About The Situation of the Greek Economy
to the 71st international exhibition of Thessaloniki
The organisation of the 71st international exhibition of Thessaloniki is being combined with the consistent projection of the goals of raising the level of competitiveness and innovation which according to the government will safeguard the prosperity of everyone.
The workers are being bombarded with the demand that they accept the measures which diminish their rights, in order to safeguard the competitiveness of the monopolies. This direction of the notorious “New Development Pattern” of the government is projected as the only way to satisfy the needs of the people in the future.
Naturally this anti-people adjustment of economic policy is not a Greek invention! In essence it is the specific adaptation of the basic measures and directions of the EU’s Lisbon Strategy, to fit the needs of our countries bourgeois class. The specific policies with which PASOK agree are leading to an amazing redistribution of socially produced wealth in favour of monopoly capital and at the expense of the peoples income.
The increased investment incentives of the new development law and the decrease of the taxation of the profits of businesses which were approved by government legislation all lead in this direction. It is not by chance that already private companies have made 1,900 applications for state sponsoring of investment plans which surpass a total of 3.5 billion euros.
The government measures which liberalise areas of strategic importance such as energy and the promotion of public-private partnerships support the speeding up of the concentration of capital. Partnerships where the state ensures as a priority the profitability of the private investor, doubly weighing down the worker as a tax payer to begin with and then later as a user of these PPP’s.
The workers, who at the same time are being tested by the freezing of increases of real wages, by price-rices and by unemployment, gain nothing by being trapped in the logic of having common National aims with the ruling class of our country.
They can and must get over this pseudo-dilemma which the bourgeois class invokes, of which method should be used for the increase of the productivity of labour and the profitability of businesses.
The dilemma for which method will increase competitiveness, i.e. by the intensification of labour, or by the use of new technologies, the contemporary management techniques and by technological innovation is false, if of course we take into consideration the interests of the workers. These two roads within the framework of capitalist relations of production lead to an increase in the level of exploitation, in the unpaid labour time of the worker. Simply observing the delay in the increase of the real wage, in relation to the increase in productivity in our country in the last 2 decades, is enough to provide a basis for what we have just claimed.
Each increase in the productivity of labour goes hand in hand with new demands by capital for the suppression of the cost of labour and the undermining of every element of stable and permanent employment. The recent restructurings of labour relations in the public telecommunications company, the public electricity company and in the financial sector are characteristic examples.
Obviously the transformation of our country into a centre for the provision of high-level services and technological innovation cannot form a common “National” aim for both capital and labour. This specific goal is embellished by the fraudulent slogan of the “Knowledge Economy”, which covers up the real aim of the complete adjustment of the structure and content of education to the immediate needs of capital and the creation of an army of flexible, cheap, semi-specialised worker-scientists.
We must also underline that the claim that whatever country shows a significant decrease in its industrial production can play a leading role in technological innovation and in applied research for a long period, is an illusion.
More generally we believe that at the very least anyone who seeks a solution for the people’s interests who considers the free movement of capital, labour and goods ie the framework of the EU and capitalist relations of production, does so in vain.
Within this framework of the anarchy of social production anyone who really believes that the only solution is found in the policy of attracting private investment and the safeguarding of profitability through the continual sacrificing of workers rights.
Nevertheless this road is a dead-end for the people.
The workers must move against the bourgeois strategy and demand the satisfaction of all of their needs by the massive social wealth which is produced today. This is predicated on the release of economic life from the laws of capitalist profit, the socialisation of the basic means of production. Only within this framework, that of the people’s economy, can central planning, based on workers’ control, ensure development in the interests of the people. This road of hope can consolidate education, communication and information technology as social rights and not commodities.
e-mail:cpg@int.kke.gr