With the housing bubble set to burst (when rather than if), the National government selling state housing, and homelessness on the rise, housing and homelessness are key concerns for anyone concerned with social and economic justice. A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Joel Cosgrove (Fightback) will speak on the political economy of the housing crisis.

Steve Flude from The Soup Kitchen will provide an outline of the Te Mahana, Wellingtons collaborative approach to homelessness and the prevention of homelessness.

Session for Fightback Conference 2015.

Free entry (koha appreciated).

Food and drinks provided. Special thanks to the Tertiary Education Union for a donation to assist with catering for this event.

Children welcome. Wheelchair-accessible. Please let us know if you need any assistance to make this event more accessible.

2:30-4pm, Saturday 4th July
St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington
[Facebook event]

A look at tertiary education, capitalism and resistance. What is the purpose of education? What needs to change? How can we get there?

Speakers:
Sandra Grey, Tertiary Education Union President
Ian Anderson, VUW student and communist

Session for Fightback Conference 2015.

Free entry (koha appreciated).

Food and drinks provided. Special thanks to the Tertiary Education Union for a donation to assist with catering for this event.

Children welcome. Wheelchair-accessible. Please let us know if you need any assistance to make this event more accessible.

1-2:30pm, Saturday 4th July
St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington
[Facebook event]

Public pressure in the wake of the Roastbusters case resulted in some small concessions – reallocation of funding to sexual violence support services, advice that schools should include consent education. This is far from enough. Sexual violence prevention and support initiatives continue to be dangerously underfunded, and consent education in schools is not compulsory or consistent. How can we address gendered violence and implement a consent-based approach in our communities? What are the barriers to transformation?

Sandra Dickson is a Pakeha feminist who has worked to end gendered violence for more than two decades. She will talk about what research tells us works to prevent sexual violence, and why working in schools could be the best chance we have to change rape culture in New Zealand – if we get it right.

Session for Fightback Conference 2015.

Free entry (koha appreciated).

Food and drinks provided. Special thanks to the Tertiary Education Union for a donation to assist with catering for this event.

Children welcome. Wheelchair-accessible. Please let us know if you need any assistance to make this event more accessible.

10:30am-12pm, Saturday 4th July
St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington
[Facebook event]

In the wake of another crushing electoral defeat for the left, in a period with record-low strikes and record-low voter turnout, how do we begin again? Where next for the Left? A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Daphne Lawless is an indexer, translator, editor, electronic musician and goalkeeper based in Auckland. She is a ten-year veteran of the radical left and co-editor of Fightback’s regular magazine.

Giovanni Tiso is a writer, blogger and translator based in Wellington. His main area of activism is around disability and school inclusion.

Opening night panel for Fightback Conference 2015.

Free entry (koha appreciated).

Food and drinks provided. Special thanks to the Tertiary Education Union for a donation to assist with catering for this event.

Children welcome. Wheelchair-accessible. Please let us know if you need any assistance to make this event more accessible.

8-10pm, Friday 3rd July
St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington
[Facebook event]

Land of the Dead (2005), which portrays an increasingly conscious zombie uprising.

By Thomas Road (Fightback Otautahi / Christchurch).

A zombie is haunting New Zealand – the zombie of Marxism. The narrative of zombie apocalypse is familiar, and has had a significant resurgence in popular culture over the last few years. The image of the zombie has long been what Mark Dery punningly calls a ‘bloated signifier’, an image which is loaded with ideology, myths, ideas, and connotations.

Whether in Métraux‘s study Voodoo In Haiti where the colonial-economic origins of the zombie myth are explored and the reanimated wage slave is “a beast of burden that his master exploits without mercy”¹ or in the resolution of the satirical zombie flick Shaun of the Dead where the undead are reintegrated into society with low paid jobs in the workforce, the zombie often seems to stand in as a gothic symbol of the ‘masses’. These unwashed masses, represented by the zombie, will come to represent the different anxieties of society at the time. George A. Romero’s series of zombie films made over a period of four decades (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead) exemplify this well. A particular comparison of Dawn and Land is especially informative. The zombies of Dawn of the Dead are memorable as the most blatant anti-consumerist symbolism – literally banging on the walls of a mall, coinciding with the rise of consumer culture they become a representation of the worst fears of a liberal middle class being kettled into the cultural quagmire of “I spend therefore I am”². With Land of the Dead Romero’s zombies take on a wholly different character and become the protagonists – an oppressed class achieving consciousness to overthrow their exploiters in the form of the remnant human society which slaughters them for amusement³. Zombies, then, are much like the nostalgic musings of the social democratic Labour Party faithful – with the shambling remnants of organised labour on the march – a nostalgia which is no less a decaying reanimated corpse than the zombie itself.

