ANTARSYA US Mission


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.