This Final Resolution of the EEK Emergency Conference was posted on our web site earlier. But we now have a revised and annotated English version. We are publishing this new version together with the Greek original and a recent Turkish translation. The editing and the notes are by the US revolutionary Marxist web site http://forum.permanent-revolution.org
1. The country’s economic bankruptcy and social disintegration led to the most acute crisis of political power. The collapsing Samaras-Venizelos government tied to the troika’s Memoranda can no longer govern; and a successor SYRIZA-based government is not a viable option neither for the ruling class or the very popular masses that are likely to vote for them.
Samaras’ headlong rush with the attempted termination of the Memorandum and his failed “success story” rhetoric ended into a tragicomedy. The troika, and above all the IMF itself and Schäuble pulled the rug from under the feet of the Samaras/Venizelos government by demanding new devastating measures for the people, accelerating thus the presidential election and early parliamentary elections. There is no doubt that troika’s ultimatum had as its final recipient not the departing right-wing prime minister, but the left-wing coming. The cynical EU blackmail is clear: either SYRIZA will bow refuting the popular expectations either it will be crushed by the “markets”, as to send a message to Podemos’ Spain and Sinn Féin’s Ireland.
On the EU side, there is no room for compromise as the Union is sinking into recession, over-indebtedness, deflation and the systemic capitalist crisis from the periphery now threatens its hard core: Italy, France and Germany itself. On the other hand, the right-wing political subordination to the Troika and the capital now exceeds all limits of people’s survival, The politics of SYRIZA to reduce austerity through negotiation and compromise with the EU, the IMF, international and Greek capital exceeds their limits set by the worsening crisis of capitalism.
Reaction is preparing for the confrontation, strengthening its positions in the state, para-state, repressive, judicial, ideological apparatuses and fascist gangs to turn a SYRIZA government into a “left parenthesis” before the extreme right-wing returnes to take the revanche with a social counter-revolution.
The upcoming elections are undoubtedly a crucial episode in the class struggle’s new phase. However, whatever the election result may be, it is certain that it will not solve but it will further exacerbate the political power crisis and, finally, the crisis of class rule. The ruling capitalists are unable to lead society out of their system’s crisis. Only the working class, supported by the popular classes that the crisis is currently destroying, can provide a way out of the crisis, organizing the exit from the system, the bourgeois and imperialist domination, to international socialism in the region, in Europe, worldwide.
As in the epicenter it is the power crisis itself , the primary question of revolutionary strategy, all the necessary class struggle and electoral tactics; the transitional program; the attitude towards the debt, “austerity” measures and the EU; fronts, alliances etc. derive from and are connected with this fundamental strategic question.
2. The next political battle is given in the hostile field of bourgeois parliamentarism, controlled by capital, systemic parties and media, condemning to silence the revolutionary Left voices. Nevertheless, the fight is taking place precisely in advanced decay conditions of bourgeois parliamentarism and under popular outcry providing an important arena for arevolutionary intervention by the EEK..
The early presidential election with the suffocating stench of scandals, “transfers”, pay-offs, extortions, back-stabbings, accelerated the decay of the political system. It completely unmasked a Parliament-zombie rubberstamping preapproved decisions within a bourgeois regime in a state of “emergency”. In the name of the dying bourgeois democracy, the rulers, for the needs of class war, build Type-C prisons not only for the prisoners but to imprison every resistance; for the confinement of the entire society. The elections will not revive the undead parliamentarism, although parliamentary illusions may grow along with the expectation of a parliamentary “left government”.
The roads of freedom do not pass through electoral “self-reliance” or parliamentary coalitions and compromises between left-wing and center-left or right-wing nationalists of the ANEL type [Independent Greeks], but through the working-people's self-organization and mass struggle for workers' power, the power of those in the “bottom” against the power of those on the “top”.The system reached its limits and must therefore be overthrown.
3. The Samaras government and the Official Opposition party are fighting to convince the people who will be on February 2015, “the most reliable and effective negotiator with the EU, ECB and IMF”, the right-wing "familiar faces" to Juncker, Moscovici and Merkel or the “harder”, the “left-wing negotiator”. In reality, however, there is no room for real negotiations. On the one hand, the diktats from Berlin, Brussels and Washington are not negotiable and on the other hand, our lives, the lives of the people have reached their limits, if they haven’t already been overcome and cannot be negotiated by anyone.
We don’t choose negotiators for of our lives! The memoranda will not be torn apart by any bourgeois government but by the working people itself with the General Political Indefinite Strike as its weapon until their abolition and interrelated cancelation of the foreign debt to the international usurers!
