There are no national solutions for Greece, or any other country

There is no Greek solution to Greece’s crisis. There can be only an international solution. However that solution unfolds, the day when a radically different course, a clear alternative to austerity, can no longer be avoided is perhaps drawing closer.

Aware of their dwindling support and the increasing desire among Greeks for a different course, the two “left of center” parties propping up the pro-austerity right-wing government of Greece may yet balk at committing a final suicide.

Four days after the expiration of a deadline handed down by European Union finance ministers, the leaders of Pasok and the Democratic Left were still refusing to fully agree to demands for yet another round of cuts and labor “reforms,” the standard euphemism for eliminating job protections. Those leaders’ reluctance to agree to terms with Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, and their apparent ending of talks (at least for the moment) on October 23, adds more uncertainty to the already conflicting signals coming from the Greek government.

The “troika” — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission — have been unyielding in insisting that Greece impose more austerity on its citizens in exchange for the latest tranche of financing totaling €31.5 billion.

On the one hand, we have Mr. Samaras, head of the conservative New Democracy party, saying at last week’s European Union summit that Greece will be broke next month without the latest loan installment, yet declaring:

“The economy and society are at their limits, the bloodline of the economy that is liquidity is at point zero; unemployment has reached nightmarish levels and every Greek is facing a personal tragedy.”

On the other hand, the Greek finance minister, Yiannis Stournaras, in an October 22 speech to the Greek parliament, declared the country’s nightmare does not reside in the austerity cuts demanded in exchange for fresh loans, but rather in not imposing the cuts:

“The cost for the country will be boundless if we don’t get the €31.5bn installment. … If we don’t get the loan people will go hungry.”

Perhaps the finance minister, one of the “technocrats” who hold most portfolios in the current government, is unaware that Greeks already are starving. Several rounds of imposed austerity has brought only misery to the people of Greece. Here are some of the results:

• Overall unemployment is at 25 percent.
• Youth employment is at 55 percent.
• Average wages have been cut 40 percent.
• Cuts to the health care system of 25 percent since 2009.
• Economy has shrunk 18.4 percent since 2008.

The years of austerity were supposed to turn around the Greek economy, yet the deficits only become larger. The country’s deficit for 2011 is now estimated to have been 9.4% and its debt has widened to 171% of gross domestic product. If more people are thrown out of work and those still employed take home less, then less can be bought and less taxes will be paid.

Although the International Monetary Fund quietly admitted earlier this month that austerity does not work, the troika is holding to a hard line in demanding still more austerity measures. Greece is expected to come up with another €13.5 billion in cuts. The troika demands implementing a six-day working week; further cuts to the minimum wage; further reductions to pensions; “increased flexibility” of work schedules; tens of thousands of government workers and professors be laid off; and income-tax rate gradations flattened, which would increase the tax burden on those who aren’t wealthy.

The latest €31.5 billion installment won’t be going to Greeks; virtually all of it will go to banks. A conservative Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, reported (based on a leak from Pasok) that Germany’s finance ministry demanded that an escrow account be set up that would ship money to the European Central Bank. The proposed escrow account would not only be the recipient of all the bailout money, but Greece’s tax revenues would also sent there.

To put this in plain language, Greece would be reduced to a vassal state in which it had no control over its finances and its tax revenues would be used to pay banks instead of for government functions.

European Union finance ministers had demanded, as long ago as February 2012, that such an escrow account be set up for bailout money, but the extension to Greece’s internal revenue is something new. Kathimerini quoted Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, as declaring:

“In the last program [for Greece] we introduced mechanisms; we need to strengthen those in the sense of control mechanisms, perhaps also automatic stabilizers.”

The “automatic stabilizers” are measures that would automatically further cut Greek government spending beyond whatever is agreed if the deficit grows wider. Given that austerity will lead to less revenue, a wider deficit is the likely outcome. Seeming to draw a line, Democratic Left leader Fotis Kouvelis on October 23, following the impasse in talks with Samaras, added still more contradiction to the government coalition’s signals. Kathimerini reported:

“ ‘If the unacceptable demands of the troika are met, they will increase sackings, unemployment and the recession,’ said Kouvelis, adding that he felt the troika was aiming to ‘flatten’ any working rights that remain.”

