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The ‘SYRIZA Experience’: Lessons and Adaptations

22 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by in Current Affairs, Greek, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, Left politics

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Andreas Karitzis

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 inward 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 lurking in front of us but we are far from having a common and feasible strategy.

In a situation like this, 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? Another urgent task is how to transmit the ‘SYRIZA experience’ abroad, facilitating the left in other countries in the fight against neoliberalism and increased hostility of the elites. ‘Novel’ tasks require a different mentality and operational qualities from the ones we used to deploy through traditional political action.

But first we need: (i) a thorough understanding of the positive and negative aspects of the ‘SYRIZA experience’, and (ii) an open, bold and innovative process of arriving at the new conditions of doing politics. These are some preliminary thoughts in this direction.

The Failure

SYRIZA failed to stop austerity and neoliberal transformation in Greece. One could argue that SYRIZA also betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes and those fighting against financial despotism. It chose to remain in power, thereby ‘normalizing’ the coup we witnessed last summer and accepting neoliberal coordinates that shape governmentality today in Europe.

SYRIZA’s choice deprived the people of a crucial ‘tool’ in this fight by its painful defeat: the political representation of non-compliance with financial despotism. SYRIZA eliminated the chance of a ‘tactical withdrawal’, a collective process of reassembling our forces that could take into account the escalation of the fight provoked by elites – and forming a more effective and resilient ‘popular front’ that would build its resources to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy in the future.

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 middle ground, you are quickly converted into an organic component of the biopolitical machine aimed at dehumanizing our societies. Arguing that the implementation of the agreement is the only way out of the present situation is just a reformulation of the neoliberal core-argument that There Is No Alternative; no strategy for continuing the fightback against financial despotism.

However, there is a danger of underestimating the brutal 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 the self-evident negative nature of SYRIZA’s choice 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.

Today in Greece a ‘Left government’ is implementing austerity, leftwing people are confused and ‘The Left’ is turning into a pro-memorandum political force in people’s minds. Nationalists and fascists have remained the only ‘natural hosts’ of popular rage and resentment, the expected emotional outcomes of the burial of hope we witnessed last summer. Greeks are sensing that the future of their society is severely compromised.

The majority of Greeks have been sentenced to misery and despair through the imposition of newer harder austerity measures without any real hope for the future. If we add to the economic and social disaster that austerity is inflicting on us the huge waves of refugees that are entering Greece – especially the complex and contradictory ways in which their drama impacts on the abused psychic economy of the Greek population – and add also the fear of increased geopolitical instability in the region, then it seems certain that prosperity, stability and peace has left Greece for the identifiable future.

These are exactly the suffocating conditions that prevail in a society before it explodes – due to a random incident – deepening even further the decline, and plunging existential depths. It is like we are walking on thin ice from now on in Greece. In moments like this we have to remain calm and think clearly if we want to arrive at what is needed to adapt and to be effective.

The Sad Case of Europe

The neoliberal EU and Eurozone has transferred a bundle of important policies and powers that once appeared to belong to the nation state 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 Eurozone today, the elected government is no longer the major bearer of political power. 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 decisions on such crucial economic and social issues as 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. The elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – 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 or not.

That’s what happened to Greece; that’s the core argument of the president of Portugal behind his initial decision to appoint 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 the power to shape these decisions.

It is evident today that the EU is an openly anti-democratic institutional structure. The left must embrace the crude reality: in Europe a new kind of despotism is emerging fast.

The Time Lag of the Left

In western societies, the left, but not only the left, of a robust democratic constitution has been trained to do politics within the coordinates of a post-war institutional configuration. We assumed that the elites were committed to accepting the democratically shaped mandate of an elected government. If they did not like the policies that it promoted, they had 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.

But was this ever truly the case even for western societies after the Great War? This is surely a debatable issue. However, it is sufficient to assume that this was at least the dominant conception of political functioning that shaped the methodology and strategy of political agency over the last decades, even if it does not correspond fully to reality.

According to this conception, the post-war global balance of forces inscribed in state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, so that people without considerable economic power nevertheless 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 a kind of institutional configuration contaminated by popular power. In recent decades (not accidentally after the fall of the Soviet Union) they made decisive steps toward diffusing this kind of power and hence limiting the ability of the popular classes to influence crucial decisions. Today the elites feel confident enough to openly defy democracy. Democracy is no longer a sine qua non.

