Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

Two articles that at first reading seem to take opposite approaches in fact complement each other in a clear finding that unilateral fiscal cuts have failed as a solution for dealing with the Eurozone debt crisis. These are the article by Stefan Kaiser in the German weekly magazine “Spiegel”, entitled «Time to put an end to the farce of Greece’s rescue», and the article by Jean Pisani Ferry in the Financial Times, entitled «Europe’s self-destructive austerity». In the first article, taking Greece as the occasion (it is not described, as usual, as a “special case”), it is pointed out that harsh fiscal austerity has trapped the country in recession and forces the two sides to adopt rhetoric that does not correspond to reality: on the one hand, the lenders use harsh language and put forward insulting proposals, such as the proposal for a budget commissioner, in order to reassure their own public opinion that they control the situation; on the other hand, the borrowing country signs up to targets it knows it cannot meet. The wording of the article does not exclude applying its conclusions also to the other countries with a debt crisis, inside and outside the Temporary Mechanism. In the second article, unilateral austerity policies are presented as a strategic risk for the whole of Europe, since the countries of the South together with France represent more than 50% of the Eurozone’s GDP. The observation that the commitments to limit the deficit by 2013 undertaken by France and Spain are unrealistic is crucial. The above approaches carry particular weight because they are being published in the shadow of the harsh Merkel-Sarkozy rhetoric toward Athens, rhetoric intended to cover the strategic embarrassment of the two leaders over the course of the crisis in the Eurozone. In recent months the Eurozone has faced an incredible vicious circle of political deterioration of the crisis: in December an unworkable and ineffective strengthened Stability Pact was adopted, in the expectation that it would make it easier for the German government to accept the issuance of eurobonds and the path toward quantitative easing and controlled inflation. This is the hard reality that Berlin pretends to ignore: acceptance of its destructive obsession with unilateral fiscal austerity comes from the expectation of its partners that austerity, with the side effects it has already accumulated, can become the driving force for a radical change of policy. All of the above is a dangerous and borderline game that risks igniting a pan-European social explosion and political destabilization that will flatten all the achievements of consensus and stability of the post-war period and will cause tremors reminiscent of the 1930s. Thus, in the name of the syndrome of Weimar, supposedly the hard core of the German ideological obsession with fiscal discipline, all the conditions of stability on the Old Continent after 1949 are threatened.

The syndrome of Weimar is more pretext and alibi, since the German problem today has chiefly a geopolitical dimension: as Wolfgang Munchau aptly points out, Germany is too large to be fully bound within a European framework and too small to stand alone in global competition. At the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, the E.U. and the Eurozone are in a precarious balance, since any accident may have uncontrollable side effects. We must unfortunately admit that we live in a Europe without a future, whose peoples are deliberately and methodically sinking into the merciless, dead-end austerity imposed on them by the international usury of the markets. It is self-evident that the debt crisis dissolves social cohesion. The policy of austerity, instead of reducing public debt, increases it. Our usurious lenders, after humiliating us, lend to us so that we may pay our loans, which keep increasing. A vicious circle baptized as the salvation of the country. It is generally admitted that the aid packages are not a solution. Greece needs a serious investment plan, as happened with Germany in the 1950s. Proposals for overcoming the crisis had been formulated even before our unconditional surrender to the IMF and to Merkel by GAP – KOSTARIKA. Let us not name names; otherwise, everyone knows it and we pretend it is our little secret. The economists who formulated them were gradually cut off from television and their voices disappeared because they spoke bitter truths that the system’s lackeys do not forgive. Yet even today there is still time if, God forbid, there is consent from our executioner-lenders. That is, it may be agreed that the total debt be lifted and that a five-year grace period be granted. During that time, if we tightened our belt and attempted the necessary structural changes, we would reach a surplus budget. Then we could speak about the beginning of servicing the real, renegotiable public debt. Was this not what defeated, destroyed and at the same time humiliated Germany did in the 1950s? At the time when it had made a disgrace of itself after first drowning the world in blood. Today, however, economically powerful usurer Germany, while it is shaken by the resignation of its president Wulff for corruption, shows us its ugly face and thirsts to watch Grand Guignol scenes from the Occupation. Back then, the dead from cold and hunger were collected with municipal carts, a situation into which the fascist hordes of the Nazis had brought us after plundering and destroying the country [Nomika - Epilekta “bankruptcy and moral debt”]. The salvation of peoples endangered by memoranda and restrictions lies only in overthrow. Like the first, the second memorandum too was not designed to achieve its declared aims (the reduction of fiscal deficits), but to set the institutional and economic framework so that society may be restructured in a reactionary direction. In other words, so that wealth may be accumulated in few hands. So that profits and employer despotism may be strengthened. So that labor and social rights may be dismantled. So that the “flexibility” of labor may increase. For capitalist power, recession is chosen as a strategy of clearing away (individual capitals that are insufficiently utilized, but also the social institutions that protect labor) and of redistribution (of income and power in favor of the bourgeois order). The worsening of the crisis constitutes the destruction of every obstacle to competitiveness, so that the rate of profit may move upward again and capital accumulation may