The Greek case is particularly revealing about ‘neoliberal radicalization’. Here we have a country which, on 25 January 2015, elected a parliament whose majority was intent on ending the austerity policies that had over five years reduced the amount of wealth produced by one-quarter, pushed people into poverty, and raised the mortality rate. For six months, supposedly ‘apolitical’ European institutions – in close coordination with Greek oligarchs, the principal owners of the media – waged a veritable economic and ideological war on the Syriza government. Following a series of concessions that began in February, they brought it to the point of complete submission to the logic of austerity contained in the ‘memorandums’ signed since 2010 by Greek governments and the Troika (European Commission, ECB, IMF). Surrender was finally secured in July 2015, with the signature of the third memorandum approved on 19 August.1
It has been amply demonstrated that the euro, by its very modus operandi, has resulted in growing imbalances between the economies of the member-states while causing credit bubbles in Southern European countries, especially Spain and Greece. But this malfunctioning is not simply due to some technical design fault, as Paul Krugman imagines. It stems both from the economic balance of forces between countries and from the political conception of a currency developed by ordo-liberalism. In fact, the euro was introduced not as a monetary tool in the service of democratically determined policies, but as an inviolable element in the institutional and regulatory framework in which policy absolutely must be inscribed. The ordo-liberal conception of the currency is thus strictly disciplinary.2 But how is this discipline exercised in the European Union? This is what we have learnt from the political war conducted by the European institutions against the government of the Greek radical Left in 2015. The direct blackmail used to get the Tsipras government to capitulate was the threat of expulsion from the eurozone, soon made concrete by the progressive monetary blockade by the ECB from the start of February. But the main weapon was the dependency created by the debt, which translated into pressure on the Greek authorities to implement austerity measures completely incompatible with the commitments made by Syriza.
The ‘sovereign debt’ crisis in Europe has demonstrated the political efficacy of such dependency. Obviously, debt is an economic means of extracting and transferring wealth to lenders and, in the event of a risk of default, imposing the solutions most advantageous to them. But it is much more than that. It is a formidable means of government. We know that EU policy is largely guided by Germany and France – the countries whose banks were most exposed to Greek debt because they lent recklessly to households, businesses and the state in order to finance their own exports.3 German and French enterprises were deluged with Greek government orders for technological goods and top-of-the-range military equipment. Gaël Giraud has pointed out the terms of the equation: the volume of loans to Greece by foreign banks quadrupled between 2000 and 2007. He also highlights the use of these sums: ‘Greece, that European superpower, was one of the five largest arms importers in Europe between 2005 and 2009. The purchase of fighter aircraft alone (including twenty-five Mirage 2000s from France) represents 38 per cent of its total imports.’4 To this old source of Greek debt we must add the massive, ongoing flight of Greek capital to German and Swiss banks, whose volume exceeds the current total debt. Finally, much of the debt is attributable to two series of causes that are invariably concealed: the drain operated by creditors in the form of high interest rates, and fiscal measures greatly advantageous to Greek oligarchs, which reduced tax receipts from 2000.5
How, then, can a veil be drawn over the inter-oligarchic system of interests which generated the initial monstrous debt, other than by creating the impression that the situation is attributable exclusively to the incompetence of irresponsible peoples who need to be disciplined and punished? The pressure put on the countries of Southern Europe and Ireland (the famous ‘PIIGS’) takes on a moral cast. The rulers of the creditor countries explain to public opinion that everyone is duty-bound to pay their debts.6 This moral crusade is based on a historical falsification of reality. It aims to make people forget the origin of the ‘sovereign’ debt – an effect of the asymmetrical relations between ‘core countries’ and ‘peripheral countries’,7 and the fruit of a European monetary policy highly advantageous to high incomes and large fortunes, but also, more directly, the result of the financial crisis.8 The truth is that the ‘new European governance’ has introduced an unprecedented model of ‘sovereignty’ under constant surveillance.
