Chris Dillow: The errors of the oppressed

Chris Dillow explores The errors of the oppressed.

It is of course true that one of the great problems for Marxism has been that the working class has not developed the class consciousness that Marx hoped for. But why should other oppressed groups fare any better?

Now, this is NOT to say that such groups should not be heard and should instead be represented by wiser heads such as um, well white male PPE graduates. For one thing, the more privileged have weaker incentives to fight inequality. And for another, they/we too are also prone to cognitive biases: one of the sillier if unintended implications of the “nudge” agenda has been the idea that rulers are free of cognitive error.

Instead, we much distinguish sharply between two questions: “what do you think?” and “what do you know?” It’s the latter that matters. For example, the everyday sexism project has awakened me to the troubles that women face far more than windy feminist theory has done.

Which brings me to the problem. The institutions that might give voice to the lives of the most oppressed — the poor both here and globally; women and gays in backward communities and so on — are to say the least under-developed. One of the symptoms of genuine oppression is that one’s voice is not heard. When this absence is combined with the lack of mechanisms to counter false consciousness, it is small wonder that injustice is perpetuated.

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This is why an alternative media, such as Green Left Weekly, is so important as it allows the voices of the oppressed to be heard.

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Dick Nichols: Greece: vulture creditors jostling for their next feed

Dick Nichols writes that vulture creditors jostling for their next feed in Greece.

The strategy is to increase the pain that the SYRIZA-led government has to inflict on its support base as the price of getting each new tranche of desperately needed funding: in this way, the government will hopefully become so unpopular that the conservative New Democracy can defeat it at the next election, which could be brought on early by the refusal of some SYRIZA MPs to support the next wave of austerity measures.

At the same time the idea of a radical left alternative can be discredited across Europe, especially with a view to undermining the position of anti-austerity forces in the repeat Spanish election due for June 26. If Germany and the IMF reject Tsakalotos' alternative to the creditors' “contingent” cuts package — the commitment to meet deficit targets in case of shortfall but with flexibility for the Greek government to decide how — it will be clear confirmation of their intention to remove SYRIZA from government as soon as politically practicable.

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The brutality imposed on the Greek people is a warning to everyone else that change is not possible within the Capitalist system.

Nonetheless, only six months after its September election win and despite its best efforts, SYRIZA's message looks to be wearing thin. In a context of ongoing social revolt voices expressing concern at growing popular alienation with the government are more and more heard within the radical coalition.

On April 15, according to the Macropolis web site, the “movement of 53”, the most left-leaning of the groupings within SYRIZA and with 11 MPs including Tsakalotos, issued a statement which said that, while SYRIZA had been able to argue convincingly enough at the September poll that it had been forced into signing the third bailout, the memorandum was now increasingly seen as the left coalition’s own program rather than one imposed by Greece’s creditors. The group also criticised slow progress in implementing the parallel program and stressed that much more was needed to maintain the belief of SYRIZA's supporters.

Most tellingly, it said that it disagreed with the opinion of the Tsipras leadership that SYRIZA should try to stay in government at all costs, stating that the government should “fall heroically resisting the internal or external troika rather than humiliatingly at the hands of [Greek] society itself.”

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This is the main problem of a reformist program—all of your efforts are tied to working within the Capitalist system while having minimal power. People should see that the attainment of government power does not lead to a better world. The Capitalists would not allow this.

The conclusion is:

What factors, then, would possibly prevent the German-IMF position from prevailing in the negotiations? As always, the creditors must calculate what the political price of that hard line might be. It might:

• Deepen the struggle of resistance inside Greece, strengthening forces to the left of SYRIZA and complicating the job of installing a more reliable New Democracy-centred administration;
• Revive the spectre of Grexit and of euro instability at a time when the European establishment is committed to avoiding Brexit;
• Provide another example of the brutality of the European Union powers-that-be that would become a factor in the June 26 Spanish election, at which it is not excluded that alliances of Podemos, the United Left and various left nationalist formations could overtake the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), setting it down the road to PASOK-like irrelevance; and
• Even help produce a left-wing government in the Spanish state after June 26, shifting the balance of forces on a European scale and potentially turning debt cancellation from a nice idea into a definite possibility.

All of that adds to Greece's narrow room to manoeuvre against its creditors. Given that, will the SYRIZA-led government resist or succumb to their aggression?

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I agree that only a widening of the left-wing revolt throughout Europe can give relief to the suffering of the Greek people. When the Capitalists see people revolting against their brutality, they begin to consider concessions in order to allow passions to cool.

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