Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Panagiotis Sotiris
Introduction
The arrival of Syriza to power on January 2015, that is the first time that a Party
Left does not represent the minority of the coalition is, obviously, a historic event,
the opening of a new historical phase, an indispensable message of hope for all
the subaltern classes in Europe. At the same time, this specific conjuncture poses
crucial challenges for the strategy and political practice of the radical Left, in
particular ion what concerns its relation with the European Integration project,
this text I will occupy myself with the following questions: a) The Greek electoral
and development that made manifest the contradictions of the European version
debt.1
the 2009-10 crisis in Greece was not the failure of the ‘peripheral version’ of the
‘European project’; it was its ‘success’, it was its ‘truth’. The answer to this
violent manner, a regime of capitalist accumulation that was based upon the
annihilation of all social gains and all labour rights, upon the total deregulation of
revenue towards the finance capital. This response has also been a test site for
first post-modern coup in the form of the Papademos government, led by the
1 As Stathis Kouvelakis has stressed the introduction of the euro led to ‘boosting the overall
financialisation of economies internationally, ‘bubbles’ of all kinds in the periphery (especially in
real estate, banking and credit-fuelled private consumption), accompanied by export
performances and gigantic lending flows from the core’. (Stathis Kouvelakis, « The End of
Europeanism», in Costas Lapavitsas (ed.), Crisis in the Eurozone, London, Verso, 2012, p. xvii)
2 On the concept of post-democracy see Colin Crouch, Post-Democracy, London: Polity, 2004.
The result was a social disaster that can only be compared to the consequences of
the WWII: A reduction of GDP of almost 25%, an unemployment rate which at the
end of 2013 reached 27% and which in 2015 is still at 25%, an mass flight of
young degree-holders that face a youth unemployment rate that still exceeds
However, the Greek electoral earthquake was not simply the consequence of
social struggles, including highly original forms of political protests such the
mass assemblies in City Squares that created new forms of unity between the
subaltern classes, gave an antagonistic and radical sense to the notion of the
“historical bloc” of the forces of labour, culture and knowledge. It was this
exceptional sequence that could explain the intensity of the crisis of hegemony
and the extent of changes in the relations of representation and of the impressive
discrepancy between the political system and the aspirations of the subaltern
classes. It is here that we can find the roots of the electoral victory of Syriza on
January 2015.
defeat, which will be a message of desperation. Every day we witness new forms
of cynical blackmail exercised upon the Greek government, which is now under
cost of servicing the accumulated debt towards the EU and the IMF. There’s not a
single day without the other members of the EU demanding the imposition of
If this defeat indeed happens, this will be the result of the incapacity of a great
part of the Greek Left, in particular the leading group in Syriza to confront the
question of political power and sovereignty at the national level and the
international level and in particular at the intersection of the national and the
serious debate on the question of the State and on the question of what it could
be done in the international context where the new Greek government found
itself.
In what concerns the international context you are well aware of the situation.
The Greek government has been the target of an extreme attack from the part of
the European Union. After an election where the electorate obviously rejected
austerity and neoliberal reforms, the institutions of the European Union have
tried to financially suffocate Greek society in order to see the continuation of the
dependence of Greece, which cannot continue to finance its public service, its
salaries and its pensions, and pay its debt towards the IMF and the ECB, without
using the instalments of the loans arranged under the bail-out packages and the
The aim of the ‘institutions’ is to prove that no country can escape the politics of
austerity and the neoliberal obsession dictated by the European Union. What the
ultraliberal norms of the political choices of the Greek government, with the
orthodoxy.
It is exactly this version of reduced and limited sovereignty that the European
institutions want to impose upon the new government. The determinant aspect
has not to do with the particular measures but with the mechanism of imposing
‘ad infinitum’ neoliberal policies. In this sense, we have to not that this neoliberal
engaging in new concessions and new compromises and trying to invent new
.
