Methodology for a new politics: changing the ‘operating system’ of the left after the Greek experience of 2015

Abstract

The “SYRIZA experience” provides valuable insights into the inadequacies of the traditional Left methodology to engage effectively with the state and the government within the neoliberal framework. The political imagination and methodology of the Left need to be modified, and I argue that we need a new conceptual and organizational framework of doing politics—both within the state and outside of it—that is relevant to the current situation.

*The article is based on 2016 Phyllis Clarke Memorial Lecture

*Published November 2016, Studies in Political Economy

Europe: Counter-hegemonic politics in times of austerity, ideological uncertainty and regressive policies

*Extended version of talk delivered in Amsterdam, February 2016, New Politics Project/TNI 

I am going to present some thoughts based on my experience of being at the leadership of Syriza for 12 years, of doing politics from that position under the regime of troika the last 6 years, and from the perspective of what happened in 2015. These thoughts, I think, reflect a growing awareness within the Greek Left broadly construed to include people who are not affiliated with the traditional Left organizations, but they engage actively in the fight against financial despotism. Also, these thoughts shape the framework of a newly founded hub for social economy, empowerment and innovation that aims to contribute to a process of upgrading the operational capacities of the popular classes and the people willing to continue fighting. I hope that these thoughts will be helpful to the New Politics Project since that project also reflects the need to reassess our means and ways of doing politics under the light of the recent developments at the global scale.

1. Lessons from the Greek-European experience:

I will refer only to one lesson so to speak and then I will present some thoughts for the modifications needed of emancipatory politics in Europe. Due to the emergence of the neoliberal structure of the EU and the Eurozone, a bundle of important policies and powers that once belonged to the state has been transferred out of the reach of the people. In EU and Eurozone today, people’s democratic will has been successfully limited. The elected government is no longer the major bearer of political power, but a minor one. In the case of Greece, democratically electing a government is like electing a junior partner in a wider government in which the lenders are the major partners. The junior partner is not allowed to intervene and disturb the decisions and the policies implemented on crucial economic and social issues (fiscal policy, banks, privatizations, pensions etc).

If it does intervene and demand a say on these issues then the people who appoint it are going to suffer the consequences of daring to defy the elites’ privilege of exclusive access to these kinds of decisions. The European elites have managed to gain total and unchecked control over the basic functions of the society. It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a society will have a functional banking system and sufficient liquidity to run basic functions or not.

That’s what happened to Greece; that’s the core argument of the president of Portugal behind his decision to appoint initially a pro-austerity minority government: ‘I am preventing unnecessary pain.’ Pain that will be caused by the naivety and dangerous ignorance of the people and political powers that still insist on people’s right to have access to crucial decisions while at the same time they do not have anymore the power to impose their participation in shaping these decisions.

The Left – but not only the Left – in western societies of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics within the coordinates of the post-war institutional configuration. According to it, the elites are committed to accept the democratically shaped mandate of an elected government. If they do not like the policies that it promotes, they have to engage in a political fight; opposition parties must convince the people that this policy is neither desirable nor successful and use the democratic processes for a new government of their preference to be elected.

The post-war global balance of forces inscribed in the state institutions of western societies a considerable amount of popular power, rendering them quasi-democratic. This consists simply in allowing/tolerating/accepting that people without considerable economic power will have access to crucial decisions. Of course, the quality and the range of the access was a constant issue of class struggle. The elites were obliged to fight according to the rules (or at least to appear to do so) and at the same time they were working deliberately to diffuse this kind of institutional configuration contaminated by popular power. In the last decades (non-accidentally after the fall of Soviet Union) they made decisive steps towards diffusing this kind of power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions. Today the elites feel confident to openly defy democracy. Democracy is not a taboo anymore.

Based on the premise that this is still the framework in which politics is being performed, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: support social movements, build alliances, win majority in the parliament, form of a government. The strategy of SYRIZA was implicitly based on the premise that institutional power is not exhausted; by winning the elections, the remaining institutional power would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity. We all know the results of such a strategy now. The real outcome was totally different. There was virtually no change of policy. The elites are no longer committed to the post-war democratic rules of the political and social fight.

It is evident today – through the Greek experience – that the EU is an openly anti-democratic institutional structure. Instead of just trying to maneuver in vain through the confines of the toxic neoliberal European context, the Left must deploy a complex strategy of building social power. We have to create new popular power if we want to bring substantial change or become resilient instead of just handling the remaining – seriously depleted if not already exhausted – popular power inscribed in the traditional institutional framewrok. Such a strategy requires radical modification of our methodology, organizational principles and imagination in order to set up a network of basic social functions controlled by the people, no matter how difficult this may seem to us. Only then we will be able to seriously challenge the financial despotism that stirs nationalism and fascism and drags Europe into decline.

The experience of the SYRIZA government, in the months after the agreement, shows that there is no middle ground between financial despotism and democracy and dignity; if you try to reach such a ground, you are quickly converted into an organic component of the biopolitical machine that set forth the ambitious task of dehumanizing our societies.

However, focusing on its choice there is a danger of underestimating the fact that we indeed suffered a brutal strategic defeat in 2015. If we want to remain useful to the people we should not hide the strategic nature of our failure to seriously challenge financial despotism behind the choice SYRIZA made last summer. The choice SYRIZA made reflects deeper, structural weaknesses of the Left today. We must dare a serious reassessement of our methodology and tools if we want to be relevant in the new conditions. That’s why the “New Politics Project” can be very useful for the renewal of emancipatory politics especially in Europe.

2. New strategy – Redesign the “operating system” of the Left:

So, in order to be in a position to pursue or implement any kind of policy one may consider as being the right one on the governmental level we need to create a degree of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions. Without it we will not be able to confront the hostile actions of the elites and their willingness to inflict pain to a society that dares to defy their privilege over crucial decisions.

Based on people’s capacities, proper alignment, connection and coordination it is possible to acquire the necessary power to at least be in a position to assume the basic functions if needed. In the worst case, we will achieve some degree of resilience; people will be more empowered to defend themselves and hold their ground. In the best case, we will be able to regain the hegemony needed: people could mobilize positively, creatively and massively, decidedly reclaiming their autonomy.

