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.
I was asked to contribute to this session presenting various thoughts regarding a feasible political strategy and methodology based on lessons from the recent political experience in Greece.
My core assumption is that the political imagination, the methodology of mobilization and the organizational principles of the traditional political left and movements do not meet the requirements of the today’s political and social antagonisms. There is a time lag or inability of adaptation to the emerging authoritarian environment that the neoliberal project is imposing to societies.
Another aspect of the necessary update is the need to transform methodologies, organizational schemes and the respective imagination and mentality of fighting taking into consideration technological advances that swift the battleground and the rules of the political and social struggles. This is not just a matter of incorporating new technology in the traditional paradigm of doing politics; what we need is a paradigm change.
The current level of performance of what we could call “forces of emancipation” is not sufficient. The political left and the movements seem outdated as social organizers of building popular power in a productive sense, instead they continue to express and represent demands in a toxic political environment designed to be intolerant to people’s needs.
On the other hand, the thousands of alternative initiatives seem marginal, feeble, lacking a “critical mass”, they are not integrated into larger operational frameworks, it is difficult to upscale, they end up isolated and fragmented destined to face the same difficulties again and again.
We need a new organizational/operational DNA capable to replicate in various social levels and sectors creating cells of collective, productive activity governed by a different logic. Cells that can be combined in such a way that a new paradigm of emancipatory social change can emerge. Τhe ominous battlefield of the 21st century
but before I begin I would like to highlight that it is vital to have in mind that the development of technologies and the building of institutions that promote democracy will take place in a context of brutal political and social struggles.
Let’s be frank to ourselves; despite all the subtleties and the complexities of our predicament the truth is that we are facing an extermination process and a danger of severe regression of what we could called modern societies that would affect the fate of humans in the entire planet. We are entering a transition phase in which a new kind of despotism is fast emerging, combining the logic of financial competition and profit with technological advances and pre-modern modes of brutal governance: multi-dimensional exclusion of people in terms of access to crucial decisions and satisfaction of vital needs multi-dimensional process of enclosure (resources, spaces, knowledge, information etc) and of course pure, lethal violence and wars.
At the same time long-term tendencies approach a critical point threatening humankind with severe regression: depletion of natural resources, environmental instability, food crisis and collapse of national and regional systems of administration and performance of basic social functions.
The elites today care only how are they going to accumulate more power, and by doing so they push humankind in decline. Neoliberalism is not only unfair for the people without economic power; it represents a future that reduces the emancipatory dimension of modernity into an unstable and feeble outcry within the dark ages. at the same time it fundamentally cannot provide the proper conceptual and operational framework for real solutions to the today’s global threats of humankind
These solutions must be based on sustainability, solidarity and openness in order to check the long-term tendencies of reaching a crucial bio-social limit, the rise of inequallity and barbarism that gradually takes the form of an extermination process of the poor and the threat of digital/military/financial authoritarianism.
At the same moment, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have so huge reserves of embodied capacities, a vast array of rapidly developing technologies of connection and data collection, and values and life philosophies from different cultures within our reach. Apart from the dangers, We are living in extreme times of unprecedented potentialities.
So, the context of developing technologies and institutions for democracy will be a very brutal battlefield; my experience from greece shows that we are forced to evolve and become more efficient while at the same time we -as people – are suffering huge losses, we retreat bleeding and every day we are pushed into greater misery and despair.
Why do democracy and the relevant technologies matter
But if this is the case then are we loosing our time with democracy, relevant technologies and other luxuries instead of focusing on survival strategies? Are we disillusioned and miss the overall picture? It depends on how we frame this kind of work in this broader picture. The crucial question is: Does democracy matter in terms of survival? The answer is yes; democracy is not a luxury as the mainstream narrative suggests but the most powerful weapon of the popular classes if properly treated. In order to respond adequately in these suffocating conditions, new organizational standards and methods are needed for the engagememnt of thousands of people in this day-to-day and multi-level fight. Here the role of technologies and institutions that promote democracy is crucial. Democracy is the most powerful tool we have at our disposal in order to deploy a survival strategy. We must unleash all the embodied capacitites that people have and throw them into this battle.
By transferring the decisions to the people, by giving them the space, the tools and the freedom to realize and mobilize their capacities, we can unlock crucial reserves of creative power. Unlocking these reserves will change substantially the balance of forces between the popular classes and the elites. If we elaborate effective ways and means of democratic functioning we will realize that we are actually much stronger than we think. This is the lesson of the syrian Kurdish: democracy is not mainly an ideological preference; it’s what the people need in order to make full use of their embodied capacities in order to upgrade their power and survive.
That’s why the work on developing technologies that enhance participation and democratic decision making is an essential dimension of the battle that has been intensified the last years between the popular classes and the elites. It’s the answer on the how question; how we – movements and organizations/institutions fighting for emancipation and societies running a severe risk – are going to mobilize the human reserves of creative power which are the onlyform of power we can have at our disposal in this struggle.
In the remaining time 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 till my resignation last summer, and from the perspective of what happened in 2015.
In EU and Eurozone today, people’s democratic will has been successfully limited. 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 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.
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. The amount of power we can reach through the traditional political practice is not enough to pave the way for the restoration of democracy and popular sovereignty in Europe.
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, digital data 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.
Is this feasible? 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 financial competition.
