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The argument over the banks - Communist Party of Greece
The governmental majority in Greece voted through a multi-pronged draft law that affects dozens of professions and workers’ gains. The draft law is deeply anti-people, the savage measures included in it have a class character as was stressed in the plenum by the parliamentary representative of the KKE, Nikos Karathanasopoulos: “It is capitalism itself, naked, without decorations, which has as its result the concentration of the wealth produced in the hands of a small group of capitalists and leads the direct producers of the wealth to poverty and destitution.”
The draft law is comprised of three chapters. The first includes a serious of reforms which legalize work without social security cover, abolish collective bargaining agreements, for example for the teachers in private schools and the seamen, the benefits that increase the minimum wage, reduces the employer contributions to the social-security funds, drastically reduces the lump sum received on retirement, as well as the auxiliary pensions etc. The second includes measures that will have dramatic consequences at the expense of the self-employed, violently driving them out of the market to the benefit of the monopoly groups. The third reinforces the banks. This concerns the recapitalization of the banks, which is the strategic framework for the recovery of the capitalist economy of Greece. It is an issue that has become the focus of the confrontation of SYRIZA with the coalition government of ND-PASOK.
SYRIZA placed enormous emphasis on this issue, more so than on the other restructurings. It spoke of a crime, using the example of the USA and Spain, where the recapitalization was carried out by the public sector. It also spoke about the cession of the banks to speculative funds (in reality foreign funds that have placed capital in banks, buying shares, while they are also interested in buying loans that are “in the red”). They claim that the banks under public control will have a pro-people role, supporting the recovery of the economy. The government responded by saying that SYRIZA does not want the recapitalization and is impeding the provision of loans to investments and blocks development.
SYRIZA’s rationale regarding banks in favour of the people can only be taken for a joke. The banks, regardless of whether they are public or private, are not charitable institutions, they are the core of the capitalist economy. They concentrate capital in order to loan money to the capitalist businesses, thus making a profit. Just as they also make a profit by loaning to the working class and popular strata. At the same time the banks themselves participate in business activity, in the monopoly groups, in investments. Indeed, SYRIZA is claiming that it has a magic wand that can transform a purely speculative function into a pro-people one.
It is a fact that capitalist development without the banks can not exist. It is no accident that the bourgeois media in the previous period, SEV (Hellenic Federation of Enterprises), the Federation of Export Businesses, the association of small and medium businesses etc. insisted on the need for the “crash test” of the banks to happen quickly, a prerequisite for their recapitalization, so that they can start providing loans for investments. This is of course combined with making arrangements for “in the red” loans, the large part of which are loans which had been taken by the big businesses.
SYRIZA and the government are hurrying for capitalist development. And both of them seek to reinforce the business groups. SYRIZA assesses that the government is selling at a loss, strengthening the bankers with state money, when it could, having the banks under public control, fund the capitalist businesses. The government considers that the banks must be funded in order to contribute directly to these investments. The position of SYRIZA is identified to a significant extent with that of SEV. This hostility between the “bankers” and “industrialists” exists during the whole crisis period.
The argument over the banks is an argument over which sections of private capital are placed in the banks, which business groups will receive loans, over what sectors of the economy will receive investments. This confrontation is alien to the interests of the working class and people, as both the recipes strengthen capital at the expense of the working class-people’s rights. The workers must, however, be concerned with freeing themselves as quickly as possible from the shackles of capital and the EU, from the various recipes and formulas of the capitalist development path. They can contribute significantly to this direction by voting for and decisively strengthening the KKE in the forthcoming elections.
I am wondering when, instead of writing these polemics, the KKE actually starts to do something about these "new and improved" capitalist attacks on the working class.
But for the KKE working class liberation is of course a result of such revolutionary tactics as....voting in a bourgeois parliamentary system:
Proletarians of all countries...unite...eh...VOTE!!! Wait...what??
voting
voting
voting
voting
As of three days ago:
Elections to the European Parliament:
SYRIZA 26.5%
New Democracy gets 25.1%
To Potami 14.2% (new party since February)
Golden Dawn 7.9%
ELIA / PASOK 5.9%
KKE 5.2%
IG 3.6%
DIMAR 2.9%
OTHER 8%
Although other polls are also available...which show a slightly less unfavorable position of irrelevance for the KKE:
6th April: http://metapolls.net/2014/04/06/gree.../#.U0MepPmSwy4
4th of April: http://metapolls.net/2014/04/04/gree.../#.U0MfBfmSwy5
That said...for the Parliamentary elections the social democrats of the KKE gained 3% support from December to January. And polls predict the following outcome:
SYRIZA 29.2%
New Democracy getting 28.5%
Golden Dawn 9.7%
KKE 8.7%
PASOK 6.4%
IG 5.9%
DIMAR 4.7%
Last edited by PhoenixAsh; 7th April 2014 at 21:57.
