As we write this statement, the victory of ‘NO’ in the Greek referendum on the latest proposal of the Troika seems irreversible: with 65% of votes counted, «No» has an advantage of more than twenty points than the YES (61.3% against 38.7%).

It is a victory of the workers and the Greek people against the European Union, the IMF, the European Central Bank, and all the European capitalist Governments trying to impose a new austerity memorandum to the Greek people and also a political defeat.

It is clear that, despite Syriza’s misleading policy around the referendum, which we have denounced, the exploited people of the Hellenic country have expressed at the polls their opposition to the austerity, to the policies of hunger in the past years, the imperialist arrogance of the Troika and the almost «semi-colonial» status of Greece in the EU. Once again, as in the elections of January 25 – again, even if they didn’t express a clear independent, class and Socialist outcome-, the Greek people has inflicted an important defeat to pro-austerity of all sorts, especially given the imperialism terrorist campaign in which the President of the European Parliament himself came to affirm this morning that the victory of the ‘NO’ would mean clearly Greece leaving of the Euro zone.

Without a doubt, the Government of Syriza will try to take advantage of this victory to strengthen its policy of negotiations with the Troika, which has led to today’s impasse and which has led Syriza to renounce to all its initial promises and to accept the essential impositions of the Troika. Syriza and Tsipras may come out of the referendum stronger than before, and they’ll try to channel it towards new capitulations and defeats. But this will not be easy: the great gap between the NO and the YES – bigger than expected-, the social and political polarization that preceded the referendum, the dynamics and mobilizations from below that was organized around it -with a demonstration in support of the NO of 100,000 people in Athens and big international solidarity – seem to reduce the margins of Syriza for a capitulation, an option that Tsipras has been looking for several months now. From the beginning we have pointed out that our NO is critical, independent of Syriza’s reformism. We believe that with their vote, the workers and the Greek people have not given carte blanche to the Greek Government: the voters did not express their support for Syriza rotten proposal to the Troika, in which we have to seek with a magnifying glass the «improvements» in comparison of the proposal of the Troika, because in it Syriza accepts the payment of debt, increase in VAT, continuation of privatizations, reform of retirement. What the voter expressed is a rejection of the austerity, of imperialism and the Troika policy, of the subjugation of the Greek people. Indirectly and contradictorily, a refusal also to future attempts of Syriza to carry out this same austerity policy.

What is needed now, is to transform this victory in the referendum into the starting point of a big workers and people’s demonstration, that takes that undetermined NON from the hands of Syriza, to transform it into a clear NO to the negotiations with the Troika, a NO to austerity, a NO to the payment of the debt. It is on this basis that we will be able to step forward with the strategic measures Greek working class needs: nationalization of the banks and of foreign commerce, nationalization of key sectors of economy, anticapitalist rupture with the imperialist European Union, resolution of basic needs of the workers and the people (health, education, employment, and housing). It is only with an anticapitalist and socialist program, clearly independent from Syriza’s reformist direction, based on the self-organization and massive mobilization of the working class that poses the question of who rules the country and to which interests, that we will be able to build an alternative to the capitalist crisis, an alternative at the service of the exploited and the oppressed. The referendum is only a starting point, never an arrival point: in fact, elections will never be able to change at the roots this oppressive capitalist system that condemns us to hunger and misery. Only the revolutionary and independent mobilization of the workers and the people of Greece, with strong revolutionary party at their direction, can end this inhuman system and builds the workers power and the socialism.