It has rightly been said that the European Union succeeded in breaking Syriza’s determination to reject austerity policies and thereby managed to reverse the verdict of universal suffrage, which had expressed a desire to obtain debt relief. The policy was not entirely new, but formed part of a supervisory regime that commenced before January 2015. From the start of the ‘euro crisis’ in 2010, European oligarchs were open about it: liberal democracy of the classical kind is no longer suited to a world involved in a generalized economic and military war. The events that have unfolded over the last five years in Greece are of the utmost importance for understanding this strategy. Yanis Varoufakis has made the essential points: ‘Greece is a battlefield on which a war against European democracy, against French democracy, has been tried and tested … I am here because our Athens Spring was crushed, like the one in Prague. Not by tanks, obviously, but banks. As Bertolt Brecht said: “Why send assassins when we can employ bailiffs?” Why stage a coup d’état when you can send the president of the Eurogroup to tell the finance minister of a newly elected government, three days after he takes office, that he has a choice between the previous austerity programme which plunged the country into an enormous depression or closure of its national banks?’9 Such blackmail, in practice excluding any rupture with the logic of austerity, was employed in the first accord of 20 February between the Eurogroup and Greece.
But the ‘war on democracy’ is not restricted to Greece. What is happening to Greece encapsulates in particularly brutal fashion the way that neoliberalism is imposing itself in a large number of countries today.10 As a matter of urgency, liberal democracy, with its regular elections and more or less changeable public opinion, debates and protests, must be curbed, if not hollowed out, in the ‘serious’ world of the market economy. Jean-Claude Juncker, the then president of the Eurogroup, was the first to admit this in the German magazine Focus in July 2011: ‘Greece’s sovereignty will be enormously restricted’ as a result of the ‘future wave of privatizations’. And he added: ‘It would be unacceptable to insult the Greeks, but we must help them. They have said that they are ready to accept the eurozone’s expertise.’11 In diplomatic terms, this amounted to saying that a member of the EU, and not the least significant of them symbolically, no longer qualified for democracy, but must be placed under supervision by the inter-governmental and international organizations that make up the ‘Troika’. Such supervision has loomed over Greek institutions ever since. Its initial major display of power came in December 2011 with the replacement of Prime Minister George Papandreou by Lucas Papademos, confidant of the banks and markets, and hitherto governor of the Greek Central Bank. Papandreou’s fault, committed at the end of October 2011, was to have proposed a referendum on the structural adjustment plan imposed on him by Merkel and Sarkozy.
One of the novelties highlighted by the ‘Greek crisis’ is that there is no longer any need to respect the conventions when it comes to counteracting liberal democracy. Candour is now the rule in European leaders’ statements. In an article in which he conveyed his ‘vision for Europe’, Jean-Claude Trichet, former president of the ECB, declared that in future ‘the authorities in the eurozone would play a much more radical and authoritarian [sic] role in formulating states’ fiscal policies’.12 In other words, the form of power over the Greek budget inaugurated by the Troika’s directorate would be generalized and become a normal principle of government or, at any rate, a ‘legal’ form of intervention in the event of a country’s rulers not being able or willing to respect the constitutional norm of the fiscal ‘golden rule’. National institutions and elected representatives would thus no longer have any choice but to approve the decisions taken by the new authorities – the European authorities reserving the right to exercise sovereign power in the event of ‘deviations’. Extrapolation? Let us read the rest of Trichet’s statement: ‘This separates us from the current framework, which leaves all decisions in the hands of the country concerned. On the contrary, in some cases it would be possible and even obligatory [sic] for the European authorities to take decisions directly.’ Trichet is not unaware of the gravity of his suggestion and accepts full responsibility for it: ‘Implementing this idea also requires adopting a new concept of sovereignty, given the complex interdependence between the countries of the eurozone.’13 When we recall that one of the oldest historical pillars of liberal democracy is the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’, we can appreciate the historic shift effected by the European oligarchs in public law.
The constitutionalization of competition, balanced budgets and monetary policy in treaties is insufficient. New methods of government must also be put in place that will override national political authorities in implementing European decisions. In other words, in the event of a serious crisis, economic ‘constitutionalization’ must be augmented by direct government of a member-state by economic and financial authorities arrogating to themselves the right to change or promulgate that country’s laws. While this executive policy obeys no pre-set rule, and while the entities that implement it (the Troika and the Eurogroup) do not possess a clear legal status but are equipped with opaque powers,14 their mission is patent: saving the system of private and public financial interests and keeping national governments on the path of austerity. We can now better appreciate Juncker’s comments, cited at the start of Chapter 4, which were made on the morrow of Syriza’s victory and occasioned controversy: ‘To say everything is going to change because there is a new government in Athens is to take one’s desires for reality … There cannot be a democratic choice against the European treaties.’
