Greece: the government, the party and the people

Antonis Davanellos is one of the best-known figures on the left wing of the Greek governing party, the radical left Syriza. He is a member of the Internationalist Workers Left (DEA) and is currently a member of Syriza’s Central Committee and Political Secretariat. In this article for DEA’s newspaper Workers’ Left, he emphasises the importance of the party’s rank and file, and its grassroots organisations, for the struggles that lie ahead. This article was first published at Socialistworker.org.

----------

Since the elections of 25 January, we have seen daily that Syriza may have won government office, but it is not in power.

The relentless opposition from the pockets of real state power – including the characteristic challenges of top officials within the economic and judicial bureaucracy, but also the alarming actions of the Naval Special Forces teams [who chanted far right nationalist slogans during the annual Independence Day march on 25 March], should remind everyone, but especially the leadership of Syriza, of the importance of the decree of the party’s founding congress – that a “government of the left” isn’t the final destination, with the task of “saving the country”, but a transition point on a road that must lead toward socialist liberation.

The Syriza-led government’s positions are weaker still if viewed in terms of the international balance of power. The brazen blackmail of the European “institutions” and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is designed to force the government to choose between direct subordination to the lenders or rapid collapse.

To paraphrase a famous saying from the time of the Russian revolution: Without a transformed policy in Europe, without the outbreak of a political resistance movement led by the left in Spain or Ireland or France or Italy, we will perish.

This reality places a clear obligation on the members and leaders of Syriza, among others. Our policy must be to maintain an active call for a Europe-wide uprising to overthrow austerity.

The awareness of the difficulties we face and the need to translate these aims and obligations into concrete action are not unfolding in conditions of our own choosing. The decline of the mass struggles of 2010-12, which created the mass support for Syriza and eventually propelled it into office, has created a lull – a temporary waiting period while the effectiveness of the electoral road to overthrowing austerity is tested.

But this lull restricts our political potential and – along with the failure of any concrete international support to materialise – creates opportunities for our local and international rivals. All of our strength and abilities within these obviously difficult conditions must be directed toward finding initiatives that can create the possibility of international support in aid of Greece.

This assessment leads directly to the crucial role of Syriza as a party.

In the mainstream media, the party is depicted in a negative light: as a dead weight that prevents its leadership from taking bold action (action to the liking of the lenders and markets, of course); as a nest of fossilised Marxists who won’t allow the enlightened leaders of the government and the state to make the necessary overtures – for example, to the To Potami party – and guide the government safely to the calm waters of the centre left, with an acceptance of the European lenders’ oversight of government policy and a commitment to remain in the euro, no matter what.

Indeed, the party of Syriza does have this important “defensive” role to play. Under vast internal and international pressures, it is an irreplaceable factor for enabling the government to remain connected to the original policies and program Syriza was founded on. Precisely because it can demand accountability [from its leaders], the organisation of the party at its base, among its rank and file members, must be maintained and decisively strengthened.

But a defensive role is not enough. The party organisations of Syriza must take aggressive initiatives, attempting to mobilise a mass challenge against our common political opponents. These initiatives can press for radical change and social gains based initially on Syriza’s campaign commitments made last year at the Thessaloniki International Trade Fair, but also more comprehensively in the Syriza program from its founding conference.

For example, the government’s capacity to resist internal and international pressure for privatisation will depend directly on mobilising mass opposition to act against the HRDAF [the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund, the state-run agency in charge of privatisation], in the defence of public spaces and resources, to stop the crime in Skouries [a village near Salonika, where a local movement is opposing the sale of a gold mine] and so on.

The ability of the government to resist further destruction of the public health system will depend directly on whether and how Syriza members and base organisations take the lead in the protests and public discussions of resistance, speaking to the demands and expectations of health workers in particular and the working class majority in need of a public hospital system.

These initiatives should be planned carefully, but they must also come decisively and quickly, because time is not on our side.

This insistence on a radical left program, on standing for the people, and on popular mobilisations is the only way forward for Syriza as a party. In fact, it is the only way forward for the government, caught as it is between the Scylla and Charybdis [an expression derived from Greek mythology, which means “having to choose between two evils”] of local and international capital.

The mainstream media regularly display their contempt for the Marxist radical wing inside Syriza and demand that the party’s leaders eliminate it as a condition for being recognised as “reliable” and “realistic”. This wing within Syriza is real and with more influence than many media analysts acknowledge. It has demonstrated many times that it is a valuable and irreplaceable factor in the political dynamic of Syriza – far more so than is the norm for mass political parties.

The many people who are not connected to any tendency within Syriza, but who look to the party’s mobilisation based on a radical left program – this is the power that leads the way forward. The road ahead must start with fighting for and achieving what we promised before the election. But it must also continue toward the broader objective of overthrowing austerity, once and for all.