Yanis Varoufakis (July 10, 2015): "This weekend brings the climax of the talks as Euclid Tsakalotos, my successor, strives, again, to put the horse before the cart – to convince a hostile Eurogroup that debt restructuring is a prerequisite of success for reforming Greece, not an ex-post reward for it."
Paul Mason (July 10, 2015): "Fourth, it [the deal, i.e.the Greek government proposals] is the work of Euclid Tsakalatos. Tsakalatos, as I’ve been explaining since mid-January, is existentially committed to two things: Euro membership and the use of government to foster widespread modernisation and social change. He wants to stay in power – not lose it to a government of 'technocrats'." I think the two statements underestimate Tsakalotos' political and theoretical understanding of the Greek siutation. Euclid Tsakalotos & Christos Laskos (2013): "Introduction: The Greek Crisis in Context This book makes four interrelated arguments about the nature of the Greek crisis, and how it relates to the world economic crisis and especially to that of the Eurozone. Our major contention is that Greece is far from being a special case. The severity of the Greek crisis is not, as is often asserted, the result of either underdevelopment, or the failure to promote neoliberal structural reforms. On the contrary, the Greek crisis represents a crisis of a particular neoliberal political settlement. It follows that one needs to understand not only the underlying causes of the world economic crisis that broke out in 2008, but also why the economic and financial architecture of the Eurozone was inadequate to meet the challenges set by such a crisis. The problematic nature of that architecture also needs to be addressed in terms of its neoliberal foundations - the alternative conceptualization that the root cause lies in an incomplete fruition of the neoliberal modernizing drive within the Eurozone as a whole lacks even the superficial appeal of the similar argument made for Greece. The policies of austerity which, at least after the initial period of the crisis, came to dominate, and not only within the Eurozone, point to a hardening of the neoliberal political and social order. The space for responding to demands and aspirations from below seems to have drastically narrowed even compared to the period of neoliberal hegemony before the crisis. Such a hardening may suggest either that elites have isolated themselves from the realities of the lived experiences of the many or, alternatively, that they lack the confidence to incorporate ideas and solutions stemming outside their narrow circle - Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek may have been useful to elites in the dark days of the social-democratic consensus, but they are unlikely to provide much of a road map in the conditions of the present crisis. This lack of plasticity suggests that the final resolution to the crisis is unlikely to entail a return to either the neoliberalism of the pre-2008 period or the earlier socialdemocratic Keynesian consensus. We need to recall that there was no return to the status quo ante in the two previous major crises of capitalism in the 1930s and 1970s. Thus, we might be moving either in the direction of a far more authoritarian capitalist settlement, or to a long period of transcendence of some of the essential features of capitalism. The interest of the Greek case lies in the fact that the very acuteness of the crisis has brought to the fore both potentialities." (p. 1-2) Tsakalotos, Euclid; Laskos, Christos (2013): Crucible of Resistance. Greece, the Eurozone and the World Economic Crisis. London: Pluto Press. Contents: Acknowledgements viii lntroduction: The Greek Crisis in Context 1 1 Neoliberalism as Modernization 16 2 The Greek Economy and Society on the Eve of the Crisis 33 3 The Eurozone Crisis in Context 56 4 From Crisis to Permanent Austerity 91 5 The Underdogs Strike Back 113 6 Out of the Mire: Arguments within the Greek 130 Appendix 146 Notes 160 References 170 Index 177 The concluding paragraphs of their last chapter (which in fact is a short history of SYRIZA until the end of 2012): "It was not, of course, the case that the Left of SYRIZA suggested that progress towards socialism, or at least a leftist exit from the crisis, needed to wait for the resolution of such difficult questions and debates. Nor did it ever argue, as was often unfairly claimed. that change in Greece would have to wait for the simultaneous maturing of the poliical Left in Europe as a whole. On the contrary. as we saw in Chapter 5, it was actively involved in nearly all forms of resistance against the governments of austerity. It was clearly aware that the nation state constituted the primary locus of such resistance. But at the same time it sought to challenge traditional leftist politics by claiming that a programme of the Left never fully pre-exists independently of the movement - something which holds whether we conceive the movement towards a different society in terms of a long process of evolutionary changes within capitalism, in terms of a more condensed period of rupture with the capitalist System, or as something in between (intermediate 'ruptures' along the path to socialism as left Eurocommunists used to argue). SYRIZA's meteoric rise during 2012 may seem to be a vindication of the position it took in the above three debates, but this would be going too far. For SYRIZA was also awarded for its commitment to left-wing unity in the face of the onslaught by austeritv governments. Its appeal to both the KKE and ANTARSYA to form a common front to block existing policies had widespread resonance. It argued hat the Left could unite while keeping debate on inter-left disputes as a prerequisite for such unity. This, more than anything, turned the tide in SYRIZA's favour in spite of, or perhaps because, its appeals fell on stony ground. SYRIZA's recognition that it was part of something larger probably worked in its favour. The Greek Left was increasingly aware that it was facing common dangers - notably the rise of a new and far more authoritarian version of neoliberalism - and common aspirations, in terms of a progressive exit out of the mire. The scale of the crisis in Greece had led not only to the most impressive amount of resistance to authoritarian attempts to resolve the crisis, but sustained debates that sought to broach new ground. But the overall significance of both will surely ultimately depend on how this resistance, and these debates, connect to developments beyond Greece's shores." (p. 144-5) _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
