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'.
