Posts By Rónán Burtenshaw

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Tsipras in London: “Europe is the field of the class fight”

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The following questions and answers with an audience took place after a talk Alexis Tsipras gave to SYRIZA’s London branch in Friend’s House in Euston on Friday, March 15th. Coverage of the speech itself can be found here. Some of the questions have been condensed to remove lengthy preambles and/or tangents but they remain an accurate reflection of the query posed by the audience member. Rónán Burtenshaw

Q. Could you give us a few reflections on what we can learn from the Left in Latin America and particularly the legacy of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela?

A. That’s a good question because I was in Venezuela a few days ago. What impressed me about my recent visit was the tens of thousands of people waiting patiently to go past the remains of Chávez. They weren’t expressing grief waiting to pay their final respects but they were showing hope, resolution and determination. This signifies that for the last fourteen years this process has been ongoing in Venezuela and is continuing. This shows us that no social transformation or movement can be sustained without popular support. Chávez was accused by his opponents of being a dictator but I have not met many dictators who have won thirteen elections in fourteen years. For us it is clear proof that without popular support it is not possible to carry out these reforms. This is what we can learn from the Latin American experience, and particularly Venezuela.

Q. How can Greece create enough room to manoeuvre at the international level to resist pressure from the creditors, the IMF and the EU and follow a real alternative path to austerity?

A. How will our lenders, creditors and our partners in the European Union be able to answer that question? It would be the first time that they are under this pressure from a government with popular support. How would they deal with this pressure? I am certain that austerity isn’t the way out of this crisis and, in fact, that it is the political aim of those who force it upon us. They are fully aware of that. They want to blackmail people with this enormous debt, which has been worsened by government policy, and by the threat of expulsion from the Euro. The clear aim is to create the conditions where the southern European belt will be a place of cheap labour and favourable conditions for exploitation, and they have been confronted so far with no opposition from any of the governments from the south. Instead what these governments are doing is accepting every absurd measure that’s being proposed to them. But once they have resistance from a government with popular support the balance of fear will change, it would move to the other side of the battlefield.

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Tsipras in London: “SYRIZA has a responsibility to put an end to this social disaster”

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This is the first of a two-part on the SYRIZA London event with Alexis Tsipras on March 15th. The second will cover the more discursive question and answer session which followed his speech as well as my own reflections on the ideas and proposals he put forward. Rónán Burtenshaw

Alexis Tsipras arrived in Friend’s Meeting House in Euston on Friday evening for the final leg of a three-day London tour. He used the trip to make connections with the British centre-left establishment – meeting with members of the Labour shadow government, speaking at the London School of Economics (LSE) and doing interviews with Channel Four and the Guardian. Friday was more informal – a public address organised by his SYRIZA party’s London branch in front of a mixed audience, largely made up of British leftists and Greeks, that numbered about a thousand. Tony Benn, the democratic socialist former Labour MP, had been scheduled to introduce Tsipras but was unable to attend for medical reasons. He sent a statement instead, read out by members of the Greek Solidarity Campaign in Britain, which called SYRIZA “the party of hope for Greece and democracy in Europe.”

Tsipras began his speech by framing the European conflict as a battle between neoliberalism and democracy. “Europe is on edge, with two forces colliding. On one side stands the productive forces of democracy, the people fighting to create a society of justice, equality and freedom. And on the other side a neoliberal political project unfolds. Its aim is to control bodies and minds through the politics of fear, to discipline human life in its entirety, to intensify the exploitation of labour and to increase the profits of capital.” SYRIZA, he said, “declare that we are part of the experiment of democracy.”

The struggle for democracy was the central pillar of the speech – its references far outnumbering those of socialism or equality. It was raised as a popular and radical demand, one that would undermine the legitimacy of the established order and halt the advance of neoliberal capitalism. “Syriza believes that radical democratic changes are the only way out of the crisis for the people of Europe. This is not an optimistic illusion. It is the compelling conclusion of rational argument and detailed analysis.”

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Raceocracy: An Interview with Dr. Barnor Hesse – Part 1

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“If you’re going to mobilise against racism as an ideology and want to affirm the importance of democracy, you’ve got to realise that, in terms of its performative immediacy, western democracies promote racial equality and sustain racial inequality.”

In the first part of an interview series Dr. Barnor Hesse, Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Northwestern University, talks to student journalist Rónán Burtenshaw about how the performance of race shapes our politics and governance.

Q. Can you tell us a bit about your intellectual background?

I grew up in a politically left-wing family in Liverpool, with a father from Ghana and a mother from Jamaica, and a younger brother also born in Liverpool. My father was particularly influential on my thinking, given his activist experiences in anti-racism, anti-colonialism, trade unionism and Left Labour party politics more generally. Without digressing too much into my background let me say, by the time I was doing my PhD in Government at Essex University during the early 1990s in the “ideology and discourse analysis” program, I had acquired enough intellectual and activist dislocations and concerns of my own to begin questioning the ways in which we have erroneously come to understand the political institution of race in the West and how black politics, has  been socially pathologized and violently repudiated by western liberal democracies, while remaining remarkably under theorized by its practitioners. Add to that gestation the fact that my approach to these matters is heavily indebted to cultural studies, post-colonial studies, African American studies, post-Marxism and post-structuralism, and you have a quick portrait of me as a Black British academic.

Since becoming a professional academic my particular theoretical interests have been focussed on rethinking the meaning and materiality of race as a form of western colonial governance, and trying to provide a more theoretically sophisticated account of black politics as symptomatically oppositional to that regime. The latter was always interesting to me because growing up and living as a person of colour in the west, it is impossible to escape being saturated with white western scholarship, where various lineages of blackness in politics, cultures and histories are pathologized, marginalized or exorcised. Routinely what you find as an black academic or activist, particularly in Europe, is that the intellectual lineages in which you seek to locate yourself are mostly available as raw empirical, statistical experiences or as histories of racist images for white European thinkers to theorise, and that’s assuming black related experiences are even seen as worthy of theorisation in the western academy; often they are not. This was always the difficulty with finding one’s self located in the British academy. Nevertheless I have always been interested in trying to understand the West’s European colonial formation and its politics of race as constitutive of its mainstream liberal democratic institutions rather than exceptions to their rule, which is the conventional understanding.

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