Greek workers are suffering the greatest decline in living standards since the Nazi occupation. Unemployment is above 20 percent and 50 percent for youth. Wages have been slashed by up to 50 percent and pensions, education and health care decimated.
What is being enforced in Greece by the troika—the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank—is a social counterrevolution. For the international financial aristocracy, Greece is a testing ground for measures that are to be rolled out across Europe, as the economic crisis spins out of control and the world is plunged into a depression worse than the 1930s.
Europe’s workers must rally to the defence of their Greek brothers and sisters.
Greece shows what is in store in Britain. To date less than 10 percent of the austerity programme of the Conservative/Liberal government has been implemented. Far worse is to come.
It also points to the crisis of leadership facing workers everywhere. In Greece widespread hostility to the troika is being sidelined into appeals for clemency from these same reactionary bodies, even while they demand their pound of flesh is paid whatever the costs and Greece’s rulers prepare for police/military repression.
What is required in Greece and throughout Europe are workers’ governments that will put an end to the rule of the bankers and corporate bosses. But this requires a struggle against the EU and all its governments by workers throughout the continent for workers’ power in a United Socialist States of Europe.
Meeting details:
Leeds
Tuesday, June 12, 7:30 p.m.
Cosmopolitan Hotel
2 Lower Briggate
LS1 4AE
Bristol
Wednesday, June 13, 7 p.m.
Easton Community Centre
Kilburn Street
BS5 6AW
Manchester
Friday, June 15, 7 p.m.
Friends Meeting House
(Behind Manchester Central Library)
Mount St
M2 5NS
London
Saturday, June 16, 2:15 p.m.
Patidar House—Federation of the Patidar Associations
22 London Road
Wembley
HA9 7EX
Nearest tube station: Wembley Central–Bakerloo Line (venue is a two-minute walk from station)
Glasgow
Saturday, June 16, 2:00 p.m.
Partick Burgh Hall, Room One
9 Burgh Hall Street
G11 5LW
Peterborough
Saturday, June 16, 1 p.m.
Bretton Library (The Cresset Centre)
Bretton Centre
PE3 8DS