In the initial few days after Syriza took office, there was a sense that
this would be a different kind of government since both its words and
deeds appeared to be a break from the past. Alexis Tsipras announced
that privatization of the Piraeus port would be halted and that the
minimum wage would be restored, while Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis
spoke of challenging austerity up and down the line.
But when Syriza sat down with the EU kapos, reality came as a slap in
the face as it would appear from its willingness to accede to a
continuation of business as usual. Was there going to be any difference
between Syriza and PASOK? Its left critics, from the KKE to Antarsya,
now seemed vindicated.
Apparently, Yanis Varoufakis has furnished Greece’s overlords with a
5-page “reform” proposal that includes the minimum wage hike, something
that will undoubtedly irk the Germans. Varoufakis claims that if the
proposal is refused, the deal will be “dead and buried”. We will
obviously find out more later on.
In their readiness to characterize Syriza as PASOK redux, the left seems
to have suffered a short-term memory loss. When PASOK’s Costas Simitis
took office in 1996 with about the same percentage of the vote that
Syriza just received, he moved rapidly to implement a “modernization”
program that would be crowned by entry into the Eurozone. Marxist
economist Stavros Mavroudeas outlined PASOK’s program as follows in
“Greece and the EU: capitalist crisis and imperialist rivalries”:
The economic policies of the Simitis governments of PASOK hold a
special place in this canvas of neo-liberal restructuring. With its
religious adherence to the EMU requirements and rules it expanded and
deepened furthermore the neoliberal policies. In order to achieve
entrance to the EMU it instituted austerity at the expense of labour as
wage costs had lag behind productivity increases. It repeatedly and
systematically reformed labour law in the direction of deregulation and
flexibility (introduction of part-time, extended part-time
‘arrangements’ of working time, private firms hiring and lending
workers, weakening of collective bargaining etc.). It expanded
privatisation programmes and also provided even more space within the
Greek economy to foreign capitals. It reformed the welfare system
curtailing benefits even though it failed – due to strong strike action
– to proceed even further. Finally, it facilitated actively two major
one-off acts of income redistribution from the working and middle
classes to capital. The first was the so-called ‘stock-exchange theft’
in which savings from the popular and middle classes were systematically
driven by 12 government’s economic policy to a stock market bubble.
In other word, with no pressure at all be applied on PASOK from German
bankers, it plunged ahead with an economic program that would eventually
turn into the disaster of the past five years at least. PASOK was
ideologically disposed to neoliberalism. It, like Tony Blair’s Labour
Party, believed that Greece could move forward through an application of
free market economics that had been embraced by liberals and
conservatives alike. In the mid-90s, both Jeffrey Sachs and Milton
Friedman preached the benefits of deregulation, privatization, reduction
in government spending, trade agreements such as the WTO, and all the rest.
full:
http://louisproyect.org/2015/02/23/sometimes-the-boss-is-much-stronger/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