Whoever gets elected, the only choice is the continuation of the class struggle up to the victory of the working class and all oppressed.. If, most likely, the crumbling R ight isoverthrown, there should be neither a day nor an hour of respite, negligence, inaction, waiting or “grace period” granted to the new government. The power of the people must immediately be exercised with all forms of mobilization and self-organization of its forces in neighborhoods, public spaces, places of work and study. If the cause of our liberation from suffering is left to the hands of the “negotiators”, the local and international Reaction lurking and preparing its revenge will win. Victory is a strategic question, to organize the struggle for power from the part of the oppressed and downtrodden, unemployed and working, the poor and the newly poor of the memoranda whirlwind.
4. The EEK is not indifferent nor politically snobish against the broad masses who hope for a SYRIZA victory to get even the faintest of breaths from the suffocation by austerity. We do not keep an equidistance attitude or flatten the differences between the Right-wing and SYRIZA, as does the Stalinist Communist Party [KKE]. We share the popular anger and we join its struggle. We are ready for joint action against the troika, the memoranda block, the black-blue-green Right and the common class enemy.
We recognize the conditions and also, the limits of the mass shift towards the Left which from 2012 took the form of mass political support to SYRIZA, not just as opposition force and a pressure group to bourgeois power anymore, but as an alternative government of the Left. Together with the hopes of many, we do not ignore the aspirations of some “former” pro-troika, “former” PASOK, “former Democratic Left”, center left, and other scoundrels, seeking in SYRIZA a Siloam's Pool to absolve for their public sins and an access to the scoop of honey of bourgeois power. Above all we do not lose from our vigilant sight capitalist groups, “business circles” and bourgeois politicians promoting “necessary alliances with a SYRIZA-based government”, remaing always within the capitalist system and the EU, and which will move tomorrow class collaborationist policies.
Already, the acceptance of such class collaboration that can be only against the interests of the workers and against the people is seen in the declarations of loyalty of the SYRIZA leadership for “continuity of the State” in conditions of the capital's state power crisis, to stay in the EU and NATO , to accept the conditions of suffocating imperialist domination and involvement in geopolitical explosions in our region.
We call upon the forces within the working class, the youth, the intellectuals supporting or investing their hopes in SYRIZA to demand from their leadership to break with the bourgeoisie, the political staff, all opportunists and suitors of capital’s power. To reject the policy of the “continuity of the State” and the agreements with imperialism, bankrupt capitalism, the EU, the IMF and NATO.
At each step that the popular base will take towards this direction we will be on their side maintaining our political independence, our criticism, and warning that reformist leaders are not at all prepared for such necessary ruptures. They already show their servility with the reassuring statements to the capital and the EU, with their actions, especially with their program.
The austerity measures cannot be cancelled without the unilateral cancellation of the debt and without exemption from the prison of the EU, ECB and IMF. Austerity measures, the debt and the Troika are the heads of one Hydra; we cannot cut just one head leaving the others in place. The totally inadequate “program of Thessaloniki” [ advanced by SYRIZA] wants to empty the ocean of the people’s sufferings with a teaspoon. And his allegiance to “continue the State” opens the way to a 1973 Chile-type tragedy.
To get bread, work, health, education, freedom, it is necessary to overthrow the system of hunger, unemployment, ignorance and repression. Otherwise we will be buried under the ruins of capitalism’s bankruptcy. A radical re-organization of the economy on new social, socialist bases, in accordance with a democratically drafted plan to meet social needs; nationalization of strategic sectors, without compensation to the capitalist sharks, under workers' control and workers' management.
A powerful United Front of all workers' and popular organizations, movements, collectivities, all social resistance foci of struggle against the crisis that exist or should be created and further developed, all the people of the Left and of the revolutionary movement – from KKE, SYRIZA, ANTARSYA to EEK, the other left organizations, anarchist and antiauthoritarian movement; to smash the Reaction, the imperialist domination, the police state and the fascist parastate, social slavery, to open the way of universal human emancipation that for EEK is none other than the universal libertarian communism.
5. The crisis is not a Greek peculiarity but it is a worldwide process. At the epicenter of this world capitalist crisis is Europe. A definitive way out of the crisis isn’t feasible if it remains within a single country, with national “autarky” or national entrenchment. The economic nationalism that caused tragedies in the interwar period and brought the World War, flares up again, especially in the EU, with far-right, right-wing or “left-wing” characteristics, because of the social cannibalism measures of E.U. and its governments. If it proved to be ineffective and destructive in the past, today it’s a reactionary utopia , a recipe for disasters. The ΕΕΚdeclares unambiguously: no compromise with the devastating economic nationalism even under a “left-wing” sign. The salvation of the people requires nothing less than a social revolution. The revolutionary struggle can begin in Greece or in another country, but its victory cannot be completed unless on an international scale, with the unification of all social revolutionary struggles, for thesocialist unification of our region and Europe over the ruins of the imperialist E.U.
