Economics - Greece on the Brink

Greece on the Brink - The Crisis of Capitalism and the Socialist SolutionThis film gives an in-depth insight into the profound crisis that Greece is facing today. Greece took over the EU Presidency at the beginning of 2014. At different festivities celebrating this occasion, European and Greek politicians tried to ensure the public that the worst is over and that the country is leaving the crisis behind. However, reality is something else entirely.The country, which is facing the seventh year of a deep recession, is in a state of absolute collapse at all levels: financially, socially and politically. The Greek population has been exposed to a radical change in their lives. Joblessness, homelessness and suicide rates have all hit a sad record high. Soup kitchens spring up like mushrooms and the countrys public assets are for sale.Through so-called rescue packages the country is in reality enslaved to the Troika, consisting of the European Union Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The mechanism of the debt repayment resembles the Structural Adjustment Programmes carried out by the IMF and the World Bank in developing countries. These bail-out packages - far from helping the Greek people - have only benefited the financial sector.The impressive fight back against these measures in the last few years has been immense, with a countless number of demonstrations, general strikes and occupations of squares. However, on the other hand, the repression by the state forces was also massive, helping to ensure the punctual interest payment to big banks and companies, while at the same time squeezing the last drop out of ordinary people.A small team of the IMT - equipped only with a hand-held camera - travelled to Greece, interviewed political activists about the social and political situation and got some hair-raising stories about the misery that exists. The team visited the newspaper cooperative Efimerida ton Syntakton and the occupied former public broadcaster ERT, which is run under workers control. The documentary also covers the serious change in the political landscape as the left party of SYRIZA became the main opposition party in the last elections.In order to locate the Greek crisis in an international context, the team visited the Marxist theoretician Alan Woods in London and tried to discover the root of the problem in the international crisis of the capitalist system. And as the staggering public debt is not a unique problem for Greece alone, the team went to Italy and spoke to Claudio Belotti, the author of Crisi, Debito, Default - Rompere con lutopia, about his radical approach of cancelling the debt altogether and what this would mean about the future of the country.Finally, all those interviewed develop a viewpoint about what in their opinion is the only real solution for solving this economic crisis: in the first place the overthrow of the very system that produces all the problems humanity faces today and replacing it with a socially owned, democratically controlled and rationally planned economy.The documentary is distributed online under the creative commons licence, which means it is freely available to all.