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If Weekly Worker came out with a line in full support of Syriza, I'd be shaken and reconsider my support. This is reassuringly predictable. Weekly Worker exist as a sort of left gossip sheet to complain about everyone else on the left and how they are adopting to this or that or doing whatever wrong. In regards to Greece, what sort of program do they think greek *working people* -- who are Syriza's audience, not readers of Weekly Worker -- are actually LOOKING for? They want answers to austerity, and Syriza has to provide some -- if you cannot make headway driving back the brutal class war, more radical policies are utter fantasies, however easy they are to write in article no one asides from other ddicated far left members are going to ever read. The question is not how radical in abstract Syrzia's proposals are -- it is how they stand in relation to the actually existing class forces. That is, capital is waging a class war and the Greeks are int he firing line. Syriza's propsals run directly counter to that, advocate ceasing that war and beginning to move in the opposite direction -- a direction in which the much-suffering Greek people need and want to travel. So, capital is not going to just stand by and let an election force a change of course. It is going to fight to keep its course, to keep making Greek working people pay for its own crisis. To stop that war and start to move in the other direction requires a political struggle against capital that Syrixa representatives, no matter how clever they are, cannot win except through mobilising working people into a counter power to drive capital back. And, if they can do this, this will no doubt strengthen the working class organisationally, they will be tempered through struggle, they will have aqa clearer idea of the lie of the land, where different forces lie, who is on their side and who isn't -- and, if they secure some wins through this struggle, most important of all, their self-confidence will be much greater. They will start to believe they CAN win if they organise and fight. This will set up the potential to fight for even more radical measures, to push capital further back, to win more. To fight on a higher and deeper level. THAT is how you are going to get a movement of working people fighting directly for a program more radical than the one Syriza will take to the January 25 elections. NOT by writing predictable, dreary articles in Weekly Worker no one is going to read except for the same tiny, isolated, usual suspects. And frankly, thank christ for that. Give me 1000 Alexis Tsipras's over any number of Weekly Worker writers. Stuart On 11 January 2015 at 08:57, Louis Proyect via Marxism < marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote: > ******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** > #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. > #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. > ***************************************************************** > > On 1/10/15 4:45 PM, Ken Hiebert via Marxism wrote: > >> I don't know much about Weekly Worker, so I don't know if your >> description is a caricature. Your dismissive remarks might be >> applied to a number of smaller groups. It might even describe the >> smaller groups that came together to form Syriza. My guess is that >> some of these groups, when they started out, were small and isolated. >> But those who did the plodding work to build these groups have seen >> their work bear fruit in the broad support for Syriza. >> > > I view the CPGB as parasitic. Their newspaper functions as a critic of the > left, a sterile exercise that is based on the assumption that this will > earn them brownie points. > > They give Lars Lih a platform but I don't think they have the foggiest > idea of how his writings are implicitly a critique of the entire > hammer-and-sickle fantasy world of the Marxist-Leninist left, including > them. > > I used to check in on their newspaper a decade or so ago when, like Andy > Newman's Left Unity blog, it could be relied upon for a steady stream of > gossip about the British SWP. Nowadays when I read that sort of thing, I > feel soiled--like washing my face in a urinal. > > _________________________________________________________ > Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm > Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/ > stuartmunckton%40gmail.com > -- “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is humanity’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.” — Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism “The free market is perfectly natural... do you think I am some kind of dummy?” — Jarvis Cocker _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
