Scottish Socialist Party defends Syriza
By Steve James and Chris Marsden of WSWS
Syriza’s abject capitulation to the European financial oligarchy provides a devastating exposure of Europe’s pseudo-left tendencies, none more so than the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP).
For years, Syriza has been hailed as a model party of the future. Now the model is in pieces. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras is preparing to impose unprecedented levels of pro-European Union (EU) austerity measures, for which all those who have hailed Syriza share responsibility.
Syriza can continue to count on the support of these tendencies, even as it intensifies its assault on the working class.
The comments of SSP co-leader Colin Fox are a record of political blindness—at first characterised by wild enthusiasm and then by cynical dissembling and demoralisation.
Writing on his blog on January 25, Fox breathlessly celebrated Syriza’s electoral victory as the coming to power of “Europe’s first radical left-wing government since 1945.” He described Syriza as offering a way out of “social and political purgatory.”
For Fox, Syriza’s rise to power was an opportunity to promote illusions in a perspective based on national economic development under capitalism and within the framework of the EU. It provided the SSP with the possibility of arguing that meaningful social concessions could be won outside of and in opposition to a revolutionary struggle against capitalism. According to Fox, Syriza in government implied, “Hope is coming. Greece will advance. Europe is changing.”
Events have left Fox’s claims in ruins. By June, he was forced to admit, “Any honest and objective assessment of the progress made on [its] pledges does not flatter Syriza. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his colleague Janis Varoufakis have succumbed to pressure applied by their creditors in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels and New York. The debts have not been written off. Indeed unaffordable repayments have all been made in full. The Port of Piraeus, the jewel in the crown of the Greek state, is to be sold off to a Chinese company. The promised increases in the minimum wage and state pensions have not happened either.”
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