Greece
Under the path of the New World Order
"Left-wingers", liberals and neo-liberals
of every shade, are proposing a "humanist"-moralist approach to the
issue of illegal immigration. This would perhaps be an interesting proposition,
if the goal of socialism were to offer consolation to the dwellers of the
valley of tears, promising heaven as a reward for their stoic patience. But
this is the purpose of the Christian religion. The purpose of socialism is
obviously to teach the poor, not to endure the miseries of life, but to change
it. For this, they need to know the causes and the nature of social problems,
like that of illegal immigration. Moralist approaches lead to contradictions
and dead ends, and, as everybody knows, are often used as an alibi for the
greatest crimes. It is in the name of moral principles and humanitarianism that
the peoples of Iraq and Yugoslavia are being slaughtered, while NATO has turned
these principles into an official alibi for its new strategy. For those
reasons, we must be wary of moralists. In dealing with them, we should - to say
the least - hold on tightly to our wallet.
Illegal immigration is not an exclusively Greek
phenomenon. Yet Greece has received an enormous number of illegal immigrants,
out of any proportion with its size and resources. This fact is not unrelated
to the infamous Schengen agreement, which defines Greece as a country
responsible for the initial reception of refugees - a door open for the whole
of Europe. As a result, we have a dramatic rise of unemployment, and the
modification of its nature. It is no longer conjunctural. It has become
synonymous with the social marginalisation of the Greek worker. The destruction
of his social conquests and rights. Of course the government and some of its
fervent "enemies" are denying all this. But working people know very
well what is happening, as they are the ones called upon to pay the bill.
Our fathers of the nation, first of all, maintain
that illegal immigration has no significant impact on employment. Foreigners
are employed in menial and dirty jobs that the well-nourished Greek worker
would not deign to do. We read in the press recently that Spanish workers have
equally aristocratic inclinations. That's why "their" government
decided to bring within the next few years one million Romanians and Moroccans,
to do the jobs that the locals ostensibly snub. It is to be noted that Spain
has now officially more than 20% unemployment.
Here is what a father of the nation, a member of the
great "anti-racist" family, has to say:
"All these conditions have created, as you have
seen in the poll, in a great section of the population, the impression that
foreigners are the cause of all the tribulations and disasters. This is perhaps
the easy solution. We, who are always the same, are never at fault. It is
always the others who are responsible. The others - who ? The foreigners:
dark-skinned, black-skinned, yellow-skinned, sometimes even fair-skinned -
because of Germany. But the truth is usually different. The truth is that
foreigners don't steal the jobs of our kids, instead they do the jobs that we
don't deign to do, because we consider them to be below our social standing.
Painters, garbage-collectors, housemaids, road construction workers, gardeners,
agricultural workers."
Thus spake Yakoumatos, an MP of the New Democracy
party, speaking in a meeting under the subject "racism and xenophobia -
initiatives for the legalisation of foreign workers", organized by the
PASOK-controlled Athens Labour Council. A representative case of a political
con-man - "anti-racist". He impulsively admits his class racism - the
only racism that really exists. The honest jobs, that allow the drones of his
clan the means to live in luxury, he considers below human dignity!
Following close, the groups of extra-parliamentary
"left" - this substitute of western social-democracy, adapted to
Greek conditions. They do nothing more than to serve the official sophistries,
reheated. In one of the journals of this political milieu, we read:
"Most of the jobs occupied nowadays by
foreigners, have been abandoned by Greek workers for years. Housemaids,
gardeners, scrubwomen, nurses for the elderly ... land workers and shepherds,
the rest in hard menial jobs, construction, quarries, and sweatshops"
All these unrewarding and heavy jobs have been abandoned
by Greek workers "for years"! It seems we didn't even produce stones.
We used to import them!...
Further down, the columnist adds in petulant tone:
"Let all those ridiculous racists tell us ...
the thousands of Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Russian women that are in the hands
of ruthless procurers, whose job are they taking? (newspaper "Ergatiki
Exousia" ["workers' power"]).
Is it true that the indigenous worker is snobby,
that he considers some jobs to be below his dignity, or is there some other (well-known)
secret? The chairman of the parliament, Apostolos Kaklamanis, spoke at least
with more squareness to the journalist Yiannis Diakogiannis: "Cheap
labour, not only for farm work, but also for the industry and the construction
sector, has often been the ulterior unavowed aim".
A former cadre and minister of New Democracy,
industrialist well known for his cynicism, Stefanos Manos is even more precise:
"immigrants are god's blessing, we need them because they work with one
third of a Greek worker's wages, because they cannot go on strike, they cannot
form unions, they can do nothing".
So the foreigner is not for some
"undignified" jobs, he is for every job, as long as he does it with
one third of the wage, with no other rights, with the head bowed.
A natural law?
Another fairy tale widely circulated, presents the
mass influx of illegal immigrants as a physical law: Wars and famines create
inevitable waves of "economic refugees", that the state is unable to
contain. It does its best. It organizes bodies of border guards, it buys
speedboats, trains "Rambos" - all without result. Thus, since we
can't prevent the phenomenon, we have to live with it.
It is of course a fact that there is misery in the
world and that wars take place. But humanity has seen much worse, without these
results. If capitalism didn't use the disasters it produces as an alibi for its
policies, if the state did indeed want to stop illegal immigration, there are
more simple, economic, civilized and effective ways to do it. Even the
gentlemen of the extraparliamentary "left" can realize that the
problem could easily be solved if the government prohibited employers to employ
persons who are not legally in the country. A few heavy fines would discourage
potential violators. There is no need for police dogs, live fences or machine
guns. But the government doesn't want. It too is animated by
"humanitarian" feelings...
Many are those who feign ignorance, but in fact
everyone knows that foreigners are here not in spite of the authorities, but
with their will, as cheap labour. As far as citizens of countries of the former
"socialist" camp are concerned, there are also other expediences,
purely political ones. Especially for Albanians. This doesn't mean that
economic reasons lose their importance.
