Tsipras in Austria on Kreisky's trails

The leader of SYRIZA, Alexis Tsipras, visited Vienna recently where he spoke at the Bruno Kreisky Forum, drawing much attention. However, instead of appearing as the fiery left leader that some expected he posed as a reasonable social democrat.

The “most dangerous man of Europe” paid homage to Bruno Kreisky in his speech, calling him a great social democrat. [See his speech here]. He also criticized the right turn of European social democracy. Considering that the programme he presented in Vienna differs greatly from the programme that made SYRIZA a mass party in the elections of May and June 2012, this criticism on his part came across as rather strange.

Little more than a year ago, SYRIZA espoused a programme that not only rejected the diktats of austerity, but also contained demands that clearly broke with the rules of capitalism: nationalization and democratic control of the banks, reversal of all privatizations of national enterprises, promotion of workers' control at all levels of the economy. To this end, SYRIZA aimed at forming a “Government of the Left” with Greece’s' other big workers' party, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE).

But the KKE has long since ceased to be SYRIZA's primary point of contact. For a long time now, Tsipras has preferred to work with the nationalist-populist far-right bourgeois party of the “Independent Greeks” (ANEL). Of course, ANEL is not a party with which one could form a “Government of the Left”; hence SYRIZA has begun to replace that slogan with the slogan of a “Government of National Salvation”.

The complete rejection of the memoranda and the cancellation of Greece's debt are also no longer discussed by the party. Instead, Tsipras and the leadership of SYRIZA aim to reduce the quota of public debt to a “healthy” level of 100%. They aim to achieve this by negotiating with their “partners” of the troika. Within Greece, they call for a simple politics of redistribution in order to combat poverty. And in order to get into a position to do this, Tsipras needs to cleanse himself of his “dangerous” reputation. To this end, he has been spending a big part of the last months on promotion tours, speaking wherever somebody is prepared to listen to him – even in the White House.

This is the context in which the event in Vienna must be seen. Tsipras's discussion partner, finance state secretary Schieder, had excused himself due to illness. No other prominent Austrian Social Democrat found time for Tsipras, either. Despite being unable to talk to a leading representative of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), as he had probably intended, he spent much time on trying to advertise his programme, of which he literally said that it was “very realistic and not revolutionary at all”.

However, he failed to give a clear response to the question of how he would react to the probable resistance of the EU and IMF to his plans. Instead he emphasized that SYRIZA would depend on “solidarity from Europe”. Neither was he disturbed in any way by the clear fact that there is no reason at all to expect a change in policy of any important European power. Instead of concrete answers, there was much propaganda for a “social Europe of the peoples” in which national sovereignty would no more be undermined, as well as lots of superficial criticism of the neoliberal orientation of European crisis policy.

As Marxists, we have argued for a long time that both varieties of capitalist crisis policy –so-called neo-liberalism, which Tsipras scathingly criticizes, and Keynesianism, which is the basis of his programme – are inadequate to deal with the current crisis. They are not opposites but twins. If you stick to the rules of capitalism instead of breaking them, there is no way out of the catastrophe that has befallen Greece, which will soon reach the same intensity in the other countries of Southern Europe and which threatens to crush the stronger countries of Central and Northern Europe as well.

The central idea of Keynesianism is that the state – or in this case, the European Union – should finance economic growth. Tsipras is trying to sell this idea under the name of a “Marshall Plan for Europe”. It is allegedly the kind of policy that led to the success of Roosevelt's “New Deal”, but it is entirely inadequate as a tool to fight the current crisis, in Greece and all over the world.

One of Greece's biggest problems is capital flight. In order to fight it, the neoliberal approach plunges Greece into a vicious circle: In order to attract investors, wages are lowered and businesses are given tax breaks, but this causes a drop in purchasing power, which in turn prevents Greek businesses from selling their commodities. Consequently, they go bankrupt, which slashes the purchasing power of Greeks even more.

The Keynesian approach would consist in raising the purchasing power of the population, which would have to happen by means of state subsidies – for which there is no money – and other restrictions on businesses, which would only increase the problem of capital flight. The only way to fight capital flight effectively and sustainably is to “to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie”, as Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto.

The only secure way to defend the standard of living of the Greek people and to raise it in the near future is to nationalize all industries necessary to provide basic supplies to the population. These industries will have to be put under workers' control. In order for this to happen, the working class must seize political power. In Greece, SYRIZA is indispensable for this to succeed, having become the largest party representing working people. Unfortunately this is not the programme defended by the party's leadership. Instead, they foster illusions in the possibility of a “reasonable” and negotiated solution within the limits of capitalism and the bosses’ European Union. Tsipras may have the best intentions, but the current stance of the leadership is a guaranteed recipe for disaster.

SYRIZA needs a leadership that will implement a programme which follows the above-mentioned advice from the Communist Manifesto. In the quoted passage, Marx goes on to explain: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production. These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.”

The Communist Tendency of SYRIZA has produced a programme which outlines what these measures would be in Greece. In their programme, the way to end the catastrophe in Greece is clearly spelled out: Cancellation of all public debt, instant cancellation of all memoranda, heavy taxation of big capital and wealth, workers' control in all enterprises. Moreover, full employment can be achieved by a massive reduction in working hours, the creation of new state-owned enterprises and the expropriation of bankrupt enterprises. The banking system and the key industries must be nationalized at once and be subordinated to the needs of the population. They would serve as levers to centrally and democratically plan the entire economy. Moreover, a state monopoly on foreign trade is necessary to align imports and exports with the needs of the people.

Marx writes that these measures will “appear economically insufficient and untenable”, and he is right – as long as Greece is surrounded by capitalist countries, all these measures are indeed insufficient to end the crisis. But what they would achieve is that the working class would come to power in a country. Greek workers would no longer be enslaved, degraded and impoverished for the profit of the few, and they would be in a position to call on the workers of Europe and the entire world to follow them and to finally finish capitalist barbarism in Europe and in the entire world.