Four years ago, British journalist Paul Mason found himself uncontrollably excited.

He was standing in the middle of Athens’s Syntagma Square, surrounded by thousands of Greek protesters singing songs and chanting slogans from the country’s fight against the dictatorship of the 1970s. Ahead of him was Alexis Tsipras, leader of a six-month-old government now stuck in a protracted battle with European authorities. Tsipras had been campaigning for a “no” vote in the referendum scheduled for the next day, launched as the last move in a standoff with the Eurogroup and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Mason himself had been following these events closely for Britain’s Channel 4 News, as well as informing followers on Twitter and drafting rousing columns for the Guardian.

Mason was hardly alone in his excitement. Jacobin published dozens of articles on the drama. In a July 2015 video, the American anarchist David Graeber said that Syriza would “bring down the international financial system,” while philosopher Toni Negri, always up for a revolt, thought that a “true social Europe” was now “incoming.” In less than a week, “oxi” (Greek for “no”) hashtags had flooded Twitter and led to the foundation of a German newspaper with the same name. As Stathis Kouvelakis put it in 2016, “the Greek case” gave leftists “a glimpse of what an alternative might be.”