[This] is not a ‘betrayal’. It’s not about the well-known scenario ‘they have sold out’. We have seen that there was real confrontation. We have seen the amount of pressure, the blackmailing by the European Central Bank. We have seen that they want to bring the Syriza government to its knees. And they need to do that because it represents a real threat, not some kind of illusion of a reformist type. So the reality is that the representatives of the Greek government did the best they could. But they did it within the wrong framework and with the wrong strategy and, in this sense, the outcome couldn’t have been different … The people who think that ‘the reformists will fail’ and that somehow in the wings stands the revolutionary vanguard who is waiting to take over somehow and lead the masses to a victory are I think completely outside of reality.30
All this was said within a month of Syriza’s election at the end of January 2015 by Stathis Kouvelakis, whose interpretation of the dramatic unfolding of events in his country garnered widespread attention on the international left. Himself a member’s of Syriza’s Central Committee as a partisan of the Left Platform, he was speaking at a meeting in London and addressing the disappointments already felt when the new government agreed to renew negotiations with the EU and IMF. Less than five months later, as these negotiations infamously came to a climax, he would, along with many others, leave Syriza in response to what he now called the government’s ‘capitulation’, which indeed became the most common epithet used by the international left. Yet the need to ask whether the outcome could really have been different was now greater than ever. And while the answer did indeed hinge on the adequacy of Syriza’s strategy in relation to Europe, that in turn related to deeper issues of party organization, capacity building and state transformation – as well as the adequacy of strategies on the wider European left, at least in terms of shifting the overall balance of forces.
The common criticism of Syriza, strongly advanced by the Left Platform, was that it had not developed a ‘Plan B’ for leaving the eurozone and adopting an alternate currency as the key condition for rejecting neoliberal austerity and cancelling debt obligations. What this criticism recoiled from admitting was that the capital and import controls this also would require would lead to Greece being forced out of the EU as a whole. After 35 years of integration, the institutional carapace for capitalism in Greece was provided by the many ways the state apparatus became entangled with the EU. Breaking out of this would have required Syriza as a party and government to be prepared for an immediate systemic rupture. It could certainly be said that Syriza was naïve to believe that it could stop the European economic torture while remaining in the eurozone, let alone the EU. At the very least, this simultaneously posed two great challenges: could the Greek state be fundamentally changed while remaining within the EU, and could the EU itself be fundamentally changed from within at the initiative of that state?
For a small country without significant oil resources, a break with the EU would have entailed economic isolation (along the lines of that endured by the Cuban revolution, yet without the prospect of anything like its geostrategic and economic support from the former USSR). The Syriza government faced the intractable contradiction that to fulfil its promise to stop the EU’s economic torture, it would have to leave the EU – which would, given the global as well as European balance of forces and the lack of alternative production and consumption capabilities in place, lead to further economic suffering for an unforeseeable period. Despite the massive popular mobilization the government unleashed by calling the referendum in July to support its position against that of the EU-IMF, the dilemma was the same as it had been when it first entered the state. That the government managed to win re-election in the fall of the 2015 while succumbing to and implementing the diktats of the ‘Institutions’ indicated that Kouvelakis’s observation when it entered into the negotiations back in February still held: ‘People support the government because the perception they have is that they couldn’t act otherwise in that very specific situation. They really see that the balance of forces was extremely uneven.’
Costas Douzinas, another prominent London-based Greek intellectual newly elected as a Syriza member of parliament in the fall of 2015, outlined the ‘three different temporalities’ through which the radical left must ‘simultaneously live’ once it enters the state.31 There is ‘the time of the present’: the dense and difficult time when the Syriza government – ‘held hostage’ to the creditors as a ‘quasi-protectorate’ of the EU and IMF – is required ‘to implement what they fought against’, and thus ‘to legislate and apply the recessional and socially unjust measures it ideologically rejects’. This raises ‘grave existential issues and problems of conscience’ which cannot go away, but can be ‘soothed through the activation of two other temporalities that exist as traces of futurity in the present time’.
This begins with ‘the medium term of three to five years’, when time for the government appears ‘slower and longer’ as it probes for the space it needs to implement its ‘parallel program’ so as not only to ‘mitigate the effects of the memorandum’ but also to advance ‘policies with a clear left direction … in close contact with the party and the social movements’. This is the bridge to the third and longest temporality, ‘the time of the radical left vision’, which will be reached ‘only by continuously and simultaneously implementing and undermining the agreement policies’. As this third temporality starts unfolding, freed from the neoliberal lambast, ‘the full programme of the left of the 21st century’ will emerge. ‘It is a case of escaping into the future, acting now from the perspective of a future perfect, of what will have been. In this sense, the future becomes an active factor of our present.’
