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The Impossible “Honorable Compromise” For Syriza, embracing an “honorable compromise” means abandoning the platform that brought them to power. by Stathis Kouvelakis Jacobin magazine, May 25 <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/greece-syriza-european-union-austerity-troika> . . . The break is in any case unavoidable. The choice is between a Kornilov type of break and a Lenin type of break, in other words between a counterrevolutionary coup and a radicalization of the revolutionary process. Under these circumstances the search for a compromise would mean political impotence, and impotence in such a polarized situation means annihilation. . . . To put it somewhat differently: it is precisely because “compromise” under present conditions is in practical terms impossible, that its compulsive evocation obscures the actual issues, depoliticizing and presenting them as a clash of ethical preferences: “realists” vs. “hardliners,” “pragmatists” vs. “utopians,” and so on. What is actually reflected in the current discursive struggle is that “honorable compromise” is not possible because the prerequisites for it do exist. The stronger party, the European Union, is not interested in compromise but only in administering humiliation, which by definition entails dishonor. . . . The shock therapy applied to Greece over the past five years is nothing more than a radical (by the standards of a Western European country) version of this same neoliberal counterrevolution. Those who embody it, inside and outside the country, are executors of an operation of plundering and naked subjection. They are at once violent and vulgar, the antithesis of the type that would seek compromise. In those conditions only the action of the oppressed can open up a perspective of political, social, and ethical regeneration. This presupposes a decisive reemergence of what Gramsci, quoting the French Marxist Georges Sorel, called the “spirit of cleavage” of the subaltern classes, their ability to break the ideological and ethical hegemony of the dominant groups, to uncover the latent antagonism in social relations and put forward their own world view and their own “ethical reform.” Only the cleavage is, in the here and now, “honorable” — precisely because it is the vehicle for a break that is both the prerequisite for and the harbinger of the radically new, uniting politics and ethics in the struggle for popular emancipation. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
