The New Left Parties: a False Dawn? [video]

A WIN discussion, February 2004. The traditional parties of the working-class find themselves today everywhere in free fall. In recent elections, the French Socialist Party won 1.7%; the Swedish Social-Democrats their lowest vote for a century; the German SPD has been overtaken by the racist AfD; the Italian Communist Party has evaporated. But over the last decade alternative left parties or movements have sprung up in several countries: SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise in France and several others, alongside the huge groundswells of support for Corbyn in Britain and Sanders in the USA. These all raised the hopes of worker militants and especially the youth… only in most cases to rapidly crash and disintegrate: a process paving the way for a dangerous resurgence of the far right. A prime example is SYRIZA in Greece, which came to power in 2015 promising to challenge the stranglehold of the banks, and almost immediately afterwards capitulated to them. The Greek Marxist Andros Payiatsos introduced a review of this process and offered an alternative socialist strategy.