Granted, there seems to have been a reduction in turnout and the Greek electoral system appears to vastly and disproportionately reward MPs to the largest party, I can only construe this result as Greeks saying that they are basically ok with how Syriza handled negotiations and with the current “reforms.”
Congratulations to Tsipras.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
– H.L. Mencken
(Update: It appears 780K people who voted in the last election did not vote in this election. That is more voters than all but the first two parties received. Only the Centrist Union and PASOK did not lose votes this election compared to last.)
batalos
just in case…
the WW3 has already begun. Global right (neoliberal “aristocrats”, British Empire & the rest (Reih), “conservatives”, zionists, and so on – under many curtains) vs global left (“socialists”, “progressives”, “commies”,”internationalists”, masons and do on – under many curtains)
this is the end of the world as we know, just as many survivalist freaks imagined to come
the shift will be formed as the “war against ISIL” at the start. the trick is that ISIL is the left side (as Al-Quaeda is the right side) and in almost any country there are both sides within (like Putin and his clan on ministers, CEOes, the Church , local authorities and many more on the right, and Medvedev and his Eltsin clan on ministers, CEOes, local authorities and many more on the left in RF).
both sides know about our predicament – at least at the top – and have there view of the outcome. I don think I know there iew
Mandos
As I said, the left needs to show that it can govern under real existing constraints. The former Left Platform/LAE refused to actually govern when it had the opportunity and catered to a fantasy of an Axis of Pariahs, the one that was being touted here not long ago. They were punished for this. Yes, governing now involves implementing neoliberalism, because not to do so requires, especially in the case of Greece, a massive break with everything that is done so far. If you want to do that, you must have the people onside, and not surprisingly, with people still having a lot to lose, and no credible plan, they didn’t.
Can left-wing parties come to power and deal with the constraints they’re presented? Can they gain credibility governing? Can they gain administrative experience? That is the issue that remains if you want to pursue an electoral strategy as a primary strategy.
batalos
I have studied this topic for 8 years. And just now I think I can see the big picture though i did see the big picture from the physics point of view for long, but now – I can see it from the geopolitics point of view at last.The puzzle is done
DMC
This seems to be the result that displeased the most voters the least. Things stay bad or get a bit worse in order to dodge(supposed) complete and fulminating disaster of financial ruin of one sort or another. Gotta’ make good on those bonds. Can’t have the fixed interests taking a hair-cut. Louse up the percentage. Punks start gettin’ ideas.
Ian Welsh
Shorter Mandos: the left needs to show that it is responsible enough to understand that it is not the left and engage in neo-liberal austerity policies.
Mandos is the sort of guy who is all for left-wing politics, except in real life, when any excuse for a left wing party to not engage in actual left wing economics is acceptable.
If only he’d gone into economics, his future would have been assured, much like Krugman.
For left wing economics in theory, but never when it matters. Never when there is a chance of it actually being done.
People like Mandos are the exact opposite of actual power pragmatists. When neo-liberals got into power they did much of what they did against the existing status quo. As a result, they have ruled the developed world for 40 odd years.
The real world result of attitudes like Mandos’s is all the deaths and misery caused by austerity.
When you take the “constraints” created by an enemy ideology as actual constraints on action…. well… these are the results.
EmilianoZ
The neolibs were able to do their revolution not because they were “power pragmatists” and had the guts to challenge the status quo but simply because they had the rich behind them. Everything becomes easier when you do what they want. Just ask Mitterrand 1981/82.
jackrousseau
Ian,
I think you’re being unfair to Mandos. Syriza and the Greek left more generally were up against overwhelmingly powerful opponents. Those constraints, the ones you use scare quotes for, were and are very real. Short of risking extremely long odds of success, with loss entailing the conversion of Greece into a failed state, they took the only “choice” offered to them.