There was no concerted plan to destroy the most basic principles of classical democracy. Theorization of the new ‘sovereignty’ simply caps political supervisory practices which European institutions, the IMF and the governments of various member-states had established without bothering unduly about respect for European law. For the sacrosanct ‘respect for the rules’ invariably brandished by ordo-liberals is blithely violated when it comes to the means employed. Here anything is permitted. The history of the ‘Troika’ or ‘Eurogroup’ – institutions without any legal standing15 and without explicit principles – is evidence enough. Greece has been the principal ‘laboratory’ of the new, authoritarian method of government through debt.16 As we have seen, this obviously stems from the size of its debt as a proportion of GDP. But the lesson to be drawn applies to all other countries. It indicates the possibility of taking control of a national economy and society by means of debt and, in concrete terms, through a financial blockade mounted by the creditors whom it is meant to legitimize. The three ‘loans for reforms’ memoranda that Greece has had to sign since 2010, without being in a position to negotiate them, are the most tangible proof, along with the methods employed by creditors to impose their analyses and decisions as well as to control the country’s political institutions: visiting ministries regularly, drafting legislation and decrees, drawing up the list of privatizations, directly controlling the civil servants responsible for government receipts, and so on. The means employed by the creditor institutions were even more violent when they encountered resistance from the Tsipras government as it attempted to negotiate, ‘calmly’ and ‘reasonably’, a ‘more intelligent’ policy facilitating absorption of the effects of austerity and a resumption of investment and growth in Greece. They did not hesitate to initiate financial asphyxiation of the country from the beginning of February, two weeks after Syriza’s victory, and then to apply it radically from late June and early July 2015, when the ECB decided not to raise the ceiling on the emergency liquidity available for Greek banks but to strangle the economy. The third memorandum of 13 July 2015, which put a noose around Greece’s neck, made it perfectly clear that Parliament was no more than a body for registering the instructions of creditors, to the extent that it forced the government to retroactively cancel laws voted since the February accord. Thus, it was stipulated that ‘the government must consult the institutions and agree with them on any legislative plan in the areas concerned, with an appropriate period of notice, before submitting it to public consultation or Parliament’.17
If we are to believe Varoufakis’s insider testimony, the political issue was in fact much more important than the economic issue, which scarcely interested his interlocutors in the Eurogroup. During one meeting, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German economy minister, allegedly said: ‘Elections cannot change anything. If the rules changed every time there’s an election, the eurozone couldn’t function.’ To which Varoufakis replied: ‘If it’s true that elections can’t change anything, we should be honest and say so to our citizens. Perhaps we should amend the European treaties and insert a clause suspending the democratic process in countries obliged to borrow from the Troika. But is Europe okay with that? Did our peoples vote for that?’18 The question would seem to have gone unanswered. But it was enough for Varoufakis to observe that all the participants in the Eurogroup concurred in their contempt for the universal suffrage of a member-state. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is not new: Europe advances by riding roughshod over the rules of electoral democracy.
What, then, is the implacable logic of the Troika? Financial blackmail certainly ensures a real appropriation of wealth for creditors, but at the same time causes escalating indebtedness, or a kind of large-scale banking ‘pyramid scheme’ where new loans essentially serve to meet the repayment deadlines on old ones. The third memorandum of July 2015 caused the debt to climb above 200 per cent of Greek GDP.19 In this sense, from the standpoint of strictly arithmetical rationality, the austerity imposed on Greece is ‘irrational’. Tsipras’s initial error was to believe that there was an ‘economically rational’ way of resisting European diktat and on this same ‘rational’ basis to hope for balanced mediation at least, if not succour, from Hollande or Renzi.
