Treating Syriza Responsibly
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- Published on Monday, 13 July 2015 12:00
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1140 .... July 13, 2015
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Treating Syriza Responsibly
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
As against those on the international left so keen to put the boot in against the Syriza government with the charge that they had abjectly capitulated already with the plan passed in the Greek parliament, it is instructive to read this document from the German finance ministry.
Syriza's unique capacity on the international left to build the type of party capable of both mobilizing against neoliberalism and entering the state to try to actually do something about this has always hinged on the way it sought to find room for manoeuvre within a European Union which has neoliberalism in its DNA, going back all the way to the Treaty of Rome let alone the Economic and... Monetary Union thirty years later. Anyone who at all seriously followed developments in Greece over the past five years should have known that the leadership of the party would only go as far as the Europeans would let it, and that the balance of power inside the party made the Left Platform faction's strategy for Grexit an effective non-starter. Those on the revolutionary left who hoped that after Syriza's election this leadership would get swept away by a massive popular upsurge for Grexit in face of the limits and contradictions of a Syriza government were, as usual, dreaming in technicolor.
