There are people who pass through history leaving traces of struggle. And others who pass on leaving well-preserved chairs. The leadership of the GSEE, with its president of twenty years as its iconic representative, belongs to the second category. Not out of personal weakness; but as a product of a whole social path: the trade union aristocracy.
The term is not hubris; it is analysis. One finds it already in Lenin, when he describes that upper layer of workers' representation which, tied materially and ideologically to the bourgeois state and capital, functions as a mediator of discipline rather than an instrument of conflict. In its Greek version, this layer has acquired a name, offices, European programmes and political routes.
It is no coincidence that the top of the GSEE has for decades been a breeding ground and refuge for PASOK cadres. Trade unionists with «heavy resumes», who started in the auditoriums of the post-war period, passed through the public sector, sat on boards of directors and ended up speaking the language of «competitiveness» and «social consensus». A familiar route: from the slogan to the corridor of ministries.
Along the way, class struggle has been translated into social dialogue, strikes into workshops and demands into co-funded projects. The famous «workers» training" became the new gospel. Not as a tool for emancipation, but as a mechanism for integration. Tens of millions of euros ,today they talk about 73, were channelled into a world of certifications, NGOs, institutes and stamps, while wages collapsed and collective agreements were dismantled.
At the same time, in the years of the memoranda, the working class has experienced an unprecedented attack, flexible relations, individual contracts, unemployment, emigration. And the GSEE, present with its silence. As was once said of others, «it did not speak because it read». Here, it did not speak because it was implementing programmes. Training instead of picketing. Evaluation reports instead of clashes with employers.
When there were beatings in the streets and thousands of workers were repressed, the trade union leadership separated itself from the “extremes”. Class conflict was baptised populism. Resistance, bullying. Thus the ideological hegemony of subordination was built.
The recent industrial accident in Viollanda came as a reminder that there is blood behind the words «growth» and «productivity». Yet again, silence. Because silence has become a political choice. It is the choice of those who have learned to co-sign with ministers and industrialists, as happened with the so-called “social agreement” that buries the Collective Labour Agreements. These developments confirm the popular saying «it is impolite to speak with your mouth full».»
The problem is not the morality of certain individuals. It is their role in the relations of production. When trade unionism is cut off from the base and acquires material interests separate from the class it is supposed to represent, it becomes a mechanism for the reproduction of domination.
Today's judicial developments, the frozen accounts, the accusations of embezzlement, will be judged institutionally. Politically, however, the judgment has already been made. This is not a “political prosecution” of militant trade unionism. It is about a crack in the edifice of a trade union elite that for decades has acted as a cushion between capital and the anger of the workers.
The answer cannot be to replace persons with other, more «suitable» ones. The answer lies in the change of correlations, in mass participation, in the conflict with the state and the employers. In class unions, not corporate unions. Live, not certified.
At this point it must be clearly stated that the responsibility for the downfall of the GSEE does not only lie with the Right and its willing spokesmen within the trade union movement, from the employers« mechanisms to the most brutal cases of the Lascaris type, who embodied without pretense the transformation of the trade union into an extension of the employer and the state. It also weighs heavily on the partisan, state-sponsored leaderships that have learned to live on grants, dialogues and roles of »institutional partners’, completely cut off from the factories, offices and warehouses. But it also weighs on the left itself, which for years abandoned the battle in the GSEE, either out of self-sufficiency or sectarianism, leaving it in the hands of these mechanisms. When the conflict was replaced by denunciation from outside rather than struggle within the correlations, the vacuum was filled by the most disciplined servants of the system.
Because, after all, the question is not how many seminars were held. It's how many workers were left unprotected. And in this lesson, silence cannot be corrected by education, only by struggle.