It is exactly by means of this perverse mechanism that combines a form of limited
and ceded sovereignty, in particular in what concerns social policies, and the
centre and the periphery of the Eurozone, which is most aggressively manifest in
the negation of monetary sovereignty, that the European Union has become the
most brutal experiment not only with neoliberal economic policies but also with
democracy.
experimentation with the forms of this limited sovereignty, this new form of
billions of Euros on the condition that Greece applied ‘reforms’, namely accepted
the destruction of its entire social infrastructure and put in action a violent
change in the relation of forces in favour or employers and the forces of capital. It
government with the ‘institutions’, that is the infamous Troika. The aggressive
practices of the RU are not an exceptional choice. As part of the ‘permanent state
cesarism that is military but financial and bureaucratic’, 4 that represents the
4Ceé dric Durand and Razmig Keucheyam, ‘Un ceé sarisme bureaucratique’, in Ceé dric Durand (ed.),
En finir avec l’Europe, Paris : La fabrique, 2013.
‘organic crisis’ of bourgeois strategies and of the European project for the simple
represents exactly this ‘pseudo-historical bloc’. When the markets become the
governance.
the European project to generate consent has led to national and continental
cesarism is the only strategy that the continent’s elites dispose in order to
or the ‘pressure groups’ and the obsessive lobbying (30.000 employees of the
5Op.cit., p. 99.
6http://www.politis.fr/Juncker-dit-non-a-la-Grece-et,29890.html.
7On the antisocial and antidemocratic character of the politics of austerity see Armin Schaë fer and
Wolfgang Streeck (eds.) 2013, Politics in an Age of Austerity, Londres: Polity, 2013.
European Comission in Brussels plus 30.000 lobbyists), that the supposed
capacity of the collective will of the subaltern classes to impose their political and
integration.
sovereignty.
The rupture with this new European « normal », the rupture with the monetary,
the European treaties become today the necessary condition of a progressive and
democratic exit from the crisis and for the opening of new socialist perspectives
in Europe. If we take the example of the Euro: the exit from the Eurozone is not a
generalised social dumping and the structural inegality of the Eurozone. Above
all it is the recuperation of a democratic control upon economic and social policy
and the necessary liberation from all the constraints and the forms of
In this sense, we have to say that today the question of sovereignty becomes a
class stake, a question around which we can see the condensation of antagonistic
class strategies. We do need a democratic and popular sovereignty, as
demand and exigency and the problem, in countries such as France, with the
based upon the common condition of the subaltern classes, based upon solidarity
sovereignty: the same idea, which is that of a community mastering its own
destiny’8.
profound change in the relation of forces and represents this collective and
the direction of society based upon the potential hegemony of the working
classes.
But what about nationalism? What we can do about nationalism and the historic
nationalism? I would like to insist that we can have a political conception or more
a politically performative conception of the nation. In this sense the nation is not
subaltern classes, the unite of those that share the same problems, the same
misery, the same hope, the same struggles. The nation is not a common origin; it
consequences of colonialism and state racism, the struggle against all forms of
‘the modern Prince must be and cannot but be the pro claimer and organiser of
an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a
history, typical of those who turn their heads to look back, like the damned in
Dante. The ‘mission’ of the Italian people lies in taking up once again Roman and
medieval cosmopolitanism, but in its more modern and advanced form. Let it
has constituted the reserve army for foreign capital, since it, together with the
Slavonic peoples, has given the rest of the world a labour force. Exactly on this
account must it take its place in the modern front of the fight to reorganise the
9 Q13, §1, SPN, pp. 132-3.
world, including the non-Italian world, which through its labour it has
Cahuzac? Not French. Johnny et Depardieu who wander around the world like a
self-service shop for passports ? Not French. The Mamadous and the
Mohammeds that toil in sweatshops, that do the work that no one else wants to
do and pay their taxes are a thousand times more French than this race of
masters. The blue-bloods of tax evasion, out! Passport and welcome to all the
dark-coloured people are dwelling on this territory, those that have contributed
twice, by their labour and their taxes to collective life, a double contribution that
gives its own unique criterion to the belonging to what, yes, continues to be
called a nation!11
I think that we have here the possibility to rethink the question we usually define
And this poses the question of internationalism. I would like to stress that one of
the most important problems, one of the signs of the profound crisis of the
is, in reality, a sign of defeat in face of the neoliberal offensive. The accusation of
10Q19, §5, FS, pp. 253-4.
