Greece: The Troika Murdered the Youth! Let the Tragedy Not Go Unpunished!

Author: Dorian González

Two years ago, 57 people tragically lost their lives on the railway tracks in Greece, in what has come to be known as the largest “accident” in the country’s history. On the second anniversary of this tragedy, hundreds of thousands of young people took to the streets to demand justice for the lives lost. The final report ruled that the main causes of this event were “human error, outdated structures, and system failures.”

Human error fills the thousands upon thousands of reports on workplace accidents and tragedies such as the one that occurred in Greece. It is estimated that these causes account for 80% to 90% of such events. However, this clearly demonstrates an indiscriminate condition of incidents that are ultimately declared, in their vast majority, as preventable. In 2023, Greek railway workers denounced the appalling conditions under which they were forced to work, with minimal training and an obsolete system.

These conditions, denounced for more than 30 years, were aggravated by the Greek financial crisis of 2010, which caused millions of job losses, hunger, and dozens of general strikes throughout the country. For more than a decade, workers—and especially Greek youth—have taken to the streets against all the austerity policies demanded by the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, and IMF) so that the country could access further international loans. Courage has not been lacking among the Greek proletariat to bring down this system of exploitation, plunder, and corruption; on the contrary, it has been their political leaders who ended up tying the impoverished masses to the decomposed bourgeois State.

It was in 2013 that the Greek government launched the privatization of the operator TRAINOSE (now Hellenic Train S.A.) as part of the demands of European financiers to make Greece a “viable” country, while the rest of the transport infrastructure was auctioned off. In this way, control of passenger and freight transport was handed over to the Italian company Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane. In 2017, the European Commission ratified that this “aid” was in accordance with state aid to Greece in order to “provide a better service to Greek passengers and business clients.” An adjustment that has ultimately been paid for by the majority of the population through the generalized rise in the cost of living and mass unemployment. Hellenic Train S.A.) como parte de las exigencias de los financistas europeos para hacer de Grecia un país “viable” mientras se remataba la demás infraestructura de transporte. De esta manera, el control de trasporte de pasajeros y de carga quedó en manos de la italiana Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane. En 2017, la Comisión Europea ratificaba que esta “ayuda” se encontraba en acuerdo con las ayudas estatales hacia Grecia para “prestar un mejor servicio a los pasajeros griegos y a los clientes empresariales”. Un ajuste que ha terminado pagando la mayoría de la población con el encarecimiento generalizado del costo de vida y desempleo masivo.

Out of these crises emerged Syriza on the left, and New Democracy and Golden Dawn on the right, as the main tools of the bourgeoisie to contain and suffocate the revolutionary methods of the Greek proletariat. All reformism bet on the Popular Front headed by Tsipras to save capitalism from its inevitable crises. PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement), associated with Yanis Varoufakis and which governed the country for decades, also served this dirty task within the ranks of the workers’ movement, together with a series of Stalinists and false Trotskyists. Little remains today of these reformists, and since 2019 the country has been governed by the bourgeois party New Democracy.

Greece’s subordination to the Troika’s memoranda marks the condition of domination exercised by foreign capital over the Hellenic country. From Syriza to Golden Dawn, all have served as pillars of a regime tutored by international creditors. Even the function of fascism in a backward country like Greece is to subordinate itself to foreign powers and their financial capital. Lessons such as these appear even more clearly in Ukraine’s situation vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism. Greece is yet another field of struggle for foreign capital, leaving very little room for maneuver for the local bourgeoisie.

If there is one thing that must be clear from this entire Greek experience, it is that the crisis of capitalism inevitably produces sharper revolutionary struggles, but in order to defeat the bourgeois regime and its State, a revolutionary political leadership is necessary—one capable of disputing the leadership of the struggle with reformism. The passivity of reformism pushes the middle sectors toward the exit offered by fascism; history shows that this tool will only be used by the bourgeoisie as a last resort to crush the masses or prevent revolution. The proletariat, for its part, needs a Marxist leadership that clarifies the path forward and leads the destruction of the State’s repressive apparatus.

Today, the streets are once again filled with proletarian youth who recognize themselves in the mostly young people who died on the railway tracks two years ago. This demonstrates that the working class has not been defeated, nor has it ceased to exist, but remains the only class capable of carrying this system to its grave. Hungry proletarian youth take to the streets in search of new political alternatives, but the majority of so-called proletarian parties end up capitulating and subordinating themselves to the bourgeois State.

The sell-off of resources and national infrastructure within the package imposed by financial capital claims the lives of youth. The majority of tragedies under capitalism are caused by exhaustion and the inhuman exploitation of labor power, the waste of resources to fill the pockets of businessmen, and the diversion of funds to corrupt officials who profit from the financial plunder of the nation. Here lie the real causes of death in a system that is falling apart and is sustained by reformists incapable of making “more humane” a system that produces only death and misery worldwide.

All parties that have governed and remain tied to the bourgeois State bear responsibility for the tragedy of two years ago, and today they once again work to subordinate the struggle in the streets. The necessary path for the Greek proletariat is the construction of its own organs of struggle to control the expropriation of transport and other productive branches, in order to provide jobs for the unemployed. To reject the payment of the debt to creditors, because that money has served only to increase the profits of foreign capital and to take the lives of youth. These organs must prepare for a more decisive struggle to bring down the regime, setting up self-defense committees and opening the road to socialist revolution in Greece and throughout Europe.

These measures can only be consciously advanced by a revolutionary party capable of winning the support of the masses and fighting with an internationalist orientation. The present moment in Europe demands it: the industrial proletariat, the European proletariat, must rise again in the face of new political crises on the continent. Unity with the Arab, Asian, African, and Latin American proletariat is the necessary condition to guarantee a new path.

Let us refound the Fourth International!

Let the world socialist revolution advance!