Congress of Syriza for the Greek election campaign, January 2015. Demotix/Kostis Ntantamis. All rights reserved.Although the history of
the Left has produced an extraordinary theoretical legacy, which continues to
be the nucleus of almost all radical thinking, it has nonetheless left a trail
of extraordinary failures in practice.
I understand the
dialectical relation between theory and practice, of course, but we have to
admit that in real historical terms this dialectic is terribly uneven, to the
degree in fact that it may render questionable a great many of these
theoretical achievements, which, if we are going to be rigorously leftist about
it, cannot really stand entirely on their own.
To this general account,
I now add a series of realizations that have arisen from the experience of a
government of the left in Greece since Syriza was elected, a complex,
circuitous, contradictory, and internally conflictual trajectory that is still
unfolding in full force.
Anyone who thinks that
Syriza as a left phenomenon has ended, been coopted or defeated, etc., is
thinking too much too fast. Too much complexity is being swept carelessly under
the rug. For this reason, despite everyone’s intense attention to the recent traumatic
developments, it’s worth conducting an assessment of the full trajectory of
Syriza in government.
Radicalising democracy
As a prelude to mapping the
details, let me confess that the overall course of events has
made me aware of the weakness of theoretical predeterminations, and especially of
the dangerous tendency, common in left thought, of grasping at schematic theoretical
straws in the face of the perplexing circuitry of politics in action – all in
some fashion remnants of the history of the left, no matter how dressed up with
new terminologies and allegedly new significations.
The field of historical
action in the last few months has exceeded the theoretical armory that is
presumed to be somehow its strongest signifying capacity, so that in all its
turns, sometimes even counter-intended manifestations, historical action needs
to be considered in itself, from its own standpoint, as it is happening and in
the terms that it sets as it is happening, rather than encountered from the
safety of our preexisting theories.
I understand how
exasperating this is – indeed as exasperating as it has been to experience this
phenomenon of the left in government. My hunch is – because it’s too early to
tell – that this exasperation with experience and this theoretical incapacity arise
directly out of the radical democratic process that makes the Syriza phenomenon
different (perhaps even unique) in the history of the Left. It is, in other
words, the very precarious, disorderly, an-archic, unpredictable, groundless,
perilous, open-ended and resistant-to-closure ‘nature’ of democracy that has
radicalized this already uneven dialectical relation between theory and
practice in favor of the second.
Left governmentality
My wager here is to investigate
a terrain that we can name left governmentality
which has emerged as a problematic challenge with the worldwide, even if
politically and culturally heterogeneous, phenomenon of the assembly movements
since the Arab Spring, to which Syriza’s rise owes a great deal.
As mass withdrawals of
consent to existing political institutions, assembly movements produced an
entirely different signifying framework of political action and brought back to
the fore the urgency of radical democratic politics outside and even against
the established ‘democratic’ modes of power. This certainly includes the presumed
stability of the party formation, with dire consequences for the political
history of the left, and, in the case of Syriza’s electoral victory in a
parliamentary terrain, a grave challenge to the most unassailable categories of
what government, governance, and governmentality might mean.
To anticipate what I
will try to retrace from the events of the last 6 months in Greece, let us remember
from the outset that Syriza is an unusual political formation. It is a loose,
self-contradictory, and internally antagonistic coalition of leftist thought
and practice, very much dependent on the capacity of social movements of all
kinds, thoroughly decentralized and driven by the activism of solidarity
networks in a broad sphere of action across class lines of conflict, gender and
sexuality activism, immigration issues, anti-globalization movements, civil and
human rights advocacy, etc., and not entirely determined by the crisis although
obviously at the front lines of what the crisis has created.
In this sense, Syriza is
not a party per se, even though it had to be legally codified as one in order
to qualify for the established parliamentary bonus as victor in the elections.
This has key implications in our analysis of what has taken place so far and
what is to follow, to the degree that we can even remotely predict.
Syriza
is a problem – not a problem to be solved, for nothing
in politics can be mathematized, but a problem in the sense of an open
framework of trouble in the terrain of politics. It is a problem in the midst of
the political – in terms of Greek history, if nothing else, certainly unprecedented
and way beyond even the history of the Greek left from which it has obviously
emerged. To use a phrase by Edward Said in a different signifying framework,
Syriza enacts “a technique of trouble”. It means trouble; it gets into trouble
and creates trouble for all presumed-to-be-stable categories, including, of
course, the category of the Left. And the fact that it is now politically in trouble is also part of the same
rubric.