In reality, the absolute obligation to repay, however absurd and impossible, conforms to a much deeper, political rationality.20 The members of the Eurogroup cannot have been unaware of this absurdity, even if they had not shown any interest in the social consequences of the measures imposed on the Greek people by the Troika. They are not so stupid as not to have noticed that the debt burden has risen since 2009 (from 115 per cent of GDP to practically 200 per cent in 2016). Even the IMF, an apologist for austerity, ended up seeing this. It was clearly understood by an advisor to the Greek government who followed the negotiations with the Troika closely: ‘We set out for battle thinking we had the same weapons as them. We underestimated their power. It’s a power that forms part of a veritable social fabric, the way people think. It’s based on control and blackmail. We’ve got very few levers in the face of it. The European edifice is Kafkaesque.’21 Basically, Syriza’s programme, presented in September 2014,22 which had dared to display independence from the political line of the Commission, the ECB and the IMF, was the real target of the blackmail. The Eurogroup could not tolerate the implementation of any of the programme’s four pillars – as Greek negotiators learnt to their cost. ‘Dealing with the humanitarian crisis, reflating the real economy, restoring jobs and labour law, and a civic overhaul of the state and institutions’ – all these points in Syriza’s programme betrayed a heresy that had, at any cost, to be eliminated from the European Union before any pernicious ideas about social justice became contagious and spread.
Indebtedness has made it possible, provisionally perhaps, to neutralize all the Greek government’s efforts to depart from ordo-liberal orthodoxy. Many historical and ethnological traces of debt as a method of enslavement exist.23 It has even been a direct cause of slavery in certain times and places. In particular, we are familiar with the significance of the ban introduced by Solon on making people surety for loans. Aristotle tells us that the measure to cancel debts, private and public alike, was called seisachtheia, or ‘shaking off the burden’, precisely because the burden of debt was shaken off thus.24 Today, financial debt no longer entails an appropriation of individuals by creditors, but it does result in a rich cultural inheritance being made to function as security, in deductions from the flow of new wealth, and in a loss of collective autonomy.
The current situation must be analysed predominantly in terms of power relations. Private lenders are now the real masters of the game by virtue of their key role in financing states. With the backing of ratings agencies, they have acquired the power to guarantee (or decline to guarantee) the continuity of economic life and hence social existence. They are in a position to speculate via derivative products on the ability to repay debts, causing interest rates to fluctuate in line with ‘market opinion’ about government policy. The power of the financial oligopoly manifests itself in the capacity to oblige states to transform the private debts accumulated on bank balance sheets – debts that have become toxic as the insolvency of private and public borrowers grows – into government debt guaranteed by taxpayers in the last resort.25 Similarly, the risks taken by banks are ultimately covered by states which, unilaterally or conjointly, recapitalize private banks out of state budgets.
The power of creditors explains why the ‘Keynesian pact’ (Krugman) of reflation through public expenditure and capital controls no longer works, and why government ministers take absurd measures that serve only to deepen recession. ‘Fear of speculators’ is the basic reason for austerity policies. In other words, the sovereignty of creditors, acknowledged in practice, leads to a logical inversion of macroeconomic policies.26 In Latin America, Asia and Europe, self-induced speculative attacks have done such economic and social damage in recent decades that governments have been led to adopt policies contrary to ‘good sense’ just to ‘restore the confidence’ of financial markets – those capricious, sheep-like, perverse entities ever ready to increase the risk premium on loans. This obsession with ‘confidence’ has (Krugman points out) had the effect of making economic policy ‘an exercise in amateur psychology, in which the IMF and the Treasury Department tried to persuade countries to do things they hoped would be perceived by the market as favorable’.27
‘Restoring market confidence’: this is the key to the Washington Consensus and its structural reforms. Such is also the ne plus ultra of European policy, which merely ‘copies and pastes’ IMF recipes from the 1980s and 90s. This elegant phrase is simply a euphemism for states’ self-subjugation to the power of finance. Competition between speculative funds and between banks results in uncontrolled risk-taking and behaviour that fuels bubbles, stokes over-indebtedness and, ultimately, creates the domino effects of the financial crisis.28 Competition between financial centres leads them to align themselves with the countries that practice the lightest regulatory touch, in the manner of the City and, more generally, Anglo-American finance. This suits the financial actors of other countries fine, because they derive juicy remuneration from it.29
But ‘restoration of confidence’ is above all an expression of the relations between a ‘debtor state’ and the powers that lend to it under conditions dependent on this famous ‘confidence’. Thus, in and through their fiscal policy, neoliberal states have constructed their own subordination to markets, which are in a position to dictate the policy they must follow. Hence the spiral of concessions and presents to the wealthiest classes and companies. Wolfgang Streeck justifiably compares the way that shareholders are guaranteed control of the boards of directors of private enterprises, in order to ensure a favourable distribution of profits, with the way that banks and hedge funds have taken control of governments to secure tax benefits and access to public property: ‘Much as an increase in shareholder value requires management to hold down the workforce or – better still – to lock it into common efforts to boost the share price, so does the trust of creditors require that governments persuade or compel their citizens to moderate their claims on the public purse in favour of the “financial markets”’.30 This also confers considerable power on the public servants who negotiate the debt in bond markets. The Greek example demonstrates that the rights of loan capital now prevail absolutely over the right of populations to basic guarantees and quality public services. In other words, the debtor state must above all ensure the welfare of capital against its population.
