Comrades, let me start with this nice quote indeed that was just mentioned of the unemployed workers: “It is absolutely true that we went to the final of the championship of class struggle.”

But I’m afraid that we have lost the match or at least that we have lost this match. I would have like to come here and bring positive news but unfortunately this is not the case. As most of you probably know, the Greek parliament voted yesterday the proposal that will be submitted tomorrow by the Greek government to the Euro Group.

And this proposal amounts to no less than to a new austerity package, — and this is perhaps even more shocking —only slightly modified compared to the austerity package that was proposed by Mr. Juncker [the President of European Commission] a couple of weeks ago and that was massively rejected in the referendum by 62 percent of the Greek people on the 5th of July.

This is clearly a completely disastrous outcome of a political experiment that gave hope to millions of people struggling in Europe and elsewhere. And of the most interesting experiment in left-wing politics we have since decades. The consequences of this will be of course far-reaching and are at this stage unpredictable both for the left, for the political landscape in Greece and more broadly in Europe.

And, of course, as you know in cases like this the most important thing to understand in order to go ahead is to analyze how did we get there? What are the causes actually at work behind this very negative outcome?

Before starting I would like to make one methodological remark about what in my opinion we should not do in those circumstances: what we should not do in order to be able to approach in a productive way the difficult situation we have to face.

The first mistake I think we should avoid is to repeat ready-made formulations and certainties that have been used innumerable times in the past — sometimes rightly, sometimes less so. And to be more concrete I will give you a couple of examples of what I mean here.

Let me start with the first kind of ready-made analysis: ‘What we have seen in Greece is totally unsurprising, it’s the old story of reformism, reformism is betrayal of the working class, they have betrayed, full stop, nothing new, let’s move ahead.’

Well, I think that things are a bit more complicated because, just to talk about Greece, we had reformism in Greece. We had Pasok in power in the 1980s. Actually, Pasok dominated political life in Greece for decades and the Pasok type of reformism is not at all associated with something negative in the memory of the Greek people, at least the Pasok of the first period. Right, it was a party that took measures of general social measures that promote democratization in Greek society.

Of course, it was not about socialism but it meant a very concrete improvement in the lives of millions of working people. And what is at stake today is absolutely not this type of reformism. What we are talking about here is about a left-wing party coming into power with a very radical agenda and implementing a variant of neoliberal policies. So it’s a more general point that we have to make and I think about what reformism and social democracy mean currently, not 50 or 70 years ago.

The second has to do with the notion of betrayal itself. I don’t think it is a particularly useful category to understand political processes. And, personally, I think I have been close enough to that specific situation to say that it’s not very helpful.

The notion of betrayal usually means that there is a kind of pre-established plan that comes into fruition, you know, these people have somehow manipulated public opinion, their own party activists, etc. They come to power and then they betray because that was the plan, this is what they wanted to do. I don’t think at all that this is how things very concretely happened. I think that what happened in Greece is the failure of a political strategy and I’ll analyze [it] in a moment. And when we say that a political strategy fails — and fails entirely — it means that at the end of the story we are left only with bad or disastrous choices. And that was indeed the point we went at this precise moment.

Now, the last I think methodological mistake is a bit different. Even if much broader theoretical issues are at stake in this situation, we should first start at least by the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.

Let me illustrate this point. We had a very powerful discussion with Alex in February on the Greek situation. And some of the points raised by Alex at that moment were those about the state, the role of the repressive apparatuses and how we should break with that; also the role of alliances and, more specifically, about the participation of the party of ANEL, the Independent Greeks, in the government.

I think that these are the two very important points, of course, but I don’t think that they can explain what has happened now. I don’t think that the surrender to the demands of the creditors can be explained by the way Syriza dealt (or not dealt) with issues in defense policies or even in issues of concerning the repressive apparatus of the state, although the record of the government on that matter is a very problematic one.

And I also don’t think that ANEL played any significant role in reaching this point into deal. Actually, the ANEL — although all their deputies voted in favor of the proposed agreement — were quite reluctant to the surrender for their own reasons and following their own logic.

So once again I think that the central issue here is that we need not some kind of general and in a way quite superficial point about reformism or betrayal, all these kind of things, but a very concrete analysis of what was strategically at stake, here and now, in the Greek conjunction.

So let me here start with a brief recap of Syriza’s strategy. Syriza came into power with — in a way — a very clear simple mandate by the people: Break with austerity politics and liberate the country from the burden of an unjust and unsustainable debt. Its core commitments were included in — what we can call in our tradition a transitional program — the Thessaloniki program: so a set of co-commitments on how to break concretely with the austerity politics as they have been applied in Greece in a very ferocious way with a memorandum the last five years.

This strategy relied on two pillars: it was first of all based on a dissociation between the issue of the debt and the issue of the break with the framework of austerity. On the issue of the debt, it was about renegotiating the debt on the model of the 1953 London Conference on German Debt but without excluding unilateral moves in case of a failure — although this last point was clearly somehow put aside, at least in the discourse these last period. Concerning the break with the framework of austerity, the idea was that the core commitments of the Thessaloniki program — which once again was a kind of transitional minimal program, if you like —should be implemented independently of the negotiations going on with the creditors and with the European Union.

