"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)

Thursday, March 05, 2015

Austerity in the Colours of Syriza

Golden Dawn: on the march
EXTRACTIf you find yourself in a situation where there is absolutely no reasonable or viable prospect of carrying out your full minimum programme, then you should remain a party of extreme opposition - something that stands full-square in the Second International tradition, to which Lenin and the Bolsheviks fully subscribed. Regrettably, sections of the left think the Weekly Worker is mad for raising these issues - showing how they have lost their historical memory. But there are objective, material factors that cannot be overcome by an act of will or even a big popular vote. Greece, at the end of the day, is a small and economically weak country that does not produce much in terms of industrial production and, if placed under siege, would be unlikely to be able to feed itself: essentially it is a tourist and shipping country.
What Syriza should have done, if it had being any sort of a genuine Marxist party, is resist the temptation of government (‘taking power’) - let the pro-memorandum parties take responsibility for the shit they created. It should have concentrated instead on building up its own forces and digging deeper roots in society, to the point where it became genuinely hegemonic within Greece. Most importantly of all, it should have aimed to develop and deepen its European connections and contacts, with the eventual aim of taking power on a continent-wide basis alongside other working class parties.

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