from the EZ and by providing it with a quite big and cheap loan, so that it be well equipped to wage the battle against bankruptcy on its own without dragging the whole EZ down.
The big weakness of the EU and the whole Western bourgeoisie in dealing with the Greek problem is actually rooted in the economic and ideologic deadlocks of the Western monopolistic capital that prevent it from clashing with the Eastern Russo-Chinese neonazi social-imperialistic block, with which it so closely cooperates in the barbarous exploitation of the laborers in both the East and the West. On ideological grounds, this is translated into weakness of the today decadent and old Western monopolistic bourgeoisie in studying the everywhere prevailing state-monopolistic economy and basically the imperialistic policy that corresponds to this economy. So, Europe this old woman theoretically lives within the fictitious, abstract and quite hypocritical world of the old-time free competition of her youth. So she hasn’t noticed and couldn’t imagine that there might be prime ministers and opposition leaders that passionately want to destroy the great part of the productive capital of their own country because this might be to the advantage of another country in which the state-monopolistic capitalism has reached its most concentrated level. She cannot imagine that the decent gentlemen who govern the phenomenically insignificant Greece and who have studied Keynes and Friedman at the American universities are agents of a country, Putin’s Russia, that takes delight in thinking and acting with the political economy of the looter, as is today this red-grey mixture of national-socialism and reversed marxism. And all these happen because the European liberal monopolistic capital can’t imagine, out of its liberal indolence, that apart from the notion of the ridiculous conspiracies it detests, there are also real conspiracies. These are made possible grace to the economic, military, and finally political over-concentration of power of the state-monopolistic capital that is obliged to seek for a new forceful re-distribution of the world so that it could from a stronger position conquest the global hegemony at grounds of its state-monopolistic economy per se.
There is a certain advantage in this inborn weakness of the Western monopolistic imperialists. This will all the more allow to the real marxists, that is the devoted followers of the theory of the revolutionary proletariat, to be the ones who will see quite clearly and resolutely fight the chief enemy of the given phase: social-imperialism. So, time will come again when the great revolutionary struggle- that was severed during the 1960s-80s, when the new type bourgeoisie that sprung from the heart of the politically all-mighty working class came to power first in the USSR and later in China and crushed the revolutionary proletariat in the whole globe- will resume from better positions. The new type bourgeoisie did this not only for its own sake but also for the sake of and with the devout support of the Western liberal imperialists.
Now, the Western imperialists are paying for and will pay more for their huge historical crime, which was to march along with the new Hitlers against Stalin and Mao. So, they bear a great responsibility for the formation of the Chinese and Russian neonazi monsters. Specifically, they will pay a lot for the fact that the latter has given them to swallow a subjugated and all-desperate Greece that is now exploding in their EU stomach. In here, they pay in particular for having delivered their class enemy N. Zachariadis (the secretary of the old revolutionary KKE, the Communist Party of Greece) to his Russian brezhnevists executioners after he himself had firstly exposed them as traitors before the whole world. So, instead of having a European democratic and patriotic proletariat in Greece, they have to face a horde of the most disgraceful lumpen agents of the new czars pretending to be the representatives of labor. But Greece is neither China nor Russia, the neonazi leaders of which could pretend to be nationalists. Those pretending to be nationalists here will be easily exposed as agents of Russia and China, as the latters will be more and more perceived as the dominant beneficiaries out of this great national disaster we’ve all started living. And the rage against them will be unanimous.
FOOTNOTES
We call saboteurs the dominant political factions within the two major parties (PASOK-governing party and New Democracy- Major opposition party until November 2011 when coalition government was formed) and especially the leaderships of the two so called left parties (“C”PG and SYN -Coalition of the left), the party “Democratic left” led by former cadre of SYN, F. Kouvelis and the crypto-fascist anti-Semitic party LAOS. We call all of the above saboteurs because they have systematically hindered industrial development with a series of methods, such as introducing legislation that forbids the use of land for industrial productions, thousands of court decisions and administrative acts against every big scale investment in every sphere of production supposedly in the name of the people’s movements for the protection of the environment, or using the pretext of the need for archaeological researches, or the so called bureaucratic impediments, or the “people’s struggle” against monopolies etc. These are pretexts to kill every greek or western investment but on the contrary all Russian and Chinese investments and also the investments of pro-Russian oligarchs never face problems to invest.
Antonis Samaras is the leader of “New Democracy”, Alexis Tsipras is the leader of SYN and Fotis Kouvelis is the leader of “Democratic Left”.
It is well known in Greece that Tsipras and his party (SYN) initiate various “movements” against investments supposedly on environmental reasons and resort to courts asking for their cancellation. There is a high court of the Administration named Council of State that almost always accepts every anti-investment demand of SYN and CPG.
4-5. When we refer to pro-Russians and pro-Russian parties we mean the political forces and parties that want Greece to become subservient to Russia and China, promoting a strategic alliance with the Russian-Chinese axis against “dependency from the monopolies of EU and USA”. We consider as pro-Russian parties the CPG, SYN, the “Democratic Left” and LAOS, and pro-Russian forces the small but leading political factions within the two major parties PASOK and ND, that is, the saboteurs. Recently, the leader of ND since November 2009, A. Samaras, has tightened relations with “United Russia” of Putin.
6. When we refer to non-Eastern investments we mean investments that are not made by the monopolies of the Russian-Chinese axis or its allies (Qatar).
7. Aleka Papariga is the leader of “C”PG.