T. Krikellis, former MP of the New Democracy party,
in a TV show hosted by a well-known journalist revealed that "In a meeting
at the ministry of public order that took place in 1994-95 in the presence of
three experts from the ministry of foreign affairs, the issue was raised of
supporting Albania by showing tolerance in the issue of hundreds of thousands
of illegal immigrants, because the neighboring country had made a definitive
turn to the west and should be supported in this course."
Mr. Krikellis pointed out that there had been a
related "message" originating from the U.S., addressed primarily to
the New Democracy Party as the PASOK government had already accepted the
propositions. In other words the U.S. want to pay their agents, in their efforts
to resurrect capitalism in Albania (and elsewhere), not at their own expense,
but with the wages of the Greek worker.
Who doesn't know that the Greek consulate in Korytsa
hands out heaps of visas? One of those suspect characters who have proclaimed
themselves "representatives" of Albanian workers, speaks of 300 visas
daily, in parallel with illegal entry.
Foreigners not only enter with the indirect approval
of the authorities, but are also subject to a selection process. No other
country in the Balkans has suffered as many tribulations as Serbia. Besides the
war, its people are tormented by an inhuman and long-lasting embargo. Still,
there are no Serb illegal immigrants in Greece! You see, in Serbia they don't
have their own people, Berisha or Maiko, to support. Instead there is the
"last communist dictator", Milosevic, whom they want to overturn.
There are also many Kurds - but what kind of Kurds?
Not the kind that are being persecuted by Turkish generals in South-East
Turkey. These are few and, when they aren't being delivered to Ankara, they are
getting shut in the camp at Lavrio. But we have many from the other kind, those
who are under U.N. protection in the unofficially occupied Northern Iraq.
Because there, there are also lackeys of the west, whom they want to support.
Messrs Barzani and Talabani, who are being used against the other enemy of
freedom, the "nationalist dictator Saddam Hussein"!
Of course all this doesn't look like a "law of
nature", with which we 'll have to live, as we are being assured. But
then, whatever serves the interests of capitalism is nature, whereas what
protects the interests of workingmen is against nature.
Some will say: "but aren't immigrants
workingmen"?
They are indeed, and the Greek working class has
nothing to divide with them. But it has with the governments that are using the
misery and pain of other peoples against it, embellishing at the same time
their dirty policy with "humanitarian" pretexts.
This is a permanent tactic of imperialism. After WW
II the U.S. took advantage of the persecutions and torments to which Jews had
been submitted in Europe to gain the acceptance or the tolerance of public
opinion to the uprooting of Arabs from Palestine and the creation of a
"Jewish" state. They rounded up the more miserable Jews with the
promise of giving them a motherland and used them in fact as cops of the region
in order to continue stealing Arab oil.
Globalisation and illegal
immigration
The phenomenon of illegal immigration has not
occurred at a random moment. We live in the days of so-called neo-liberalism
and of economic globalisation. In Europe, as far as tariffs are concerned,
borders have been abolished years ago. Similar free trade zones have been
established in North America and East Asia, while via the GATT (now the WTO)
tariffs are gradually being abolished worldwide. At the same time,
protectionist currency controls are being abolished and the movement of
capitals is becoming totally deregulated. Under these conditions, it would be
not only logically but also practically inconsistent not to release controls on
the movement of the most important economic factor, namely of labour. So let
them leave aside the sophistries about natural laws and snobby Greek workers.
The inconsistency of restrictions in the labour
market has often been pointed out in the press of the extraparliamentary
"left". In one of them, the columnist Th. Koutsoumbos writes on this
issue:
"Contrary to what was the case in the 30s,
today "globalisation" knocks down the economic borders. Commodities
move freely, and in unconceivable quantities due to the use of modern
technology. (Only for the movement of people are "walls of shame"
being erected (Germany), with electric fences and police controls...)"
("Nea prooptiki" ["new perspective"])
We don't know what happens with other categories of
people, whether some countries welcome tourists and businessmen with
"electric fences", but illegal immigrants are certainly passing
borders (those remaining "walls of shame"!) in unconceivable
quantities, and without the need to use modern technology!.. The fact that this
is not being done in a legal way is simply a mater of political expediency.
Governments don't want to take upon their shoulders the responsibility and the
resulting political cost. They prefer to shovel them to the immigrants
themselves and to natural laws. On the other hand, it is also a matter of
price: Just as illegally imported cigarettes are cheap for smokers, illegal
workers are cheap for the employers. Being illegal they are literally at their
mercy.
The gentlemen of the extraparliamentary
"left", although most of them deny the very existence of
globalisation and brand it a myth (Th. Koutsoumbos is still using quotation
marks for it), at the same time become its proponents and apologists. Their
slogan "borders open for the working class" is nothing but a
formulation embellished with left-wing verbalism for the liberation of labour
market. Not only do they recognize as progress the fall of the "walls of
shame", but they outbid for the completion of the process. And how could
one be for the liberation of the labour market without also being for the
liberation of the market in general and thus for the globalisation - and the
converse?
Yet gentlemen, you cannot be for economic
globalisation, under capitalism, without at the same time supporting political
globalisation, that is the abolition of political borders (the "walls of
shame") and consequently of the national state. Without in essence
pleading for a global imperialist power, that is for the new world order. In
short without being, in practice, pitiful western-style social democrats,
totally aligned in all important issues with imperialism and the Simitis
government. The fact is not accidental that the extraparliamentary
"left" had a despicable position on the question of Yugoslavia. That
some groups openly supported the NATO bombings, while others did the same
implicitly, by regurgitating the cadaveric literature of the CNN in order to
persuade us that the "nationalist" and "genocidal" Serbs
got what they deserved!