It must be asked, however, why Mr. Kouvelis’ Democratic Left, and Pasok, are propping up Mr. Samaras’ pro-austerity government, since such goals have long been in place. Mr. Samaras’ New Democracy — Greece’s leading big-business party — has strong links with European capital and has no basic disagreement with the ruthless austerity being imposed across the continent despite the prime minister’s public worry that the Greek “economy and society are at their limits.”

The waves of strikes that have washed over Greece is a development that Samaras can’t fail to notice. Yet he and his government have nothing to offer other than more austerity; the “troika” certainly has nothing else to offer. A radically different course is necessary. Greece can not survive as an island unto itself — to repeat, there is no Greek solution to Greece’s problems, only an international solution. Financiers and industrialists operate internationally, and working people have no alternative to uniting across borders in order to defend themselves.

That does not, however, mean that Greece can’t adopt new programs internally. The main political current offering a radically different program is Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, the largest opposition party and which currently leads in polls. In a talk last summer, a Syriza representative laid out a different course:

“The reversal of the descent towards degradation and marginalization cannot be achieved without the implementation of a radical program of reforms and transformations of the state, the political system and the entire ‘body’ of the Greek social formation. … [T]he crisis we are living through is a crisis of the system itself, rather than simply a management crisis of the system. Everything must change: the political system, the state, the relation of the citizen with the state and with politics. Consequently, the way out cannot be found in a return to some version of the past. The way out lies in opening up new paths to new productive and consumption paradigms, to new forms of real democracy, to new social arrangements based on equality and solidarity, the respect of human dignity and the environment.”

Among the highlights of Syriza’s program are:

• New taxation policies to lessen the burdens on low-income people and small businesses to make taxation more fair and to eliminate the large problem of the “black market” whereby many Greeks don’t pay taxes.
• Elimination of the “clientist” system that rests on the “inside dealing” of the two-party system (New Democracy and Pasok) through a drastic overhaul of the administrative system and empowerment of citizens through bottom-up and top-down changes.
• New institutions of workers’ control and social control to increase day-to-day democracy and accountability.
• Democratic planning involving the parliament, the scientific community and society at large, linked to specific policies.
• Development of long-term plans to reconstruct the economy on the basis of increased bargaining power for labor; reducing dependence on imports and external borrowing, supporting employment and respecting the environment; and building a society of justice, full employment and solidarity, with an enhanced and equal position in the European and international division of labor.
• Changing the banking system to support the real economy and a targeted productive reconstruction, establishing public control over banking, and recapitalizing banks through the issuing of ordinary voting shares.

Such a program is by no means “revolutionary,” and Syriza supporters don’t claim it is. But such a program (which has much more to it than the above summation) is no mere reform, either; rather, it offers a radically different way of organizing Greek society tomorrow that can be built with the bricks of today. This program also keeps Greece connected to Europe; Greece can’t prosper in isolation.

Present-day Europe, in the form of a European Union dominated by the unaccountable and undemocratic European Central Bank, is not capable of becoming a platform for such a program as outlined by Syriza. Ultimately, Greeks, Europeans and everybody else can only prosper in a democratic system geared toward social good, public accountability and an economy oriented toward full participation and the development of all men and women.

The dismantling of the current structure of the E.U., one-sided trade agreements, international financial institutions and the immense power concentrated in corporate hands will have to be mirrored everywhere. If we are living in a globalized world, then the world’s salvation can only be on a global basis.

You can vote as bankers dictate, but is that democracy?

By Pete Dolack

Voters in Greece sort of voted as they were ordered to by European financiers and banking officials. Or least enough voters did so for them to declare victory.

The stability that financiers and banking officials cherish, however, appears elusive. Greece will have a new austerity government although anti-austerity parties won a majority of votes. For, to put it in the current Greek terminology, the pro-“memorandum” parties earned only 42 percent of the vote between them. Yet those two parties, New Democracy and Pasok, won a majority of seats in Greece’s parliament.

Those parties, along with coalition partner Democratic Left, will govern for now, but they will not rule.

