CLASS UNITY OF ALL PROLETARIANS AGAINST ABJECTION
BROAD ANTIFASCIST FRONT AGAINST RACIST ATTACKS
The great deception
- “Foreigners take our jobs” – they “drop” the wages-they increase unemployment-they deepen the crisis
According to the results of the 2001 census, the number of immigrants in Greece amounted to 762.191 people, the 391.764 of which were employed, in their majority hired (88,9% in the total of employed foreigners).
The Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) claims in a 2004 research on the issue: “According to our estimations, the actual number of immigrants and repatriates is over 1 million (850.000 legal and approximately 200.000 “irregular” immigrants), corresponding to 9% of the overall population, and above 12% of Greece’s labour force.”
“Foreigners take our jobs” – they “increase” unemployment! This is one, among others, and great LIE, for foreign workers neither “take” the jobs, nor increase UNEMPLOYMENT: The local CAPITAL is the one that “takes the jobs,”, that is, it destroys “employment places” by closing down businesses because of: a) the antagonism between businesses leading many of them to bankruptcy and workers to UNEMPLOYMENT, b) the deep economic crisis – inevitable within capitalism – which, in its turn, leads to massive bankruptcies of business and as a consequence to massive UNEMPLOYMENT, C) the closing down of businesses for speculative reasons (loans, etc.) or their transfer to our countries with cheap labour, with both developments “generating” unemployment.
Therefore, it is local (as well as foreign) CAPITAL the one that exclusively and solely “takes” the jobs from local and foreign workers: the one that destroys hundreds of thousands of employment positions with the closing down of businesses, thus increasing massive UNEMPLOYMENT with many hundreds of thousands young unemployed people.
Our class brothers and sisters, who supposedly “take” the jobs of the locals and supposedly increase unemployment, in reality:
Contribute to GDP increase, in levels that during the period of Olympic works, of the great “growth”-looting by the capitalist, reached an increase owing exclusively to their own work, in levels of 2,3% (!), according to data by EKKE.
1/3 of those working to Olympic construction works were foreign. In the construction industry, in particular, they represent 4/10 of working people, with salaries and working conditions of unskilled workers, overtime not paid, despite the fact that in certain specialties (stockade, ironmongery) they are particularly skilled and experienced. They are paid cheap – with the current abjection of the proletariat as a result of the bankruptcy of capitalist-dependent Greece – they reach levels of servitude (below 30 Euros) – they do not get pension credits, their need forces them to generate additional absolute surplus value with flexible work schedules, they work without basic observance even of those rotten capitalist measures concerning work safety and hygiene.
At worksites, they are forced not to wear even means of individual protection, that is, helmets, gloves, anti-slippery shoes, etc. The result of non-providing protective equipments, the non-observance of any security measures, and exhaustion due to the extension of work schedules is the heavy toll they are taking. 70% of deadly accidents at Olympic works were immigrants, and only in 2002, 40 immigrants lost their lives at the construction field. During the period of the great looting of the Olympiad, big contractors were seeking much and cheap labour force, and they were finding, by squeezing and wiping out immigrant workers. It can be easily understood that the devaluation of work, that now is a rule for the entire working class, was initially tested and applied upon immigrant workers, as if they were guinea-pigs. Their cheap labour is certainly the result of capitalists blackmailing workers who cannot afford to live, with the joint responsibility of ALL workers’ patrons who do not accept immigrants as equivalents into the trade-union movement. Today, in the vortex of bankrupt capitalist Greece this time, immigrants “do not take the jobs of local workers.”
On the one hand, the number of so-called “illegal” workers has gradually and dramatically reduced mainly in the last two years, not so much because of their incomplete “legalization,” but mainly due to the inexistence of jobs, which forces them to leave the country. According to the research “Estimation of the mass of foreigners residing illegally in Greece,” carried out on behalf of the Institute of Immigration Policy, with professor Theodoros Lianos as scientific supervisor, in April 2008 the number of illegal immigrants ranges from 172.259 to 209.402. This number, being that of undocumented immigrants had decreased significantly in respect to the approximately 700.000 of the past decade, and has gained bursting proportions in the last two years. (This is one more answer to fascist and crypto-fascist voices that are trembling at the thought of the country’s “dehellenization”). As for those immigrants who are staying behind, capitalists push sultrily downwards their already low day’s wages (unpensioned day’s wages of even 20 Euros), leading them against their “old” comrades from Albania, former USSR, etc.
