Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
A Reply to the Sophists
Stathis Kouvelakis
In the last few days there have been two sophisms circulating among those who refuse to look reality square in the face and recognise the retreat that Syriza has been forced to make, as well as its possible consequences. Or rather, two and a half. And I say ‘forced’ with good reason, because the new government has been trapped by its mistaken strategy: though I wouldn’t say it was a ‘betrayal’ or ‘capitulation’, since these are moralising terms that are of very little use for understanding political processes.
The first sophism: ‘Syriza has no mandate to quit the Eurozone’. If it had adopted such a position it wouldn’t have won the elections. Putting it that way, we see how absurd this reasoning is. Yes, of course, it had no ‘mandate to quit the Eurozone’. But it certainly didn’t have a ‘mandate’ to abandon the core of its programme in order to hang onto the Euro, either! And, without doubt, if it had presented itself to the electorate saying ‘here’s our programme, but if we find that its implementation is incompatible with keeping the Euro then we’ll forget about it’, then it wouldn’t have achieved much success at the polls. For good reason: keeping the Euro at any cost is exactly the same fundamental argument as the pro-Memorandum parties who’ve ruled Greece all these years put forward. And even if Syriza never fully clarified its position on the Euro, it did always reject the logic of ‘the euro at any price’. On that note, let’s remember that contrary to what most commentators think, Syriza’s programmatic texts do not rule out leaving the Eurozone if forced to by the Europeans’ intransigence, or defaulting on the debt payments. Though it is true that recently these texts seem to have been rather hidden away.
A second variant of this first sophism: Syriza had a dual mandate of breaking with austerity and staying in the Euro. This sounds more rational than the first version, but nonetheless it is still sophistry. It’s as if the two sides of this mandate were equally important and thus it would be politically legitimate, if we had to choose (and indeed we do have to choose – that’s precisely the problem), to sacrifice the break with austerity on the altar of keeping the Euro. Without having even abandoned its mandate! But then why not turn that reasoning the other way around, saying ‘since I realise the two objectives are incompatible, I choose to stick to the break with austerity, since essentially that is the reason why Greeks voted for a party of the radical Left’? That is, to opt for the rupture and not ‘stability’ within the existing framework. We might at least think that this choice is more befitting of a radical Left party that sets ‘socialism’ as its ‘strategic goal’ (even if that clearly wasn’t the agenda on which it won the elections).
The third sophism is the one promoted by Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra. Having sarcastically remarked on those on the ‘left wing of Syriza’ who are crying ‘capitulation’ (let’s ignore for now the fact that no one on the Syriza left has ever used these terms), from recent events Balibar and Mezzadra draw the conclusion that ‘we will not be able to build a politics of freedom and equality in Europe simply by asserting national sovereignty’. According to them, the main thing is that Syriza has bought time, admittedly at the cost of making some concessions (with the obligatory reference to Lenin to prove the radicalism of what they’re arguing); and that it has allowed for other future political victories (they mention Spain) and the development of social movement mobilisations of a ‘transnational’ bent (the likes of Blockupy).
Here again we are swimming in the waters of sophistry – of a pseudo-naivety that would be confusing, if it did not make total sense coming from ardent defenders of the ‘European project’ (a ‘nice version’ of it, of course) like these two authors. After all, the rhythms of the political forces to which they refer are not in synchrony. From now until summer the Greek government faces a series of more than pressing deadlines; and it’s hard to see how a successful demonstration in Frankfurt, or even the possibility of Podemos winning the Spanish elections at the end of the year, could change the situation in Syriza’s favour. The gaps among these different forces’ temporal rhythms are one of the reasons why the national context is of such strategic importance to the actors in the political struggle: it is the terrain where the power relations among classes are condensed in decisive fashion.
Balibar and Mezzadra also gravely underestimate the demobilising effect that will inevitably follow – both within Greece and at the European level – from the perception that Greece and the Syriza government have been forced to kowtow to the EU’s austerity diktats. And this what everyone is ultimately going to think, whatever the short-sighted defenders of the Greek government do to try and dress it up differently. Already in Greece, the climate of mobilisation and rediscovered confidence that we saw in the first weeks after the election now seems long in the past. Of course, the mobilisations may well resume, but this time they will be directed against the government’s decisions, and in any case they won’t appear ‘on demand’.