The 50-seat bonus given to the first-place finisher, a peculiarity of Greek electoral law, did what it is intended to do — make the formation of a government easier. Without the bonus, there would have been too much fragmentation and the likelihood of a third election in as many months. As it is, the June 17 re-vote provided a vivid illustration of a bitterly divided country, although the vote was more consolidated than was the May 6 vote.

New Democracy, Greece’s major party of the Right, won 30 percent of the vote this time as opposed to 19 percent a month ago; Syriza, the Coalition of the Radical Left, won 27 percent of the vote as opposed to 17 percent a month ago. At bottom, such consolidation probably reflects more than any other factor the relentless pressure applied by officials of the European Central Bank, the European Union apparatus, the Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank) and finance capital in general. They quickly served notice that the pressure is not off when they demanded the formation of a government to their liking.

Before the results were official, the finance ministers of the countries using the euro as their common currency (referring to themselves as the “Eurogroup”) issued a statement that declared the election “should allow for the formation of a government that will carry the support of the electorate to bring Greece back on a path of sustainable growth. … The Eurogroup therefore looks forward to the swift formation of a new Greek government that will take ownership of the adjustment programme to which Greece and the Eurogroup earlier this year committed themselves. The Eurogroup expects the [lending] institutions to return to Athens as soon as a new government is in place to exchange views with the new government on the way forward and prepare the first review under the second adjustment programme.”

European Union officials were said to be insisting on the largest possible coalition, although New Democracy and Pasok, Greece’s discredited parties who formerly alternated in government, do have a majority of seats by themselves thanks to New Democracy’s 50-seat first-place bonus. Double-talk promises by the two parties that there is no alternative to continuing with the “memorandum” (as the agreement with the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund is called in Greece) was paired with their insisting they would negotiate new terms.

In essence, New Democracy and Pasok said, “Vote for us and we’ll get more loans and better terms.” But let’s parse the finance ministers’ statement above. The key passage is their “expectation” that the “Greek government that will take ownership of the adjustment programme,” making sure to note that Greece has “committed” itself. Minor tinkering with the details aside, that means stick with the (austerity) plan. Considering the highly politicized state of Greeks these days, the number who voted for one of the two austerity parties out of fear induced by the daily warnings of economic armaggedon must surely be higher than those who believed the unrealistic promises. The statement given by the finance ministers isn’t any different from what they, and the financiers whom they represent, had repeatedly delivered in the five weeks between elections.

Banking officials realize they have to “reward” Greeks for voting as they were told, and will make minor concessions, mostly likely by extending some repayment periods. The basic program, however, is not going to change, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel made clear in a proclamation at the Group of 20 summit a day after the election: “There can be no loosening of the reform steps.”

The translation of Chancellor Merkel’s statement is that the “markets” — financiers in the form of investment bankers, bond traders, hedge-fund managers and other speculators — will be making the decisions. That is consistent with her insistence that further “relief” from mounting debt depends on a willingness to subordinate further to financiers and central banks. Chancellor Merkel is not a stubborn holdout nor obsessed with Weimar-era inflation as she is often portrayed; she is simply reminding other national political leaders that any eurozone harmonization will conform to the tightest policy among them and Germany has that tightest policy. The “markets” insist on it.

The choice facing not only Greeks but all peoples living in eurozone countries is to accept the logic of capitalist development or to mount a coordinated, cross-border fightback. Accepting the logic of E.U. capitalism is to accept that financiers and central bankers will continue to impose austerity and the inevitability of relinquishing the power to make political decisions to them so that decisions are made by unaccountable bureaucrats in a supra-national governing structure rather than by national governments subject to elections.

Not that elections are currently decisive. The new Greek government will govern, but it will not rule. That was made clear last year, when former Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou dared to suggest a popular referendum on austerity plans. The Guardian reported at the time that Chancellor Merkel and then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy “summoned” the Greek prime minster to a meeting to inform him there would no referendum. There wasn’t. What did happen was a dictated revision to the Greek constitution mandating that repayment of debt would supersede any other government spending.

Markets aren’t voted upon. But, again, markets are the amalgamation and distillation of the most powerful big capitalists, and it is those interests that will not be put to a referendum. New Democracy and Pasok had already submitted to this power and, having made their commitment, can do nothing other than go on submitting to it.

