It would be hard to do a better job defending the political project that was Syriza — against both those who have condemned it from the beginning and those who now defend the leadership’s capitulation — than Stathis Kouvelakis has done over the past few months.

Kouvelakis, however, was not only defending Syriza or the “new” European left more broadly, but the very strategy of building mass workers parties — to organize and transform class consciousness through struggle — a strategy that stretches back to the nineteenth century.

Kouvelakis’s stance is very different from those like Tad Tietze who dismiss the possibility of a political alternative to austerity and ask us to instead focus on developing extra-parliamentary movements.