Of course we are talking about elements that may not be developed sufficiently yet.
Elements that may have been nurtured in mainstream contexts and that are often functionally connected to the standard 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.
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. 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.
We must and set up institutions that focus on identifying best practices, methods and regulations – both from the experience of our collectivities and from the scientific production regarding issues such as management, leadership, organizational, complexity and network systems theories, psychology etc. – in order to provide them to our agencies. It is also vital to upgrade our operational capacities through appropriate processes and nodes of connection, facilitating smooth flows of know-how, best practices and information, building databases and accumulating knowledge and expertise in an easily retrievable and useful way etc.
Actually, this is the advantage of multinational and large corporations in general, in comparison to 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 really to be relevant and useful to the people from now on.
Let me conclude with the question of whether the Left must engage with the state or not. I would suggest that the question should be reformulated. What kind of Left we need in order to engage with the state in such a way that will promote even further the people’s leverage against the elites’ hostility?
The level of the state has its own modalities, but there is nothing there that in principle excludes the Left. However, when the Left approaches government power structural inadequacies can be disastrous. Moreover, the administration of the state poses questions and tasks that we cannot avoid. There is no way to transcend the dominance of the logic of profit and competition and deal with today’s challenges if we do not address large-scale questions of organizing, planning, managing and administering societies. Being at the leadership of SYRIZA during the period of preparation of assuming governmental power, I have come to the conclusion that the Left is missing a mode of governmentality stemming from its own logic and values. We miss a modality of administrating populations and run basic social functions in a democratic, participatory and cooperative way.
One aspect of this lack in the case of SYRIZA was the indifference towards issues that are related with the implementation process. The prevailing rhetoric was that the problems are political and not technical.
So, all we have to do was to decide what we want to do, not to explore the ways in order to be able to implement them.
The implicit premise was that the crucial point was to be in the government and the ministries taking political decisions, and then, somehow these decisions would be implemented by some “technical” in nature state mechanisms.
Apart from the fact that this attitude contradicted with what we were saying regarding the corrosive effect of the neoliberal transformation of the state and the complexity of being in the EU and the Eurozone in this respect, it also shows the prevailing superficial understanding of the notion “transformation of the state” and justifies fully the need for a radical redesign of the “Operating System” of the Left.
The major problem is that a mentality like this ignores the obvious fact that the range of one’s political potential in being in the government is determined by what one knows how to do with the state.
The implementation process is not a “technicality” but the material basis of the political strategy.
What the traditional Left takes to be the political essence, namely the general, strategic discussion and decision (what to do with the debt, privatizations etc) is just the tip of the iceberg of state-politics.
The implementation process is the “iceberg” of state-politics beneath the surface.
Actually, it’s where the political struggle within the state becomes hard and the class adversaries battle to prevail over implementation, that is over shaping reality.
One of the results in the case of SYRIZA was that the Programme Committee, the highest political organs and the departments of the Central Committee instead of working deliberately on managerial issues regarding steps, methods and difficulties of implementing our own policies and organizational issues like restructuring processes in the various state institutions we would have access to, they were sites of political argumentation in the most general and abstract terms.
The tip is not going to move the iceberg by itself as long as it is not supported by a multi-level and multi-personal implementation strategy with clear orientation, functional methods and high-level coordination.
This is the integrated concept of state-politics that we have forgotten in practice and by doing so we tend to fail whenever we approach the tip of the iceberg.
So, the question is not whether we should fight for the tip or not, but whether we have any clue what to do with the iceberg beneath it or not.
*Talk delivered in TNI Annual Meeting, Amsterdam, May 2016
1. The quest for a new paradigm
We are living in a period of time in which:
– the aggressiveness of the neoliberal transformation threatens democracy establishing a social/institutional configuration that blends the logic of profit and competition with authotitarian modes of governance and multi-dimensional exclusions.
– long-term tendencies, the capitalist crisis and novel elements lead humankind to a threatening critical point: depletion of natural resources, environmental instability, food crisis, escalation of geopolitical antagonisms and wars, collapse of national and regional systems of administration and performance of basic social functions.
– the dominant logic of profit and competition and the elites as the major agents that determine the course of things unfold, accelerate and aggravate today’s deadlocks while at the same time they fundamentally cannot provide the proper conceptual and operational framework and agencies for real solutions to the today’s global threats of humankind.
These solutions must be based on sustainability, solidarity and openness in order to check the long-term tendencies of reaching a crucial bio-social limit, the rise of inequallity and barbarism that gradually takes the form of an extermination process of the poor and the threat of digital/military/financial authoritarianism.
At the same time we have never before been so close to an evolutionary/emancipatory step; for the first time in our evolutionary history we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach.
And yet, it seems that we are not in a position to change the course of things. The current level of performance of what we could call “forces of emancipation” is not sufficient; they do not meet the standards of the today’s antagonisms. The political left and the movements seem outdated as social organizers of building popular power in a productive sense, instead they continue to express and represent demands in a toxic political environment intolerant to people’s needs.
On the other hand, the thousands of alternative initiatives seem marginal, feeble, lacking a “critical mass”, they are not integrated into larger operational frameworks, it is difficult to upscale, they end up isolated and fragmented destined to face the same difficulties again and again.
