Today we will know whether Greece’s international creditors, the IMF, the ECB and the EU Commission, have accepted the Greek government’s proposals for debt repayment.  If not, there will no doubt be further frantic rounds of negotiations accompanied by speculative runs on the Greek banking system.

Is this pressure all the fault of the penny-pinching Germans? 

In an immediate sense it is. German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schaeuble, is leading the pack. He is a true believer in neoliberal economics, was one of the architects of the eurozone and is politically embedded in German big business. He is a member of the supervisory board of KfW, the German bank owed €15 billion by the Greeks. Fifteen years ago he had to resign as chair of CDU/CSU parliamentary group for involvement with an election donation of €100,000 from an arms dealer.  

So Mr Schaeuble speaks from experience when telling the Greeks to clean up their act.

But to see the Greek crisis in these simple terms is a mistake. It is not really a matter of Greeks and Germans.  It is about the EU’s Single Market and how it serves the needs of big business within global markets. 

The EU’s blueprint for the single market, the Cechinni Report, was published in 1988.  We were told that its implementation from 1992 would boost growth and create five million new jobs. Barriers to competition would be eliminated. Inefficient producers would go. 

But the small print in the Cechinni Report also said something else. The new jobs would depend on labour’s flexibility and mobility. New employment would mean moving — not just down the road but across the EU. 

Just like the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership today it was intended to create a “drive to the bottom” — competition among workers to push down wages and conditions.

The 1988 report already talked about the EU’s centre and its periphery. The “centre” had the big highly productive firms, the periphery did not. But the centre’s wages were too high to meet US competition. 

The single market, and with the single currency, would solve this. And it did. German wages were forced down. The straitjacket of the single currency’s deficit limits outlawed the use of Keynesian growth policies during recessions and butchered public-sector provision. Across the EU unemployment rose and real wage growth slackened.

But the same policies also caused an even bigger problem: the banking crisis.

As competition from the big firms in the north wiped out competitors in the south, a massive trade imbalance emerged. The EU had capped public spending - not bank lending. German, French and British banks lent to the debtor countries to maintain purchases of their own exports – with the added benefit that higher risk also brought higher interest charges.

That’s why €395bn out of Greece’s €410bn bailout went straight back to the banks of Germany, France and Britain. 

So it’s not “just” the Germans. It’s the system that has been set up to benefit big business in the strongest EU economies in competition with other global trading blocks, the US and Japan.

This is why it is delusionary to think that the EU and the eurozone can ever solve the problems facing working people. Like TTIP, the EU treaty overules democracy and can only lead to a greater concentration of wealth and power.

We need to give every support to the people of Greece. They voted to end the austerity policies that since 2011 have brought nothing but disaster. They have seen their GDP drop by 25 per cent - with something like 300,000 people in Athens alone dependent on food kitchens. 

But we should also take heed ourselves. While Britain is not a member of the eurozone, it is exposed to the same single market regulations that deny public ownership and state intervention in industry. In defending Greek democracy we defend our own.