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(A long article on Tsipras's perfidy ends with this paragraph proposing that Grexit is some kind of panacea. As if Greece could overcome its semi-peripheral status by returning to the drachma.)
This is the heart of the matter. The Greek case discloses the impotence and the illusions of the ‘radical’ European left. It is because of their inability to understand the powerful mechanisms at work in this polarized, hierarchized space, abstracted from any possibility of democratic control, that left-wing attempts, however partial, to break with this regime have been doomed to failure. This incomprehension is not the result of simple intellectual oversight. It is at bottom political, arising from the refusal of real confrontation with the dominant forces, which in turn derives from the left’s internalization of its historic defeat. Europeanist blindness has made a damaging contribution here: the rallying cries of the dominant discourse, which represents EU membership as a commitment to ‘internationalism’ and the ‘values of openness’, forestalled thinking about the need for a ‘plan B’—exit from the Eurozone as an indispensable measure of resistance to the Troika’s blackmail. [56] This is Greece’s bitter lesson for the forces of social transformation. Those who are not prepared to fight to the finish to break free from the iron cage called the European Union are doomed to capitulate. The vain search for a ‘third course’, or a ‘decent compromise’, has done no more than prepare the way for that crushing outcome, for Greeks certainly but also for the people of Europe. There can be no serious strategic thinking that does not pose from the outset the question of a necessary confrontation with the EU’s institutional structure, as a concentrated expression of the violence of neoliberal and imperial policies that condemn whole populations to dehumanizing precariousness and a state of permanent political minority today.
full: https://newleftreview.org/II/110/stathis-kouvelakis-borderland _________________________________________________________ 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
