Costas Isychos, is the defence and foreign policy spokesperson of the broad left SYRIZA party in Greece. This is an edited version of comments he made at a forum in Melbourne on April 8.
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I want to give you some idea of what has been happening in Greece since the world economic crisis started in 2008. This is a nightmare that started for humanity when the true identity of the banking and financial system appeared to the world.
Banks are not just houses where you deposit money and you get loans. Banks in the last 20 or 30 years have changed. In Greece, we say there is a “bank democracy” instead of a people’s democracy.
In Greece we have lived through a unique experiment, which is now being extended through southern Europe, in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland.
These countries all have the same recipe, the International Monetary Fund’s recipe. They told us there is only one road — keep on getting money from the banks and keep giving your country to us, along with your people’s rights.
Greece has been undergoing not only an economic crisis but also a social, political and cultural crisis. In Australia, you’re very far away and some people might tell you this storm is not going to hit Australia or New Zealand.
But in the 21st century, neoliberalism is a virus, and if recession hits Europe — meaning mass unemployment, social and political breakdown — this will expand to the world economy.
When the crisis started in Greece, SYRIZA was a very small party, which had about 3.8% [of the vote] and we were laughed at by the media. At the beginning of the crisis, we said to ourselves, “we have to change as the Left. We have to speak the people’s language a little bit better.”
How did the debt crisis begin? In the ’70s and ’80s, these neoliberal ideas — you have too many employees in the public sector, you have too many doctors, too many teachers, you have to get rid of them — took hold.
Now, 60% of young people under 35 are unemployed. 30% of the labour force and 42% of all women are unemployed. Five-thousand-two-hundred people have committed suicide in the past three years, a record high in Europe.
Six hundred thousand homes and small businesses don’t have electricity because they cannot pay their bills. We have had people dying from extreme cold in the last winter, including three students in one apartment whose parents couldn’t afford to send them money because they were unemployed.
How much longer do we have to pretend there is no other road? We are told that we have to keep on getting money from the Troika [the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank], because if we don’t, we’ll starve and there will be chaos. Well, what is happening now?
They tell the unemployed, “you’re lucky to even have one meal a day.” So the unemployed are scared.
Some people say that people voted for SYRIZA because they had no other hope and they were just angry. Maybe that’s true. But it’s our job as a left-wing party to not just talk to the left wing, but to talk to the working class, to the unemployed, to the middle class, to the small businesses, to the small farmers, and tell them: “We’re all together in this and we have to find a way out.”
Last December, our president, Alexis Tsipras, went to Brazil and Argentina, two countries that went into bankruptcy — Brazil in 1987 and Argentina in 2001. They told us about their experience during the IMF recipe of social genocide and after when they renationalised their national resources, and they have one of the highest growing economies and they have low unemployment. Of course they have problems, but they’re overcoming them.
Then we went to the United States and spoke to the IMF and told them, we don’t want your medicine anymore, it’s killing us. If somebody is sick, and you find out what the disease is, you don’t keep on giving them the same dose of the same medicine that was killing them. But in Greece they’re giving us the same dose, when they know the diagnosis has to be different. This is the recipe of the IMF, the World Bank and European Central Bank.
There is hope in Greece and we want you to believe in that hope. We prefer to go out defeated as a left-wing government, trying to do our best, rather than to become a client of the national and the political system in Europe and become absorbed, as many have done in the past, in an attempt to readjust the system.
This is a great historical and political opportunity for the left in Greece and we have to look to the future.
Neoliberalism today in Europe says one simple thing to people: “You’re on your own, you have to save yourself — even if that means death for the person standing beside you.”
Capitalism, especially 21st century capitalism, is not the solution. But its problems are not going to be solved just by Greece, or just by southern Europe. It’s going to take the whole planet. This is the dilemma today, we’re either going to win a better life and a better planet, or lose ourselves and other living things.