Making any political choice conditional on the emergence of social movements is more than risky. It is a way of saying that it is a decision that will have to be changed if the mobilisations do not take place or if they are insufficiently powerful. In reality, we have to take the opposite line of march. We have to assume that we have already made the decision to break with austerity: it’s this that stimulates mobilisation, which will then enjoy (or acquire) its own autonomy. Moreover, that is exactly what happened in Greece during the government’s ‘confrontation’ with the EU between 5 and 20 February, when tens of thousands of people took to the street in a largely spontaneous manner, outside of any party framework.
Besides, the argument that ‘we have won some time’ is in this case an illusion, since during these four months of supposed ‘respite’, Syriza will in fact be forced to operate within the existing framework. And this will strengthen this framework: Syriza will have to implement a good part of what the Troika (now restyled ‘the institutions’) demands, while ‘putting off’ the application of the key measures of its own programme – precisely the policies that would have allowed it to ‘make a difference’ and cement the social alliance that brought it to power. Indeed there is a very major risk that the time that Syriza has ‘won’ will prove to have been ‘wasted time’, undermining Syriza’s base while allowing its enemies (particularly those on the far Right) to regroup and present themselves as the only partisans of a ‘real systemic break’.
We should also note that, despite the disgust that Europeanism addicts like Balibar and Mezzadra feel upon any mention of ‘the national’, the very political successes to which they refer, from Syriza to Podemos, not only took place within a national context – changing the relations of force precisely insofar as they allow radical Left political movements to access the nation state’s levers of power – but were also, in part, only possible thanks to these parties’ insistence on national sovereignty: in a democratic, popular, non-nationalist sense, open to the outside world. ‘National-popular’ discourse and references to ‘patriotism’ abound – Tsipras and Iglesias are perfectly willing to use these terms – as do national flags (Greek and Spanish Republican ones, not to mention the flags of the nationalities within the Spanish State) among the crowds and the ‘autonomous’ movements (as Mezzadra and Balibar call them) filling these countries’ streets and town squares.
More than anything else, this shows that in the particular case of the dominated countries on the periphery of Europe like Spain and Greece, reference to ‘the national’ is a terrain of struggle that progressive forces have managed to hegemonise, thus making it one of the most powerful factors driving their success. And this is the basis on which we can build a real internationalism, not the empty talk – entirely disconnected from the concrete realities of political struggle – about a supposedly already-existing and unmediated ‘European’ or ‘transnational’ terrain.
One last point, to conclude: there is a degree of truth in the first two sophisms, when they talk about Syriza’s ‘mandate’ to leave the Eurozone. It is indeed true that there has been a contradiction in the party’s dominant approach to this question, a contradiction that has now burst into full view. The idea of breaking with austerity and Greece’s debt burden within the existing European framework could not have been more clearly refuted in reality. In such a situation, it is vital that we speak frankly and honestly. The first thing to do is to admit the failure, and thus the need for us to discuss once again the best strategy for Syriza to keep its promises and get Greece out of its current rut. At the same time, this will send a message of struggle to all those people – and there are a lot of them – who were counting on the ‘hope offered by Greece’ and rightly refuse to accept that they are beaten.
London, 25 February 2015
Stathis Kouvelakis
* http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1892-a-reply-to-the-sophists-by-stathis-kouvelakis
* Translated by David Broder.
’Syriza wins time—and space’
Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra
So is it true, as many of the papers tell us, that Athens has given in to the Eurogroup’s demands (as La Repubblica puts it) or that it has take the first step toward returning to austerity policies (as the Guardian reports)? If we believe certain leaders of the left wing of Syriza, the new government’s courage didn’t last long, and the ‘capitulation’ has already begun…
It is a little bit early to pass judgement on the agreements made at the Eurogroup meeting. Only in the next few days will the technical details be published, and only then will we be able to gauge their full political meaning.
However, in the meantime, here we are going to suggest a different way of analysing the confrontation between the Greek government and the European institutions – as expressed by Syriza’s compromises and the hints of division within these institutions. By what criteria should we measure Tsipras and Varoufakis’s actions, in order to judge how effective or appropriate they were?