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.

Prepare for Landing

A strategy that wishes to be relevant to the new conditions must take on the duty of acquiring the necessary power to run basic social functions. No matter how difficult or strange this may sound in light of the traditional ways of doing politics, it is the only way to acquire the necessary power to defy the elites’ control over our societies.

Is this feasible? My hypothesis is that literally every day human activity – both intellectual and practical – is producing experiences, know-how, criteria and methods, innovations etc. that inherently contradict the parasitic logic of profit and competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history, we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach that we are bound to progress our collective intelligence in this regard if we put our minds to it.

Of course we are talking about elements that are not developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may indeed have been nurtured in liberal or apolitical contexts often functionally connected to the standard economic orthodoxy. 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 any left that wishes to take up a clear, systematic and strategically broadbased orientation.

Based on people’s capacities, proper alignment, connection and coordination it is possible to acquire the necessary power to at least be in a position to assume the basic functions if needed. We can do this by ‘extracting’ the embodied capacities of the people and putting them into use for the liberation of society.

For those who are frankly skeptical of the possibility of laying the groundwork for such a process, let’s see the potential in the stark case of Greece.

SYRIZA at its peak had approximately 35,000 members, the various solidarity networks included thousands of people and from experience we know that plenty of people were available to help SYRIZA with their expertise if there had been suitable processes to ‘extract’ their embodied capacities in an efficient way (which was not the case). Furthermore, massive unemployment provides us with huge numbers of people who would be willing to participate in networks of a different nature as long as we can build and expand processes of this kind in a systematic way. So, it is possible to pursue such a path as long as we apply the proper methodological and organizational principles in our way of doing politics.

In the worst case scenario, 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, even decisively to reclaim their autonomy.

Redesign the ‘Operating System’ of the Left

We know that the popular power once inscribed in various democratic institutions is exhausted. We do not have enough power to make the elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions. More of the same won’t do it. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; we need to reshape the ground. And to do that we have to expand the solution space by shifting priorities: from political representation to setting up an autonomous network of production of economic and social power (NESP).

We must modify the balance between representing people’s beliefs and demands and coordinating, facilitating, connecting, supporting and nurturing people’s actions. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a toxic anti-democratic European political environment designed to be intolerant 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, community control over functions such as infrastructure facilities, energy systems and distribution networks. These are ways of gaining the degree of autonomy necessary to defy the control of elites over the basic functions of our society.

It is not only in Greece that there is a growing exclusion of people from having a job or a bank account, having a ‘normal life’. Modern society in general is in decline. From history we know that societies in decline tend to react in order to survive. It is up to us to grasp this and start building networks that can perform basic social functions in a different way – one that is democratic, decentralized and based on the liberation of people’s capacities. First, this would allow people who are being excluded today to survive. Second, this could begin a transition toward a better and more mature society. And last but not least, there are no empty spaces in history, so 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.

Shifting the Battlefield

Our opponents have already spotted the shifting nature of the battlefield and have moved to new unclassified ways of organizing and acting. They develop new kinds of institutions (a Greek example www.corallia.org) compatible with the 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 have emerged in the last few years to enable the R&D departments of big multinational companies to cope with the current distributed nature of knowledge and expertise that exceeds past means of control and usurpation of human intellectual creativity and innovation.

We have to create new popular power if we want to bring about substantial change or make ourselves resilient instead of just handling the remaining, seriously depleted if not already exhausted popular power inscribed in the traditional institutions. The question is what does it look like to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing traditional democratic functioning – to restore it by newly transforming it? In other words, what are the modifications needed in our political practice for the constitution and expansion of NESPs?

These modifications may be classified in three categories: political imagination, methodology and organizing principles. From my experience, the very same people who energetically claim that we need to be more innovative, better adapted and more efficient, when they actually do politics, reproduce priorities, mental pictures, methods and organizational habits that they already know are insufficient or inadequate. There are ingrained norms in terms of methodological guidelines that decisively shape the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. In the same vein, 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. We need to recognize these blind spots and set up a process of identifying best practices, methods and regulations – both from the experience of our collectivities and from expertise in management, leadership, organizational complexity and network systems theory etc. – in order to operationally upgrade our forces.