The immigrants, who supposedly “take our jobs,” are occupied at about 31% in agriculture, according to data of the reactionary 1996 research “The Political Economy of Illegal Immigration,” by L. Katseli, G. Lianos, and A. Sarris. And this is the general rule for any menial job, of intensive labour, where Greeks are not willing to do it. In the primary sector in particular, immigrants not only do not take the jobs of Greeks, but in the contrary and according to facts, their presence rescues whole backward areas from the further decrease of production, hunger and eventually the definitive standstill, and this keeps “open” the employment positions of Greek workers as well. In some cases, their work in the agricultural field generates “employment positions,” as, for example, in agricultural products light processing, regardless of the fact that the widespread capitalist crisis does not provide such prospects at the moment. At the same time, the generation of employment positions in rural areas led not only to the revival of these areas’ financial activity, but also to the increase of the income of many Greeks who exploited wildly the immigrants’ labour forces. Furthermore, in some of those areas, such as the strawberry fields of Manolada, immigrants were subjected to violent racist attacks when they demanded humane working conditions. In any case, and according to data of the last census, the economic productive position of rural areas is directly proportional to the number of immigrants being occupied in those areas. And this is happening during a period that, with the responsibility of EU imperialists and their Greek servants, “between 1996 and 2007, the agricultural income in Greece dropped at 24%, while the respective average of EU-27 is on a stable increase, and in the period 2001-2007 it increased at 5%,” as stated by the EU Agriculture Commissioner mrs. Boel.
In general, our class brothers and sisters are occupied in positions where no job offer, and consequently no antagonism with Greek workers, exists, such as in cleaning services, where the case of the fighter Kouneva illuminated the sordid/mafia-like working conditions (medieval “worker hiring”), and also in watching the elderly and the sick, filling gaps that the average working family could not have handled without help, in the current and ever-worsening “healthcare” of the insurance funds that are deep in debt due to capitalist looting (again with unpensioned work, without insurance and 14 salaries). It is still relevant to mention what even reactionary technocrats-lackeys of capital admit regarding the positive effect of immigrants on the insurance system, not only because of their numbers, but also with the fact of their small average age, since they contribute financially, without still taking advantage of it in the least.
The importance of the immigrants’ young age in relation to the aforementioned appears also in researches proving how much they―young people―contribute to an aged country by providing age “oxygenation”:
NATIONAL STATISTICAL SERVICE OF GREECE 2008: CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS, PERSONS OF FOREIGN NATIVITY 540.345 PERSONS (6.5% OF GREEK POPULATION), EARLIER RESEARCH OF THE INSTITUTE OF GREEK DIASPORA EDUCATION AND INTERCULTURAL STUDIED (IPODE) 123.839 FOREIGN STUDENTS IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS
Regarding so-called “illegal immigration,” on the one hand the fact that first and foremost immigrants are political refugees uprooted by the imperialists’ “rush to war” in the conditions of the decay of capitalism, and certainly that our particular class brothers and sisters certainly do not increase unemployment by selling CDs and handkerchiefs in corners and traffic lights. The Greek state’s participation in the imperialist slaughters of NATO and the Americans, by sending troops to Afghanistan and former Yugoslavian regions ought to be mentioned here. This participation makes the Greek state responsible as well for forcing human beings to become refugees (“illegal immigrants), and compels it, due to its real aid to the imperialists’ atrocities, to legalize all humans who were forced to be uprooted from their homelands.
Fascists, who accuse untruly immigrants of the criminality characteristic of themselves, force people to live without water, toilets, basic healthcare, and along with the fascist persecutions, they “forget” one detail revealed by the UN High Commission and UNESCO – compelled to do so by the self-evident case and macabre findinds – the sudden disappearance of “traffic light kids” shortly before the atrocious fiesta of the Olympics. The massacres in Epirus and Albania were discovered along with warehouses of children’s organs in Italy. What happened to this crime? Did an investigation ever take place for this 21st century Dachau?