Syriza is a troublemaker
entity in politics, and this is something that we should not lament or wish to
extinguish, but rather engage with with an open mind, if we are ever going to
get out of the categorical sludge of much leftist thinking, especially since
the enormous geopolitical shift of 1989.
From electoral victory to the Greek referendum
Electoral victories that
result from popular movements always precipitate a climate of euphoria, even
bliss. It’s standard. What is also standard is how short-lived this is. A basic
psychological reason is that popular movements always look beyond the temporal
frame of governance because their desire manifests itself in the present tense.
It does not wait and will not be deferred – all the more, after a victory against
the grain of previous history and established power.
Popular movements want
the future now, and in looking beyond their place in the present they overlook
the shift that takes place from the politics of opposition to the politics of
government. Winning power under these conditions always produces enormous
expectations; it is the self-propelling force of a dream that must become
reality.
Syriza’s victory in the elections
of January 25 created unprecedented waves of expectation and hope in a
population brutalized by extreme austerity conditions imposed by external financial
interests with the full cooperation of the Greek political elite. This blissful
wave of expectation was magnified even more if we consider the unprecedented
event of an electoral victory of the left, whose symbolic magnitude exceeds
Greek boundaries. While from this standpoint such exuberant response was
unavoidable, it nonetheless unleashed, from the very beginning of the encounter
with the new governmental reality, an internal danger that the left should have
been smarter in anticipating: the danger of self-subversion in the name of political
oppositional purity.
Less than a month after
Syriza assumed government, without really having a chance to govern, precisely
because of the political and financial liability against the EU’s great powers inherited
from the previous government, we heard voices ranging from prominent Syriza members
to key intellectual figures at home and abroad, as well as forces in the
movement, manifesting grumbling disapproval, which began to aggravate and wear
out the edges of the movement, thus overshadowing both the magnitude of
problems faced by the new Syriza government and a cool-headed assessment of its
early actions.
This attitude strains
beyond the guise of traditional leftist critique from within. Its almost
immediate occurrence, even before the dire conditions of the recent events,
suggests that it is an endemic issue, not driven by circumstances. The fact
that even in the early weeks and months of the new government the elite media interests
in Greece had a field day with these presumed critiques seems to have escaped
the attention of these critics.
While I would be the
first to argue positively that this is the mark of Syriza not being a properly
ordered party but a loose coalition of voices, there was – and is, because it
continues ever louder – a self-satisfied attitude of pronouncement here that clashes
with the hard realities of what it means for the left to govern in the world of
global capital. Part of it stems from the great difficulty the left has always
had historically – outside the Leninist legacy that still haunts it – with
assuming the responsibility of power, even as a mere idea (not to mention the
rare occasion of reality).
Part of it, however,
also has to do with not understanding the essential non-coincidence between a
leftist movement and a leftist government that this movement has brought to
power, or a relation of relative autonomy between the two that is the starting
point of configuring what ‘left governmentality’ might mean.
With its electoral victory,
Syriza ceased being a mere opposition party. It became the government of a
country, whose sovereignty and survival are more important short term than even
its prosperity long term. As the government of a country, a party of the left
is no longer beholden simply to its ranks: to the activist nucleus that forms
the movement, and certainly not to its party members. It is beholden first to
the voters who have elected it to power (in Syriza’s case some 38%, most of
whom are not on the left ideologically), but even more so to the entire
national polity, for Syriza now is a government of all the Greeks and bears
responsibility for Greece as such, not just some part of it.
When the Greek Finance
Minister is engaged in a Eurogroup battle, his primary responsibility is to his
country’s viability. This certainly includes his responsibility to the popular
will – for this is essential to any democratic government – but ultimately the
cherished objective is society’s overall viability. In a bankrupt country,
shackled to a regime of creditors who also hold the power tools of fiscal
living being, this is a formidable task that requires a sort of acrobatic
handling and, let’s face it, a risk that some decisions may be deemed to be deviations
from the original vision or even the electoral platform.
“Deviations” is already
a compromised word, for it assumes that political criteria remain unchanged, even
while political situations are always changing – in this case at extraordinary
speed and scale. Let us rather speak of repositionings or reconfigurations of
priorities or reconsiderations of conditions, all terms that indicate the need
to remain flexible relative to one’s adversarial forces externally and sustainable
relative to the internal sphere of consent or contention.
