EL

It was not Tsipras’s job to decide whether or not there was an alternative. A referendum took place at the most crucial point of the negotiations, meant to decide whether to continue austerity policies — policies that had increased income inequality, dismantled the welfare state, and dramatically reduced wages and pensions while demolishing social protections.

The answer given by the Greek people was as unambiguous as the question itself — 61.5 percent voted against austerity. We know now, thanks to statistical analysis, that many sectors of Greek society were united in that vote: workers from the business sector, civil servants, precarious workers, the unemployed, the young, and the poor. All these social categories voted “no” by a margin of 80 percent to 90 percent.

On the other side, high-income social categories — owners of capital and wealth — overwhelmingly voted “yes.”

To put it simply, those who are benefiting from austerity policies and structural reform voted “yes” while those who suffer from these policies voted “no.” This is a clear-cut division: the week before the referendum was one of those rare historical moments when the schism between social classes becomes starkly visible, even to the naked eye.

The bloc of social forces in power entered the electoral battlefield to openly defend, without the usual ideological fluff, their immediate class interests — the “right” to live on profit, to live off the labor of others.

This bloc included big capital, bankers, industrialists and shareholders, executives of big corporations and financial firms, as well as smaller business owners who now pay only half the wages they paid in 2010 thanks to internal devaluation and labor market reform; old people sitting on their accumulated wealth. Also included in this group were big media journalists, high-ranking bureaucrats, rentiers, and neoliberal intellectuals and artists.

The presence of this powerful social bloc was felt strongly, not only in demonstrations and TV but also in the workplace — employees were often openly threatened by employers, who claimed that workers would lose their job if “no” were to prevail.

This exhibition of naked self-interest and crude force by the capitalist class precipitated the long process of formation of a unified anti-austerity social bloc, comprised of the working class, the precariously employed, and the unemployed — said simply, the young and the poor.

The formation of this bloc started in 2010 with the implementation of economic adjustment programs driven by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. It culminated a few days before the referendum, with massive demonstrations of historical size and energy in support of “no” that took place without the intermediation of leading Syriza politicians, who only mildly supported the “no” campaign.

This anti-austerity bloc voted “no” against all the threats and bullying, against the risk of being fired and thrown into the misery of a country cast out from the supposedly stable and secure economic environment of the eurozone.

Tsipras’s job was to follow that mass movement, not to decide if there was an alternative. But instead he led the country into debt captivity. He had pledged to win the fight against austerity in Europe, yet proved to be no hero to his own people or to the European left.

All the great hopes about Syriza were dashed in one night. Alexis Tsipras, instead of dramatically increasing the risk of a major crisis for the eurozone by bringing back on the agenda Syriza’s programmatic commitments, so as to change the balance of power in the negotiations, capitulated.

The population that supported Tsipras from the beginning of the crisis to the U-turn of July 12 knew that after the capitulation Syriza was not the same party as before. Still, some of them voted for Tsipras in the December 2015 elections, hoping that he would keep at least some of the party’s renewed promises; others (one million voters in a country of eleven million) preferred to abstain from voting.

The promises Syriza made in the elections of September 2015 have not been fulfilled. We are confronted with a volatile situation in Greece: there is a strong anti-austerity social bloc of conscious, politicized workers, the unemployed, young people, poor people and militants who have acquired precious political skills during six years of social conflict and political struggle, yet there is no political party or organization able to represent it.

Since July 2016, the dominated classes are facing new waves of attacks on their income, property, security, freedom, and social rights. The shameless looting continues. But this time it is Syriza itself that organizes and executes the attack. The perspectives to work for an alternative to austerity, captivity by debt, internal devaluation and social catastrophe have nothing to do with Syriza anymore.

By applying the strategy of its ex-adversaries, Syriza has degenerated to a Renzi-style social-democratic party — as Pascal notes, atheists who pray regularly soon end up good Christians.

The outcome is a crisis of social reproduction. Prolonged depression in Greece is giving rise to a crisis in the reproduction of the working class, which in turn gives rise to political destabilization.

Put in a more detailed way, employment losses due to disrupted capital accumulation in Greece — combined with fierce austerity and deconstruction of the welfare state — triggered a variety of processes that are destroying a large fraction of the labor force. This is leading ultimately to a crisis of ruling-class hegemony, thus opening a window of opportunity for radical change.

As Marx explains in the Manifesto, the capitalist class is unfit to rule when it is unable to ensure “an existence to its slave even within his slavery.” Increasingly, this seems to be the situation in Greece. But the political outcome of this hegemonic crisis remains uncertain.