We need a new organizational/operational DNA capable to replicate in various social levels and sectors creating cells of collective, productive activity governed by a different logic. Cells that can be combined in such a way that a new paradigm of emancipatory social change can emerge.
The question is whether the notion of commons can contribute to the emergence of such a paradigm. I believe that it can help us in many ways in this exploration as long as we do not take it as a ready made solution of our complex queries. The commons is not a fully articulated system; it is not a magic key that unlocks easy and quick our present deadlocks.
2. Aspects of commons/commoning
A commons consists not just of a resource, but of a community that manages a shared resource by devising its own rules, traditions, and values.When “seen from the inside,” each commons is socially unique. A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource collectively, on the basis of fair access, use, and long-term sustainability.
Commoning is not a novel invention but rather an unnoticed – existent system of management that has been re-emerged and become visible the last years through various initiatives and movements (indigenous and land rights movements, environmentalists, digital freedom movements, open access movements, self-employed urban youth etc).
The commons managing system is more transparent, controllable by communities, more flexible, locally responsive, and regarded as trustworthy and socially concerned. It is also less prone to creating negative externalities by connecting use with stewardship.
By giving people significant new opportunities for personal agency that go well beyond the roles of consumer, citizen, and voter, the commons introduces people to new social roles that embody values and entail both responsibility and entitlement.
3. The language of commons
The commons names a set of social values that lie beyond market price and propertization (informal, tacit, intergenerational, ecological etc). Experiences, traditions, cultural values, and geographies are recognized and privileged. The commons is a language and a socio-political-economic practice that honors the generative and intrinsic human value of such particularity. An indigenous commons will be quite different from an urban commons, and both of them will be quite different from, say, the Wikihouse design community. And yet they are all commons.
The language of the commons could be thought as an instrument for reorienting people’s perceptions and understanding. It provides a way to make moral and political claims that conventional policy discourse prefers to ignore or suppress.
The language of the commons provides a holistic vision that helps diverse victims of market abuse recognize their shared fate, develop a new narrative, cultivate new links of solidarity and hopefully build a constellation of working alternatives driven by a different logic.
As a meta-discourse that has core principles but porous boundaries, the commons has the capacity to check at once the established and no longer functional models and conceptions of politics, governance, economics, and culture. Importantly, it can also expose the alienation associated with modern life and reveal people’s existential need for human connection and collective meaning, something that neither the state nor the market, as they are now constituted, can do. The commons paradigm offers a coherent critique of neoliberal economics, with hundreds of functioning examples that are increasingly converging.
4. Fighting for the commons
Commoners are focused on reclaiming “common wealth,” in both the material and political sense. They want to roll back the pervasive privatization and marketization of their shared resources—from land and water to knowledge and urban spaces—and reassert greater participatory control over those resources and community life.
The de-commodification and mutualization of daily life can occur through many commons-based systems: community land trusts that take land out of the market to reduce housing costs; cooperative finance alternatives to reduce exposure to high-interest rates and debt; cooperatively produced goods and services to reduce costs and enhance quality; shared infrastructure (energy, transportation, Internet access, social media platforms); open and commons-based systems for software code, data, information, scientific research and creative works.
Commoners tend to seek direct sovereignty and control over spheres of life that matter to them: their cities, neighborhoods, food, water, land, information, infrastructure, credit and money, social services, and much else. The very process of independent commoning has numerous benefits. By demonstrating the superiority of commons-based systems (e.g., free or open-source software development, local food provisioning, cooperatives, alternative currencies), commoning creates quasi-independent, socially satisfying alternatives to profit-oriented markets.
According to most of the people who identify themselves as commoners, they seek to develop institutions, regulations and norms for a post-capitalist, post-growth order. They wish to confront the dominance of market-based options with a richer and more relevant to today’s challenges sense of human possibilities and capacities than those offered by the producer/consumer mode of thinking. These include community forests, local currencies, Fab Labs, municipal water committees, farmland trusts for supporting local family farming, indigenous “biocultural heritage” areas for stewarding biodiversity, permaculture farming, “omni-commons” structures that provide administrative/ legal support to commons-based enterprises, and many others. Such mutualized systems of provisioning of course must be developed and extended.
5. Commons and the need for a new paradigm
The commons could function as a unifying principle for diverse movements and initiatives in different areas of human activity.
The commons could contribute to the reinvigoration of political imagination: by focusing on collective use and management of shared resources it facilitates the expansion of our imagery of fighting – beyond resistance or pressure movements and marginal alternativism – towards productive ways of building real popular power. It pushes us to think, practice and explore ways to optimize collective administration models and democratic management methods governed by our values and logic, able to spread and replicate dissiminating an emancipatory logic everywhere.
Hopefully, it can contribute heavily to the emergence of new modes of governmentality, small and large-scale administration models and the respective configuration among local, regional and transregional cells of commoning, forging a system of governance of a different logic. By embracing and developoing peer cooperation on distributed networks we may be in a positin to do work that bureaucracy cannot perform well. This is not a matter of “reinventing government,” but a matter of integrating production, governance, and bottom-up participation into new sorts of commons institutions and new modes of large-scale administration. Network-based or -assisted commons can provide a vital infrastructure for building a new social economy of participatory control and mutualized benefit.
