Monday, February 9, 2015, 6:30 PM
News & Letters Library, 228 S. Wabash, Room 230, Chicago
News and Letters Committees invites you to a discussion on:
Greece and Syriza: Against the inhumanity of austerity, we pose the fullness of human liberation!
See our statement on the Greek elections.
Poets protest in Athens, Greece, against austerity in 2012.
The electoral victory of Greece’s Syriza party represents an important step in resisting the brutal austerity that has been imposed on the Greek and European working class as the capitalist system’s response to its own intractable, seemingly never-ending crisis. We in News and Letters Committees celebrate the resistance represented by the Greek vote against this intolerable system.
That Syriza attempts to embody a form of anti-capitalist politics makes it the necessary object of revolutionary criticism. The victory of Syriza has been made possible by a worldwide movement, begun and inspired by the Arab Spring revolutions. At such a time of ferment, revolutionary thought will either rise to the moment and develop further, or it will die.
In this regard, serious alarms must be raised by Syriza’s choice to ally with the racist, theocratic Independent Greeks party, who also have opposed the austerity imposed on Greece, but from a very different perspective. It is to be hoped that this unprincipled alliance will be short-lived and not become the model for a politics that brings together “Left” and Right in a way that can only lead to future disasters and the suppression of genuine opposition to the rule of capital. For now, the most likely effect—perhaps intended, perhaps not—will be to dismay and demobilize the most revolutionary elements of Syriza’s voting base.
Popular assembly in Syntagma Square, Athens, Greece, May 5, 2012. Photo by Adolfo Indignado Cuartero, http://www.flickr.com/photos/popicinio/
Speaker: Gerry Emmett, author of “Revolt surges against racist system destroying Black lives” and “World in View” columnist, News & Letters
For more information: 312-431-8242 / arise@newsandletters.org / www.newsandletters.org