How are deductions from the wealth produced to repay the debt, at least in part, to be ensured? And how is a situation to be created where this draining of wealth from debtor to creditor lasts long enough to avoid unduly heavy losses for lenders in the event of over-indebtedness? With the Greek case, this classical problem has taken an exemplary turn. The objective of the ‘loans for reforms’ accords was not only to ‘suck out’ wealth, but also to reorganize society – that is, to impose reforms, especially as regards privatization, wages and the labour market. What is striking about the current domination of finance is the ability acquired by financiers to use blackmail to dictate major economic, social and political changes to the benefit of local oligarchies. Any protocol, pact, contract or memorandum affords an opportunity to attach ‘conditionalities’ to loans to a government that urgently needs funds, to prevent its economy being strangled and its society descending into chaos. This blackmail is not to be confused with a much subtler mode of governmentality, relying on individual management of human capital.31 We are dealing with two different ways of ‘governing by debt’. In the case at hand, government debt does not introduce a subjective relationship of accumulation and profit, in the manner of a student loan, as a putative anticipation of the income derived from the ‘human capital’ built up in studies. Instead, government debt introduces a blackmail relationship of the ‘repayment or your life!’ variety. It is not so much a biopolitics as a ‘necropolitics’.32 It consists in the fact that the creditor has power of life and death over a banking system, a productive apparatus, a government and, ultimately, a population.
In the end, the conditionality of the loan is more important than the sustainability of the debt when it makes it possible to impose ‘structural reform’.33 If the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to be believed, such reform seeks to remove obstacles to international trade, to attract direct foreign investment and to liberalize financial markets. More broadly, it aims to lower wage costs in production to improve competitiveness, make labour markets flexible, reduce public expenditure and cut pensions – in a word, to ‘free up economic supply’ from any constraint deemed excessive by employers.34 Radical transformation of the most indebted countries via their ‘subjection to a programme’ has become the main objective of the European Commission and the ‘apolitical’ ECB.
The OECD proposes directions for use of the debt crisis. The text just cited explains very clearly that ‘structural reform’ encounters social and moral resistance, especially when it comes to liberalizing labour markets. What the OECD calls the ‘political economy of reform’ is simply a set of methods for successfully imposing it in the face of ‘established interests, the anxieties of workforces, or deep-rooted institutional arrangements that are difficult to alter’. Actors should not shrink from a policy of making things worse to further their ends: ‘Major crises are not comfortable for political leaders, but they can foster change. Studies by the OECD indicate that an output gap (the difference between actual and potential output) of 4 per cent increases the likelihood of a major structural reform by nearly one-third. It was a crisis, marked by a recession, a descending wages spiral and sizeable deficits, which prompted change in the Netherlands in the 1980s, and in Canada and Finland in the 1990s, when the public finances were in deadlock. Economic gloom also imposed reforms on Japan. The case of Europe is instructive. The countries that have carried out radical and difficult reforms, like Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and the UK, indicate the importance of crises in eliciting support for reforms and advancing them.’
Thus, in order to impose ‘internal devaluation’ of incomes, especially civil service pensions and salaries, it is necessary to cleverly exploit debt and currency crises to get the reforms accepted by public opinion as so many measures for the ‘common good’. Above all, however, a population must deliberately be put ‘under stress’, in a situation of acute crisis, so that it ends up accepting, albeit with a heavy heart, the erosion of its political gains and social rights. People have quite rightly denounced the ‘illegitimate’ character of debt, demonstrated its ‘odious’ character, and exposed the violations of the most basic human rights entailed in its repayment.35 It is right – and will continue to be right – to show that the consequences of the memoranda of agreement for which the lenders are jointly responsible contravene the European Social Charter. But there is one thing that must be grasped above all else: debt is one of the most effective weapons of political war. The OECD puts it bluntly: ‘Economics rarely decides the outcome of the battle of reforms: it is politics that holds the key.’
