En Passant

‘Those who lead Greece and its Left to surrender should be opposed,’ writes Stathis Kouvelakis in Jacobin. Stathis serves on the central committee of Syriza.

No one on the left of the party is responsible for breaking an “anti-austerity” government’s majority. The government itself did that when it broke from the party’s programme – even its most minimal one: no more austerity. There is an honourable tradition of representatives of the left finding themselves in a minority in an assembly on a matter of principle, only then to find – sometimes more quickly than they had anticipated – that they represent majority feeling in the society.

Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey famously declared that Australia needed to be a nation of ‘lifters, not leaners’. Just who are the real leaners?

For Marxists the ruling class exploits the working class. This means it extracts surplus value (what becomes profit, interest, rent, dividends etc) from workers. That surplus value is the unpaid work workers do for the boss in the normal working day over and above what they are paid to survive, come back the next day and raise the next generation of workers with a little left over for socially determined activities like after work drinks on Friday night.

This means it is the bosses as a class who are the real leaners.