Lies and Deceptions on
the Left: The Politics of Self
Destruction
Over the past year, what appeared as
hopeful signs, that Left governments
were emerging as powerful alternatives
to right-wing pro-US regimes, is turning
into a historic rout, which will
relegate them to the dustbin of history
for many years to come.
By James Petras
March 22, 2015 "ICH"
- The
rise and rapid decay of left-wing
governments in France, Greece and
Brazil is not the result of a military
coup, nor is it due to the machinations
of the CIA. The debacle of left
governments is a result of deliberate
political decisions, which break
decisively with the
progressive programs,
promises and commitments that
political leaders had made to the great
mass of working and middle class voters
who elected them.
Increasingly, the
electorate views the leftist rulers as
traitors, who betrayed their supporters
at the beck and call of their most
egregious class enemies: the bankers,
the capitalists and the neo-liberal
ideologues.
Left Governments Commit
Suicide
The self-destruction
of the Left is an
unanticipated victory for the
most retrograde neo-liberal political
forces. These forces have sought to
destroy the welfare system, impose their
rule via non-elected officials, widen
and deepen inequalities, undermine labor
rights and privatize and denationalize
the most lucrative sectors of the
economy.
Three cases of Left
regime betrayal serve to highlight this
process: The French
Socialist regime of President
Francois Hollande governing in the
second leading power in Europe
(2012-2015);
Syriza, the left regime in Greece
elected on January 25, 2015, portrayed
as a sterling proponent of an
alternative policy to ‘fiscal
austerity’; and The Workers Party of
Brazil, governing in the biggest Latin
American country (2003-2015) and a
leading member of the BRICS.
French ‘Socialism’:
The Great Leap Backward
In his Presidential
campaign, Francois Hollande
promised to raise taxes on the
rich up to 75%; lower the retirement age
from 62 to 60 years; launch a massive
public investment program to reduce
unemployment; vastly increase public
spending on education (hiring 60,000 new
teachers), health and social housing;
and withdraw French troops from
Afghanistan as a first step toward
reducing Paris’ role as an imperialist
collaborator.
From 2012, when he was
elected, to the present (March 2015),
Francois Hollande has betrayed each and
every political commitment: Public
investments did not materialize and
unemployment increased to over 3
million. His newly appointed Economic
Minister Emmanuel Macron, a former
partner of Rothschild Bank, sharply
reduced business taxes by 50
billion euros. His newly appointed Prime
Minister Manuel Valls, a neo-liberal
zealot, implemented major cuts in social
programs, weakened government regulation
of business and banking and eroded job
security. Hollande appointed Laurence
Boone from Bank of America as his top
economic adviser.
The French ‘Socialist
President’ sent troops to Mali, bombers
to Libya, military advisers to the
Ukraine junta and aided the so-called
Syrian ‘rebels’ (mostly Jihadist
mercenaries). He signed off on
billion-euro military sales to the Saudi
Arabian monarcho-dictatorship and
reneged on a contracted sale of warships
to Russia.
Hollande joined with
Germany in demanding that the Greek
government comply with full and prompt
debt payments to private bankers and
maintain its brutal ‘austerity program’.
As a result of
defrauding French voters, betraying
labor and embracing bankers, big
business and militarists, less than 19%
of the electorate has a positive view of
the ‘socialist’ government, placing it
in third place among the major parties..
Hollande’s pro-Israel policies and his
hardline on US- Iranian peace
negotiations, Minister Vall’s
Islamophobic raids in French Muslim
suburbs and the support of military
interventions against Islamic movements,
have increasingly polarized French
society and heightened ethno-religious
violence in the country.
Greece: Syriza’s Instant
Transformation
From the moment in
which Syriza won the Greek elections on
January 25, 2015, to the middle of
March, Alexis Tsipras, the Prime
Minister and Yanis Varoufakis, his
appointed Finance Minister,
reneged in
rapid order on
every major and minor electoral
program. They
embraced the most retrograde
measures, procedures and relations with
the ‘Troika’, (the IMF, and
European Commission at the European
Central Bank), which Syriza had
denounced in its Thessaloniki
program a short time earlier.
Tsipras and Varoufakis
repudiated the promise to
reject the
dictates of the ‘Troika’.
In other words, they have accepted
colonial rule and continued
vassalage.
Typical of their
demagogy and deceit, they sought to
cover up their submission to the
universally hated ‘Troika’ by
dubbing it ‘the Institution’ –
fooling
nobody but themselves– and
becoming the butt of cynical cackles
from their EU overseers.
During the campaign,
Syriza had promised to write off all or
most of the Greek debt. In government,
Tsipras and Varoufakis
immediately assured the
Troika that they recognized and
promised to meet all of their debt
obligations.