Beyond this, zombie narratives changing character over time represent a world after the AIDS crisis, the fear of avian flu, of the insurgents within society seeking to disrupt the social order. A zombie crawling out of a grave as some kind of ‘outside’ threat has all but disappeared to be replaced with the zombie threat within – when our peers suddenly turn against us and destabilise society. Films like 28 Days Later and the shift from undead to infected indicates the more palpable fear of mega-bugs wiping out huge swathes of humanity. Rather than the shambling rotting corpse of yesterday, zombies now move at lightning speed – no longer the unionist strike but the riot. The post apocalyptic wastelands of zombie world’s are reflections of the economic apocalypse of the Global Financial Crisis, the curiosity of the ‘dead mall’ with a downturn in spending creating retail ghost-towns across much of the OECD.

The zombie, in fact, contains a much more sinister and reactionary image. As an iteration of the popular imaginary, it is a grand example of sooner imagining the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But more than that, zombie narratives are the fears of the elite generalised. It is always the gated community, often being in fact a space of embattled whiteness, which survives best in the looming zombie apocalypse. In an era when the middle and ruling classes are quickly cloistering themselves away from the rest of us, the dispossessed masses outside the gates appears as the majority of the planet – and the worst fear is that somehow the infected and subhuman will penetrate these zones of security. Travis County residents in Christchurch were in a furore over a prefab unit being built in their neighbourhood – an unacceptable insurgence of the unwashed masses, probably renters, into their idyllic community⁴. Phil Ochs’ classic Ringing of Revolution of and the mansion on a hill – the last bastion for the ruling classes mirrors the phenomenon:

In a building of gold, with riches untold, lived the families on which the country was founded
And the merchants of style, with their made velvet smiles, were there, for they also were hounded.
And the soft middle class crowded in to the last, for the building was fully surrounded.
And the noise outside was the ringing of revolution ⁵

Indeed, the cloistering of the survivors into highly militarised mini-states in a zombie narrative is reflected in real life by the actions of states across the Anglosphere and Western Europe. Most explicitly represented in World War Z by the state of Israel’s ability to resist the oncoming zombie horde, the highly militarised and exceptionalist nations of the world are clamping down on security and immigration. Whether it’s the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Labour Party and New Zealand First⁶, the Nauru Detention Centre⁷, Obama’s record rate of deportations⁸, or new legislation in the UK which looks to expel all immigrants earning less than £35,000⁹, it is clear that the ruling class is preparing for scenarios where separating the dispossessed and most exploited sections of society is essential.

It’s widely known that Marx himself was a great fan of the gothic novel, notably the opening passage of The Communist Manifesto spoke of the spectre haunting Europe – and the imagery associated to the ruling class is nothing less than vampiric. However, contemporary Marxist formations may have taken on this gothic character in quite the wrong ways. The Socialist Workers Party UK has been criticised since the 80s, along with many similar activist organisations, as a self-perpetuating ghoul. Recruiting from idealistic under graduates whose brains are consumed for fuel and are then discarded, burnt out, and are often put off politics for a life time. Richard Seymour, formerly of the SWP writes eloquently about how the business as usual Marxism in the UK seems more and more about banging our heads against a wall¹⁰. A futile re-enactment of the life of the glory days – various theorists arguing that we must return to whatever their personal favourite year was for true militant activism. This ritualistic headless activism may not be dominant in New Zealand. The anti-capitalist left is largely starting from square one, but woe to us if we do not learn from other parts of the world the easy traps of organisational forms that are more concerned with their own self preservation than with overthrowing the oppressive social order.

