En Passant

Petros Constantinou is a long-term socialist activist from Greece. As a member of the anti-capitalist coalition Antarsya, the Greek socialist organisation, SEK, and a councillor for Athens, Petros has been a part of the momentous struggle of Greek workers against austerity in the midst of capitalism’s greatest crisis since the Great Depression. Now, as the newly-elected left party Syriza tries to manage the crisis, Petros will join us at the Keep Left conference to discuss: Recession and austerity in Greece: Can Syriza solve the crisis? A debate. Join us.

‘Those who lead Greece and its Left to surrender should be opposed,’ writes Stathis Kouvelakis in Jacobin. Stathis serves on the central committee of Syriza.

I cannot predict if the Australian working class will abandon Labor and create a radical left party akin to SYRIZA, although the portents are there. My task at the moment is to help build Solidarity, a small group of revolutionaries who believe that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class. If you want to be one part of building for the future today, check us out.

Antonis Davanellos is one of the leading voices of SYRIZA’s left wing. He is a member of the Internationalist Workers Left (DEA), which cofounded SYRIZA as a coalition of left-wing organizations in 2004, and he is a member of the party’s Central Committee and Political Secretariat. Davanellos talked to Lee Sustar in Socialist Worker US about the debate over Greece’s future and the hardening battle lines in the discussion of what comes next.

The head of the Left Front in France, Jean-Luc has Mélenchon has called, together with the French Greens (Europe Écologie – Les Verts or EELV), for a mobilisation in the streets of France in support of Greece. He says that there is no time to waste to offer the French people a way to express solidarity with the Greek people and to defend their own independence before France too is challenged [by the troika] just like the Greeks. In light of the European Central Bank attack, and following the lead of the Left Front in France, maybe the Left should organise demonstrations across the globe where feasible in support of the Greek people and Government?

Alex Callinicos in Socialist Worker UK looks at the challenges facing Greece’s new left government—and the ideas behind its strategy. He concludes that revolutionary socialists should celebrate the new government’s victory and support the progressive measures it takes. But the entire Greek radical left will be judged by how successfully they promote working people’s self-organisation, confidence, and combativity. That is where the power to end austerity lies.

A social democratic desire among workers for improved living standards and services is both systemic, arising from the forced sale of our labour power to survive, and historical. The reality that workers’ living standards are falling relatively, and may have to do so from capital’s point of view in real terms, conflicts with the very real yearning of workers for a better world of full employment, improved wages and conditions and good schools, hospitals and transport. In Australia at the moment that yearning finds expression not in strikes and demonstrations for these outcomes – strikes are at near historic lows – but in the yo-yo of electoral change from neoliberal Labor to the neoliberal Liberals to neoliberal Labor.

Mick Armstrong writing in Red Flag (before news of the coalition with the anti-austerity but racist ANEL party):

In and of itself, SYRIZA’s electoral victory won’t be sufficient to reverse the austerity measures. SYRIZA will face ongoing opposition and sabotage from every section of the Greek and European establishment: the bankers, the media moguls, the heads of the public service, the judges, the police chiefs and the army generals.

SYRIZA will only be able to implement its program in the face of this concerted opposition by mobilising its working class supporters in determined and ongoing struggle on the streets and in the workplaces.

Europe’s business and political elite are trying to stifle or subvert the radical left party SYRIZA. It needs international solidarity against the bankers, writes Alan Maass in Socialist Worker US.

Panos Petrou is a leading member of the socialist group Internationalist Workers Left (DEA), one of the groups that co-founded SYRIZA – the Coalition of the Radical Left – in 2004. Here he reports on what took place at its recent conference and the political debate that is taking place over its future and direction.