Why Greece Doesn’t Matter

There is a line in the 1972 political film satire “The Candidate” where Robert Redford looks reservedly at the camera and quietly says “politicians don’t talk, they make sound”.

For the past five years Greece has been making a lot of sound. For the past five months, the SYRIZA-led coalition government has been nothing but noisy. The noise even formed slogans: “No more Austerity!” “Out with the Troika!” “Yes to a democratic Europe!” “Referendum!” But semantics don’t make strong arguments.

Elections and referendums are easy to win, change is harder.

Greece Is Chaos, Repeated Again and Again

What has happened in Greece is a tragedy. The country now finds itself in the process of realising a third Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The first two MoU’s created a humanitarian crisis of subhuman levels: 177% debt to GDP, 41% of children in poverty, a 35% increase in suicides with 35.7% of the population being at risk of poverty. Greece has 27% unemployment with over 50% youth unemployment. 2% of the population have left since the crisis began in 2010. The economic collapse is the second largest recorded in modern history, surpassing even the the Great Depression of the United States. Critically however, the Greek crisis is still unfolding and is widely predicted to deteriorate further.

People are dying on the streets of Athens. This has to stop.

With each MoU the governing party has fallen trying to implement it. Greece even had an unelected Technocrat government in 2011–2012 and in the last election a fascist, neo-Nazi party won the third largest amount of seats in parliament.

To complicate matters further, the urban morphology of Athens is not designed to handle the crisis. Its modern infrastructure is physically unable to support such a rapid depreciation in living standards. For the past few winters the skyline of Athens has descended into smog as rising gas prices force people to start wood-fires within their apartments to stay warm. People have been dying from the smoke, but people have been dying from the cold too. But as tragic as this all sounds, the political thaw has yet to properly begin.

Alexis Tsipras and his SYRIZA government (literally an acronym for ‘Coalition of the Radical Left’) are agreeing to engage in the largest scale destruction of a European country’s social fabric since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The third memorandum includes as much as €86b of financing, a €50b privatisation plan monitored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the recalcitration of basic social and sovereign rights. It is widely seen as deliberately cruel and designed to punish Greece. This is not to place the blame solely on SYRIZA, the ECB (European Central Bank) and IMF are smart enough to know that what is being proposed is “an agreement that will deepen the country’s recession, makes its debt position less sustainable and virtually guarantees that its problems come bubbling back to the surface before too long.”

Nearly Everyone Is At Fault

Greek politics is corrupt. Greek politics has long operated under a system of clientelism. Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index places Greece as the worst offender in the EU, on par with Moldova and Mongolia. Greece has also been subject to numerous international violations of sovereignty: in World War II, Britain backed Royalist forces over Partisan forces, contributing to the ignition of a brutal civil war, and from 1967–74 the Military Junta that ruled Greece with an iron fist was supported by the United States government.

Critically, Greece entered the Eurozone without meeting the debt requirements for entry. The Greek government was consequently lent money at low-interest rates regardless of its ability to pay it back — lending money to someone who is unable to pay it back is egregious, especially by shared political mechanisms.

Here’s the thing: nearly everyone is at fault. The ECB should have audited the Greek finances much sooner (it’s widely known Greece never met the conditions for Euro entry), The EU should have never politicised the debt to the extent that it has, and historically the role of the IMF is to give advice to its partners rather than engage in the directly financing of “bailouts”.

Germany is meant to be an equal partner in the Eurozone rather than its hegemonic counterweight.

This is the fault of the messianic structure of the Euro itself, a flawed union that is anything but united. It also varies depending on what extent you consider the EU as a political project or an economic one. Regardless, we again find ourselves uncomfortably in medias res with Greece.

The present crisis is constantly analysed, debated and discussed from the preposition that the Greek political class holds an active agency in its resolution, and possesses the potential for transformational change within the unfolding Euro-conflicts. This is wrong. This is how SYRIZA have been framed and it is lazy: political identity politics at its most pejorative.

Focusing On Party Narratives Presents False Hope

SYRIZA promised a new politics. The only thing that was new was the party administering it.

SYRIZA stormed university campuses with police, repeatedly infringed on the right to assembly, abused parliamentary process to stifle debate, worked with the Greek oligarch class, carried out mass privatisations and supported NATO. They formed a coalition government with a nationalist party whilst their own parliamentary composition comprised numerous former PASOK members (the same PASOK whose implementation of the first MoU led to a genuine humanitarian crisis). They refused to address the law in Greece that gives politicians legal immunity, and refused to remove the electoral law that awards the party with the highest votes an extra 50 seats in a 300 seat parliament.

