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Title: Syriza Canât Save Greece Author: CrimethInc. Date: January 28, 2015 Language: en Topics: Greece, democratic socialism, Left Electoralism, crisis Source: https://crimethinc.com/2015/01/28/feature-syriza-cant-save-greece-why-theres-no-electoral-exit-from-the-crisis
On January 25, after years of economic crisis and austerity measures,
Greek voters chose the political party Syriza to take the reins of the
state. Formed from a coalition of socialist, communist, and Green
groups, Syriza appears to be sympathetic to autonomous social movements;
its leaders promise to take steps against austerity and police violence.
Many outside Greece first heard of Syriza in December 2008, when, as a
far-left group commanding less than 5% of the electorate, it was
practically the only party that did not condemn the riots that followed
the police murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Since then, Syriza has
become the most powerful party in Greece, drawing many of the voters who
had supported less radical partiesâand some movement participants who
previously supported no parties at all. Even some Greek anarchists are
hoping that after years of pitched violence and repression, the election
of Syriza will provide a much-needed breather.
But will Syrizaâs victory offer oxygen to movements for social changeâor
suffocate them? Weâve seen such promises of âhope and changeâ before;
notably, when Obama won the presidential election in the US, but also
when Lula and other Left politicians came to power in Latin America.
When Lula was elected in 2002, Brazil hosted some of the worldâs most
powerful social movements; his victory was such a setback to grassroots
organizing that it took until 2013 for Brazilians to mount a real
challenge to the neoliberal projects that he took up from his
predecessors.
The consequences of Syrizaâs victory will be felt around the world,
especially for participants in the social movements they wish to
represent. Parties modeled on Syriza are on the rise all over Europe.
International financial institutions are watching the Greek laboratory,
but so are millions of people who are fed up with being on the losing
end of capitalismâas well as nationalist and fascist groups who hope to
exploit their rage. We need to understand why these parties are drawing
so much support, what their structural role is in maintaining capitalism
and the state, and how their rise and inevitable fall will shift the
context of resistance. Anarchists especially must prepare for the
intense struggles that will follow as the terrain changes, lest we find
ourselves alone and backed into a corner.
Poverty, unemployment, prohibitive tuition and healthcare costs,
homelessness, hunger, forced migration, racism, criminalization,
alienation, humiliation, suicide⊠These are not just the consequences of
the financial crisis, but the conditions that precarious billions have
experienced for decades as business as usual, serving as the laboratory
mice in the neoliberal experiment. Yet thanks to the uneven distribution
of the Fordist compromise, many Europeans were sheltered from this
reality until the welfare state began to collapse in 2008.
With the onset of the financial crisis, many who had previously lived
relatively comfortable middle-class lives were pushed into poverty
overnight. Years of upheaval followed all around Europeânot only in
Greece, but also in Iceland, Spain, England, Turkey. Almost every
European country has experienced some kind of popular social rebellion
since 2008, all the way up to stable, social-democratic Sweden. Most of
these began as single-issue strugglesâthe student rebellion in Croatia,
protests against gold mining in Romania, the anti-corruption protests in
Sloveniaâbut swiftly gained a more thoroughgoing character, opposing
themselves to austerity and the political system or even to capitalism
and the state. Mayors and ministers resigned, police stations and
parliaments burned, governments fell. It wasnât just anarchists at the
core of these movementsâin some countries, such as Ukraine and Bulgaria,
the movements veered in a nationalistic direction. But everywhere, these
protests became a space in which people who would never previously have
been politically aligned could express their anger together; in many
places, such as Bosnia, the most militant participants were people who
had never taken the streets before. Trust in parliamentary democracy
plunged to a record low, and people rediscovered direct action.
Those protests were anything but monolithic, and they remained more
reformist than radical. Many peaked with small victories, such as the
resignation of the government (as in Slovenia) or the promise of
negotiations with the political elite (as in Bosnia). Participants who
had expected easy changes were often left disappointed. But the volatile
situation posed an increasing threat to the ruling order.
The stateâs first reaction was to criminalize resistance. On one hand,
this was intended to intimidate those who were protesting for the first
time: often the harshest sentences were doled out to the least
experienced participants, who lacked support networks. On the other
hand, repression was focused on anarchists and other determined enemies
of the ruling order. In the past decade, we have seen scores of social
centers evicted (Ungdomshuset in Denmark, Villa Amalias in Greece,
Klinika in Prague) and âanti-terrorâ crackdowns on dissent such as
Operation Pandora in Spain and the continuing harassment of anarchists
in the UK. Spain, Greece, and other countries also introduced severe
anti-protest laws.