I’ve been reading the long series of Naked Capitalism posts about the extreme difficulties (IT and otherwise) of getting out of the Eurozone on the timeline that Syriza had available. I think even 100:1 odds against winning with a Grexit strategy would be too generous. In light of that, the only alternative for the left in Greece is to try and build credibility (and maintain ideological positioning) for when a break finally appears. “Discretion is the better part of valor”…
markfromireland
@ Ian,
North American left … structural function of.
mfi
markfromireland
@ EmilianoZ
Certainly wasn’t true of Thatcher when she first took over the conservatives. The establishment including the financial establishment saw her as a divisive and unelectable extremist. They got two out of three right. The big money only started to flow to the conservatives after they’d proved they could win elections under Thatcher.
mfi
Mandos
I was about to come in with like bluster and similarly long-winded snarky accusations and argumentation, but I realize that actually this is the very kernel of my disagreement with Ian here and everything else is contingent on it:
It can’t possibly be the case that you actually think that this dichotomy is a real dichotomy: that a constraint imposed by people who hew to an ideology isn’t a real constraint. The neoliberal forces that surround Greece both literally and economically spent the whole summer proving to the Greek people that their ideological opinion had very material consequences for very many Greeks.
And your response is, what? So far the only plan I’ve ever seen from you is the honestly ludicrous Axis of Pariahs scenario which consists of:
1. Barges of vegetables from Argentina.
2. Oil from Iran — meanwhile busily trying to get into neoliberal good graces.
3. The Russian financial cavalry coming over the hill — meanwhile it turns out that Putin doesn’t quite see the strategic picture this way, probably doesn’t intend a Eurozone wedge/breakup.
4. ?
Grexit and freedom from the neoliberal noose requires something rather different from the drama we saw over the summer. It requires proving to the Greek people that there are competent people who can return a Grexited Greece to growth sooner rather than later, which is not at all assured (Greece isn’t Iceland or Argentina). It means showing Greeks that you can actually govern and aren’t a bunch of salon ideologues railing against the enemy.
LAE/Left Platform attempted this experiment and failed, and your response when I remind you of this is to stick your fingers in your ears and put me figuratively in the dunce corner with Krugman?
Krugman, who is more likely to agree with you and who expresses skepticism that Grexit would be so hard? How does that even make sense?
The lessons here are increasingly clear. The left needs first and foremost to govern — or it needs to work on grassroots transformation of the electorate. These halfway gimmicks won’t cut it.
Mandos
Actually it ended up long anyway but about half of what I had originally planned to write, so, heh.
Pausanias
I am all with Ian on this.
The reaction of the Eurozone to Tsipras was predictable and predicted by many (including the Left Platform within his party but many others internationally). There was no way you could get debt relief and any change in policies without having exit from the Eurozone as a bargaining chip, and to do so you had to be prepared to exit.
Tsipras (and his insiders group) did not even want to think about Grexit and was able to extract the silence of the Left Platform on the topic up until the election announcement in August. Any serious preparation (and Varoufakis’ brain-storming about IOUs and parallel currencies do not fall under that category) for Grexit was neutralized. For the SYRIZA-ANEL government to have extracted any concessions it had to have a serious Plan B, and that was deliberately ruled out by Tsipras. (The difficulties, even nakedcapitalism’s overblown Grexit “IT” problems, would have been overcome with 6 months of serious planning.) The first failure of “governing” by Tsipras was this complete absence of preparation for what he was sure to face. You don’t wait until July 12 arrives (the day of the final showdown with Merkel et al) to look for a plan B and when, predictably, you don’t find it you give it all away.
If you want neoliberal “governing” then why would want Tsipras and SYRIZA to do it? Why don’t you go for the real, more experienced ones?
All the signs are that Tsipras was planning on doing what he actually did, only he expected a bit better treatment. His insiders circle (especially Dragasakis and Flambouraris) had been cultivating many of the Greek oligarchs. The great tell, and that is not very well-known, about where Tsipras was going was appointing as the General Secretary of the January 25 government (a very important gatekeeper, but low-profile, position) of Spyros Sagias, foremost Greek expert on privatizations and generally well-connected establishment figure (see link to his law firm):
http://www.sagiaslawfirm.gr/index.php/en/%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%B1%CE%B5%CE%BC%CF%80%CE%B5%CE%B9%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B1/itemlist/tag/Ports%20and%20Ports%20Policy
Tsipras’ strategy from 2012 on has been pretty much on target. He bet on TINA and he won, for now. But I think history will judge him harshly.
