Progressive people through the world are bemoaning the Greek crisis. In the U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the Progressive caucus of the Democratic Party have issued statements in defense of the left oriented Greek government and the Greek people while Hillary Clinton and the Republicans have said nothing, the latter attacking Clinton on of her emails as secretary of State and Obama on the proposed nuclear treaty with Iran.
This all reminds me of old definition of word “reactionary”. Those who only are not so much condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past because they learn nothing from history, as philosopher George Santayana wrote famously, but something even worse. Those who enthusiastically embrace the failed policies of the past, for example, a return to the “laissez-faire” capitalism that previously produced depression and war, renewed worship at the altar of “free trade” and response to economic crisis by retrenchment, belt tightening, “austerity,”or the words of depression President Herbert Hoover, the “economy is fundamentally sound” and any government intervention in the market place would only postpone the prosperity waiting “around the corner.”
In the 1980s, Labor Party critics of Margaret Thatcher called this kind of political leadership and policy a commitment to establish “a better yesterday.” In the U.S. Ronald Reagan followed with similar policies and advertising slogans like “its morning in America,” an America straight off Kelloggs Corn Flakes box tops.
` Today the Republicans “better yesterday” is to defeat the Iran Treaty the way they defeated SALT II with Jimmy Carter and intensify fears of Middle East based “terrorism” to win the White House and launch a third wave of Reaganism. The Greek crisis, the continued economic stagnation in the U.S., are for them merely opportunities to lambast the usual scapegoats, “government spending and taxes,” illegal immigrants,” and the decline of family and moral values. The Greek crisis means nothing to them. If anything they would say privately what Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, champion of deregulation and detaxation of the wealthy said to President Herbert Hoover as the depression swept the country “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate….it will purge the rottenness out of the system….people will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people..
Hillary Clinton’s “better yesterday” is, I believe, to follow in the footsteps of her husband, speak in glittering generalities (“we will end welfare as we know it,” “we will have a government that will look like America looks,” “we will provide tax cuts for the middle class, not the millionaires”) and make her way to the White House on the sum total of her constituents hopes and her opponents fears.
She has to convince the core constituents of the Democratic party that she sympathizes with the issues raised by Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the AFL-CIO and all unions that she will protect them from further attacks by the Republican Right and her core constituents in the corporate and financial boardrooms that she will serve, like her husband as their broker in regard to policy, not making any waves against them and looking out for number one, namely, herself and administraton by purusing conservative policies
Neither Clinton nor any likely Republican Presidential candidate will interfere with the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank. At present only Bernie Sanders of the announced candidates is likely to do that, because only Sanders has raised the issue.
But what can be done, after thirty five years of right and center right domination in the U.S. and a global shift to the right.
First we should look at the participants in the crisis. How did Greece get to this state?
First Greece was and is a poor country in South East Europe. Before WWII it was part of the British empire’s “sphere of influence” in the Eastern Mediterranean. Its government was a rightist dictatorship under General Metaxas, who many commentators considered to be a fascist.
But the Metaxas regime was a target of the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, Hitler’s ally who attacked Greece in 1941, suffering defeats and prompting a German invasion and occupation. The Greek Communist party, as was true across Europe and Asia, then played the central role in organizing and leading the anti-Axis resistance.
The resistance movement, the EAM, and its military arm, ELAS was among the strongest in Europe, along with the Communist led partisans in Yugoslavia, the Communist led partisans in Italy, and the Communist led partisans of the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) in France. For this reason, the British army, when it invaded Greece in the fall of 1944, launched a counter-insurgent war against the EAM forces, the only case during the war where an allied army directly attacked an anti-fascist partisan army.
What followed was a Greek civil war was continued long after WWII ended, with Britain establishing and supporting a conservative monarchy filled with reactionaries including Nazi collaborators against a revolutionary resistance comparable in many ways to the national liberation movements which were already in existence in Indochina and would develop in many countries.
By 1947, the British empire was bankrupt, retreating from its colonies through the world and unable to fund the “counter-insurgent war” in Greece. The U.S. stepped in with the Truman Doctrine, which specifically took over the British war in Greece and more generally proclaimed that the U.S. was prepared to fight a global “cold war” against revolutionary forces and their alleged Soviet backers, a policy that Henry Wallace called a “world Monroe doctrine” at the time
Meanwhile, Greece itself was devastated by the increased warfare, although for the U.S. military planners, the “counter insurgent war” in Greece was a great success, a victory against “international Communism,” and a model for further interventions through the world that would not be so successful.
The U.S. also created NAT0 and brought Greece and Turkey, its Truman Doctrine friends, into the alliance, the most powerful military alliance in history. Greece fought on the “UN” side in the Korean War and it’s authoritarian center- right governments continued in power, with limited civil liberties for the labor and the left.
When a popular upsurge developed in Greece in the late 1960s, in part stimulated by the murder and cover-up of a prominent progressive ( Costa Gravas great film,”Z”, is a sort of docudrama about those events) a military Junta regime was established with the support of the Johnson administration in the name of anti-Communism.
