Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Whose class interests does SYRIZA 2.0 SAY it represents?

Yesterday, and after meeting with representatives of ESEE and GSVEE, the leader of SYRIZA 2.0, aka "Popular Unity", Panayiotis Lafazanis made the following statement, which is very interesting from the standpoint of the kind of class consciousness it represents, and, of course, the class consciousness it addresses and solicits:
Within the context of the mandate I have received from the President of the Republic [as "third Party", despite never having been elected as such], I had the honor to meet two of the greatest Confederations of our country, GSVEE and ESEΕ. It was especially honoring to me that we sat and talked and exchanged views with honesty, for quite some time, I would say. 
It was a meeting of many hours, but also a substantial and productive exchange of views. What I derived from it is of course well-known, but I will repeat. The Memoranda have two great victims in Greece: the first and great victim is of course our youth, which is unfortunately compelled to migrate in order to survive; the second great victim of the Memoranda are medium and small businesses. Medium and small businesses have been placed in the gallows, in the guillotine. With the Memoranda, austerity, tax raiding, lack of cash flow [bank closure was implemented while Lafazanis and other members of "Popular Unity" were in the government cabinet], the robber bank system, which becomes constantly more rapacious, under these conditions, medium and small businesses cannot survive. They have no future whatsoever. And with them, of course, the Greek economy, Greece and the Greek people have no future.
At this point, the message we are sending is that the country must be rid of the Memoranda, austerity and national dependence. And this is what Popular Unity guarantees [lol] in light of the elections. We call on medium and small businessmen, all those working in the medium and small business, businessmen and workers, to support Popular Unity in its antimemorandum struggle, its consistent [lol] antimemorandum struggle. With Popular Unity, Memoranda will be over [see same man's statements when he was in SYRIZA] and a path of recovery and economic reconstruction, centered on small and very small businesses, medium and small businesses, can open.
Some very simple and commonsensical observations, from a Marxist standpoint, regarding the stated goals of "Popular Unity":

1. There is no reference whatsoever to the working class as a "victim of the Memoranda" and of austerity. Workers do not exist in Greece.

2. There is in fact no reference to class exploitation and class struggle, which is logical given #1.

3. In fact, Lafazanis states explicitly that there are no classes, since he calls on both businessmen and their workers/employees to a common "struggle against the Memoranda" (ie, he calls on them to vote for him--that's what "struggle" means in social democratic parlance).

4. It is clear from the above statement and its first three constituents that "Popular Unity" aims explicitly at a capitalist and not a socialist organization of production. The "reconstruction" and "recovery" of which it speaks are explicitly based on helping small capitalists survive against banks and monopolies. 

5. In other words, the stated [careful! It is of course not the actual] economic program of Messrs Lafazanis, Stratoulis, Lapavitsas, Kouvelakis, et al. is absolutely identical to that of the U.S populists in the 1890s, some fifteen years before Lenin wrote "Imperialism".

In honor of that vintage feel, our illustration is from the matrix of "Popular Unity", the People's Party of the US, founded in 1891 and dissolved in 1907.

Oh, forgot, Messrs Lafazanis and Co. call this "socialism for the 21st century"....

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