From this standpoint, Etienne
Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra’s early diagnosis
that what Syriza needs most of all is to gain time (for which ground would be
provisionally ceded) still remains correct and has been irresponsibly
vilified.
Even after the most recent
developments, which I address below, the conditional requirement of Syriza’s’s predicament
was the need to gain time, against all odds and at great cost, in order to gain
control of the dire situation it had inherited, to organize and apportion its
forces to maximum capacity and effectiveness, to gain broader public support to
shore up its slim parliamentary control, etc., so as to set in motion the governance
of its essential task, which is not so much the
settling of accounts with the EU but, above all, the radical reorganization of
Greece’s long term corrupt social and political institutions.
In other words, Syriza’s
extraordinary problem – which would not be faced by any other political party
in government – was to alter internal
institutional frameworks under conditions of external institutional assault.
Of course, always but
especially in today’s hard political reality, these two aspects – external confrontation
and internal reorganization – are linked and, moreover, the link is asymmetrical
in all respects: work on the internal front is of much greater magnitude and
therefore requires a greater duration of time, while the external confrontation
is under extraordinary temporal duress – the EU elites are still doing
everything they can to deprive Syriza of time in order to drive it to its death.
Therefore, the response to the situation is not a theoretical matter, a matter
of what is properly 'Leftist' politics, but more than ever a matter of
Realpolitik, which here I would reiterate not simply as a politics of reality
but as a real politics.
It was in that spirit –
of real politics – that the Syriza
government went into the arena of negotiations with EU elite powers immediately
after it took office, without even a few days of assessing how profoundly
shackled its arms were by agreements it had inherited from the previous regime.
The EU elites were counting on this duress, with full anticipation of how to
counter the new government’s initial drive to change the previous terms of
relation between EU and Greece, which Syriza derived from the democratic electoral
mandate.
Their wager had been all along to wear down Syriza’s capacities by
stonewalling all its proposals, until it would cave under forced capitulation
and the democratic mandate would be withdrawn via popular disaffection. Their
plan was, as Costas
Douzinas called it early
on, to enact a “velvet coup” (which since then has
been revealed instead to be made of hard steel): to undermine the democratic
will by eroding trust in the government’s electoral platform. For this reason
alone, critical voices from the self-ascribed left flanks in the coalition are
especially open to charges of political irresponsibility, since they never realized
how much they were drawn into the trapping logic of the enemy and, even worse, that
they were counted on to be so drawn.
The hapless politics of Grexit
Greek PM Alexis Tsipras speaks at Syriza group meeting, Athens,Feb.,2015. Demotix/Panayiotis Tzamaros.All rights reserved.From the outset –
certainly since the point in the negotiations on February 25 where the Syriza
team was outmanoeuvered out of inexperience – the loudest accusation from these
quarters has been that the Syriza government adopted a strategy of ‘staying in the
Euro at all costs’. Strictly speaking, and as we have discovered by the conflicting
plurality of voices and accounts since then (on both sides of the negotiations),
this was inaccurate because ‘all costs’ of staying in the Euro were constantly
evaluated and reassessed – an essential component in the required manoeuvering of
any prolonged and multilateral negotiation. But let us assume that the charge is
accurate, at the very least because, whatever the definite mistakes in the
negotiation strategy, in the end this tendency prevailed and alternate plans,
despite assessments, were never fully realized.
The first thing to say about
the charge of ‘staying in the Euro at all costs’ is that what has always been proposed
as an alternative follows the same logic – the logic of ‘at all costs’. When
possible costs of abandoning the Euro are to this day brought up in protest to
those who claim that Grexit is the only option, cost estimates are often
dismissed as panic-driven, or at the very least, temporary in effect. Rarely
are these costs really measured against current costs, and partly this is an obvious
methodological issue: the fact that the current costs are known, while the
Grexit costs are positively unknown. Their calculation is a matter of
speculation at best, or as Costas Lapavitsas (the leading voice of this
strategy) admitted in his GCAS lecture
and the heated discussion that followed,
it is a projection based on economic models worked out in a laboratory of
numbers. Therefore, in terms of real knowledge, whichever position one takes on
Grexit, for or against, one is inevitably engaged in some phantasmatic
projection. Whether utopian or catastrophic, it doesn’t matter in essence – the
two are equivalent, as fantasies go.