Hugh
“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
Emma Goldman
ProNewerDeal
What happens to the Greek Popular Unity/LAE voters, who failed to reach the 3% to get any seats in Parliament?
Does LAE support of 1 of the 8 parties in the new parliament as the Lesser of 8 Evils? If so which party, Syriza? Or KKE, the Communist anti-Euro party?
Does LAE have a “Shadow Cabinet” indicating the policies they would have had they been in Parliament, ala what the US Green Party does on their website?
Does LAE try to be an active social movement, conducting protests, etc, for a 4 years until the 2019 election? Occupy was a global movement in 2011, but seemed to fade away by 2013 iirc. How can a social movement continue being active & relevant for years?
Hugh
There never was a plan B. There wasn’t even a plan A, unless capitulation counts as one. Everything else was and is atmospherics and window dressing. Tsipras and Varoufakis’ whole strategy was to throw Greece on the mercy of those who had victimized the country and now wished to make an example of it. What could go wrong? If ever there was a case of criminal political malpractice, … but as we all know, and this goes far beyond Greece, the crimes and failures of our elites not only go unpunished. They are often rewarded, as the re-election of Tsipras shows.
The take-home here is that as long as we, the ordinary peoples of this world, act like rubes we are going to be treated like rubes.
Mandos
You’re kidding. A six months conveniently timed for the default deadline? Forget the IT problems, on what planet do you think they would have found enough foreign currency reserves to plan a low-pain Grexit…in six months?
This is all typical back-filling of facts required to make the story work as it is done by left-wingers who are perpetually disappointed by any leader who makes it to power. It’s the same pattern, every single time, and yet no one imagines that it is them.
You are missing exactly the component that left movements miss — your arguments are a microcosm. The issue is: administration and administrative capacity. Even Left Platform members were in charge of ministries, and there were even under the troika still lots of details that were left to the government to decide.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/panitch-greece-baltas-syriza-leadership-tsipras/
Tsipras had created for them a window to establish themselves as competent managers of the ship of state, regardless that it be under adverse conditions, and they blew it on a bad theory and a bad ethical and ideological calculation evidently shared by you and Ian—that has now been rather lightly thrown away by Lafazanis, etc.
(And it’s all very well to complain about the vote turnout, but it’s a sword that cuts both ways: why didn’t LAE, Antasya, and KKE attract all those voters who stopped voting? Because even the disillusioned supporters of Syriza wouldn’t trust them to run anything.)
When Syriza came to power, the Greek government was already in the midst of privatization. At minimum, you need lawyers capable of handling and understanding that. So I presume you know of a Greek legal firm or expert that is reliably left-wing and qualified to handle the details of privatization, etc?
As I said way back when on another thread, the left-wing bench lacks in general adminstrators familiar with managing a state: and you think that Syriza could have prepared a six-month Grexit? Even if it were physically possible, there are perfectly plausible reasons why they excluded it before you immediately fall on betrayal and Lucy-football narratives.
Mandos
Or backing out of privatization, for that matter. Which is what they (quite rightly, I agree) tried to do. You still need lawyers, administrators, etc. A few. Somewhere.
Mandos
Libération on the outcome:
http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2015/09/21/la-gauche-de-la-gauche-grecque-desavouee_1387669
UP simply could not present a vision of Grexit that inspired enough people even to keep them in power. They weren’t even able to present themselves as anti-establishment. It’s like a microcosm of the little failures of left-wingers at practical politics.
http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2015/09/21/renfort_1387668
In this editorial, Libération proposes that the very electoral survival of Syriza is an important achievement under the circumstances; I agree, regardless of what follows.
Pausanias
( Mandos’ comment in brackets – don’t know how to frame otherwise)
[Forget the IT problems, on what planet do you think they would have found enough foreign currency reserves to plan a low-pain Grexit…in six months?]
Greece had about 15 bil. in foreign currency reserves with the Bank of Greece the last time I checked (some months ago). It also has a balanced current account (becoming ever more positive), which implies that Greece can fully pay for its imports with its receipts from exports of goods and services, including tourism. Greece has had capital controls since late June, which implies restrictions on imports that are the same that would be faced after Grexit. No need to even touch the reserves. Moreover, there are almost 50 billion euros in cash held by individuals and firms, and some of it would find its way to finance imports, if that were to become necessary.
