Greece: Troika aims to oust Syriza
Stuart King from Lambeth Left Unity writes.
The Greek government is looking over a precipice. Whether the Greek people vote yes or no in Sunday’s referendum the Troika – the EU, ECB and IMF – have made clear they want Syriza out of office.
Having dared to call a referendum to consult the people about the latest ultimatum involving years of austerity and unemployment they are no longer considered fit to govern by the banks and hedge funds, “the markets”, who have the last say in such matters.
Having expressed their “shock” that Tsipras should do such a thing, the European Central Bank deliberately pulled the plug on its funding in the middle of a bank run. Leader after leader of European institutions lined up to denounce Syriza’s actions, denouncing the “chaos” they themselves had just created and blaming the Greek government for it. Their international media and those belonging to the Greek oligarchs piled in behind them to ensure a Yes vote.
This is what bourgeois democracy looks like.
Problems in the No camp
It needs to be said, Tsipras has not made it easy to mobilise the people against the Troika’s ultimatum. On the 22 June he presented a set of proposals that abandoned many of Syriza’s “red lines”. He offered increases in VAT, for restaurants, certain food items, for the Greek islands, as well as concessions on pensions – increasing workers contributions, phasing out early retirement by next year and raising the pension age to 67 by 2023. Further, taxes were to be raised on business with rises of corporate tax and a special levy on businesses with profits over €500,000. The aim was to increase taxes to create a budget surplus as demanded by the Troika to pay back interest on its £172bn debt.
This offer was quickly scotched by the IMF. Its head Christine Lagarde – she with the £300,000 annual salary that is exempt from tax – demanded that the taxes fall less heavily on business and more heavily on workers, by for example raising VAT on energy bills to 23%. Tsipras and his finance minister walked away and called the referendum on the Troika’s final offer.
While many thought a No vote would mean a break with negotiations about more austerity, Tsipras and his finance minister made clear this wasn’t the case. Rather it was a vote to “strengthen their hand in the negotiations”. Indeed at one point a couple of days into the campaign Tsipras sent a message to the Troika suggesting they could agree to the Troika austerity measures providing something was done on debt relief. The offer was dismissed out of hand by Berlin.
Not surprisingly many voters are confused. They are being bombarded by the EU, big business and their media with the argument that a No vote is a vote to leave the euro, while the leadership of Syriza is saying it’s no such thing, just a vote to continue the constantly stalled negotiations over how much more austerity the Greeks must suffer.
Tsipras is offering the No voters no clear way out of this ongoing crisis, just more of the same.
Syriza’s fatal flaw
For all its strengths – its ability to unite competing fractions of the Greek left, its activity and roots in the popular movements against austerity, its parliamentary discipline under enormous pressure – Syriza had one fatal flaw, its commitment to stay in the euro and EU at all costs.
As a result it went into the election promising the Greek people it could both end austerity, re-negotiate the debt, and stay in the euro. This gave it very little to negotiate with. Over five months of constant meetings and demands the Troika have played Tsipras and his finance minister like a fish caught on a line, offering a little here, reeling in there, with the aim to tire the party and its supporters out.
At no point, not even in this referendum, has the leadership of Syriza said to the Greek people “the only way out of this impasse of ongoing poverty and austerity stretching into the distant future is to break with the euro and declare a unilateral moratorium on the debt”. Of course this would have brought down the wrath of international capitalism on Syriza’s head and it would have had to prepare for a real fight. But the alternative is to be reeled in by the Troika and thrown out of office.
Such a strategy would be no easy option. The government would need to use the referendum to rally the anti austerity forces, follow up capital controls with taking over the banks and placing them under the control of the government. It would have to adopt an emergency plan, quickly introducing a new currency to replace the euro, taking over the key transportation, food distribution and major businesses, placing them under the control of local and popular committees. It would need to establish state control over imports and exports and seek support and finance from whoever was willing to give it – Russia, China and progressive governments in south America. Above all it would have to try and neutralise the threat from the armed forces by establishing democratic rank and file soldiers committees in defense of what would be a real workers government in a fight for survival.