Even though Greece clashed with Turkey, its fellow NAT0 member, even though Andreas Papandreou, the son of a former center right Prime Minister(he was at the University of Michigan when I was a graduate student there with a progressive American wife and a supporter of the Great Society policies in the U.S. and internationally) turned against U.S. policy when it supported the Junta and eventually would lead a Social Democratic government in the post Junta period, the political economy of Greece did not change.
It remained a poor country that became part of the European Union that was created in the postwar era, initially hailed as a “United States of Europe,” advanced by Jean Monnet and other European liberals and Social Democrats as an economic union that would prevent war among the major European states and also advance economic development and greater economic equality and security among the people of Europe.
Just like the “war on poverty” that Andreas Papandreou hoped the U.S. was advance in Greece and internationally when he was teaching at the University of Michigan before the Junta seized power in Greece, the European Union did not materialize as an institution that would advance greater equality and security in Europe.
Instead, it functions today in alliance with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and World Trade Organization(established by the U.S. at the end of WWII with hopes by New Dealers they would also help foster economic development that would alleviate poverty and inequality) as institutions by which rich countries tie poor countries to them in a quagmire of debt, forcing the governments of these countries to become financial juntas and “repo men” against their own people or face economic isolation.
For the Greek people and the SYRIZA government, the EU today is essentially a Frankenstein monster demanding that they impose the regressive taxes and draconian pension and social benefit cuts which they have voted against overwhelmingly in the recent Greek national referendum or face harsh punishment.
Similarly, the IMF-World Bank-WTO system is today a Frankenstein monster for the poor countries of Latin America and Africa ((it has long been that, but ait is also a potential Frankenstein monster for its U.S. creators. Few Americans know that IMF economists for years have been warning about the U.S. national debt as a threat to the global economy in terms of IMF definitions of “growth” and “trade” and calling for draconian U.S. budget cuts in in Social Security benefits (the one aspect of a welfare state that exists in the U.S) as a way to “manage” the U.S. debt crisis.
Given the size and strength of the U.S. that is of course politically impossible at the moment. But for how long will it be politically impossible if the EU wins in Greece.
But what can and should be done. First, agitational rhetoric about the betrayal of “democracy” in Greece and name calling against German finance capital as establishing a “Fourth Reich” though the EU does little in itself, especially when it is connected to policies that call for Greece remaining in the EU and praying that “good cops” in France and Italy will enable Greece to plea bargain and get a less onerous settlement.
In Greece itself, what is necessary is a restoration of something like the anti-fascist people’s front alliances of the 1930s in Europe and the U.S—that is a clear alliance between the left oriented SYRIZA government and the Communist Party of Greece to fight against the EU policy and to mobilize the Greek people and its allies to do so. To come forward with policies that the people can accept and suppo
The existence of the sinister neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement in Greece should be a wakeup call to the left and center left forces in Greece. Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has referred to the present situation as comparable to the Versailles Conference, where defeated Germany was saddled with severe war reparations and other economic restrictions.
However, this is an inexact analogy, because Greece is not Germany, a major world power. Nor has Greece done anything to warrant the EU policies except seeing its debts increase under the EU system. Also, I don’t think that the EU would be that concerned over the establishment of a fascist Golden Dawn government in Greece, a “midget Hitler” government, since such governments were relatively easy to buy off by the great powers and threatened their own people, not the great powers.
Internationally, what should Communists particularly and the broad left generally be doing. First, there remain international agencies like the World Federation of Trade Unions which have sided with the Greek people in this crisis. Making people in the U.S. aware of their stand, not necessarily to agree with them, should be a priority.
Then there is the question of the IMF-World Bank-WTO system. That system as it currently exists should be rejected. It represents the most predatory destructive elements of global corporate-finance capitalism. Can alternatives to this system be development?
China for example has moved to develop an infrastructure bank for development which at this moment is a huge positive improvement over the current World Bank, although it is in its early stages. Many have looked to the developing economic relationships between Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-callebd BRIC countries) as a possible alternative to the IMF-World Bank-WT0 system, although so far little that is concrete has emerged from these developments.
Then there is the IMF-World Bank-WT0 system itself. One should note that it was not always what it has been in recent decades. When the Soviet Union and its allies existed as both a deterrent to global imperialism and a center in the world providing aid to developing countries for infrastructure and public sector projects, these institutions did often provided aid to similar projects and did not serve as bill collectors, compelling countries to open their markets, increase their exports of agricultural and mineral raw materials, and reduce the limited social welfare protections that existed in their countries in order to keep afloat.
For Greece and the poor countries of the world, life is like the old U.S. miners song, “you load sixteen tons and what do you get, another day old and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t you call me because I can’t go, I own my soul to the company store.”
In the U.S., the Bernie Sanders campaign and a militant trade union movement offer the best chance of beating the EU-IMF-World Bank-WT0 system the global “company store” that some celebrate, others simply kowtow to as the “new normal” of 21st century capitalism. In Greece and throughout the EU countries, including Germany united fronts of labor and the left are what we all should be working to adv