The other response was to seek to coopt these movements. Protesters had
proclaimed, âNO ONE REPRESENTS USâânot just as a complaint about the
existing parties, but as a rejection of representation and liberal
democracy. People who had just discovered their political power were
experimenting with direct action and collective decision-making
processes such as the popular assemblies in Spain, Greece, and Bosnia.
In response, patronizing intellectuals and hysterical corporate media
outlets demanded that protesters form political parties to unify their
voices and negotiate with the state. At the same time, new political
parties were positioning themselves within those movements by advocating
for imprisoned protesters (like Syriza in Greece), backing protestersâ
agendas in the media and parliament (like ZdruĆŸena levica in Slovenia),
and sharing resources (like Die Linke in Germany). They appeared to be
developing a party-movement model, incorporating protest groups and
demands into their organizational structure.
Syriza has its own unique origins in the specific context of Greece. So
do Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany, Parti de Gauche in France,
RadniÄka fronta in Croatia, ZdruĆŸena levica in Slovenia, and Bloco de
Esquerda in Portugal. But at this historical juncture, all of them serve
the same basic function. Faced with so much unrest, the ruling order
suddenly has a use for new radical political parties that promise to
embody calls for âreal democracyâ within the existing system. Whatever
the intentions of the participants, their structural role is to rebuild
trust in electoral democracy, neutralize uncontrollable
extra-parliamentary movements, and reestablish capitalism and the state
as the only imaginable social order. When they enter the halls of power,
they commit themselves to perpetuating the authoritarian institutions
and unequal distribution of wealth that triggered the movements from
which they appeared in the first place.
In times like these, those who benefit from the prevailing order are
willing to risk small changes in order to avoid big ones. The emerging
electoral popularity of these parties all over Europe shows that the
chapter that opened with the Greek uprising of December 2008 has closed.
If all goes according to precedent, these parties will re-stabilize
capitalism and state power, then pass from the stage of history, to be
replaced byâor becomeâthe next defenders of the status quo.
Greece has been at the forefront of all these processes from the
beginning. Greek comrades took to the streets years before revolts
spread from Egypt to Brazil, and they have never really left them since,
while the troika of lenders that bailed out the Greek economyâthe
European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International
Monetary Fundâimposed package after package of austerity measures.
What does this look like up close? A few years ago, anarchist groups
around Europe were collecting money for a Greek comrade who needed to
get her infant out of the country for an operation that would save her
life. The reason was that, due to financial cuts, the Greek state had
simply stopped performing certain surgeries. This story is just one
among many, and most people did not have the privilege of a community to
support them thus. While the fascists of the Golden Dawn killed comrades
like Pavlos Fyssas on the streets and the police killed migrants on the
Greek borders of Fortress Europe, the state killed poor people on the
doorsteps of hospitals by denying them health care.
As the state closed down hospitals, television stations, schools, and
kindergartens, anarchists and others self-organized to set up autonomous
clinics, educational projects, public kitchens, social programs, and
neighborhood assemblies. Over the following years, the Greek anarchist
movement became a major social force, mobilizing tens of thousands of
people to fight beside them. At the same time, this ideological
polarization also benefitted fascists in Greece. Golden Dawn gained
power in parliament as police officers swelled their ranks. Police
repression of anarchist demonstrations became ceaselessly and
mercilessly violent, while the far-right-controlled media maintained a
conspiracy of silence and prisoners filled the new maximum-security
prisons built under the most conservative government since the military
junta fell in the 1970s.
These were the conditions in which a small coalition of Trotskyists,
Maoists, Greens, and social democrats began to gain popularity under the
name Syriza and the leadership of Alexis Tsipras. When thousands of
people who did not belong to anarchist or leftist groups marched with
anarchists and clashed with police in the fight against gold mining in
Chalkidiki, the defense of the social center Villa Amalias, the struggle
against Golden Dawn, and demonstrations in solidarity with migrants,
Syriza took positions on the same issues. They spoke about them in a
parliament and their members attended the demonstrations. Whenever
possible, they took advantage of these struggles to gain recognition in
the media.