Of course it is very late to attempt such a change of course, it should have been the “Plan B” popularised in all the trade unions and popular organisations over the last five months giving the No vote forces a real strategy to fightback.
In many ways the developments in Greece have brought us back to the arguments we had at the founding of Left Unity. Can a “Left Party” make radical reforms within the capitalist framework or do we need to build a party that is explicitly anticapitalist, one that is not afraid to establish a workers government that can take on the capitalists, the banks and their armed forces in the interests of workers in the fight for a socialist society. Syriza is showing us that even a left reformist strategy based on serious struggles cannot win.
Solidarity
Whatever our criticisms of this or that decision or strategy of Syriza we should never forget that the real enemy in all of this is the Troika working for and on behalf of “the markets” and international capital. And no one should believe that Osborne and the Tories weren’t part of these decisions, as his recent refusal to deny it in Parliament shows.
Our solidarity is with the Greek people in their struggle with austerity, not with this or that political party or leadership faction and that is the attitude we should take into the Greece Solidarity Campaign and Medical Aid for Greece.
Now more than ever the entire left needs to take up the cause of solidarity with Greece, joining the demonstrations and pickets, denouncing the undemocratic attempts to oust Syriza and replace it by a pro Troika “technocratic government” – one whose only task will be to enforce austerity, smash the trade unions through privatisations and continue to loot Greece in the interests of the international banks.
One thing we need to add to these actions is twinning in the trade union and labour movement – linking British TU branches and workplaces to TUs and popular organisations in Greece, sending aid, supporting struggles, organising delegations and spreading the word about what is really happening on the ground.
Victory to the anti-austerity struggles in Greece!
Down with the Troika!
4 comments
4 responses to “Greece: Troika aims to oust Syriza”
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A good article that raises many important , tactical and wider strategic political issues for radical socialists.
Unfortunately for Syriza as a radical , but absolutely core fundamentally ideologically reformist, socialist party, the highly advanced stage of the global capitalist crisis in Greece – compared to the rest of Europe, has left it totally trapped between a rock and a hard place.
The Syriza leadership went to the last Greek election on a completely mistaken proposition – that staying in the Eurozone AND negotiating hard through their clever tactics and wizzo radical Keynsian economic expertise to end Austerity was possible. The Greek electorate believed them, and hence was never asked by the Syriza “electoral offert” to question the entire viability of Greece’s place in the mainly German economy benefitting Eurozone .
In a rational world perhaps this unlikely mix of and end to Austerity and continued Eurozone membership was possible, but the need to make an example of the Greeks and its Left government in its “impudent demand” for an end to Austerity and the prioritising of the protection of German and other European banks, meant no good deal was ever on offer from the Troika powers.
The tragedy of Syriza has been , perhaps unknowingly, to have pursued a confrontational revolutionery “Transitional” demands strategy , but without any intention to carry out the necessary mass mobilisation of the Greek working class, and to move rapidly leftwards with the nationalisation of the banks and “Commanding Heights” of the Greek economy as the crisis deepened. Given this fundamental limited reformist politics within the Syriza leadership and major sections of the party membership, the last few months of step by step “red lines” policy retreat, and the recent 11th hour almost complete capitulation of Tsipras to the Troika’s demands can only serve to demobilise the “No” vote – and also ensure that even WITH a small successful “No” vote the Syriza government is tactically adrift in a sea of surrounding capitalist hostile pressure.