Lapavitsas is a
recognizably accomplished economist and he can never be accused of jumping on
the bandwagon or opportunistically taking advantage of circumstances. He
developed his position that battling within the Euro is impossible because the
Eurozone is institutionally predisposed to a very specific structure of capitalist
forces years before he was elected MP in the Syriza government. His critique of
all the deadlocks of the Eurozone cannot be disputed on its own terms; I am
sure that even his enemies would secretly acknowledge it. The problem arises with
the articulation of an exit from this deadlock as an alternative. The
speculative nature of this alternative is outmanoeuverable. This is not wrong
in and of itself, since we can hardly fault the work of the imagination in
radical thinking. But the fact that it is presented in terms of scientific
certainty betrays rather a lack of imagination. Lapavitsas may be right to
critique the overprivileging of the political in the left: “not
everything is possible through politics,” he
says, but I wonder how he could disavow the fact that not everything is
possible through economics.
The economics of Grexit,
especially in conditions that Greece finds itself after five years of austerity,
have been questioned by people who know far better than I. But some of this
questioning is common sense. Assurances that the social and infrastructural
crisis precipitated by switching to the new currency would last for just a few
months are really ungrounded for an economy whose productive forces have nearly
stalled and banks are depleted of capital – current deposits in the Bank of
Greece would barely last three months.
And however many months
this would entail, not much thought has been given to the fact that the
greatest burden would be borne precisely by those people who have suffered most
and whose daily existence already constitutes a humanitarian crisis. This would
include not only Greeks but large numbers of undocumented immigrants, who are de facto off the social security grid. Moreover,
Lapavitsas’ proposal that in order to stave off rapidly sliding devaluation we
would need to peg the new currency to the Euro is at the very least perplexing,
given the whole point of abandoning the Euro framework. How would this be
squared with unilateral default on Euro loans, which would be necessary in
Grexit (without this there really is no point), and which would mean de facto economic war with the EU (not
to mention the international financial community), is not addressed. In the
end, the new national currency would be totally unprotected – assaulted by the
ruthless global market and unsupported by ruined capacities for national
production of wealth. Finally, equally speculative, it seems to me, is the
assumption that somehow the Greek people will rise to the occasion and by sheer
will and labor would not only endure the impending catastrophe, but reverse it
– this specifically is a strange amalgam of nationalist and Maoist fantasies.
Beyond the Lapavitsas
position, which in any case is the most consistent and articulate, the staunch
(and rather old fashioned) economism of ‘abandoning the Euro no matter the
cost’ is never acknowledged as a monetary ideologeme by its proponents who are otherwise
proud to point to the (neoliberal) monetary ideology of their opponents.
In the end, the ardent
purveyors of Grexit as an imaginary of salvation are unwittingly engaged in an
analogous – but negatively laden – fetishism of the Euro as the so-called
Europhiles. They are indeed anti-Europhiles – not adversaries of those who
presumably ‘love the Euro’ but proponents of ‘loving to be anti-Euro’. Whatever
may be the political repercussions of the Euro/anti-Euro battle, as a purely
economic terrain of contesting opinions, the two sides of the Euro battle are
two sides of the same coin.
Syriza’s primary goal
What escapes discussion
in this deadlock is that the Euro as hero or devil is not Syriza’s concern.
Syriza’s primary goal and responsibility to history is to alter clientelist Greek
institutions and practices that have gone on unchecked for decades, and as a left
governmental coalition that understands its place in a globalized economy, the
majority of Syriza correctly determines its avenue of struggle to be within the
European terrain, not outside it. Partly because it does not see itself to be
alone as a radical democratic movement of change, partly because it understands
the severity of being thrust to the forefront of this new international movement,
Syriza must persist in the idea that its struggle cannot be restricted to the
national terrain alone.
This is the only mature
way to think politically as far as the history of the left in governmental
power goes – a small and not particularly successful history after all. It
means that Syriza will have come to terms with the reality that the ‘national
economy’ as primary determinant of national sovereignty no longer holds sway in
a regime of globalized capital. We may lament this fact but it is a fact – for
all countries without exception, including the United States – and aspiring to
retreat to such a position of nostalgic national fantasy, especially for a totally
bankrupt nation with nearly nonexistent primary productivity and de-developed
infrastructure, is just mind-boggling.
As a proposed
alternative, Grexit is thus absurd – doubly absurd, since it also turned out to
be precisely the enemy’s plan. Its entire logic is monetary; it expresses a formalist
economics worked out in simulation model terms, since exiting a monetary union has
never occurred before.