The liberalization of markets is a necessary
adaptation of world capitalist economy to the phenomenon of the multinational
companies, which initially appeared after the WWII and have seen a tremendous
growth in the last two decades. The merger of capitals across borders and
irrespective of their national origin is objectively in contradiction with the
economic and political existence of the national state. In this sense,
abolishing the national restrictions to world trade becomes an inescapable
necessity for capitalism. Still this has nothing to do with the much-advertised
restoration of conditions of healthy competition. Quite the opposite is true,
as protectionism used to dampen competitive inequalities. Now the law of the
jungle is being imposed everywhere. In the market of commodities, as well as in
the labour market. The globalisation of markets is the means for the conquest
of the world economy and the abolition of labour rights by the big beasts, the
multinational monopolies.
In the past, and even more so today, under
conditions of a deregulated economy, competition forces multinationals to
transfer more and more of their economic activities to regions that can ensure
them competitive advantages. Wherever there are limitless supplies of
"black labour", tax exemption and unaccountability. Particularly to
South-East Asia, where wages are up to 45 times lower than the equivalent
western-European ones. Also to countries of the former eastern bloc, and
wherever else attractive opportunities for cost-squeezing present themselves.
This is a totally new phenomenon, even if the
eyeless of the extra-parliamentary "left" fail to see it. They have
their reasons for this.
In the past, a North-American company would invest
in Brazil in order to conquer more easily the Brazilian market. Nowadays, the
target is the North-American and the world market. This leads to loss of jobs
for the North-American working class. The same happens to each and every
country where the hunt for profit drives capital to migrate.
But what happens to capital that, for various
reasons, remains invested in the traditional industrial centers and their
immediate satellites? It is obvious that in order to survive, in order to avoid
massive bankruptcies in Europe and North America, this capital must make use in
the metropolitan centers of exactly the same advantages that are available in
the periphery. If Muhammad can't go to the mountain, the mountain must go to
Muhammad. Governments take it upon themselves to import in camouflaged ways
"black labour" into Europe and North America, which means at the same
time importing third-world standards of living for local workingmen. This is
the real reason and the aims of the deluge of immigration that causes a stir in
the working class, in Greece and elsewhere.
The well-paid strata of labour aristocracy, inside
which most of the so-called anti-racists find their supporters, believe they
are safe. But the unemployment and poverty of masses causes the European and
North-American markets, the two largest in the world, to shrink. It is not
enough to produce cheap, one must also have customers to sell the products to.
What seemed to be a way out for capitalism reproduces the old problems in a
more acute form, worsening the commercial crisis. Competition becomes more
acute and squeezing costs even further becomes a matter of life and death. The
capital seeks even cheaper labour while at the same time putting in the
crosswire of austerity new strata of society.
Computers and communications nowadays, among other
things, are unifying the labour market. Since the borders are open everyone
can, via the Internet, knock a door in any other place, especially when he is
being prompted to do so. This has started happening in Greece too.
"Imagine - tells us an MIT professor (with the
belief that this does not concern him personally) in a Scientific American
article - a doctor in Sri Lanka who makes $20 a day, administering health care
to homeless people in Boston via a kiosk, equipped with a remote video and
medical instrument connection and staffed by a nurse. The service might cost $5
a visit, and although not perfect, it would be superior to no health care at
all."
Computer-related jobs are daily gaining larger
percentages in the labour market, especially among younger people. Here too, in
order to offer his services, one doesn't have to go to Boston. He can do it
from home! "imagine - says the same professor - 1,000 accountants from
Beijing doing accounting services for General Motors at $1 per hour."
Why "imagine" it? It is already
happenning. Swissair, for example, has already transported a large part of its
accounting services to India.
All this, seen from the point of view of progress
and technology, seems seductive. But on the basis of capitalism, it means the
globalisation of Sri Lanka living standards.
Immigration during the 50s and illegal
immigration.
Many are those who like to compare the current
illegal immigration with the immigration of Greek and other South-European
workers to the North of Europe, especially W. Germany, in the 50s. In this way,
they want to silence the working class.
Why does it complain? And with what right? Didn't it
immigrate en masse to Germany? But, what connection is there between that
immigration and the one of today? Is really the difference that hard to see?
Then the capitalist world was passing a phase of
great expansion, which created increased needs in working hands. Without these
hands, what was called "the German miracle" would not have existed,
nor would the equally impressive economic and cultural flourishing of the other
industrial centers. Conditions of full employment and increased demand for
workforce, dictated the establishment of bilateral state agreements under which
specified numbers of workers were dispatched to specific industries. This was a
legal and coordinated immigration. Immigrants were filling real and great needs
in the labour market. They had the same wages and enjoyed the same rights with
their local coworkers. The same labour legislation applied to all.
What is happening now? Capitalism is deep in the
worst crisis of its history. Workforce requirements are continuously shrinking.
Millions of workers are officially unemployed in Europe, and even more are
unofficially so. In Greece, out of one and a half industrial workers, before
the big immigration wave started, hundreds of thousands were already unemployed,
"employed", "semi-employed", "employable".
Illegal immigrants, who are another one and a half million, didn't come in
order to fill some big or small needs for labour hands. The well-oiled door was
opened for them in the middle of the night in order for them to elongate to an
unbelievable degree the columns of the unemployed. In order for the battles for
jobs to become even tougher, with full conscience that for the local labourer
they would be lost in advance.
What should we say and what should the position of
the left be, if Greek workers had gone to Germany, not under the conditions
that they did, but in order to work with one fourth the wage of the German
worker, without social security and working hours, because they could afford it
and this was the only way they could find work, taking in this way the position
of the German worker? Would the left approve of this? And would the German
worker be a racist if he denounced "his" government for this
under-the-belt hit? Or would those who blamed him be imbeciles, if not agents
of the German capital?
In such a situation, the Greek immigrant would be no
different than a scab that, forced by unemployment and misery, and because of
his backward class consciousness, accepts work with a lower wage in order to
take the place of his brother.
