As we enter the eighth
year of the long-lingering global economic crisis, it is sobering indeed that
it is only in Greece that a political party putting forward a clear, radical
democratic alternative to the perverse policies of neoliberal austerity stands
on the doorstep of entering the state.
The policies imposed
by the European Central Bank (ECB), and above all by the German central bank
acting behind it, made the term Great Depression rather than Great Recession
especially apt for Greece in this crisis. Unemployment was pushed beyond 25 per
cent, minimum wages were cut by a third, and people were cut off the
electricity grid and denied basic pharmaceuticals. The rule of law was simply
thrown out in terms of labour relations.
Immediate Steps Post Election
Having clung to office
for two more years, the governing coalition of the old patronage parties is
about to be displaced by Syriza in next Sunday’s election. What Syriza is first
of all promising is that it will renege on the reactionary austerity policies.
They are promising to reinstate collective bargaining and workers’ basic
rights, to raise the minimum wage, to reconnect people to the electricity grid.
It is a sad commentary on our times that these have become radical things to
do.
A good deal of this
can be done without resolving the very large question of whether Greece will
continue to treat as legitimate and pay all the interest on the enormous debt
that was run up by previous client list and, in many senses, corrupt governments,
who always worked hand in glove with the very small capitalist oligarchy that
runs industry, trade and finance. Syriza has costed its immediate restorative
policies at some 11-billion euros, equivalent to less than 20 per cent of
revenues lost through tax avoidance. Its most popular proposed revenue measure
involves finally requiring the big media barons to pay license fees for the use
of that very basic public resource - the airwaves.
Syriza is not saying
that they want to leave the euro. They don’t, and wouldn’t be anywhere near
where they are in the polls otherwise. The question is whether they can have
the breathing room to undertake basic restorative policies, and to lay the
ground for a longer-term economic strategy. This would entail real structural
reform of the Greek state, so there could be some real democratic involvement
in what’s invested and how it’s invested, so that Greece might come out of the
crisis in a progressive manner.
The loans Greece has
had from European Union, the European Central Bank, and the IMF in exchange for
introducing such terrible austerity has not removed its heavy debt burden. The
loans were mainly designed to allow for paying interest due to the bondholders,
so that Greece could continue to borrow, at exorbitant rates. The insistence
that a newly-elected Syriza government – which would be Greece’s first really
honest, non-client list government – should first of all embrace the obligation
to pay such interest rates to either wealthy Greek capitalists or to foreign
bankers is nothing less than scandalous.
Overcoming the Crisis
The premise that were
Syriza to succeed that somehow this would deepen the European crisis stems from
looking at the world in terms of the dangers that a democratically elected
government poses for domestic and international capital rather than in terms of
the necessary things that a democratic government should be doing for the
majority of its people.
Syriza represents the
first and the strongest democratic response to the bizarre deepening of
neoliberalism after the 2008 crisis. Were such a democratic government to be
stymied or brought down by the hostility of its domestic capitalist class
working in cahoots with international capitalists and their political
representatives, this would be a tragedy for democracy. It would reinforce the
notion, growing ever stronger in Europe today, that the only way to protect
people from the neoliberal austerity is through supporting right-wing
ethno-nationalist parties.
What Syriza stands for
in this context is what Spain’s newly elected Republican government stood for
in the early 1930s at a time when the Nazis on the march to winning elections
in Germany. For the moment – at least until Podemos reclaims the mantle at the
end of this year – a democratic Greece under Syriza would represent what
democratic Spain represented for the international left in the 1930s. The
prospects for a different outcome are much better, provided there is strong
international support for giving a Syriza government the breathing room it
would need.