Syriza had promised to
prioritize humanitarian spending
over austerity – raising the minimum
wage, rehiring public employees in
health and education and raising pension
payments. After two weeks of servile
groveling, the ‘re-formed’ Tsipras and
Varoufakis
prioritized austerity – making
debt payments and ‘postponing’ even the
most meagre anti-poverty spending. When
the Troika lent the Syriza
regime $2 billion to feed hungry Greeks,
Tsipras lauded his overseers and
promised to submit a multi-billion euro
list of regressive ‘reforms’.
Syriza had promised to
re-examine the previous rightwing
regime’s dubious privatization of
lucrative public enterprises and
to stop on-going and future
privatizations. In government, Tsipras
and Varoufakis quickly disavowed that
promise. They
approved past, present and
future privatizations. In fact,
they made overtures to procure new
privatization ‘partners’,
offering lucrative tax concessions in
selling-out more public firms.
Syriza promised to
tackle the depression level unemployment
(26% national, 55% youth) via public
spending and reduced debt payments.
Tsipras and Varoufakis dutifully met
debt payments and did
not allocate any funds to create
jobs!
Not only did Syriza
continue the policies of its
rightwing predecessors, but also it did
so in a ludicrous
style and
substance: adopting ridiculous
public postures and demagogic
inconsequential gestures:
One day Tsipras would
lay a wreath at the gravesite of 200
Greek partisans murdered by the Nazis
during WW II. The next day he would
grovel before the German bankers and
concede to their demands for budget
austerity, withholding public funds from
2 million unemployed Greeks.
One afternoon, Finance
Minister Varoufakis would pose for a
photo spread for
Paris Match depicting him,
cocktail in hand, on his penthouse
terrace overlooking the Acropolis; and
several hours later he would claim to
speak for the impoverished masses!
Betrayal, deceit and
demagogy all during the first two months
in office, Syriza has established a
record in its conversion from a leftist
anti-austerity party to a conformist,
servile vassal of the European Union.
Tsipras’ call for
Germany to pay reparations for damages
to Greece during WW II –a long overdue
and righteous demand– is another phony
demagogic ploy designed to
distract the impoverished Greeks
from Tsipras and Varoufakis
sellout to German contemporary
austerity demands. A cynical European
Union official tells the
Financial Times (12/3/15, p. 6),
“He’s (Tsipras) giving them (Syriza
militants) a bone to lick on”.
No one expects German
leaders to alter their hardline because
of past injustices, least of all because
they come from interlocutors on bended
knees. . No one in the EU takes Tsipras
demand at face value. They see it as
more empty ‘radical’ rhetoric for
domestic consumption.
Talking up 70-year
German reparations avoids taking
practical action today repudiating or
reducing payments on illegitimate debt
to German banks and repudiating
Merckel’s dictates. The transparent
betrayal of their most basic commitments
to the impoverished Greek people has
already divided Syriza. Over 40% of the
central committee, including the
President of the Parliament, repudiated
the Tsipras –Varoufakis agreements with
the Troika.
The vast majority of
Greeks, who voted for Syriza, expected
some immediate relief and reforms. They
are increasingly disenchanted. They did
not expect Tsipras to appoint Yanis
Varoufakis, a former economic adviser to
the corrupt neo-liberal PASOK leader
George Papandreou, as Finance Minister.
Nor did many voters abandon PASOK, en
masse, over the past five years, only to
find the same kleptocrats and
unscrupulous opportunists occupying top
positions in Syriza, thanks to Alexis
Tsipras index finger.
Nor could the
electorate expect any fight, resistance
and willingness to break with the
Troika from Tsipras’ appointments
of ex-pat Anglo-Greek professors. These
armchair leftists (‘Marxist
seminarians’) neither engaged in
mass struggles nor suffered the
consequences of the prolonged
depression.
Syriza is a party
led by
affluent upwardly mobile
professionals, academics and
intellectuals. They
rule over (but in the name of)
the
impoverished working and salaried
lower middle class, but
in the interests of the Greek, and
especially, German bankers.
They prioritize
membership in the
EU over an independent national
economic policy. They abide by NATO, by
backing the Kiev junta in the Ukraine,
EU sanctions on Russia, NATO
intervention in Syria/Iraq and maintain
a loud silence on US military threats to
Venezuela!