Foreigners, due to currency differences in their
countries of origin, due to their way of life, due to the fact that they accept
to live without modern amenities, to be packed 4 or 5 to a room, to live in a
sweatshop attic, in a shed of a peasant, eating the food prepared by the wife
of the peasant, in short due to their limited needs, can settle for a fraction
of the average wage, on which the Greek worker couldn't possibly subsist and
which he therefore couldn't possibly accept. Thus the modern immigrant, the
illegal immigrant, doesn't take his place alongside the local worker. He
replaces him. The indigenous worker doesn't just become unemployed. He loses
all prospects of ever being reintegrated into the production process,
especially when he isn't young and specialized.
Even if the Greek worker can settle, even
temporarily, for the employment conditions of the foreigner, even if he gives
up his habits and his way of life, with the hope of better days in the future,
the employer will prefer the "illegal" immigrant, to the Greek who
may in the future take him to a court to ask for his legal rights.
No wonder we are reading in the press news like this
one:
Miracles don't happen nowadays in the Duomo.
Executions do, however, even if they are symbolic, like the execution of the
"Napolitan unemployed". The cathedral was occupied last week by
hundreds of unemployed people. The Italian unemployed then marched to the
embassy of Gabon. "We want an African citizenship", they said,
"because those from outside the [European] community find work easier than
the locals. We are not racists. We are just demanding equal opportunities with
the Africans"...In the troubled archipelago of the unemployed of Southern
Italy, a war is looming among the poor. ("Ta Nea", 2/24/1999)
The modern world has never known a similar
situation. The governmental staffs of the new world order have managed, acting
under the sign of "humanitarianism" and with the good services of the
"left", to return society to an era lost in the depths of history.
The position of an indigenous worker nowadays can only be compared to that of
the free Italian worker under the Roman Empire in the epoch of its decline.
Then the massive use of slave labor made a pariah of him - permanently
unemployed, a parasite of society, who eked a meager living thanks to the
municipal mess and the state wheat allowances.
But the foreign competitor of the indigenous worker
also resembles a slave more than a free immigrant worker. Is it by chance that
his transportation to Europe has been called slave trade? From the point of
view of his compensation and rights, his employment is nothing but a modernized
form of slavery. Moreover, this archaic employment regime is not restricted to
himself, who after all has chosen it. Its scope is inevitably being extended to
the entire working class. That's exactly the point: using immigrants as a
battering-ram in order to eliminate labor rights that have been gained with
struggles over the course of an entire century.
Those who are now speaking of the equalization of
wages between foreigners and Greek workers, in order to eliminate unfair
competition for jobs, are mocking the Greek workers and the foreigners alike.
The equalization has already been accomplished. Not because foreigners are now
being treated as Greeks, but because Greek workers, in their overwhelming
majority, are being treated as immigrants, and this only if they are lucky
enough. How could things be different? When there is this inconceivable
super-supply of workforce, wages are necessarily equalized at the lowest limit.
If some "leftists" don't have ulterior
motives, and are just contemplating the Greek workers as a salvage vessel, they
should at least remember the coast guard regulations: a boat designed to carry
fifty persons, can take a couple more. But when another fifty climb in, and
others are constantly being coming, the result is not that a hundred will be
saved - they will all go to the bottom!
The union issue
nowadays
"No", replies the "left" almost
without exception, "calm down - Things can be fixed with united trade
union struggle!"
Workers who hear this will smile indulgently. They
know first of all how temporary and fragile are the gains of any trade union
struggle. That in the end, the law of supply and demand is imposed on wages
too.
Of course, for the union bureaucracy, trade union struggles
are everything. But if things were indeed thus, if trade union struggle was not
in the end, in spite of its tremendous importance, ineffective, the working
class would not be drawn into politics, it would have no reasons to build its
own party, aiming at the abolition of wage slavery itself.
But why not organize common struggles that could for
a while (who knows how long?) improve the situation? For the aforementioned Th.
Koutsoumbos, this is a panacea. In the journal "nea prooptiki", under
the heading "racism in the epoch of globalisation", exposing a
position almost the entire left shares, he lays on the shoulders of the Greek
working class the duty to liberate every immigrant from the bosses' super
exploitation!
"But", he writes, "the working class
can't liberate itself without liberating every exploited section of society,
without first liberating the Albanian workers and other immigrant 'foreigners'
from the wild super exploitation of the bosses"
Koutsoumbos has read somewhere that Marx and Engels
were saying something similar about English workers, and he believes he can
apply the same formula to the Greek workers, banking on their prestige. Marx
was speaking about the word-ruler England. Almost the entire world was its
colony. It had the world industrial monopoly. From this position, its
bourgeoisie was realizing enormous profits. Thanks to them, it could buy out
important layers of workers who, according to Engels, "were enjoying in a
state of bliss along with them (the bourgeois) the colonial monopoly of England
and its monopoly of the world market". Only when England would lose its
colonies, the monopoly of the world market, and the English workers their
privileges, could they start to think and act in a revolutionary way.
As far as we know, Albania, Pakistan, the Ukraine
etc are not colonies of Greece. The Greek working class is not "enjoying
in a state of bliss" the crumbs falling from the exploitation of
foreigners. Other layers are enjoying them, and, by a devilish coincidence,
they are all "anti-racists" and "anti-nationalists". The
only thing the working class collects is misery. And, of course, it can't
liberate foreigners for the simple reason that their exploitation goes on
against its will, and their liberation goes contrary to theirs.
In reality, every working class can only be
liberated in its own country, against its own ruling class. Fighting behind the
"walls of shame", which can only truly fall in this way, and in any
case not upon the heads of working people.
Beyond this, the integration of foreigners in the
union movement presupposes their social integration. This last is not a
technical issue. Foreigners must first acquire common experiences and the
feeling of a common nation, which replaces the solidarity of ghettos. They must
become indigenous, native. And this is not simple, not easy, and often not
possible at all. But even when it is possible, it takes a long time, which
doesn't pass easily and agreeably for everyone.