Syriza promised the end of austerity measuresâthough for the elections,
this rhetoric softened into promises to renegotiate the conditions of
Greek debt. They promised to dismantle the most brutal police
unitsâthough for the elections, this was reduced to only disarming
officers that come into direct contact with protesters. Syriza promised
to leave NATOâthough for the elections, this was reduced to not
cooperating in foreign assault missions. Syriza promised to close down
high-security prisons and reestablish the universities as a no-go zone
for the police, a legal privilege the movement lost after December 2008
in what proved to be a huge setback in clashes with police.
Syriza has less power to mobilize people onto the street than
anarchists, but the party successfully mobilized people to go to the
voting polls. This aptly illustrates the transition that Syrizaâs
supposed enemies would like to see social movements undergo in Greece
and all around Europe. With some people spreading rumors that there
could be electoral fraud or a military coup if Syriza wins, and others
threatening that such a victory would result in Greece going bankrupt,
the European ruling class is successfully concealing the fact
thatâcompared to the social movements from which it aroseâSyriza is a
much safer bet for them. Just as police brutality can catalyze rather
than suppress resistance, electoral fraud or military intervention might
trigger a new wave of movements in Greece and all across Europe. The
reactions to Syrizaâs election will be harsh in rhetoric but
reconcilable in practice. Faced with the challenges of retaining state
power, Syriza will probably deliver much less than they promised. In a
globalized world, in which a country can go bankrupt overnight,
capitalists donât need to stage a coup to get their way.
For those who see no connection between the ways that electoral politics
and capitalism concentrate power, it is tempting to imagine that a new
political party could finally make the system work the way âit is
supposed to.â But even anarchists, who have no faith in representational
politics or reform, might hope that a Syriza-led government could create
a more conducive environment for resistance. Indeed, it is an open
secret that members of Syriza have served as the lawyers of many
anarchists; why shouldnât they continue to play a protective role at the
helm of the state?
All this is hopelessly naĂŻve. In the long run, no party can solve the
problems created by capitalism and the state, and Syrizaâs victory will
only hinder the revolutionary movements that we need. Hereâs why.
responsible for the crisis in the first place.
Indeed, the entry of Syriza into power has already re-legitimized the
institutions of government for many who had lost faith in them.
Regardless of Syrizaâs intentions, it is this same government apparatus
that forces the effects of capitalism upon people, blocking access to
the resources they need. Even if it were possible for Syriza to use
state power to combat the effects of capitalist accumulation, sooner or
later the reins of the state will return to the hands of those who
usually hold them. When that happens, efforts to delegitimize the
government will begin all over again from scratch.
This cycle of disillusionment and re-legitimization has served to
preserve the authoritarian structures of the state for centuries, always
deferring the struggle for real freedom beyond the horizon. Itâs an old
story stretching from the French revolutions of 1789, 1848, and 1870,
through the Russian revolution and the national liberation struggles of
the 20th century, right up to the election of Obama.
Syriza itself will do nothing to undermine the fundamental hierarchies
of politics. Many of these new left parties started as ostensibly
horizontal networks, promising real transparency and democratic
decision-making processes. But as they grow, they inevitably abandon
horizontal structures and come to mimic the older parties they claim to
oppose. These changes are often justified as political pragmatism or
solutions to the problem of scaleâand indeed, the exigencies of
representational politics do not lend themselves to the sort of
horizontal, autonomous structures that can arise in genuine grassroots
social movements. So it is that at the top of every successful party
like Syriza, ZdruĆŸena levica, or Podemos, we can expect to find a
charismatic leader like Alexis Tsipras, Luka Mesec, or Pablo Iglesias.
These leadersâ personalities become entangled with the parties, in ways
reminiscent of Hugo Chavez and other famous politicians of the Left. If
you are building a party that has to play according to stateâs rules,
you will end up with a structure that mirrors the state. This internal
transformation is the first step towards re-establishing the status quo.
Leftist parties have always displayed a contradictory attitude towards
the state. In theory, they assert that the state is merely a necessary
evil on the path towards a classless society; on the field of
realpolitik they always protect and defend its repressive mechanismsâfor
no one who wishes to hold state power can do without them. Some of these
new parties do not even wait to gain power to take that path; in
Slovenia, as part of their struggle against austerity, the left
opposition party ZdruĆŸena levica has called for the police to receive
better equipment and more officers. Today, these new political parties
see state power as an essential precondition for their struggle against
neoliberalism; rejecting the privatization of state owned companies,
they propose nationalization as one of the primary ways to fight the
consequences of economic crisis. Their goal is not to dismantle the
state and the economic disparities it imposes, but to preserve the
bourgeois ideal of the welfare state with a neo-Keynesian economic
program.