There are far from the first. Here are two quick examples. When the Sandinistas stood for re-election in 1989, Nicaragua had endured several years of debilitating terrorism and economic sabotage from the Contras and their U.S. organizers. There was no ambiguity here: the United States told Nicaraguans to vote out the Sandinistas or the war will continue. Weary Nicaraguans voted to end the war and for a coalition that dangled promises of U.S. aid in exchange for voting as they were told. The war did end, but no more than a tiny fraction of the promised aid was delivered. Nonetheless, the anti-Sandinista coalition, having made its commitment, carried out the dictated privatization that was a windfall to foreign capitalists because the state properties were sold well below market value — the price for what aid did arrive.

A second example is South Korea. Austerity was imposed on that country as the dissident leader against military dictatorship, Kim Dae-jung, became South Korea’s first opposition president at the end of 1997. Speculators had fueled construction booms and stock-market bubbles across Southeast Asia in the mid-1990s, causing an inflation in the local currencies until it was no longer profitable to speculate on the exchange rates. At that point, speculators pulled their money out, causing the value of those currencies to plunge and triggering the region’s 1997 economic collapse. Countries such as Thailand had to impose harsh austerity, including widespread layoffs, in exchange for loans needed after the collapse. President Kim took office two weeks after South Korea accepted loans with similar conditions, and although the United States had failed in its effort to defeat him, “market discipline” did more to neutralize him and demoralize his supporters than direct U.S. political pressure could have done.

No single country can stand outside the forces of capitalism. Syriza, had it finished first and been able to form a government, could not simply delink Greece. Syriza’s voters unambiguously sought an end to austerity, an end to immiserating an entire country to maintain financiers’ profits and the renouncement of the memorandum including a halt to debt payments. A Syriza-led government could do those things, but would still be forced to maneuver within the parameters of the world capitalist system.

It is estimated that the Greek government is owed 45 billion euros in unpaid taxes. On top of that total, many wealthy Greeks and some middle class Greeks who work in the private sector pay little or no taxes. Greece’s most powerful industrial sector, the shipping industry, pays no taxes and has its tax-free status enshrined in the constitution. New Democracy’s base is the wealthy and others who don’t pay taxes. The party’s backers would not tolerate a change and have a network of links with international capitalists intertwining their interests.

Syriza and the other Left parties in Greece could require them to pay taxes, but the ease with which the wealthy can move their assets and bank accounts to other countries would greatly diminish the effect. Inevitably, nationalization of key industries would move on to the agenda, and that would bring to the fore a serious questioning of the capitalist system.

That system can’t be challenged by any one country, certainly not one as small as Greece. A credible challenge can only be a multi-national challenge. And a challenge to austerity, or the larger system that imposes it, will not take place in the ballot booth.

For the past several weeks, Greece had been on a knife edge, a political Schrödinger’s cat. Accepting the memorandum, rejecting the memorandum. The latest election gives the appearance of acceptance at the same time more voted to reject. A stalemate. But that is not any more stable. Greece can not accept and reject simultaneously. If the choice, finally, is to reject, then the rejection can only be an international rejection. The world’s financiers and industrialists are united across borders; the rest of us must be as well.

We may be Greek working people, British working people, U.S. working people, Argentine working people, and so forth, but we share a common humanity — the basis on which to join together. It is Greece today but it will be you tomorrow.

Greeks and French vote against austerity, but what did they vote for?

By Pete Dolack

The weekend’s election results in Greece and France can be interpreted in different ways. The most obvious reading, and not at all untrue despite its obviousness, is to see them as a continuation of European voters’ rejection of their governments.

Ten of seventeen Eurozone governments have fallen or been voted out in the past fifteen months, and throwing out the incumbents is a natural response to an extended period of economic malaise. So just as Spain voting in its conservative party to punish the socialists’ austerity can’t reasonably be portrayed as a Spanish lurch to the Right — the conservatives, after all, promised to impose more austerity and swiftly became unpopular when they did as they said they would — we should be cautious in proclaiming a French shift to the Left.

Then again, since there is nothing socialist about the French Socialist Party, we have ample reason to avoid saying France has shifted leftward. Europeans clearly are sick of the mindless austerity being imposed on them, but for the most part have not advanced beyond wanting to throw out the incumbents. The surest way to do that is to vote for the main opposition party, but doing so only reinforces the system that is not working.

