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Dennis Brasky wrote https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/inquiry/22532-syrizas-u-turn-on-israel-is-now-complete ------- What I've questioned in the past about Syriza as exemplar and what has not been alluded to in this article is how in the world one expects a left party without a demonstrated socialist mandate from an effective preponderance of constituents to do anything other than manage the increasingly complex and onerous administration of a capitalist state. That of necessity includes in present context managing austerity and therefore, however reluctantly, aligning with the banks, trans-nationals, local capital, the police to enforce worker resistance, and the essentials of a geopolitically mandated foreign policy in a strictly regulated global pecking order. Some, with self-sufficient resources can do so to a limited extent, like Venezuela has with a program of worker-council participation and redistribution garnering popular support despite limitations of ambivalent, bureaucratically corrupt governance of a still-capitalist state, maybe Bolivia as well, Chile with Allende, regimes like Cuba with Soviet assistance, and the dictators who fell from grace like Hussein, or now Assad, because they strayed from the flock or failed to manage worker compliance and material resources to capital’s satisfaction. The question to be asked in the case of Tsipras’s cow-towing to Netanyahu is the possibly, necessarily magnified extent to which it’s required in order to get much-needed natural gas to keep Greece from collapsing, and to what extent Tsipras thinks that this is sufficiently peripheral so as to not on balance create an issue with the bulk of his main constituency. Unless you play the game right, the footing out there in the empire is precarious to the max. I don’t think, all things considered, anyone should be surprised given his required, increasingly restricted role at what Tsipras does from now on. Recall also that George Papandreou was threatened by Merkel with enforced bankruptcy unless his country signed up to austerity measures and backed off from his declared, last ditch intention to conduct a referendum, which destroyed his political career. We might expect a similar fate for Syriza, conceivably less so since the European banks have been successful in not only insulating themselves from the domino effect of Greek default and the (debilitating for Greek workers) absence of an alternative on the left but also apparently from the much-diminished threat of a worker-supported alternative strategy by a Syriza government in the future. By governing on behalf of international capital the ostensibly-left regimes become, willy nilly, personifications of capital - to be reigned in or replaced if they fail to act in a manner not conducive to appropriate capital expansion, exploitation, waste of human and material resources and imperative return on investment. Consider the severe constraint on taking power and defying capital without a massive mandate from below that makes the intended socialist outcome feasible. Maybe it has something to do with Varoufakis and the left platform getting the hell out of Greek governance. Doesn't the same apply to Corbyn? Maybe that has something to do with Seymour's silence on UK. What I can't understand is how Syriza including the left platform and Varoufakis from the get-go expected to carry it off without an effective, massive mandate to take over the government and move toward socialist transition, gauging all actions so as to be in consonance with ever-closer approximations, as Rosa Luxemburg said, to substantive equality and worker self-management (in a resource-strapped nation, worse luck). What else do we have here, essentially, but what happened to Euro-communists and social democrats in other, perhaps different times, at least since the Gotha program of the United Workers' Party of Germany, or the second international? How is it possible in the absence of an already aroused global working class where the demonstration-effect of one’s actions has the required effect? Please answer in no more than twenty-five words. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus _________________________________________________________ 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
