On Apr 2, 2015, at 10:51 AM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 6:45 PM, Marv Gandall <[email protected]> wrote: >> Specifically, if you take Syriza's victorious platform as an indicator of >> what the "Greek people" as a whole are "demanding", it looks like they want >> two mutually contradictory things: (1) end austerity, and (2) stay within >> the Eurozone. > [...] The question of whether the Greeks can escape from austerity within the > eurozone or whether they will need to default and exit in order to get on the > road to recovery is as a a subject of great contention within Syriza and > wider circles by people with a much greater connection to the situation than > either of us, and we should be mindful of that. > > > Of course. Tsipras et al have a very difficult and unenviable job and I do > hope they can pull this off. > > I was mainly arguing with a couple of implicit premises in "Why not start > with what the Greek people are themselves demanding." > > You are assuming two things here that seem very questionable. (1) there are > clear and coherent things that we can identify that the majority of Greek > people support or demand, and (2) the public opinion is progressive. > > It seems to me that a lot of the wide public support in Greece for staying > within the Eurozone is not motivated so much by pragmatic considerations of > the economic costs to Greeks of a "Grexit", but more by some pathetic > nationalistic pride in being part of a more prestigious and powerful entity > like the EU. > > More generally, it seems to me that people in mass democracies often demand > and support very fucked up things. After all it is only recently that rabid > right wing elements won the Israeli elections. And a grotesque like Narendra > Modi continues to enjoy widespread popular support in India. Etc. > > So I'd argue that we have to be careful about automatically supporting what > the "people themselves are demanding". > -raghu.
Certainly. Fascist and conservative parties have had popular support, as you point out. But the widespread support for Syriza, a left-wing party, is progressive, and the demand of the majority of Greeks to scrap the unsustainable debt and austerity memoranda imposed on the country is also progressive - even if there is a lot of confusion and division about how to accomplish this. I don’t agree that, in pursuing this eminently rational goal, most Greeks are mainly motivated by “pathetic nationalistic pride”. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