French voters at least had alternatives to vote for in the first round of their presidential elections, but the Left Front candidate who offered a clear Left alternative to France’s two main parties, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, finished a disappointing fourth with 11 percent of the vote, below what he had been polling. Worse, the far Right candidate, Marine Le Pen, won 18 percent. The Socialist François Hollande and Union for a Popular Movement’s Nicolas Sarkozy earned only about 55 percent of the first-round voting between them — the French demonstrated they are seeking an alternative.

But what alternative? That is as yet unknown. But the strong showings by crypto-fascists in France (Le Pen) and outright fascists in Greece (the Golden Dawn party) demonstrate the danger inherent in allowing economic malaise to continue without a solution or alternative. If the Left is unable to offer a coherent alternative, the extreme Right will threaten to fill the vacuum. Golden Dawn won seven percent of the vote in Greece on Sunday, elevating a fascist party into a national parliament. And if you have doubts about Golden Dawn being fascist, here is an excerpt from a report by Maria Margaronis in The Guardian on May 7:

“Its leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, threw Greek journalists who wouldn’t rise for him out of his press conference and dedicated his victory to ‘the brave boys in the black shirts.’ ‘Those who slander us,’ he barked, and ‘those who betray this country should be afraid: we’re coming.’ Near Kalavryta in the Peloponnese, the site of one of the most terrible Nazi massacres in the 1940s, Golden Dawn graffiti calls for ‘a new Holocaust to clear the filth from the country.’ ”

Greece has enough history with Right-wing extremism that the Golden Dawn’s words can not be dismissed as mere antics. The Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II, conducted through a Greek puppet government, caused hundreds of thousands to die of starvation, and tens of thousands more to be executed. An armed resistance movement, organized by Left groups but widely supported, gradually forced the Nazis to withdraw. A government was installed in Athens by the British, but the Communist-led resistance, having liberated the country, had strong support and could have taken power. Josef Stalin, however, ordered Greece’s Communists not to do so. In return, the British-backed government made mass arrests of resistance fighters while allowing Right-wing gangs to kill others by the thousands. In response, Communists resorted to an armed struggle, reversing themselves in a much less favorable position, touching off a civil war that crushed them and displaced millions, so furious was the counter-insurgency. The British heavily supported the régime it had installed while Stalin simply stood by because he did not want further tensions with his former World War II allies.

Execution, long imprisonment or exile became the fates of many Greeks. The Left was outlawed for three decades, and a period of disastrous Right authoritarian government culminated in the murderous military junta of the “four colonels” from 1967 to 1974. That junta imprisoned several thousand people just in its first month, many of whom were tortured, and imposed a brutal dictatorship. Although this history, completely entangled with Cold War politics, might seem to have no bearing on present-day Greek politics — and definitively rendered armed uprisings by the Left a relic of the past — it left Greece with a legacy of deep social divisions, a weak political center and an archaic class structure compounded by an exemption from paying taxes for the favored.

Considerable force was applied to provide Greece’s capitalists with large advantages. But although in recent decades they have been content to maintain their privileges via traditional legal means, the system they have been reliant on has become unstable. Stirring up nationalism has been a common method for the world’s privileged to maintain power, and nationalistic attitudes below can easily take a violent direction.

When fascists declare an intention to “clear the filth” and threaten violence, they mean it: Fascists speak with fists and weapons, not words and ideas. The showings of Len Pen and Golden Dawn are alarm bells are ringing, loudly. And fascists do not need a majority to seize power — Hitler never received more than a third of the vote and was appointed chancellor by German president Paul von Hindenburg; Mussolini never won more than a tiny percentage of votes. Force elevated them to power, with just enough people susceptible to their simplistic siren songs to provide the shock troops.

The Greek Left — split three ways among the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza), the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Democratic Left — did score much higher than the extreme Right, a combined 31 percent of the vote, although this was at the low end of the 30 to 40 percent they had collectively polled during the past couple of months. Syriza finished second and only two percentage points behind the mainstream Right party, New Democracy. But because of a quirk in the Greek electoral system — otherwise a proportional-representation system requiring only three percent of the vote to enter parliament — the May 6 results rendered it impossible for the Greek Left to form a government by themselves, even if the parties could reconcile their significant differences.