But more to the point, it
was always falsely presented as economics, since its impetus is entirely political.
Grexit is a name for none other than a politics of national independence, the
impetus of which no sane person can possibly disavow. But whether such
independence would be achieved in these terms, at least for Greece at this
point in time, is doubtful even to the most well-intentioned minds. As national
sovereignty is no longer safeguarded by a national economy – which is, as I
said, compromised by globalization regardless of sovereign currency – the whole
political impetus collapses. As national sovereignty is no longer safeguarded
by a national economy – which is, as I said, compromised by globalization
regardless of sovereign currency – the whole political impetus collapses
Worse than that, Grexit
ends up feeding the fantasy of alternatives to neoliberal globalization without
giving to social movements themselves a chance to really work at imagining such
actual alternatives. In this sense, paradoxically it strengthens the real
effect of TINA – the famous Thatcherite injunction “There Is No Alternative” –
because what determines it, what gives it existence as thought and project, is
none other than the very entity it seeks to evade, the European Monetary Union
itself.
Surely, to battle
against the definite problem of the European Monetary Union as a whole and reconceptualize
one’s fate in relation to it can just as easily happen from within it: Surely,
to battle against the definite problem of the European Monetary Union as a
whole and reconceptualize one’s fate in relation to it can just as easily
happen from within it: from the standpoint of democratic movements across
borders that emerge from and against its excesses, movements that challenge and
disrupt its operations.
Syriza is one such
movement – it remains a movement – and it is now also a political event, a governmental event. The international
significance of this event and the vehemence with which it has been opposed is
due precisely to Greece’s existence within the Eurozone. Who would really care,
now that there is no Cold War, if a government of the left had come to power in
a little country with drachma as its currency?
There is surely no
theoretical necessity that battling the EU must take place on the basis of
one’s removal from its political-economic terrain. One can certainly take this
position, but to do so would be as much a construct of one’s political
imagination as any other, no matter how rigorous the analysis in economic
terms.
An assessment of the referendum
No-voter in Greek referendum. Demotix/Giuseppe Cicci.All rights reserved.The referendum of July 5
was indicative of Syriza as a troublemaker organism: mobilizing radical
democratic desire against, but also in the service of, an institutional battle.
Faced with an ultimatum from
Eurocrat institutions that went beyond its electoral mandate to negotiate on
the basis of sovereign decision, the government turned the decision over to the
people. The conditions of externally and internally driven war that marked this
extraordinary event are well known – I won’t rehearse them here. I will only make
a few schematic assessments of what the referendum unleashed into the
historical terrain, especially in light of the government’s action subsequent
to the result which since July 12 has been an almost violent point
of contention in the ranks of the left, in Greece and otherwise.
First
of all, let us settle the fact that the historical
significance of the referendum has not yet been completed – it is still being
made. It cannot be reduced to its event. Like all events, the referendum is
liminal and its significance may easily be effaced by the conjuncture that it
generated. Its present significance is obscuring its future. What we still feel,
is its continuously pulsing radioactivity. The subsequent developments which
are perceived as a reversal extend this presently active incompleteness.
Indeed, in this case, the wholeness presumed to be inherent in every event has
brought into our field of vision – the historical field – the fact that what
now seems to have been something else (a reversal, an erasure) was always in
place in the course of the event’s happening.
Second:
contrary to the propaganda in Greece and abroad, the question fielded by the
referendum was crystal clear: “Do you want this situation to continue or not?”
But the strange thing is that this indisputable clarity produced an enormous
range of interpretations. That the dilemma posed by the referendum was meant to
be Yes/No to the Euro was above all the interpretation of the enemy. With unprecedented
intervention and propagandist onslaught, the Eurocrats made it clear that for
them this was the referendum’s sole significance, no matter what the Greek
government argued. Thus, when the result was announced, the Eurocrats’ singular
interpretation contradicted the evidence that 75% of Greeks expressly preferred
to stay in the Euro. Assuming a simple deduction in what is no doubt a
complicated and ambiguous intersection of desires, this could easily mean that
of the 62% “No” to the Eurozone ultimatum, 37% was “Yes” to the Euro. One thing
is for sure: the majority of Greeks drove a wedge in the Eurozone logic that
entwines the politics of imposed austerity with the people’s sovereign
existence within the Euro. One thing is for sure: the majority of Greeks drove
a wedge in the Eurozone logic that entwines the politics of imposed austerity
with the people’s sovereign existence within the Euro.
