An interview with Costas Lapavitsas
Syriza continues to oversee the implementation of austerity. But all is not hopeless in Greece.
In Greece, it’s not quite accurate to talk about the “rise and
fall” of the left-wing party Syriza. “Rise and plateau” would be more fitting.
Syriza came to power in January 2015
promising to confront the “troika” — the European Commission, the European
Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund — to secure an exit from
the Greek debt crisis and end the austerity under which Greeks were suffering.
Thus commenced five months of high-drama negotiations that culminated in a national
referendum in which the Greek people said a resounding “no” — “Oxi”
— to the deal offered by the troika.
Yet in the face of this historic
response, Syriza prime minister Alexis Tsipras went towards the creditors,
signing a third memorandum resigning the country to ever deeper austerity and mounting
privatizations.
Tsipras’s unprecedented
capitulation was followed by another: his decision to stay in power to
implement the terms of the memorandum. To many, Syriza’s rapid climb to
state power, its tough talk in negotiations, and its feints towards “Grexit” signaled
an acceleration of the class struggle in Greece. Its capitulation proved an
abrupt end to that feverish process. Now the party lumbers on, zombie-like,
dully implementing anti-worker and anti-left measures of historic magnitude.
Costas Lapavitsas accompanied every step
of this dizzying process as an MP for Syriza and a member of the Left
Platform, a
bloc within the party that called for exit from the European Monetary Union and
the preparation of the Greek people for confrontation with international
creditors. Had the Left Platform won the strategic and political argument in
Syriza, Greece likely would have gone down a very different path.
Today neither Lapavitsas nor the Left
Platform continue to be part of Syriza. Yet Lapavitsas has not relinquished the
Left Platform’s central
assertion:
that the subjection of Greece’s working class is not inevitable.
Here, George Souvlis, a PhD candidate in
history at the European University Institute in Florence, and Petros Stavrou, a
former Syriza adviser and current member of the radical left initiative ARK,
speak with Lapavitsas for Jacobin about Syriza’s
government, the struggle against austerity across Europe, and the prospects for
reviving the Greek left.
GS: By way of introduction. Would you introduce yourself
by focusing on the formative academic and political experiences that strongly
influenced you?
CL: I come from the generation that began to
understand the world after the fall of the dictatorship in Greece. During this
period, radicalization was a crucial feature of Greek society. My own family
was on the Left, so I was naturally radicalized long before I began my university
studies. But the wider context of the 1980s in the UK was crucial for my
formation. During this period I realized that the world was far bigger, and the
ideological and political issues at stake were far wider, than I had
experienced in Greece in the 1970s. Much
of my political maturing, in other words, occurred in Britain. Since then, I
have been active in the ranks of the British Left. Another crucial intellectual
experience for me was discovering Japanese Marxism nearly three decades ago. It
provided me with an even wider aspect of both Marxism and economics as well as
a broader way of looking at capitalism.
GS: Could you name some of the intellectuals—such as economists
and political theorists—that were crucial for your intellectual formation as a Marxist
economist?
CL: The first book I read in political-economy was
Sweezy and Baran's Monopoly Capital, when
I was pretty young. It’s a great book, one of the most important contributions
to Marxism in the twentieth century, and gave me a lasting respect for Sweezy's
economics. Needless to say, I have also read the bulk of Marx’s writings carefully,
but never treated them as holy texts. For me, Marx was a great thinker and
revolutionary, but that is about it. I have also read the usual complement of
Marxist classics. I should single out Trotsky in particular, whose writings on
the Russian Revolution, the development of the Soviet Union, and the emergence
of fascism in the interwar years have influenced me greatly. I have long belonged
to the part of the Left that is heavily critical, even rejectionist, of the Soviet
Union. Finally, my specific understanding of Marxist economics is a mixture of,
first, the Anglo-Saxon Marxist renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s and, second,
of the Japanese Marxism of the Uno School. I owe a great debt to many but I
would single out Ben Fine and Laurence Harris in the UK and Makoto Itoh and
Tomohiko Sekine in Japan.
GS: Let's discuss Greece. SYRIZA—after the defeat of
the new bailout—has created a narrative about the unavoidable nature of this
development, suggesting that this was the only way to move forward. Do you
share this understanding of events? If not, what was the other way? In terms of
economy, what should SYRIZA have done to avoid these developments?