Avoiding the zombification of Marxism is paramount, and doing so will require a commitment to opposing the traps of headlessness, of the nostalgia for a reanimated corpse of the post-war welfare state, and instead developing a collective vision of a society beyond capitalism. We must allow ourselves the time to stop and seriously assess the situation, in order to avoid clawing aimlessly at the walls built to fortify the ruling class from the mess they’ve created. Capitalism itself alienates us completely from our own lives, and a left which does not clearly aim towards the continuous rupture of this state of affairs will be just as stale and paralysed with rigor mortis as the dead end of capitalism.

“More than this, capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital. Young people still have the strength to refuse this death; they are able to rebel against domestication. They demand to live. But to those great numbers of smugly complacent people, who live on empty dreams and fantasies, this demand, this passionate need just seems irrational, or, at best, a paradise which is by definition inaccessible.” ¹¹

The Mattachine Society, a ‘respectable’ gay organisation, opposed the Stonewall Riots which kicked off the Pride movement. Policing of queer politics for respectability continues to this day.

Article by Emilie & No Pride in Prisons concerning events at Auckland Pride 2015, reprinted from GayNZ.

Trigger warning: Rape mention.

I: ON THE EVENTS OF PRIDE 2015

Earlier this year, Auckland Pride Festival Incorporated (Pride Inc.) permitted the New Zealand Police Force and Department of Corrections to march their members in uniform and on horseback in our parade. The New Zealand Police Force engage in structurally racist policing practices, as does the Department of Corrections – from apprehension to conviction to sentencing, they institutionally discriminate against Māori. Most sickeningly, the Department of Corrections forces many trans women to serve their sentences in men’s prisons, where they are at extreme risk of sexual violence. They refused an Official Information Act request so we have no idea how many trans women they are subjecting to this treatment. We are not even allowed to know for sure what steps they take to protect trans women from sexual violence during their incarceration, but every indication seems to be that they simply put us into ‘protective’ solitary confinement for extended periods of time – a practice defined by the United Nations as torture. By every metric, these institutions are shamefully discriminatory ones – the Department of Corrections in particular were keeping Wellington trans woman Jade Follett in a men’s prison during the period the parade took place.

Pride Inc. did not only allow employees of these institutions to march in the parade – certainly, those individuals have the right to be proud of themselves as queers and march – but by inviting these institutions to march their employees en masse and in uniform, Pride Inc. used our parade to explicitly endorse these institutionally discriminatory organisations. This was a cynical hijacking of our parade, intended to celebrate our communities’ acceptance of a society which wants us dead or worse, to cosy up to repressive state apparatuses who only serve the needs of a white, middle class, cisgender clique. None of us have anything in common with these people, nor they with us. All they want is a position of power and comfort from which they can sell out our parade, our resistance, our community. Pride Inc. exist to sell us out to whichever bank or political entity will pay up, be they labour abusers like ANZ or apartheid terror states like Israel. Pride should be worth more than that.

This year a number of our members nonviolently impeded the Police Force as they marched in pride of place in our parade and I, the only visibly Māori and trans member of the group, was assaulted by a member of Pride Inc.’s security, who broke my arm and hospitalised me for days. (For the record – it was a broken arm, not a hairline fracture). This is the price of addressing Pride Inc.’s hypocrisy. This is what Pride Inc. values. Marginalised queers need to stay in the margins, or we will be forced there with violence. This is what Pride Inc. has made our parade into – an opportunity not to challenge the powers which destroy us and celebrate our victories over them, but to regurgitate their PR and participate in their marketing.

We are not proud of our racist cops. We are not proud of our torturing jailers. We are ashamed of them, we are ashamed that they marched in our parade – we have no faith in Pride Inc. and no pride in prisons.

Pic from GayNZ.

