http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/lazarou290715.html
by Athanasios Lazarou
We have to stop talking about Greece. What must emerge from the
calamity of SYRIZA-ANEL is a renewed call for democracy.
There is a scene in the 1972 political satire The Candidate where
Robert Redford looks at the camera and quietly says, "Politicians don't
talk, they make sounds."
For the past five years Greece has been making a lot of sound. For
the past five months, the SYRIZA-led coalition government has been nothing but
noisy. The noise even formed slogans: "No More Austerity!"
"Out with the Troika!" "Yes to a Democratic
Europe!" "Referendum!" But slogans are not the same
as strategies.
Elections and referendums are easy to win, change is harder.
Tragedy
What has happened in Greece is a tragedy. The country now finds
itself in the process of realizing a third Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
The first two MoUs created a humanitarian crisis grinding people down to
subhuman levels: 41% of children in poverty, a 35% increase in suicides, 35.7%
of the population at risk of poverty. Saddled with 177% debt to GDP,
Greece has 27% unemployment with over 50% youth unemployment. 2% of the
population have left since the crisis began in 2010. The economic collapse
is the second largest recorded in modern history, surpassing even the Great
Depression of the United States. Critically, however, the Greek crisis is
still unfolding and is widely predicted to deteriorate further.
People are dying on the streets of Athens. This has to stop.
With each MoU the governing party has fallen trying to implement it.
Greece even had an unelected technocrat government in 2011-2012, and in
the last election a fascist, neo-Nazi party won the third largest number of
seats in parliament.
To complicate matters further, the urban morphology of Athens is not
designed to handle the crisis. Its modern infrastructure is physically
unable to support such a rapid depreciation in living standards. For the
past few winters the skyline of Athens has descended into smog as rising gas
prices have forced people to start wood-fires within their apartments to stay
warm. People have been dying from the smoke, but people have been dying
from the cold too. And no end is in sight.
The present crisis is constantly analyzed and discussed starting from
the preposition that the Greek political class has active agency in its
resolution and possesses the potential for transformational change within the
unfolding Euro-conflicts. This is how SYRIZA has been framed and has
framed itself. It is lazy and wrong -- political identity politics at its
worst.
False Hope
SYRIZA promised a new politics. The only thing that was new was
the party administering it.
SYRIZA stormed
university campuses with police, infringed on the right to
assembly, abused parliamentary process to stifle debate, worked with the Greek oligarch class, carried out mass
privatizations, andsupported the
NATO. They formed a coalition government with a
nationalist party whilst their own parliamentary composition comprised numerous
former PASOK members (the same PASOK whose implementation of the first MoU led
to the aforementioned humanitarian crisis). They refused to address the
law in Greece that gives politicians legal immunity and refused to remove the
electoral law that awards the party with the highest votes extra 50 seats in a
300-seat parliament.
When SYRIZA came to power they promised to remove the "Troika"
from Greece; instead they merely recategorized the Troika as "the
Institutions." The referendum was claimed as a democratic call to
arms, yet it too had severe structural flaws: a 72-word question referred to
two technical documents of fiscal policy that had already lapsed. The
"No" option was moreover placed above the "Yes" option on
the ballot paper. It was an act of political theater.
Despite these numerous and repeated violations of legal, moral, and
political conduct, people still called the party the "radical left"
and assembled in the streets of Athens and throughout Greece in its support.
And people were dismayed when Greece was offered far worse terms than the
ones that they had resoundingly rejected. This is because the Greeks are
desperate for an end to the crisis.
SYRIZA offered a break from the existing model, appearing to emerge from
within itself. Yet all that emerged was an old politics with a new face.
All those who actively supported SYRIZA are complicit. That is how
democracy works.
SYRIZA and the numerous other parties within the Greek political
spectrum whose names even those outside Greece have had to learn over the past
five years (ANEL, PASOK, New Democracy, To Potami) are all part of the same
catalogue of neoliberal political products: they just operate at different ends
of the rhetorical spectrum. Some like New Democracy serve the interests
of capital directly through the monopolies and oligarchs, whilst parties like
SYRIZA co-opt those disenfranchised by them to do the same. One side
serves capital by operating under the promise of economic development at all
costs, the other serves capital by promising a "fairer"
redistribution of the intangible benefits. They are both fuelled by
global capital and at most only look to fiscal policy as remedy. They
both acknowledge the same market-dictated rules of the game. They still
need the same system to function and build upon each other to take turns in
charge, just as they still need to seek "the other" to blame, whether
this takes the form of a rival party or a foreign state.
These are all parties that insist on finding solutions for the problems
of capitalist social and economic relations within
capitalism itself. Rarely is policy communicated
on anything other than an economic indicator. SYRIZA is neither radical
nor left. SYRIZA was
doomed to fail before it took power. History is
not deterministic, but orientations within history are.
People are still dying from the humanitarian crisis. This has to
stop.
Contemporary Capitalist Political Economy Doing What It Does Best
Under the banner of "hope," SYRIZA promised an impossible act
of staying in Europe, rejecting austerity, and implementing a redistributive
social program.
In five months SYRIZA has proved that the quickest way to erode public
support is to throw it away in five minutes and propose measures that even your
critics couldn't have imagined. First Greece was seen as tragedy, now it
is a farce.
Most alarming, the forces of the popular struggle have been betrayed by
the very political apparatus that claimed to represent them: it is only through
the leadership of a party claiming the left mantle such as SYRIZA that the
implementation of a third memorandum could ever be tolerated by a Greek
electorate.