The emphasis on creating antagonistic commons-based productive systems may give us insights for the required modification of traditional political mentality, methodology and organizational principles blending participation and representation in a way that could transcend the traditional framework of the institutionalized – no longer functional – representative democracy. The combination of commoning and real democracy modifies the status of political participation upgrading the aspect of pro-active individual engagement in collective processes: political participation is understood not as singular moments of voting and demonstrating but rather as the individual immersion in a collective activity pursuing a shared goal.
The swift towards a non-statist conception of the public (the commons) and the emphasis on developing cells of commoning (and an alternative network of institutions and processes) coincides with the current state/institutional erosion in terms of democracy and its resulting fact: the state-oriented left political strategies have been seriously disarmed. This swift could be part of people’s response – if vanguard and isolationist tendencies are avoided – to the growing authoritarian turn of modern societies and the multi-level exclusion of people from rights once guaranteed by the state. It offers an imaginary of fighting and organizing that can help in overcoming the present-day puzzlement of emancipatory forces.
6. Challenges for the commons and all of us
The big challenge for commoners is to federate their models into larger, collaborative social ecosystems. Like DNA, which is under-specified so that it can adapt to local circumstances, the commons discourse is general enough to accommodate myriad manifestations of basic values and principles. As I said before, the commons helps make legible the many social practices (“commoning”) that are often taken to be too small and inconsequential to matter – but which, taken together, constitute a different type of economy. The commons discourse has an integrative potential to build a new type of a networked polity or provide us with methodological insights for a transformation strategy of the state. A commons-friendly polity would develop “meta-economic networks” to bridge these fields of action so that, for example, open knowledge networks (for technology design, software, and manufacturing) could interact constructively with people dealing with agriculture and eco-sustainability. This is not just a matter of states becoming enlightened about open networks. The state must be reinvented as a “Partner State” in support of commons and peer production.
A significant unresolved problem for many of commons-based initiatives is access to credit and revenues. A post-capitalist vision for finance and money is necessary to emerge. Self-organized commons are trying to create their own value-accounting and exchange systems, including currencies and credit, which could enable them to bypass many of the pathologies of conventional debt-driven lending and market-based production.
State law is hostile to, or simply noncomprehending of, the very idea of commons and commoning. Civil law as administered by the state is focused on individual, private property rights and market exchange; it is structurally focused on “things” in isolation from dynamic social relationships, history, culture and ecosystems. The struggle to inscribe a “commons-based law” within the edifice of conventional state law is therefore an ambiguous or paradoxical challenge; some say it is impossible. And yet it is absolutely needed because the nation/state is suffering a decline in legitimacy and efficacy as global capital becomes even more powerful, and as the scale and complexity of problems outstrip the capacity of corporate and governmental bureaucracies to solve them.
Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies. It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview as embodied in law. What we need, as some argue, is a major paradigm shift in science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings. Instead of seeing the Earth and human societies as a machine of parts, we must see them as a holistic, indivisible ecological system: the world as a network of interdependencies. And the notion of commons seems to be aligned with this kind of new way of understanding.
The last eight months I am no longer a member of a left party leadership which it was my political identity for more than 10 years.
I currently work for a “funding and development” consulting firm where methodological and managerial questions arise, similar to those I was very much concerned with by the time SYRIZA was approaching government power.
In a corporate environment and driven by the logic of competition and profit people are trying to answer these questions.
In the Left we are under another kind of pressure. We are sensing that our societies are in decline, that humankind approaches a critical point where long-term and short-term tendencies accumulate and novel elements shake our institutional framework and challenge our default cognitive maps.
So, we should be more alert in answering them. We should be more determined in order to be operationally capable to meet the requirements of today’s demands.
But we are not.
My talk today will try to reinforce the determination needed, for the emergence of a Left back in action. These are the sections of the talk and I hope we will have the time go through them all today.
By the time the Soviet Union was falling apart I was becoming a leftist.
It was a choice of deep, personal connection with those humans who fought, fight and will keep fighting for a better world, exemplifying the best qualities of our species.
Additionally, being raised in a poor, working-class family – living together with my illiterate grand-parents – I had from early on a sense of gratitude: the local and global balance of forces that happened to exist when I was a child gave me access to a decent education.
Access which was not available to my grandparents and may again not be there for my grandchildren.
I could see that I owed this precious opportunity to millions of people who devoted their lives, suffered and died in all over the world for equality and freedom.
This sense of gratitude and hence the respective deep respect for them defined my acquired capacities ever since as my own contribution in the collective effort for a better world, mainly through my direct political action.
These capacities do not belong strictly to me; they are not products only of my personal efforts and individual abilities; it’s a combined, collective result centered on me.
I have a major role in this, which gives me enough self-recognition, but also being the bearer of a precious collective investment means that I should treat it with wisdom that balances my narcissistic needs.
So, using the investment in a narrow, selfish way as a means for individual social ascent would be disrespectful towards the previous generations and irresponsible towards present and future generations.
The way I saw it back then was that despite the ominous days that were seemingly ahead of us in the early 90’s, there was only one choice: to take my position in this chain of fighting humans and engage in the battle.
From this moment on, there was no time to whine and be disappointed; when you are in the battlefield all you care about is what is helpful to your cause.
Why I am saying all these? Because the same train of thought is keeping me functional and psychologically stable during the last difficult months after the Greek defeat of last summer.
The respect and gratitude for the past generations is also my personal link with Phyllis Clark.
