Statement of the Communist Tendency leaving Syriza

Originally published on 24 August 2015

The Communist Tendency participates in Popular Unity and invites all its friends and supporters to do the same. Read the report.

The representatives of the Communist Tendency in the Central Committee of SYRIZA, Stamatis Karagianopoulos and Orestis Doulos, its representative in the central council of the SYRIZA youth, Ilias Kirousis, and the members of the editorial board of the newspaper “Epanastasi”, of the magazine “Marxistiki Foni” and of the website www.marxismos.com, together with the members from the Tendency belonging to dozens of party organs and to the youth, declare that we support Popular Unity, that we participate actively in its foundation and in the efforts to strengthen its political influence.

We would like to clarify that this self-evident break with the party that still carries the name “Coalition of the Radical Left” (SYRIZA) is only a formality. In essence, we and the thousands of left-wing militants that have rallied to Popular Unity have not given up or split from the party. The party has already dissolved itself. The leadership faction, with its policies and the methods it has used to implement them, collaborating with the ruling class and the imperialist creditors of the Greek state, has done away with SYRIZA as a left-wing party. It is no longer capable of representing the interests of the working class and the oppressed layers of society.

The Communist Tendency was established in April 2013, tabling the only alternative, oppositional document to the official theses of the leadership faction at the founding congress of SYRIZA. The political positions of the Communist Tendency were backed by hundreds of party members from all over Greece, to the effect that the Tendency, despite its young age, obtained representation in the Central Committee of SYRIZA and in the Central Council of the Youth. From then on, it clearly and promptly, in all its interventions in the party organs and also in its public statements, warned of the dire consequences of the Social Democratic policies of the leadership faction. The Tendency opposed this political line boldly and systematically. It is no accident that the Communist Tendency was the only faction that was barred from the list of SYRIZA candidates for the elections of the 25^th of January. This was in spite of the fact that some of its members had been recommended to stand as MPs in the internal party proceedings. It was also, more generally, the only group that did not “enjoy” any of the privileges offered by the party apparatus, such as funding, full-time positions, etc.

SYRIZA has been dissolved due to the Social Democratic-bourgeois line of the party leadership. What failed and was defeated are not the fundamental revolutionary principles of the left-wing, communist movement, but the ideas of reformism; the utopian and objectively treacherous belief in the possibility for a “progressive” type of capitalism “with a human face”. The chief political and ideological conclusion that flows from the fall of SYRIZA is the need to return to the principles of genuine, scientific socialism.

Popular Unity represents today a necessary initiative to rally the thousands of left-wing activists that remain faithful to the fight for the radical transformation of society. The Communist Tendency, which is already participating actively in Popular Unity on the frontline of its struggle, invites its friends and supporters to do the same thing. In this new political battlefield the weapons of the Communist Tendency remain the same, the ideas and the programme of scientific socialism, which are the only ones that can really achieve the vital goal of doing away with the memoranda and with savage austerity measures and with the capitalist system that creates them.