That quirk is that the first-place finisher gets a bonus of 50 extra seats above what it earns from its proportional share of the vote. New Democracy, as the first-place winner, therefore was awarded 108 seats instead of 58 — a massive boost. Put another way, N.D. has more than a third of parliament’s 300 seats despite winning nineteen percent of the vote. That, in theory, made the most likely government to be formed a “grand coalition” of N.D. and the mainstream Left party, the “socialist” Pasok, plus at least one other because New Democracy and Pasok together finished short of a majority.

Such a government, to put it mildly, would be seen as illegitimate by Greeks — more than two-thirds voted against the two ruling parties and their policy of pitiless austerity. But that illegitimacy surely was not the reason that N.D. leader Antonis Samaras handed back his mandate to form a government after one day instead of using all three days he was granted to find willing coalition partners. There are two conclusions that can reasonably be drawn: Samaras does not actually want to govern, or he is calculating that nobody will be able to form a coalition and new elections will be called for June that he believes he will win by a greater margin.

The first scenario in the preceding sentence arises because, in essence, Samaras would have his bluffed called were he to become prime minister. The N.D. is Greece’s Big Business party, and has consistently boosted those interests while expanding its base through policies that enable Greece’s middle class professionals to avoid paying taxes the same as the rich and powerful. But its support, in practice, for austerity are a direct contrast to its verbal claims of opposition to austerity, a contradiction exposed by its “solution” to Greece’s crisis: tax cuts for businesses. The Big Business backers of New Democracy are too connected with business and financial interests elsewhere in Europe to abrogate the austerity agreements with the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Greeks voted against austerity. What did they vote for? That is not nearly so easy to answer.

Syriza, itself a coalition of Trotskyist, Maoist, Eurocommunist and other non-orthodox communist Leftists, has called for a coalition with the KKE and the Democratic Left, in contrast to the orthodox communist KKE that eschews working with other parties and the moderate Democratic Left that, during the electoral campaign, sought a coalition only on its terms. As Syriza won more votes than KKE and the Democratic Left combined, and as the party most willing to join hands with other anti-austerity parties, it might develop into a home for Greeks sick of austerity and willing to throw off the shackles of European Union financiers.

Syriza contains differing opinions on retaining the euro (although its leader, Alexis Tsipras, favors remaining in the eurozone) and definitively advocates remaining within the E.U. but with a thorough restructuring. Syriza demands a suspension in debt payments until the economy recovers, followed by a “selective” default; redistribution of wealth; and a re-orientation of priorities toward growth-inducing investment. A day after Syriza’s second-place finish, as multi-sided negotiations to form a government began, Tsipras told Athens News:

“We strongly believe that the country’s salvation will achieved through the rejection of these barbaric measures, through relief from recession and the looting of pensions and salaries, through the cancelation of austerity measures and their replacement with measures to boost the economy and tax built-up wealth so that funds are found to help the weaker sections (of society). … Our message of our people to European leadership is clear, the Greek people last night rejected the policy of austerity, as it is being rejected by all the peoples of Europe. The time has come for it to be withdrawn.”

Having been given the mandate to form a government as the leader of the second-place finisher after Samaras said he is unable to form one, the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported that Tsipras’ coalition negotiations will center on these demands:

• The immediate cancellation of all impending measures that will impoverish Greeks further, such as cuts to pensions and salaries.
• The immediate cancellation of all impending measures that undermine fundamental workers’ rights, such as the abolition of collective labor agreements.
• Reform of the electoral law and a general overhaul of the political system.
• An investigation into Greek banks, and the immediate publication of the audit performed on the Greek banking sector by BlackRock.
• The setting up of an international auditing committee to investigate the causes of Greece’s public deficit, with a moratorium on all debt servicing until the findings of the audit are published.

The “policy of austerity” has unquestionably suffered a “crushing defeat,” but without any consensus among Greeks as to what the alternative should be. Regardless of whether Greece leaves the eurozone and re-adopts its former national currency, the drachma, Greece’s future is in Europe. There is no Greek solution to Greece’s crisis, nor is there a French solution to France’s stagnation, nor a national solution to any other country’s economic malaise.