When SYRIZA came to power they promised to remove the “Troika” from Greece, instead they merely recategorised the Troika as “the Institutions”. The referendum was claimed as a democratic call to arms, yet it too had severe structural flaws: a 72 word question that referred to two technical documents of fiscal policy that had lapsed in their terms for acceptance. The “No” option was also placed above the “Yes” option on the ballot paper. It was an act of political insulation.

And yet people are dismayed when Greece has now been offered far worse terms than the ones that were resoundingly rejected just ten days ago.

Despite these numerous and repeated violations of legal, moral and political conduct, people still called them “radical left” and assembled in the streets of Athens and throughout Greece in support. This is because Greeks are desperate for an end to the crisis.

SYRIZA offered a break from the existing model whilst appearing to emerge from within itself. Yet all that emerged from was an old politics with a new face.

All those who actively supported SYRIZA are complicit. That is how democracy works.

SYRIZA and the numerous other parties within the Greek political spectrum whose names we have had to learn throughout the past five years (ANEL, New Democracy, PASOK, To Potami) are all part of the same catalogue of neoliberal political products: they just operate at different ends of the rhetorical spectrum. Some like New Democracy serve the interests of capital directly through the monopolies and oligarchs, whilst parties like SYRIZA co-opt those disenfranchised by them to do the same. One side serves capital by operating under the promise of economic development at all costs, the other serves capital by promising a “fairer” redistribution of the intangible benefits. They are both fuelled by global capital and the merits of fiscal policy as an operative solution. They both acknowledge the same market-dictated rules of the game. They still need the the same system to function and build upon each other to take turns in charge, just as they still need to seek “the other” to blame, whether this takes the form of a rival party or a foreign State.

These are all parties that insist in finding solutions for the problems of capitalist social and economic relations within capitalism itself. SYRIZA are neither radical, nor left. Rarely is policy communicated on anything other than an economic indicator. SYRIZA was doomed to fail before it took power. History is not deterministic, but orientations within history are.

With the creation of the third MoU SYRIZA are implementing a policy that they themselves have said will cause Greece to enter into further recession for an undefined and extended period.

Again, people are dying from the humanitarian crisis. This has to stop.

The Unfolding Crisis Is An Example Of Contemporary Capitalist Political Economy Doing What It Does Best

Under the banner of “hope”, SYRIZA promised an impossible accord of staying in Europe, rejecting austerity, and implementing a redistributive social program.

In five months SYRIZA have proved that the quickest way to erode public support is to throw it away in five minutes and propose measures that even your arbiters couldn’t have imagined: first Greece was seen as tragedy, now it is a farce. Before the last Eurogroup meeting and by their own accord, SYRIZA rushed through parliament packages containing €13b of more austerity (the referendum rejected €8b worth of austerity). The so-called “left-faction” within the “radical-left” party did not revolt (a scary thought considering the previous coalition government led by New Democracy was forced into elections this January after failing to pass what is now considered a “mere” €2b worth of more austerity measures).

Most alarming, the rise of SYRIZA has prevented Greece descending into civil war: it is only through the leadership of a party claiming the left mantle such as SYRIZA that the implementation of a third memorandum could ever be tolerated by a Greek electorate. The forces of the popular struggle have been betrayed by the very political apparatus that claimed to represent them.

After winning the referendum and mobilising the largest contemporary demonstrations in modern Greek history, Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA have committed what can only be called a post-modern coup d’état: combining activist network organisation with parliamentary and electoral deceit.

The unique position of SYRIZA being in charge of implementing these agreements from their representation as a party of the left has eroded the capacity of large scale mass mobilisation to produce recognisable change within the political class of Greece up until this point.

After five years of crisis and multiple coalition government arrangements, the Greek public are worn out of dancing with an exit from the Euro.

Tsipras hasn’t capitulated as the headlines suggest. He hasn’t been bullied by Merkel, Schauble or Germany — such nationalist agitations are unhelpful — far from it, he is merely the extension of his and SYRIZA’s own political operations reaching their logical conclusion; operations that were predetermined the moment he, and the party he leads, orientated towards a politics within the existing orientations of contemporary capitalist political economy.

As the fallout from the SYRIZA-ANEL capitulation plays out, our mesmerisation of the party-narrative and the sceptre of Greek parliament is only now being discussed. Speaking in the Guardian, Paul Mason writes that “Syriza itself is the embodiment of a leftism that always believed you could achieve more in parliament than on the streets. For the leftwing half of Greek society, though, the result is people continually voting for things more radical than they are prepared to fight for.