II: IN THE AFTERMATH

Neither Pride Inc. nor the closely affiliated Gay Auckland Business Association (GABA), responded with anything but denial. The president of GABA can be seen in footage of my assault harassing me and trying to destroy another protester’s cellphone footage. They exploited the chaos immediately after the parade to pass off everything as unconfirmed rumours, even after the reality of my injury came to light. They have consistently refused to communicate with No Pride In Prisons in any manner more comprehensive or sensitive than publicly casting us as troublemakers, even fabricating details of No Pride In Prisons protesters assaulting parade-goers. The police were similarly more invested in making it clear that it was security who broke my arm than in taking any action to apprehend the man who had just dragged me by the hair and broke my arm in front of dozens of uniformed police officers. Four months later and I’ve still yet to hear anything from the investigation which the police promised.

GABA in particular were very hostile. Their refusal to be held accountable by the community extended so far as to include blocking all persons under 21 from engaging with them on Facebook – a striking decision from an organization which funds scholarships for school-leaving youth, their recipients including at least one member of No Pride In Prisons.

The public reaction on social media was much the same. Myself and No Pride In Prisons were incessantly attacked by members of the community. Some sent rape and death threats. Is this what we, as a community, want around our pride events? Rape threats and broken bones for young women sick of prison violence against queers and glory for the government departments who facilitate it? Are Māori queers and queer prisoners to be less welcome in Pride than their jailers?

When they incorporated themselves, Pride Inc. also opted to sever all of their obligations to uphold the Treaty of Waitangi. This is extremely worrying, and extremely telling. When a majority-Pākehā organisation takes steps to explicitly exclude itself from accountability to Māori members of the community which it claims to be representing, we are at risk of being further disenfranchised. Just as your queerness is precious to you, so are Māori experiences of sexuality and gender precious to us. These traditions were almost lost to us during colonisation, just as our language was almost almost lost. Like te reo Māori, the Treaty of Waitangi promises Māori the right to retain our precious cultural practices – including the uniquely Māori traditions of takatāpui. Any organisation purporting to be representing queers must accept the responsibility to work in partnership with takatāpui – not the tokenising, disrespectful, ultimately violent disregard Pride Inc. has shown us.

III: WHAT IS TO BE DONE
Over the past few decades, we’ve seen the increasing commercialisation and corporatisation of Pride, wherein businesses and organisations with a financial stake in Pride events come to be prioritised over those most marginalised members of queer communities. No Pride in Prisons’ original message was that the first Pride at Stonewall Inn was a riot, against the police, and that this legacy has been appropriated and erased by the subsequent Pride movement. What we saw at the 2015 Auckland Pride Festival was precisely this trend. We saw the visibility and prioritisation of corporations, oppressive institutions, banks, those members of Tāmaki Makaurau’s queer community who least need the movement, and the violent exclusion of anyone who objected.

The fact that the body running the Auckland Pride Festival now exists as an incorporated society, rather than a charity, means that those organising the Festival have a vested financial interest in the events. It also means that Pride Inc. creates the rules which govern its conduct. Pride Inc. is capable of evading accountability for its conduct and decisions to a far greater extent than it could as a public charity. In light of the events at Auckland Pride Festival 2015, this should worry the queer community.

No Pride in Prisons believes that when Auckland Pride Festival broke the arm of a protester, police neglected to allow her immediate treatment, and known Pride Inc. officials responded to the protest with disdain and vitriol, Pride Inc. lost its mandate to hold Pride events. Pride Inc. has proven its inability and unwillingness to listen to members of the community it professes to serve. As a group, they no longer represent us; indeed, they never did.

The time has well passed for them to be removed and allow for us to build something new; something better.

See also

• 7 Thoughts on Pride and the act of Protesting, Kassie Hartendorp

Fightback recently launched a campaign for paid radical writing by women and gender minorities.

This campaign has now reached its goal of $2600, with three days to spare.

This means we can pay all contributors a minimum of $100 per page.

While Fightback can cover the costs of printing, we couldn’t have raised the funds to pay contributors without wider support, so we thank everyone who has pledged.

Fightback is a socialist-feminist, ecosocialist organisation (fightback.org.nz/about) that holds an annual public conference. This year we’re holding the public sessions at St Andrews on the Terrace, Wellington, on the 3^rd-4^th of July [Facebook event]

If you’re interested in possibilities for transforming our exploitative, oppressive society on the basis of social and ecological justice, feel free to come along and discuss!