Based on a strategy of this sort we can launch a process of redesigning the operating system of the Left so to speak. If we look at the horizon of the political practice of the Left we will see that it mainly contains demonstrating, that is organizing movements, pushing demands to the state; and voting, trying to change the balance of forces at the parliamentary level and hopefully form a government. But we know that moving and fighting within this framework is not sufficient.

When one wants to solve a particular problem, expanding one’s solution space increases one’s potential to find that solution. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining your strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; you need to reshape the ground. And to do that you have to go beyond it, expand the solution space and find ways to change it favorably in order to continue fighting from a better position. One way to expand the solution space is by shifting priorities: from political representation to setting up an autonomous Network of production of Economic and Social Power (NESP).

Which means that we must modify the balance between representing people’s beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people’s actions at the profiling of the Left. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a toxic anti-democratic european political environment designed to be intolerable to people’s needs, we must contribute heavily to the formation of a strong “backbone” for resilient and dynamic networks of social economy and co-operative productive activities, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, democratically functioning digital communities, communities control over functions such as infrastructure facilities, energy systems and distribution networks. These are ways of gaining a degree of autonomy necessary to defy the control of the elites over basic functions of our society.

The signs of collapse of the standard economic circuit are obvious in Greece but not only there. There is a growing exclusion of people from the economic circuit—having a job or a bank account, having a “normal life”. Modern society in general is in decline. From history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive. It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way—one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people’s capacities. Since there are no empty spaces in history, if we do not do this, the nationalists and the fascists – with their own militarized ways of performing these basic functions – may step in to conclude the decline.

The formation of a “backbone” or better of the necessary “nodes” for the NESP poses the challenge for new forms of “organization”. We are living in a period of profound and structural changes and the traditional ways of organizing seem to be inadequate to seriously challenge the financial despotism that is emerging rapidly the last decades. Our opponents have already spotted the shifting nature of the battlefield and they have already moved to new, unclassified ways of organizing and acting. I am talking about building new kinds of institutions and promoting new methods that are compatible with the new emerging environment of fast flows of information, distributed knowledge and expertise, digital frameworks of action and production etc. For example, “open innovation” models emerged in the last few years to facilitate the R&D departments of the big multinational companies to cope with the current distributed nature of knowledge and expertise that exceeds their past ways of control and usurpation of the human intellectual creativity and innovation. It is evident that the forms of organization that we need in order to create and expand the NESP will be unclassified and hybrid from a traditional point of view.

The question is what it means to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing the traditional democratic functioning and in order to restore it by newly transforming it. This is the crucial aspect of the “New Politics Project” from the prespective of the Greek-European experience according to my understanding. In other words, what are the modifications needed of our political practice for the constitution and expansion of NESP? For the time being I am thinking that the modifications needed fall in three categories: political imagination, methodology and organizing principles. It could be part of our research agenda the detailed identification of those modifications. At this point I would like to address an obvious objection: why on earth should we think of modifications like these instead of just being “careful” next time we approach power and making the right choices and decisions? From my experience, when people contemplate and talk about what are we doing, how are we aligning our forces, how are we functioning etc, they tend to agree with the claim that we need to be more innovative, better adapted and more efficient. But the very same people when actually doing politics they reproduce priorities, mental pictures, methods and organizational habits that they already know are not sufficient or adequate anymore. To my mind this means that there are implicit, deep-rooted norms in terms of methodological guidelines, organizational principles and mental images that shape crucially the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. That is why it is not reassuring enough just to say that we will do it better next time. It’s not important what we think, it’s what we know how to do that matters. And the latter is a product of our collective imagination, methodology and organizational principles.

Additionally, we often tend to underestimate and neglect problematic features either of internal functioning or of methods governing our actions and interventions. We believe in and fight for the promotion of the logic of cooperation and democracy against the logic of competition but in practice our organizations suffer severely in terms of cooperation and democracy on the operational/organizational level. Ten people tend to be less effective when they work together, interpersonal dynamics tend to deteriorate our processes, our decision-making processes in larger groups tend to be time-consuming, incoherent and dysfunctional etc.

Furthermore, our actions and initiatives are not connected properly with each other, they are fragmented and isolated, destined to face all kinds of difficulties again and again. We need to upgrade our operational capacities through appropriate nodes of connection, facilitating smooth flows of know-how and information, transferring best practices, building databases and accumulating knowledge and expertise in an easily retrievable and useful way etc. Actually, this is the advantage of multinational and in general big corporations in comparison with others: they have a vast social network and powerful databases that give them the necessary tools to plan and pursue their goals while at the same time their smaller competitors seem blind and disarrayed in a global environment of rapid changes. We need these qualities if we want to be really useful to the people today.

Another fascinating dimension of the project “redesign the “operating system” of the Left”: what it means to embed the function of political representation within the operational coordinates of NESP? The function of political representation is a fundamental one in complex societies. The expansion of a network of the sort we are discussing here and the changes it is going to generate on various levels of the social configuration would and should be reflected on the function of political representation itself. We may be in front of new ways of political representation and new types of political parties. For example, exploring ways, models and methods of building the NESP requires evaluation and use of concepts like the “commons”. By expanding this notion even further and putting forward a research project of shaping political representation as “commons”, it could give us valuable insights towards new ways of performing vital functions like political representation, transcending the traditional, institutional framework of representative democracy.

Another aspect of the project “redesign the “operating system” of the Left” is the elaboration of a multi-level democratic transformation strategy of the state and its effective interconnection with the NESP. The Left talks too much about the democratic transformation of the state. In practice, the driving concept is the restoration of state functions as they were before the neoliberal transformation. I am sensing that the expansion of a network of economic and social power under people’s control can further unlock our imagination towards targeted reforms of state institutions that are needed in order to connect them with the NESP. In theory this is an old idea: the transformation of the state is a complementary move to the self-organized collectivities of the people outside of it, driven by these forms of self-governance. Actually, this is exactly what our opponents did consistently and persistently during the last decades. They were designing and implementing reforms on various levels of the state institutions based on the methods, the criteria and the functioning of their own “social agents”, namely the corporations and their own understanding of the nature of public space (beyond the state), namely the market. This is exactly the “mechanics” of transformation that various intellectuals and leaders of the Left were describing already a long time ago. Perhaps, by shifting our priorities we will be able to revive old but useful ideas that have been forgotten in practice.