“When it comes to the now-abandoned Thessaloniki Programme, the radical manifesto on which Alexis Tsipras came to power, there is always talk of implementing it “from below”: that is, demanding so many workers’ rights inside the industries designated for privatisation that it becomes impossible; or implementing the minimum wage through wildcat strikes. But it never happens. When strikes are called, it’s by the communists. When riots happen, it’s the anarchists. The rest of leftwing Greece is mesmerised by parliament.”

And further critique emerges from John Pilger: “The day after the January election a truly democratic and, yes, radical government would have stopped every euro leaving the country, repudiated the “illegal and odious” debt — as Argentina did successfully — and expedited a plan to leave the crippling Eurozone. But there was no plan. There was only a willingness to be “at the table” seeking “better terms”.”

Greece Really Doesn’t Matter

We must stop talking about Greece. Greece doesn’t matter. It is merely the keygen to more complicated arguments regarding systemic power struggles within orientations of market capitalism. We have to stop ceding power to undemocratic institutions such as the ECB, IMF, NATO and other acronyms that are omnipresent in modern political discourse. They do not serve to represent the interests of voters directly. They have their own interests, be they financial, geo-political or politically polyamorous, but these interests are definitely not humanitarian, nor democratic. They do not come under the same scrutiny as elected bodies. They do no debate in open forums, but shake hands behind closed doors.

The Eurogroup is not a democratic institution, and the Eurozone was not founded on strictly democratic principles, it was founded on the Maastricht treaty; an open market treaty designed to operate within the functioning of a shared currency. It’s fundamentally a market mechanism that ties economic growth with closer integration to a central bank. Open market structures by their very definition are designed to run on inequality. Market’s don’t care about democracy, they care about profit. The past five months has made that abundantly clear.

What Now?

What is needed is the creation of a new possibility.

What is needed is a politics that works democracy as an emancipatory tool. If the past five years of Greece proves anything, it’s that the logical conclusion of a political apparatus seeking to promote change by seeking power within a contemporary capitalist political economy is an approach that has been formally and practically tested and has failed miserably. SYRIZA had a mandate from an election, a resounding referendum win, and the mobilisation of public support.

SYRIZA also had a vocal “left” platform rooted in the ideology of a left-Europeanism that emerged out of the Marxist Eurocommunism. Make no mistake, the so called “left platform” of SYRIZA are the worst kind of collaborators, who sought change by seeking power, and when in power used it to implement a process that will create a third MoU that goes beyond what any of the previous conservative governments implemented.

The left platform now cry foul of the positions they find themselves in.

The left platform of SYRIZA is an oxymoron, they do not seek change, they did not revolt during the July 11 vote in parliament that proposed over €50b of austerity, hand in hand with parties who implemented the previous memorandums and which by doing so caused untold humanitarian crises. They still communicated in terms orientated towards a solution in association with market directives, which proved to be ideologically more derisive when confronted.

And now, as Greek membership to the Eurozone fluctuates on a daily basis, the third MoU reaches €86b. It is predicted the Greek economy will peak at 200% debt to GDP (again, still measuring the crisis in economic statistics).

It would be criminal to generate a lapse in this chain of events and the ontological entitlement of their political origins.

What is needed is a change towards a new orientation removed from the sole directives of fiscal policy solutions.

It depends on your perspective of how emancipatory political movements should operate and under what principles you consider democracy achievable. One thing is certain, when the SYRIZA party is long and gone from political memory it should be buried with Euro coins over its eyes so that it may walk the underworld blind to its dogma, and everyone would say as they walk by: “there goes SYRIZA, the political party who thought the Euro was a beacon worth attaining”.

Change in Greece will not come from short term strategies and tactics of seeking power, but from a long process of co-ordinated and planned immanent critiques. This political organisation will not aim to represent itself in the mechanisations of parliament — where the watchful eyes of the IMF and ECB will determine policy, but will emerge from an organised movement comprising the disenfranchised, the working class and the intellectual vanguard. It will not compromise or play politics. It will instead operate under an ideology for an emancipatory alliance of humanity removed from the spreadsheet, removed from NATO, and removed from free-market directives. It will not seek to claim power in an election, it will be given it by the people themselves when the movement is ripe.

This movement already exists in Athens, yet everyone has been distracted by the sounds of SYRIZA politicians claiming, exalting, and ultimately burying the left narrative.

Everyone has been looking in the wrong places.

It’s not about voting for “deals” and seeking “conditions”. It’s not about playing politics. It’s about making demands. Basic demands, humanitarian demands. Democratic demands.

Greece doesn’t matter, it never did.