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On 3/6/15 5:54 PM, James Creegan wrote:
This is called dodging the question. How do you envisage the Greek
situation as unfolding, or how would you like it to do so?
This is something I told you already when you badgered me last time on
this. I wrote this before Tsipras took office and the self-anointed
rrrrevolutionaries began denouncing him for selling out. I would not
change a word:
http://louisproyect.org/2015/01/25/reflections-on-syriza/
Of course the real question is whether Syriza can deliver such reforms
given the relationship of forces that exist. Germany, its main
adversary, has a population of 80 million and a GDP of nearly 4 trillion
dollars. Greece, by comparison, has a population of 11 million and a GDP
of 242 billion dollars, just a bit more than Volkswagen’s revenues.
Given this relationship of forces, it will be a struggle to achieve the
aforementioned reforms. To make them possible, it will be necessary for
the workers and poor of Greece to demonstrate to Europe that they will
go all the way to win them. It will also be necessary for people across
Europe to demonstrate their solidarity with Greece so as to put maximum
pressure on Germany and its shitty confederates like François Hollande
to back off. But if your main goal in politics is to lecture the Greeks
about the need for workers councils, armed struggle and all the rest,
you obviously have no need to waste your time on such measly reforms.
Part of the problem for much of the left is its inability to properly
theorize the conditions of class struggle in a post-Soviet world. In
Latin America and southern Europe, states are struggling to improve the
lives of their citizens but without abolishing capitalism. In an
interview with Stathis Kouvelakis for Jacobin magazine, Sebastian Budgen
asked what Greece would look like if Syriza won the election, adding,
“We all know that socialism in one country doesn’t work. To what extent
would a left social democracy in a poor, backward European country with
no access to international lending, excluded from the Eurozone be able
to change things? What kind of society would that be like?”
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