Since 1974, my generation, the people who grew up under the dictatorship of 1967, fought persistently for the connection of the fragile Greek democracy with the European Union because we understood that Europeanisation meant modernisation, and that the European project was the only way to take Greece out of its Balkan solitude and its Ottoman legacies.
“The SYRIZA ideologues are supposedly Marxists, but they fail to provide a Marxist analysis of the administration of power and the social forces that resist change.”
Pioneers in this struggle were the parties of the Left, the ancestors of contemporary SYRIZA, under the democratic leadership of Leonidas Kyrkos and Mihalis Papayiannakis. The Synaspismos, as it was called back then, understood that the political elites did not want to democratise the exercising of power by the Greek state; far from it.
The political order which prevailed after the restoration of the republic in 1974 tried immediately to protect themselves from any true democratisation, accountability and transparency.
Greece joined the European Union just seven years later, providing a unique opportunity to re-structure Greek society. Yet the old two social and political tendencies within the country – the European and the Balkanist – retained their opposition.
The Balkanist isolationist power structure morphed on many occasions throughout the last 40 years: its first incarnation as part of the ‘deep’ PASOK during the 1980s and 1990s – reaping the benefits of the EU without accepting its obligations.
The same strategy was followed by the populists of New Democracy, who also believed they could use the financial assistance of the EU to simply cater for their clientelist armies appointed as public servants. Both parties promoted the deleterious doctrine of Greek exceptionalism – that Greece was always a ‘special case’ which needed special consideration, hence extra financial assistance.
These were the two pseudo-prophets of deferred modernisation: political elites which promised to deliver the country into the 21st century. They failed abysmally, unable to act against their own ideology.
What’s more, they kept the Greek people in the dark about the process of the European integration. Why? To maintain a political system beyond any democratic control.
The European project was questioned because of the failure of these political forces to implement policies integrating Greece to other member states of the union. On the contrary, the two parties used participation in the EU to expand their privileges, legitimise their power and quash all opposition: their opaque system of oligarchic and plutocratic governance, without checks and balances, was beyond any transparency and accountability.
SYRIZA was elected six months ago because of the frustration and anger of the Greek people against those political elites. In the elections of 2009, it was a small party of 4 per cent. In 2015 it rose up to 37 per cent. How did this happen? What is its platform and its explicit program? For those who have studied programs and statements of New Democracy and SYRIZA in recent years, the 2012 Samaras Zappeion statement (of renegotiations with the EU) and the 2014 Thessaloniki SYRIZA program bear close resemblance – indeed on many occasions they read like the same text.
Both were full of platitudes: forgiveness of the enormous debt, structural changes in the public sector, investments for development and growth. However, successive Greek governments insisted on removing the debt but nothing else. No prime minister admitted to the Greek people (the current PM included) what sort of changes had to take place.
Instead, they employed florid nationalistic rhetoric against the foreigners (and their collaborators in the recent farcical referendum), spreading fear that if any such changes were implemented, they would lose power and control over society.
The SYRIZA ideologues are supposedly Marxists, but they fail to provide a Marxist analysis of the administration of power and the social forces that resist change.
The truth is that the central body politic of the country is structured around the petit (or indeed petty) bourgeoisie which defines the dominant political activity and determines most modes of political thinking. The working class is diminished after the de-industrialisation of the country and high unemployment. No real middle class was ever developed as productive activity was always held or funded by the corrupt state bureaucracy.
The petit bourgeoisie constitutes the central body of voters who change governments according to their short-term interests. The astounding number of public servants (who mostly constitute this class) is not the main problem for the Greek economy; the main problem is that most of them are unqualified, inexperienced and untrained. This generates the excessive bureaucracy we find in all encounters with the Greek state.
All political parties gamble their election to office by using the fears and anxieties of this class. Thus, the main state ideology is right-wing or left-wing populism fused with an aggressive form of nineteenth century nationalism. Ethnopopulism is the central ideological axis that brings all political forces together and maintains the grip of the Balkanist ideology on the people to this day.
Such ideological parochialism is exacerbated by the absence of modern capitalist structures (an understanding which is totally missing from the various analyses by Paul Mason, for example, or Paul Krugman). What prevails is a resale economy, with state monopolies, or private oligopolies, controlling implicitly or explicitly all financial institutions (the banks for example). It’s hardly surprising that favouritism and nepotism, and clientelism, are the central practices.
This model of economics bears close resemblance to the fascist corporatist economy in Mussolini’s Italy; it is what Cornelios Castoriadis called ‘bureaucratic’ or ‘state capitalism’, a model of production which is completely obsolete under the current conditions of globalised and interconnected economies.
Unfortunately, the SYRIZA government continues this model, centralising it even further; maximising the benefits of the public sector, ignoring the rights of private enterprises and implementing policies of heavy taxation on the latter in order to protect the benefits of the former.
After six months in power not a single measure has been taken by the Tsipras government for the protection of the 1.5 million unemployed people of the private sector. All measures that do exist were taken by the previous, much-excoriated government.
The main discussion was, and still is, about public servants and their rehabilitation in fully-paid positions. SYRIZA continues to express the dominant conservative stream in political activity and has no other option but to continue corrupt and nepotistic traditions of previous governments. Culturally, it represents the reactionary Balkan-oriented elites who wish to isolate the country from the European project.
Certainly the European Union is not a paradise; there are conflicting interests and competing agendas between its member states, with Germany having taken the hegemony and created a block of satellite nations. But the European project does not belong to Germany, and it will be a serious error with geopolitical consequences if we abandoned it to them. If you want to win a battle you must be on the battlefield – not behind the lines.
Unfortunately, the current government expresses the statist elite which will fight until the death against all forms of modernisation. The idea that the state can be a single huge corporation – which extracts the surplus-value of its workforce in order to invest in further production – is pure and unadulterated utopian socialism. We know all too well how this experiment ended.
Instead of enhancing the presence of the working class, the Greek government relies once again on its main enemy, the state-sponsored petit bourgeoisie. SYRIZA taxes people not to pay off debt, but to maintain the clientelist state.
Wages are dependent on wealth, not the other way around. The good of the state is not always the good of the public. In order to invest capital you must first create and accumulate it – not simply borrow it from the ‘infamous’ creditors, or Russia, China, Iran or Goldman Sacks for that matter.
Unfortunately, SYRIZA expresses the most distorted forms of left-wing ideology. Its policies are right-wing dressed up in left-wing phraseology. Despite its grand – though increasingly transparent – rhetoric, it will, like so many previous governments, destroy the public good in order to protect state power. The worst is still to come.
* Professor Vrasidas Karalis teaches Modern Greek at the University of Sydney.