Furthermore, our actions and initiatives are not properly connected up, but fragmented and isolated, destined to face the same 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. 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 gives them the necessary tools to plan and pursue their goals while their smaller competitors seem in disarray in a global environment of rapid changes. We need these qualities if we want to be really useful today.

What About Political Representation?

The function of political representation is a fundamental one in complex societies. It’s the function that political parties mostly perform and that shapes everyday thinking regarding what ‘politics’ is about. The task here is not to revive neglected aspects of politics – like building popular power – or to reinvent collective and individual qualities; the aim is to explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to upgrade significantly the political leverage of the people.

Of course, building popular power will also invigorate and possibly transform the institutional framework, giving substantial meaning back to political representation. But, the expansion of a network of the sort we are discussing here and the changes it could generate at various levels of the social configuration must be reflected on the function of political representation itself. We need to evaluate and explore concepts like the ‘commons’. Advancing a project to shape political representation as ‘commons’ could give us valuable insights into new ways of performing vital functions that transcend the traditional, institutional framework of representative democracy.

Democratizing the State?

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. But the expansion of a network of economic and social power under people’s control could unlock our imagination toward more advanced and better targeted reforms of state institutions. 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 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 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 described in detail 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.

Mind the Gap

The ‘SYRIZA experience‘ will be worthless if we do not resist 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 notions 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 just repeat what SYRIZA did, justifying fully the threat of our opponents: either you will be marginal or you will become like us! The existential threats and crucial questions regarding their future that our societies face 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 twenty-first century, the left will either be relevant and useful for the defense of human societies, or it will be obsolete. •

Dr Andreas Karitzis is a former SYRIZA member and former member of its Central Committee and Political Secretariat. He is a founding member of the “Hub” for social economy, empowerment and innovation. He blogs at karitzis.wordpress.com.

This article first published on theopenDemocracywebsite.

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Rekindling Hope: SYRIZA’s Challenges and Prospects

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Current Affairs, Greek, INTERNATIONAL NEWS

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Michalis Spourdalakis

Before turning to the main theme of this article it would be very useful to come to terms with at least the following preliminary observations:

Greek farmers protesting against planned pension system reforms.

Greek farmers protesting against planned pension system reforms.

The left in government and especially the radical left in government has never been the subject of easy discussion among leftists. As the project of social transformation was never a peaceful stroll in the park, the debates on the question of in and/or out of government, let alone those about political power, have been very heated. In fact, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that these debates are as old as the left itself. Before, during, and after coming into office, leftist theorists and practitioners have been involved in fierce discussions and heated arguments, often leading to organizational splits and fragmentation. The intense polemical nature of these debates has very rarely led to useful, positive, and practical conclusions for the left.

In addition, these debates, which characterize not only the ʻold leftʼ, often tend to be ahistorical in the sense that they engage in, or are even based on, comparisons with situations whose objective and subjective conditions were or are quite different. It is thus not surprising that there are a number of attempts to compareSYRIZA‘s socio-political experiment with that of the Workersʼ Party (PT) in Brazil or of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Even if one is obliged to do so, one has to bear in mind that we are then comparing political experiences arising in quite different social formations, different continents, and of course with different geopolitical and institutional constraints. At the same time, one should realise that we are talking about different parties with different social bases, histories, and socio-political traditions within which they operate. Therefore if these comparisons are to help provide a framework for more effective socialist strategy, their relevance should be understood with the appropriate degree of abstraction without viewing them as providing concrete recipes to be applied directly.

Finally, before we look at the Greek case, we need, given the developments of the last few months, to come to terms with the notion of ʻdefeatʼ. Since the left is committed to the subaltern social strata, to the under-class, and to all oppressed people, and is guided by a vision of human emancipation, defeats are perforce a recurrent experience. In fact, historically, at least since 1848, it seems that retreats and defeats can be seen as one of the constituent components of the left’s identity. Therefore a defeat, such as that experienced by the SYRIZA government last summer should not lead to defeatism, to individual retreat and withdrawal, or even worse to panic. On the contrary, we should confront the left’s defeats as useful developments and as prime opportunities to identify and understand mistakes and shortcomings. In this sense, there are no absolute defeats or absolute victories. After a major political development for the left such as a defeat and, even more, a victory, the left’s strategy should not lead to calm reassurance. In the last analysis, as the left’s history is one of a long series of defeats and victories, we must realise that no attempt at radically transforming society has ever been anything but a painful marathon with numerous retreats, defeats, diversions, and short-term disappointments.