Third:
mining a whole inventory of civil strife images and affects going back to the
1920s, the internal oligarchy’s media propaganda went wild with charges that
the referendum was divisive, that it pitted Greeks against each other. I would
argue the exact opposite. The referendum was unifying, for it brought Greeks
out into the public for the most rare and precious occasion of making a
decision together about their present and future. Indeed, nothing is more
divisive than party politics, the great legacy of liberalism that splits the
body politic in multiple conflictual fragments which rarely come to understand that
together they are acting in a common decision-making framework in which
antagonism is inherently shared.
Fourth:
the referendum shattered party lines. Despite the extraordinary efforts of the
Syriza movement and solidarity networks to do foot-soldiering on behalf of No, which
ultimately decided the outcome, not all the No votes came from the Syriza
electorate, and even more, some Yes votes (few I imagine, but definitely so)
were from Syriza voters. The bilateral structure of the referendum was
characterized, if nothing else, by extraordinary heterogeneity, not only
ideological but otherwise. The political/ideological range of the No vote was
particularly wide-ranging (from extreme nationalist to some communist votes),
while even the Yes camp, though more ideologically solid, did not exhaust
itself in some unabashed liberal Europhilia.
The political/ideological range of the No vote was particularly
wide-ranging (from extreme nationalist to some communist votes), while even the
Yes camp, though more ideologically solid, did not exhaust itself in some
unabashed liberal Europhilia.
Moreover, I know much
has been made of the fact that the bilateral structure was split across class
lines. This is too simplistic, as demonstrated from quick demographic studies
already made. Surely, the split was based on wage-earning differences and along
employment-unemployment lines (which are not reducible simply to class
divisions); along generational lines (which are linked to the unemployment
factor but also convey a certain sentiment of rage against the established
political order tout court); and was
also determined by geographical factors (the islands and border areas, for example
– although this too is linked to the finances of taxation), etc.
This plurality of the
electoral split and the heteromorphism of the voting blocks make very difficult
the political assessment of the referendum along strict party lines. In
addition, more than ideological, a key
factor involved in the outcome was what we call the logic of sentiment, a
certain insurrectionary affect against the onslaught of media manipulation and in
opposition to the blatant coup d’état elements of foreign interference. The
same sentimental logic operates when, in the aftermath of Syriza’s compromise,
people speak of the “No” victory in the referendum as a victory of Syriza which
was then sold out by the government. Even if the feeling is genuine and, thus, cannot
be criticized as such, the politics derived from it are unfair to the
complexity of the event and its aftermath, which is still being played out.
The only obvious victory
for Syriza as a result of the referendum was the neutralization of
parliamentary party opposition, which now gives the government a buffer zone of
non-interference on the social battlefront against oligarchic clientelist
networks. Apart from this, the only thing we can safely acknowledge about this
momentous event is that it mobilized forces that transformed the political
landscape, whose consequences we’ll have
yet to see, including how these forces will realign on the parliamentary front,
or whether they will disavow established political institutions altogether. In
either case, by calling for a referendum Syriza unleashed a whole new set of
forces in the body politic and will have to find ways to adjust to this
shake-up.
But the key political
significance of the referendum was international – which is a bit of a
contradiction, given that referenda are quintessentially national events and
affairs. But the key political significance of the referendum was international – which is a bit of a contradiction, given that referenda are quintessentially national events and affairs.The event took place under conditions of international war (financial
strangulation, media terrorism, sovereign intervention) and it mobilized an
international wave of support for the sovereign democratic action of the Greeks
against all odds.
This specific bilateral
block of contention between neoliberal bureaucratic order and popular
solidarity mobilization is now fully active in most countries in Europe. This marks
a great victory on behalf of both the Syriza government and the movement, which
should not be underestimated and which needs to be mined further in the time
ahead, as the political antagonisms in the European landscape are certain to shift
radically.
All in all, the
referendum has enabled Syriza finally to govern: to pursue the making of a
different governmentality. The no doubt odious terms of the post-referendum
agreement were meant to deprive Syriza of governmental capacity, and there are
people, including within Syriza, who think this is very much the case.
But for Syriza to be
deprived of governmental capacity in a real sense would mean to lose popular
consent, to split its ranks, and indeed to fall, to return to the political margins.
