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An interview with Stathis Kouvelakis on how Syriza rose to office and then capitulated. His central claim is that the leadership had ruled out confrontation long before it faced one. Leaving the euro would have meant breaking with the Memoranda and accepting a fight, and after narrowly losing the June 2012 election Tsipras shelved the party's earlier formulations — "no sacrifice for the euro", "the euro is not a fetish" — for a "turn to realism". By the summer of 2015 it was the leadership itself deploying the argument from fear, casting exit as chaos, a return to the 1930s, collective suicide. Exit, Kouvelakis argues, lay outside their cognitive map entirely. He also sets this against what he sees as a long subaltern streak in Greek elite politics.
Précis by Red Mole.
Read it at the publisher or the archived copy of the marxsite page.