On February 28th a general strike was held throughout Greece on the second anniversary of the 2023 Tempi railway disaster, in which 57 people lost their lives in a head-on collision between a goods train and a passenger train packed with young people returning from a short vacation.

During the strike, huge demonstrations took place in the main Greek cities, Athens, Thessaloniki and Patras, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people. It is said that around one and a half million people participated throughout Greece, out of a population of only 11 million!

This huge participation was due to various reasons. Undoubtedly there is anger at what happened in Tempi, which was a massacre waiting to happen, caused by the lack of the most basic safety equipment and the increasingly onerous working conditions imposed on crews which had been reduced to a minimum. Despite complaints from the unions, the private company that manages the railways, an Italian company called Hellenic Train, has blatantly persisted in its policy of achieving maximum profit by cutting back on safety; a policy that is also being followed in Italy, Great Britain and other European countries.

Anger against the government is growing because it is increasingly evident that it is obstructing the search for those responsible, which may extend far beyond and be much more serious than it appeared in the days immediately following the disaster. The victims’ relatives have ascertained that the government and Hellenic Train are collaborating to hide the real cause of the fire. It is very likely that the huge blaze that followed the impact was caused by the presence of undeclared explosive substances on the freight train, perhaps xylene. Xylene and similar substances are much cheaper than gasoline and are used to adulterate fuel, a profitable business for mafia organizations in league with the political and business world.

But it wasn’t just the anger at the massacre and the lack of justice that drove hundreds of thousands of workers onto the streets. The general strike was seen as an opportunity to express their desire to fight against the employers and the State, against low wages, against precarious and insecure working conditions, against pensions that are too low, and against a health system that doesn’t work and forces the proletariat to go without care.

A Model Anti-Proletarian Democracy

Greece is a “model” European capitalism, their country of reference, and small enough to be used as a “laboratory experiment”. During the debt crisis, the employers mercilessly blackmailed workers into either accepting jobs with extremely exploitative conditions or remaining unemployed. And that didn’t change after the government budget crisis ended. In Greece young proletarians continue to work 40 or 50 hours a week for a salary of 700 or 800 euros, while the cost of living is almost the same as in countries where salaries are double or triple that amount. Retirees, who have seen their pensions cut by 40% from one day to the next, continue to get by on starvation pensions whereas, for Europe, the economy is recovering and the country is getting its finances back in order!

The Greek state, during these times when everyone is crying “to arms, to arms!” and all governments are pushing to transform car and tractor factories into ones producing tanks and fighter planes, has confirmed that it is a model to follow. While in other European countries military service has been abolished, in Greece it has always remained, with the defense of the country from the danger of aggressive Turkey given as an excuse.

And military spending, even in the darkest period for the state budget, has always been maintained at 3.5-4% of GDP while that of Italy, a country that is certainly not pacifist, is at 1.5%.

In this situation of extreme social stratification, where a small number of middle class people, businessmen, politicians, mafiosi and the whole apparatus that serves and defends them, live in luxury while the great majority of the proletariat and the impoverished lower and middle classes struggle to get by, it is the populist parties of the opposition and the government that, by diverting the anger of the masses towards the objectives of the other classes, prevent the independent organization of the proletarian class, both on an economic and political level.

Certainly the huge demonstrations that have invaded the cities of Greece are something to be appreciated. They show that the Greek proletariat has not bowed its head and is willing to fight to improve its living and working conditions, but the power of the bourgeoisie remains firm even if the right-wing government is faltering. The bourgeoisie is well aware that in order to hang on to power, the government and even the political class can be changed: the important thing is that the State, that is the machinery of power, the police, the army, the judiciary remain under its control.

The KKE, the “party of struggle and government” consents to this game, just as the PCI once did in Italy.

But theirs is a dirty game. You can’t engage in an all-out struggle to defend the proletariat by occupying seats in bourgeois parliaments. Proletarian power is not conquered bit by bit, in stages, by penetrating like rats into the cracks of the system. The proletariat will achieve its emancipation by means of the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois order, its state and all of its organs of repression and for the management of its power.

The problem of security is not solved by transferring Hellenic Train to the public sector without compensation, even if “with the control of the workers and the company”. These are all empty words. Under the present regime, the fact that a company is publicly owned rather than privately owned does not provide the proletariat with any guarantees, nor can there be “control” of company management by the workers. Only when political power is in the hands of the proletariat will it be able to exercise its control over all social and productive activities.

The slogan that resonated in the demonstrations: “Either their profits or our lives” we can make it our own, in fact it is ours and ours alone because it affirms that this regime, not the Mitzotakis government or the European Commission, but THE CAPITALIST REGIME that pervades all the states in the world and which is based on the pursuit of profit at any cost, is now not only the enemy of the proletariat but of the human species.

For this reason it is necessary that the vanguard elements of the proletariat seriously undertake the path of revolutionary preparation that shuns foolish rebellious aspirations and instead is based on the day to day work of creating workers’ unions which are truly independent of the bourgeois parties, which includes the KKE, the PASOK and also the swarm of little groups of the so-called “left”. The unions we are talking about are those that propose to defend the interests of the workers, aiming above all to unify the proletariat in the daily struggle of its members to defend their living and working conditions, overcoming divisions of work sector, work place, locality, nationality, religion and race. It is also a question of reconnecting with the tradition of left revolutionary Communism; with the International Communist Party. This work will pave the way for the social emancipation of the proletarian class by means of the seizure of political power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.