There is much to be learnt from the continual compromises of Syriza in the face of robust capitalist “pushback” – and those of Die Linke in Germany too. In the current reality of global capitalist crisis Radical Socialist Left reformism can only be successful as a strategy in the opening phases of struggle (as the UK is currently positioned), to build a large movement of mass active resistance around very basic “anti Austerity” demands. Any party, including Left Unity, which thinks that a purely reformist strategy can bring about a “solution” to the capitalist crisis domestically is seriously deluding themselves. Though mass pressure around radical reformist demands can undoubtedly win some minor but significant wins for the working class . The point though is that in the specific context of a global capitalist crisis , once a state enters a domestic economic meltdown equivalent to that Greece is now undergoing , the radical reformist strategy has either to be developed Leftwards into a fully “transitional” one , committed to building the class combativity necessary for a fundamental confrontation with capitalism itself – or the purely limited reformist government is inevitably trapped in an ever accelerating series of compromises and retreats – as Syriza is implementing today.
“Greece debt crisis: Athens accepts harsh austerity as bailout deal nears”
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/greece-debt-crisis-athens-accepts-harsh-austerity-as-bailout-deal-nears?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
“Austerity in a modified form”
http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1066/austerity-in-a-modified-form/
The unbelievably oppressive, vindictive, “deal” Tsipras has just brought back from the summit meeting with the Troika powers , and which he is ,incredibly, actually trying to sell/spin as a “good deal”, represents nothing more than a politico/economic coup by the Troika powers (under German direction) over Greek democracy. Tsipras even seems willing to recommend the transfer of 50 billion Euros of Greek national assets to a special fund to be sold off without any Greek control to pay off Greek Debts !
the ramshackle coalition of Syriza will surely inevitable splinter asunder over the next few days and weeks, as the sheer scale of the betrayal by Tsipras sinks in with a public who voted NO to a much better deal just a few days ago.
Tsipras has turned out to be an Ebert or Noske, in the long line of social democrat betrayers of the working class. Greek exit from the Eurozone is now the only route forward to escape complete national subjection under German-led Troika direct rule. unfortunately Syriza’s leadership appear to have done absolutely nothing to prepare for a “Plan b” Grexit and a new currency.
Let’s be perfectly frank with ourselves comrades – this is a complete disaster for the Syriza (and Podemos) model of loose broad radical Left political organisation. Left Unity will have to draw the appropriate lessons, and be a broad , but much politically harder, party type , if we are to have any chance of actually delivering a radical socialist alternative to Austerity.
The Troika’s determination to crush Greece bears some resemblance to the USA’s determination to bring down the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s. Both countries were small and insignificant in economic and military terms by comparison with their opponents – the reason they attacked so relentlessly and ruthlessly is because they offered a genuine alternative to free-market capitalism – the threat of a good example. Syriza’s mistake was vastly to underestimate how much of a threat they posed to the establishment. Varoufakis and Tskalotos are used to the normally tolerant atmosphere of academic seminars, where radically different opinions are treated with courtesy, and reason to a certain extent prevails – their lack of political experience may have prevented them from realizing that their opponents were never going to play by the rules. In retrospect, Tsipras should have put Greece on an economic war footing over the last few months, prepared a new currency, and used the time to expose the Troika’s determination to break Greece come what may. He might then have been able to muster the massive political capital needed to lead Greece successfully out of the Euro. However, given the deep fears in Greece about leaving the Euro, even this strategy might not have succeeded.
There is no getting round the fact that the events of the last few days have been a devastating setback to the left in Greece. At a stroke, Tsipras has squandered an apparently impregnable domestic political position. However, the savage terms Greece has been forced to accept to obtain its third bailout will strengthen the argument that Greece needs to turn its back on the Eurozone, both within Greece and outside. We must support those elements within Syriza that want Greece to leave the Euro and write off its debts. While Syriza’s left wing may initially be in a minority, as the full economic and political implications of the last few days sink in, there is a good chance that more and more Greeks will see that their only hope is to break the chains of servitude. What we have just seen is the purposeful, vindictive destruction of a country’s economy by international capital, unprecedented in a developed-world context. It should be understood as an act of economic warfare, quite as destructive, indeed, as many overtly military attacks.