Free entry (koha appreciated).

Food and drinks provided.

Children welcome. Wheelchair-accessible. Please let us know if you need any assistance to make this event accessible.

This event will have Safer Spaces Contacts available in case you need to raise any concerns related to sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or other forms of oppression and inaccessibility. These contacts will be marked out on the day. Our Accessibility & Safer Spaces Policy is available here.

Special thanks to the Tertiary Education Union for a donation to assist with catering for this event.

See below for schedule:

FRIDAY 3rd July (St Andrews on the Terrace)

8pm – Taking stock: Where to for the Left?
In the wake of another crushing electoral defeat for the left, in a period with record-low strikes and record-low voter turnout, how do we begin again? Where next for the Left? A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Daphne Lawless is an indexer, translator, editor, electronic musician and goalkeeper based in Auckland. She is a ten-year veteran of the radical left and co-editor of Fightback’s regular magazine.

Giovanni Tiso is a writer, blogger and translator based in Wellington. His main area of activism is around disability and school inclusion.
[Facebook event]

SATURDAY 4th July (St Andrews on the Terrace)

10am: Registration

10:30am: Consent education in our communities
Public pressure in the wake of the Roastbusters case resulted in some small concessions – reallocation of funding to sexual violence support services, advice that schools should include consent education. This is far from enough. Sexual violence prevention and support initiatives continue to be dangerously underfunded, and consent education in schools is not compulsory or consistent. How can we address gendered violence and implement a consent-based approach in our communities? What are the barriers to transformation?

Sandra Dickson is a Pakeha feminist who has worked to end gendered violence for more than two decades. She will talk about what research tells us works to prevent sexual violence, and why working in schools could be the best chance we have to change rape culture in New Zealand – if we get it right.
[Facebook event]

12pm: Lunch

1pm: Transforming tertiary education
A look at tertiary education, capitalism and resistance. What is the purpose of education? What needs to change? How can we get there?

Speakers:
Sandra Grey, Tertiary Education Union President
Ian Anderson, VUW student and communist
[Facebook event]

2:30pm: Housing and homelessness forum
With the housing bubble set to burst (when rather than if), the National government selling state housing, and homelessness on the rise, housing and homelessness are key concerns for anyone concerned with social and economic justice. A discussion facilitated by Fightback.

Joel Cosgrove (Fightback) will speak on the political economy of the housing crisis.

Steve Flude from The Soup Kitchen will provide an outline of the Te Mahana, Wellingtons collaborative approach to homelessness and the prevention of homelessness.
[Facebook event]

4pm: Break

4:30pm: Reflections on the Zero Hours campaign
In a period when the capitalist class is winning the war, battle victories for our side are precious. Unite’s success in beating back Zero Hour Contracts at major fast food chains is a rare exception to a 30-year rule of expanding casualisation.

Heleyni Pratley, Unite organiser for Wellington, leads a discussion on this campaign.
[Facebook event]

BBC: Syriza supporters celebrate election victory at HQ.

On Friday, Greece delayed its debt payment to the International Monetary Fund. Is a default imminent?

Michael Roberts has worked as an economist for over thirty years in the City of London financial center. His new book,The Long Depression, is out next month from Haymarket.

Article republished from Jacobin Magazine.

In the early hours of Friday morning, according to the British paper the Daily Telegraph, five key players in the Syriza government, meeting in the Maximus Mansion in Athens, made an important decision. They decided that the government would not pay the International Monetary Fund (IMF) its debt repayment installment due that day. Apparently, IMF chief Christine Lagarde was caught badly off guard. IMF officials in Washington were stunned.

The Syriza leaders had the money to pay: it had been raked up from various sources, and they had told Lagarde that they would pay. But at the late hour, they decided not to pay but instead “bundle” all the repayments scheduled for June into one payment at the end of June — or €1.6 billion. This was allowable under IMF rules but had only happened once before (Zambia in the 1980s).

The reason that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, and the other Greek government leaders decided to hold back payment was two-fold.

First, they were really angry that the IMF and the Eurogroup had completely refused to make any serious compromises on the terms of an agreement to release outstanding funds under the existing “bailout” package, despite the Greeks making huge concessions in the negotiations since an extension was agreed to in February.