I had’t heard of her before being invited here, but I am betting that she was one of those marvelous women-fighters of the 20th century.
Like her Greek sisters so to speak. Those who were born around 1924, who in the age of 17 joined the Greek resistance against the Nazis, fought in the civil war and after the defeat by the age of 25 they experienced exile and imprisonment. But at the age of 34 and despite the terror, they managed to make the Left the major opposition party in 1958. In 1967, at 43, the military coup launched a new circle of brutal oppression for them; again exile, prison and torture. From an island in exile they must have heard about the youth revolt of Polytexneio in 1973.
And then again through the ranks of Greek left parties they were there, fighting, entering the last quarter of the 20th century. By the time that Phyllis died, it was my turn to join her and her Greek sisters in this long chain of fighters and after so many years I am here today to speak celebrating her memory. With the opportunity you give me today I would like to say to Phyllis and her sisters that we are all grateful for your devotion and determination. Now it’s our turn and we promise that we will do whatever we can to be your worthy successors. Now, let’s move on to our subject.
1. Rising up from the ruins
The impact of the strategic defeat of last year is still very strongly shaping various reactions within the Greek Left. Some people seem content with superficial explanations of what happened and return to habitual ways of thinking and acting; others sense the strategic depth of the defeat and turn inwards to disappointment and demoralization.
Still others are trying to learn from the “SYRIZA experience” in order to make themselves more useful to people in the future. All of us sense the dangers in front of us but we are far from having a common and feasible strategy.
The “SYRIZA experience” provides us with valuable insights for the deficiencies and the respective upgrade we need to make in order to meet the requirements of today’s antagonisms. It seems that the strategy of building social alliances in terms of representing beliefs and demands at the political level is not enough to stop the neoliberal transformation and pave the way for the restoration of democracy and popular sovereignty.
If this is our current predicament, then the urgent question is to set up a new conceptual framework of doing politics both within the state and outside of it which is relevant to the current situation.
In a situation like ours, political priorities change and ‘novel’ tasks emerge.
For example, people far beyond those affiliated with the traditional left are scattered and in disarray, but also full of energy, determination and skills.
What should they do given the fact that they are sensing that traditional political action is not enough?
Another urgent task is to transmit the ‘SYRIZA experience’ abroad, facilitating the Left in other countries to initiate timely a process of systematic preparation and adaptation.
But, we should be aware that ‘novel’ tasks require a different mentality and qualities from the ones we used to deploying through traditional political action.
2. The clock is ticking
I will begin by outlining
one of the premises that shaped the strategy of SYRIZA, the major shifts of power assemblies in Europe and their political implications in the case of Greece, the current mode of functioning of the Greek political system after the agreement and the implications of SYRIZA’s choice for our thinking.
The major conclusion is that the traditional Left methodology and practice is not sufficient to meet the requirements of today’s antagonisms.
2.1. The time lag of the Left
The “SYRIZA experience” reveals several crucial structural weaknesses of the Left due to a time lag, or inability of adaptation to the new conditions of doing politics in the institutionalized neoliberal framework of the EU and the Eurozone.
The Left in western societies of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics under the assumption that 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 the policies are not desirable nor successful and use the democratic processes for a new government of their preference to be elected. This is democracy 101.
Of course there was always the possibility of a military coup in the cases where a radical readjustment of the balance of power was necessary.
The post-war global balance of forces inscribed in the state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, rendering them quasi-democratic.
This consists simply in tolerating a situation where people without considerable economic power have access to crucial decisions.
Of course, the quality and the range of this access was a central 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 that was contaminated by popular power.
In the last decades (non-accidentally after the fall of Soviet Union) they made decisive steps towards diffusing this power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions.
The elites are no longer committed to the post-war democratic rules of political and social fight.
Today the elites feel confident enough to openly defy democracy. Democracy is not taboo anymore.
SYRIZA’s strategic premise was that the institutionalized (in the past) popular power was not exhausted.
By winning the elections, the remaining institutional power would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity.
Based on the premise that the framework in which politics is being performed hasn’t changed significantly, SYRIZA did what the traditional way of doing politics dictates: supported social movements, built alliances, won a majority in the parliament, formed a government.
We all know the results of such a strategy now. The real outcome was totally different. There was virtually no change of policy.
2.2. Forget it people!
During the last three decades, crucial transformations have been taking place in the power assembly at a global and European scale.
The state – by being the institution of power par excellence – was the site of fundamental changes, modifications and developments towards the institutionalization of the neoliberal order.
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 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.
In the EU and the 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 (very) 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 appointed 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 and sufficient liquidity to run basic services or not.
It is evident today that the EU is an openly anti-democratic institutional structure. The Left must embrace the traumatic reality: In Europe a new kind of despotism is fast emerging, combining the logic of competition and profit with pre-modern types of institutions.
2.3. The “Squeeze Effect”
The institutionalization of neoliberal order, i.e.
– the successful excision of key funding and liquidity functions from the state,
– the respective concentration of power into anti-democratic institutions and
– the subsequent control over vital functions of Greek society,
–have created a perplexing and hazardous socio-political conjecture.
The political system has crossed a critical threshold, entering a mode of functioning which could be described as the “Squeeze Effect”: the national political spectrum has been squeezed and forced to function within the nearly non-existent space of freedom that the agreement allows.