Needless to say, not only many people inside Syriza and, of course, in other sectors of the radical left in Greece had warned from the outset this strategy proved completely unrealistic and unviable. Concerning the depth it was absolutely clear that the creditors would accept no discussion or even mention of the word cancellation or writing off.

At the very most they would discuss about the restructuring which is no real solution because it only marginally alleviates the burden of the debt. And even that restructuring would come only after the acceptance and the implementation of a further austerity package, once the continuation with the type of policies that have been applied was guaranteed in a way.

Concerning, now, the implementation of the anti-austerity measures of the Thessaloniki program which supposedly was going to happen in any case proved a complete illusion — because the whole calculation was that they would just observe leniently (or not) a left-wing government putting into practice its policies and giving, of course, an example to the entire Europe that ‘Yes, it is absolutely possible to break with austerity and you see it can work’ and so on.

Of course, this is not the way things happened. The adversary reacted, brutally, immediately and with the most powerful way it had, the weapon of liquidity of the currency. Indeed only nine days before the elections of January 25th Mario Draghi, the chair of the European Central Bank, cut the main channel of liquidity provision to the Greek Banks. And from that moment onwards, actually, the country has been submitted to a severe diet in terms of liquidity which as you probably know became a total stop — 10 days ago when the referendum was announced.

The consequences of course with all of that strategy were absolutely devastating for the economy, for the state of the public finance and more generally for the balance of forces between the Greek government and the EU. It was absolutely clear therefore that some unilateral move had to be done, but it wasn’t actually. When the Greek government decided to stop repaying the debt in early June to the IMF, this decision came too late — when the public coffers were already emptied. And when the government had already entered since the agreement signed with the European Union on February the 20^th, a descending spiral of concessions leading to further concessions, leading to even further concessions and leading, perhaps, first and foremost to demobilization and social passivity.

So there was a fundamental illusion behind this and the fundamental illusion was that you could get something out of negotiating with the European institutions. Hence, of course, the lack of a plan B — the consequences of which are very toughly and devastatingly felt now. The plan B — which means an alternative plan about what should be done if the negotiations came to a deadlock, the way exactly they did. And everyone knew that a plan B had to be considered very seriously, at the very least as an option exiting the Eurozone.

[But it] was put out of the table by the Syriza government and the majority of the leadership of the party as a sign supposedly of goodwill, of good faith in the European institutions and the will to negotiate and to respect the rules of the game. But, exactly, there are no rules in that game and this is perhaps where the core of the problem lies.

There was something which is indeed some kind of belief — in the religious or in the ideological sense of the term — of the government and of the leadership in the benevolent nature of the European institutions and in the possibility somehow to turn them around positively, the scenario of the good Euro: if you change the balance of forces in one country, if you take advantage of existing contradictions and of an international movement of sympathy and solidarity, you can bring a kind of positive change in the set of policies without breaking with the Eurozone.

This ideology, which I think is now shared by most of the forces of the European radical left, [the] left Europeanism if you like, is at the root of the problem and the defeat we are facing in Greece has to do with the failure of that strategy. We are paying the price of internalizing this ideology of left Europeanism which I think — but this is open to debate — should itself be considered as a symptom of a more deep ideological defeat of the left as it emerged from the defeats of the revolutionary experiments of the 20th century.

In conclusion, of course, I will try to give some elements as much as I can to the question, I think most of you, if not all of you, are asking now — What will happen, what are the perspectives?

I think that concerning the political project of Syriza, we have reached a point of no return. Syriza as a political project cannot continue in the way it did until now. This is the moment of a decisive break.

As you may know in yesterday’s vote in Greek parliament, the government lost its own majority with only 145 deputies of its own coalition out of 162 voting in favor of the proposed agreement. The 17 members of Syriza MPs (all of them are Syriza MPs who didn’t vote for the agreement) cover positions within the party going from the president of the Greek parliament, Zoi Konstantopoulou, some other personalities and a core of MPs of the Left Platform. 15 MPs of the Left Platform voted in favor of the proposed agreement in order not to lead to a loss of majority for the government, which actually did happen, but issued a statement saying that they are in solidarity with those who didn’t vote and that they would not accept a proper austerity package as such. The Left Platform also issued an alternative proposal of another way of breaking with austerity which puts the question of Brexit and exiting the Euro at the very center of the discussion.

Greek society, these last weeks, lived an extraordinary moment which now unfortunately seems in a way far away but it hasn’t waned or disappeared. It was the experience of the referendum. The referendum was a popular victory and the referendum testified of the fact that large sectors of Greek society — into working class, into youth, into popular classes and in large sectors of the fighting left — are ready and prepared to give a fight. And this capital should not be wasted, should not be lost — it should be brought into fruition in a much more difficult context now with the government that we know in advance will be little by little digested by the logic of managing neoliberalism.

At the political level I think it’s absolutely crucial to regroup all the forces which have drawn the lessons of what had happened in order to open up a new path for the Greek radical left and for the forces of socialism and social transformation.

I just want to finish with the following sentence. You might know that I work and teach as a political theorist and I have also worked on Marxist theory, an author who is particularly dear to me and very central to my work is the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “Every time I was mistaken it was because I haven’t been sufficiently radical.”

And I fully share this quotation provided that radical — for me, at least — doesn’t mean the repetition of the old recipes but as one comrade, actually the speaker of Syriza’s parliamentary group and prominent member of the Left Platform said yesterday, “Opening up our wings to the unknown.”

Thank you.