They
were young, attractive, well-educated, and the darlings of the
non-Communist left (and even some Communists!). The leaders of the
Greek party, SYRIZA, promised the Greek people an escape from the
jaws of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund,
and the European Commission. Instead, they delivered the humiliating
surrender of a people who only a week earlier had demonstrated a
clear rejection of accommodation to the EU ruling classes.
The
Financial Times
headlined: “Greek PM likely to rely on opposition to pass most
intrusive
programme ever mounted by EU.”
(My emphasis)
Regarding
the SYRIZA surrender, The
Real News
commentator, Dmitri Lascaris, declared that “this is one of the
worst political debacles in modern European history.”
Journalist
and award-winning documentarian, John Pilger acidly commented: “An
historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate
of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored
last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed [to] a raft
of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a ‘bailout’
that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.”
Predictably,
the non-revolutionary left scrambled to put an apologetic spin on the
embarrassing collapse of the SYRIZA program. Before the draconian
deal, the entire spectrum of the US left—from “progressive”
Democrats to neo-Marxists and other hyphenated pseudo-Marxists---were
swept into a love fest for SYRIZA unlike any since the orgy of
Obama-mania. Typical of the post-referendum SYRIZA craze was the
statement by the loquacious “Marxist” economist Richard Wolff on
Democracy
Now!
...And
if Syriza can pull that off, the message sent to the comparable
groups in every other European country is a staggering reconception
of what the future of Europe may look like, where the words
"anti-capitalism" become a unifying slogan for people
across that continent...
You
cannot impose economic structural reforms on a population that has
voted 60 percent against them, with the television blaring out
propaganda for them, every TV station and every newspaper, virtually,
doing that. You just can’t do it. It’s not a question of
argument; it’s a question of fact. (7-7-15)
Well,
Professor Wolff, the Troika did it, thanks to the capitulation of
SYRIZA.
Rather
than heap deserved blame on the SYRIZA leadership, it is surely more
useful to draw lessons from a fiasco that will have disastrous
consequences for the Greek people. Of the many possible lessons, I
offer the following three:
1.
Social democracy offers no answer to the crisis of capitalism in its
many manifestations. Whether it is the untenable strategy of
overturning the neo-liberal model of capitalism and returning to the
“golden age” of welfare statist policies, the once popular
doctrine that “a rising tide raises all boats,” or the
contradictory notion of democratizing capitalism, reformist programs
that accommodate the bourgeois state and capitalist relations of
production will fail to deliver the people from increasing
immiseration and degradation. The European experience teaches nothing
if not that.
Europeans
have understandably lost patience with the evolution of their
parliamentary systems toward two poles: tyranny of markets and
tyranny of markets with a human face. They are turning instead to
“radical” parties of the right and left. SYRIZA is an example of
a “radical” party of the left that occupies the untenable space
of defying the logic of capitalism while accepting its legitimacy.
This is akin to diagnosing cancer while refusing treatment.
Clearly,
the newly minted Euro-left parties that hide social democratic
accommodation of capitalism behind the mask of “anti-capitalism”
promise no more success than SYRIZA.
2.
The Greek Communists (KKE) won a moral and ideological victory with
their steadfast position that the SYRIZA program would end in
disaster. They argued consistently that SYRIZA's attempt to “manage”
capitalism would end badly. Speaking before a July 2 rally in Athens,
General Secretary Dimitris Koutsoumpas stated emphatically:
•Both
the YES and the NO mean the acceptance of a new memorandum of
anti-people measures, perhaps the worst that we have seen up to now.
•Both
the YES and NO will lead the people to new torments and tragedies.
•Both the YES and the No mean anti-worker, anti-people measures.
•The referendum is an alibi for a new memorandum-agreement at the
expense of the Greek people.
•The
KKE calls on the Greek people to reject all the blackmail, to cast
its proposal into the ballot box and say:
WE
DO NOT CHOOSE ANTI-PEOPLE MEASURES-WE DO NOT CHOOSE A NEW
MEMORANDUM-WE CANCEL OUT THE FALSE DILEMMAS.
Nearly
6% of the voters-- a remarkable write-in result-- complied with
Koutsoumpas' call.
Not
surprisingly, the bourgeois media ignored KKE's campaign against the
maneuvers and manipulations of the SYRIZA-ANEL government; one would
expect no less from the mouthpieces of the capitalist ruling classes.
However, the nearly total disregard of the KKE critique and
counter-program by the broad left is indefensible. Apart from a few
Leninist organizations, KKE's position was either ignored or
subjected to derision. Particularly in the US, intense anti-Communism
and ideological conformity led to an almost complete misreading of
the Greek tragedy, a development that could have been avoided with a
measure of non-sectarian tolerance toward the KKE analysis.
With
the collapse of SYRIZA as a left oppositional party, only KKE holds
the banner of left resistance. Let's see if our “left” friends
will support its struggle.
3.
For those of us living in the US, those of us destined to suffer
through a tortuous, sensationalized, but ultimately disappointingly
predictable Federal electoral campaign, the SYRIZA debacle holds some
interesting parallels. As a friend and comrade so astutely
points out, the Bernie Sanders campaign is a similar Trojan horse
channeling dissatisfaction with capitalist institutions away from
truly radical, effective solutions.
Instead
of mounting a truly independent campaign outside of the two-party
black hole, Sanders chose to run in the Democratic primary while
promising neither to bolt the Party nor to withhold support from the
primary victor regardless of the outcome. Thus, when he falls in the
primaries to Hilary Clinton's corporate coffers-- as every serious
commentator acknowledges he will, Sanders will dutifully urge the
Party's progressive wing to accept defeat and climb aboard Clinton's
juggernaut.
Apologists
for this quixotic campaign will argue that Sanders will at least move
the campaign conversation leftward. Of course this flies in the face
of every primary campaign in any voter’s memory. Every Democratic
Party primary season swings leftward in deference to the hard-core
base, only to swing even further rightward to accommodate the
“centrists” that strategists hope to cultivate. More often than
not this strategy backfires; yet it remains an irreproachable axiom
in the age of television and the Internet.
Sanders
says in his campaign literature: “...the billionaire class is
spending huge amounts of money to buy candidates and elections. We
are now witnessing the undermining of American democracy and the
rapid movement towards oligarchy where a handful of very wealthy
families and their Super PACs will control our government.”
Does
he think this process will be suspended for the 2016 primary season?
Does he not count the Clinton family, its foundation, and its massive
fund-raising machine as part of that “oligarchy”?
If
Senator Sanders believes his words, he would support a movement away
from this trap and not lend his name to legitimizing a corrupted,
bankrupt process.
Zoltan
Zigedy
