The Realism of Audacity: Rethinking Revolutionary Strategy Today
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- Published on Sunday, 22 November 2015 23:45
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1188 .... November 23, 2015
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The Realism of Audacity:
Rethinking Revolutionary Strategy Today
Panagiotis Sotiris
In a certain way, I feel a certain unease since the entire Greek Left has some form of responsibility for the fact that Greece is not currently a laboratory of hope; rather it is a reason for despair. What I am going to say should be taken as a form of self-criticism rather than a declaration. I consider myself part of the problem...
The problem is that in the country where the most aggressive experiment in neoliberal social engineering was met with the most massive, almost insurrectionary sequence of struggles, where the political crisis was the closest to a crisis of hegemony Western Europe has seen since the ‘Fall of the dictatorships’, where a... relatively small left-wing party was catapulted to power, where a defiant people refused the blackmail of the European Union in the July 5 referendum, Syriza has accepted neoliberal reforms that would make even the infamous ‘Chicago boys’ blush, from an overhaul of the pension system to privatizations and mass foreclosures and evictions, after winning an election where the rest of the Left failed to challenge the left-wing version of ‘there is no alternative’ that set the tone of the electoral debate.
Was there another road possible for Greece? Or should we accept the premise that a small country in the European South was not in a position to answer the blackmail of the EU? I strongly disagree. The moment of the referendum was optimal for a strategy of rupture: end of negotiations, stoppage to debt payments, nationalization of the banking system, beginning of the process of a return to national currency, as the starting point for a broader process of transformation. The obvious initial difficulties, arguably not much greater than what we are facing now in Greece and surely lesser that the ones we are going to face in the years to come, could be dealt with by the tremendous political potential of the referendum result and the degree of popular mobilization and international solidarity. However, there was no preparation from the part of Syriza leadership even to think the possibility of a strategy of ruptures, leading to a series of disastrous concessions and compromises, even before the January 2015 election. This absence of preparation for any eventuality other than compromise within the Eurozone was not the result of a lack of time. Rather, it was the result of the conscious choice that a rupture was impossible, choice that came as a combination of a compulsive Europeanism along with the attempt to build alliances with segments of the Greek bourgeoisie.
