Will the new government formed by Syriza - the "Coalition of the Radical Left" - deliver on its election promises? In particular, will it reverse the austerity policies of the past governments - both the Tory-like New Democracy party and the Labour-like Pasok party - which have spelt misery for the Greek working class over the past five years?
Since his party's election victory, on January 25th, Syriza's leader Alexis Tsipras has announced a raft of measures which would seem to go in the right direction.
The minimum wage, which had been cut by a third, is to be raised back to its previous level of £600/month. Several thousand sacked public sector workers are to be hired back. Collective bargaining rights which had been terminated, are to be restored. New welfare provisions are to be introduced, to meet the most urgent needs of the poorest - especially the 25% of the working class which is jobless - covering food, healthcare, transport and utility bills. In addition there are plans for a moratorium on personal debt and evictions.
Taking the money from where it is
All this sounds well and good. The question, however, is - where is the money for all that going to come from?
So far, every penny of it is meant to come out of public funds. Except that the Greek government's coffers are empty, due to the exorbitant interest it was expected to pay on its debt. And, as part of the international "bailout" plan which was imposed on the country, it has even larger repayments to meet in the coming months.
So, Syriza's finance minister has been touring the European capitals to try to get some breathing space. He even got a sympathetic hearing from a meeting of hedge fund managers and bankers, held in the Four Seasons Hotel, off London's Park Lane.
But then, why wouldn't these sharks be sympathetic? What do they have to fear? Haven't the big banks made a fortune out of the parasitic interest rates they imposed on Greece before getting the European Central Bank to buy their Greek bonds for a much higher price than they were worth? Haven't hedge fund managers made very big bucks out of speculating on these bonds?
The truth is, however, that no amount of financial engineering will allow Syriza to make the country's debt more bearable for its working class population. Under this capitalist system, someone has to pay. It will be either the working class - as has been the case so far - or the capitalist class.
Of course, Syriza has been vocal about its plans to recover the estimated £8bn to £30bn of unpaid taxes - especially from the country's shipping magnates, who collectively, control the world's largest fleet. But how will it manage to get the capitalist class - which means not just the Greek capitalists, but also their sponsors and partners in crime from the richer European countries - to pay their share, out of their accumulated profits?
The need for a social mobilisation
Even assuming that this objective was really what Syriza is aiming at - which remains to be seen - it is beyond the means of any government, as long as it remains within the framework laid out by the capitalist class.
This objective can only be achieved through a full-scale mobilisation of the working class, powerful enough to destroy the resistance of a capitalist class which considers its parasitism on the whole of society as its "right".
To its credit, the Greek working masses had the courage to stand up against the blackmail of the media and politicians which, in Greece and abroad, were threatening them with chaos, should they dare to elect an openly anti-austerity party. But their troubles are not over. Their hopes will not be fulfilled without using them using their collective strength in order to take their fate into their own hands.
What is true for Greece is just as true for us here, in Britain. Of course, in the coming election, we won't have an anti-austerity party comparable to Syriza to vote for, in any case not one which proposes to reverse the anti-working class measures of the past decade. And never mind that voting alone changes nothing, given the British electoral system, the choice is between two versions of pro-business austerity - the Tories' and Labour's. Which is no choice at all.
But, whatever the outcome of this election, like our Greek brothers and sisters, we will still have the considerable potential power of our collective strength. We haven't used it for a very long time and it's high time we did. Yes, in order to take our fate into our own hands, and stop the rot imposed on us by the politicians, their capitalist masters and the crisis of their system.