Working women and men – Young women and men

WE STRIKE ON JUNE 28-29

TUESDAY JUNE 28 OMONOIA Sq. 10a.m.

TUESDAY JUNE 28 TEMPLE OF OLYMPIC ZEUS 7p.m.

WEDNESDAY JUNE 29 OMOMOIA Sq. 10a.m.

We shall not get down on our knees – We shall not bend our heads

ALL TOGETHER in the 48-hour general pan-Hellenic strike on the days that the new anti-popular memorandum will be discussed in the parliament.

We must “empty” all the factories, construction places, offices, shops, ports, ships, everything.

• So that the condemnation of the antipopular measures will be massive and general and our message to the plutocracy, government and troika will be strong.

• So that this strike will be the starting point for the cancellation of these barbaric measures, through our struggles even if the governmental majority, possibly together with other parties or deputies, will vote them.

• We must rapidly enter the struggle to bring closer the day when we are permanently released from the class exploitation and oppression. Only in that case we will be saved and the country will be permanently saved from bankruptcies, crises, memoranda, lenders and unemployment.

Fellow working women and men,

The developments and the time that this 48-hour strike is taking place – its form and its demands- makes this strike one of the most significant mobilizations of the last decades in our country.

Its success will be a powerful message to every direction:

• That we are determined not to compromise ourselves with the nightmare future that they prepare for us.

• That there is against them, not a “movement of the squares”, a movement that is passive and tame, general and abstract, a movement of some “indignants”, but the class-oriented trade union movement that is organized and strong at every work-place, in all neighbourhoods and villages, and is able to determine the developments in favour of the popular interests.

Working women and men,

WE MUST NOT HAVE ILLUSIONS – WE MUST ACT NOW

The crisis is deep and is further sharpened. It is not the result of thieves and of bad managers; it is not a crisis of debt. These are the symptoms, not the disease.

It is a crisis of over-accumulation of capital and overproduction. It is a crisis of capitalism. It is a crisis that does not only concern Greece, but all the countries. That is why the assault on the labor, popular rights does not have an end.

The private ownership of the means of production is increasingly coming into conflict with the popular needs. The private ownership accumulates huge amounts of capital which are difficult to be invested and refunded; it produces vast quantities of goods which can not be sold, despite the fact that the popular needs are not satisfied.

The way out of the crisis for the benefit of the capital presupposes destruction of the surplus, smashing of the workers’ conquests and rights, making the labor force even cheaper at the lowest possible level, brutal exploitation and massive unemployment.

However, there is another way out for the benefit of the working class and the popular strata. It presupposes change in the correlations, labor power, and popular economy.

NO FEAR AND COMPROMISE

It is the time for workers to reject the false dilemmas. The debt was not created by / and for the welfare of the people. The deficits in the public funds and in the pockets of the popular households are the enormous profits in the vaults of the capitalists. They seek to stop, to obstruct the positive processes that take place among the people.

THE PEOPLE DO NOT OWE ANYTHING TO ANYONE – PLUTOCRACY AND THE BOURGEOIS PARTIES OWE TO THE PEOPLE

• We do not bargain only the withdrawal of the memorandum. We struggle against the policies that give birth to the memoranda.

• We do not only want PASOK (socialdemocrats) to leave and the manager to change again. We want to be finished with the capital and the multinationals whose interests are managed by the several managers.

Capitalism will not become humane, whoever the managers of capitalism in Greece and in Europe might be. It will become increasingly brutal towards the popular strata.

We must not fall into the trap of the referenda. It is about disorientation, a caricature of the supposedly “direct democracy”. In essence, they seek to make the system reactionary and the antipopular policy to be applied with the participation of the people.

WE CAN CHANGE THE SITUATION FOR OUR OWN BENEFIT

It is time of responsibility for all of us and especially for those who reinforced the parties of PASOK (socialdemocrats), N.D. (conservatives) and the parties that support E.U. through their vote and their attitude.

WE ADDRESS to all the women and men who believed and gave power to PASOK and N.D. and their mechanisms in the trade union movement and we call them to make the step today. We call them to join in the common struggle in order to cancel the kneeling of the people. To draw our own perspective.

• We must make our trade unions massive; we must join them in order to transform them into bulwarks of struggle, into castles of resistance against the employers, against the capitalists and the bourgeois state as a whole. All the workers must be massively organized within the trade unions. The basic bulwark of the organization is the assembly of workers and employees in the factory, enterprise, trade union.

• The everyday actions of the workers must be live through the trade union, through the collective process of the general assembly.

• We must throw out of the trade unions the employers-led, the compromised, the labor aristocracy which is the ally and the right hand of the capital. We must elevate within our trade unions militant people who are honest and dedicated to the interests of the working class.

• We have to weaken the parties of PASOK and N.D. and all the parties which are managers of the capital’s interests and defenders of imperialist unions and mechanisms such as European Union and NATO. We have to improve the correlations in our favour and at their expense.

• -We must construct our own popular front, against their effort to unite themselves in order for the measures to be applied, in order for them to take everything away from us and bring us to our knees for many decades.

The future of our children and our own can not be determined by the will of our exploiters. We must gain strength, to impose our own interests.

WITH POWERFUL PAME AND SOCIAL ALLIANCE WE CAN ACHIEVE THAT

We must strengthen PAME (All Workers Militant Front) – PASEVE (Panhellenic Antitrust Coalition of Tradesmen – Craftsmen) – PASY (All Farmers Militant Coalition) – MAS (Students’ Militant Front) – OGE (Federation of Women in Greece), thus strengthening the common action of all the popular strata. We have to create everywhere stable bases of the alliance in every sector, neighbourhood, through popular committees at local and pan-Hellenic level.

This kind of unity and this kind of alliance is beneficial for the working class and our people and not the kind of unity that the capital and its parties try to construct supposedly to save Greece.

A trade union movement and a popular alliance of this kind can

– obstruct the antipopular measures and can overthrow all the antilabor, antipopular laws and measures.

– obstruct the sell out of the public wealth and convert into public property all the public and private wealth which have been done by our own work and is misappropriated by a handful of parasites of the production processes, by a handful of monopolies and capitalists.

– crush the oppressive and the antipopular state and build the state of workers.

We can do it! Because no gear turns without us.