First of all, a precondition for a common union
organization is a common program of demands. The wage of the worker has an
upper and a lower limit. The upper limit is determined by competition between
capitalists. The lower, by the vital needs of workers. Nobody accepts a wage
lower than what he needs in order to survive. One prefers to die slumbering
than working. Competition is not absent within the working class. But at this
point it gets surpassed, and the common organization of workers becomes
possible, in order to demand a common minimum wage which will assure them a
decent life.
Certainly the equality of needs is only relative.
Needs differ from worker to worker. That's why there are some relative measures
in the minimum wage, which bridge the differences. But how can differences of
the nature and size that separate the wage that the native worker can accept on
one side, and the categories of immigrant workers on the other, be bridged?
What will the unions demand?
It is the impossibility of fielding commonly
accepted demands that explains the total failure of unions to organize
immigrants, not the "racism" of labour bureaucracy, as the "sole
consistent", ostensibly, "anti-racists" of the
extra-parliamentary "left" conveniently assert. As a result, instead
of organizing foreigners, the unions see even the Greek workers desert them,
being unemployed or, at best, a small minority at the workplace. The only
possible form of organization for foreigners is the solidarity of the ghetto.
Of the many ghettoes, in fact. And this has worked in certain instances, for
example in the brief strike of Albanians in Almyros. Thus the union movement
has been all but extinguished in the private sector and, to the extent that the
public sector becomes privatized and subcontracting becomes more common, the
dissolution is spreading there too. And if we take into account the fact that
unions are the antechamber for the political organization of the proletariat,
it is no wonder that the "left" becomes depilated from working-class
elements and becomes a current of petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. Unless this
state is overturned, the spectre of a dismal future is visible in the horizon.
The proletariat risks being reduced, from an organized class and a springboard
for the development of society as a whole, to an amorphous, tame, wretched
mass, with no present and no hope for the future.
The exploitation of "black labour" in the
periphery, the creation in Europe and America of a workingman of "new
type", with a humiliating wage, without working hours, who is not
protected by any law and is at the mercy of the master, lacking any potential
for resistance, have permitted the multinational monopolies to realize surplus
profits, and for capitalism to restabilise the world monetary system.
A decade ago it would seem unbelievable that
inflation in Greece would reach 1.8% annually, with a tendency to go even
lower. Based on the new slavery and the barbaric regime the Simitis government
has brought to the labour market, it can now brag that it has ascertained the
ticket for entry into the EMU (if this land is finally discovered). Bourgeois
and petty-bourgeois have found free labourers, free servants, gardeners,
nannies, nurses. Pimps have found plenty of whores. Real estate owners found
hefty, untaxed rents, for stables at which even oxen would look down with
contempt a few years ago. Gangs of slavers found the new El Dorado. And, in
this happy conjuncture, the stock exchange of course rises. While the working
masses suffer, new parasitic sectors and new privileged strata are being
created.
So how could those who rule us not care for those
"human rights", how could they not protect this
"internationalism" those who collect the crumbs falling from the
overflowing table of the rich?
Only the working class is being directly injured and
overpowered, that's why it is the only one that grudges and reacts to the
insistence of the ruling class and its foreign patrons, to defeat it,
transforming into their "multicultural" manor the country, and the
whole of Europe. We have never before seen such "internationalist"
fervor from the imperialists. Reproaches for "racism" are being
addressed to the working class only, and only from those who have nothing to
fear, or at least who think so. Even though extraparliamentarians are
thundering against the insignificant "Hrisi Avgi" group and the
"Greek patriots". Who dares not beat the donkey, beats the
packsaddle!
Marx on the competition between
English and Irish workers
The English workers who, as Engels said, were
"enjoying in bliss" their share from the profits of theirs
bourgeoisie's monopoly, were a privileged minority. The great mass was living
in poverty. Marx, as a member of the General Council of the international,
concerned himself especially with the antagonism that existed between the poor
layers of English workers and the Irish workers, whom the bourgeoisie forced to
migrate to England as cheap labour.
Marx in a letter to Meyer and Vogt (April 9, 1870)
informs them of his related propositions to the General Council. The paper
"Ergatiki Exousia" ["workers' power"], using the method of
the guillotine, by pasting together two sentences from two different
paragraphs, transforms the revolutionary materialist Marx into a mainstream
liberal petty-bourgeois. We believe that the reader stands to gain by reading
the entire excerpt that refers to the Irish question, which we cite here,
underlining the sentences used by the "Ergatiki Exousia".
I had intended to submit further RESOLUTIONS on the
necessary transformation of the present Union (i.e., enslavement of Ireland) IN
A FREE AND EQUAL FEDERATION WITH GREAT BRITAIN. Further progress on this matter
has been temporarily suspended AS FAR AS PUBLIC RESOLUTIONS GO because of my
enforced absence from the General Council. No other member of it has enough
knowledge of Irish affairs or sufficient prestige with the English members of
the General Council to be able to replace me on this matter.
Time has not passed uselessly, however, and I would
ask you to pay particular attention to the following:
After studying the Irish question for years I have
come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the ruling classes In
England (and this is decisive for the workers' movement ALL OVER THE WORLD)
cannot be struck in England, but only in Ireland.
On 1 January 1870 the General Council issued a
secret circular, written by me in French - {for repercussions in England, only
the French papers are important, not the German} - on the relationship of the
Irish national struggle to the emancipation of the working class, and thus on
the attitude the International Association must take towards the Irish
question.
Here I give you, quite shortly, the salient points.
Ireland is the BULWARK of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of
this country is not simply one of the main sources of their material wealth; it
is their greatest moral power. They represent, IN FACT, the domination of
England over Ireland. Ireland is, thus, the grand moyen by which the English
aristocracy maintains its domination in England itself.
On the other hand: if the English army and police
were withdrawn from Ireland tomorrow, you would immediately have AN AGRARIAN
REVOLUTION IN IRELAND. But the overthrow of the English aristocracy in Ireland
would entail, and would lead immediately to, its overthrow in England. This
would bring about the prerequisites for the proletarian revolution in England.
