Declaration by Eric Toussaint to the 5 July 2016 Demonstration in Athens

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Declaration by Eric Toussaint to the 5 July 2016 Demonstration in Athens

6 July 2016 by Eric Toussaint

Dear Friends and Comrades,

We will remember the 5^th of July 2015 as a day on which the Greek people once more expressed, with the utmost clarity, its rejection of the conditions imposed by the Troika. The referendum result was an unequivocal mandate by the Greek people for the government to firmly oppose further destruction of common goods and of economic, social, cultural and political rights. On the evening of Sunday 5 July 2015, all over Europe and the rest of the world, people were looking to Greece with great expectations.

If they wanted to take their cue from the people’s clear choice, the government should have planned and implemented an alternative to capitulation. It should have taken strong unilateral measures such as suspending debt payment, socialising the banks, creating a complementary currency alongside the Euro, increasing taxation on the wealthy while reducing taxes on the majority of the people, increasing public expenditure to relieve the current humanitarian crisis, and calling upon popular mobilisation. It should have used the findings presented two weeks earlier by the Truth Committee on the Greek debt that was set up by the President of the Greek Parliement at a time when SYRIZA still embodied people’s expectations. As you all know this Committee that consisted of 15 Greek and 15 foreign experts had carried out a staggering amount of work in order to provide the government with arguments showing the case for a suspension of debt payment and a radical reduction of the Greek public debt.

One year later I am proud to pay homage to demonstrators who oppose the third MoA. The struggle goes on. We must abolish illegitimate debts. Together we must build an alternative to capitulation.

Long live popular mobilisation!

Translated by Christine Pagnoulle and Mike Krolikowski

Eric Toussaint, was scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Committee on Public Debt and is the spokesman for the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM)

Author

Eric Toussaint

is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.
He is the author of Greece 2015: there was an alternative. London: Resistance Books / IIRE / CADTM, 2020 , Debt System (Haymarket books, Chicago, 2019), Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012, etc.
See his bibliography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Toussaint
He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. He was the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt from April 2015 to November 2015.