CL: It is interesting to note that the main argument
that comes from the current leadership of SYRIZA is that there was nothing else
that could have been done. This is also exactly the argument deployed by New
Democracy, PASOK, and everyone else who has run Greece for decades. Yet SYRIZA
rose to power by promising another way that would deliver real change in Greece
and Europe. I supported SYRIZA at the time because another way was indeed possible.
If not, what exactly was the point of SYRIZA? To have Alexis Tsipras as Prime
Minister instead of Antonis Samaras of New Democracy? To have people in
government who call themselves “left” and will hopefully implement the bailout policies
more “softly?” I completely reject this view.
The real problem with SYRIZA was not that there was no
other way. The real problem was the strategy adopted by its leadership was unsound
from the start. It was wrong politics, wrong economics, wrong understanding of
the world. In short, they aimed to oppose the lenders and transform Greece,
while remaining in the European monetary union. This was never possible, as I
argued at the time along with several others in SYRIZA. We gave battle, opposing
the leadership and arguing for an alternative path by exiting the EMU and
defaulting on the national debt. That was the only realistic alternative for
Greece, which could have opened a fresh path of radical social change. Events
showed that we were absolutely right and the strategy of the leadership was
nonsense. But we were not able to win the political argument, and that was the
crucial thing. After the failure of his strategy, Tsipras surrendered to the
lenders and adopted their policies. The surrender of SYRIZA is a black mark for
the whole of the European left.
GS: What you are suggesting above is at a macro-economic
level. Don’t you think that there were other short-term tactical alternatives? (Such
as organizing an earlier referendum, to impose—from the first day they took the
power—capital and banking controls.) Because what happened in the end was to
impose capital controls at the last minute in a very difficult conjuncture when
the Greek state was almost economically paralyzed.
CL: For what? What would have been the point of the
earlier tactical application of controls, if SYRIZA was not prepared to go all
the way by exiting the EMU and defaulting on the debt?
GS: It’s not my position, but some argue that these
moves would have gotten better results in the negotiations between SYRIZA and the
Troika compared to what the bailout agreement brought. Do you share this
position?
CL: Better negotiation to achieve what? This is just wrong
thinking. The problem of SYRIZA was not tactics, although the negotiating
methods of Tsipras, Varoufakis, and the others were also clumsy from the
beginning. What is the point of aggravating the lenders with a provocative style
and verbiage when you lack the steel to go all the way? It is far better to
wear a suit and tie but stand ready to declare default when it is necessary.
The problem with SYRIZA, however, was not its methods, but its strategy. They
did not understand what Europe was about, how implacable the lenders were.
Above all, they did not understand that the only way to combat the enormous power
of the European Central Bank over the availability of liquidity in the economy was
to produce a national currency. There was no other option for a left
government. I told Tsipras this in private conversation but he did not want to
hear it, for that would have involved a real break with the institutions of the
EU. And a break was not what he wanted by training, disposition, and political
outlook.
GS: I think it was crucial for the failure of SYRIZA—and
this is my opinion—that the party didn’t tell Greek people the truth during the
period of negotiations. The truth of what was going on between the two sides
and what interests were at stake. I’m sure you remember that the main discourse
produced on behalf of the party during this period was that everything was
under control, that there would be a fair agreement that both sides would benefit
from, etc. I think this was a wrong tactical step because in that way SYRIZA demobilized
the people, delegating the process of negotiations to a group of specialists,
the team around Tsipras. In that way, SYRIZA made people believe that sooner or
later there would be a solution in favor of their interests. The people were neither
accurately informed about was happening in Brussels nor were they ready to
protest en masse against the menaces
of the Troika. I believe that the Plan B
would have involved preparing the Greek people as much as necessary for a
possible brake with EU. What do you think?
CL: Popular support and political preparation of the
working class and broader social layers would have been of paramount importance
for any radical government that truly wanted to change things in Greece. SYRIZA had the opportunity to engage in that
after the 2012 election, when it became the official opposition, but it didn’t.
Instead, the leadership followed the path of promoting Alexis Tsipras as the
next prime minister and a figure of the global Left. After coming to power,
they never came clean on key questions, even though people wanted answers. The
only point on which they were adamant was that they wanted to stay within the
European institutions. That is one of the few issues on which they were honest.