6. All the requirements, opportunities and risks of the historical moment in which we live, require the political independence of the working class to be forged and to be preserved from a new Varkiza treaty[The 1945 Varkiza agreement between British imperialism and the ELAS partisans betrayed by Stalinism] . This makes more than ever necessary and urgent, the independent political intervention of the revolutionary forces, of the revolutionary Left and EEK, in the forthcoming crucial for the people electoral battle.
With that in mind we organized on Dec 15th at the Athens University Law Faculty an open meeting/discussion entitled “On December’s road – the revolutionary response to the crisis” by presenting EEK’s proposal and inviting other organizations from the so-called “extra-parliamentary left” and the antiauthoritarian movement. ANTARSYA [Anticapitalist Left Cooperation for the Overthrow] responded and two representatives, from the organizations NAR [New Left Current] and SEK [Socialist Workers Party], participated and spoke. On December the 18th a meeting of delegations from ANTARSYA and EEK took place (see the Announcement of the Politburo of EEK on Dec 20th and the Joint Communiqué of ANTARSYA and EEK on Dec 22th).
Both at the open event and the delegations meeting, beyond the agreement on individual programmatic points (such as the cancellation of the debt, nationalizations without compensation, workers’ control), the EEK insisted on to put forward the perspective of workers' power as a revolutionary anti-systemic response to the political power crisis and in a confrontation with the government proposal of SYRIZA, and categorically rejected any compromise with any “left” nationalism and thus the partnership with formations such as “Plan B” and PAMES [Initiative for a left Front Coalition], which made also meetings with known representatives from the “left patriotic movement” of imperialist France[Nikonoff] and Italy[Campo Antimperalista].
Unfortunately, the majority of ANTARSYA under the responsibility of NAR and ARAN [Left Recomposition] and ARAS [Left Anti-capitalist Group] (grouped together in PAMES), not only did not take into account the critical remarks made by EEK, but also signed solemnly a political-electoral alliance with PAMES. “Plan B”, which is involved in this Coaltion from the beginning, at the same moment that it shakes hands with the majority of ANTARSYA, has no problem to provocatively raise its nationalism and drachma-fetishism.Leaders of “Plan B”, jointly signed on Dec19th (the day after the meeting with ANTARSYA) a common public statement “for the creation of a democratic patriotic pole” with Kazakis’ EPAM [United Popular Front] and the invisible to the naked eye “Drachma, Greek Democratic Movement Five Stars” of... Katsanevas [ a corrupt ex-PASOK statesman]!!
Of course, EEK could never be associated with such a denigration even of the name of the revolutionary left, on the pretext to win “the currents that tend to differ from reformism and turn to the left". It is not difficult to see that the “patriots” of the Plan B do not break from reformism and are definitely located on the right side of KKE, but also, of forces within SYRIZA that are not hiding their critical attitude.
Without being accused of “interfering” in ANTARSYA’s “internal affairs”, with responsibility and the courage of a comradeship forged through decades of common struggles, we call the comrades of ANTARSYA, specifically the comrades of NAR and its youth organization, nKA [Youth of Communist Liberation], to reject this opportunistic electoral-political alliance and the fall in the swamp of “left” nationalism.
7. Within the specific, extremely tight in terms of time and of financial requirements circumstances, EEK must bear on its shoulders the struggle for the political independence of the working class and for the proletarian internationalism and participate independently at the elections. The voice of ΕΕΚ should be the voice of the social revolution, a minority voice, but nonetheless an incompatible and insubordinate. We must show the only way out, to discuss with the people as wide as we can, to mobilize the people –from this very moment– for the aftermath of the defeat of the memorandum supporters, to recruit and organize revolutionary forces, to train and educate ourselves as vanguard fighters for the historical battles to come. EEK’s mode of existence, its raison d'être, is the ceaseless struggle for international permanent revolution under the most diverse, sometimes exceptionally unfavorable conditions, defying obstacles and opponents on the road to social liberation and Communism.
Let us dare again, let us act decisively, let us take up the gauntlet of this historic challenge!
Emergency Conference of the EEK, December 28, 2014