Whose class interests does SYRIZA 2.0 SAY it represents?

Yesterday, and after meeting with representatives of ESEE and GSVEE, the leader of SYRIZA 2.0, aka "Popular Unity", Panayiotis Lafazanis made the following statement, which is very interesting from the standpoint of the kind of class consciousness it represents, and, of course, the class consciousness it addresses and solicits:

Within the context of the mandate I have received from the President of the Republic [as "third Party", despite never having been elected as such], I had the honor to meet two of the greatest Confederations of our country, GSVEE and ESEΕ. It was especially honoring to me that we sat and talked and exchanged views with honesty, for quite some time, I would say. 

It was a meeting of many hours, but also a substantial and productive exchange of views. What I derived from it is of course well-known, but I will repeat. The Memoranda have two great victims in Greece: the first and great victim is of course our youth, which is unfortunately compelled to migrate in order to survive; the second great victim of the Memoranda are medium and small businesses. Medium and small businesses have been placed in the gallows, in the guillotine. With the Memoranda, austerity, tax raiding, lack of cash flow [bank closure was implemented while Lafazanis and other members of "Popular Unity" were in the government cabinet], the robber bank system, which becomes constantly more rapacious, under these conditions, medium and small businesses cannot survive. They have no future whatsoever. And with them, of course, the Greek economy, Greece and the Greek people have no future.

Being Panayiotis Lafazanis: Honest, Reliable, Consistent Leader of the New New Left

Panayiotis Lafazanis, Interview with "Eleftheros Typos" [Free Press], 14 March 2015:

Q: You had stated last October that a SYRIZA government will "abolish the Memorandum and its implementation laws in one night, with one legal act, just as they were dictatorially imposed." What has changed, Mr. Minister, and you forgot about this statement? Was the raw reality stronger than the pre-election wishes of your party or do you think the government has backtracked in many of its commitments when faced with the lenders?

A: There is no statement of mine that we will abolish the Memorandum in one night; it only exists as a total distortion of what I have said at different times. Personally, I always underlined, indeed, that Memoranda and their implementation laws must be abolished by a government in which SYRIZA will participate not "dictatorially", but with normal parliamentary procedures, with respect to the Parliament and with a full observance of the Parliamentary Regulations and Constitution. The first act of our new government was to immediately stop the implementation of the Memorandum that was in process. The austerity measures and the taxes that the ND-PASOK government was about to implement were thrown in the garbage. Our commitment for full abolition of the Memoranda and their implementation laws is still wholly valid; and this commitment, despite the great post-election difficulties and the blatant blackmail from abroad, will be fully honored in the next few months. The full abolition of memoranda is a position equivalent to SYRIZA's identity and the precondition for a new, consistent, progressive, developmental course and prospect for the country.

The "erratic Marxism" of Mr. Varoufakis

The ‘erratic Marxism’ of Mr. Varoufakis

Written and translated from the Greek by Gori

Blog: Revolutionary Vigilance

The Greek Finance Minister was very clear in his ‘famous BBC interview’, but our petty-bourgeois commentators were too busy commenting on his style and the absence of a tie. He said that the current crisis has so far been dealt with as a liquidity crisis, which it is not. He said that it is instead an insolvency crisis. What he did not say is that this is a capitalist crisis. That the recession was caused by the inherent contradictions of capitalism, and more specifically by the anarchy of production, and by the gap and necessary breakdown between production and consumption, which produces all sorts of distortions the more the productive force of capitalism develops. What he did not say is that Varoufakis-Syriza’s neo-Keynesian proposal is a proposal to deal merely with the results and the symptoms of the problem (i.e. capitalist crisis), and not to eradicate the problem at its roots (i.e. the capitalist mode of production itself).