This has always been, after all, the Eurocrats’ ultimately desired outcome. But
this has not happened and, given the overwhelming discrediting of the
opposition during the referendum and the consistently wide electoral margin in
the polls, it is unlikely to happen any time soon.
The disruption of Syriza’s
ideological cohesion (as tentative and internally antagonistic as it has always
been) does not weaken Syriza’s governmentability but, on the contrary, it
places it at the forefront as its most urgent task. In this sense, the enemies
of Syriza in the EU did indeed lose the battle, not to mention their imposition
of an agreement that after all, even by their own account, cannot really be
implemented.
Government and movement
The biggest wound in
this process of tactical retreat – which was experienced as defeat, indeed
self-defeat – was surely suffered in the ranks of the movement. The experience
has been traumatic, and the condition of response to this trauma is at this
point an aporia. It is understandable as to why, if we return to what I pointed
out at the outset. The movement lives in the now. It is not made for, nor
concerned with, tactical manoeuvers of retreat. The immediacy of its social
base, relative to the mediation of the exigencies of governance, keeps the
movement free of responsibility to sovereignty, to the entirety of the polity
within which after all the movement fights agonistically, where time
is in constant flux and parameters can change at any minute and in directions
that may run counter to plans and wishes, even principles.
Here, democracy is
severely tested. The perception – but even more dramatically, the sentiment,
the profound affect – that the referendum unleashed the power of the
demos-in-action, which was then revoked by the government’s agreement with the
enemy, has precipitated explosive expressions of disaffection, depression, and
rage, as well as charges of cowardice, capitulation, selling out and indeed
treason to the principles of the movement.
The referendum was
decided by the government and was won, for the government, by the movement in
order for the government to act on its basis. Nothing in this equation is
assumed to be linear or self-evident, or even simply causal. The components are
irreducibly linked but cannot be collapsed into each other.
Neither the
government nor the movement is subservient to each other and yet both the
government and the movement are responsible for each other. They can exist just
as easily in coincidence as in contestation, and indeed they must, if the
radical democratic impetus is to be sustained. But this can only happen if
Syriza retains its heterogeneity, and does not forget its internal ideological
antagonism as well as its historic burden: to have been entrusted by the
majority of the Greek people to change things as they are But this can only
happen if Syriza retains its heterogeneity, and does not forget its internal
ideological antagonism as well as its historic burden: to have been entrusted
by the majority of the Greek people to change things as they are– not just the
present conditions of austerity, but the long term oligarchic stranglehold on
Greek society by institutional structures of corruption, illegality, and
injustice.
The power that the
government drew from the referendum was thrown into the arena of international
conflict, and indeed I would argue that it helped the government safeguard the
disastrous effect of disorderly default, which would have heaped untold damage
on the Greek people, on top of their already tortuous conditions of
devastation, and rendered Greek sovereignty (financial but also political) prey
to the vultures of elite power externally and internally.
The idea that the
movement could have been counted on to help fight this disaster of default were
it to occur is a non-starter, whatever the great capacities of the movement,
because the government that sustains this movement would have fallen (as all
governments in history that have presided over national bankruptcy have fallen),
and the enemies would have achieved total annihilation – not just Grexit,
which, we must remember, was also a plan in the enemy’s mind, but, in our terms,
the annihilation of Syriza itself and thereby the infliction of unfathomable
damage to the movement internationally.
Of course, people say –
and rightfully so – that the compromise of the Syriza government has inflicted
precisely such damage by discrediting the whole experiment. Frankly, only time
will tell. And time remains the most precious thing gained by the agreement –
time to put left governmentality to work. On the (politically) reasonable basis
that all agreements under unequal power are terrible but no agreement under
unequal power is catastrophic – Thucydides’ description of the Athenian-Melian
dialogue here is singularly instructive – the Syriza government still holds
open the task of the radical reorganization of society’s institutions and the
defeat of corrupt elite interests.
It will be judged on
that ground, and it will be judged most intensely and mercilessly by the
movement. But at this point, where people in the movement are terribly
disaffected, indeed enraged, it is important to consider what lies ahead and
what has not had the chance to be implemented – for the struggle to sustain
liquidity in a bankrupt country against all odds has kept any real governance
from happening. And governance here includes the movement, whose transformative
projects have not had a chance to really take off. The solidarity networks are
now needed more than ever, for the humanitarian crisis continues and, indeed,
intensifies, beyond the political differences between government and movement that
have emerged as a result of the compromise. The solidarity networks are now needed more than ever, for the humanitarian crisis continues and, indeed, intensifies, beyond the political differences between government and movement that have emerged as a result of the compromise.As relatively autonomous from the
government, the movement has its own task ahead – an essential task that no
government can handle.