Also, the leaders knew that their Syriza party members and members of parliament were incandescent at the attitude of the troika (the IMF, the European Union, and the European Central Bank). There was no way that they were going to support any deal along the lines of further austerity and neoliberal measures demanded by the troika. So the Greeks have fired a warning shot across the bows of the IMF and the Eurogroup, hinting that they may prefer to default rather than be forced into further concessions.

According to sources for the Daily Telegraph, the IMF representative in the negotiations, Poul Thomsen, has “pushed the austerity agendawith a curious passion that shocks even officials in the European Commission, pussy cats by comparison.”

The IMF is demanding further sweeping measures of austerity at a time when the Greek government debt burden stands at 180% of GDP, when the Greeks have already applied the biggest swing in budget deficit to surplus by any government since the 1930s and when further austerity would only drive the Greek capitalist economy even deeper into its depression.

As the Telegraph summed it up: “six years of depression, a deflationary spiral, a 26pc fall GDP, 60pc youth unemployment, mass exodus of the young and the brightest, chronic hysteresis that will blight Greece’s prospects for a decade to come.”

The Syriza government has already made many significant retreats from its election promises and wishes (see Syriza’s latest proposalshere). Many “red lines” have been crossed already.

It has dropped the demand for the cancellation of all or part of the government debt; it has agreed to carry through most of the privatizations imposed under the agreement reached with the previous conservative New Democracy government; it has agreed to increased taxation in various areas; it is willing to introduce “labor reforms”; and it has postponed the implementation of a higher minimum wage and the re-employment of thousands of sacked staff.

But the IMF and Eurogroup wanted even more. The troika has agreed that the original targets for a budget surplus (before interest payments on debt) could be reduced from 3–4 percent of GDP a year up to 2020 to 1 percent this year, rising to 2 percent next year, etc. But this is no real concession because government tax revenues have collapsed during the negotiation period.

At the end of 2014, the New Democracy government said that it would end the bailout package and take no more money because it could repay its debt obligations from then on, as the government was running a primary surplus sufficient to do so. But that surplus has now disappeared as rich Greeks continue to hide their money and avoid tax payments and small businesses and employees hold back on paying, uncertain about what is going to happen. The general government primary cash surplus has narrowed by more than 59 percent to €651 million in the four-month period of 2015 from 1.6 billion in the corresponding period last year.

The Syriza government has only been able to pay its government employees their wages and meet state pension outgoings by stopping all payments of bills to suppliers in the health service, schools, and other public services. The result is that the government has managed to scrape together just enough funds to meet IMF and ECB repayments in the last few months, while hospitals have no medicines and equipment, schools have no books and materials, and doctors and teachers leave the country.

Even Ashoka Mody, former chief of the IMF’s bailout in Ireland, has criticized the attitude of his successor in the Greek negotiations:“Everything that we have learned over the last five years is that it is stunningly bad economics to enforce austerity on a country when it is in a deflationary cycle. Trauma patients have to heal their wounds before they can train for the 10K.”

The final red lines have been reached. What the Syriza leaders finally balked at was the demand by the IMF and the Eurogroup that the government raise the VAT on electricity by 10 percentage points, directly hitting the fuel payments of the poorest; and also that the poorest state pensioners have their pensions cuts so that the social security system could balance its books.

Further down the road, the troika wants major cuts in the pensions system by raising the retirement ages and increasing contributions. The Syriza leaders were even prepared to agree to some VAT rises and pension “reforms,” but the two specific demands of the troika appear to have been just too much.

As Mody put it: “I am frankly shocked that we are even having a discussion about raising VAT at all in these circumstances. We have just seen a premature rise in VAT knock the wind out of a country as strong as Japan.” 

As for pensions, they have already been slashed under previous bailout agreements with the Troika. Main pensions have been slashed 44–48 percent since 2010, reducing the average pension to €700 a month. Contributors to a supplementary scheme receive a top-up averaging €170 a month. About 45 percent of Greek pensioners receive less than €665 monthly — below the official poverty threshold.