SYRIZA’s Defeat?

When Alexis Tsipras conceded to the blackmail of the so-called ʻinstitutionsʼ on 12 July 2015, he did what any sensible and committed trade unionist, negotiating on the basis of an overwhelming (61 per cent) strike vote and confronted with the vindictive response of a management threatening to close down the business, would have done. Logic prevailed and the SYRIZA government retreated. Under the circumstances, retreat is a key word; it was the only way to avoid the disastrous social, economic and political consequences.

No one in his or her right mind could claim that this setback, or more accurately defeat, was the result of treason and/or subversion from within. This dramatic retreat, especially after the impressive result of the referendum, should be taken as the basis for creatively rethinking how to continue to serve what SYRIZA has long committed itself to – the ʻstrategic goal of social transformationʼ. This strategic goal, despite superficial analyses, remains the main goal of SYRIZA, as Tsipras stated clearly in his address to the last session of the party’s Central Committee (30 July 2015).

In this respect, there are some very important questions that need to be addressed. What led the promising radicalism of the SYRIZA government to such a dead end? Why did it not have a realistic and effective government plan in the event the negotiations failed? Why did it not recognize the uncompromising stubbornness and even vindictiveness of the country’s lenders? Without answers to these questions it will be impossible to draw up a solid new strategy, given the new conditions and constraints that the new agreement imposes on the country.

To address these questions one has to go back to the 2012 election when what has been called the ʻmiraculous rise of SYRIZAʼ became more than a realistic prospect. More concretely, following the election that brought it into prominence, it seems that the party gradually drifted away from the strategy that had made it into a key player at the centre of the country’s political scene. This development had given hope not only to those Greeks suffering from the effects of the memoranda but also to the concerned, democratic, and progressive citizens who had doubts about the social, political, cultural, and even ecological future of societies under the aggressive hegemony of neoliberal austerity in Europe and elsewhere.

SYRIZA’s (forgotten?) Strategy

The success of SYRIZA – to which of course specific political and social conjunctural conditions contributed – was the outcome of its unique political strategy in the Greek political arena. Its strategy had five principal elements. The first and basic element was its involvement in the social sphere, embedded as its activists were in the multifaceted social movements without engaging in the vanguardist practices that usually prevail in the Leninist tradition and in fact in the post-Junta practices of the political system. The second element was its commitment to participating in the institutions of political and social representation in a way that prevented it from being subsumed by the bureaucratic constraints of those institutions. The third was the establishment of a programme based on this experience in the social field as well as in these institutions. The fourth was its call for the unity of the entire left tradition. Indeed, SYRIZA managed to become the common organization of all the traditions of the left: from the historic left (from the old social democratic tradition to all versions of communism, such as Maoism, Trotskyism, etc.) to all the specific concerns of the radical social movements. However, it was the fifth and final element of SYRIZA’s strategy that proved most significant in distinguishing it from other left organizations, and which proved most decisive in its success. This was its explicit intention to come to power.

These distinct elements of the party’s strategy, in a dialectical relationship with one another, proved very functional and effective. This was the case both at the social level by representing the social alliance of social strata that the austerity policies had created (between the working-class, precarious, unemployed, and the old and new middle class), as well as at the political level as an answer to the statism of the cartel-like party system. At least in retrospect, one needs to realise that this strategy, which started to emerge as early as 2004-2005 and became much clearer during the 2008 youth uprising, was not only the result of political planning but also evolved out of the contradictory pressures of limited electoral tactics. However, it must be stressed that it was underpinned by a federated pluralist organizational structure and a party culture that imitated the model of the mass party of the Leninist tradition although certainly not in substance.

So successful was SYRIZA’s strategy that in the 2012 elections it became the leading opposition party. The handwriting was on the wall. No particularly astute political analysis was needed to recognize that this was no flash in the pan, and that SYRIZA would soon enter government.

Negligence

The quick and unexpected emergence of this success in 2012 was probably what led much of the party’s leadership to believe that effective politics would from then on be an easy affair, not requiring much further party development. They did not bother with consolidating or even fine-tuning the strategy that had brought about this success, in such a way as to facilitate the dissemination and deepening of this strategy among broader layers of society as well as among the party rank and file. Instead, the leadership adopted more conventional tactics, which in practice meant a rush to move toward power by all means available. Thus, gradually SYRIZA became not just parliamentarist but also governmentalist even before it came into office.

