SYRIZA: A closer look S jumped sharply from its humble beginnings
2015 2015-03Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 11 →
The words are the paper's own, from its digital file; the division into articles was made by machine, so a box or caption can end up inside the article next to it.
Scan page 11
300,000 new jobs in the public and private sector.
But even before the Feb. 20 deal, SYRIZA began to shift to advocating policies that are more to the lik ing of the world’s capitalists. Today, there is no more talk of nationalizing the banks; instead, it calls for banks to run on sound commercial-banking princi ples. Privatizations that have not yet been launched will be reviewed.
SYRIZA agreed to raise minimum wages in a man ner that “safeguards competiveness and employment prospects,” and in consultation with its “partners.” It will identify cost-saving measures through a thorough review of expenditures; review spending for nonwage benefits across the public sector; and control health costs while improving the quality of medical services and granting universal access. It will take measures to unify and streamline pensions.
The agreement with the Troika makes it clearer than ever that working people should not support SYRIZA’s capitalist government.
Break the coalition with ANEL!
Allowing the right-wing pro-capitalist ANEL to share the government with SYRIZA will ensure that basic demands of the working class can never be met. The rights of immigrants, national minorities, women, and LGBT people will be sacrificed to ANEL’s reactionary precepts.
As the Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky warned, hitching the workers’ movement to a capital ist government can only end in disaster, never social ism. Examples abound of these multi-class govern mental coalitions, often known as “popular fronts”: Spain and France in the 1930s, Indonesia in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s, Haiti in the 1990s, etc. All ended in massive defeats at the cost of many lives.
The wild card in Greece is the fascist goons of the Golden Dawn Party (6.3%), whose racist attacks on immigrants and leftists have made them notorious. Their tactics and goals are modeled on the racism and anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Nazi Party. Six of its leaders march of SYRIZA supporters.
were out of the race, imprisoned for running a “criminal organization.” Ever seeking to divide the Greek working people into “them” and “us” with anti-austerity rhetoric, Golden Dawn re mains the third largest vote getter. Formed from within Greek police units, GD is a deadly enemy for the labor movement to confront and defeat in the streets. Lawyers and court suits cannot eliminate the menace of fascism.
After the 2013 murder of the popular radical rapper, Pavlos Fyssas, by Golden Dawn killers, a united front of most of the left marched 30,000 strong in Athens. However, SYRIZA took part in few anti-fascist mobilizations.
A united mass workers front is desperately needed in Greece. Without decisive action against Golden Dawn and a winning strategy against capital on the economic front—such as mass marches, strikes, occupations, and nation alizations—the stranglehold of international capital will not be broken and the fascists will be emboldened.
Greek workers need jobs, and the youth needs a future, free of the Troika and its own corrupt ruling class. While fighting for reforms shoul der to shoulder with other Greek workers, class-conscious worker activists must strive to build a mass party with a revolutionary social ist program. Only socialist revolution, properly organized over time and led by a revolutionary party, can defeat international capitalism and its collaborators!
It is time for workers and activists in all coun tries to actively support the struggle in Greece. In the United States today, as we defend union rights, fight for the $15 an hour minimum wage, defend the environment, and protest killer cops, international solidarity will pay off in the end. Their fight is our fight! n YRIZA was founded in 2004 and its fortunes have SYRIZA’s founders, like Tsipras, came from rightward splits from the Communist Party (KKE) of the 1980s. Known as “euro-communists,” they were mainly fol lowers of latter-day Stalinism practiced by figures such as ex-Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Eurocommunists advocated a gradual strategy to achieve socialism—when they bothered to mention it at all—to be achieved in the dim future and primarily through the ballot box.
The Euro-communist tendency has melted away over decades as radicalized European workers found it too tame and too willing to join corrupt capitalist governments, losing much of its identity as radicals. SYRIZA today is led mostly by intellectuals, frequent ly in universities.
SYRIZA’s ties to the working class are mostly ideo logical, with estimates of union influence at just 5% to 10% and concentrated in the public sector more than in private enterprise.
SYRIZA is unique, however, in that it consists of a coalition that includes Trotskyists, Maoists, and an archists from the Greek Occupy movement, as well as Euro-communists. Collectively, this radical wing con stitutes the “Left Platform” within SYRIZA. The Left Platform is about 30% of SYRIZA’s Central Commit tee and has nine ministers in the new government.
A study of SYRIZA voters indicates that 31% iden tify themselves as socialists, 11% as “anti-capitalists/ anti-authoritarians,” 11% as social-democrats, 8% as communists, and 6% simply as leftists. Yet, for a par ty that won 2,250,000 votes, its membership is only 35,000, a dangerous weakness that is attributable to a focus on elections and not on building a fighting party on the ground. —M.G.