Developing a left
governmentality entails precisely that internal dissent would register its
critical force as part of the governmental capacity. I repeat: Syriza is a
heterogeneous coalition, not a party, strictly speaking. Hence, the notion that
‘voting No in Parliament against the measures is a vote of support to the
government,’ as was voiced by various dissenting Syriza MPs, utterly bamboozled
the media technocrats and the liberal parties, who can only understand a
hierarchical, monovocal, and ideologically sutured party politics.
This notion is not some
crazy sophism, but utterly genuine and consistent with Syriza’s troubling and
troublemaking character. The fact that the oligarchic media is obsessed with
Syriza dissenters and is conducting a frenzy of ad hominem cannibalization of
certain persons proves the point. Critical dissent within the coalition is
indeed support; that’s what radical democracy demands and left governmentality
requires, and Syriza needs to protect its own, especially against savage media
manipulation.
In this light, I would
definitely fault Alexis Tsipras’ decision not to have immediately convened Syriza’s
Central Committee to air collectively the full force of internal dissent.
Strangely enough, Tsipras’ greatest strength is the dissent in his ranks. Even
if distant from reality as some of the internal opposition is – dissent is by
no means cohesive and on the same terms for everyone – its unreality serves to keep
Syriza’s governmental position from
succumbing to some transcendent righteousness of its truth, as instrumental as
this truth might be. Syriza’s trouble in the ranks must remain, so that its
trouble-making ‘nature’ can continue to confound stable categories of
governmentality in both Greece and in the EU.
Syriza’s trouble in the ranks
must remain, so that its trouble-making ‘nature’ can continue to confound
stable categories of governmentality in both Greece and in the EU.
Nothing is more radical,
more troubling, and more trouble-making than a government that proclaims that
it disagrees with the policies it has agreed to implement, a government that
refuses to identify with these policies because it recognizes them as abhorrent
and unfeasible.
It thus exposes these
policies for what they are: absurd demands of reckless power. But even more, it
exposes what is always hidden in the liberal understanding of politics: that in
the end politics is a performative domain, whose most dangerous aspect is that
it is believed to be genuinely true, utilitarian, and transcendent. Syriza’s
overt disbelief in the policies of
the agreement actually exposes the profoundly political nature of the force-field of action in which it exists,
provisionally and agonistically, in which and against which it struggles. Syriza’s
overt disbelief in the policies of
the agreement actually exposes the profoundly political nature of the force-field of action in which it exists,
provisionally and agonistically, in which and against which it struggles. It
exposes the fact that its existence is precisely struggle – not only against
the enemy, but against itself.
The reality of defeat
Of course, there are realities that are affected by this
extraordinarily intense and even violent political show of forces. And there is
indeed a reality of defeat in the
agreement that the Syriza government was forced to sign. But this reality has
been addressed by the internal opposition in the most conventional liberal
terms of politics – to the degree of arguing that Tsipras
is enacting an anti-politics. A
worthy and indeed sumptuous exception has been Slavoj Žižek’s call to assume the
responsibility of fighting with defeat and from within defeat.
Žižek also brilliantly dismantles the obsession with the TINA argument: “The
true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences
of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an
alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, it functions as a fetish which
prevents us thinking to the end the deadlock of our predicament.”
TINA has been used in
the last two weeks as the grand bogeyman of leftist incapacity. But the
greatest mark of leftist incapacity has really been to think and fight from the
very standpoint of the reality of being
deprived of alternatives – precisely what the Eurocrats have done to the
Greek left government they so obsessively desire to destroy.
Radical democracy and
left governmentality are not about the politics of unreality – so-called alternatives
that belong to fantasies of the past, like the nationalist self-enclosure of
Grexit scenarios. They are about crashing with realities head on, from the
precarious position of groundlessness on matters of principle and the sheer
incalculability of decision in the midst of struggle exactly at the point where
all options have been removed from the table.
This manifests
democracy’s greatest challenge to the status quo, keeping in mind that democracy is a politics of high risk.
It is not easy politics, it is not even necessarily good politics or wise
politics, but it is free politics, the only autonomous politics there is.
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