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Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Greece and Europe can only do one thing: a Revolution


As the pace of the Greek revolution speeds up, with the first casualties in a burned down bank office and the Greek Parliament besieged daily by the angry people, one may wonder why is people so angry. After all, according to the Imperial media, it's all their fault and the government is doing what it must do to save the nation.


The answer is logically that people is not so naive: they have barely, if at all, benefited from the bad practices that have triggered the crisis (rather the opposite) and they have yet to see any of those white collar criminals being brought to court and their properties seized to help pay the national debt.

The answer is that the whole nation is being held for ransom for the corruption of a handful of oligarchs and, what is maybe even more important, their international accomplices.

That's simply not acceptable.

And obviously this means a regime change in Greece: one that can effectively arrest the criminals and issue the appropriate international capture orders for their accomplices in Washington and Brussels.

One that has no problem in nationalizing the product of past years' robbery when possible.

One that dares to declare bankruptcy if need be.



So Greece is set for a revolutionary regime change and that is most unlikely to be prevented because there is no alternative. The only question is the pace and exact extension of this change.

But what about the rest or EU. EU can live without Greece but can it live without half of EU members? Because the speculators' aim is already set to other Eurozone states. It seems by the signals that the Iberian peninsula will be next but Italy, Ireland and the very UK (out of Eurozone but of great importance by its size) are clearly in the agenda.

The European Union today.
Eurozone in blue, comitted to join the Eurozone in green, special statuses in red, non-EU states using the euro in purple.
Stripes signify those states clearly targetted by the Transnational Capital to be ripped off in a "controlled demolition" (Latvia included because it's already suffering the IMF blackmail).
Original map from Wikipedia (modified).

The goal is to recycle these countries into cheap labor zones for the Euro-Global Capital without these vampires losing a cent in the process. The 'problem' is that the plan may go awry and trigger a pan-European revolutionary process.

Maybe the level of popular organization is not yet high enough but, even if the Transnational Capital achieves its goals it can only be a temporary situation as the rage they will leave behind in some of the more privatized and less well-off states of EU, where people do already struggle to make ends meet, cannot really be contained in the mid run.

While the Greek spending spree may have been going on before the advent of the Global Crisis, in the rest of countries public spending has actually been a reaction, a much needed one, to this disintegration of the Capitalist World Order. Claiming that states have to cut spending in the midst of a general crisis is totally absurd: states must increase their spending to put up for the inability of the so-called "market economy" to generate jobs and salaries, which are after all the only ones that will generate demand for the beleaguered private companies, at least for most of them.

Cutting public acquisitive power is not an option, not even for German capitalists: it's a suicide.

If the European Bank must print more euros, so be it. If the euro has to be devaluated, that is not a problem but in fact good news for European companies, which would see their international competitivity improved greatly by such measure.

But EU institutions are not working for the good of the European common citizen (or should I say denizen?), EU institutions are only working for the good of some privileged elites and they don't care at all about the common European, not even about the common European small company. Only huge multinationals matter for them.

This situation obviously demands a regime change at EU level. A regime change that redefines EU as a social federation and not as a capitalist one, a regime change that establishes EU finally as a representative democracy and not a mere bureaucracy at the service of the transnational mafias.

It may take some time but it will be done. The only alternative is for EU to disintegrate completely and its various states (or fragments of states in some cases, as Spain for example is not going to survive this one in a piece, nor will the UK) let to fend off alone in the vast ocean full of sharks. That's not a realistic or at least desirable goal and it's something that goes against the common feeling of nowadays Europeans, for which a European union, this or another better one, is a default.

So the only alternative is pan-European revolution.

Let's do it, do you have a better plan for today, my dear unemployed bored and desperate reader?

_________

Note: you can read the declaration of a colleague of the dead bank workers blaming the deaths on the bank owners at Occupied London (in English) and Indymedia (original in Greek). Triggered by this tragic incident, the Greek bank workers are going to strike tomorrow even if the corporative guild forbids them to do so.



2 comments:

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

I'm deeply skeptical that monetary policy (i.e. the Euro) has much to do with the Greek public finance crisis. It rules out a solution (hyper-inflation) that would probably have done more harm than good, but that is about it.

This isn't to say that there is no problem, or that it doesn't involve inter-regional capitalist exploitation. But, if anything that Euro is simply preventing the more fundamental issues from being obscured.

Maju said...

You're maybe right that state-driven inflation (not necessarily hyper-inflation) may be harmful but in other cases it has proven of some use, specially because it lowers all costs internally allowing also for the recovery or a competitive advantage in the global markets: more exports, less imports.

In fact that's partly the secret of Chinese success: keeping the yuan artificially "weak" to keep the economy healthy.

Instead in Europe, the model is the opposite: keep the euro too strong, so raw and "simple" imports are cheap, so German industries can build cheap and "export" inside EU mostly (because the final product is not that competitive in the global markets anyhow).

But that means that the German industrials (and alike) need to keep the purchasing power of other Europeans high and this crisis highlights that such thing is not possible in a Capitalist context. Devaluating the euro to about dollar parity (i.e. up to -25%) would be a most reasonable move but this is hindered by the lack of a pan-EU government that thinks in terms of Europe and not just Germany, Greece, UK, Spain, etc. So there is a pan-EU government that thinks in terms that may have to do with German or French interests and, of course, with corporative ones, but not in terms of what's the best interest of Europeans as a set.

And that's bad. We should never have implemented single currency without single democratic government, without a true federation (with or without the UK - that's not really relevant).