In Ireland, the land question has, so far, been the exclusive form of the
social question; it is a question of existence, a question of life or death for
the immense majority of the Irish people; at the same time, it is inseparable
from the national question: because of this, destruction of the English landed
aristocracy is an infinitely easier operation In Ireland than in England itself
- quite apart from the more passionate and more revolutionary character of the
Irish than the English.
As for the English bourgeoisie, it has, d' abord, a
common interest with the English aristocracy in turning Ireland into simple
pastureland to provide meat and wool at the cheapest possible price FOR THE
ENGLISH MARKET. It has the same interest in reducing the Irish population to
such a low level, through EVICTION and forced emigration, that English capital
(leasehold capital) can function with SECURITY in that country. It has the same
interest IN CLEARING THE ESTATE OF IRELAND as it had IN THE CLEARING OP THE
AGRICULTURAL DISTRICTS OP ENGLAND and SCOTLAND. The £6,000-10,000 ABSENTEE and
other Irish revenues that at present flow annually to London must also be taken
into account.
But the English bourgeoisie also has much more
important interests in the present Irish economy. As a result of the steadily -
increasing concentration of leaseholding, Ireland is steadily supplying its
SURPLUS for the English LABOUR MARKET, and thus forcing down the WAGES and
material and moral position of the ENGLISH WORKING CLASS.
And most important of all! All industrial and
commercial centres in England now have a working class divided into two hostile
camps, English PROLETARIANS and Irish PROLETARIANS. The ordinary English worker
hates the Irish worker as a competitor who forces down the STANDARD OF LIFE. In
relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the ruling
nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists
against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He harbours
religious, social and national prejudices against him. His attitude towards him
is roughly that of the POOR WHITES to the NIGGERS in the former slave states of
the American Union. The Irishman PAYS HIM BACK WITH INTEREST IN HIS OWN MONEY.
He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of
English rule in Ireland.
This antagonism is kept artificially alive and
intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the
means at the disposal of the ruling class. This antagonism is the secret of the
English working class's impotence, despite its organisation. It is the secret
of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class. And the latter is fully
aware of this.
But the evil does not end here. It rolls across the
ocean. The antagonism between English and Irish is the secret basis of the
conflict between the UNITED STATES and England. It renders any serious and
honest cooperation impossible between the working classes of the two countries.
It enables the governments of the two countries, whenever they think fit, to
blunt the edge of social conflict by MUTUAL BULLYING and, IN CASE OF NEED, by
war between the two countries.
England, as the metropolis of capital, as the power
that has hitherto ruled the world market, is for the present the most important
country for the workers' revolution and, in addition, the only country where
the material conditions for this revolution have developed to a certain state
of maturity. Thus, to hasten the social revolution in England is the most
important object of the International Working Men's Association. The sole means
of doing so is to make Ireland independent. It is, therefore, the task of the
'INTERNATIONAL' to bring the conflict between England and Ireland to the forefront
everywhere, and to side with Ireland publicly everywhere. The special task of
the Central Council in London is to awaken the consciousness of the English
working class that, for them, the national emancipation of Ireland is not a
QUESTION OF ABSTRACT JUSTICE OR HUMANITARIAN SENTIMENT, but THE FIRST CONDITION
OF THEIR OWN SOCIAL EMANCIPATION.
As we see, Marx doesn't have recourse to the
pseudo-theory of "racism" in order to explain the existence of two
hostile camps inside the working class. He looks for the cause, not in the
ideas of people, but in the social conditions that determine them in order to
finally point out, as the only solution, the revolutionary change of these
conditions. The priestly idea that the problem could be resolved with admonitions
about the fraternity of all races doesn't even cross his mind. He sets off the
material root of the division that was none other than the English occupation
of Ireland. This is the ABC of his materialist method, of which many declare
themselves to be supporters and experts - but this is not enough to transform
into Marxism their various subjective conclusions.
Marx doesn't try to persuade English workers to
accept certain faits accomplits, he doesn't attempt to surpass the division by
throwing bridges of morality. Contrarily, he draws attention to the causes of
the problem and calls on them to support the revolutionary struggle for the
independence of Ireland. Thus would open the road for the economic and cultural
development of Ireland, its workers wouldn't be forcibly uprooted in order to
be used as cheap labour by the English bourgeoisie. The last would lose its
ability to sustain a labour aristocracy and to control by this means the
movement of the proletariat. Contrarily to Marx, our anti-racists do nothing
else than to muddle the waters and to cover the real causes of the current
divisions in the camp of workers. For them, responsible is "racism".
There is no other issue toward which they would have to take position and
fight!..
Of course Marx is dealing with different questions
of a different era. It is impossible to mechanically transplant all his
propositions to the present, and especially to Greece. To say the least, the
countries of origin of the nations that live and work here are in no way Greek
colonies or subordinate partners in a federation, as Ireland was. No part of
the Greek working class is gaining from their colonial exploitation. What is
timeless in Marx is his materialist historic method. And according to it, there
is no possibility of a serious, stable and frank cooperation of the Greek
working class with immigrant workers as long as they are being used to degrade
the wages, the living standards and to destroy the social rights it had gained
with struggles. And, whether we like it or not, immigrant workers, as long as
they are in Greece in this massive and limitless scale, can only fulfill this
role, willingly or not.
As a result, the Greek capitalists, thanks to the
cheap wage of the foreigners, are able to stabilize their economy, to
demoralize the Greek working class, dissolve its political and union movement,
extending in this way the life of capitalism itself. At the same time,
extending the life of restorationist mafias in the countries of the former
"eastern bloc", financing their counterrevolutionary regimes with the
wage of the Greek worker. Of course, the same is being done by the ensemble of
the ruling classes in the countries that compose NATO.
Thus illegal immigration, this modern-day slave
trade, of which the "left" leaderships are becoming, openly or in a
veiled way, apologists and defenders, is nowadays the greatest obstacle to the
social revolution, in the East and the West alike.