11Lordon, op. cit.
social-chauvinism against all those that insist on the rupture with the European
sovereignty that could be essential in the defence of social gains, of union rights,
of public services, at the same time it can accommodate itself with all forms of
nationalism, with the mass and murderous exclusion of refugees and migrants,
and with all forms of discriminations at the national level. Within the European
Union the problem is not the ‘democratic deficit’; it is the void of democracy. It is
We know that even within the radical left there are partisans of a democratic
federalism in Europe. Toni Negri and Raué l Saé nchez Cedillo have launched an
appeal, some weeks ago. In it they recognise the loss of sovereignty in the
European context and they affirm that the only solution now is a democratic
federalism that would transform Europe into a counter-power against
Atlanticism and neoliberalism12. However, the problem is that from the beginning
Ceé dric Durand has stressed, it was Hayek himself that considered federalism as a
internationalist means to wage the collective effort to break with the European
based upon the collective struggle and intelligence of the subaltern classes. This
example at a global level, does not exclude social and political antagonism,
the fact that the international behaviour of States is determined in the last
12Antonio Negri et Raué l Saé nchez Cedillo, “The new left in Europe needs to be radical - and
European”, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/27/new-left-europe-
greece-democratic-capitalism-nato.
conjunctures of capitalist counter-offensive. Therefore, peace and cooperation
depend, in the last instance, upon the relation of force and the social and political
configuration in social formation. Any hit against the EU today, every ‘link’ that
However, everything depends upon the question of power, the question of the
state. In the Marxist theory and politics, there is always a certain ambvalence.
On the one hand we know all the references to the necessity of the destruction of
emancipation as liberation from the state. This is a rupture with the entire
On the other hand, we also find in the Marxist tradition a taking into account of
power that is even despotic as Marx stressed in the Communist Manifesto where
the State’, even if he defined the state as the ‘the proletariat organised as the
ruling class’.13
13Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Peking: Foreign Language
Press, p. 57.
As a solution to this bifurcation between a profound anti-statism and the
necessity use state power, it was Marx himself that insisted on the fact that ‘the
working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield
it for its own purposes’.14 EÉ tienne Balibar has stressed this phrase as a form of
1. The first condition is the existence, besides the apparatus of the State, or
2. But the second condition is even more important, because it conditions the
production. In other terms, the end of the absolute separation, which was
developed by capitalism itself, between ‘politics’ and ‘economy’. Not in the sense
of an ‘economy policy’, which has nothing new, not simply by means of the
workers [...] the transfer inside the sphere of production of an entire part of
political practice15.
‘black ops’. However, the change is more profound was the internalisation of
within the state apparatuses which make the executive much more important in
Popular demands come to have a more and more problematic place in the
elaboration of state policy: not only because the interests of monopoly capital
are furthered by such changes, but also because the administrative apparatus is
materially organized in such a way as to exclude popular needs from its field of
tendency. We can see this aspect as a manifestation at the European level of what
Poulantzas already had described as the new strategic role of the state
bureaucracy:
Thus placed under the authority of the Executive, the state bureaucracy is
becoming not merely the principal site but also the principle actor in the
Consequently, it is impossible to simply use the state, the apparatuses of the state
as neutral instrument. The affirmation that the state is not an instrument but the
Poulantzas insisted, does not signify that a simple change in the relation of
electoral forces can change the role and the function of state apparatuses. We can
In this sense, we can say that in the case of a government of a party that is not a
‘party of the state, a systemic party, there can be (and this is more probable) a
contradiction and antagonism between political will and its capacity to impose
its choices and the strategy inscribed within state apparatuses. We have seen its
19 Ibid, p. 224.
most aggressive form and also the most tragic has been the case of the Allende
government. But we have also seen the possibility of a ‘coup d’etat’ more quiet,
and more silent which day by day leads to retreats and compromises.