This was partly justified by its commitment to prevent the social calamity created by the aggressive austerity policies imposed by previous governments. However, now joined or at least supported by political figures with roots in a wide range of old and new political parties ranging from right-wing to centre-left modernizers, the leadership became alienated from SYRIZA’s radical physiognomy as a party. This drifting away from what had previously characterized SYRIZA revealed the existence of a number of tacit perceptions and analyses that were to become real problems after its much-celebrated electoral victory in January 2015. The rush to power not only bypassed a number of democratic procedures that were needed for the building of its party organization, especially after the fourfold increase in membership, but also resulted in a number of politically naïve mistakes, which would come all too quickly to the fore.

Without going into great detail, in addition to the unquestionably very hostile environment inside the country organized by the media, the opposition parties, and the oligarchs, these naïve ideas are in my opinion to blame for the dead end in which the SYRIZA government found itself when it was forced into last summer’s dramatic retreat, which led to the adoption of the new Memorandum.

These naïve ideas, perceptions, and practices can be seen both on the internal front and in the international sphere. Although all of these had already been part of the party’s baggage, there is no doubt that they became dysfunctional after the party leadership moved into office and adopted at the same time a very instrumentalist conception of power. On the one hand, its rhetoric to the contrary, the SYRIZA leadership now seemed to limit its conception of political change to governmental change (for example, no immediate plan for transforming the media, at best a formalization of its support for the social movements, a kind of polite, neutral, and slowly emerging response to the bureaucracy’s undermining of government policies). On the other hand, key figures in the government felt it was necessary to appease the old establishment and the bourgeoisie. To this end, the so-called technocrats or experts who clearly have close relations with the old corrupt personnel and networks were recruited by the SYRIZA government into the state.

But behind this naïve and instrumentalist orientation to taking state power, one can detect similar problems in SYRIZA’s party programme. Although the detailed programme was the product of enormous political and even scientific energy, it was never concretized to become a real operational plan. This was in some sense the side effect of the expectation that the change of government would be smooth and that the administration of the state by the radical left would not require any particular caution, let alone preparation.

Even on the internal party front, this naïve neglect has proven very damaging. The limited educational and informational work done within the party led to further problems. The membership was left uninformed and unsupported and thus frequently fell into in the hands of propagandists both within and outside the party. One of the notions created was that all those who proposed a vague plan B (mainly the Left Platform) were identical with the radical wing of Syriza. Arguments around the party’s strategy were often reduced to the simplistic euro vs. drachma dilemma.

Another naïve assumption motivated the tactic of most radical cadres (whose grouping came later to be known as the Group of 53), who more than anyone else were the key to the development of SYRIZA, to negotiate a modus vivendi with the part of the leadership that was in a rush to enter the government. It was an arrangement that, in addition to consuming the capacities of these cadres, did not even result in establishing certain rules for party building. In fact, the party organization fell increasingly into the hands of self-appointed leaders of small or larger networks and sub-groups within the party.

Such problems also characterized all wings of the party in terms of the international context and environment. It was assumed that what were called ʻtough and honest negotiationsʼ would be sufficient to convince the ʻinstitutionsʼ, as if the outcome of these exchanges were a matter of rational, well documented, and well researched scientific arguments and not of naked power interests. In addition, the idea that one radical government alone, even if the prospect of others like it were emerging on Europe’s periphery, could change the EU or ignore the structural reproductive commitment of the most aggressive capitalist interests, proved to be another naïveté.

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The road map for drafting a new strategy under the new conditions created by the government’s retreat needs one clear sign post:to become SYRIZA again.”

Given all this, the classic question of ʻwhat is to be doneʼ, or better ʻwhat can be doneʼ, becomes more urgent than ever. The point of departure for answering it, given the features of SYRIZA’s victory (lack of enthusiasm and shrunken turnout) and the tight constraints of the ʻAgreementʼ, which make ʻpolitical time extremely compressedʼ, should be a deep understanding of the party’s strategy, especially during the five-year period that preceded the 2012 election. The road map for drafting a new strategy under the new conditions created by the government’s retreat needs one clear sign post: to become SYRIZA again. This means nothing other than continuing to govern without being eroded by governmentalism and continuing to solidify the party’s relation to its social base without being paralysed by parliamentarism.

