En Passant

Many of my readers will be hoping for a Jeremy Corbyn in Australia to move the Labor Party here to the left. There is no Corbyn in the Parliamentary Labor Party. The Labor left, such as it is, is thoroughly imbued with the logic of neoliberalism. In the main it is a tribal allegiance rather than an ideological ferment of ideas to challenge capitalism. You never hear the S word from these very models of a modern major general of capital. None of the possible contenders for Corbyn down under have the same track record as Corbyn in opposing austerity or fighting against social and political injustice. Indeed people like Albanese and Plibersek have been Ministers in Labor governments that have implemented neoliberal policies and attacked public services and workers’ rights and conditions. They are part of the very problem Corbyn is fighting against.

If there are two lessons I draw from the surrender of SYRIZA they are, first, not to pursue a grand reformist project, especially an electoralist one aimed at winning power to manage capitalism, and second to consider how to unite those small and disparate forces now on the ground in Australia that understand that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class.

Sydney Wednesday solidarity rally with Greek workers striking against austerity.

NO MEANS NO – NO TO AUSTERITY DEAL – SOLIDARITY WITH GREEK WORKERS

Meet Sydney Town Hall Steps, Wednesday 15 July, 5:30pm

Petros Constantinou is a long-term socialist activist from Greece. As a member of the anti-capitalist coalition Antarsya, the Greek socialist organisation, SEK, and a councillor for Athens, Petros has been a part of the momentous struggle of Greek workers against austerity in the midst of capitalism’s greatest crisis since the Great Depression. Now, as the newly-elected left party Syriza tries to manage the crisis, Petros will join us at the Keep Left conference to discuss: Recession and austerity in Greece: Can Syriza solve the crisis? A debate. Join us.

Wednesday is the public sector general strike and the parliamentary vote on the Third Memorandum in Greece. There is a global call for solidarity with Greek workers striking against austerity. 5.30 pm Wednesday in every central square worldwide. Get cracking. Organise.

As one public sector trade unionist told me last night during the “violent� negotiations in Brussels:

“The foreign media seem to think that if he [Tsipras] signs up to something and the parliament passes it then it’s going to happen. Quite simply – it is not. There will be an enormous battle.�

2) The executive of the ADEDY public sector union federation meets this afternoon. It is set to consider a call from the anti-capitalist left for a 24-hour strike against the new memorandum, whether agreed to by the government or imposed from without through a capital-enforced expulsion of Greece from the eurozone.

The historic nature of events in the last week in Greece with the mobilisation and then resounding No vote against austerity and now the rotten deal Tsipras’s Syriza government has offered the troika demands unity. Unite the left wing No forces in the fight against austerity. And for those of us far away learning important lessons from the events in Greece, it means uniting in our support of those in Greece fighting against capitalist austerity no matter who is imposing it.

‘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.