The victory of Syriza in the Greek elections on 25 January show the willingness of the working class to stand up to vicious attacks by the ruling class on their living standards and hard-won rights.
Syriza is vaunted as “radical leftics”, “communist” or even “Marxist” in the right-wing press. They are none of the above.
While the working class of Greece suffers and struggles to scrape by, their hatred of the “austerity” programme struggles to find an expression. Alexander Tsipras and his allies spring to the defence of capitalism in its moment of need. With their rhetoric and left-sounding phrases, they work to divert the working class outrage away from outright opposition to capitalism. They tell the working class that it is not capitalism that is at fault. It is “bad” capitalism. Those ogres in the troika (the IMF, ECB and European Commission) are the culprits. If they would only follow Syriza’s programme, capitalism, the Euro and the Eurozone could all be saved.
The programme advocated by Syriza is surprisingly similar to the programme advocated by The Economist magazine for several years. In June 2011 The Economist wrote of the EU leaders: “their strategy of denial—refusing to accept that Greece cannot pay its debts—has become untenable”. They went on to suggest, “While the EU’s leaders are trying to deny the need for default, a rising chorus is taking the opposite line. Greece should embrace default, walk away from its debts, abandon the euro and bring back the drachma (in a similar way to Britain leaving the gold standard in 1931 or Argentina dumping its currency board in 2001).”
Defaulting on debt is a fine capitalist tradition. It does not make you a socialist to merely acknowledge that Greece cannot repay its debts.
Instead of trying to get the Eoropean leaders and the IMF to agree to reduce their debt by 50 per cent (Syriza’s policy) the Greek working class should repudiate the whole debt. That money was not lent to the Greek working class. It was lent to the thieves and brigands who ran capitalism on behalf of the ruling classes. It is time for all working class Greeks to repudiate not only these capitalist loans, but the capitalist system itself. If refusing to pay back the punishing debts to capitalist lenders results in any furtherlowering of living standards, the Greeks should take over the banks, insurance companies and finance houses and put them under workers’ control. Workers’ control, in this context, means control by a government voted for and directly answerable to the Greek working class. Not a government elected for 4 or 5 years, and subject to manipulation and control by foreign governments, corporations and institutions.
The Greeks, who pride themselves in being the founders of democracy, have an opportunity to lead the world again in establishing the first workers’ democracy in an advanced capitalist economy.