In Greece, SYRIZA drafted the Thessaloniki Programme back in September 2014. Prior to this, the coalition released 40 points on policy reform back in May 2012.
Reading these proposals, one is first of all struck by how sane and reasonable they all are. The bottom line principles of these proposals are crystal clear:
(1) Debtors who have no money cannot repay their debts anyway; instead of forcing them to commit suicide, therefore, better let them survive and have them repay gradually.
(2) Researchers who have the skills to contribute to the Greek economy are emigrating rapidly due to lack of job prospects in Greece; therefore, invest in the public sector and hire these skilled workers.
(3) Increased crime rates can also be an economic burden; therefore, take precautionary measures by assuring human rights are protected.
(4) The biggest potential source of revenue for the Greek state is the group of corporations who are making the most profit; therefore, tax these corporations the most heavily.
These are perfectly sensible principles, and their scope seems quite modest. As financial minister Yanis Varoufakis writes in this article, one important priority in Greece at this moment is to prevent brutal, large-scale upheavals. Varoufakis knows very well, as any good historian should, that poverty combined with a hopeless, futureless social system, including most of all a dysfunctional state apparatus, is a dangerously fertile soil for irrational, violent nationalism, or even a coup -- although the last might be less likely in Greece compared to other European states.
These modest suggestions by SYRIZA, however, clearly go against the implicit rules of today's capitalism. Multi-national conglomerates are no longer tied to one particular state; they can jump from one state to the next based on the principle of profitability. The logic of credit and debt is the primary ethical system for those in power such as shareholders, bankers, and CEOs. "Responsibility to shareholders" trumps any other responsibility, including that to millions of ordinary good citizen workers -- who, more often than not, are forced into overwork. And for what? For helping these conglomerates to accumulate profit, so that they might buy up more businesses and "expand." Within the rules of this game, welfare states do not stand a chance of winning, since the latter are emphatically not interested in squeezing out the last drop of labor out of every citizen for the sake of handing over profit to shareholders and helping businesses to keep on expanding their scale.
Traditionally, when corporations still had to base themselves in a particular country and operate under a particular state, governments and laws had the power to tame the logic of profit-making and debt-collection through various measures - mostly the same as the ones proposed by SYRIZA. The problem with today's capitalism is that, if one country decides to tax big businesses for the sake of social welfare, the former simply moves to another, more "profitable" state. In order for the welfare state to work, therefore, all governments around the world must introduce the same level of regulations against corporations. Therefore, there is the familiar free-riders problem. If all governments do turn into welfare states except for one country, corporations who are making the most money would go to this one country. The irony is that although this one country might gain more tax revenues relative to all the others (not because corporations are paying more, but because they are not paying at all to the others), the absolute amount of money which can be spent by the state decreases quite drastically, which is bad news for ordinary citizens who struggle to make a living (the "99%" referred to in the Occupy movement.)
Therefore, what is perhaps most challenging for the current SYRIZA government is to implement point 9 in the proposal: "Combat the banks’ secret [measures] and the flight of capital abroad." Obviously, there is little that can be done to incentivize corporations to stay in countries that are going to take 75% of the income of their top executives in tax. Therefore, the Greek government is left with no other option but coercion. Here, again, there is a risk of a different kind of barbaric backlash. Nonetheless, at least the SYRIZA government is not only more reasonable in terms of their strategy of debt repayment than the previous government, but also displays clearly its care for the Greek citizens, a display desperately needed in a country where suicide rates have risen since the introduction of "unscientific" austerity measures.
