Greece's “new normal”

Submitted by Matthew on 11 December, 2013 - 11:52

On Sunday 1 December, a 13 year old girl died in the Xirokrini district of Thessaloniki (north-east Greece), where she lived with her unemployed mother.

Originally from Serbia, the girl had lived in Thessaloniki for the last ten years. Her mother struggled along by doing casual jobs such as cleaning houses and washing dishes in restaurants.

In recent months the jobs ran out. According to neighbours, the mother and daughter had lived for the last quarter without electricity. It had been cut off because of their inability to pay.

On Sunday the mother lit a brazier to warm the flat. Around 10 pm she fainted. When she regained consciousness, she saw her daughter unconscious. In fact she was dead.

According to the coroner, the girl was probably poisoned by gases from the brazier. The mother was arrested and charged with manslaughter, but then released.

Meanwhile, however, the police discovered that she is living illegally in the country...

The number of household electricity cut-offs due to unpaid bills has increased. An alarming number of families are left without electricity or any form of safe heating at the beginning of winter.

Also recently, a 55-year old woman, also of Serbian origin, drowned in her home in the city centre of Argos (in the Peleponnese).

When the local rivers flooded, flood relief failed to work due to cut backs and lack of funding. The council does not have the staff necessary to operate the machines.

When wages, pensions and benefits are cut, when unemployment is 30%, such things are not just accidents. Or they are inevitable accidents.

In March two young university students in Larisa died when poisoned by fumes from a brazier. Then, government representatives blamed “lack of education”, and not the fuel poverty and destitution which are the root case.

The greatest danger in Greece today is for us to get accustomed to the blackness and barbarism that surrounds our daily lives.

The greatest danger, ultimately, is not to have squares and parks filled with homeless people. It is not to have to work for 300 and 400 euros per month.

It is not having people searching in trash bins for something to eat and forming long queues at soup kitchens; or a million workers being owed between one to 12 months’ arrears of wages; or 1.5 million unemployed people living in conditions of poverty and depression.

The greatest danger is of us as a society learning to live with such conditions and accept that they are “normal”.

If the government gets us to accept that it is normal for people to die from braziers, for the streets to be filled with homeless and beggars, for poverty, destitution, and suicides to be widespread, then the government will have crushed our spirits as well as our material conditions.

As Albert Camus wrote in his book The Plague, there is something worse than the plague. That is getting accustomed to the plague.

That half a century ago people got to the moon, but now, when we have unprecedented scientific and technological capacities, half of humanity cannot afford good food, is not “normal”.

That in the country with the richest ship owners in the world, 68% of Greeks live under the poverty line is not “normal”.

It is not “normal” that a thousand families a day have their electricity cut off.

Memorandum policies have turned the clock back decades for the working-class movement, Greeks and immigrants alike. However, as always, the migrants are the first and the worst hit.

This should be an alarm for the working-class movement and the left.

The left should demand that the government takes responsibility for the consequences of its policies and immediately tackle the huge gaps in infrastructure and flood protection work. We should fight for the abolition of the excise duty and VAT on fuel.

The right to heating and cheap electricity and oil are non-negotiable.

We need a strong resistance movement which will claim and fight for effective and unhindered access for all households in cheap electricity and heating oil, which will contribute to the overthrow of the government and its memorandum politics.

We should demand that no home be left without electricity .

In 2014 measures already initiated by the previous agreements with the Troika will be implemented, including massive layoffs in the public sector. All that brings nearer the moment of a new round of anti-working class measures in the probable third Memorandum which will accompany the new borrowing to cover the Greek government’s financing “gap” for the three years from 2014 to 2016.

If the solutions are left to the “automatic workings” of the market , then the next two or three generations of workers will be devastated. The gains of the labour movement, and its general tradition and culture, will be flattened.

That is the actual program of Merkollande and SamaroVenizelos. It is, however, also the material base for the search for radical solutions by the working class.

The promise of the government of the left must be directly linked with a commitment to specific ruptures (cancellation of the memorandum and its austerity policies) and for restoration of conditions (collective-bargaining agreements, wages and pensions, education, health care, heating and electricity.

Even those modest commitments cannot be achieved by a class “consensus”. They will be possible only through measures taken by a government of the left.

This is the critical programmatic issue on which Syriza and the rest of the left must respond urgently.

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