The troika wants more. It is pressing for across-the-board cuts in both main and supplementary pensions; the abolition of a special monthly stipend for pensioners receiving the lowest benefits; an increase in the retirement age to sixty-seven; the ending of special arrangements that allow working mothers and people in “dangerous” occupations to retire early on full pensions; and the merger of dozens of sectoral pension funds into three main funds.

The horrible truth is that none of these further cuts would be necessary if the troika had just cancelled some of Greece’s public sector debt back in 2012 when the debt was “restructured.” Instead, the banks of Germany and France were paid off for their holdings of Greek government bonds with just a small “haircut,” and the debt burden then fell on the shoulders of the new eurozone bailout institutions and Greece’s own pension funds.

Greece’s pension funds lost an estimated €25 billion of reserves that were held in government bonds as a result of the debt restructuring. They have been unable to replenish them. Meanwhile, contributions to the system fell sharply as unemployment soared above 25 percent and outlays rose sharply as more than sixty thousand public sector workers opted for early retirement, fearing their jobs would soon be eliminated.

The reality is that Greece can never pay back these loans. Greek capitalism is in a deep depression and experiencing deflation.  The OECD has just slashed its Greek GDP estimates to 0.1% in 2015 from 2.3% in its previous forecast published last November. So the debt burden is rising not falling despite (and partly because of) austerity. The IMF recognizes this and suggests that the Eurogroup agree to a haircut on its loans (while the IMF still expects full repayment of its loans).

The Eurogroup has already agreed that no repayments on its debt need be made until 2020, but won’t agree to a debt haircut (yet). And both the IMF and the Eurogroup want to cut the debt in the meantime and thus are demanding more austerity measures.

Syriza has made a very modest proposal to cut the debt burden in the future, but this proposal has been ignored by the troika, at least until Greece capitulates on the current bailout terms.

The Greek government is running out of cash to pay back the IMF and the ECB, and very big repayments are scheduled for July and August. It will definitely run out of money by the end of this month, when the choice will be between paying the IMF the bundled-up debt or paying government workers their wages.

The cruel irony is that if Syriza agrees to the demands of the troika on VAT, pensions, and other austerity measures, the money it receives under the existing bailout agreement of €7.2 billion (and some €1.9 billion in held-back ECB profits on Greek bonds) would just beimmediately transferred back to the IMF and the ECB. Nothing would touch the sides of the Greek government to pay its employees or suppliers.

So even if there’s a deal soon (and it will have to be done probably by June 18, when the next euro summit takes place, so that the German and Greek parliaments have time to endorse the deal), almost immediately negotiations will have to be concluded on a new package so the Greeks can make repayments to the IMF (scheduled up to April 2016) and to finance any deficits and interest payments down the road. Greece will be tied into another five years of austerity.

The late-night decision of the Syriza leaders shows that they have reached the end of their tether and it will not be possible to persuade their own party to accept troika demands that would mean accepting in full everything that the previous New Democracy government agreed to. If that happened, what would be the point of a Syriza government, supposedly elected to reverse austerity?

According to opinion polls, the Greek people still overwhelmingly want to stay in the eurozone and they still give strong support to Syriza in polls, but support for the government’s negotiations with the troika has been fading. The people want a deal but they don’t want austerity. This appears to be an unresolvable conundrum.

What next then? Well, assuming that the troika does not blink and drops its latest demands, and assuming that the Syriza leaders do not capitulate, then default on the debt will take place at the end of this month. The government will have to take steps to introduce capital controls to stop the flow of funds out of the banks and abroad, already sizable in the last few months.

In my view, Syriza would finally have to grasp the nettle and take over the banks; reverse all austerity measures; launch a program for state investment and jobs and appeal directly to labor movements in Europe for a continent-wide program of action over the heads of the euro leaders. Up to now, Syriza has failed to do this, but it is not too late to start at ten minutes past midnight.

As I said in a post last March:

The issue for Syriza and the Greek labour movement in June is not whether to break with the euro as such, but whether to break with capitalist policies and implement socialist measures to reverse austerity and launch a pan-European campaign for change. Greece cannot succeed on its own in overcoming the rule of the law of value.