“I would say the Greek economic crisis is 20% global, 20% Europe based … 60% due to Greece,” says Dimitrios Papadimoulis in the ante-room of his party’s offices in the Athens parliament. With his regulation clipped white moustache, and neat blue suit, he has an air of David Niven about him, but he crackles with energy, as he sets out an alternative plan to start a recovery in his beleaguered country.

One of the 14 MPs for SYRIZA, the coalition of the Radical Left, Papadimoulis has just emerged from a meeting discussing plans for tomorrow’s 24-hour general strike, which will bring the country to a halt. SYRIZA, or its core party Synaspismos, from which all SYRIZA’s MPs come, has much the best account of the current crisis, and a path out of it — a simultaneous reform of the Greek state, and of the EU’s current neoliberal set-up.

But the party’s impact is limited by the dominance of the Greek Communist Party, which has a strong base in unions and the countryside, and the current popularity of Papandreou and PASOK. That PASOK has taken over much of its program, on extending rights for immigrants, is small consolation.

For Papadimoulis and Synaspismos, though reconstructing Greece may be a key part of the recovery, it’s the nature of the EU that contributes to the crisis that’s enveloping not merely Greece but the whole of southern Europe.

“The financial deficit is in fact a democratic deficit.”

“There needs to be a change in what the EU is, how it’s governed, a change to the rigid rules on deficits, a democratic control of the central bank …”

Though they may not express it in those terms, workers across Europe are thinking along the same lines. As a lead-up to the Greece spectacular, the Spanish workforce came out today, protesting plans to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67, while France’s oil refinery workers came out, bringing the country to a crawl. Italy is heading towards a general strike on March 12, and even Germany got into the act, with Lufthansa pilots coming out to protest the airline’s attempt to gradually replace their (admittedly well-paid) jobs with flights by non-unionised cheap carriers. The Greeks themselves had a curtain-raiser when the PAME workers front — the organisation of KKE-affiliated unions — blockaded the stock exchange today.

That so many Europeans are refusing to take an erosion in their conditions lying down has been a source of consternation to the northern European elite running the EU — and of utter confusion to many American observers. “Why is there so much anger and angst across Europe?” CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked in unfeigned bemusement, to one of the network’s “global experts”, who tut-tutted about the Europeans’ lack of realism.

But it is not that European workers are unrealistic about some of the reforms necessary to modernise their economies. Much of the support for Papandreou comes from the realisation that things can’t go on as they are. “We have had 15 years of growth, and we have not paid down any debt,” said Papadimoulis, whose political career began in one of Greece’s Communist Parties, now sounding like Peter Costello. “But it was the last six years [of the New Democracy Party] that really did for us.”

The difference is that European workers clearly aren’t going to accept the reform process being driven by the liquidity needs of banks, a process that Papadimoulis describes as “turning a private financial crisis into a series of national crises”.

Effectively, what the implementation of the EU in its current form — that of a low-deficit, monetarist-influenced stability pact with an unelected central bank setting policy — has done is to entrench the north-south divide in the continent. The combination of cheap capital flowing in from the euro, together with hastily delivered “stabilisation funds” has left little incentive or leverage to reform southern Europe’s government institutions, largely inherited from the 19th century, and dependent on patronage, territoriality and informal corruption.

The North has remained a centre of capital, the South a client of it — and the fact that there is no countervailing power to the money markets increases that dependency, all the while making it look like freedom.

For Papadimoulis, the EU’s rigid inflexibility precludes measures that could easily relieve the crisis. “There’s no reason why the ECB couldn’t buy up Greek bonds at a lower level, for example.”

What is playing out in Greece, and across southern Europe is in miniature the structural crisis tipping the Western world into the second wave of recession — deep-seated imbalances and inequalities that are not resolved by boom times, and that right-wing and centrist parties may lack the political capital to resolve through enforced austerity measures. The Anglo-American world had the deflationary policies of Thatcher and Reagan, imposed at a time when similar moves in continental Europe would have been politically unthinkable.

Indeed, one of the reasons for the creation of the EU in its post-Maastricht neoliberal form was that these measures could be imposed by unelected institutions, not subject to political pressure. This process has been subverted by the mutual agreement of governments to break the rules. This has simply made the EU the focus of political mobilisation — in fact generating a cross-Europe political unity of movements hitherto somewhat sequestered in their national domains. Many in SYRIZA see scope for an expansion of the left once public support for Papandreou fades. Mind you, they also believed that they could shoot up to 10% in the last election. They wound up with the usual 4%.

Indeed one concern is that the right will benefit from the situation before the left does. “There is the possibility of a strong anti-immigrant response. We have more than a million of them as part of the boom and we have a situation where there is a break between, errmm,” Papadimoulis looks for the English words.

“The base and the superstructure,” I suggest.

His smile brightens. “Yes.”

In the next room, they are calling for him again. More people have piled in. On top of the bookshelves I notice a pile of used espresso cups and saucers, marked with the grounds of Greek coffee. The whole building is buzzing, and the MPs talk Marxism.

How could this not get interesting?