Elections come and go, new saviours of the people arise and fall, somehow the people never learn. Next time round a new face, a new personality takes centre stage, suddenly the promised land is is sight, only once again to fade in the mist of state bureaucracy, wheeling and dealing with the corporate world and the financial Mafia. White-knight saviours of the people fall from grace like leaves in autumn and their fabricated party of the people crumbles into the dust of antiquity.
No matter the "principles" of the party, no matter the vision of the leader, the state can never be a vehicle for freedom, equality and justice. Surely by now we have seen it all, from Ramsay MacDonald to Obama, from Blair to Tsipras, they arrive on their white horse with a sack full of promises, and deliver the same pitiful rubbish, nothing for the people.
We have to stop letting the state and its smoke and mirror illusions of elections, set the agenda. To keep doing the same thing expecting a different outcome, is one sign of madness. Freedom and justice lie outside the state, outside authority, we can only create these qualities in our own communities, by ourselves. Let's leave the leaders, messiahs, and saviours to the deluded. We can create a world of mutual aid and co-operation, a world that sees to the needs of all our people, without the need to follow the "great leader" nor do we need to weigh ourselves down with all the useless baggage of the one true party.
We have the power and the imagination, we have the resources and the skills, we have the numbers, all we require is the will, the will of the ordinary people to bring crashing down, this unjust, unequal, brutal system of exploitation.
As various segments of the US radical left begin planting their flags in the electoral arena, Syriza’s recent fall from grace should serve as a stark reminder of the unfulfilled promise of the electoral road to socialism.Read the full article HERE:
Syriza’s rise to power elicited widespread praise from the left internationally, inspiring renewed enthusiasm for the possibilities and promise of “mass left” party building in and outside the United States. At a rally celebrating Syriza’s electoral victory in Spain, Pablo Iglesias, secretary general of the Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, declared that“the sun of hope rose over Greece.”
Yet “the sun of hope” began to set on Greece almost as quickly as it rose. Shortly after taking office, Syriza, the “Coalition of the Radical Left,” formed a coalition government with the right-wing, anti-immigrant Independent Greeks (ANEL) party, followed only months later by the predictable surrender of the government to a new round of harsh austerity imposed by Greece’s creditors.