Truth sometimes emerges from the mouth of the Eurocrats themselves. A few days after Syriza’s victory, the chair of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, stated: ‘Either you sign the memorandum or your economy is going to collapse. How? We are going to crash your banks.’36 We can see why Varoufakis could claim that there was never any negotiation between Greece and the Eurogroup, only ‘match-fixing’.37 The only possible outcome was an act of surrender. In the Greek case, this took a while to materialize, due to Syriza’s victory and six months of resistance by the Tsipras government. Such blackmail has virtually become a habit. Cyprus had already paid the price in 2013, as had Ireland in 2010. Trichet even dared to threaten the Irish government with ‘exploding a bomb in Dublin’ should the government not repay all its creditors.38 Tsipras assumed the role of leader of a small member-state anxious to obtain a goodwill gesture from ‘friends’ with whom he had cultivated ‘relations of trust’. This was to misread the political determination of Syriza’s enemies, who asked the ECB to cut liquidity to Greek banks, thus prompting their bankruptcy and economic collapse. Unless Syriza had repudiated the second memorandum after the victory of January 2015, rather than continuing to meet the deadlines for repayment of an unsustainable debt, exhausting available resources, the room for manoeuvre was non-existent.
In the absence of a clean break, the Greek government was on the back foot until the surprise announcement of a referendum at the beginning of July, which offered the glimpse of a change in the balance of forces. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems to have been a fool’s game.39 The lesson of Greece is that no real change of direction can come from within the European institutional mechanism, because of the blackmail used against those who resist the dominant line. The threat of ‘Grexit’ brandished by Wolfgang Schäuble on 11 July, with the support of an ECB encouraging a run on the banks, was merely the latest bluff to force the Greek Left back into line. With this increasingly explicit and aggressive blackmail, Europe’s leaders achieved their ends: eliminating the Greek anomaly by converting the wolf into a lamb. The point was to make an example, to demonstrate the price of disobedience to other countries that might be tempted to escape the austerity trap – Portugal or Spain, for example.
But we must not isolate the ‘Greek crisis’ from the ‘European crisis’ or the ‘global crisis’. They are aspects of a generalized war to change the world in accordance with the norms of capitalist rationality. The policy of the major Bretton Woods institutions and the US government has constantly been orientated to negating democracy, supporting dictatorships and despotic regimes, and participating in coups d’état in Latin America.40 With the Washington Consensus, implemented since the 1990s, the objective remains the same, but the methods have changed somewhat. Pressure has become indirect, utilizing the debt weapon. Why establish a military dictatorship if the same outcome can be obtained via markets? Submission to power is replaced by ‘compliance with agreements’, on pain of economic and financial strangulation. Neoliberalism continues to be imposed on societies, which it transforms using economic blackmail. The ongoing war waged by creditors is conducted by all available means: blackmail over jobs, financial strangulation, and fear of privatization. The term given it acts as a mask: ‘the crisis’.
We must draw some political conclusions from Syriza’s defeat. Its leadership did not have an adequate appreciation of the character of the situation, the strength of the opponent, or the objectives and tactics needed to fight him. It remained profoundly conciliatory. It believed it could pull through by adjusting, inflecting and re-orientating public policy; it still does. It does not grasp the underlying logic of the European Union and does not appreciate the resolve of its adversary. The major strategic error committed by Tsipras and the majority leadership of Syriza was to believe they could persuade an interlocutor in good faith, with rational arguments, to avoid an open crisis with the European Union. But persuading the Eurogroup of the terrible consequences of prolonging austerity assumed that Europe was a ‘Habersmasian’ universe where the ethical rule of rational public discussion prevailed. This is also the error of Stiglitz, Krugman or Piketty, who stride onto the historical stage armed with the majestic scientific truth which they believe invincible. Faced with the iron system of oligarchic interests, neither good faith nor the power of rational argument carries much weight. The war waged on Syriza by the European Union has demonstrated that no ‘social’ adjustment of austerity can be envisaged in the current framework of the eurozone and the treaties. But it has also exposed the inanity of political conduct that consists in pledging adherence to that framework while wishing to avoid suffering its consequences. The indispensable confrontation with the ordo-liberal European Union obviously calls for tactical and technical measures to avoid a social disaster on the scale of an isolated country. And this confrontation is at the heart of any alternative strategy.