This is all part of the mythology and scaremongering that the Greek elites have developed and to which Tsipras has greatly and willingly contributed about the supposed armageddon that the drachma is supposed to bring about. Hyperinflation! They will throw us to the wolves (geopolitically)! How will people pay their mortgages (laughable when their conversion to the drachma will not increase and very likely lower domestic debts due to devaluation)? Like there are no countries in the EU without the euro, or countries that have abandoned hard currency pegs. Given the capital controls, much of the cost of Grexit has already been paid. I mentioned the IT issue because that’s the only one that is left that differentiates a Grexit from something like Argentina’s abandonment of the dollar peg.
[ The issue is: administration and administrative capacity.]
It’s a straw man to argue that anybody would be against developing administrative capacity. Of course we are not. It’s Tsipras who has in many different ways has discouraged that. It’s totally irresponsible to “negotiate” without developing in its administrative details a plan B. He lives and breathes short-term politics and PR pyrotechnics, and he provided the example in his first administration that only those things matter.
[At minimum, you need lawyers capable of handling and understanding that [ie, privatization]]
Again, nobody argues that you should not hire expert lawyers on privatization. But how do you make the legislative point man and of the prime minister’s office and major advisor someone who has made a career in the other camp?
Look, Tsipras not only did not fulfill any of his pre-election promises and, given the new agreement, he cannot fulfill any of them with his new government, but he has adopted as his own a program one that is worse than his predecessors could even implement. The troika has found the perfect guy: a “radical leftist.”
Mandos
You enclose in “blockquote” HTML tags like:
<blockquote>
My text.
</blockquote>
Hopefully that will show up with less than and greater than signs.
Pelham
Maybe the Greeks are just tired at this stage. Can’t blame them.
And the euro now looks like a roach motel.
Mandos
Everywhere I’ve looked, I haven’t seen anything close to that number, even on the BoG’s web site.
Um. Would it continue to charge Euros for exported goods and services during a Grexit? When will it switch to drachme?
But also a spending spree by the rich, who would have been the most likely to have moved Euros out of the country (to prevent drachmaization of the money). I assume that’s the money you’re talking about?
There are no countries in the EU with the Euro that have so far abandoned it that have been subject to the kinds of agreements and constraints placed by being part of the Eurosystem. Argentina was not in that position, it was just a currency peg.
Because he had to survive the first few months of negotations, so administration was basically impossible. The point is, now was the time to have actually developed the experience governing, knowing that after the experiment was tried, a less than perfectly favourable (in this case admittedly quite bad) outcome would emerge.
My point was: I find it extremely unlikely that you would find expert lawyers on privatization who did not make their careers in the other camp. Where do you think expert lawyers on privatization come from these days?
Well, if you believe that Grexit was ever a serious threat, then of course you would feel betrayed. I never believed it was a serious threat because there was no popular buy-in: not even the OXI meant “Grexit” –and of course because I believe it would be MUCH MUCH harder than you make out. I think the best alternatives were either: (1) this outcome or (2) staying out of power and making the gamble that some spontaneous new order will emerge from non-electoral popular efforts. I think (1) is a surer bet but involves much longer buy-in from impatient leftists chomping at the bit to find the traitor, somehow, somewhere.
Mandos
It was explicitly conceived as such. The central banks are not genuinely under the sovereignty of their corresponding governments. What do you think that means?
Dagnarus
@Mandos
I think your analysis fails to take into account what Tsipras actually did. I could understand if he had pragmatic conclusion that grexit was impossible and that his only choice was to accept the bailout and do all that was possible within its strictures, and yes if he had he would have still been called traitor. He did not do that however, what he actually did was push his country to the precipice of financial Armageddon, with out any plan B in case Greece went over the edge (and it looked like Schauble really wanted to give that shove), indeed the closest thing the man appeared to have to a plan B was to call a referendum, have the Greek people force him to cave to the creditors, and then leave the stage blameless. Or to put it another way his grand strategy involved torching the Greek economy in order to appear like a tough guy, and then have the Greek people “force” him to pull back from the precipice, the only problem for him was that the Greeks didn’t blink (probably because Tsipras’s behaviour gave the poor deluded fools the impression that he might actually have a plan) and he was forced to carry out the capitulation himself. Personally I think that expecting competent management from the man is a bit of a stretch. Indeed it’s something he has already failed at.