The political spectrum has been pushed in a tiny space, it seems irrelevant tothe crucial economic and social issues, struggling to fit its different poles into a space so tiny that these poles eventually overlap and poke through each other.
The “Squeeze Effect” has highly deforming and tampering implications that further erode the function of political representation.
We could say that before the neoliberal consensus of the 90’s there was a quasi-democratic political functioning subject to military coups.
Then, the right-wing and social-democratic parties adopted neoliberalism as political programme, decisively downgrading the function of political representation.
And now we are in the phase of institutionalized neoliberalism in which a new circle of political deformation has been launched; a circle that reflects the advanced degree of institutionalization of the anti-democratic neoliberal mode of governmentality in Europe.
Because of the “Squeeze Effect”, the political system is explicitly incoherent, amplifying the confusion and the feeling of despair within Greek society.
Moreover, the “Squeeze Effect” renders the political personnel sterile regarding the real life conditions of the population and entirely impenetrable to the people’s deadlocks and anxiety.
The negative social consequences and psychic implications caused by austerity and social decline cannot anymore be reflected at the political level, they cannot be represented, democratically expressed, and hopefully positively transformed in such a way that contributes to social stability and cohesion.
Without a minimally proper function of political representation in place, these social and psychic wounds – in the form of negative and (self-) destructive dispositions – are spread across all social networks of interpersonal relations shaking social cohesion in a deeper way.
If we add the waves of refugees that will be trapped in 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 suffocating conditions that can – following a random incident – lead to an explosion will prevail in Greek society, reaching crucial existential depths.
2.4. Mind the gap
SYRIZA was the last gatekeeper of the political functioning through its non-compliance with the financial despotism that the Troika represents.
That was SYRIZA’s most precious role over the previous years that contained the Greek society from a deep decline. The implosion of the political system – via SYRIZA’S choice to remain in power – is the key factor in shaking social cohesion in a deeper way today.
However, focusing on SYRIZA’s choice, there is a danger of underestimating the strategic defeat that we all suffered in 2015, hiding from ourselves the extent of our current impotence as regards any serious challenge to financial despotism.
We must dare to perform an extensive reassessment of our methodology and tools if we want to be relevant in these new conditions.
And to do so, we should not preoccupy ourselves with what SYRIZA did and comfort ourselves that this is the source of our problems.
The choice SYRIZA made is, among other things, a symptom of the deeper, structural weaknesses of the Left.
3. Prepare for landing
I am going now to present two claims that lay the ground for what I call “redesigning the “OS” of the Left:
a) in order to meet the requirements of today’s antagonisms we need to obtain a degree of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions under the people’s control, and
b) in order to create the popular power needed for the required degree of autonomy we must shift the balance between representing people’s demands and facilitating/organizing people’s activities in the profile of the Left.
3.1. Flawed design
We saw that the popular power once inscribed in the traditional institutional configuration is seriously depleted, if not exhausted.
We do not have enough power to make the elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions.
The amount of power we can reach through the traditional political practice is not enough to pave the way for the restoration of democracy and popular sovereignty in Europe.
But in order to overcome our impotence to challenge financial despotism in Europe, we must avoid an unproductive oscillation: every time a state-oriented Left strategy fails, a movement-oriented strategy will prevail and vice versa.
We can always blame for our impotence either the choice of intervening in the state institutions or the choice of abstaining from it.
Our strategies implicitly presuppose that doing politics in both cases is given. But here in lies a deeper issue that needs to be addressed: our know-how of doing politics is seriously outdated, undermining all our strategies from the very beginning.
In other words, there is the danger of constant oscillation between strategies that have no chance of succeeding because of flaws in their design.
Instead, what we need is a dauntless process to set up a new conceptual and organizational framework of doing politics both within the state and outside of it, which is relevant to the current situation.
If we look at the horizon of the political practice of the Left we will see that it contains movement-oriented and state-oriented approaches: organizing movements, demonstrating and fighting in the streets pushing demands to the state and voting, trying to change the balance of forces at the parliamentary level and hopefully form a government of the state.
If we look closely we will notice that both of these approaches – and, thus, the entire horizon of our political practice – are mostly shaped around the traditional institutional framework of representative democracy that situates the state at the center of political power.
But we know that the elites have already shifted the center of gravity of political power towards anti-democratic institutions and repositioned the state within the institutional neoliberal European order.
The elites have managed to gain total and unchecked control over the basic functions of society.
In order to be in a position to pursue or implement any kind of policy one may consider as being the right onewe 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 on a society that dares to defy their privilege over crucial decisions.
3.2. Expand the solution space
If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; actually SYRIZA did quite well in this respect over the previous years. We need to reshape the ground.
And to do that we have to expand the solution space.
One way to expand the solution space is by shifting priorities: from political representation to building popular power.
We must modify the balance between representing people’s beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people’s actions in the profile of the Left.
Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a European framework designed to be intolerant to people’s needs, we must set up an autonomous Network of production of Economic and Social Power (NESP).
A network of resilient, dynamic and interrelated circuits of co-operative productive units, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, community control over infrastructure facilities, digital data, energy systems, distribution networks etc. These are ways of gaining a degree of autonomy necessary to defy the despotic control of the elites over society.