After winning the referendum and mobilizing the largest contemporary
demonstrations in modern Greek history, Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA have
committed what can only be called a post-modern coup d'état: combining activist
network organization with parliamentary and electoral deceit.
The unique position of SYRIZA being in charge of implementing these
agreements as a governing party of the left has eroded the
capacity of large-scale mass mobilization to produce recognizable change within
the political class of Greece up until this point.
After five years of crisis and multiple coalition governments, the Greek
public are worn out of dancing with an exit from the Euro.
Tsipras hasn't capitulated as the headlines suggest. He hasn't
been bullied by Merkel, Schäuble, or Germany -- such
nationalist agitations are unhelpful. Far from it, he is merely the
extension of his and SYRIZA's own political operations reaching their logical
conclusion -- operations that were predetermined the moment he, and the party
he leads, orientated towards a politics within the existing capitalist
political economy.
As the SYRIZA-ANEL dénouement plays out, the problem of our
mesmerization by the party narrative and the parliament spectacle is only now
being mentioned. Paul Mason wrote
in the Guardian:
Syriza itself is the embodiment of a leftism that always believed you
could achieve more in parliament than on the streets. For the leftwing half
of Greek society, though, the result is people continually voting for things
more radical than they are prepared to fight for. . . .
When it comes to the now-abandoned Thessaloniki Programme, the radical
manifesto on which Alexis Tsiprascame
to power, there is always talk of implementing it "from below": that
is, demanding so many workers' rights inside the industries designated for
privatisation that it becomes impossible; or implementing the minimum wage
through wildcat strikes. But it never happens. When strikes are
called, it's by the communists. When riots happen, it's the anarchists.
The rest of leftwing Greece is mesmerised by parliament.
The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical
government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the
"illegal and odious" debt -- as Argentina did successfully -- and
expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan.
There was only a willingness to be "at the table" seeking
"better terms".
Greece Really Doesn't Matter
We must stop talking about Greece. Greece doesn't matter. It
is merely the keygen to more complicated arguments regarding systemic power
struggles within orientations of market capitalism. We have to stop
ceding power to undemocratic institutions such as the ECB, IMF, NATO, and other
acronyms that are omnipresent in modern political discourse. They do not
represent the interests of voters. They have their own interests, be they
financial, geopolitical, or politically polyamorous, and these interests are definitely
not humanitarian, nor democratic. They do not come under the same
scrutiny as elected bodies. They do no debate in open forums, but shake
hands behind closed doors.
The Eurogroup is not a democratic
institution, and the Eurozone was not founded on democratic
principles -- it was founded on the Maastricht treaty: an open market treaty
designed to operate within the functioning of a shared currency. It's
fundamentally a market mechanism that ties economic growth with closer
integration to a central bank. Open market structures by their very
definition are designed to run on inequality. Markets don't care about
democracy, they care about profit. The past five months has made that
abundantly clear.
What Now?
What is needed is the creation of a new possibility.
What is needed is a politics that works democracy as an emancipatory
tool. If the past five years of Greece proves anything, it's that a
political apparatus seeking to promote change by seeking power within a
contemporary capitalist political economy is an approach that has been formally
and practically tested and has failed miserably. SYRIZA had a mandate
from an election, a resounding referendum win, and the mobilization of public
support.
SRYIZA also had a vocal "left" platform rooted in the ideology
of left-Europeanism that emerged out of Eurocommunism. Make no mistake,
the so-called "left platform" of SYRIZA are the worst kind of
collaborators, who sought change by seeking power, and when in power used it to
help carry out a process that could not but create a third MoU that would go
beyond what any of the previous conservative governments had implemented.
The left platform now cry foul of the positions they find themselves in.
The left platform of SYRIZA is an oxymoron: they do not seek change,
they did not revolt during the July 11 vote in parliament that proposed over
€50b of austerity, hand in hand with parties that implemented
the previous memorandums and that by doing so caused the unending humanitarian
crisis. They still communicated in terms orientated towards a solution in
keeping with market directives, which proved to be ideologically more derisory
when confronted.
And now, as Greek membership to the Eurozone fluctuates on a daily
basis, and the third MoU reaches €86b, it is predicted the Greek economy will
peak at 200% debt to GDP (again, still measuring the crisis in economic
statistics).
What is needed is a change towards a new orientation, beyond the limited
horizon of fiscal policy solutions.
That depends on your perspective of how emancipatory political movements
should operate and under what principles you consider democracy achievable.
One thing, however, is certain: when the SYRIZA party is gone from the
stage it should be buried with Euro coins over its eyes -- as it walks the
underworld blind to its dogma, those who glimpse its shadow may say: "There
goes SYRIZA, the political party who thought the Euro was a beacon worth
attaining."
Change in Greece will not come from short-term strategies and tactics of
seeking power, but from a long process of coordinated and planned immanent
critiques. This political organization will not aim to represent itself in the
machinery of parliament -- where the watchful eyes of the IMF and ECB will
determine policy -- but will emerge from an organized movement comprising the
disenfranchised, the working class, and the intellectual vanguard. It
will not compromise. It will instead operate under an ideology for an
emancipatory alliance of humanity removed from the spreadsheet, removed from
the NATO, and removed from free-market directives. It will not seek to
claim power in an election, it will be given it by the people themselves when
the movement is ripe.
This movement already exists in Athens, yet everyone has been distracted
by the sounds of SYRIZA politicians claiming, exalting, and ultimately burying
the left narrative.
Everyone has been looking in the wrong places.
It's not about voting for "deals" and seeking
"conditions." It's not about playing politics. It's about
making demands. Basic demands, humanitarian demands. Democratic
demands.
Greece doesn't matter, it never did.
