by PATRICK O’CONNOR
Throughout the SEP’s campaign for the Melbourne by-election, I have been warning that Australia is not immune from the global crisis of capitalism, and that the political lessons from events in countries like Greece and Spain have an immediate relevance for workers here.
These experiences are particularly applicable in assessing the various pseudo-radical organisations such as the Socialist Party, Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance. Their enthusiasm for the recent rise of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) points to the reactionary political role that they will play here as the resistance of the working class develops to the austerity agenda being imposed by governments, both Labor and Liberal.
SYRIZA is a party representing a layer of the Greek upper middle classes—especially union bureaucrats, academics and professionals—that won 27 percent of the vote in the June 17 election, just behind the traditional right-wing New Democracy party. The party is an amalgam of various ex-Stalinist, ecologist, feminist and other ex-left organisations.
SYRIZA capitalised on the social disaster confronting the Greek working class, by posturing as an opponent of the severe austerity measures imposed by the Troika—the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund—on behalf of European finance capital. At the same time, however, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras pledged to do whatever was necessary to keep Greece in the EU—including to pay back bailout funds and to implement the very economic “reforms” that SYRIZA claimed to oppose.
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