Concluding, I would like to point out that the “SYRIZA experience” will be worthless if we do not resist decidedly the temptation to replace one mistake with another. The failure of SYRIZA the failure of traditional electoral poltics creates favorable conditions for mentalities like “self-referential alternativism” and “vanguard isolationism” to emerge and preoccupy the minds and hearts of those who are willing to continue fighting. But choices like these are just symmetric to what SYRIZA did justifying fully our opponents: either you will be marginal or you will become like us! The existential threats and the crucial questions regarding their future that our societies are facing today have nothing to do with a strategy of building “arcs” that aim to safeguard the “Left” or any other identity. Entering the ominous battlefield of the 21st century, the Left will either be relevant and useful for the defense of human societies or it will be obsolete.

Public is good: using democratisation against privatisation of public services

*Extended version of talk delivered in Zagreb, November 2015. Seminar with the title »Public is good: using democratisation against privatisation of public services», organized by Institute for Political Ecology.

I would like to thank the Institute for Political Ecology for the invitation and the opportunity to present experiences and thoughts on one of the most crucial pillars of the neoliberal trasformation: privatizations. I am going to present briefly the course of privatizations in Greece and I will outline the innovative features of the struggle against privatization of the water company in Thessaloniki. I will conclude with several thoughts regarding necessary requirements for a transformative process from a defensive struggle to protect public enterprises run by the state towards a more confident way of fighting that promotes a new model of democratic management and social control over enterprises that are related to common resources and goods.

1. The process of privatization in Greece began in the early 1990s. The right-wing government of the day considered privatization as the main policy objective. However, the implementation of this first wave of privatizations was blocked by strong political and labor union opposition.

The context changed after 1995, when Greece was admitted to candidacy in the European Monetary Union (EMU). This exerted pressure on the governments to implement structural reforms in order to foster policy credibility. During this second stage privatizations mainly involved public utilities (water, gas, electric distribution), banks, services, and telecommunications.

Since 2011 and under the rule of Troika the strategy of privatization became even more aggressive. A new Fund was created, responsible for gathering the state and public assets that were for sale and new legislation passed to facilitate the process. Indicatively, the assets were 35 state buildings, shares of the state in various enterprises like Athens International Airport, Hellenic Petroleum, Athens Water Company (EYDAP), Thessaloniki Water Company (EYATH), Hellenic Motorways, the companies of the major ports of Pireaus and Thessaloniki, Hellenic Post (ELTA) and 10 other Ports.

The major privatizations that are being pursued at this period of time is the two major ports of the country, the railway company, 14 regional airports, and the gas company. The further privatization of some major assets and companies of the electric companies group is postponed for the time being for reasons that are not connected to citizen’s or worker’s mobilization.

2. The movements that are developing against privatization of public enterprises and assets include apart from usual suspects like environmentalists – who are very well aware that privatization and subsumption of public properties under the logic of profit means severe threats for the environment – left and progressive groups, mainly include the relevent labor unions and local communities (especially in the case of ports and airports). These movements are mainly developed in traditional lines, namely by focusing on labor and community rights that are going to be compromised by the respective privatizations. That’s why they are having difficulties to build a wider front of social support and as we know from past experience they tend to dismantle if the government is willing to offer various types of compensation to the mobilized agents. This is a common pattern whenever the movement is centered exclusively on the rights of specific groups that are being affected directly by the process of privatization.

We could say that the majority of the movements and the citizens who were and are fighting against privatizations in Greece do not focus sufficiently on issues like democratization of public enterprises, participatory governance and citizen’s involvement in planning, implementation and control of the relevant policies. And this is the case mainly for two reasons: firstly, only recently the Greek society is gradually becoming aware of the dangers and the deadlocks of the privatization process: increase of price, underinvestment, poor maintenance of infrastructure and decrease of service quality. So, the citizen’s initiatives and movements are now realizing that we need a convincing rhetoric and a victorious strategy. So, we can speak of growing awareness but not a more radical – in terms of democratic processes – movement strategy yet.

Secondly, it hasn’t been developed sufficiently yet – both in practical terms and in terms of political imagination – effective methodological and organizational tools for functions like democratic management and control of public enterprises. However, due to the recent political developments in Greece – namely the insufficiency of traditional electoral politics to change the basic parameters of austerity and other neoliberal policies, like privatizations – plenty of people are beginning to explore ways and methods of impoving citizen’s real involvement in democratic, transparent and participatory processes that could take on the responsibility of running basic social and productive functions, part of which are the functions of controling and managing public enterprises.

On the other hand, there were various domains of social mobilization during the memorandum years that were characterized by participation, active involvement, self-organization,self-governing and deepening of democratic processes. Solidarity networks of various kinds, networks of distribution and social medical centers and drug stores developed organizational traits and shifts in social relations that point towards new models of collaboration and collective existence that can help us elaborate a different mentality of citizen’s control and management over basic functions of our societies. However, these features didn’t emerge through the struggle against privatizations which is the topic of our discussion here.

So, we could say that the Greek society is just beginning to follow the path that other european societies have already taken the last years. The path of increased confidence that leads to bolder goals like the remunicipalisation or bringing back services to public sector because of the negative effects of their privatization. A path that sometimes led also to democratisation of public services through experiments in participatory governance and involvement of various social groups in supervision and management of public companies and institutions. In other words, it seems that Greece has just begun to converge with what is already happening to other countries.

3. The struggle against the privatization of the water company in Thessaloniki was the most important one regarding the issues we are discussing here. A dynamic grass rooted movement managed to mobilize citizens and institutions and to spread the information concerning the consequences of water privatization, based on data extracted from the international experience.

