A group of young socialist activists from Britain are going on a delegation to Greece between 23 and 26 January, to be there during the election. Six of the delegation members took part in the dayschool which London Workers' Liberty held on 18 January, alongside a good size group of other young people, to discuss the political issues behind Greece's dramatic political situation.
Such discussions are all the more important in the context of Greece's contradictory political development over the last two years: a falling back of struggles and continued drift to the right by Syriza but also a sustained move by Greek society to the left.
We began by getting to grips with the basic facts of Greece's upheaval over the last five years, from the initiation of austerity by the social-democratic government in 2009 to the intense class struggles of 2010-13 to the political realignment and polarisation which led to the possibility of a Syriza victory.
We looked at the organisations of the Greek labour movement and left, including the origins of much of the left in the Stalinist KKE, the nature of Syriza and the revolutionary socialist groups operating outside and inside it.
After that we discussed how socialists should approach the situation in Greece from two important angles.
We read and considered Trotsky's discussions with his Belgian comrades on how socialists related to the workers' movement around the reformist "Labor Plan" put forward by the Belgian social democrats in the 1930s - and the relevance of such discussions to revolutionaries relating to the rise of Syriza.
We finished by discussing socialist attitudes to European integration and capitalist globalisation more generally. We noted the contrast between the non-Syriza left's focus on withdrawal from the Eurozone and the Syriza left opposition's stance - shared by the AWL - that class struggle is decisive, not which currency Greece uses, and that a "Greece out" position cuts against spreading the Greek struggle across Europe.
We hope that the delegation will strengthen links, discussion and solidarity between socialists and labour movement activists in Britain and Greece during the political shifts ahead, and that our discussions at the dayschool have contributed to this.
(We'll post links to the reading from the event soon.)
