Limits of Social-Democracy

The Greek tragedy is just the antepenultimate episode of the always sad and lamentable story of the historical Social Democracy, that is to say the bourgeois party for workers and farmers, this social force in charge of emptying popular movements of struggle from their subversive substance, of diverting their perspectives of radical transformation of the world onto a simple reform, and finally of making wage-earners falling back into ranks of social peace. The camp of Social Democracy materializes at two levels: by setting up a militant structure external to working class, a structure directly stemming from leftist and progressive factions of the bourgeois class on the one hand, and by development of a reformist ideological corpus generated within the very working class and based on the weaknesses, limitations and illusions of the struggle on the other hand, all that in a dialectical back-and-forth movement between both.

So what's going on in Greece is nothing very different from what the very "radical" Workers Party of Brazil (led by the reformist Lula da Silva and the former "guerrilla" Dilma Roussef) achieved in recent years in terms of attacks on workers’ and peasants’ living conditions; what by the way provoked the June 2013 revolt against austerity and misery.

Historically people got used to the "betrayals" of Capital's left and far left (even if only gullible fools believing that any bourgeois alternative will solve the fundamental problems of humanity). Already in 1871, during the significant proletarian movement known as the "Paris Commune", the left and the far left took over its leadership and set up a government that had never taken any revolutionary measure to counter the bourgeois forces of Versailles or to internationally extend the militant efforts underway. All the measures of this "Paris Commune's government" had resulted to only one thing: disarming (both military and programmatic) of the rebels confronted with historical enemy that could after it had been defeated for a short time, reconstruct itself...

Going back to 1914, one can notice the same phenomenon when leftists, who had declared to be openly opposed to war, changed the side before one could say knife. For example, the French "revolutionary socialist" militant Gustave Herve who had originally written in the newspaper La Guerre Sociale ("The Social War") that workers have to "plant the national flag on the dunghill" quickly joined the defense of "the country in danger"... Ditto for the French anarcho-syndicalist CGT which after years of antimilitarist propaganda joined in serried ranks of war supporters and sacred union, allowing thus the feasibility of general mobilization or at least contributing to its smooth course... In 1917, while soldiers were getting increasingly angry on all fronts against the capitalist slaughter, the "Bolshevik Party" went at the head of the war refusal movement in order to better bring it in the dead end of a "radical" change of government, toppling the reign of the millennial Tsar, and it ultimately participated in the reconstruction of the capitalist State in Russia, roughly shaken by working class in struggle, what resulted in Stalinism and its "socialism in one country".

What's really the point is the practical implementation of a programme to contain popular movements, not only in Greece but also in other parts of Europe where Capital needs to hit even harder and to discipline a surplus labour power, to always more divide working people into different categories, whites and "darkies", nationals and migrants, the good hard-working citizens who accept the austerity without too much fuss and those who raise their heads, those who show their teeth and organize, struggle, revolt... And in this sense, Greece is a social laboratory for the multinationals and their local commission agents.

Ordinary people all over the world are condemned to always get their aspirations smashed... If the law-abiding and pacified workers in Europe and North America, addicted to always more terrorist State campaigns of citizenship attitude development, believe to escape their fate without struggling, it is kidding themselves as never before...

There will have to put an end to all these parliamentary illusions, about the game of political parties, but also that of trade unions which do nothing but saving social peace and negotiate the sale of labor power to the highest bidder.

Against the capitalist catastrophe made of more misery, austerity, repression and wars, against the environmental destruction of the planet generated by a social relation that does not care about humans, there is no other alternative but the revolutionary struggle to the death for the destruction of what destroys people.  

[contributed]

Frontier
Vol. 48, No. 8, Aug 30 - Sep 5, 2015