In 2012 the government announced that will set the management and almost the total of the two biggest cities water companies stock capital under private control. When the government made the offer in 2012, apart from private firms, a component of the movement in Thessaloniki, the “initiative 136” proposed a model of social management and ownership. The initiative was named by the following idea: if we divide the estimate EYATH’s capital value out of the number of those it serves we would need 136 euros per each in order to have the company under social control. For that reason non-profit cooperatives per municipality have been created in order to be in charge of water management. The Initiative 136 collaborated closely with the workers of the company and the latter supported their proposal.

The interesting thing here is that a struggle against privatization didn’t use only the traditional arguments and tools but shaped a public proposal based on organizational principles of direct democracy: decisions would be taken at open assemblies, based on principles of self management and one person, one vote process. They proposed a deepening of democracy through social participation of public goods management and division to smaller local water companies, a development that could facilitate participation and control from the consumers due to the smaller scale. In that way they manage to overcome the reservations and dissatisfaction towards public companies and mobilise more people towards the fight against water privatisation.

Of course, there were various debates within the movement mainly related to the efficiency of such a proposal. Water is too important and needs high expertise and big amounts of money for investments in infrastructure and maintenance, attributes that the state is in a position to secure. It is not the kind of recourse that we can take risks by experimenting with its management. Additionally to that, many people were asking ‘why we should pay again for an infrastructure that we have already paid for as tax payers?’.

As it was expected, K136’s proposal was not accepted by the government, even though it attracted wide international interest and publicity. In March 2013 the EYATH Workers Union made an open call for the creation of a great alliance against privatization. Municipalities, Initiative 136, the Citizen’s Union for Water (second level union of water cooperatives), 12 non-profit water cooperatives, several grass rooted movements and independent citizens, co-founded the coordinating body ‘SOSte to Nero’ (Save Water). It is indicative that ‘SOSte to Nero’ took the stance that water should be under public control.

Despite differences, the need for unity prevailed. And not only that. By being excluded from institutional and official ways of promoting their struggle and influence the decision-making process, ‘SOSte to Nero’ made another unexpected move: it decided to organise a local popular referendum on water privatisation. On the 14th of March 2014, the Regional Association of Municipalities of Central Macedonia decided unanimously to hold a referendum despite the fact that its legitimacy was debatable. The inspiration came by official and unofficial referendums that took place in other countries or cities like Italy 2011, Berlin 2011, Vienna 2013. Three-member steering committees have been created to organize it in each municipality and municipal community of Thessaloniki, involving one representative from each municipality, one of K136 and one of the EYATH Workers. ‘Soste to Nero’ circulated a call for support at European level. EPSU (European Federation of Public Service Union) took a lead in coordinating financial donations as well as volunteers in order to facilitate the process and provide international observers as a way to enhance credibility and legitimacy. The referendum took place on the 18th of May, the day of local and European elections, despite the efforts of the government to prevent it. 218,002 citizens participated in the referendum (half of those who participated in the local and european elections at the region) and 98% of these voters said No to privatization.

As a result, the privatization process was blocked and dignity and social empowerment were strengthened. It is interesting to point out that by using tools and methods that enhance people’s participation like referendums, participatory budget, popular legislative initiatives etc, it is possible to achieve legitimacy and the necessary power to enforce people’s will. There were also positive institutional shifts: the higher court of Greece decided that the state should remove the water company of Athens from the fund responsible for the privatization process, in order to comply with the Constitution. Since then, several initiatives, conferences and events from grass rooted groups, active on water issue were asking for the same thing. In any case, it became clear that once we organize resistance effectively and mobilize people approrpiately, there are ways to overcome the power of corporations and the state.

4. Now, let me conclude with a few thoughts regarding necessary requirements for upgrading our power in the fight against privatizations:

– Instead of just convincing citizens and workers in the relevant companies that democratic management and social supervision is the right way to go, we must focus on elaborating planning, implementation and monitoring tools and organizational schemes that facilitate the transition towards this direction. We know that people are demoralized when it comes to those issues because of the fact that they seem to be terribly difficult – if not impossible – to make them function. Let’s reorient our attention from the political argumentation towards the improvement of a democratic and participatory operating system.

– the progress in various areas of human intellectual and practical experience, the innovative configuration of know-how and expertise in colaborative work and new technologies could provide us the initial ground for the systematic elaboration of efficient models of co-management, democratic decision-making and social supervision.

– Democratic management and social supervision is the only way to confront corruption in various levels in a period of time in which our societies will have limited resources at their disposal. We can afford neither the imposition of profit nor corruption to the administration of our infrastructures and the relevant resources.

– Privatization is the highest stage of the non-transparent state function of public enterprises; not an answer to it. Non-transparent state function of public enterprises deprives us from the right to decide or have a say on crucial issues. But it is considered to be a problem, since we the citizens are still typically the owners. Privatization legitimizes the problem; it transforms it into normality; only the owner have a substantive say and we are no longer the owners; we are just clients. Privatization is the final destination of a gradual derpivation of people’s right to have access to crucial decisions regarding crucial issues for their lives such as vital infrustrures of our societies. Not having any control over infrastructure is a dangerous direction especially in the era of increased geopolitical instability and war we are gradually entering.

From my experience people are gradually aware that the era of innocence and naivity has passed. It’s time the citizens to step in and take direct control of their own societies.

The “SYRIZA Experience”: Learn and Adapt

*Extended version of talk delivered in London, November 2015. Historical Materialism Conference.

Introduction

I am going to present a – still incomplete – overview of a dual project I am currently working on. The project can be divided in three parts:

(i) understand in a rigorous and integrated manner what were the positive and negative features of the ‘SYRIZA experience’,

(ii) specify what is needed in order to adapt and be effective in the new conditions of doing politics, and

(iii) engage in a process of shaping the conditions for a new resilient and potentially hegemonic emancipatory political practice to emerge.

The duality of the project is related to the dual character of its third part, namely its domestic and international dimensions:

(iiia) transmit in a functional way the ‘SYRIZA experience’ abroad, facilitating the Left in other countries to initiate on time a process of systematic preparation and adaptation in order to be relevant to today’s demands of the fight against neoliberalism and the increased hostility of the elites and

(iiib) reassemble, reconfigure and realign the existing, disarrayed and scattered – but also full of energy, determination and capacities – people willing to continue to fight for bringing dignity, democracy, liberty and emancipation back to Greece. People that go far beyond those affiliated with the traditional Left.