They were, and remain, committed Europeanists. How, then, could they have
prepared the people for a major clash with European lenders? Even at the time
of the July 2015 referendum, which could have evidently been a point of
rupture, they meticulously avoided preparing the people for battle. Powerful centers
in Greece and abroad were systematically trying to scare the Greek people by
saying that a ‘No’ would mean exit from the EMU and disaster. SYRIZA and its leadership
never put it that way but always said that the referendum was merely another
weapon in the negotiations with the lenders. And in the end they surrendered
and turned ‘No’ into ‘Yes’. They never wanted a real fight.
GS: Do you think this strategic choice is connected
with the strategy that Eurocommunist parties adopted during the 1970s, or was it
strictly a decision by the people around Tsipras? For example, Giorgos
Stathakis, the current minister of environment and energy and one of Tsipras’s
most important economic advisors, was one of the most sincere people in SYRIZA,
having said from November 2016, that the only realistic option for the party in
power was immediately to sign a memorandum with the Troika. What is your take
on this? Can this choice be explained
with reference to ideological, economic, or personal reasons, or is it some intersection
of these factors that can effectively decode the adopted strategy?
CL: I do not think that we can directly connect the
shambles of SYRIZA with the Eurocommunist tradition. There were many historical
currents of the Left that went into SYRIZA. Some came from Eurocommunism, but
some of the most prominent ones came from the Stalinist tradition of the Greek
Communist Party. A good proportion of SYRIZA’s leading cadre were straight down-the-line
Communist Party cadre and not Eurocommunist by any stretch of the imagination. The
real problem with SYRIZA was not Eurocommunism but how the party was constituted,
and what it became. It began in an uncertain way in the early 1990s, mostly as Synaspismos,
effectively an offshoot of the Communist Party that was always top-heavy and
not rooted in the working class. It became SYRIZA in the 2000s, a small outfit
that saw itself as potentially an important player in Greek politics because it
seemed to be offering a new way of doing politics that would be pluralist, democratic,
and so on. The major change in SYRIZA occurred under the leadership of Alekos
Alavanos, who was probably the most talented politician of his generation on
the Left. SYRIZA acquired the features of a new mass party that could attract
many different currents of the Left in an environment of constant discussion
and exchange of opinion. It was also consciously movementist.
The disastrous mistake that Alavanos made was to
appoint Tsipras and his small group as the new leadership of SYRIZA, thinking
that he was opening the way for a new, fresh, and radical generation. Tsipras
proved enormously ambitious and equally adept at taking over the party. He
pushed SYRIZA toward great electoral success in 2011-12. Around 2010, SYRIZA
was just a small party among many on the Left and, to be frank, it spouted the
greatest nonsense regarding the nature of the unfolding crisis. Tsipras boldly
pushed it to take part in the mass protests that then occurred in the Squares
of the Greek cities. Above all, Tsipras was prepared to say that he was ready
to govern, unlike all the other leaders of the Left. The combination of his
willingness to govern and the involvement of SYRIZA in the movement of the Squares
propelled the party forward in the elections of 2012. It became the government
in waiting.
For a short period of time it seemed that SYRIZA
represented a new form of organization that could be the future for the Left
not only in Greece, but in Europe. A loose alliance of various currents engaging
in constant debate, with a powerful cadre, which could attract electoral
support and become the party of government. The reality became clear in 2015.
SYRIZA was not a new way of doing politics for the Left, but merely the latest
way in which the Greek political establishment could continue to rule. Endless
political debate and movementism proved neither a guarantee of internal
democracy nor a challenge to capitalism. SYRIZA has shown itself to be completely
undemocratic in government, an amorphous political body with an all-powerful
leader at the top and no real political debate. It’s an electoral machine that
has become imbricated with the Greek state and seeks only to maintain itself in
power. There is no future for the Left in the SYRIZA model, that’s for
sure.
GS: A discursive motto that informs the official narrative
of the Greek government after the July 2015 agreement is that its governance,
despite the many difficulties it’s confronted until now, can defined as a
success story due to its fiscal performance increasing the state's primary
budget surplus to roughly 4% of GDP in 2016. Do you share this optimism on
behalf of the Greek government? Could we define its economic performance as a
successful one?
CL: Let me put things in context. The great economic contraction
in Greece ended in 2013. Since 2014, the Greek economy has been effectively
stagnant: a litle bit up, a little bit down. The worst part of the crisis was already
over a year before SYRIZA took power. So it’s ludicrous to say that SYRIZA has
delivered some kind of success for Greece, or the Greek people. In factual
terms, after SYRIZA took over, the economy returned to mild recession and has
continued on an indifferent path throughout 2016 and so far in 2017. Of course,
in Greek politics it is possible to create a parallel reality through the
constant repetition of falsehoods, and SYRIZA is very good at this. But the
truth is obvious in the figures and in the lived experience of people.