The scarecrow of racism
The state with its plans creates the conditions of
the nationalist antagonisms and at the same time propagates the myth of
'racism' so as to strangle under the shadow of this scarecrow every thought and
attempt of the working class to fight against its social alienation, to fight
against the absolutism of the new world order. We should not be amazed if
tomorrow any protest against illegal immigration and the multi-cultural
mutation of the country provokes the intervention of the courts with the
accusation of stirring up racist and nationalist passions.
The myth of racism is used to obscure the true
nature of the problem, presenting it as a psychological and cultural
phenomenon. The immigrants are swindled and their relations with the Greek
people are undermined as a completely perverted image of the real reasons of
the resentment of the Greek working people is presented to them.
When the myth of racism is also underwritten by the
"left", great political confusion is created and the path to
right-wing adventurism is laid. Every increase in right-wing bigotry is due to
the result the sell-out by the "left".
Everyone isolates the problem to racism. Grigoris
Felonis doesn't pretend to be a 'leftist'. He is an "honorable"
member of the central committee of PASKE (the pro-government union bloc) and,
as president of the Athens Labour Council, the main speaker in the meeting on
racism. This heavy-duty labour bureaucrat is in full agreement with the
demoralised 'left'. He too believes that there are no other reasons for the
reaction against the mass use of immigrants by the bosses, besides racism,
which according to his descriptions is:
"The philosophy of the intellectually lazy.
They believe they are unique on earth. That the other, the one different from
them, is essentially non-existent, a humanoid. They believe they belong to a
race privileged with higher spiritual and bodily forces, which are being
bequeathed to the clear descendants of the race."
This is then the problem of the Greek workers. They
are frightened lest their "Aryan" race be diluted!
In Dafni, a suburb in Athens with mainly labour
population, we had one of the government organised 'brush operations'. There we
had certain extra parliamentary leftists who demonstrated as 'multi-cultural'
Greece was in danger. The local residents of the area deprecated them.
Koutsoumbos, ostensibly shocked, comments in "Nea Prooptiki":
"Our cdes were provoked from people they didn't
expect. Frightened housewives and pensioners, whose hide been tanned by the
state and capitalists with poverty and super-exploitation, the silent
'populace', usually silent when facing smacks from those "higher up",
suddenly raised their voices against those few who had the sensitivity to react
to the barbarity of the police".
Concluding:
"we aren't dealing with the traditional
phenomenon of racism. Something deeper but equally bestial is developing and
embracing popular masses".
These people overflowing with intolerance and
contempt for the 'bestial populace", who is only worth receiving 'smacks
from those higher up', dare to pose as anti-racists! They pretend to defend,
like Hercules, the true interests of the working class. The ones only they, not
the "empty-headed" workers, know!
There, outside the public sports hall of Dafni, an
anti-racist employer arrived with the same 'sensibility and courage' as the
"far left". He was complaining because the police had (provisionally)
deprived him of his immigrant employee. If anyone proposed to this gentleman to
hire a Greek worker in his place, they would have had the opportunity to
witness with their own eyes that the first victims of racist discrimination in
Greece is the one against Greek workers. All others follow, however... the
Polish worker is being replaced by the Romanian, the Romanian by the Albanian,
the Albanian by the Pakistani and the Pakistani by the next cheap hands that will
be discovered. Fortunately for capital, 'multi-culturalism' has still many
reserves left...
Koutsoumbos believes, along with the rest of the
so-called 'left', that the "Brush Operations" are a right-wing turn
of Simitis under the pressure of the masses, which sent their message, with the
results of the European elections! Thus for them Simitis stands to the left of
the popular masses. They criticise the Greek population which, according to
their claims, has pro-fascist tendencies, those self-styled endangered remains
of democratic citizens!
It's not only in the electoral result that they
recognised the stigma of fascism. Fascistic they had characterised the massive
mobilisations on the issue of Macedonia, with which the Greek people declared
its decision to resist the chicanery of the new world order in the Balkans.
Whatever is the political consciousness of the
masses, one thing is certain: among them and the extra parliamentary
"left" lies an abyss. On the question of the side of the abyss on which
fascism lies, we ask the right to believe that, if nothing else, it isn't on
the side of the masses.
The extra-parliamentary left characterises the
working class as being inclined toward fascism, attempting to base their
calumnies on skin-deep aspects of its spontaneous resistance. On its supposed
racism and nationalism. But fascism doesn't simply consist of some external
traits. It consists of its fundamental objectives. And these were not the
transformation of Jews into soap, or the triumph of the Aryans, but the
imperialist union of Europe under one centre of power. In this consisted the
'new order', which the Nazis also proclaimed.
Today American imperialism has exactly the same
aims: To unite the whole world under its own hegemony. The cadre of American
imperialism don't hide their affinity with German fascism, borrowing from it
the term 'new order', even the codename 'Desert Fox', of one of their great
operations against Iraq. But conditions are totally different and the past
could not reappear, as many imagine, in the exact same form.
The Americans aren't obliged to repeat the doomed in
advance attempt of Hitler to militarily occupy Europe. They attempt to base
themselves on the consent and collusion of their big and small allies, taking
advantage of the common interests created by the multinational forms of
composition of capital, from the end of the war until today. That is why their
'new order' cannot be based on nationalism and racism, but on fraud of 'human
rights', multiculturalism' and the levelling of national resistance by the steamroller
of globalisation. (From one point of view this constitutes an advantage for
current imperialism, but at the same time its Achilles' heel. Every time it is
forced to use violence, it cannot count on the patriotic enthusiasm of its
armies, but only on the doubtful successfulness of a new technological
fascism.)
We could suppose that the extra parliamentary
'left', is a victim of naivete and of its hereditary inability to distinguish
internationalism from globalisation and the modernised form of the fascist new
order. In a few cases this obviously holds true. But we cannot say the same
when we judge it as a political current. Because these gentlemen are the exact
same ones who cheered the desert storm against the 'Islamist dictator Saddam'
and the storm in the Balkans against the 'Stalinist dictator Milosevic'.
