The Greek Solidarity Campaign organised another one of their delegations to Athens. The group met and spoke with politicians and cleaners, doctors and farmers who are building a peoples' movement against austerity while working out the route to a new society.
What they saw and what they heard opened their hearts and their minds.
This is what the delegates saw and heard.
Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza said
'Syriza will probably the next government.' And 'our prediction is it will be be the next government after February. (2015)'
He said that Syriza's principle was that not one cent would go to the payment of interest on the loans until the needs of the Greek people had been met.
He said that pensions would be restored to pre 2008 levels as would the minimum wage. (They have been cut by a third - more if inflation is taken into account.) He said anti-labour laws would be repealed. He said banks would be socialised and forced to create loans for new business and employment.
'It is necessary to find the money to meet the needs of the Greek people.'
Sorting out the 60% youth unemployment would be front and centre. He said a health service would be rebuilt. He said taxation would be reversed from its current position where 70% of income tax is paid by workers, the unemployed, pensioners and 30% by business and the wealthy. And where 60% of the tax burden is carried by indirect taxation. These and other priorities would be enacted
'Directly. Without delay.'
The OECD says that in Greece, today, 17%, 1.7 million Greek people, do not have enough to eat. The delegation saw and heard that this figure is a serious underestimate. The reality is much worse - in every direction. For example 33% do not have health insurance which costs 400 Euros a month. (Pensions are now 500 Euros.) Primary care has gone. Childrens' vaccines cost 70 Euros each. Support for births costs 600 Euros, 1200 if you are not Greek or there are complications. One nurse in station for 47 patients during the day, 60 at night. No insurance - you pay. You do not pay - then your income is taxed. You can't pay the tax they take your house or your car or you go to prison. Birth without money becomes criminal.
'What do you do about this?' the delegation asked.
'We break the law' said the nurses.
But when you have 1640 patents in an A&E with 5 nurses over 16 hours, even if you ignore the law, people die. The delegation learnt that each year gets worse and they saw the mental health patients lined up on both sides of two corridors on their trolleys, all of them quiet and still and unfocused, outside the 25 bed Psychiatric unit.
'The medical crisis' said the doctor 'has become a crisis of public health.'
Last year there was a 40% increase in infant mortality. Last year there were 300,000 official abortions (at 250 Euros each) and last year was the first year since the Nazis ruled Athens that more died in Greece than were born.
The delegates saw the new solidarity clinics. They saw clinics and pharmacies and solidarity markets where farmers provide produce directly to consumers and 2% is left for free distribution in the solidarity food, education and advice centres. They are all self managing. When a young man came to a clinic with no more money in his family for his leukaemia drugs, the clinic put out an appeal across the solidarity network. Sufferers sent small quantities of their own drugs. One women in her sixties sent two weeks worth. The clinic found out her address and thanked her but said she should not sacrifice herself. She said she was old and the young man needed to have a life.
Today the mass actions in the squares and the roads have diminished. But Syriza's polls go up and 3 million have used the solidarity network - born barely a year ago.
Solidarity not charity.
Rights not gifts.
Until people win a government and a state that will defend and carry out their human rights the solidarity movement helps people to stand up, to act, to carry their hopes into practice.
A student delegate said that what he saw was the endless groups of police, hanging around the city like groups of youths in a shopping centre. Except they were armed for a public war, with machine guns and pistols, riot shields and gas and retractable metal batons that clicked above the noise of the streets as the bored, nervous police flicked them out and in - as their eyes flick about the street. A nurse told the delegation how her leg had been smashed by a policeman's boot as he had chased her into a hospital after a march broke up. They wait for the action to come.
If there is a new anti-memorandum, anti capitalist government in Greece in 2015 a new mass movement of millions of the Greek people will be needed to defend it and to ensure its direction is true. Similarly, those who are preparing; big capital, the police, the Colonels, Golden Dawn, the EU and IMF and even NATO; to defend their money-given right to rule, will need to be challenged by a European, even world wide movement in defence of the Greeks allowing them the space to become again, the hope of the world.
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