In terms of actual economic policies, SYRIZA has
proven to be the most obedient government Greece has had since the beginning of
the crisis. They have accepted the economic policies of the lenders, signed the
third bailout agreement in August 2015, and have been meticulous in applying
it. There is no evidence of independence, no exercise of sovereignty. In this
respect, the latest agreement they signed in May 2017, completing the second
review of the third bailout, once again obediently followed the dictates of the
lenders. During its ascent to power, SYRIZA made a huge fuss about negotiating
hard, being tough, and standing up to the lenders, unlike the previous, “soft” Greek
governments. In practice they have proven the worst negotiators Greece has had during
the crisis. The lenders have completely dominated them, imposing austerity,
taxes, and pension cuts, without providing any debt relief.
The future looks bleak for Greece. It will probably continue
to stagnate: growth will perhaps pick up a little, then it will decline a
little, and then again the same. It will become a country with a permanently
high unemployment rate and high income inequality; a poor country whose trained
youth will leave; an aging country crushed by huge debt; an irrelevant little
country on the fringes of Europe. Its ruling class has accepted this
eventuality, it is a historic bankruptcy of its rule. SYRIZA is also playing a
part in this disaster.
GS: And what
about the debt? SYRIZA has claimed that there will be debt relief soon.
CL: In May 2016 the Eurogroup, which is the body that
basically runs the monetary union, decided a framework for the Greek debt,
which SYRIZA has accepted. There will be no “haircut,” because there is no
mechanism within the monetary union for one state to take the losses from the
policies of another. According to the framework, Greek debt will be considered
sustainable as long as the total cost of servicing it (interest and principal)
does not exceed 15 percent of annual GDP. Greece might be offered some help to
achieve this “sustainability” by lengthening the term of some of the existing loans
and providing a reduction of interest. This is the best that Greece can hope
for from its “partners” in the EU. For that, Greece will have to shape its
fiscal policy to achieve a very substantial primary surplus for a long time.
That is, low government spending and high taxation, i.e., deep austerity, for
decades. By implication, rates of growth will be lowered. This is an awful
predicament that makes the Greek debt decidedly unviable in the medium to long term.
In May 2017 the SYRIZA government signed a further
agreement based on precisely this framework. They have legislated fresh
measures, reducing pensions and imposing taxes to ensure eye-watering austerity
of 3.5 percent primary surpluses a year until 2022. They have also agreed to achieve
further surpluses of 2 percent a year until 2060! Despite legislating these
extraordinarily harsh measures, they have received absolutely no concessions on
the debt. It is amazing incompetence. They have capitulated, surrendering every
last vestige of national sovereignty and imposing harsh measures on working
people, while failing abysmally to secure any terms that would allow the Greek
economy to recover, thus reducing unemployment. The SYRIZA government is a
disgrace to the Greek people but also to the international Left.
GS: Do you think that this situation in Greece can be
compared to that of Latin American states during the crisis of the 1980s, since
a debt crisis was a determining feature in both cases?
CL: To an extent, yes, because the Greek crisis was in
substance a balance-of-payment crisis. Moreover, the crisis has been handled by
the IMF, so one can find similar results to Latin America. However, the real
analogue for Greece is not Latin America but the German crisis after the First
World War, the war-reparations crisis. After losing the war, Germany was forced
to make huge reparations, mostly to victorious France, while at the same time
it faced restrictions on its economy that reduced its capacity to export, and
thus to make the payments required. Throughout the 1920s Germany was put in an
impossible position, as John Maynard Keynes realized immediately. The end
result was, of course, the rise of Hitler, who denounced the debt and militarized
the economy in preparation for the Second World War. Greece is in a similar
position today. It has a huge external debt and is obliged to make foreign
payments, but it cannot generate the external surpluses since the monetary
union effectively does not allow it. The budget surpluses at present are created
by squeezing the domestic economy, thus reducing the prospects of growth. It is
an impossible situation for Greece, which could only be resolved by forcibly
breaking out of the trap.
GS: The ex-minister of finance Yanis Varoufakis has
endorsed recently that there was a Plan B. Do you believe this statement? If
there was one, why was it not used as an option by Tsipras’s team during the
negotiations with the Troika when there was still time and space for maneuvers?
