Re: [Marxism] Overwhelming Greek opposition to Grexit?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/13/15 10:50 PM, Shalva Eliava via Marxism wrote:

nd I say that for several reasons. First of all, the polls which are
frequently cited as evidence the Greek people don't want to leave the
Eurozone, many of them if not almost all of them have been conducted
by media organizations or commissioned by media organizations in
Greece that are controlled by the oligarchy. And the polling in
Greece has performed very poorly.


The Washington Post article that I referred to recently indicated that 
the polling was done by the University of Macedonia Research Institute 
that identified respondents through multi-stage stratified sampling. 
What evidence is there that this group is controlled by the oligarchy? 
Do you think they falsified the 5 percent support for a Grexit? A brief 
search on their prior polling results indicates no particular 
ideological slant.

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Re: [Marxism] Overwhelming Greek opposition to Grexit?

[Joseph Green via Marxism]

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Louiis Proyect wrote:
 The Washington Post article that I referred to recently indicated that 
 the polling was done by the University of Macedonia Research Institute 
 that identified respondents through multi-stage stratified sampling. 
 What evidence is there that this group is controlled by the oligarchy? 
 Do you think they falsified the 5 percent support for a Grexit? 

Maybe you need new glasses. The poll did NOT say there was 5% support for 
Grexit. It said 5% expectations of Grexit, and about one-third of Syriza 
supporters favored Grexit. 

The Washington Post article on the poll stated:

Although the majority of government voters does not want Grexit, the move to 

leave the euro zone would still be endorsed by about one-third of the 
government´s electorate. Moreover, the bank holiday and capital controls have 

already materialized some of the costs associated with Grexit.

If the Tsipras government additionally manages to convince voters that 
Grexit is mainly the euro zone´s fault, the government may be able to survive 

such a development. Incidentally, the sizable support for euro exit in the 
government´s camp might also provide a rationale for the argument that Grexit 

was Tsipras´s preferred outcome from the start.

The 5% figure was about expectations of what the likely outcome would be, not 

about what people wanted:

Only 5 percent believed that a no vote would mean Greece would exit the euro 

zone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/07/09/what-were-the-gr
eeks-thinking-heres-a-poll-taken-just-before-the-referendum/

The question of mass support is more than a question of polling; it is also a 

question of what the masses are prepared to work for and sacrifice for, and 
what is the state of their mass organizations. It is a question of what their 

mood will be in the future, too; how they will react to future developments. 
But as long as we are are talking about polls, let's cite them properly.


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Re: [Marxism] Overwhelming Greek opposition to Grexit?

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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On 7/14/15 12:37 PM, Joseph Green via Marxism wrote:


Maybe you need new glasses. The poll did NOT say there was 5% support for
Grexit. It said 5% expectations of Grexit, and about one-third of Syriza
supporters favored Grexit.



You are right. I was wrong to view Grexit as a desire to leave both the 
EU and the eurozone. When the question is on just leaving the eurozone, 
it gets the support of 38 percent of Syriza voters. So the job now for 
those who are persuaded that a return to the drachma, nationalizing the 
banks, etc. will be one of building upon that and putting a government 
into power that will take such a course. Let's see what happens, 
especially since there is so much disillusionment with Tsipras.

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[Marxism] Overwhelming Greek opposition to Grexit?

[Shalva Eliava via Marxism]

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I was listening to this TRNN interview from Sunday night and was intrigued by 
the following points raised by Dmitri Lascaris:

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=31Itemid=74jumival=14231

The other is the political obstacle to a Grexit. And Michael touched upon this. 
There--Michael mentioned that the Greek people don't seem to be ready for this. 
From my perspective, that's not so clear. And I say that for several reasons. 
First of all, the polls which are frequently cited as evidence the Greek people 
don't want to leave the Eurozone, many of them if not almost all of them have 
been conducted by media organizations or commissioned by media organizations in 
Greece that are controlled by the oligarchy. And the polling in Greece has 
performed very poorly.

I think the referendum is an excellent example of this. Michael indicated that 
the most optimistic prediction from a poll vis-a-vis the no vote was a ten 
point margin of victory. The margin of victory was 24 points at the end of the 
day. That's a huge discrepancy, given the number of polls that were performed. 
As I say, that was the one that predicted the largest margin of victory. Others 
showed that there was going to be a vote--the difference of the vote was going 
to be two or three percentage points. Some were even predicting a yes victory. 
And yet you had this massive discrepancy between the no vote and the yes vote. 
How could they all have gotten it that wrong?

You have in the context of a Grexit polls from external organizations or 
independent organizations like Gallup in 2014 in December, which showed a 
slight majority wanting to leave the Eurozone or preferring the drachma. There 
was another in March of this year by an organization, an independent polling 
organization called Bridging Europe, which showed 53 percent wanted to leave 
the Eurozone. So there's an issue about whether these polls that show a desire 
to remain within the Eurozone to be accurate and reliable.

I recalled this point today when reading this wire service report:

https://news.yahoo.com/greeks-humiliated-bailout-cry-hands-off-acropolis-210103897.html

They can't take a part of the country, said an aghast Lefteris Paboulidis, 
who owns a dating service business.

Has that happened anywhere else so it can happen here? The situation is 
dramatic.

Like many ordinary Greeks, he was sceptical that the deal would bring about any 
improvement to their lives.

- Worse for years to come -

It would be better not to have a deal than the way it was done because it will 
certainly be worse for the years to follow, the 35-year old said.

I would have preferred something else to happen, such as Grexit, where we 
would have starved in the beginning but dealt with it ourselves.

Ilias, a 26-year-old civil servant, insisted that the important thing is for 
the country to be better off -- not so much if we stay in Europe or not, that 
is the last thing to think of.

If we stay in Europe and the country goes from bad to worse, I can't see 
anything positive about that, he said.

Haralambos Rouliskos, a 60-year-old economist, described the agreement with 
Greece's eurozone partners as misery, humiliation and slavery.

His feelings were echoed by Katerina Katsaba, a 52-year-old working for a 
pharmaceutical company, who said: I am not in favour of this deal. I know they 
(the eurozone creditors) are trying to blackmail us.

But despite belief in many quarters that radical left PM Alexis Tsipras has 
been taken to the cleaners by Europe, she added: I trust our prime minister -- 
the decisions he will take will be in the best interests of all of us.

The Greek population, exhausted by five years of austerity, overwhelmingly 
approved Syriza/Tsipras to lead them. He/they should have made an executive 
decision on it and explained honestly and clearly to the population why they 
were doing it and why it was the only option. It wouldn't have even needed to 
be an immediate or automatic course of action. As many others have pointed out, 
Syriza could have taken measures concurrent with Troika negotiations so they 
could have fallen back on an already printed Drachma in a worse case scenario. 
Moreover, if they were going to hold a referendum, it should have happened much 
much earlier (long before they began tapping various reserve funds to make IMF 
payments) and involved a very clear choice to vote on (e.g. Euro and endless 
austerity or Drachma and possibility of a new start in the long-term). The fact 
that they failed  to do any of that reveals more about their own poor 
leadership and overall naivety/myopia than their supposed