Let’s say it again right away: the conflict opened up by Syriza coming to power has come at a moment of acute crisis in Europe. The wars spreading just outside the periphery of the EU, to its East as well as its South and South East, or the series of massacres of immigrants – drowned in the Mediterranean – suggest something like a decomposition of the European space. But there are also other aspects of the crisis, proliferating dramatically in just a few years of recession. More or less racist and neo-fascist political forces are on the rise from one end of the continent to the other. In these circumstances, Syriza’s electoral triumph and Podemos’s advance in Spain look like a unique opportunity to reinvent a left-wing politics fighting for equality and freedom, across Europe.
Nor should we forget that the background to these possibilities are the imposing mass struggles against austerity that have already been going for several years in Greece as well as in Spain. But at the same time that they spread ‘horizontally’, these struggles also crashed up against equally formidable ‘vertical’ limits: the banks’ and financial institutions’ domination of contemporary capitalism, and the new distribution of political power that has established itself thanks to the crisis. A few years ago we called it ‘a revolution from above’ [1]
These are the barriers Syriza has come up against, only just after it succeeded in establishing a ‘vertical’ axis of power allowing the rejection of austerity to resonate in Europe’s halls of office. Soon enough, it has had to deal with the regime that is currently in power in Europe and suffer all the violence of financial capitalism. It would be naïve to imagine that the Greek government could break down these barriers all by itself. Even a country with a much larger population and economy than Greece would not have been able to do so. Recent events have again demonstrated – if it was even necessary – that we will not be able to build a politics of freedom and Europe simply by asserting national sovereignty.
Yet the ‘barriers’ of which we have spoken now appear in a different light, as does the possibility of sweeping them aside. Struggles and protest movements did shine a light on how odious they are, but the rise of Podemos as well as Syriza’s triumph at the polls, followed by the actions of the Greek government, have begun to outline a strategy for overcoming them. We didn’t need telling that an electoral outcome alone would not be sufficient – in any case, Alexis Tsipras himself was clear enough on that point. Rather, we need a political process to open up, and, to that end, the affirmation and construction of a new relationship among Europe’s social forces.
Lenin once said something like the following: there are situations where we have to give up some space in order to buy ourselves some time. We could adapt this principle to last Friday’s ‘accords’: as always in politics, there is some unpredictability, here, but our bet is that the Greek government has ‘given something up’ in order to win both time and space. It has done so in order to allow the opportunity that has arisen in Europe to remain open, waiting until other possibilities ripen (not least with the Spanish elections), and until the agents of the new politics have managed to ‘conquer’ other spaces.
But for this process to develop, it must take to many different terrains in the coming months: this means social struggles and political initiatives; new everyday behaviours; a different state of mind among Europe’s populations; government action; and citizen counter-powers that assert their autonomy. So while we recognise the decisive importance of what Syriza has accomplished – and Podemos is planning to do – on the institutional terrain, we must also articulate the limits of this.
In an extraordinary article that recently appeared in the Guardian, the Greek finance minister Varoufakis showed that he is himself perfectly aware of this [2]. He tells us that, fundamentally, what governments can today do is seek to ‘save European capitalism from itself’ – save it from a tendency to self-destruction that threatens the peoples of Europe and opens the door to fascism. They can seek to push back the violence of austerity and crisis and open up spaces for conservation and cooperation, in which workers’ lives are a little less ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ (to use Hobbes’s words). No more than that, but no less either
So let us interpret what Varoufakis is saying. By definition, going beyond capitalism lies outside of any government’s field of possibilities, in Greece or anywhere else. That is something more than urgently rescuing European capitalism from a catastrophe that would also be our own – it is a perspective on the horizon of prolonged social and political struggles that cannot limit themselves to the institutional terrain.
But the collective force on which the advances of future months and years depend must be materially established also on the terrain of this other ‘continent’. So the terrain this force has to take to is – can only be – Europe itself, with a view to a constituent rupture with the current course of its history. Hence the importance of mobilisations like the one that the Blockupy movement has called for 18 March in Frankfurt, upon the inauguration of the new ECB headquarters. It is an opportunity to make the European people’s voice heard, supporting the actions of the Greek government. Beyond the – very necessary – denunciation of finance capital and the post-democratic regime (Habermas), it is also an opportunity to measure the advance of alternative forces, without whom the activity of the parties and governments fighting austerity will itself be condemned to powerlessness.
Étienne Balibar and Sandro Mezzadra
* Translated by David Broder.
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