For the congress on 10-14 July which transformed Syriza from a coalition into a single party, there was a programmatic proposal from the majority leadership (“mainstream”), which won 68% of the vote, an amendment from the Left Platform which won 30%, and a counter-proposal from another minority.
The keynote speech from Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras was bland. It did not cancel the leftish turn which Tsipras has made since the start of the workers’ occupation at ERT (Greek equivalent of the BBC, which the government wants to shut down), but it did not sharpen it either. It did not return to the rightward drift which Tsipras outlined for Syriza at the end of 2012.
75% of the debate around the congress was about the dissolution of the components of Syriza. At the congress, the leadership backtracked on its demand for the immediate dissolution of the components, but still asked for them to dissolve “in due time”.
The new Syriza will recognise rights for “tendencies”. What makes the step from “components” to “tendencies” more than a change of name is mostly two things.
The “components” had some guarantees of representation in Syriza’s committees. And they got a share of the state funding allotted to Syriza under Greece’s rules for funding political parties. The share might be small, but for the small components it has been significant.
Behind the call for the dissolution of the “components” is a call for the minorities in Syriza to cease public political activity outside Syriza, i.e. to stop publishing their own papers and calling their own public meetings.
Already at the congress, the literature tables of the minorities were much less visible than they traditionally have been.
Kokkino, one of the revolutionary socialist components of Syriza, has split. Kokkino has always wanted a “broad left” party, and a strong minority, including some leading people, decided that Syriza is now near enough to what they want.
Another left-wing component, Rosa, has also dissolved: that is different, since really Rosa constituted itself as a formal organisation only in order to be able to participate in Syriza as a component.
DEA, the other main revolutionary socialist component, has fought consistently against dissolving the components.
The committee of the new Syriza was elected by a vote between rival whole “lists”, removing the right which previously existed for members to vote for some candidates from one list and some from another and thus to “amend” the leadership’s list even if no faction is strong enough to defeat the leadership list outright.
The majority presented itself as a “rainbow arc”, a pluralistic mainstream, so as to marginalise some more militant minorities.
Alexis Tsipras was elected president by direct conference vote, with 74% to 4.7% for Sissy Vovou and 0.7% for Panos Iliopoulos. The Syriza left had argued against direct election, and for a president elected by and accountable to the committee. There is a lot of demagogy about making Syriza “a rank and file party”, which can mean a party with a large passive membership and a leader who can use an elective majority among that large passive membership to overrule the activists.
In the last year Syriza’s membership has risen from 16,000 to 35,000 (equivalent of about 190,000 in Britain).
There are reports of a big influx of new people into Syriza about a month before the congress, maybe to get votes for the congress. The local organisations of Syriza don’t always work that well, so a flood of new members into Syriza is not such a good thing as it may seem.
Behind the organisational details, the battle is political. One trend stands for a Syriza operating within the system and aiming to be the centre of a coalition government which may include bits of Pasok and even the right-wing anti-Memorandum “Independent Greeks”.
The other stands for an anti-capitalist Syriza that will commit itself to defend at all costs the interests of the working class, using a left government as a first step to achieving workers’ control and workers’ power.
The Stalinist but still-strong Greek Communist Party (KKE) still ignores this battle. According to the KKE paper Rizospastis, the Syriza leadership and the Left Platform are just the same politically, both social democrats. The Left Platform exists only to give Syriza left cover and divert Greek workers from the revolutionary path of joining KKE.
Syriza is almost even with ND (the conservative party) in the opinion polls. Both Syriza’s scores and ND have been fairly stable since the June 2012 election; Pasok has lost a lot of support, and the Golden Dawn fascists have gained support, though that has levelled off.
But when opinion polls ask people whether they think a Syriza-led government will really cancel the Memorandum imposed by the ECB, the EU, and the IMF, they say no. Syriza has to convince people that it is serious about cancelling the Memorandum, and it hasn’t done yet.
The central issue here, and the Left Platform rightly emphasises it, is workers’ control. A left government which cancelled the Memorandum and reversed the cuts could not bring immediate prosperity and harmony. It could ensure decent conditions for the poorest (at the expense of the rich), and democratic control over what happens.
The dimension on which the right wing of the Syriza leadership used to rely — that a left government in Greece could win through by chiming in with a pro-growth reform programme on a European scale — has become less plausible.
A year ago there was a lot of talk at the top of the EU about the need for measures for growth. It came to nothing, and the talk has gone. All ideas that the French government under Francois Hollande would push for a big change in EU policy, or that the Social Democrats in Germany would seriously differentiate from Merkel on European policy, have faded.
Syriza must look to the rank and file workers’ movements in other countries to construct any even plausible European dimension. Looking for shifts at the top is less plausible than it was.
Yet there has been no proper evaluation within Syriza of how, in Cyprus, a left government ended by introducing a Memorandum.
The leaders of the EU now think they have pulled the governments of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland into line. As long as they remain in line, the EU leaders will offer fudges and concessions at the edges. They will “overlook”, for example, the fact that the coalition government in Greece has got and will get much less revenue from privatisations than projected. But on the basic line they are more confident and arrogant than before.
There have been shifts to the left in the unions in Greece (in the “second-level” unions). How much they will mean, remains to be seen. There is a strike by public sector workers on 15 July, with some occupations of town halls, against planned job cuts, and the workers’ occupation continues at the Athens offices of the ERT (Greek equivalent of the BBC).