When this was possible in the past, it was only possible for a few
privileged nations at the expense of exploited millions around the
globeâand even the beneficiaries of this arrangement werenât sure they
wanted it, as the countercultural rebellions of the 1960s showed. Today,
when capitalist accumulation has intensified to such a degree that only
massive austerity programs can keep the economy running, the old
compromises of social democracy have become impossible, and everyone
acknowledges this except the snake oil salesmen of the left. The
doomsaying of German economists who are concerned that Syriza will sink
the Greek economy is true enough: in a globalized economy, there is no
way to redistribute wealth without causing capital flight, unless we are
prepared to abolish capitalism along with the state structures that
preserve it.
Most of the participants in the movements of the past seven years are
not yet prepared to go so far. They entered the streets out of
frustration with the existing governments, but they saw these movements
as a way to seek an immediate solution, not as a single stage in a
centuries-long struggle against capitalism. When the protests didnât
produce immediate results, they joined parties like Syriza that promised
quick, easy solutions. But what seems pragmatic today will be an
embarrassing mistake that everyone remembers with a headache tomorrow.
Isnât that always how it goes with parties?
movements that propelled them into power.
It is too early to predict what the precise relationship will be between
the new governing party and the movements that put them in place. We can
only speculate based on past precedents.
Letâs return to the Brazilian example. After Lula came to power, the
most powerful social movement in Brazil, the 1.5-million-strong land
reform campaign MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), found
itself in a considerably worse position than it had faced under the
preceding conservative government. Although it shared considerable
membership and leadership with Lulaâs own party, the necessities of
governing precluded Lula from assisting it. Though the MST had managed
to compel the previous government to legalize many land occupations, it
ceased to make any headway whatsoever under Lula. This pattern has
played out all across Latin America as politicians have betrayed the
social movements that put them in office. This is a good argument for
building up strength we can use on our own terms, autonomously, rather
than trying to get sympathetic politicians into officeâfor once they are
in office, they must act according to the logic of their post, not the
logic of the movement.
Syriza came to power by courting votes and watering down demands.
Representative democracy tends to reduce politics to a matter of lowest
common denominators, as parties jockey to attract voters and form
coalitions. Indeed, Syrizaâs first move after the election was to
establish a coalition with Independent Greeks, a right-wing party. In
order to preserve this coalition, Syriza will have to make concessions
to their partnersâ agenda. This will mean, first, forcing unwanted
right-wing policies past its own membershipâand then enforcing those
policies on everyone else. Thereâs no getting around the essentially
coercive nature of governing.
Many anarchists hope Syriza will put the brakes on state repression of
social movements, enabling them to develop more freely. Didnât Syriza
essentially support the riots of 2008? But back then, they were a small
party looking for allies; now they are the ruling elite. In order to
retain the reins of the state, they must show that they are prepared to
enforce the rule of law. Though they may not prosecute minor protest
activity as aggressively as a right-wing government would, they will
still have to divide protesters into legitimate and illegitimateâa move
out of the counterinsurgency handbook that guides governments and
occupying armies the whole world over. This would not be new for Greece;
the same thing happened under the social democrats of PASOK in the early
1980s. Even if Syrizaâs government does not seek to maintain the
previous level of repression, their function will be to divide
movements, incorporating the docile and marginalizing the rest. This
might prove to be a more effective repressive strategy than brute force.
In these new conditions, the movements themselves will change. Syriza
has already become involved in many grassroots social programs; they
will probably offer the most cooperative of these projects more
resources, but only under the mantle of the state. It will become harder
and harder for grassroots organizers to remain truly autonomous, to
demonstrate the difference between self-organization and management from
above. Something like this has already occurred in the US non-profit
sector with disastrous effects. We may also cite government involvement
in supposedly grassroots neighborhood organizing in Venezuela under Hugo
Chavez.
This kind of assimilation into the logic of the state is essential to
parties like Syriza. They need movements that know how to behave
themselves, that can serve to legitimize decisions made in the
parliament without causing too much of a fuss. Indeed, the mere prospect
that Syriza might come into power has kept the streets of Greece largely
empty of protest since 2012, intensifying the risks for anarchists and
others who continued to demonstrate. Parties on the Syriza model can
pacify the public without even entering office.
So what happens to the rest of the movement, to those who continue to
assert their autonomy, seeking to build power on their own terms outside
the institutions? That is the question before us.