Is this feasible? 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 financial 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 mainstream contexts and that are often functionally connected to the standard 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 societiesis just a short description of the duty of a Left that has a clear, systematic and strategically wide orientation.
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.
Here I would like to take a few minutes to present an example of why I think we should modify many of our implicitly inherited collective qualities.
Our collective political imagination prevents us from examining recent developments in many areas with a positive attitude.
A capitalist society is a society in which the logic of capital is dominant. However, this claim does not imply that there is nothing more than the logic of capital in everything humans are doing.
But our collective imagination makes this slip.Our organizations are indifferent and even hostile to what humans achieve in a capitalist society, misinterpreting their efforts as stemming solely from the logic of capital.
If we look closely we will realize that human activity is amazingly complex, humans deploy – especially today – many different logics trying to solve plenty of problems exploring innovative ways, tools and methods.
The level of our evolution in all areas of human activity is the current state of the art and the existing ground for any future society. It is utterly self-defeating to fight for social change ignoring the state of the art – the best results of human activity – of the very same society we want to change.
I would like to end this section by highlighting the fact that 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 and 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.
This would allow society to survive, especially people who are being excluded today and could also kickstart a transition towards a better and more mature society.
And since there are no empty spaces in history, if we do not do this, nationalists, religious fanatics and fascists – with their own inhuman and militarized ways of performing these basic functions – may step in to conclude the decline.
4. Redesigning the “Operating System” of the Left
I argued above that today we need a different balance between representing demands and building popular power (in terms of controlling basic social functions), if we want to seriously face our current impotence to counter financial despotism.
However, a better balance in favor of the – often neglected and taken for granted – aspect of building popular power is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
We do not just need more resources and time spent on building popular power.
Political parties, supposedly, are the collective organisms that play major role in performing a set of fundamental functions: building popular power (as a social organizer), condensing it into political power (through political representation) and exercising power (as an agent of transformation).
But, the current performance of the Left regarding all these functions is very low and it does not meet the requirements of today’s political and social antagonisms.
So, changing the balance in favor of the function of building popular power is just a crucial starting point that must lead to radical modifications of our ways of doing politics.
We need to upgrade all aspects of our political practice by modifying our political imagination, methodologies and organizational principles.
In other words, we must redesign the “Operating System” of the Left.
4.1. Building power
It is clear that we must 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 institutions.
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?
From my experience, when people in the Left 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 when the very same people actually do politics they reproduce priorities, mental images, methods and organizational habits that they already know are not sufficient or adequate anymore.
This means that there are implicit, deep-rooted norms that shape crucially the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy.
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.
The constitution and expansion of a dynamic and resilient network of production of economic and social power under people’s control requires creative and managerial qualities relevant to the current, highly diversified and rapidly changing social field. Moreover, the functional articulation of elements of the network in alternative patterns of performing vital functions of society requires integrated circuits, a high degree of coordination and many other qualities.
Constituting and expanding such a network includes the need for building relevant institutions and organizations.
Our opponents have already spotted the shifting nature of the battlefield and they have already moved to new unclassified ways of organizing and acting.
They develop new kinds of institutions that mostly incorporate values and methods of our own logic and are compatible with the new emerging environment of fast flows of information, digital frameworks of action and production etc.
They also explore new methods and models; for example, “open innovation” models – here you can see several diagrams and visualizations of these models – emerged the last few years to facilitate the R&D departments of big multinational companies to copewith 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 organizational forms and models that we need in order to create and expand the NESP will be unclassified and hybrid from a traditional point of view.
Moreover, we often tend to underestimate and neglect problems of internal functioning.
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 and our decision-making processes in larger groups tend to be time-consuming, incoherent and dysfunctional.
We must and set up a process of identifying best practices, methods and regulations – both from the experience of our collectivities and from the scientific production regarding issues such as management, leadership, organizational, complexity and network systems theories, psychology etc. – in order to upgrade our forces.
Our actions and initiatives are currently not connected properly with each other, they are fragmented and isolated, destined to face the same difficulties again and again.
It is vital to upgrade our operational capacities through appropriate processes and nodes of connection, facilitating smooth flows of know-how, best practices and information, building databases and accumulating knowledge and expertise in an easily retrievable and useful way etc.
Actually, this is the advantage of multinational and large corporations in general, in comparison to others: they have a vast social network andpowerful 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 really to be relevant and useful to the people from now on.
4.2. Political representation
There is another crucial aspect of redesigning 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.
It’s the function that political parties mostly perform and that shapes the everyday conception regarding what “politics” is about. Of course, building popular power will invigorate and possibly transform the institutional framework, giving back 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 could 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.
The task here is not to revive “neglected” aspects of politics – like building popular power – or to reinvent relevant collective and individual qualities; the aim is to explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to restructure existing ones and upgrade significantly the political leverage of the popular classes.
For example,putting forward a project of shaping political representation as “commons” could give us valuable insights towards new ways of performing political representation transcending the traditional framework of representative democracy.
4.3. Transformation Strategy
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.
The expansion of a network of economic and social power under people’s control can 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 in 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, 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.
By shifting our priorities we may be able to revive old but useful ideas that have been forgotten in practice.
5. It’s the implementation stupid!
Mr. Schauble used this phrase in a public discussion with the Greek PM for his own reasons.
