"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Victory Tainted by Right Populists

Homelessness is widespread
EXTRACTWhat all this shows, needless to say, is that the question of the memorandum/austerity slices through Greek politics orthogonally, to the ‘normal’ or formal left/right divide. Therefore it is perfectly possible to be totally reactionary on virtually all social and constitutional issues, yet be militantly anti-troika and anti-neoliberal, as Anel amply demonstrates.
The dangers of going into coalition with a party that you can crudely describe as the Greek equivalent of the UK Independence Party are more than obvious (the major difference being that you cannot serious describe Ukip as ‘anti-austerity’, let ‘anti-neoliberal’). Imagine if George Galloway teamed up with Nigel Farage. The Syriza-led government may not be a classic popular front, but it certainly is a popular front sui generis - of a special kind. The determining characteristic of all popular fronts, including the unpopular kind like Galloway’s Respect, is that the minor or junior ally sets the limits of the governmental programme. Given that Anel is an outright reactionary bourgeois party, this is quite an alarming prospect.

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