[D66] Seymour comments

[Antid Oto]

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=854&issue=136

A comment on Greece and Syriza
Issue: 136
Posted: 9 October 12
Richard Seymour

The “strategic perplexity” of the left confronted with the gravest 
crisis of capitalism in generations has been hard to miss.1 Social 
democracy continues down the road of social liberalism. The far left has 
struggled to take advantage of ruling class disarray. Radical left 
formations have tended to stagnate at best. Two exceptions to this 
pattern are the Front de Gauche in France and Syriza in Greece. While 
the Front de Gauche did not do as well as many hoped, it did channel a 
large vote for the radical left in the presidential elections won by 
Hollande. Meanwhile, Syriza is potentially a governing party in waiting.

In Alex Callinicos’s piece for the last International Socialism, he 
offered a complex analysis of these developments.2 At the most general 
level, he argued that the capitulation of social democracy to 
neoliberalism in combination with the capitalist crisis is opening up a 
space to its left. He suggested that the reason why Syriza and the Front 
de Gauche had succeeded was that they were dominated by “left 
reformists”. They speak the language of an older reformist tradition 
with deep roots in the working class and are thus far better placed to 
capitalise on workers’ discontent than revolutionaries.

This analysis is a rebuke to the notion that there is nothing between 
the far left and social democracy. That diagnosis may have been 
appropriate in the period of revolutionary growth beginning in 1968.3 
This period, marked by the long-term decomposition of once dominant 
social democratic parties, is quite different. A typical feature of 
emerging radical left parties and coalitions is the involvement of a 
left breakaway from the old reformist parties, as well as a realignment 
of some of the Communist parties associated with them. There is a 
structural gap between what such forces represent on the ground and what 
they can project in elections, which makes any success extremely 
fragile. Nonetheless, today there are quite serious forces between us 
and social democracy. And in the circumstances, this is no bad thing.

.. continued..