I am going to present the unfinished structure for the second part of the project “Specify what is needed for adaptation and resilience in the new conditions”.

Where we stand today

SYRIZA failed to stop austerity and the neoliberal transformation of Greece. Mainly it failed to initiate a process of elaboration of a new strategy for the disengagement from the suffocating conditions the new agreement created. A left government is implementing austerity, the people of the left are puzzled, the left will gradually be registered as a pro-memorandum political force in people’s minds. The nationalists and the fascists have remained the only «natural hosts» of popular rage and resentment, the expected emotional outcomes of the burial of hope we witnessed last summer.

Moreover, Greek society experienced unprecedented pressure and a brutal defeat. It is not easy to assess the damages on the social body from the fact that the Greeks had to choose between two existential attributes: their personal dignity and national pride on one hand and the profound sense that we are inherently part of the European people on the other. I do not have time to expand on this, but I am convinced that nothing good – for Greece or for Europe – can come out of the irresponsible and superficial decision of European elites to push Greeks to an existential split.

The most severe problem is that the Greeks are sensing that the future of their society is severely compromised. The majority of Greeks has been sentenced to misery and despair through the imposition of new hard austerity measures without any real hope for the future. If we add to the economic and social disaster that austerity is inflicting on us the huge waves of refugees that are set to enter Greece – especially the complex and contradictory ways in which their drama is reflected on the abused psychic economy of the Greek population – and add also the fear of increased geopolitical instability in the region, then it seems that prosperity, stability and peace is not what Greeks are experiencing now and certainly not what they feel their future is bringing.

It’s like we are walking on thin ice from now on in Greece. In moments like this we have to remain calm and think clearly. The second part of the project is about specifying what is needed in order to adapt and be effective to the new conditions of doing politics. I am thinking of four steps:

– Identify the battlefield

– Diagnose the core weaknesses of the left

– Deploy a relevant/feasible/resilient/potentially hegemonic strategy

– Redesign the ‘operating system’ of the left.

Identify the battlefield:

There are various aspects we could mention here. For example, the ones related with the state, its diminished power, neoliberal transformation and positioning at the national and international networks of power. Then, there are international aspects: geopolitical imbalances, dynamics of European neoliberal architecture, global financial pitches and transnational ‘trade’ agreements. And of course there are aspects regarding the people: intensified exclusion, fall of standard of living, disorientation and fear on the one hand. On the other hand, we can spot enormous embodied capacities, unmediated networks of info and know-how flows, radicalization and determination.

Here I will only mention a few things regarding the state. A bundle of important policies and powers that once belonged to the state has been transferred either to external authorities or directly to the elites – in both cases out of the reach of the people. At the same time, a vast array of neoliberal regulations and norms govern the function of the state. These two conditions combined mean that government and state are not the center of political power but only one of the poles of such a power.

In other words, due to the neoliberal advance of the last decades – like the emergence of the neoliberal architecture of the EU and the Eurozone for example – today people’s democratic will has been successfully limited. The elected government is no longer the major bearer of political power, but a minor one. In the case of Greece, democratically electing a government is like electing a junior partner of a wider government in which the ECB and the lenders are the major partners. The junior partner is not allowed to intervene and disturb the decisions and the policies implemented on crucial economic and social issues like fiscal policy, banks, the growth model, privatizations, pensions, wages etc. If it does intervene and demand a say on these issues – for example by refusing to concede in pensions cuts – then the people who appoint it are going to suffer the consequences of daring to defy the elites’ privilege of exclusive access to these kinds of decisions. The elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain total and unchecked control over the basic functions of the society. It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a society will have a functional banking system or sufficient liquidity to run basic functions or not.

That’s what happened to Greece; that’s the core argument of the president of Portugal in appointing a pro-austerity minority government: I am preventing unnecessary pain. Pain that will be caused by the naivety and dangerous ignorance of the people and political powers still untrained in the new balance of power. People and political powers that still insist on people’s right to have access to crucial decisions while at the same time they do not have anymore the power to impose their participation in shaping these decisions. The Portuguese President – like the European and Greek establishment and media – is the bearer of a crucial message for us: you do not have enough power to make us accept and tolerate your participation to crucial decisions. Forget it people. We have to listen to them carefully – overcoming their cynicism and the fear of what this really means for our lives and societies – and respond properly.

Diagnose the core weaknesses of the left

In this project I am trying to identify core-weaknesses of the left based on my privileged access to the SYRIZA experience. Here I will focus on one of the premises that shape implicitly the political imagination and methodology of the Left. The Left – but not only the Left – in western societies of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics within the coordinates of the post-war institutional configuration. According to it, the elites are committed to accept the democratically shaped mandate of an elected government. If they do not like the policies that are being promoted, they have to engage in a political fight; their parties must push the government through their political activity towards more moderate directions, they must convince the people that this policy is not desirable nor successful and use the democratic processes for a new government of their preference to be elected.

Based on the premiss that this is still the context in which politics is being performed, SYRIZA backed up anti-austerity movements the last five years and being in opposition rejected ferociously any excuse for the implementation of austerity policies. It formed a program responsive to people’s needs, built social alliances and in 2015 managed to win the elections. SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: support social movements, build alliances, take majority in the parliament, form of a government. But the outcome was different. There was virtually no change of policy. The elites are no longer committed to the post-war democratic rules of the political and social fight. We can see the same attitude in other topics as well. The elites have developed ways to avoid taxation that render the political decision of a government to increase their taxes extremely difficult to implement. The elites gradually detach themselves from our societies. They are becoming increasingly indifferent and cynical towards our societies and the deadlocks they are causing.

