Monday, July 24, 2017

Tsipras-Varoufakis: Loyal servants of the capitalist system

By Nikos Mottas*

During the last few days we are witnessing a highly hypocritical “blame game” between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. In his latest book titled “Adults in the room”, Varoufakis tries to present himself as a “fighter” who resisted Europe's “deep establishment”.

In his “political thriller”, the ex-finance minister describes how the Tsipras government handled the negotiations with its creditors, outlining the role each government official played during that period. As for his former collaborator, Varoufakis writes among other things: Alexis Tsipras appears totally overwhelmed, unable to collide with his own consultants who were pro loan agreement, in some cases he was totally manipulated by the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Troika”.

From his side, in a recent interview with the “Guardian”, the Greek PM launches an indirect attack against Varoufakis. We quote from the interview: “I have made mistakes … big mistakes,” he says, adding that his biggest error may have been “the choice of people in key posts”. Asked if that is a direct reference to his first finance minister, the maverick economist Yanis Varoufakis, the leftist rejects the notion, saying he was the right choice for an initial strategy of “collision politics”, but dismisses the plan he presented had Greece been forced to make the dramatic move to a new currency as “so vague, it wasn’t worth talking about”.

The “blame game” between Tsipras and Varoufakis- two politicians whose role as servants of the bourgeoisie has been undoubtedly proved- has nothing to do with the actual interests of the Greek people. Both of them share immense responsibility for deceiving the people, both before and after the January 2015 elections.

Regarding the role of Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, let us remind the following:

As an opposition party, SYRIZA had promised to tear up the austerity memorandums, which the previous governments had signed with the foreign lenders (the EU, the ECB and the IMF), and which contained the antiworker-antipeople measures. It was February 2015, just a few weeks after SYRIZA's electoral victory, when the then Finance Minister Varoufakis revealed that the government agrees with 70% of the “reforms” included in the memoranda and disagrees with 30%, which it describes as “toxic”.

As an opposition party, SYRIZA had established a fierce rhetoric against privatizations. After being elected in the government, according to the statement of the then Finance Minister, Y. Varoufakis, the position had changed: “We want to move on from the rationale of cut price sales to the rationale of their development in partnership with the private sector and foreign investors”! So, the government of Tsipras and Varoufakis had adopted privatizations in order to reinforce the private sector but also tried to present other forms of privatizations, like, for example, public private partnerships and concessions to business groups, etc as being beneficial.

The- highly advertised by Tsipras and Varoufakis- “negotiations” between the Greek government and the creditors had a specific content which wasn't related to the “end of austerity”, as SYRIZA and other opportunist or social democratic parties were claiming. That specific content was- and still is- an inter-bourgeois game, related to the needs of the monopoly groups which arise from the negative consequences of the deep capitalist crisis.

Regarding the so-called “revelations” of Yanis Varoufakis and the “blame game” between the former finance minister and PM Tsipras, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) has made the following comments:

"If the revival of the discussion about 2015 proves something, that is how the dominant circles of the system and the EU “used” SYRIZA and its fake radicalism in order to continue the antipeople policy that New Democracy and PASOK didn't finish, as well as to sow frustration within the people.

It also proves that the real pro-people alternative does not exist in the various sectors of the capital that lead the people to bankruptcy, inside or outside the eurozone, for the sake of capitalist profitability, but towards a radically different way of development, in favor of the popular needs” (23/7/2017).

The KKE also states: “The transformation of SYRIZA into a “pure blood” bourgeois social democratic party cannot be explained neither with Mr. Tsipras' statements of repentance nor with “political thriller” like the ones of Varoufakis. That was the specified ending of a party which undertook the management of the antipeople capitalist way and the service of the capital's needs, something that the KKE had predicted from the very first moment” (24/7/2017).

Indeed, neither Mr.Tsipras nor Mr.Varoufakis have the right to pose as “defenders” of the people's rights. Their role is well-known to the working class of Greece. Both SYRIZA and the new political platform of Varoufakis (DiEM25) are loyal servants of the capitalist system: despite any particular differences, their goal is common and that is to foster illusions among the working class about a supposed “pro-people” management of capitalist economy.

The capital- the bourgeois class- has the ability to use a variety of (supposedly) “radical” political representatives who are eager to serve the aim of people's manipulation. The interests of the working class do not lie in the demagoguery of any Tsipras or Varoufakis, but in the strengthening of the struggle against the bourgeois class and the capitalist shackles, for worker's power and towards the construction of a new society, the one of socialism-communism. 

* Nikos Mottas is the Editor-in-Chief of 'In Defense of Communism'.