Greece

Eurozone leaders demand new coalition in Greece

On 8 April Greece’s prime minister, and leader of the left-wing Syriza party, Alexis Tsipras, visits Moscow. Officially he is talking only about Greek fruit exports to Russia, but rumour is that he will explore whether Russia might lend the Greek government money if the eurozone and the IMF won’t. For 9 April the Greek government has promised that it will in fact make a debt repayment due to the IMF. On 24 April eurozone finance ministers meet, and Greece hopes to get a deal for more credit. The Syriza leaders are still trying to break the bonds of neo-liberalism, but... by clever negotiation...

Time on whose side?

As I write, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras is heading to Berlin for talks with Angela Merkel (23 March). He has sent a letter saying that the present limits imposed on Greece by eurozone finance ministers and the European Central Bank (ECB) “would make it impossible for any [Greek] government to service its debt”. He “urges” Merkel to support an easing. Let’s hope he succeeds. The trouble is that international left and labour-movement solidarity with Syriza is increasingly reduced to hoping that Tsipras does well in talks. In May 2012 Syriza surged in Greece’s elections, and it looked...

View from Syriza's left

Syriza’s Central Committee met at the end of February to discuss the interim agreement made with European leaders over Greece’s debts. An amendment from the Left Platform characterised the agreement as a retreat from Syriza’s commitment to reverse austerity. This was defeated by a narrow margin, with a number of people from Tsipras’ majority grouping within Syriza supporting the position. Antonis Davanellos, a member of the Internationalist Workers Left (DEA) and a Syriza Central Committee member, wrote this article. (Abridged from a translation first published here ). [Syriza] is a broad...

The Socialist Workers' Party and Syriza

On 26 February 500 demonstrators marched in Athens denouncing the Syriza-led government’s deal with the Eurogroup finance ministers and demanding that Greece repudiate its debt and quit the EU. Some of the demonstrators — not on the initiative of the organisers, it seems — smashed up shops, set cars on fire, and threw molotov cocktails. The organisers were Antarsya, the left coalition in Greece in which SEK, by far the most important group outside Britain linked to the SWP here, is a leading force. Antarsya, in coalition with a left-reformist pro-EU-exit group, scored 0.64% in Greece’s January...

Advice or class struggle?

The Guardian has published (18 February) a talk from 2013 by Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis in which he declared himself an “erratic Marxist”. Varoufakis praises Marx’s account of how capital both develops labour’s creativity and energy, and simultaneously cramps it within rigid, quantifying limits. But, he says, he himself seeks “a modest agenda” to “save European capitalism from itself”. He learned to avoid more radical aims, he says, when a student in England in the early years of the Thatcher government. At first he thought the “short, sharp shock” of Thatcher’s attacks would...

Long-distance race in Greece

The government portrayed the agreement with the Europeans as a matter of necessity, caused by the position it was left in by the previous government and the imminent expiration date on the bailout of February 28. They claim that they won time — four months to prepare for further negotiations where they can make more gains. But the truth is that they didn’t prepare for any other option... They signaled their willingness to compromise from the beginning, with the formation of the government. The alliance with the Independent Greeks was a unilateral decision of the party leadership, without any...

Syriza heads for a crossroads

On Thursday 5 March European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi refused to increase the limits on the Greek government’s issuing of treasury bills. He extended the provision of emergency liquidity to Greek banks via the ELA by only 500 million euros, to €68.8 billion. Draghi reiterated that “Greece will not participate in the QE program [Quantitative Easing, that is, ECB buying-up of government bonds]... a country in an economic program [i.e. Memorandum] under evaluation cannot be included. “The ECB cannot until July or August purchase Greek securities under the program of QE since...

Syriza's leading economists analyse the euro-deal

In this article written in late February, SYRIZA members Spyros Lapatsioras, John Milios and Dimitris Sotiropoulos analyze the agreement with the Eurogroup and propose a different way forward. Lapatsioras is a SYRIZA central committee member and assistant professor at the University of Crete; Milios is a SYRIZA central committee member and professor at the National Technical University of Athens, and was until recently chief economist of Syriza; Sotiropoulos is a SYRIZA member and lecturer at the Open University Business School in Britain. "One must know how to employ the kairos of one's...

Syriza MPs rebel against Euro-deal

Journalist Vasiliki Siouti reports on the rebellions; and left Syriza central committee member Stathis Kouvelakis has posted on Facebook as below. Click here for how the Syriza government leaders present the deal (interview with Yanis Varoufakis) and click here for a very rough (Google) translation of the statement by the "Red Network" of revolutionary socialists within Syriza, around DEA. Stathis Kouvelakis: Important news: one third on Syriza's parliamentary group rejecting the agreement in internal vote! Yesterday a crucial meeting of Syriza's group of MPs took place. Initially scheduled to...

Another Brest-Litovsk?

No small country, and in fact no country at all, can simply defy and ignore the pressures of the capitalist world market, not unless it wants to reduce itself to a pauperised, shut-off condition. It would be wrong and demagogic to denounce the Greek government just for trying to do a deal with the eurozone leaders, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. It is even more demagogic to say that it could have an easy way out of the difficulties just by quitting the European Union. A Greece having quit the EU would still have to find ways of dealing with the capitalist world market. It would still...

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