Someone who can't distinguish between the imperialist new world order and its
victims, even at the time when they are bleeding, is not just confused but an
accomplice. It is the person who supports imperialist violence and robbery of
the people as the foundation of his own privileges and good life.
New World Order and Multi-Culturalism
Imperialism, while dissolving with fire and
brimstone the multinational entities created by the course of history, attempts
to artificially create, even with the use of violence, new multicultural
communities. In Bosnia it holds the Bosnian Serbs in a 'federation', whilst in
Kosovo it's trying to maintain the Serbian minority against the Kosovo
Albanians. At the same time, the monopolies' Europe advertises its
multicultural future.
Are these changes a step forward, a step towards
internationalism? Our 'leftist' friends say yes. Some with a subnote, some
without. The working class says no and is right. It a step backward. It doesn't
lead us into the post nation-state era, but to eras when the nation state was
the issue. To the feudal and slave-owning empires. The Ottoman, the Byzantine,
the Roman. It isn't the actualisation of the socialist perspective but the political
adaptation and servility of the planet to the needs of the transnationals.
Multi-culturalism under the iron cross of NATO is
the tool for the dissolution of the nation state for the sake of the new order
and globalisation. It not only doesn't bring closer the peoples, but it
constitutes an attempt to sink them to the depths of national antagonisms and
conflicts. To mutual neutralisation. It is an attempt at generalising the
American multicultural model. The plutocracy of the USA is convinced of its
functionality. For two and a half centuries now it exploits a whole array of
racial and national antagonisms in order to guarantee the stability of its
power. It is these antagonisms that have prevented the working class, despite
its great strength, from acquiring its own political physiognomy and its own
political party.
From this perspective the Greek people are right to
be wary. In particular with the Albanian element. It has both an infallible
instinct, and long historic experience. Of course the Albanian nation doesn't
just consist of Mafiosi eager to get rich. It also consists of people of
labour, of wages. But the collapse of the hated Hoxha dictatorship, which
called itself communist, has propelled the political pendulum to the other
extreme. The pro-capitalist and agent elements are at the top. For the moment
Albania is the feared bulwark of American imperialism in the Balkans.
The mercenary coalition with NATO against
Yugoslavia, the demonstrations in Athens with the Star-Spangled Banner and the
burning of the Greek flag, don't foretell anything good. The stance of the
government and the political establishment make the situation even worse. Of
course, Andreas Andrianopoulos and the other 'internationalists' are
reassuring! Unfortunately they are not trustworthy. Especially those promising
to tame the conflicting interests with internationalist admonitions.
"Prin" ["before"], the
well-known product of stalinist abortion, makes fun of the worries of the
theatrical writer Dialegmenos regarding the demographic change which illegal
immigration is causing. They obviously consider without importance the history
and traditions of peoples. So does the new world order, which wants to restart
history from scratch. But the Greek people will never accept to have decisions
on its future taken by national groups that don't have its history and
experience and are still proudly marching behind the American flag. All of this
belongs to the past for it and no amount of wretched invocations of
internationalism can force it to go back to stages of its history, which it has
long surpassed. That may be the objective of the new world order but it is in
no way to its own interests.
Nationalism - not with the warped definition which
cold war anti-communism gave it, but as a right of the peoples to support their
national sovereignty, as a demand for the respect to national traditions and
cultures - isn't opposed to internationalism, but its pre-condition. It is the
irreplaceable vehicle of history, which leads towards internationalism.
Multiculturalism and internationalism are the vision
of socialism, the vision of the workers. But this cannot be translated into the
right of the capitalist in using 'black labour' so as to crush the domestic
worker in every country, nor into the means for imposing the hegemony of the
American superpower on an endless array of national minorities and
civilisations with no ability of resistance.
The abolition of states under imperialism is a
totally reactionary perspective. It is equivalent with a return to barbarity.
It promises working people nothing but the generalisation of misery. This can't
be, and isn't, the aim of socialism. Its programme is the surpassing of the
nation state by moving forward. It aims to generalise prosperity.
Workers' solidarity cannot be understood as, nor can
it be, the Christian cue of sharing one dish of lentils into fourteen portions,
so the poor can survive and the rich get richer. It is the solidarity of the
workers who fight first of all in their own country, for the overthrow of their
own ruling class. The common and planned effort to overcome the uneven
development bequeathed by history to different nations, as a necessary
precondition for the abolition of national states, with the free will of the people
and in their interests.
November 1999
Communist Internationalist League - KDE
(trotskyists)
Father of the nation: A term used, often ironically,
to describe the MPs in Greece.
New Democracy: The right-wing bourgeois party in
Greece, equivalent to the Tories in GB or the Republicans in the USA.
PASOK: The "left-wing" Greek bourgeois
party, more or less equivalent to the Democrats in the USA.
Extra parliamentary left: The collective name used
in Greece to denote the groups that claim to stand to the left of the
"official" left (represented by the CP and its various splits).
The expression "the wall of shame" was
used in Greece to denote the Berlin wall.
Black labour: The word "black" is used in
the Greek language to denote unofficial, shady, illegal or semi-illegal
dealings: "black market" has the same meaning as in English,
"black money" is money received under the table, not declared to the IRS,
etc. Black labour specifically, refers to illegal employment, in which the
employed person is being paid in cash, without social security and retirement
benefits, and without the safeguards provided by Greek labour legislation.
Hrisi Avgi Golden Dawn: a totally unimportant extreme-right
grouplet, which nobody would be aware of, if it wasn't for the
"leftists" advertising it and using it as a fig leaf for their
bankrupt policies.
Andreas Andrianopoulos: A former minister of the
right-wing New Democracy party, one of the foremost proponents of
"neo-liberalism" and deregulation in Greece. He is best remembered
for abolishing state control on the price of gasoline, reassuring everyone that
this would result in a fall of gasoline prices. Within a week, the price jumped
from 80 to 200 Drs a litre, and remained there since. He too is an anti-racist,
of course.