Prospects

In the new post-Referendum, post-Memorandum and post-September 2015 victory conjuncture, given the economic and institutional constraints, SYRIZA should craft or even better re-draft its strategy based on its successful march toward government. Some key presuppositions of these prospects should be:

1. SYRIZA should stay in government. The administration of state resources is key not only for managing the ʻAgreementʼ with the country’s debtors in the most democratic and humane fashion possible, but also as a vehicle to organize political and social initiatives that can work under the radar of the Memorandum’s constraints – as a ʻparallel programmeʼ – as well as a framework conducive to the long overdue task of party building.

2. SYRIZA should minimise the consequences of the rupture. After the creation of Popular Unity by the Left Platform and in response to the simplistic and emotional polemics coming from the ʻother leftʼ (Antarsia and the Communist Party of Greece) and the anarchists, SYRIZA is in danger of falling into the trap of unhelpful exchanges. This could prove counterproductive in any effort to plan and implement a ʻparallelʼ and class-based programme that will transcend the social and political cleavages that developed around the Memorandum, turning them into creative pressures on the government along anti-austerity, anti-neoliberal, and eventually anti-capitalist lines.

3. SYRIZA should completely change its method of recruitment into the state. So far, and as a result of the government’s instrumentalist understanding of state power, people from the old political, technocratic, and academic scene have quite often been recruited to the cabinet and more broadly to positions that depend on political appointments. Since part of SYRIZA’s support came from the huge anti-establishment, anti-corruption popular sentiment, the presence or the re-emergence of such people in key positions strains the people’s trust in the government as representing a political and ethical countercurrent. This does not mean that all new recruits should be in full agreement with the government; rather, the rising opportunism should be counteracted by the SYRIZA government’s generosity toward party cadres who have expressed their scepticism of the party’s strategy after last summer’s retreat.

4. In addition to the creative social and political organizing that must be based on the party’s experience in the social arena, a new strategic orientation should be formulated: Given SYRIZA’s failed strategy vis-à-vis the ʻinstitutionsʼ, it needs to reconsider its commitment to the Eurozone, even though under the current economic, political, and cultural circumstances, both the party and society are far from prepared to realistically assume a rejectionist position toward the latter, especially given the balance of power in Europe.

5. All the previous points are essentially proposals to deal with the defeat and to correct the mistakes and omissions that many radicals in and around SYRIZA have identified. However, the morale of the social base can be raised and consolidated only when a new goal is put forward and directly related to social developments. In this context, SYRIZA will have to have a clear and systematic commitment to actively return to the social field. This will be the key to rekindling hope. This hope naturally has to do with the reconnection and the mobilization of the party’s social base and thus the reclaiming of its radical left identity. Without the effective creation of a new vision around which to mobilize, such as the improvement of social conditions through debt reduction, it will be very difficult to consolidate the social alliance of the working-class, the unemployed, pensioners, and the dramatically squeezed lower middle class who have supported SYRIZA massively.

These ideas, and probably many others, will need to be put forward in a very concrete fashion. They must all aim at dealing with the disappointment from the defeat and at recovering the morale and the trust of the social base, which invested its hopes in SYRIZA. These are not at all novel as they come straight from the very strategy that made the party of Greek radical leftists an inspiration not only to the country’s citizens but to radical and democratic citizens worldwide. In the last analysis, one can see them as interpreting what Tsipras not long ago made ingeniously clear at a meeting of the party’s Political Secretariat: “It is not a revolutionary act to escape from reality or to construct a fictional one. What is revolutionary is to find ways even when they do not exist.”

In response to those who think it unlikely that anything like this can now be initiated because the party is far from being in a condition to sustain it, one can argue that political parties are voluntarist institutions par excellence. This is particularly true of left parties, especially young ones like SYRIZA with weak internal bureaucracies. To put it differently, the necessity for renewed party building and organizational development is a prerequisite to reconnecting with the strategy that propelled SYRIZA into the government and to regaining the ground lost since the defeat. Without this, the precious political capital created by the Greek people’s democratic and anti-austerity struggles will be squandered. •

Michalis Spourdalakis, a founding member of Syriza, is one of Greece’s foremost political scientists and currently Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Politics, University of Athens.

This was first published intransform! 2016: The Enigma of Europe
(ISBN 978 0 85036 721 8). Published by www.transform-network.netin association with www.merlinpress.co.uk.