Mandos
I’m willing to accept a criticism that he didn’t have a plan, or at least not the right plan. He had a choice between bringing Syriza to government at an inconvenient time—one criticism I have heard that possibly makes sense is that he could have allowed Samaras to stay PM until the ongoing memorandum ended, but it would have been a “bird in hand vs. two in the bush” kind of decision that would risk heading to an election with less momentum.
On balance, I think it is better that he brought Syriza to government.
Now that of course forced him to follow through with the rhetoric he had come to power with. And he did, in an environment where everyone including—evidently—the Greek voter knew that there was no actual Grexit threat. And no, neither he nor his original governing team had any real experience of running a country.
My complaint is exactly that: LAE and the Left Platform presumably knew all this, they were on the inside from the beginning. And when they departed, they brought absolutely no sign that they could do any better with them. Which the Greek voters—again, evidently—noticed. The right thing to do in that case, with them implicated in the whole process in any way that mattered, would have been to remain in government. Instead, they chose political suicide for a few minutes of grandstanding.
Jessica
@MFI
“The establishment including the financial establishment saw her [Thatcher] as a divisive and unelectable extremist.”
There is a difference between proposing to do something that the elites would love to do, but don’t think they can get away with [Thatcher’s situation] and proposing to do something that the elites hate and will fight against [Syriza’s situation].
Hugh
As I have often written, the euro was from its inception a scam with 6 fundamental problems:
1. The lack of a fair and democratic fiscal and debt union
2. A weak, and capricious, central bank interested only in defending an unsustainable status quo
3. An insolvent and predatory banking sector
4. Europe internal mercantilist trading patterns
5. Thoroughly corrupt political classes
6. A ruling kleptocratic class of the rich
Perhaps the greatest service Tsipras and Varoufakis could have performed for the Greek people would have been educational, that the euro was no part of their sincere desire to be part of Europe, that it was a trap, not just for them, but the 99%s of Europe in general, that they could best fulfill their role as Europeans by resisting and exposing the euro con, that the “Greek” bailout had been, in fact, a bailout of German banks, and finally that the traditional Greek political parties like Pasok, which were responsible for so many of the policies which led the debt crisis, had conspired with the Germans to transfer via the initial bailouts the soft debt owed to the German banks to the hard debt owed to the troika.
Along with this education, Tsipras and Varoufakis needed to put in place the infrastructure for a Grexit/Plan B. This would have included instituting capital controls early, reorganizing the banks, collecting taxes (with qui tam incentives), setting up (without implementing) the basics of a dual currency system, and modifying bankruptcy law to make it easier for Greek companies to get out of euro denominated contracts. None of these actions would have precluded negotiations with the troika. Indeed they would have given Tsipras and Varoufakis a much stronger negotiating position, that and the threat of a partial repudiation of Greek debt to the troika or a unilateral conversion of Greek euro debt to drachma debt with subsequent float of the drachma.
The three great keys were education, planning and implementation, and timing. The truth is the timing could not have been better tactically for Tsipras. All this was going on in warm weather when the Greeks could grow gardens and food crops and when there would be no expensive heating bills to pay.
The one point that I want to get across is that this was doable. It would have been hard. It would have required the Greeks to make sacrifices, and there would have been risks, but the amazing thing about ordinary people is how much they will sacrifice for something they believe in. But none of this happened, and it shows how unserious/complicit Tsipras and even Varoufakis were. They were more committed to the euro, the thing that was killing their country, than to Greece and its people. It was not that they tried and failed. It was that they never tried at all. In the end, Tsipras was nothing more than Merkel’s Gauleiter in Athens.
Pausanias
Hugh,
It was definitely doable. It just required some basic pragmatism and honestly preparing the population. Tsipras chose the easy path.