Brazil: Budget Cuts,
Corruption and the Revolt of the Masses
Brazil’s self-styled
Workers Party government in power an
unlucky 13 years, has been one of the
most corruption-ridden regimes in Latin
America. Backed by one of the major
labor confederations, and several
landless rural workers’ organizations,
and sharing power with center-left and
center-right parties, it was able to
attract tens of billions of dollars of
foreign extractive, finance and
agro-business capital. Thanks to a
decade-long commodity boom in
agro-mineral commodities, easy credit
and low interest rates, it raised
income, consumption and the minimum wage
while multiplying profits for the
economic elite.
Subsequent to the
financial crises of 2009, and the
decline of commodity prices, the economy
stagnated, just as the new President
Dilma Rousseff was elected. The Rousseff
government, like her predecessor, Lula
Da Silva, favored agro-business over the
rural landless workers’ demands for land
reform. Her regime promoted the timber
barons and soya growers encroaching on
the Indian communities and the Amazon
rain forest.
Elected to a second
term, Rousseff faced a major political
and economic crises: a deepening
economic recession, a fiscal deficit,
and the arrest and prosecution of scores
of corrupt Workers’ Party and allied
congressional deputies and Petrobras oil
executives.
Workers’ Party leaders
and the Party’s campaign treasury
received millions of dollars in
kickbacks from construction companies
securing contracts with the giant
semi-public petroleum company. President
Rousseff promised “to continue to
support popular social programs”,
and “to root out corruption”,
during her election campaign. However,
immediately after her election she
embraced orthodox neo-liberal policies
and appointed a cabinet of hard-right
neo-liberals including Bradesco banker
Joaquin Levy as Finance Minister. Levy
proposed to reduce unemployment
payments, pensions and public salaries.
He argued for greater de-regulation of
banks. He proposed to weaken job
protection laws to attract capital. He
sought to achieve a budget surplus and
attract foreign investment at the
expense of labor.
Rousseff, consistent
with her embrace of neo-liberal
orthodoxy, appointed Katia Abreu, a
rightwing senator, a life-long leader of
agro-business interests and sworn enemy
of land reform, as the new Agricultural
Minister. Crowned “Miss
Deforestation” by Greenpeace,
Senator Abreu was vehemently opposed by
the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement
(MST) and the labor confederation to no
avail. With Rousseff’s total backing
Abreu set out on a course of ending even
the minimal land redistribution carried
out in Rousseff’s first term in office
(establishing land settlements
benefiting less than 10% of the landless
squatters). Abreu endorsed regulations
facilitating the expansion of
genetically modified crops, and promises
to forcefully evict Amazonian Indians
occupying productive land in favor of
large-scale agro-business corporations.
Moreover, she promises to vigorously
defend landlords from land occupations
by landless rural workers.
Rousseff’s incapacity
and/or unwillingness to fire and
prosecute the Workers Party Treasurer,
involved in a decade long billion-dollar
kickback and bribery scandal, deepened
and widened
mass opposition.
On March 15, 2015 over
a million Brazilians filled the streets
across the country,
led by rightist parties, but
drawing support from the popular classes
demanding immediate anti-corruption
trials and stern sentences, and the
revocation of Levy’s cuts in social
expenditures.
The counter
demonstration in support of Rousseff by
the CUT labor confederation and the MST
drew one-tenth that number – about
100,000 participants.
Rousseff responded by
calling for ‘dialogue’ and claimed to be
‘open to proposals’
on the issue of corruption but
explicitly rejected any changes in her
regressive fiscal policies, neo-liberal
cabinet appointments
and her embrace of their agro-mineral
agenda.
In less than two
months, the Workers Party and its
President has indelibly stained its
leaders, policies and backers with the
brush of corruption and socially
regressive policies.
Popular support has
plummeted. The right wing is growing.
Even the authoritarian, pro-military
coup activists were present in the mass
demonstrations, carrying signs calling
for ‘impeachment’ and a return of
military rule.
As in most of Latin
America, the authoritarian right in
Brazil is a growing force, positioning
itself to take power as the center-left
adopts a neo-liberal agenda throughout
the region. Parties dubbed
‘center-left’, like the
Broad Front in Uruguay, the
pro-government
Party for Victory in Argentina,
are deepening their ties with
agro-mineral corporate capitalism.
Uninformed claims by
leftist US writers like Noam Chomsky
that, “Latin America is the vanguard
against neo-liberalism” is at best
a decade late, and certainly misleading.
They are deceived by populist policy
pronouncements and refuse to
acknowledge the decay of the center
–left regimes and thus fail to recognize
how their neoliberal political actions
are fostering mass popular discontent.
Regimes, which adopt regressive
socio-economic policies, do not
constitute a vanguard for
social emancipation…
Conclusion
What accounts for
these abrupt reversals and swiftly
broken promises by recently elected
supposedly ‘left parties’ in Europe and
Latin America?
