Calling Syriza far left hides the extremism of the far centre

From the Guardian to the Financial Times, from the BBC to the Daily Mail, from Reuters to the Daily Telegraph, the mainstream media is united on one point; the likely winner of the Greek elections on Sunday, Syriza, is a ‘far left’ party. In keeping with the extreme image and hotfoot from page 2 of ‘The Book of Journalistic Clichés’, Syriza’s leader, Alex Tsipras, is invariably labelled a ‘firebrand’.

But after you have traversed excursions into Syriza’s roots as a radical left coalition, you brush up against an inescapably dissonant fact. That what Syriza is advocating is not ‘far’ or extreme in the slightest, but moderate, humanitarian and sensible.

Here’s is a list of Syriza’s ‘far left’ policies, culled from a Guardian article. The party wants to supply free electricity to people who have been cut off, give health insurance to the uninsured, food stamps to children and homes to the (legions) of homeless. In addition, Syriza is determined to massively reduce Greece’s euro debt of €320 billion and cut interest payments, urging an international conference debt relief conference, akin to the one that slashed West Germany’s war debt in 1953. Syriza wants to decrease the tax burden on ordinary Greeks and increase it on corporations. (Corporate income tax in Greece, it should be noted, was scythed in half, from 40 to 20%, by the ‘centre-left’ Pasok party in 2001, the year the country joined the Eurozone).

“There is nothing radical, much less revolutionary, in these policies,” said Greek economist Costas Lapavitsas in December. “They represent modest common sense and would open a fresh path for other European countries.” Syriza itself claims its policies were “standard fare” during the Golden Age of capitalism in the 1950s and ‘60s. “Instead the leftwingers argue that the centre of gravity in politics has shifted so much to the right since the advent of Thatcherism that the party’s proposals now seem radical,” writes one journalist.

And it hasn’t entirely slipped under the radar that Syriza’s policies are eminently sensible. “At the core of Mr Tsispras’s economic platform is debt relief, an idea so unthinkable that nearly every mainstream economist has advocated it,” noted the Financial Times rather sarcastically earlier this month. The pro-globalisation economist, and former European Commission advisor, Philippe Legrain, has come out in favour of a Syriza victory, lauding such an outcome as a “necessary step toward resolving a crisis that has been festering since 2009”.

But still the epigram ‘far left’ is not given up, and not because of lazy journalistic habit. Mainstream commentators must brand Syriza as far left in order to maintain the fiction that the centre itself is not extreme. It was, after all, the political centre that inflicted the current sadistic penance on Greece, an austerity package that has resulted in GDP contracting by 25%, wages falling by a third, and unemployment of 26% and above. “The human cost has been immeasurable, amounting to a silent humanitarian crisis,” says Lapavitsas. “Many families scrape by on seniors’ slashed pensions. Crowds jostle for handouts at food banks. Some children are reduced to scavenging through rubbish bins for scraps. Hospitals run short of medicines. Malaria has even made a return,” writes the definitively anti-leftist Legrain.

And all this to make sure that Deutsche Bank, and other deserving creditors, receive their interest payments.

But Greek austerity is clearly not the first manifestation of the centre’s extremism. The Iraq War of 2003, prosecuted in part by that denizen of the centre-ground, Tony Blair, resulted in between 185,000 and 700,000 deaths. Through deregulation and liberalisation the mainstream was midwife to the huge economic crisis of 2008, and in response, has inflicted the costs of paying for it on those least responsible, whilst showering corporations with tax cuts, and intervening in the market through Quantitative Easing to ensure share values and wealth of the rich are not depleted. Britain is not Greece but the number of people accessing three days’ worth of emergency provisions through food banks in the UK, has increased nine-fold in a single year and now stands at over 900,000. Internationally, the same political mainstream has aided and abetted off-shoring by corporations at every turn (known euphemistically as globalisation), a process that has sent carbon emissions soaring to their highest ever level, as more and more products are transported across the globe, at precisely the time that emissions must be reduced in order to give civilisation a chance of surviving the next hundred years.

Yet, Syriza is a ‘far left’ party threatening the mainstream with its ‘suicidal’ policies. In an honest world, Angela Merkel’s CDU, David Cameron’s Conservatives and Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party would be labelled the ‘far centre’. Of course, they won’t; that immediately sounds like a non-sequitur. Which is precisely why the use of words is so jealously guarded. Nobody wants to spout nonsense, do they?

Recognising the common sense behind Syriza’s positions does not mean it will have an easy time in government. Besides sabotage by the troika, Syriza will find that saving capitalism from itself will not be an easy task in this financialised era, a far cry from the golden years of capitalism, when economic growth seemed impossible to stop. The same dilemmas will face Spain’s Podemos, newly leading the polls in that country, which likens its policies to mainstream Social Democracy or even Christian Democracy in the post-Second World War era.

But if a person is asphyxiating under a concrete slab, the first priority is to lift up  the slab and let them breathe. That is what Syriza can do.

Addendum:  

If you want an example of the 'far centre' in all its bizarre glory look no further than IMF chief Christine Lagarde's tribute to King Abudullah of Saudi Arabia

He did a lot for women 'discreetly'. He had this unfortunate habit of beheading people, but, hey, nobody's perfect!

Christine Lagarde, we salute you!

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has a talent for communication that should stun us all. In one interview, lasting probably no longer than an hour, she has managed to encapsulate to a developed world audience the real role of the IMF in the world. A feat that, for decades, has eluded assorted socialists, NGO dissidents and apple cart capsizers.

Greece, as everyone knows, is subject to an IMF/EU/ECB austerity programme that has seen its economy shrink by a fifth, public sector salaries drop by 40 per cent, and private sector salaries by a quarter. Conditions, according to one observer, are so desperate they are not third world, but fourth world. Children in Athens schools are too dizzy to do PE because they don’t have enough food.

From the Guardian:  “Asked whether she is able to block out of her mind the mothers unable to get access to midwives or patients unable to obtain life-saving drugs, Lagarde replies: "I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens."

Lagarde, predicting that the debt crisis has yet to run its course, adds: "Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax." She says she thinks "equally" about Greeks deprived of public services and Greek citizens not paying their tax.

"I think they should also help themselves collectively." Asked how, she replies: "By all paying their tax."

Asked if she is essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe that they have had a nice time and it is now payback time, she responds: "That's right."

Thanks to Lagarde, it becomes unnecessary to point to the Cambridge/Yale University study of IMF intervention in former Soviet bloc countries and its finding of 100,000 extra deaths resulting from cuts to public health spending demanded by the IMF’s “strict economic conditions”.

Her “solution” to the crisis, which involves Greek citizens paying their tax, makes it redundant to highlight the good corporate “citizens” fleeing to Luxembourg to avoid paying anything to the state or the third of large companies who pay no corporate tax at all in Britain.

Lagarde’s helpful reference to the IMF’s role in Niger makes it superfluous to draw attention to the “degradation” of health services there, “crippled” in order to meet debt payments. Or the privatization that has put them beyond most people’s reach. Or the 19 % tax increases on flour, milk and sugar, later withdrawn after protests (now there is a lesson in self-help).

Christine Lagarde, you are doing a fantastic job. More interviews please.