Mandos,
You have obviously bought into the impossibility of exiting the euro. Nobody said it would be easy, but the closing of the banks and the imposition of capital controls goes a long way towards making it easier. I also said that 6 months of planning – and includes preparing public opinion – would have been sufficient. Capital economics and others had offered pretty detailed plans since 2012 and Flassbeck and Lapavitsas had done so more recently. But I actually think, just as Varoufakis came around to think (after consistently calling Grexit “catastrophic”), that getting rid of the euro even in an unplanned way in July would have been better than the current alternative.
The drachma is not a fetish (Tsipras, before his complete conversion, used to say “the euro is not a fetish”). It’s just the only instrument for Greece to get out of its Depression, and gain some semblance of local control – and that is beyond left and right. There are few sane economists (other than Greek ones) who do not see that.
Whereas there is all this talk of the impossibility of exiting the Eurozone as a way of justifying Tsipras, what actually Tsipras acquiesced to is barely discussed. Here is a sample of what has been agreed to:
-Almost 2% of GDP annual fiscal adjustment (higher taxes and lower expenditures) for the next three years. This is occurring after GDP has fallen by more than 25% and the unemployment rate has been more than 25% since early 2012.
-If the fiscal targets are not met, then essentially automatic cuts will take place, a feature that did not exist in the previous “bailouts.”
-The privatizations will continue and intensify but now the privatization agency will be under foreign control. When a similar idea was floated under Papandreou, there was a huge outcry in the press. Now there is absolute silence.
-All sort of “reforms” will be implemented, with the complete dismantling of any semblance of labor protections.
Tsipras has been railing against all the above and more for five years. Now he is expected to faithfully implement them. It beats me how he can do it with a straight face. Apparently he has no single ounce of shame or guilt.
The new government will be a facing a tsunami of humiliating demands that would be impossible to fulfill, and the threat of Grexit will come back again.
This is not about being a consistent “lefty” or anything like that. A mainstream Greek rightist, believing in basic social justice and who has a healthy dose of patriotism, would be appalled about all this and I know plenty who are. It is not about right or left. It is about Greek society surviving as a functioning society.
Greece has become a debt colony with a “left” government as its enforcer.
Re. [Um. Would it continue to charge Euros for exported goods and services during a Grexit? When will it switch to drachme?]
If you have a current account surplus, how does it matter what currency you use? A French tourist, for example, who pays in drachmas will have to exchange her euros for drachmas, with her euros eventually becoming available in the Bank of Greece to be used for the payment of imports.
Mandos
What Tsipras agreed to is quite well known. He will have to implement the muscular neoliberalism that is in any case baked into the Eurozone itself.
I’m entirely blatantly telling you that every plausible road ran through this outcome, vicious privatisations and all, and the test of a elected left-wing government and its politicians is how it can survive in the context of the situation it is presented, in the absence of revolutionary fervour among the populace and the willingness to “go Cuba”.
You don’t need to tell me this: you need to tell the Greek voter who has consistently rejected Euro exit in favour of complying with the bailout. Now Ian and many of the rest of you think that this is merely a sign of mass abjection and/or propaganda. I think it is because they don’t trust the Greek state and Greek politicians not to make a hash of it, and they don’t want to be subject to a scheme drawn up by Lapavitsas. Among other reasons.
I’m curious about the mechanics of how this actually works. The French tourist who pays in drachmas isn’t likely to pay in drachmas, not really — many of the business she buys from, like package vacations, will expect her to pay in Euros, because they would prefer not to be subject to the decline of the drachmas and they will likely have Euro bank accounts and so on, and there is more than enough online apparatus for bypassing the Bank of Greece entirely for the transaction. Free movement of goods (unless you intend to cancel that too) means that you cannot prevent them from e.g. buying supplies online, for example. If somehow the Greek state organizes itself sufficiently to make them pay their taxes in drachmas, they would just exchange their Euros for even cheaper drachmas later on, since it’s not like tax day is every day…
But the Greek state would easily be starved under this scenario, current account surplus or not, and austerian suffering among much of the populace would happen in the short to medium term, anyway. Which they really didn’t want to gamble on.
I don’t think this is anywhere near the trump card you say it is.
