00:02 Ed Rooksby: Yeah, thank you for all the questions. [There's] far too much for me to respond to, so I'll take the main things. What Pete was just saying is, I think, absolutely right. One way of thinking about Greece — and it's right, it's actually southern Europe rather than Greece — [is that] the global capitalist crisis, crises find a way of — there's usually focal points where the crisis is condensed and concentrated, economically and then politically, and that place is the eurozone, but particularly Greece; it's the southern peripheral states of the eurozone.
00:33 So what happens in Greece, what happens in Spain, what happens in Portugal, in a way it's an exaggerated form of what's happening across the world. And politically, what happens in Greece — given that that is the country in which the left seems to be a government waiting — can have massive repercussions. There can be a ripple effect politically. So just as Greece concentrates the economic crisis, it can also concentrate a political crisis, and what happens in Greece politically can spread out across the rest of the world.
01:04 And I think the rise of Syriza itself, the way it's fired the international left in Europe at least, is just a tiny indication of what it might do if it actually took power.
01:04 In terms of whether or not it's moved to the right: I kind of agree with Simon, it has moved — I think it has moved to the right. But I also agree with Alan that I think that when and if it gets to power — and it could be, you know, the Greek government could collapse any week, any day — it'll be faced very quickly with either capitulating, in which case it just loses its support; the pressure on Syriza from its supporters to follow through on what it says is really intense. And of course it'll also come under intense pressure from capital *not* to do it.
02:06 And there's something that Stathis Kouvelakis said in a letter, actually, in response to Alex Callinicos's article on Greece — and he's now a central committee member of Syriza. He says that Syriza in government will be faced with the stark choice: either surrender and renege on its commitments, or press ahead. And then he says, look, what's the dynamic that will come into effect if it presses ahead, if it moves forward on its promises to reject the memorandum agreements with the Troika and so on?
02:36 He says that this will mean engaging in a protracted battle which [will] almost certainly lead to results that go beyond the current objectives put forward by the leadership of Syriza. This is a transitional dynamic: rejecting the austerity measures of the Troika and so on leads them either to collapse and being kicked out — and that would be a disaster for them, [a] disaster for the left internationally I think as well — or to press on and then take the consequences of that, which will mean radicalising.
03:07 Now, my feeling is — I hesitate to say this — of those two outcomes, I fear that the first outcome is more likely, actually: that Syriza does capitulate. I think that's actually the more likely outcome.
03:37 I think that when you look at — one of the arguments against left reformism and centrism that you often hear is that, well, look at the history of left governments in power: it's a history of collapse or military overthrow, in the case of Chile; it shows that it doesn't work. It doesn't show that it doesn't work. It shows that the forces ranged against the left are huge, [that] the challenges facing the left are huge. Of course most attempts to get beyond capitalism will fail. Of course they will.
04:08 It's not an easy thing. How do you overthrow capitalism? How do you build a democratic, humane socialist system? It's not something you can just do like that. You are likely to fail most times. But if we are socialists we have to have the hope that we will succeed, [and] we have to try to drive things forward to the extent that we can. We have to hope, and put pressure on the Syriza government, [and] hope that it does the right thing. But I think we also need to be pessimistic: we need to be prepared for the likelihood that it won't do that.
04:38 If I just respond to a couple more things. I totally agree with the distinction I think Phil made at the start between government and power. Taking government — in fact, to go into government isn't necessarily to take government power; it's not to take state power; it's certainly not to take social power [?]. And I agree that in Venezuela the class in charge is the bourgeoisie, of course it is — and perhaps that was John's point — but this is true.
05:10 In terms of Simon's point about what a left government in the UK would look like, dovetailing with Dave's point about the concrete demands made in Trotsky's transitional programme — again I think Pete is absolutely right. I don't know what it would look like. But I think the importance of the left government perspective is not to fill [it] out in advance — should I be optimistic and say we're about ten years away from a left government? — it's not to come up with a programme of what we're going to do.
05:41 We can come up with a programme: if Left Unity was to stand in the elections, of course you'd have to come up with a manifesto [of] what it would do. But it's not really going to be in any position to do those things. You can't really fill out the programme until you get to the point when you actually know what the programme is — what are the actual demands of working people, how do we respond to those things.
06:13 One thing that's been raised, of course, is the example of Chile — a chilling example, the example of Chile: what happens when a government really challenges power, challenges capital. You get this revolt of the deep state and so on. Of course, this is something that we can't avoid.
06:43 But it seems to me that saying now that what we want a transitional government to do — having, perhaps, in a Left Unity manifesto, saying "arm the workers" — well, it seems to me to be bizarrely counterproductive. For most people, for me, the idea of arming people right now seems to me to be absolutely absurd, and quite frightening actually. Who's going to get these arms? [Inaudible.]
06:43 There may well be a situation in which it becomes necessary to arm people, and there may of course be [such a moment] — of course it's [more] likely to be that situation in a revolutionary situation. That's when you start talking about [arming] [?]. I think that talking about it right now is just — I don't think it's the [right] tool [?]. But okay. Thank you. So I'll stop there. Thank you.
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