Syriza’s performance in office is no more complex than that of so many other governments backed by unions and social movements who were quickly forced to abandon their programs as a condition of governing a capitalist state. Syriza’s was a more dramatic fall given the depth of the crisis in Greece, the high hopes it’s electoral victory engendered, and its subsequent flight from the renewed anti-austerity mandate handed to it in the referendum, but it’s record was not so extraordinary and difficult to understand as Louis likes to make out.
The Syriza leadership, including Varoufakis, acted on the assumption that could widen what it saw as an incipient split within the European bourgeoisie and governments - on the one side, the French and Italians who considered that austerity had reached its limits, and on the other, the Germans and their allies who made aid conditional on the completion of structural reforms in labour and product markets. This was a disastrous strategic miscalculation which turned Syriza away from continued mobilization and education of its own anti-austerity base in favour of futile and dispiriting cap in hand appeals for relief from the German-led creditors’ troika. The more realistic approach - suggested by many commentators, and not only on the left - would have been to admit the possibility of failure and, if it came to that, to try to negotiate an orderly exit from the eurozone. Schauble, in particular, was unhappy about throwing good money after bad, and was encouraging a Greek “suspension” from the Eurozone. This would necessarily have been an orderly exit since it was and is not in the interest of the US and Europeans to starve and destabilize Greece to the point it becomes a failed state at a strategic global crossroads. It became clear early on that the truly utopian notion was that the Germans, in concert with the IMF and ECB, would agree to substantial debt relief without Syriza implementing the deregulation, fiscal discipline, privatization, and other measures that previous Greek governments and other eurozone debtors had accepted. The troika was as conscious of the “demonstration effect” of the Greek negotiations throughout Europe as the hopeful European left which hoped to emulate a Syriza victory in Spain and elsewhere. Short of being able to negotiate an orderly and viable Grexit, it would have been better for the Syriza government to have resigned and continued to patiently organize and educate from opposition rather than sign on to the harshest austerity package to date. If Syriza’s accession to office last January was marked by enthusiasm and hope, it’s post-capitulation re-election in September was characterized by resigned support for the party as a “lesser evil” and an illusionary hope born of desperation that it could still mitigate the worst effects of the new agreement. It confuses cause and effect to blame the ostensibly more “conservative” Greek and European masses for the government’s behaviour. It never tried to give a lead to the most combative sectors of the growing anti-austerity sentiment sweeping Europe, and its swift and unprincipled capitulation in defiance of the July referendum vote confused, demoralized, and split those who had once looked to the party for inspiration. The net effect of the Syriza experience, as has been the case with all left-centre governments administering a capitalist state, was to halt the forward movement of the mass of the population yearning for change. If the fear is that more radical measures pointing to socialist revolution inevitably produce catastrophic results in a small country with a weak and undeveloped economy, then the question must be asked: Why form or elect parties like Syriza which promise sweeping social change in the first place? Arguably, the Greek masses would not have been exposed to the same economic subversion and hardship perpetrated by the troika had they not had the temerity to reject its favoured parties, PASOK and New Democracy, in favour of one which sought to tear up the austerity memoranda they had signed. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