accelerate again, even starting from a smaller total production. It is inconceivable: the wage in the private sector was cleaned out to 586 euros gross! With the net 450, an amount with which the average working Greek is called upon to “live or die”. For civilized (?) Europeans, life and dignity are goods of trivial value! The strategy of capital is therefore the devaluation of the purchasing power of wage earners and, to achieve that objective, rising unemployment is a prerequisite. Of course, all things also have their opposite side. If the majority of workers enter a condition of insecurity, then the reproduction of capital also becomes insecure, because capital is a social relation; its existence rests on the smooth reproduction (and consent) of labor. The Memorandum therefore constitutes a strategic way out of the crisis of capitalism. Yet it is not the only strategic way out, as its supporters claim. In reality there are two opposite directions. On the one hand, the recovery of profitability by every means; on the other, social solidarity and the prioritization of social change. The Memorandum is the plan for a society without public services, within which schools, hospitals and medical centers are demolished, health becomes a privilege of the rich, vulnerable populations are destined for a planned extermination, while those who still have a job are condemned to extreme forms of labor insecurity and economic impoverishment. The grim situation is realistically described by the French intellectuals who published in Liberation the text «Save the Greek People from Their Saviors». And they continue that one in two young Greeks is unemployed, 25,000 homeless people wander the streets of Athens, 30% of the population is below the poverty line, thousands of families are forced to put their children in institutions so that they do not die of hunger and cold, and the newly poor and refugees fight over trash bins in public spaces. Harsh scenes of everyday life compatible with the memoranda, scenes that break your heart. The question I read and that seriously troubles me is: a miserable end or misery without end? Each person takes a position according to his strength and endurance. I always admired the great Rigas: «Better one hour of free life than 40 years of slavery, memoranda and occupation». Let us remember the Icelanders for a moment, even if they are only a handful of people. In 2009, after the country’s financial collapse, they drove the politicians away with stones while besieging parliament. The small Icelandic people decided not to pay the debt loaded onto them by the British and Dutch banks after the collapse of the Icelandic banks. Today, regardless of its size, Iceland proves that there is life after debt. It refused to enter the IMF hearse, and now the rating agencies are upgrading the country’s creditworthiness, which means that Iceland is considered safe for investment. We are safely heading for the rocks. Grit is not produced in test tubes. You either have it or you do not. Are there 300,000 Icelanders in Greece, or even 300 Spartans to guard Thermopylae? The 700 Thespians wait with anguish and self-denial to sacrifice themselves voluntarily and freely, «obeying their words», even if history had forgotten them. These are the real heroes, without «with it or on it»! The life of the majority is being demolished, which means that the Memorandum has won significant battles. It will also win the (social) war if the movements and the forces of labor do not overthrow it. For its overthrow, popular mobilizations must impose Democracy and an alternative government. A government that will prioritize social needs over the financial markets and over the compulsion for the continuous increase of the profitability of capital. The logic of social needs and social control constitutes an alternative project against “competitiveness” and profit. On that basis a radically different society can become possible. This is what I. Milios points out… Postscript. Germany, you who ...were teaching others. The corruption scandal that led to the resignation of German president Christian Wulff is a serious blow to Merkel’s facade. She was the one who stubbornly insisted on the election of the two presidents who resigned within two years! Why? Beyond that, the prestige and credibility of a country that wants to direct Europe’s fate are directly damaged, while it wags a threatening finger at the disobedient lazy people of the corrupt South. And not only that. Germany itself has many times seen its political elite embezzle public money or offer favors, not without compensation, to economic titans. What corruption is the uncultivated, yet forgetful and arrogant, “honorable” Mrs. Merkel talking about? Has she forgotten the scandal of Friedrich Karl Flick, revealed in the 1980s? Flick was the richest German and for many years indiscriminately financed ALL the political parties of Germany in exchange for tax exemptions worth hundreds of millions of marks! Among the crooks was the great Helmut Kohl, who, when asked in parliament whether he had taken money, answered with the proverbial “I do not remember”. A worthy child of German culture was the absentee, the chief crook, Christoforakos, who greased the whole of Greece. Mrs. Merkel, despite the recent apology you made for the racist crimes that took place and continue to take place in your country, however economically powerful you may be, YOU too are corrupt, and we simply say: shame on you! Will you not stop the rotten talk, Mrs. Merkel, and see to cleaning your own house from the stench of corruption? 300,000,000 marks were found in secret accounts in Switzerland as “financing” for Kohl’s Christian Democrats; you were probably away on a trip! Why do you not instead describe to us the buffooneries that take place at the conferences of the largest German parties, which have turned into industrial exhibitions? Last year you posed at the stand of the energy giant Vatternfall, and I do not believe that at the same time you were also giving a lecture about the corrupt South. By the way, your pride, Siemens, which the Americans have condemned to pay compensation, has it perhaps internationally disgraced you? Unfortunately the Germans do not have the moral stature and are not “entitled to speak”, and above all not to accuse everyone else of corruption, because they themselves are more corrupt. They simply cover their scandals with their economic power. Here the right of the stronger strictly applies. As for the rest of us, “woe to the vanquished”!