The only way forward for Europe is for a European Union radically different from the one that exists — an E.U. that is democratic and designed to benefit all peoples, not a dictatorial bureaucracy interested only in maintaining the fabulous wealth of a capitalist elite, in particular financiers, at the cost of everybody else.

In previous posts, I have summarized programs proposed by various economists, some envisioning Greece remaining in the eurozone and some envisioning Greece dropping the euro and returning to the drachma. What these programs have in common is a vision of a European-wide economic restructuring.

To summarize some of these ideas: The E.U. should be leveraged to internationalize the resistance of working people; full employment demanded as an explicit goal; banks should become publicly owned and democratically controlled so that capital is directed toward socially useful investment instead of speculation; a highly progressive taxation system should be coordinated at the E.U. level; wages raised to account for improved productivity that has, for three decades, gone to capitalists; governments should default at least some of their debts to banks; bank deposits should be guaranteed; and there should be more investment in education to enhance future productivity.

Some of these, or at least moderate versions of some of these, are articulated by the Greek Left. These are, however, yet to be articulated by European politicians elsewhere. Politicians such as Hollande argue for reforms within the current E.U. framework, not a break from that framework or even a strong questioning as to why ensuring profits to bond holders and speculators should be the highest principle of Europe and that entire countries should be immiserated for it.

Although a reformist, it can be said that Hollande came to advocate strong reforms, winning backing for ideas such as including a 75 percent tax rate on France’s highest earners, the hiring of new teachers and social spending to stimulate the economy. Sarkozy, on the other hand, dangerously adopted some of the arguments of Le Pen and her National Front party in a craven attempt to win her voters — thereby giving legitimacy to extremists who scapegoat immigrants and attack intellectuals. Such programs (and its equivalents elsewhere, including the “tea party” in the United States and Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands) are demagogic attempts to deflect attention from the structural issues underlying economic malaise and the vast wealth inequalities that are destabilizing society. Although these have the appearance of grassroots “populist” movements, they are always supported by Big Business interests and are often, as is case with the “tea party,” lavishly funded by those interests.

Elections for the French parliament occur in mid-June, and that might provide more guidance as to where France is going. But the mainstream Center-Left governments of Europe that have imposed austerity have fallen just the same as Center-Right governments doing the same. It is possible that a spell of both applying roughly similar austerity policies will finally spark the rupture that is necessary. If that proves to be so, then we will be able to look back and say that Greece — having rejected both its major parties — arrived first. But a systemic break with the capitalist logic of austerity can only be an international movement: It is indisputable that “socialism in one country” can’t survive a hostile capitalist world, and a small country such as Greece all the more so could not survive as a socialist island in a capitalist Europe.

Inevitably, a post-capitalist Europe would be an example for the rest of the world, not excepting other advanced capitalist countries. I want to be clear here that I — and those whom I have summarized here and in previous posts — are advocating a democratic system, one much more democratic than currently exists. The 20th century’s top-down, state-owned and -controlled economic system that developed in the Soviet Union failed, and failed for real reasons — sufficient reasons can be found internally. Rather, what is advocated is cooperation in a decentralized economy.

Political democracy is not possible without economic democracy. Economic democracy is impossible without production being oriented toward human, community and social needs rather than private accumulation of capital. Everybody who contributes to production earns a share of the proceeds — in wages and whatever other form is appropriate — and everybody should be entitled to have a say in what is produced, how it is produced and how it is distributed, and collective decisions in turn should be made with community involvement.

A Left that can articulate a democratic vision of a better world can succeed. The signs are around us: the rapid assent of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, the electoral success of the Greek Left, the mounting fury around the world at a rigged capitalist system that is failing humanity. But a better world can only be made through international struggle and a radical vision of economic and political democracy. Such a task will not be easy: The rulers of the capitalist world have a panoply of weapons at their disposal (control of the workplace, the ability to fund groups to do their ideological bidding, seemingly limitless budgets for police and militaries among them) and a historical willingness to fund extreme Right movements when feeling threatened.

The breakthroughs of the extreme Right in France and Greece over the weekend are sober reminders that a descent into barbarism and dictatorship under conditions of scarcity is also a possible future if we do not find a way out of the ongoing economic malaise.