The post-war global balance of forces inscribed/infused in the state institutions a huge amount of popular power, rendering them democratic. This consists simply in allowing/tolerating/accepting that people without considerable economic power will have access to crucial decisions. Of course, the quality and the range of the access was a constant issue of class fight. The elites were obliged to fight according to the rules (or at least to appear to do so) and at the same time they were working deliberately to diffuse this kind of institutional configuration contaminated by popular power. In the last decades (non-accidentally after the fall of Soviet Union) they made decisive steps towards diffusing this kind of power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions. Today they do not feel obliged to show at least some respect for the democratic rules they violate. They feel confident to openly defy democracy. Democracy is not a taboo anymore.

The strategy of SYRIZA was implicitly based on the premise that institutional power is not exhausted; the elites will not cross the Rubicon, they will prefer to stay formally within the confines of democratic rules or at most they will push them to the edge. They will respect at least a shred of democracy and provide the new government with at least a minor degree of freedom needed in order to heal social wounds and restore economic activity. We could say that the implicit idea was that by winning the elections, the remaining institutional power would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity and then in a relatively stable environment we could enhance people’s power using the state institutions (another implicit premise that needs to be examined). We all know the results of such a strategy now.

Deploy a relevant/feasible/resilient/potentially hegemonic strategy

Our present situation requires us to think what is needed in order to stop austerity and restore democracy and popular sovereignty. As I said before, the elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain total and unchecked control over the basic functions of the society. So, in order to be in a position to pursue or implement any kind of policy one may consider as being the right one, we need to create a degree of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions. Without it we will not be able to confront the hostile actions of the elites and their willingness to inflict pain to a society that dares to defy their privilege over crucial decisions. A strategy that wishes to be relevant to the new conditions must take on the duty of acquiring the necessary power to run basic social functions. No matter how difficult or strange this may sound in light of the traditional ways of doing politics, it is the only way to acquire the necessary power to defy the elites’ control over our societies.

Is this possible? My hypothesis is that literally every day the human activity – both intellectual and practical – is producing experiences, know-how, criteria and methods, innovations etc that inherently contradict the parasitic logic of profit and competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach. Of course we are talking about elements that may not be developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may have been nurtured in liberal or apolitical contexts and that are often functionally connected to the classical economic circuit. However, the support of their further development, their gradual absorption in an alternative, coherent paradigm governed by a different logic and values, and finally their functional articulation in alternative patterns of performing the basic functions of our societies is just a short description of the duty of a Left that has a clear, systematic and strategically wide orientation.

Based on people’s capacities, proper alignment, connection and coordination it is possible to acquire the necessary power to at least be in a position to assume the basic functions if needed. We can do this by extracting the embodied capacities of the people and putting them into use for the liberation of society. In the worst case, we will achieve some degree of resilience; people will be more powerful to defend themselves and hold their ground. In the best case, we will be able to regain the hegemony needed: people can mobilize positively, creatively and massively and reclaim decidedly their autonomy.

Redesign the ‘operating system’ of the left

Based on a strategy of this sort we can launch a process of redesigning the operating system of the left so to speak. I will focus only on the core weakness I referred to earlier. We know that the popular power once inscribed in the democratic institutions is exhausted. We do not have enough power to make the elites to accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions. But the left is inclined to handle this kind of power through the function of political representation. This is true not only for SYRIZA but for most left groups and organizations. If we look at the horizon of the political practice of the Left we will see that it contains demonstrating, that is organizing movements, pushing demands to the state and voting, trying to change the balance of forces at the parliamentary level and hopefully form a government. That means that our political practice is mostly shaped around the institutional framework of representative democracy. But we know that moving and fighting within the confinements of institutional power is not sufficient.

When you want to solve a particular problem, expanding your solution space increases your potential to find that solution. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining your strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground (SYRIZA did quite well in this respect); you need to reshape the ground. And to do that you have to go beyond it, expand the solution space and find ways to change it favorably in order to continue fighting from a better position. One way to expand the solution space is by shifting priorities: from political representation to setting up an autonomous Network of production of Economic and Social Power (NESP).

Which means that we must modify the balance between representing people’s beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people’s actions at the profiling of the left. We must turn our attention towards setting up processes that will empower people, for example by advancing social economy and co-operative initiatives or community control over functions such as infrastructure facilities, energy systems and distribution networks. These are ways of gaining a degree of autonomy.

In other words, instead of being mainly the political representative of popular classes we must contribute heavily to the formation of a strong backbone for resilient and dynamic networks of co-operational productive activities, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, democratically functioning digital communities and other aspects of economic and social power necessary to defy the control of the elites over basic functions of our society. We need to build networks that activate people’s capacities and produce real power that can then be used to bring meaningful change.

The signs of collapse of the standard economic circuit are obvious in Greece but not only there. There is a growing exclusion of people from the economic circuit—having a job or a bank account, having a “normal life”. Modern society in general is in decline. From history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive. It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way—one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people’s capacities. First, this would allow society to survive, especially people who are being excluded today. Second, this could begin a transition towards a better and more mature society. There are no empty spaces in history, so if we do not do this, the nationalists and the fascists with their militarized ways of performing these basic function may step in to finish off the decline.

We have to create new popular power if we want to bring substantial change or become resilient instead of just handling the remaining – seriously depleted if not already exhausted – popular power inscribed to the democratic institutions. It’s like we must reinvent the political methodology that left organizations were deploying in periods when the state and the institutional configuration were extremely hostile to people’s needs and demands (anti-democratic). What kind of political practice is compatible with a strategy of acquiring/accumulating power in order to be relevant, resilient and potentially hegemonic and successful in democratically transforming the institutional framework? We are in a similar situation. The question is what it means to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing the democratic function of representative democracy and in order to restore it by newly transforming it. In other words, what are the modifications needed for the constitution and expansion of NESP?

For the time being I am thinking that the modifications needed fall in three categories: political imagination, methodology and organizing principles. I haven’t yet conclude the classification of what I have spotted as necessary modifications from the “SYRIZA experience” into these three categories. At this point I would like to respond to an obvious question: why on earth should we think of modifications like these instead of just being careful next time we approach power and making the right choices and decisions? From my experience, when people contemplate and talk about what are we doing, how are we aligning our forces, how are we functioning etc, they tend to agree with the claim that we need to be more innovative, better adapted and more efficient. But the very same people, including me, when actually doing politics they reproduce priorities, mental pictures, methods and organizational habits that they already know are not sufficient or adequate anymore. To my mind this means that there are implicit, deep-rooted norms in terms of methodological guidelines, organizational principles and mental images that shape crucially the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. That’s why it is not reassuring enough just to say that we will do it better next time. It’s not important what we think, it’s what we know how to do that matters. And the latter is a product of our collective imagination, methodology and organizational principles.