Facing international pressure, a divided electorate, and the structural
relationship between state and capital, Syriza cannot hope to resolve
the day-to-day problems that most Greeks face as a result of unbridled
capitalism. In the long term, this may open the gates for the last
governmental solution that Greece has not yet tried: fascism.
A profit-driven economy inevitably concentrates wealth into fewer and
fewer hands. In a globalized world, any country that tries to reverse
this process scares off investors; this is why today even the wealthiest
nations are being forced to feed all the infrastructure of social
democracy into the fire, keeping the market healthy at the expense of
the general population. This problem could be solved by the
revolutionary abolition of private property and the state that defends
it, but there is only one way to preserve the support infrastructure of
social democracy while maintaining capitalism, and that is to narrow
down who gets to benefit from it. This is the meaning of the food
distribution programs Golden Dawn organizes âfor Greeks only.â In this
regard, nationalist and fascist parties have a more realistic plan for
how to maintain the safety net of the white middle class than ordinary
socialist parties do.
Thatâs why it is so dangerous for parties like Syriza to legitimize the
idea that the government can solve the problems of capitalism by
implementing more socialistic policies. When they fail to deliver on
their promises, some of those who believed in them will turn to
far-right parties who claim to have a more pragmatic way do accomplish
the same thing. This is already happening all around Europe. In Sweden,
the flagship of social democracy, decades of left-wing activism aimed at
preserving government programs have just opened the way for fascists to
claim that, in order to protect those programs, the borders must close.
But fascists need not take power to be dangerous. They are dangerous
precisely because, like anarchists, they can carry out their agenda
directly without need of the state apparatus. Indeed, we may be entering
an era when a variety of political actors will find it more strategic to
be positioned outside the government, so as to avoid being discredited
with it. Now that the state can no longer mitigate the effects of
capitalism, people are bound to become more and more disillusioned and
rebellious. Where radical left parties hold state power, seeking to
pacify their former comrades who remain in the streets, it will be
easier for right-wing groups to present themselves as the real partisans
of revoltâas they have in Venezuela, for example. The insurrections of
the past decade are sure to continue, but the important question is what
kind of insurrections they will be. Will they put people in touch with
their own collective power, setting the stage for the final abolition of
capitalism? Or will they look more like what happened last year in
Ukraine?
With anti-Islamic hysteria and nationalist groups like Germanyâs Pegida
on the rise all over Europe, fascism is not just a future threat, but a
clear and present danger. Leaving it to governments to deal with
fascists via the rule of law is doubly dangerous: it supplants the
agency of grassroots movements with the mediation of the authorities,
andâonce moreâit legitimizes state institutions that may eventually fall
into fascist hands. Some may consider Syriza a bulwark against fascism,
but only autonomous social movements can defeat it: not simply by
fighting against it reactively, but above all by demonstrating a more
compelling vision of social change.
If Syrizaâs victory succeeds in lulling those who once met in the
streets back into spectatorship and isolation, this will close the
windows of possibility that opened during the uprisings, rendering
Syriza themselves redundant and offering a new model by which to pacify
social movements around the world. But they are playing with fire,
promising solutions they cannot deliver. If their failure could open the
door for fascism, it could also create a new phase of movements outside
and against all authoritarian power.
âIn my opinion, a possible government of SYRIZA, taken into account that
its life will be short, should serve as a challenge for the people of
the struggle. With action which will be what we call âanarchist
provocationsâ against the leftist rhetoric of SYRIZA, we should force
them to reveal their true face which is no other than the face of
capitalism that can neither be humanized nor rectified but only
destroyed with constant struggle by all means.â
âNikos Romanos, writing from prison in Greece
For this to be possible, anarchists in Greece and everywhere around the
world must differentiate themselves from all political parties, inviting
the general public to join them in spaces beyond the influence of even
the most generous social democrats. This will mean facing off against
the opportunistic politicians who once joined them in the street. It
will not be easy, but it is the only way. If nothing else, now that the
elections are over and Syriza stands on the other side of the walls of
power, the lines are clear.
Abolishing capitalism and the state is still unthinkable for most
people. Yet, as Greece has seen, the measures that could stabilize
capitalism for another generation are still more unthinkable. In the
day-to-day practices of Greek anarchistsâthe occupied social centers and
university buildings, the self-defense patrols against Golden Dawn, the
social programs and assembliesâwe can see the first steps towards a
world without property or government. If these practices reached an
impasse in 2012, it was partly because so many people abandoned the
streets in hopes of a Syriza victory. These are the examples to emulate
from Greece, not the Syriza model. Letâs stop dallying with false
solutions.