One has come to expect
this kind of behavior in North America
from the Obama Democrats or the New
Democratic Party in Canada . . . But we
were led to believe that in France, with
its red republican traditions, a
Socialist regime backed (‘critically’)
by anti-capitalists leftists; would at
least implement progressive social
reforms. We were told by an army of
progressive bloggers that Syriza, with
its charismatic leader, and radical
rhetoric, would at least fulfil its most
elementary promises by lifting the yoke
of Troika domination and begin
to end destitution and provide
electricity to 300,000 candle-lit
households. ‘Progressives’ had
repeatedly told us that the Workers
Party lifted 30 million out of poverty.
They claimed that a former ‘honest
auto worker’ (Lula Da Silva) would
never allow the Workers Party to revert
back to neo-liberal budget cuts and
embrace its supposed ‘class enemies’.
US leftist professors refused to give
credence to the crass billion-dollar
robbery of the Brazilian National
Treasury under two Workers’ Party
Presidents.
Several explanations
for these political betrayals come to
mind. First, despite their popular or ‘workerist’
claims, these parties were run by middle
class lawyers, professionals and trade
union bureaucrats, who were
organically disconnected from
their mass base. During election
campaigns, seeking votes, they briefly
embraced workers and the poor, and then
spent the rest of their time in pricey
restaurants working out “deals” with
bankers, business bribe granters and
overseas investors to finance their next
election, their children’s private
school and their mistresses luxury
apartments…
For a time, when the
economy was booming, big corporate
profits, payoffs and bribes went hand in
hand with wage increases and poverty
programs. But when the crisis broke, the
‘popular’ leaders doffed their Party
hats and pronounced ‘fiscal
austerity was inevitable’ while
going with their begging cups before
their international financial overlords.
In all these countries
faced with difficult times, the middle
class leaders of the Left
feared the problem (capitalist
crisis) and feared the real solution
(radical transformation). Instead they
turned to the ‘only solution’:
they approached capitalist leaders and
sought to convince business associations
and, above all their financial
overlords, that they were ‘serious
and responsible politicians’,
willing to forsake social agendas and
embrace fiscal discipline. For domestic
consumption, they cursed and threatened
the elites, providing a little theater
to entertain their plebian followers,
before they capitulated!
None of the
academics-turned-left-leaders have any
deep and abiding links to the mass
struggles. Their ‘activism’
involves reading papers at ‘social
forums’, and giving papers at
conferences on ‘emancipation and
equality’. Political sellouts and
fiscal austerity will not jeopardize
their economic positions. If their Left
parties are ousted by angry constituents
and radical social movements, the left
leaders pack their bags and return to
comfortable tenured jobs or rejoin their
law office. They do not have to worry
about mass firings or reduced
subsistence pensions. At their leisure
they will find time to sit back and
write another paper on the how the
‘crisis of capitalism’ undermined their
well-intentioned social agenda or how
they experienced the ‘crisis of the
Left’.
Because of their
disconnect from the
suffering of the impoverished,
unemployed voters, the middle class
leftists in office are blind to the need
to make a break with the system. In
reality, they
share the worldview of their
supposedly conservative adversaries:
they too believe that ‘it’s
capitalism or chaos’. This borrowed
cliché is passed off as a deep insight
into the dilemmas of democratic
socialists. The middle class leftist
officials and advisers always use the
alibi of ‘institutional constraints’.
They ‘theorize’ their political
impotence - they never recognize the
power of organized class movements.
Their political
cowardice is
structural and leads to easy
moral betrayals: they plead, ‘Crisis
is not a time to tinker with the system’.
For the middle class,
‘time’ becomes a political
excuse. Middle class leaders of popular
movements, without audacity or programs
of struggle, always talk of change…. in
the future…
Instead of mass
struggle, they run to and fro, between
the centers of financial power and their
Central Committees, confusing
‘dialogues’ that end in submission, with
consequential resistance.
In the end the people
will re-pay them turning their backs and
rejecting their pleas to re-elect them
‘for another chance’.
There will not be
another chance. This ‘Left’ will be
discredited in the eyes of those whose
trust they betrayed.
The tragedy is that
the
entire left will be tarnished.
Who can believe the fine words of
‘liberation’, ‘the will to hope’ and the
‘return of sovereignty’ after
experiencing years of the opposite?
Left politics will be
lost for an entire generation, at least
in Brazil, France and Greece.
The Right will
ridicule the open zipper of Hollande;
the false humility of Rousseff; the
hollow gestures of Tsipras and the
clowning of Varoufakis.
The people will curse
their memory and their betrayal of a
noble cause.