Louis Proyect's characteristic attempt to apologize for the betrayal of Tsipras and the left political stasis that led to the Venezuelan defeat by appealing to an "unfavorable balance of forces" misses the point. If it were a matter of choosing between a revolutionary program that was bound to fail, and a reformist course that had some possibility of success, of course it would make more sense to choose the latter. But that is not the choice. The same "balance of forces" that makes revolution unlikely also renders untenable the prospect of extensive or lasting reforms. Why would ruling classes who are not threatened by the prospect of revolution, or at least mass radicalization, consent to serious reforms? Louis reiterates the impossibility of socialism in one country. But didn't Mitterand's volte-face in 1981-82 demonstrate early on that Keynesianism in one country is also unlikely to succeed? The reality of the neoliberal era is that measures and policies that the ruling classes were willing to live with fifty years ago, when a third of the world was non-capitalist, are now considered tantamount to Red Terror. The fierce reaction by the capitalist class to any attempt to implement serious pro-people changes is entirely foreseeable because we have seen it so many times .
The betrayal of Syriza, and the potential for betrayal of movements modeled on it, like Podemos, does not consist in the fact that they may not be powerful enough to reverse austerity. It consists in the fact that they hold out the false promise of being able to do so by purely electoral and diplomatic means, fail to tell the people the kinds of radical measures that would be necessary for any chance of winning, refuse even to consider such measures themselves, and when--surprise, surprise!--their supplications are scorned by the powerful, turning around to become accomplices in the imposition of austerity themselves. This is most decidedly NOT the kind of left we need--one which, like bourgeois parties, considers electoral victory the only important thing, even at the price of lying to the people (or, which is the same thing, refusing to tell them the truth), and deems staying in office the supreme imperative once elected, even when it means imposing the measures they were put in office to combat. Jim Creegan ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:02:55 -0500 From: Louis Proyect <[email protected]> Subject: [Pen-l] Fwd: Greece, Venezuela and the prospects for a new left To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <[email protected]>, Progressive Economics <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed After an extended period of relative quiescence in which the North Star editorial board has been continuing to assess the progress (or lack thereof) toward the creation of radical, nonsectarian formations on the left, we hope to begin publishing relevant content again. To some extent, this is an unavoidable task since the defeats in Greece and Venezuela of such parties has led to widespread discussion of whether they were oversold to begin with. While the emphasis for people who believe in the North Star type approach has always been on organizational questions (what Lenin really meant, etc.), there is no avoiding the programmatic aspects of both Syriza and the Bolivarian revolution. In the first case you are dealing with a party that ostensibly refused to live up to its promises. With Venezuela, the issue might be one of whether the ruling party could have done anything to stay in power given the dire economic situation triggered by falling oil prices. full: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=12407 ------------------------------
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