Then there is the fascinating question that I haven’t explored yet: what it means to embed the function of political representation within the operational coordinates of NESP? Of course, creating new popular power will also invigorate and possibly transform the democratic institutions, giving again a substantial meaning to political representation and the political practice we are acquainted with. But, the expansion of a network of the sort we are discussing here and the changes is going to generate on various levels of the social configuration would be reflected on the function of political representation itself. We may be in front of new ways of political representation, new types of political parties and so on.

Another crucial aspect is the elaboration of a multi-level democratic transformation strategy of the state and its effective interconnection with NESP. The Left talks too much about the democratic transformation of the state. In practice, the driving concept is the restoration of state functions as they were before the neoliberal transformation. There is a point here but I am sensing that the expansion of a network of economic and social power can further unlock our imagination towards targeted transformations of state institutions that are needed in order to connect them with it. In theory this is an old idea: the transformation of the state is a complementary move to the self-organized collectivities of the people outside of it, driven by forms of self-governance. Perhaps, by shifting our priorities we will be able to revive old ideas that have been forgotten in practice.

 

Taking our cause seriously

Talk delivered at GCAS Conference in Athens on the 18th of July 2015

First of all, I would like to apologize to you for not being prepared appropriately. The recent defeat of democracy at the negotiation process created political turmoil inside SYRIZA and the government that prevented me from focusing with the necessary attention on today’s presentation.

So, I am going to present some thoughts based on my recent experience from the political and social process here in Greece, keeping at the same time a global view.

The general idea is that the traditional political imagination and methodology prevent the existing social and political collective agents fighting for emancipation and liberation from being truly effective or at least well-adapted to the new social and political conditions in order to be able to respond adequately to the current level of aggresiveness of the elites and to the tremendous challenges humankind faces today.

1. First point: we need to believe again, we must restore our faith.

For the first time in our evolutionary history, humankind as a whole has a common history and, hence, a common fate. And yet, human societies seem indifferent; humans keep doing things as usual, even though we have become sensitive in strange ways to the emergency that lies around us.

Why is this happening? We have been somehow convinced that the logic of competition and profit is actually efficient and effective. That somehow deadlocks and challenges will be resolved by letting the invisible hand, the markets, to do their thing. Even more, we are somehow convinced that the logic of capital that rules our culture and societies is the cause for everything good we are having today.

And I wonder, when are we going to stop admiring the perverted logic of competition and profit? It is as if the most successful colonization of the logic of capital took place in our imagination. Even marxists and people on the left are secretly fascinated by capital through the admiration of Marx’s work. When are we going to overcome the syndrome of inferiority, to escape from the seduction of our imagination?

Humans do things through many different logics. Humans are amazingly complex. Our societies achieved remarkable things not because of capital but despite the fact that this perverted logic was, and still is, dominant in our culture. And because of its dominance what we have achieved came at the cost of tremendous human pain and severe damages in our planet. We need to embrace deeply the fact that today, neoliberalism – the new and most ferocious manifestation of the logic of capital – is totally naked. Neither effective, nor desirable.

So, let’s put ourselves together. Let’s deeply appreciate the fact that manifesting the various logics of cooperation and democracy we are far stronger than we think, and that for the first time in our evolutionary history we have so many embodied capacities from different cultures within our reach. We must truly believe that our logic is profoundly better not only desirable, but better than the logic of capital, of the competition and profit, the logic of the markets.

2. Second point: forget about post-war, political, social and institutional configuration and ways of doing politics.

It is true that in the current global context, things are pretty tight when it comes to the implementation of non-neoliberal policies. Especially in Europe, today’s neoliberal configuration is even more harsh towards other political orientations. It is designed in such a way that it discards without the need for political argumentation any attempt to follow an alternative economical and social path. I am talking about a vast network of regulations, norms and directives, a huge bureaucratic apparatus of processes and mechanisms that blocks implicitly any alternative. We are talking about the institutional instantiation of the famous phrase “TINA”.

So, is there any room for emancipatory politics? It depends. No, if we seek quick and easy ways to implement alternative policies. Ways that presuppose the respect of the democratic will of the people by the elites. Ways that will not disturb the naïve and comforting conception that we – as people – do not really need to engage profoundly into collective practices. Today, the only thing we – as people – are willing to give is singular moments of participation. The idea is that through demonstrating and voting we can somehow solve the urgent problems of our societies with orthodox means, through the state and governments that are sensitive to our demands.

I do not mean that representative democracy has no value. On the contrary I think that it is a crucial dimension of a mature society. But we often ask too much from it and its failure to deliver on our expectations generates a misguided devaluation. Neither do I mean that governments sensitive to people’s needs are not crucial factors in this battle. I am just stressing the fact that we must have a broader view of the agents and the processes needed if we want to change things.

Yes, if we are determined and systematic enough to work under the radars of the neoliberal configuration, inventive enough to formally coincide with it while at the same time we empower people against it and decisive enough not to give in to threats and blackmail.

In order to respond adequately in these suffocating conditions, new organizational

standards and methods are needed for the engagement of thousands of people in this day-to-day and multi-level fight. Negatively put, without the people with the knowledge needed, aligned into groups of collaboration and embedded in a vast network of democratic decision-making that produces policies of our own logic no government will be in a position to wage this battle.

But in order to engage in such a shift we must abandon the tendency that things will change easily and quick through the revival of the previous institutional and political configuration of post war liberal capitalism. We must finally confront the reality that neoliberals are “burning” the bridges with the past behind them.

3. Third point: we are not fighting for our ideas. We are fighting for our survival. We do not choose where to fight. We are fighting everywhere.

