The Greek left responds

The deal Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras has done with the European establishment will put money into the pockets of the corrupt oligarchy, rather than food into the mouths of pensioners and the unemployed.

The hope that people put in him just one week ago is not a debt that can be deferred. He defaulted on the Greek working class when he refused to leave the table during the 17-hour Euro summit negotiation that ended in total capitulation.

Tsipras two weeks ago had tried to break a negotiation deadlock with the European establishment by calling a referendum on austerity. He could have used the historic no vote to build something. But he didn’t fight. That exposed to the rulers of Europe that the Syriza leadership would agree to anything in order to keep Greece in the euro area.

Europe, led by Germany, turned the screws. This was the most punitive action in the history of the European Union. It was not about economics. It was about humiliating everyone who stood against austerity.

The EU elite determined then that regime change was necessary. And they have got it. Syriza, as a party of the left, is almost certainly dead. This is the endpoint of a strategy based on a fatal underestimation of the opponent.

Europe is not a democratic community of peoples. It is a dictatorship of private and state creditors in which those with the most skin in the game dictate the terms and care little for reason or suffering. Theirs is neoliberal Europe. Nothing else. No clever argument, no brilliant game theory of former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, is capable of blocking their agenda.

Class struggle is the only thing that can stop them.

There is shock and disbelief in the workplaces and coffee houses. Only a week ago people were dancing with joy in the streets. Now they are told, because of their resistance and defiance, that they will be saddled with something worse than what they rejected.

There is a call from the Federation of Public Sector Unions for a general strike on Wednesday, before the parliamentary vote on the new memorandum. This is an opportunity to build a fightback out of a setback. The initiative has come from the anti-capitalist left.

The political earthquake that annihilated New Democracy and Pasok in January is taking its time to be felt at the top of the sclerotic trade union bureaucracy. META – Syriza’s trade union fraction – and the radical left have grown in influence in the unions. But the old leaderships remain.

In a meeting on Monday, raging argument from speakers of the radical left from the floor butted up against a line of cantankerous old-man bureaucrats who would occasionally lose their temper. When it became clear that the left was going to win the vote – with the begrudging support of the Communist Party and Pasok – the activists started filing out, back to work to organise or to union meetings across the city.

Activists I speak to – some in Syriza, some in other groups and some not in any group – are concerned that they do not have long enough to turn the sense of disbelief into anger. They have a matter of hours. These are the times when activists rue the gulf between what urgently needs to be done and the number of people who can do it. The Greek far left is the largest in Europe. It is impressive and committed, yet still it is an enormous task.

It is aided by something that people outside of the left and from afar can miss. While mass consciousness is struggling to understand what has taken place, the anti-capitalist left has a framework to make sense of it. The radical left organises with the knowledge that change comes through struggle and that the state is not neutral. Its activists knew the limits of Tsipras’s strategy from the beginning and one way or another have been preparing for this day.

They were not caught off guard. They say constantly that the struggle goes on and are prepared to organise in whatever circumstances they find themselves in. This is why they could act quickly and decisively. Within hours of the first vote on Saturday morning, they were in neighbourhoods, handing out leaflets outlining their response.

The other side of the struggle is the debate going on at every level in Syriza. Two members of the Red Network, the left in the party’s Left Platform, on Saturday morning voted against a new memorandum. They gave a clear lead to every Syriza MP and to the party rank and file who are looking for an alternative.

As I write, the parliamentary fraction of the Left Platform is meeting to discuss the betrayal on which they must pass judgement on Wednesday. It is much worse than what they either voted for, spoke against or abstained from on Saturday. Their stance on Saturday fell well short of what was required. But opposition has hardened since then and most, if not all, are expected to vote against Tsipras’s deal. The question is how many will Tsipras lose from the Party Majority.

He cannot say that he didn’t know who he was dealing with on Sunday. He once called them a “gang of thieves”. When a member of one gang joins a rival, he will be put through an initiation, to test if he can really be trusted. Typically it will involve making him go after his former friends.

Syriza MPs who vote against the memorandum should brace themselves for expulsion, and an acknowledgement that that project is over. But voting no will be a clarion call to workers who are looking for a lead. It will be the first step to reconstituting a radical left.

The ensuing debate in the party will determine how many of the 30,000 members can be drawn out of the current fog. The party is relatively new, is a creature of the radical left and has as its base many thousands of activists who joined because they wanted to fight austerity. That means that there are many to fight for.

It was a good sign that the youth wing of the party had a presence at an anti-memorandum rally in Syntagma Square on Monday night. I spoke to one of their members, Konstantinos who was grappling with Syriza’s whole strategy and what the MP’s should do. “It seems now that this strategy that said ‘Let’s go easy with the EU’ has been proved to be wrong … I think that the agreement that we’re bringing is worse than the previous two that the others [Pasok and New Democracy] brought.

“The European Union have shown their real faces. They are really hard neoliberals who won’t be afraid to show what they’re made of if they get pressure. I wouldn’t like to be a Syriza MP right now … I don’t really know what I would do, but I think they should probably vote no and lead country into a general election.” There are still many arguments to be won at all levels of the party.

The Red Network has called for the party organs to be convoked so that these debates can be had out at every level. It is a minority within the Left Platform, but well placed, having built up credibility with party members.

This is what happens when there is a serious engagement in debates on the left: people remember the positions different groups held and can test their utility in the struggle. Many of those in the party who said in February that it was too early to criticise Tsipras see now why it was necessary.

The outcome of the debates will determine whether or not Greece ends up with a radical left that is the sum of its existing parts, or one that is a pole for those, within and outside of Syriza, who want to carry through the mandate of the referendum.

Many have said that in succumbing to German chancellor Angela Merkel and the EU establishment, Tsipras has overturned the stunning victory of Oxi. He has not. The victory showed that millions want an end to austerity and are determined to resist immense intimidation to fight for it.

Their defiance and struggle is the reference point for a new left, armed with the lessons of the last five years of austerity, the last five months of left government and the concentrated learning of the turmoil and betrayals of the last two weeks.