Like Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon”, the story of Syriza is also one about a rape told from different, self-serving and contradictory perspectives. For both the sectarian “Leninists” and the anarchists, Tsipras’s failure was ultimately a failure to smash the state and proceed rapidly toward the construction of communism. For a post-Keynesian like Jamie Galbraith, there was not that much of a failure. As a Nation Magazine wrap-up on the deal between Syriza and the German bankers put it, Galbraith summed it up as one in which “it was the German authorities that had blinked” and a “deal makes no dramatic concessions to the pro-austerity camp”. For other post-Keynesians like Mark Weisbrot, there is more of an emphasis on what was lost even if there is a reluctance to admit that it was a full-blown defeat. As for the capitalist ideologues at the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal, you get more or less the inverse interpretation of the ultraleft. Greece was a tragedy caused by Tsipras’s hubris.
Since the last version of what happened is so patently absurd, there is no point commenting on it. It is the clash between the first two that interests me especially since they both strike me as undertheorized. Probably the best presentation of the Marxist analysis can be found on Michael Roberts’s blog in an article titled “Greece: Keynes or Marx?” that was written before the infamous deal that amounted to a new round of debt and austerity. Referring to an interview that Sebastian Budgen conducted with Costas Lapavitsas, he finds fault with Lapavitsas’s confession that he remains committed to Keynesianism despite being a sharp critic of Alex Tsipras: “Let me come clean on this. Keynes and Keynesianism, unfortunately, remain the most powerful tools we’ve got, even as Marxists, for dealing with issues of policy in the here and now.” full: http://louisproyect.org/2016/01/02/greece-as-rashomon/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
