“Neoliberal Barbarity”: There Is Nothing to Celebrate after Sunday’s Greek Elections…(New Boss, Same As The Old Boss!)
By Theodoros Karyotis
Global Research
September 24, 2015
Skyrocketing abstention, social demobilization and an impending wave of harsh austerity measures call for critical reflection after SYRIZA’s victory.
There is nothing to celebrate, really. The European leftists that arrived in Athens to support Tsipras are justified to celebrate, since they have a vision of Syriza that is external and more often than not romanticized. As far as Greeks are concerned, no one can doubt that there are honest and well-meaning left-wing people who have voted for Syriza or are even (still) members of Syriza. But after the developments of the last few months the last thing they want to do is celebrate.
How can they celebrate, when tomorrow the new Syriza-led government has to enforce and oversee the implementation of a harsh attack on nature and the popular classes, having given up its capacity to legislate without the tutelage of Brussels and Berlin, and being under constant financial blackmail by the creditors?
Left-wing pragmatism and social demobilization
Tsipras’ new “selling point” is his fight against corruption and the oligarchy, since his newly-adopted “pragmatism” dictates that he cannot anymore fight against austerity and neoliberal restructuring. Thus, the horizon of left-wing politics in Greece has become an “austerity with a human face”, a “less corrupt” and “more just” enforcement of neoliberal barbarity.
Unfortunately, in the coming months we are going to witness Tsipras’ “political maturity” and “pragmatism” extending to ever new areas: Pragmatism dictates that you cannot fight against those who own all the wealth and the mass media in Greece, that you cannot shut down the mine in Skouries, that you have to privatize the water companies after all, that you cannot permit worker occupations like VIOME to challenge private property, that you have to deal with protest and dissent deploying the forces of public order.
In short, left-wing pragmatism is going to achieve everything that right-wing arrogance could not, that is, to subdue a population that has been fighting against neoliberal barbarity for 5 years.
All the while, the social movements have been tricked into standing by and waiting for Syriza to fullfil the role it assigned for itself: that of the mediator between social resistances and political power. The government is gaining political time, while movement demobilization means that struggles are defeated one by one: The self-managed workers of ERT banished by the new management, the anti-mining movement in Halkidiki seeing the destruction of its land… Who is next? Maybe self-managed VIOME, struggling to legitimize its activity in adverse conditions? Maybe Thessaloniki’s water movement, which fiercely fought and stopped privatization, only to see it back on the table according to the terms of the new memorandum?
The failure of SYRIZA’s splinter “Popular Unity” to mobilize voters comes as no surprise: despite the anti-memorandum rhetoric, the new party repeated some of the more objectionable practices of SYRIZA: It was constituted in a top-down process, solely on party cadres, built around flamboyant and self-centred personalities, projecting a hegemonism towards movements and other political forces, seeking followers rather than allies, projecting its state-centric program of national capitalist reconstruction outside the euro as the holy grail of transformatory politics. It failed to mobilise ex-SYRIZA voters, most of whom preferred to stay at home rather than go out to vote for Popular Unity; it also failed to convince the disenchanted movement-friendly party base of SYRIZA, which to this moment remains politically homeless. It thus allowed Tsipras to emerge as the absolute winner of the electoral game.
Electoral abstention and the “lesser evil”
The Rest…HERE