More than 40 years have passed since the last serious debate on the strategy of
the left in regards to the state and government power. In the 1970s, with the
optimism caused by the prospect of governments of the left as the first stage of a
democratic road to socialism this debate was important, even though it remained
incomplete.20 And it was Althusser in that period that insisted upon the excess of
The relatively stable resultant (reproduced in its stability by the state) of this
static) is that what counts is the dynamic excess of force maintained by the
dominant class in the class struggle. It is this excess of conflictual force, real or
And we can add : into real obstacles against any effort for a radical politics.
‘democratisation’ of the actual state – as Althusser stressed, it ‘is not to add the
20 See Giorgos Kalampokas, Tassos Betzelos et Panagiotis Sotiris, ‘State, Political Power and
Revolution: Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar and the “Debate on the State”, preé sentation au Congreé s
Historical Materialism London, Novembre 2013.
https://www.academia.edu/5106893/State_political_power_and_revolution_Althusser_Poulantz
as_Balibar_and_the_Debate_on_the_State_%CE%97%CE%9C_2013_paper_
21 Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, London: Verso, 2006, p. 109.
adjective ‘democratic’ to each existing state apparatus’. 22 This transformation must
configuration of the dominant classes, a process that must appeal, in the process
movements. With new forms of democratic participation at all levels, with the
self-management, with the imposition of limits to the right of property, with new
repressive apparatuses.23
That is why we can say that one of the problems Syriza government is exactly this
which includes the European legality and the recycling of political personnel
indispensable, at the same time it is not enough. Faces with the excess of force of
contemporary state, we need an excess of force from the part of the subaltern
(counter)power, are more necessary when facing a government of the left, even
22 Louis Althusser, 22ème congrès, Paris: Maspero, 1977, p. 54.
23 See Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left, Londres : Zed, 2007.
if, as Poulantzas stressed, this also means an ‘irreducible tension between the
referred to the big debate in the European communist left on the possibility of
left-wing government by stressing that ‘the fact that class struggle (bourgeois and
proletarian) has the state as a stake (here and now) by no means does it mean
that we must define politics in relation to the state.25 It is exactly this new practice
of politics that Althusser referred to, that remains today one of the biggest
challenges for the left. We can also formulate this in the form of a question: what
also the question of a new relation between the parties of the left and the state,
what Althusser designated as the position that even if the parties of the left
growth’), based upon the experiences of collective struggles and the collective
political intellectuality that can transform current dynamic and class alliances
Did make this theoretical detour only in order to demonstrate the impossibility
of change in Greece or the incapacity of Syriza to direct, in the sense that Gramsci
used to give to this term, the process of the formation of a new ‘historical bloc’?
precedent, in the name of the potential to transform Greece into the first ‘weak
link in the chain’ of the European Union, in the name of the potentiality of
another road, another paradigm for Greek society. For a strategy of ruptures with
debt, the Eurozone, the EU. For a strong and militant movement. For a dialectic
notions of effective struggle. For the Greek radical left the challenge is not simple
political landscape where every opposition to Syriza comes from the right. The
I started this presentation by speaking about hope. We know that for Spinoza
hope and fear cannot by themselves be good affects. 29 Perhaps this is the road we
strategie-de-la-gauche-contemporaine-le-bloc-historique-comme-concept-strategique/.
29 Ethics, IVp47.
must choose. Beyond hope as a investment in the possibility of having concrete
European elites. But also beyond the fear that the rupture is impossible and
irrational. With the fortitude and the generosity 30, the rationality and the