In the case that Tsipras would play this card, what impact do you think that it
would have in economic and political terms?
CL: It’s a common thing to create a narrative about
the past that allows you to live with yourself. It is also common to keep reinventing
the past to suit better the needs of the present. People often do that in politics,
though I personally try to avoid it as much as I can. There was never a Plan B
in a real sense—that is, a plan to take Greece out of the monetary union and
break with the European Union. At most there were some back-of-the envelop
exercises on what to do if the pressure of the lenders became too much. They
never amounted to a Plan B such as I kept demanding – and proposing – that is, a
coherent whole that would be based on popular support. And there could not be for
SYRIZA because such a plan would have necessarily involved exiting the EMU.
SYRIZA leaders, including Yanis Varoufakis, were committed Europeanists who
would not countenance a break with Europe. The SYRIZA members who were not
Europeanists and demanded a break, were eventually pushed out by Tsipras.
GS: Recently you and Theodore Mariolis wrote an
analytic report, “Eurozone failure, German policies, and a new path for Greece,”
published by the RL Institute, in which you describe, the steps that a future
government should conduct in order for Grexit to be a feasible project without
destructive consequences for the majority of the Greek people. What should a
future government do to make a possible Grexit a success story, even in the
long term?
CL: The steps of Grexit have long been well
understood. There is no mystery. Grexit requires, first, recapturing monetary
sovereignty through an act of parliament, thus redefining the legal tender of
the nation. An 1:1 conversion rate would be immediately applied on contracts,
money flows, and money sums that are under Greek law. At the same time, there
would be bank nationalization, capital controls, banking controls, and steps to
ensure that there is a regular supply of medicines, food, and energy in the
initial period until the economy turns round. The most serious economic problem
would be the devaluation of the New Drachma, the extent of which will depend on
the state of the current account and the strength of the economy. In the case
of Greece, it is not easy to estimate it, but I would guess that a devaluation of
20-30 percent in the new position of equilibrium would be likely. Devaluation would
be positive for Greek industry, which needs to recoup competitiveness in the
international markets and domestically. Workers would also benefit in the
medium-term as employment would be protected, but they would require support in
the short-term, particularly through subsidies and tax relief. This is not an
easy path by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s perfectly feasible and
requires determination and popular participation. There would probably be a period
of considerable difficulties, perhaps six to twelve months, but then the
economy would turn around.
Exit, however, was never a cure by itself for Greek
problems. I have always understood it as part of a different set of economic
policies that would change the balance of social forces in favor of labor and
against capital, thus putting the country on a different path. Greece needs a
progressive exit, in other words. For that, two steps are fundamental. First,
the government should lift austerity, abandoning the ridiculous and destructive
aim of 3.5 percent for primary surpluses. It should boost public spending for investment
and other things, aimed mostly toward services because that is where employment
could be rapidly created. Second, the government should adopt an industrial
strategy using public resources to rebalance the economy in favor of industry
and agriculture rather than services. If these policies were adopted, the benefits
for working people would be substantial, the balance of class power would
change, the conditions of wage labor would be improved, and there would be
scope for income and wealth redistribution. It would be possible to talk of
Greece entering a different path of development with a strongly anti-capitalist
character that could lead to the socialist reorganization of society.
GS: In a possible Grexit scenario, where would a Greece outside of the EU fit in the
global economy—what would it trade, with whom; would it expect a trade war with
the EU?
CL: The “trade war” argument is typically employed by
people who either wish to continue with the bailout policies or are too scared
even to contemplate radical change. Greece would certainly face difficulties if
it went down the path of rupture, not least because it would inevitably have to
default on its debt. But then, it is widely known and accepted that Greek debt
is unsustainable. Default is a serious business, but today it does not lead to war,
boycotts, and other colorful outcomes. Countries continue to operate and survive.
After all, it is the state that would default, not the individual productive
agents. Far more risky than default is the prospect of a break with the
European Union, which would not occur simply because of defaulting, but also because
Greece would adopt economic policies that would contradict those of the EU. Greece
would have to be prepared for that in order to put its economy back in order.
There are no shortcuts. It would have to negotiate special terms, exemptions,
and so on, and it would have to be prepared for a fight to adopt the policies that
it needs. If the workers and the popular strata were determined, the country
could be successful.
GS: Now let's move to the EU developments. What do you
think is the future of the Eurozone and how do you see the European
Commission's scenarios for a multi-speed Europe, which appears to be the plan
that Germany currently has for the EU?
