Greece and our battle against austerity

On the evening of the 28th of January hundreds rallied to the Greek Solidarity Campaign meeting to support Syriza's victory at the TUC in London.

Two speakers from Syriza, one from the national leadership, made many points of interest. These included spelling out the first acts of the new government. The Greek people now have something to defend! 

The speakers were also adamant about the future. Of course Syriza is facing a momentous battle. Of course much will turn on whether Podemus in Spain maintains its lead in the polls and is able to open up a second front (as a result of the Spanish elections on or before Sunday 20 December this year.) But we should realise that, like the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, or the Vietnamese war of liberation against the US in the 1960s and 70s, the people, particularly the people of Europe, must rise to the defence of Greece in its challenge to western and specifically European austerity. 

Both Syriza speakers elaborated on the purpose of such an international solidarity movement. Its potential role as both a support for Syriza and the Greek people, but also its role in creating pressure on Syriza itself, alongside the mobilisations in Greece, to confirm and buttress the will of the new politics and the new politicians, to go forward -  and to go on to the end. This is the complete opposite to the traditional Labourite, social democratic perspective. When Obama won the presidency he demobilised the marches and the rallies (and had his own healthcare legislation cut to pieces by a hostile Congress as a result.) If the British Labour Party wins an election that is the end of the role of its supporters at the base. The dialectic of the struggle against austerity however reverses these shibboleths. Politics, action in the communities, isolation and even physical control of countervailing forces like the police and military and the oligarchs that use them, begins with the assertion, in action, by the people, of their indispensible place in the unfolding political drama.

The momentum of mass political action is the only route afforded by our withered western democracies to allow democratic change on the key questions of wealth and power. Our parliaments and mass parties have not, for a couple of generations, been able or willing to challenge society on these terrains. Our political leaders have become apologists for the 'here and now', for the increasingly narrowing boundaries available to democracy, for the 'realism' of decline and defeat. 

Syriza threatens to break the mould; to bring down the political class with its self serving and crushed imagination. It is inconceivable that it will succeed without the democratic movement in the communities and on the streets of Europe - and wider.