Regarding the criminality of all those that force immigrants to that direction, the truth has an objection concerning fascist psychoses. Data according to a recent research entitled “Immigration and criminality: Myths and reality” by the Institute of Political Sociology of the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) (2007, supervised by Ioanna Tsinganou) shows that in 2007, 80.2% of crimes of every nature were committed by Greeks and 19.8% by foreigners, and actually mentions word for word that “the general rule, however, is that [immigrants] are being arrested for crimes such as thefts or robberies, the impact of which is strong in civilians’ every day life, reinforcing the sense of insecurity.”
The immigration bill and the nationalist atrocities of the social democratic “Communist” Party of Greece (“K”KE) – The necessity for the unity of the working class
The working class is uniform. When you want to confront the drop of day’s wages constantly sought by the capitalists, when you want to confront the new measures of the absolute abjection of the whole working class, you do not separate and, most of all, suppress the weakest part of the working class that can become the victim of capitalists and work for a slice of bread. On the contrary, you unite the class, Greek and foreign workers, as well as the unemployed, who are remembered by social democrats of any kind only in order to get involved in politics, you accept them in united trade unions, so that the attack against the whole of the class in confronted commonly, militantly and decisively.
The very imperfect and completely “dismembered,” relating to the solution of certain problems of proletarian immigrants, immigration bill was eventually passed: “the bill was approved by PASOK and SYRIZA, while it was killed by ND and LAOS” (“R” 11/3/2010) and “K”KE stated its “presence” (!!!), which means that the bill was approved ONLY by the MPs of PASOK and SYRIZA.
Thus, the social democratic leadership of “K”KE, despite any of its unsuccessful, but also ridiculous, manoeuvres it attempted mainly during the period from the first “Statement” of the Politburo onwards (“R” 24/1/2010, p. 2-3), appearing to the immigrants with a “pro-immigrant” mask, eventually threw this mask, did what had been expected by revolutionary Marxists, that is Leninist-Stalinists, and what the leadership had already pre-concluded and projected in the front page of “Rizospastis”: “KKE” will not approve the government’s immigration bill” (R” 9/2/2010, p. 1), revoking itself with this action, which was justified through a nationalist-racist oration, the unrestrained and most base demagogy against our class brothers and sisters, the proletarian immigrants who live and work in our country.
“K”KE did not approve this bill on the “issue of immigration” not because it is “imperfect and deficient,” incomplete and completely “curtailed,” but on the contrary because this very imperfect and curtailed bill creates “an issue of minority for immigrants as well” (“R” 9/2/2010, p. 15), as stated – twice – by the head of the nationalist-racist leadership, social democrat A. Papariga, during her speech in the Parliament, also put forward for a third time in the full-page “Statement,” due to the danger “of creating stirring minority and nationalist issues, leading as far as the change of borders” (“R” 7/3/2010, p/ 7).
These are the traitors of the proletariat, who are constantly camouflaging and help the frontline of nationalism, racist, and obscurantism, ND and LAOS, who are being congratulated by Chrysi Avgi and nazi blogs for this policy for years now and are pretending to not listening, who surpassed even monarch-fascists, since they were the only ones daring to link the granting of some basic rights to immigrants, in fear of a future dispute of national sovereignty!
The struggle continues beyond the incomplete law, for the FULL and without nationalist ostensible screams granting of complete rights to the proletarian immigrants who wish for it, and certainly with the immediate granting of nativity to their children, who are a part of this country. Against reformist workers’ patrons, the workers’ movement ought to be with the immediate, equivalent and unconditional acceptance of immigrants, the first de facto “CLASS LEGALIZATION,” of all our class brothers, without exceptions.
We, Communists, Marxist-Leninist-Stalinists, in co-operation with every antifascist co-militant, struggle in the context of a broad Antifascist Front, for the class unity of the proletariat. We believe that today the immigrants are our class brothers and sisters who experience just first and more cruelly the “collective pain” of the class, and fight together with them, both in today’s defensive struggles against fascisticization, racist and nationalism, and “tomorrow’s” revolutionary struggles for the proletarian revolution. The inevitable social evolution which will sound again the passage of humanity from its prehistory to History.
June 2010
Movement for the Reorganisation of the Communist Party of Greece 1918-15
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