This scenario was only plausible insofar as what distinguished Syriza from social democratic governments in the neoliberal era, even as it implemented the neoliberal measures forced upon it, was its refusal to embrace neoliberal ideology. The really crucial condition for the three temporalities to coexist, however, is precisely the ‘close contact with the party and the social movements’, which Douzinas only mentions in passing. Even in terms of its relations to the party, let alone the social movements, the Syriza government failed to escape from familiar social democratic patterns as it distanced itself from party pressures. It seemed incapable of appreciating the need for activating party cadre to develop social capacities to lay the grounds for temporality two and eventually three.
The neglect of the party had already turned to offhand dismissal when the government called the second election of 2015. As so many of its leading cadre left the party in the face of this – including even the General Secretary, who also resigned rather than asserting the party’s independence from the government – the promise that Syriza might escape the fate of social democracy in neoliberal capitalism was left in tatters. There are still those in Syriza, inside and outside the government, who, operating with something very like the three temporalities in mind, are trying to revive the party outside government as the key agent of transformation. But whether they can manage to create the conditions for ‘Syriza to be Syriza again’ is now moot indeed.32
Yet the problem goes far deeper. It was ironically those who advanced the ostensibly more radical Plan B who seemed to treat state power most instrumentally. Little or no attention was paid by them on how to disentangle a very broad range of state apparatuses from budgetary dependence on EU funding, let alone to the transformations the Greek state apparatuses would have to undergo merely to administer the controls and rationing required to manage the black and grey markets that would have expanded inside and outside the state if Greece exited the eurozone. This was especially problematic given the notorious clientelistic and corrupt state practices which Syriza as a party had been vociferously committed to ending, but once in government did not have the time to change, even where the inclination to do so was still there. When confronted with a question on how to deal with this, one leading advocate of Plan B responded privately that in such a moment of rupture it is necessary to shoot people. But this only raised the bigger question of whom the notoriously reactionary coercive apparatuses of the Greek state, as unchanged as they were, would be most likely to listen to, and most likely to shoot.
Perhaps most tellingly, advocates of Plan B showed no more, and often rather less, interest in democratizing state apparatuses by linking them with social movements. This stood in contrast with the minister of social services, who had herself been the key founder of the federation of solidarity networks, Solidarity4All.33 She openly spoke to her frustrations that Syriza MPs, even while paying over a sizeable portion of their salaries to the networks, insisted that they alone should be the conduits for contact with solidarity activists in their communities.
The Minister of Education visited one school a week and did tell teachers, parents and students that if they wanted to use the school as a base for changing social relations in their communities they would have his support. However, the Ministry of Education itself did not become actively engaged in promoting the use of schools as community hubs, neither providing spaces for activists organizing around food and health services, nor the technical education appropriate to this, nor other special programmes to prepare students to spend periods of time in communities, contributing to adult education and working on community projects.
Yet it must be said that the social movements themselves were largely passive and immobilized in this respect, as if waiting for the government to deliver. Activists from the networks of food solidarity were rightly frustrated earlier that they could not get from the Minister of Agriculture the information they asked for on the locations of specific crops so they might approach a broader range of farmers. But they did not see it as their responsibility to develop and advance proposals on how the agriculture ministry could have been changed under the Syriza government so as to do this; or more ambitiously so as identify idle land to be given over to community food production co-ops, and in coordinating this across subregions; or even more ambitiously, how the defence ministry might have been changed so that military trucks (at least those sitting idle between demonstrations) could be used to facilitate the distribution of food through the solidarity networks.
Insofar as the Syriza government has failed the most crucial democratic, let alone revolutionary test, of linking the administration up with popular forces – not just for meeting basic needs but also for planning and implementing the restructuring of economic and social life – there were all too few on the radical left outside the state who really saw this as a priority either. The charges of capitulation and betrayal that emanated from an understandably disappointed radical left inside and outside Greece should have been tempered in light of this. There was a marked lack of seriousness, if not dishonesty, behind the tendency to treat the referendum as proving, not just the massive public support for resisting further Troika-imposed draconian austerity (which was the question actually posed) but that the same support would have existed for leaving the eurozone, and most likely the EU, in light of the capital and import controls that this inevitably would have led to.
To say this is not to have any illusions about the EU itself, or about what the Syriza government ended up doing in accommodating to it. Insofar as the majority of Greeks still did want to remain in the EU, Syriza’s critics from the left failed to politically acknowledge what the people themselves practically understood, which was precisely the further costs that this would have entailed in terms of adding to their suffering insofar as Greece would have been left economically isolated, or even subject to a military coup or civil war. Syriza did not create the conditions in which people were prepared to risk this. But there is no point in wishing those conditions into existence. The challenge for democratic socialists is to confront this and work towards creating them.