So there has been some fallout from this process in the last period? John Milios is known in the Anglophone world for his books and now for his interview in the Guardian and seems to have taken his distance from the leadership?
Until recently, Milios didn’t have a very specific strategic position within the main economic team, (Dragasakis and Stathakis have been leading the game). His role was to provide a kind of Marxist argumentation against those who were advocating a break, or a clear break, with the EU, and more specifically, on the issue of the euro.
Milios provided a lot of Marxist and radical types of arguments, saying that breaking with euro means the devaluation of labor, a regression to nationalist positions. He more or less accused — in a manner that he has carved out for himself theoretically over decades — people who put forward such themes of breaking with the euro of recycling the old “developmentist” center versus periphery type of approach of the 1970s, and of having as their real political project the development of a nation-centered Greek capitalism.
On this view, presumably, avoiding the break with the euro at any cost acted as almost a mythical guarantee for an internationalist and socialist perspective. What that meant, in terms of concrete choices, was that Milios defended the mildly reformist positions of Dragasakis and Stathakis.
Milios started taking distance from that at two levels. First on the issue of political alliances, where it was clear that, with qualifications, he doesn’t want openings to people coming from Pasok or old establishment elements. He also rejects softening of the anti-neoliberal edges of the program, and I think he was very disappointed by the fact that Syriza in the end doesn’t have a very specific elaboration on the subject of fiscal reform (which was one of his main themes), i.e. audacious redistributive policies — taxing the rich, and so on.
It is quite unclear what Syriza will do with the banks, and what it will do about privatizations. It will certainly cancel at least some of the more scandalous cases of selloffs of public assets at completely ridiculous prices. But the recent statements by Dragasakis and Stathakis about banks and privatization are not very encouraging, clearly retreating from the decisions and commitments of the congress.
So these are very important issues that a Syriza government will have to face, not even in long- or mid-term, but immediately.
