Front of the Anticapitalist, Revolutionary, Communist Left and Radical Ecology in Greece
ANT.AR.SY.A Unites States was established in order to address the pressing need to:
- build solidarity with the struggles of Greek people, present them and make them visible outside Greece, and contextualize them with other similar struggles internationally.
- provide a political platform for Greeks and non-Greeks in the United States who are interested in collaborating on the basis of an anti-capitalist, revolutionary, radical Left agenda.
- disseminate information and news on the situation in Greece from an anti-capitalist, anti-EU, anti-imperialist, revolutionary, radical left perspective.
- join forces with local activist political movements of the revolutionary left and assume a more in-depth intervention in multiple fronts, such as democratic, anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, LGBT rights, anti-EU, environmental, etc.
- provide theoretical and political analysis and debate around the pressing issues surrounding the crisis of capitalism internationally, and in Greece, in particular.
Context
Since 2008, the ongoing
global capitalist crisis has been highlighting the irrational and destructive
character of the system in place. The crisis in Greece, represents in the
context of the Eurozone asymmetry, the crystallization of an international
crisis while it also bears the particularities, and problems of the Greek
system. The crisis has served as a platform for further restructuring of the
state and society along market lines “downsizing” the country and profoundly
changing its social and economic fabric.
The current crisis in
Greece, as the most recent but also historically unprecedented neoliberal
experiment on a global scale, embodies the deeper and insurmountable
contradictions of capitalism. It is commonplace for dominant economies to shift
the crisis to weak ones by setting them up as warning examples, with lenders
pressuring them through usurious terms, and deforming them in the Procrustean
bed of the International Monetary Fund. At the same time, the European Union is
developing into a mechanism for breaking down and dissolving popular
sovereignty imposing, in the process, an extreme antidemocratic regime across
Europe.
Four years after the first
memorandum, and despite the government’s assertions that recession is about to
be over and development is on the way, the Greek economy remains in deep
recession and without any visible prospect or signs of progress. The Greek debt is by no means viable and the
inability to pay it back will generate more austerity measures, the sellout of
national resources and wealth, serious environmental destruction in the name of
profit and further immiseration, impoverishment and exploitation of the
population. The privatization program of a neo-colonial type currently under
way, has converted Greece into a marketable commodity for sale. Through the
implementation of an extreme neoliberal agenda with exhausting, cutthroat
austerity measures, the economy has been relegated to continuous stagnation. At
the same time, unemployment rates climbing at a record high (reaching close to
30%), and increasing loss of income (31% of Greeks live on the verge of
poverty) are shaping the conditions for permanent impoverishment. Draconian
cuts in wages and pensions, massive layoffs and the violation of labor laws and
vested rights, such as the right to collective bargaining, lead working people
to a hostage situation where they have no alternative but to become “flexible
labor.” The already inadequate social and welfare state is being
abolished.
In these exploitative
conditions, we are further witnessing widespread corruption, heightened
militarization and policing, the rise of fascism and racism, the curtailment of
civic liberties, the criminalization of dissent, a generalized assault on
democracy and the imposition of an authoritarian rule.
Against this landscape
currently taking shape, we envision a different world and we are willing and
ready to fight for it alongside, and in solidarity with the millions of people all
around the world who take the streets, raise their voices and give their lives
for freedom, equality, justice and popular sovereignty.