Transforming the state and social practices beyond it are two crucial aspects of emancipatory politics. Although they are autonomous in the sense that they have their own temporalities, different organizational and methodological requirements etc they stand or fall together in the end.

There is no way to transform the state in a meaningful and durable way without strong interrelation with processes of expansion of alternative social practices, democratically organized productive units, respective non-commodified circuits of distribution, a different civic mentality etc. And alternatively, there is no way to promote seriously and in a non-marginal way alternative social practices – which are feeble and hard to sustain in a hostile environment – without the support, the protection or at least the concession by the state of free space in order to develop roots and size that allows a quasi-sustainable reproduction and expansion.

But, in politics choosing so to speak between the two is often a real question: in practice, we have limited resources at our disposal and we must allocate them according to the criterion of efficiency. Then the question is not whether we should work within the spheres of state power or not but what is the optimal allocation of resources and time between working within it and outside it. And secondly, in practice we are engaged in a brutal war and sometimes you must focus on seizing state power or other forms of power just to wrest them from the hands of your opponents. For example, in Greece, we couldn’t afford leaving state power to the neoliberals.

On the other hand, the present-day situation of the state and the intensity of the neoliberal attack on societies attribute an existential twist to the theoretical claim that we must work both within the state and outside it. A bundle of important policies and powers once belonged to the state has been tranfered either to external (european or domestic but “independent”) authorities or directly to the elites – in both cases out of the reach of the people. At the same time, a vast number of neoliberal regulations and norms governs the function of the state and sections of social life. These two conditions combined, render the governmental and state power not the political power but just one of the poles of such a power, shaping a hostile environment in which considerable effort is needed just to open some space for the implementation of different policy.

In other words, as I mentioned previously, state power – as it is traditionally conceived in isolation from the social movement and bureaucratic in nature – is not enough to wage the battle we are engaged in. We, more than ever, need the expansion of democracy and cooperation in social practices and new social institutions. We need social innovation for the empowerment of the people in new ways. The fate of a left government depends on our ability to build new social and institutional structures that it will empower the people. And the duty of a left government is not just to exercise the diminished power it has, but to function as facilitator for such an empowerment of the people to take place.

But such a duty requires a new political imagination that transcends the established view of being in the government. The traditional methodology dictates that people through demonstrating and voting express their demands and will and then the governemnt uses the state to respond to them. This is no longer viable even if we wanted to do it. Instead, we need a different conception of the state and a new model of leadership as well. Being in the government is a way to use the remaining resources of the state (by transforming them accordingly) to facilitate (by organizing efficient democratic decision making and productive processes) social agents to decide, plan, implement and monitor policies and projects of an alternative political orientation. And this is not a path that our ideology forces us to follow; there is no other way to implement a different policy today than to liberate and use the embodied capacities of the people.

4. Fourth point: Spoiled teenagers cannot save humankind

We need to engage efficiently and profoundly in transforming the way of thinking ourselves and our lives. In the last decades in the western world at least, people were raised believing that a good life is essentially an individual achievement. Society and nature is just a background, a wallpaper for our egos, the contingent context in which our solitary selves will evolve pursuing individual goals. The individual owes nothing to no one, she lacks a sense of respect and responsibility to the previous or the next generations, and indifference is the proper attitude regarding the present social problems and conditions. There is no way to achieve our goals, saving the planet, transforming the economy, coping with social problems and modern challenges etc without transforming the spoiled teenager-like modern subjectivity into a mature grown-up subjectivity ready to bear the responsibility and duty of taking on the difficult and demanding task that history dictate.

5. Fifth point: Don’t try to change the people; give people the means to change the world

People don’t like being the passive objects of change. They possess the human need to be the agents of change. People do not have to be trained in democracy because they should, or because that’s the goal and the belief of a political power. People should not be viewed as the raw material that must be transformed according to some plan. Instead, we need a narrative that frames our current situation and a goal that will inspire people to make it their own. Through the struggle to achieve this goal people will be transformed and developed fully. The expansion of a democratic mentality and culture will be a side effect of this process. In the same way exploitation and repression is not the explicit goal but it is always the unquestioned way of achieving a goal. Democracy must be the self-evident choice of doing things, a means of generating real social value and quality of life; not merely an ideological persuasion.

6. Sixth point: Make our logic trendy and individual preference.

Humans tend to identify with what they know best. It is a way of self-determination, a way to think of ourselves in a favourable light. Generative Democracy – a democracy that engages and enhances people’s capacities through co-operation is preferable because it respects and liberates people’s capacities – the same capacities that people tend to be proud of. It is of vital importance to reclaim the sense of self-esteem and personal fulfillment from the corporate fantasy that now rules our culture. A democracy that is seen and promoted along these lines can have a transformative impact at this fundamental level.

7. Seventh point: By focusing on our opponents and their doings we reinforce their dominance.

We are analyzing, monitoring, explaining etc of what the opponents are doing, what is their strategy, what kind of techniques they use etc and that’s something extremely useful. However, we need to think how are we going to face today’s challenges and problems according to our logic. The modern world is declining fast and at the same time we have never before been in a position with so many potentials. It’s not only a matter of seizing the power, it’s a matter of identifying the deep reasons for such a decline and engage in a process of transformation based on the existing potentials.

We must develop a conception of ruling the world differently, of actually situating the every day activities in a different framework. We often tend to believe that getting rid of the opponents means that somehow the problems caused by them and the new challenges we are facing will be disappeared. It is true that it is extremely important to get rid of these guys, the neoloberals; however, neolibealism is deeply entrenched in social practices and the state, things are moving this way by themselves so to speak.

We must put them in different tracks, we must develop ideas and ways of connecting existing social components in a different way. And in order to do it, we must think without our opponents on sight. And actually, there are lots of good practices, social innovations etc that actually point towards a mature society. If we think this way we will realize that we are actually more stronger than we think. We must combine the existing elements effectively, incorporate them in a unified – but not one-dimensional – conceptual and organizational framework. If we launch such a project then we will gradually acquire the necessary self-confidence to rule the world, and I strongly believe that this is the most crucial part in actually doing it. If we start really believing that we can do it then the fall of neoliberalism would be a matter of time.