CL: The Eurozone crisis as a distinct period in the
historical development of the EU is practically over. Germany has imposed its
own solution and defeated all opposition. The point bears restating: Germany
has prevailed and imposed its will on Europe during the last seven years. It
has emerged as the indisputably dominant country. As that has happened, it has also
become clear that the new Europe is a highly stratified entity, with a core and
several peripheries. The old distinction of core and periphery that Marxists
used to talk about has reemerged in Europe in new and virulent ways. The core,
more specifically, is the industrial base of Germany which mainly consists of cars,
chemicals, and machine tools. There is no other industrial complex in Europe
that is remotely comparable to the German, with the possible exception of
Northern Italy.
The core has defined several peripheries, two of which
stand out. The first is immediately attached to the German industrial core: Poland,
the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, and Slovenia. This periphery acts as a
hinterland of German industrial capital, providing labor, resources, and
productive capacity, all bolted onto Germany. The second periphery is in the
South: Greece, Portugal, and Spain. These are economies with weak industry, low
productivity growth, and low competitiveness, which used to have a large public
sector that provided employment but can no longer do so. Their role is to
provide trained labor personnel to the German core.
This stratification of Europe provides the foundation
of enormous German political power. The ascendancy of Germany has not resulted
from a plan by the German historical bloc, though after a point it became a conscious
policy. The most important lever in ensuring the ascendancy of Germany has been
the monetary union, which has provided Germany with the means to dominate
Europe commercially and has acted as the base for German industrial capital to
export to China, the United States, and so on. Through the monetary union Germany
has emerged as a major global power. But like any capitalist process of this
type, tensions and internal contradictions have also emerged. These have mostly
to do with the core of Europe, and two issues are of paramount importance.
The first has to do with Germany itself. The rise of
Germany exporting industrial capital has happened on the back of German
workers: continuing austerity in Germany, wage restraint, tightened public
spending, a lack of domestic investment, and the compression of domestic
demand. This is the foundation for German capitalist domination of Europe and has
provided the wherewithal for German capital to gain share in the world market.
It is clearly an unstable and untenable situation in the long-term. Two-thirds
of German labor survives on precarious terms, with low wages and tough labor
conditions.
The second are relations between Germany, France, and
Italy. This is a point of major weakness. France is of course a country of the
core but it cannot survive with Germany because it does not have the industrial
base, the competitiveness, and the ability to shape the monetary union. In
effect, its historic bloc lacks a strategic plan on how to confront Germany and
is fast becoming subservient to Berlin. Italy is even worse. It has a
significant industrial base but its presence in the monetary union is deeply problematic
because it cannot compete on reasonable terms and its growth rate is very weak.
Italy has been in a state of low level austerity for years. This cannot persist
for ever and tensions will break out at some point. To sum up, the rise of
Germany has stratified Europe in ways that have never been seen before, creating
enormous tensions. This is where I expect to see eruptions and the acceleration
of history in the years to come.
GS: Do you think these eruptions will come from above
or below?
CL: In recent years we have seen the rise of right-wing
populism and authoritarianism, often in fascist form, in several parts of
Europe. This is a result of the stratification of Europe and the emergence of German
domination. It is also the result of the retreat of democracy as Europe has
become more and more unequal. The failure of parliamentary democracy, which is
manifest across Europe, and the fact that the political process has become detached from
the concerns of working people, is part-and-parcel of the ascendancy of German
capital across Europe. The reaction has inevitably taken the form of demanding
more sovereignty, and it has come from below: people sense that they have lost
power over where they live, where they work, who makes the laws, who enforces
the laws, who is accountable, and how. There are demands for popular and national
sovereignty across Europe.
In the past the forces of the Left in Europe would have
been formulating these demands to express the needs and aspirations of working
people, opposing big business and German ascendancy across Europe. The tragedy
is that the Left has not played this role in Europe for years, and as a result,
the right has stepped in, often even appropriating the mode of expression of
the Left, and giving an authoritarian turn to popular demands. But there is
nothing inevitable about this development. It will all depend on how the Left
reacts from now on. There is no firm attachment of working people to the far
right in Europe. The real issue is whether the Left can get its act together
and begin to intervene effectively. The potential exists. What is lacking is a
clear understanding of the burning political issues in Europe as much of the Left
continues to operate within the framework of the 1990s and 2000s. It is time for
the Left to break out of that and once again play its
historic role in Europe.