Mandos
So this is why I feel that this whole thing — the massive effort to backsolve an alternative history narrative about how anti-neoliberal forces were Just. This. Close. — is yet another instance of the left wing pathology that on my pessimistic days makes me believe it will simply never take or exercise real power. The idea that you just need to “honestly prepare the population” and they’ll go wholeheartedly along with your scheme (and the frustrating corollary that if they didn’t go along with your scheme, you didn’t “prepare” them enough) is an idée fixe that pops up in so many contexts.
The way to prepare the population in this circumstance is to give it an example of governance under adverse conditions — before they will be willing to invest in a gamble. The other way is not to play the electoral game at all (at least for the time being) but attempt to construct an alternative “extra-institutionally.”
Pausanias
Mandos,
There are how many, perhaps 150, countries in the world with their own currencies? You are trying to find every excuse that Grexit is impossible or catastrophic.
This is what the Greek elites have been unanimously been propagandazing unrelentingly for 5 years. The only thing that common Greeks have heard about exiting the eurozone is that it would be a “catastrophe” with absolutely nothing to counter all the fantastical stories about how the drachma would be the end of the world. What Krugman or Stiglitz or even Sinn and Cochrane have said is not reflected in the Greek media. Yet a substantial minority without access to mainstream media does not buy it. If the media terrorism were to change, most Greeks would change too. A few words from Tsipras in July about Greece needing its own currency to get out of the crisis would have converted many of them. Support for the euro among common folks is skin-deep.
hvd
Real governance involves leadership based on principle leavened by pragmatism. FDR is an example. Outcomes are not predetermined. Principles, however, will set the track. Showing that you can govern as a neoliberal makes you a neoliberal. We have had that problem here with at least the last two Democratic Party presidents.
Mandos
There aren’t 150 countries in the world that are trying to exit a currency regime from which explicitly no exit was ever intended.
I’m willing to believe that in a few years after Grexit, Greece might have stabilized. For all I know—these are very uncharted waters—it could be even sooner! Or later! It could be a seamless break (very unlikely) or a permanent drastic reduction in the Greek standard of living (probably also unlikely, I’d say). The certainty with which some people declare that there is a panacea for neoliberal control just around the corner with few consequences — that only hasn’t arrived because the current leader was either a quisling or didn’t have the will — is to me just another instance of the standard left-wing failure mode.
Note that the very vocal public figures who left Syriza to form LAE couldn’t even achieve 3% of the vote for providing more than a few words about Greece needing its own currency. (And the vote share of KKE didn’t exactly shoot up…) You’re in Greece, are you? Were they that unknown as figures compared to Tsipras?
Look: if you were to tell me that the policy being imposed on Greece is a slow death, I would agree with you. The problem is not merely to assert that Grexit is better — you can make the argument that ripping the bandaid off is what is necessary — but rather, that there exists on the left the administrative competence and experience to pull it off and make the aftermath not so painful. Pollyanna-ish tales in which the universe cooperates with your theory do not inspire confidence.
Or, you can just pretend that the revolutionary spirit just needs the right man to say the right words and it will awaken. Failure mode.
hvd:
Not every situation is a recreation of the situation around FDR. FDR was ultimately saving capitalism from itself. After 40 years of neoliberalism, the global environment is completely subject to it and all Greece’s external relationships are conditioned on neoliberal assumptions. What people need to do if they’re going to run on an anti-austerity platform (in any country, not just Greece, but Eurozone countries are particularly tightly bound) is show that, when they become administratively responsible, they are able to navigate these dangerous shallows. In countries with very little real clout (like Greece or Portugal), the conditions under which they do this will mostly be set by their enemies.
hvd
Any and every policy has enemies. Roosevelt took on the neoliberals of his day and although he was not a revolutionary and did not intend to uproot capitalism nevertheless stopped the neoliberal plunder of the American fisc and established a new, far more egalitarian, order. I don’t think he went nearly far enough but his is the type of conservative stewardship (governance or leadership) that you keep demanding. What distinguished his governance is that he did not simply abandon his principles because he was sorely opposed by the neoliberals and fascists of his day. Tsipras et al have not led. That is simple. That they will be neoliberal caretakers is also obvious. Real governance a la Roosevelt requires an active attempt to break the paradigms insisted on by your enemies. The path may not be clear, outcomes uncertain but the only way to create a new future is to set out on the path guided by your own principles not the principles of your enemies.