YV

Firstly, I must say that I oppose with every fiber of my being the excuse put forward by Tsipras, holding that the people weren’t ready to fight. There was a 62 percent “no” vote in the July 2015 referendum — a vote truly determined by class, perhaps the first in Europe.

The people who voted “no” were the ones who had no money in the bank, including right-wingers who had always supported New Democracy; and I can assure you that colleagues from Syriza who had money in the bank voted “yes.” In the streets, in the neighborhoods, the institutions of solidarity that emerged in the crisis years, like the medical facilities set up by volunteer doctors and the free groceries gathering food for the poor, were at their apogee in July 2015. They were ready to step in, to back up the honoring of the “no” vote.

But on the night of the referendum, the prime minister did a Ramsay MacDonald [the Depression-era UK Labour leader who imposed harsh spending cuts and allied with the Conservatives, splitting his party] in just one night. What do you expect people to do? I can tell you what they were doing: they were hugging each other and crying into each others’ arms. It was like the sense of loss after a major natural disaster, except it was even worse because it wasn’t a natural disaster, but a defeat imposed by the leader of the Left, whom they had worshipped.

The fact that they didn’t take to the streets doesn’t give Tsipras the right to say, callously, that the people weren’t ready. You weren’t ready, mate.

But the privatization of pain is a real phenomenon. You have no idea how many people were ready to fight then, but today are burnt out. They say, “it’s great what you’re doing with MeRA25, but we can’t go through it all over again.” It’s like having been through a traumatic relationship and not being able to face going through the betrayal and breakup all over again.

We are accused, perhaps with some justification, of being an elitist party. We were formed at a theater in Berlin and organized online, and people who joined thus tended to be young, well-educated, internationally oriented and so on. All this is true, but we couldn’t start out any other way while also being transnational.

But things are also changing. In recent weeks, we have built strength among the trade unions, for instance among the electricity workers. They were betrayed by Syriza, who broke up and privatized the public energy company. Or take the cleaning workers in the public sector, who bore the brunt of the troika’s assault against the poor. One female cleaning worker is running on the proportional part of our list for July 7.

We are reaching out to social movements, because they need a political organization that allows them a voice beyond their specific localities, and also one that doesn’t dominate them. If they don’t have this, then they will be crushed by a new right-wing regime of a resurgent oligarchic right – one founded on what I call the Fourth Memorandum, the state of debt bondage until 2060 agreed with the creditors by Syriza.