Unite the struggles – Fight all across Europe! (June 2010)

Common declaration of
Organization of Internationlists Communists (Greece)
Revolutionare Sozialistische Organisation (Austria, Germany, Switzerland)

To repel the attack on jobs, salaries, pensions, living standards

To bail out workers and people – not the capitalists!

All across Europe, the working class, the youth and the people are faced with a huge, barbarous attack on their most vital gains and rights:

Plant closures, downsizing, massive layoffs and unemployment.
Wage cuts, starting from the public and expanding to the private sector.
Total dismantling of any job security, with precarious and “flexible” work conditions expanding rapidly to become the everyday rule.
Ripping off public pension and health systems.

But this is only the beginning… there is still much worse to come! The 750 billion euro pact is aimed to nothing else but saving -at public expenses!- the big multinationals, banks and speculators. The working class, the people and the youth are once again called to pay for the capitalist’s salvation, with the European Commission and the IMF measures being imposed in one country after the other. First it was Greece, now it is France, Spain and Portugal – and soon Germany, UK and others will follow.

This is the agenda of the European governments and ruling parties: save the capitalists and its bankrupt system, by dismantling all the historical gains of the working class in Europe, by dragging us into an unprecedented unemployment, poverty and misery.

Capitalism’s Deepest Crisis

It’s a shameful lie that the crisis broke out because of the “golden boys exaggerations” and “unregulated markets”. After all, was it not the media and official politicians who kept on and on cheering out for the “free market”, only some months ago?

The root of the problems lies in the logic of profit, in the private ownership of the means of production, in the capitalist system itself. This is why the attacks on the working class will be merciless. This is why the fight to defend our rights is one of life and death.

After the international crisis broke out in summer 2007, all bourgeois governments started a crusade to save the trickling credit and bank sector, which was threatening to drag the global economy in the abyss. This huge bailout, however, meant trillions of public money injected to the big banks and enterprises, as well as the speculators, the same ones who seemingly everybody was denouncing. Now that this “rescue pacts” are weighing heavily on the public budgets and debts, once again they are asking the workers and the youth to pay for them. Here is our answer: We do not owe you, you owe us! We won’t pay for your crisis!

Enough with the parties of the bosses – Down with the EU of the capitalists

In perfect partnership with Merkel, Sarcozy and Cameron, the “socialist” leader of the IMF Dominique-Straus-Kahn is waging the attacks against our gains and rights, while his political mates like Papandreou, Zapatero and Socrates are fully engaged in implementing this barbarous agenda.

There is nothing to hope for in the policies of these leaders, of the big bourgeois parties, either “socialist” or traditional right. During the last decades, it was them who promoted all the neoliberal, anti-working class measures, in the name of the Maastrict accords, the Stability Pact, the Lisbon Agenda and the directives like Bolkenstein, Bologna. It was them to set up the terrible “Fortress Europe”, with the Schengen system, the racist detention camps for refugees and “anti-terror” legislations one after the other, dismantling civil liberties. It is them who are fully engaged in the war of Afghanistan, who supported the massacring of the Palestinian people, proving once again their imperialist threat against peace and the peoples of the whole world.

There can be no illusion neither on them nor in the EU itself. The EU, the ECB and the European Commission are the main apparatuses to coordinate and impose the bosses’ attacks against the working class in Europe. They can not become neither “more democratic” nor “more social”. All the more as the new measure pacts are being imposed, demanding the control of the national budgets by the Commission and imposing financial and political penalties. There is no “democracy”, no popular will expression in the EU: who elected, who mandated Triche, Juncker and the likes, the ECB and the European Commission? Certainly it was not us, but the elite of the European capital!

We are all Greek workers!

The heroic struggle of the workers, the popular masses and the youth in Greece must become a point of reference to organize and coordinate the struggle all across Europe. International solidarity is more than vital to the Greek people, against the IMF-EU measures crudely dictated upon them. Greece is a “crash test” crucial for all European workers, as the EU, the IMF and the big capitalists are counting on first breaking the backbone of the greek movement before getting down with their attacks in other countries, too.

We must have no illusion of the role of the trade union bureaucrats and of the reformist left parties. They are responsible for numerous setbacks of the movement, for laying down the arms without a fight in front of a whole series of neoliberal attacks. For participating in governments -or virtually supporting them- dismantling workers’ and social rights, like in France, Italy and elsewhere. It is them who have tried to feed us with illusion on the “popular” and “democratic” nature of the EU. It is them who ravaged the socialist perspective, by deliberately assimilating it to either their socialdemocratic or Stalinist crimes and treasuries.

There is not a single moment to waste. All across Europe, we must raise the unity, the common voice of the workers and the oppressed: Down with the barbarous pacts! Down with the governments and parties supporting and implementing them!

We must start prepare and organize for hard class struggle, occupating workplaces and university faculties, building the movement “in the rank and file”, with general assemblies and comities everywhere, with self-defense structures against state repression. This is the only way we can really show our strength. Following the mobilization in Greece, Porugal and other countries, it is necessary to organize common campaigns and days of actions, putting forward the goal: FORWARD FOR A GENERAL STRIKE ALL ACROSS EUROPE NOW!

In this context, we must raise the demand for an Emergency Social Program, to save ourselves from the ravages of the capitalist crisis:

• For a minimum pan-european guaranteed salary.
• Tax the capitalists, no to mass taxes.
• For public pension and health system, for public services for everybody.
• Ban of layoffs! Expropriation of companies which dismiss workers or evade taxes!
• 35 hour working week now! Ban of all precarious and “flexible” work!
• Cancel the public debt!
• Stop all privatization – Nationalize all banks and central sectors of the economy, under workers’ control.

All media and politicians will say these demands are not compatible with the “free market” mandates… They are not indeed! To save ourselves from the capitalist crisis, we must raise our struggles to the level of overthrowing capitalism, paving the way for another society, radical, democratic, socialist, all across Europe. We will not be saved country by country, but by setting the goal for a united socialist Europe, which will have nothing in common with the disgusting regimes of “existing socialism”, but will be based on workers’ democracy and self-management, on democratic rights and civil liberties much more developed than any bourgeois pseudo-“democracy”.

June 2010