Seen differently, this phrase indicates why we ended up in a situation in which the neoliberals are the true “revolutionaries”, changing dramatically the basic coordinates of modern societies whereas the Left seems unstable and feeble.
Going back to the question regarding whether the Left must engage with the state or not, I would suggest that the question should be reformulated.
What kind of Left we need in order to engage with the state in such a way that will promote even further the people’s leverage against the elites’ hostility?
The level of the state has its own modalities, but there is nothing there that in principle excludes the Left.
However, when the Left approaches government power structural inadequacies can be disastrous.
Our difficulties in handling governmental power reflect in a magnified way structural weaknesses that affect all aspects of our action.
Moreover, the administration of the state poses questions and tasks that we cannot avoid.
There is no way to transcend capitalism if we do not address large-scale questions of organizing, planning, managing and administering societies.
Being at the leadership of SYRIZA during the period of preparation of assuming governmental power, I have come to the conclusion that one major lack of the Left is that it misses a mode of governmentality stemming from its own logic and values.
We miss a modality of administrating populations and run basic social functions in a democratic, participatory and cooperative way.
One aspect of this lack in the case of SYRIZA was the total ignorance and mainly the indifference towards issues that are related with the implementation process.
The prevailing rhetoric within SYRIZA was that the issues are political and not technical.
So, all we have to do was to decide what we want to do, not to explore the ways in order to be able to implement them.
The implicit premise was that the crucial point was to be in the government and the ministries taking political decisions, and then, somehow these decisions would be implemented by some “technical” in nature state mechanisms.
Apart from the fact that this attitude contradicted with what we were saying regarding the corrosive effect of the neoliberal transformation of the state and the complexity of being in the EU and the Eurozone in this respect, it also shows the prevailing superficial understanding of the notion “transformation of the state” in the traditional political Left.
The fact that we are talking about a current inside the Left which includes governmental power within its strategy, the low level of awareness regarding the importance of implementation processes reflects the degree of obsolescence of the Left organizations and justifies fully the need for a radical redesign of the “Operating System” of the Left.
The major problem is that a mentality like this ignores the obvious fact that the range of one’s political potential in being in the government is determined by what one knows how to do with the state.
The implementation process is not a “technicality” but the material basis of the political strategy.
What the traditional Left takes to be the political essence, namely the general, strategic discussion and decision (what to do with the debt, privatizations etc) is just the tip of the iceberg of state-politics.
The implementation process is the “iceberg” of state-politics beneath the surface.
Instead of just being a “technicality” it is the biggest portion of state-politics.
Actually, it’s where the political struggle within the state becomes hard and the class adversaries battle to prevail over implementation, that is over shaping reality.
The tip is not going to move the iceberg by itself as long as it is not supported by a multi-level and multi-personal implementation process with clear orientation, functional methods and high-level coordination.
This is the integrated concept of state-politics that we have forgotten in practice and by doing so we tend to fail miserably whenever we approach the tip of the iceberg.
So, the question is not whether we should fight for the tip or not, but whether we have any clue what to do with the iceberg beneath it or not.
One of the results in the case of SYRIZA was that the Programme Committee, the highest political organs and the departments of the Central Committee instead of working deliberately on managerial issues regarding steps, methods and difficulties of implementing our own policies and organizational issues like restructuring processes in the various state institutions we would have access to, they were sites of political argumentation in the most general and abstract terms.
The quality of governmentality and the capacity of transforming the state-politics of the SYRIZA government is just the natural outcome of this kind of preparation.
It is a matter of discussion and research whether the SYRIZA experience in this respect is generalizable or not for the Left today at a global scale.
But, as long as we haven’t make use of important achievements of human activity and creativity yet, we can be optimistic that we may discover powerful “weapons” that could make us be more confident for our operational capacities in the future.
Especially when we have to confront powerful institutions like the IMF, the ECB etc.
6. Stay in orbit
We are entering an era in which our societies will face tremendous challenges (environmental instability, global geopolitical antagonisms, a new wave of technological advances etc.),while at the same time the socio-economic and institutional configuration is undergoing constant neoliberal transformation.
Our societies need a new survival strategy that will provide efficient organizational tools and methodology of mobilization.
I argued for the need to prioritize differently the function of building popular power and the implementation process in our way of doing politics and outlined aspects of relevant modifications.
Redesigning the “operating system” of the Left could contribute to the new survival strategy we need to deploy today.
It seems like we need to build a bridge to cross a river in order to survive.
But, we know how to build huts by the river; huts on ground that is being eroded by the river itself.
The “pragmatic Left” argues that all we can do is to continue building huts and engage in a process of doing it which is irrelevant to our survival and eventually harmful.
The “utopian Left” argues that we must stick to the need to build a bridge, but it only retreats from building huts, which is also irrelevant to our survival.
What we need is to embrace the emergency of our condition and push ourselves to get over our common problem which is that all we know how to do is building huts.
We must push ourselves to think differently and spot what prevents us from building a bridge.
We must push our collectivities to see differently what lies around and spot potentialities and “materials” we had never thought of being useful to us.
Maybe we are closer than we think in building bridges and eventually deploying a strategy that actually could actually work.
In the same vain, 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 focusing solely on traditional electoral politics to radically change the dominant neoliberal framework – 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 fully justifying 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 and survival of human societies or it will be obsolete.
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.
Ανδρέας Καρίτζης 