By Nikos Mottas.
It was six years
ago, on May 2010, when the then Prime Minister George Papandreou, in
a televised message from the picturesque island of Kastelorizo, was
announcing Greece's entry to the support mechanism of the IMF and the
EU – the 'memorandum phase'. The economic crisis in Greece had
manifested itself a year earlier, in 2009, when it entered in a phase
of rapid recession, following the outbreak of global financial crisis
in 2007-2008. Today, after four bourgeois governments (Papandreou,
Papademos, Samaras, Tsipras) and three memorandums of harsh austerity
packages, we can draw some significant conslusions. What did the
Capitalist Economic Crisis in Greece teach us?
1. The
Source of the Crisis.
Contrary
to various bourgeois interpretations and theories of the economic
crisis (over-consumption, casino-capitalism, etc.), there is one
clear, scientifically proven, reality: Capitalism itself contains in
it's DNA the inevitability of crises. Capitalist production, with
it's contradictory character and anarchy, contains the seed of such
crises. In Capitalist economy lies the motive to
push capitalist reproduction to extremes levels,
to accumulate immense profits, thus
giving a
monetary speculative form to the appropriation of surplus value from
the working class labour.
The devaluation of capital (either commercial or financial) and the
devaluation of labour power (as a commodity), has occurred repeatedly
in the past and will certainly occur in the future for as long as the
exploitative system called 'Capitalism' exists.