We often hear the following, well-intentioned question: "What would you have done if you were in the place of the SYRIZA government"?The question is not illogical. But we must place it in the right perspective.
If we, the KKE, were in the "place" of SYRIZA, meaning the place of bourgeois management, the place of defending capitalist interests, in search of winning back profits, seeking to use the advantages conferred on capital by membership in the EU, the EZ and Euroatlantic alliances and NATO; if we were in the "place" of taking up a government that is a tool of the power of monopolies; if we were in the "place" of negotiating on behalf of Greek capitalism by sitting in the roundtables of the EU, the EZ and other imperialist organizations;
if we were in that "place", we would not do anything more or less than what SYRIZA is already doing. We could not help but have the same dilemmas: should we continue inside the euro or opt for bankruptcy, whether controlled or uncontrolled, and a drachma-based Greek capitalism? We would weigh what is more to our capitalism's interest and choose accordingly. And that's what SYRIZA did.
But if we were in that "place", we would no longer be a Communist Party, the party of the working class and the popular strata; we would have become a different party, unable to struggle on their behalf.
That is what we have explained since 2012, when workers were inviting us, with good intentions, to "enter" a coalition government with SYRIZA, to support it, or at least to tolerate it on 5 or 10 issues.
We explained, back then as well, that every government of bourgeois management, for all its intentions, declarations and self-stylings, for all its pursuits, is objectively forced into a specific anti-popular path. Because that kind of government is not the product of rupture with capital, its power, the imperialist organizations, the EU, etc.
Today, the illusion and delusion that things could have been otherwise collapses before our very eyes, no matter how much various and sundry try to cover up the truth with the tatters of a caricature of rupture, of the "national currency", the capitalist "reconstruction of production", the "honest compromise"; no matter how much they try to put back the make-up and resell it, trying to entrap those who are angry, those who are disappointed with SYRIZA's policy, back into the sheep pen of the shipowners, the medicine industrialists, the US and German capitalist centers supporting Grexit.
But let us turn the question around:
What would have happened if there was a radical change in the correlation of forces, to the advantage of the working class and poor popular strata, if in place of a government of bourgeois management, a government that is a mere tool of capitalist power, one had a real worker-popular government, a tool of worker-popular power, in which communists would of course play a determining role?
Such a governmental power would not be trapped in the dead-ends of an antipopular negotiation with the imperialist organizations of the EU, the ECB and the IMF. It would not even start the kind of process we have lived through in the past five months.
First of all, because it would not acknowledge the entire existing institutional and legal antipopular and antiworker framework, nor the memorandum-related and non-memorandum related laws; it would not acknowledge the measures supporting capital, protecting its profits, the outrageous privileges of corporate groups. It would abolish all of that; it would topple it. It would also not recognize commitments to the EU, the ECB, the IMF and NATO, nor the "obligations" deriving thereof. It would abolish the participation of the country in these imperialist groups. It would disengage it from them.
It would not leave the keys to the economy, the production units, the services, energy, infrastructure and banks in the hands of business groups, capital and monopolies. It would undertake a series of immediate steps, launching the process of socialization and the organization of the economy on the basis of scientific central planning. It would thus open the path for the utilization of the productive capacity of the country, using as a criterion not the profit of corporate groups and capital, nor capitalist exploitation, but the satisfaction of worker and popular, of broader social needs. This path will allow us to exit the crisis in the interests of workers and the people. It will furnish the possibility to develop, equally and commensurably, sectors that are currently restricted because of commitments to the EU (e.g shipbuilding, sugar, meat production).
Such a power would not acknowledge public debt, nor the obligation to pay it back. It would declare its unilateral abolition.
Such a power and government would be a product of a broad worker and popular mobilization and the participation of the workers and popular strata in the exercise of power, through new institutions that will derive from their subversive struggle, replacing the rotten institutions of the bourgeois political system and the "democracy" of monopolies.
Such a power and government would immediately sign mutually beneficial agreements with other states, to import medicine, food, energy. Because it would not have the commitment to participate in imperialist organizations like the EU, NATO, etc.
This is the place for which we are struggling today.
The whole struggle of communists is oriented in that direction. It aims to change the correlation of forces to the benefit of the working class and the poor popular strata, in order to change the path the country is following; in order to abandon the capitalist path to development, whether that presupposes the euro or the drachma, along with its crises, its immiseration, its exploitation, its right-less life, the adaptation of popular and worker needs to the limits imposed by the profit of corporate groups, its commitment to participate in capitalist unions and imperialist alliances.
This is the reason why today, the KKE calls the people not simply to resist the new antipopular and antilabor attack of capital, the SYRIZA-ANEL government, the EU; but to use its struggle as a launching pad, to turn it into a step for the bolstering of the worker movement, the reinforcement of the Popular Alliance; for the strengthening of the anticapitalist and anti-monopoly orientation of the movement, the targetting of the real enemy--the monopolies, capital, employers and their governments, their parties, their international allies: the EU, the USA, NATO. This is the only way path to the change of the correlation in the interest of the people. It is the only path that allows the people to form a strong, determined force, capable of blocking the antipopular offensive today, and to topple it tomorrow, imposing its own exit plan. In this process, workers will be able to attain success and victory--smaller and larger. And that is the criterion with which they must stand in front of the ballot box, if and when this happens again: how will their vote help, bolster the effort to change the correlation of forces in order to help the people rise up, organized and determined to put their future in their own hands.
Χ.
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