At Syntagma, the higher square of protest and the lower square of reconstruction

Excerpted from Stathis Gourgouris:

“In just a matter of days, a whole other city was organized on the footsteps of the old Royal Palace that houses the Parliament, particularly in Syntagma Square proper, what came to be known as the “lower square.” In the “upper square” directly in the face of Parliament now guarded by several rows of Praetorian guards in full riot police gear, the assembly of people is like a wave formation and varies in numbers from day to day, depending on specific Parliament activity. Here, crowds from all walks of life, often without previous activist experience, show up to hurl their anathema on their elected representatives en masse. The chant structure – most common cries are the ubiquitous “Thieves!” or “Burn this brothel of a Parliament” – is not unlike what one hears in football stadiums. The tenet is animated primarily by the desperation of economic weakness which permeates the whole society: the number of suicides of bankrupt middle-aged men, fathers of families, has skyrocketed. Yet, the politics of this totalizing ritualistic renunciation remains thoughtless and, although it may accurately express the breadth of indignation all around, it is equally accurate to say that it can never lead to any sort of alternative constituent power.

In the “lower square,” however, a whole other scene of collective self-organization has been established: a first-aid station under a tent and then a proper hospital in the entrance of Syntagma metro station; a media center operating the website www.real-democracy.gr, in addition to voluminous other press work; a radio station, also streaming on the web; a neighborhood organization center that coordinates similar activity in various parts of the city; a translation center for non-Greek visitors, activists, and foreign correspondents; full functioning stations of daily needs (kitchen, bathrooms); a performing arts center; a central organization table that handles the day-to-day requests by individual people for the agenda to be discussed publicly; and a number of designated areas in the square where people sharing a specific concern can gather separately. All such groupings remain rigorously unaffiliated with any identified political agency or party. All organized party or official group insignia is banned – a measure that raised objections from various radical leftist groups. A general assembly takes place every evening, where people’s turns to speak is governed by lot and only allowed a minute and a half for positions to be developed, while direct public argument between two individuals in exclusive dialogue form is disallowed. These measures, inspired obviously from Athenian tactics (though by no means mere copies of such ancient modes), serve to guard against demagoguery and monopoly of discussion.

The order, vigor, and freedom with which positions are stated and negotiated publicly is indeed a sight to behold. All proceedings and decisions made in the assembly are posted every morning after the night session on the square’s website. Even a cursory look at the history of the discussions – although nothing can match the actual experience of being part of this process day to day – registers the profound commitment of people to question and think together, even while extensive argument is essential.

It’s not surprising that the key focus of discussion in the square’s general assembly has been the demand for immediate democracy. The term deliberately carries the double reference: the demand for democracy now and the demand for democracy in unmediated fashion. The people’s realization as to the incapacity of the entire political system – party structure, institutions of parliamentary representation, autonomy of law and justice, etc. – has been spreading across the societal spectrum since the events of December 2008. The very electoral process, once a rather festive occasion for public contention dear to every Greek, no longer inspires anyone but the last holdouts of clientelism hoping to get their due reward by some sort of reversal in the governing party in power. Hence, great discussions have been conducted about the problem of representation vs. delegation relative to the assembly itself and the general self-organization of life in the square, including the difficult prospect of more generalized action in the near future.

I repeat, this is not an academic discussion, though there is no doubt that it engages everyone in a process of self-education in the most distilled political sense of paideia. This process is entirely self-cognizant and articulated explicitly: a new generation of citizens is being formed and the political demand is not the short term protest against the social and economic strangulation of the Memorandum brokered with IMF and EU banks allegedly in order to stall the inevitable bankruptcy of the country. The demand at Syntagma is ultimately not economic but political: the radical alteration of Greek political culture. You hear it repeatedly articulated in the assembly: even if in the unlikely chance that the Greek government were to stand up to the totally debilitating terms of the Memorandum – the world’s major economists, who are otherwise not in the service of specific institutions, all agree that the Memorandum casts a death sentence on Greek economic life and all but seals the inevitability of the bankruptcy it claims to stall – the people will not vacate their position in Syntagma Square; the goal is to emancipate ourselves from the order of current political institutions.”

What are some of the difficulties in this process:

“The continuing function of democratic life in the square is ultimately threatened by physical exhaustion and spiritual fatigue. Since the last assault, numbers have decreased in the lower square. More worrisome is the laxness (motivated no doubt by the assembly’s spirit of inclusiveness) that has allowed the space to become refuge for vagrant drug addicts, availing themselves of public amenities but incapable of participating in the shaping of public space. Given the government’s explicit desire to vacate the square in the name of restoring its tourist profile, this laxness is sure to become a perfect pretext for clean-up operations.

The biggest challenge of the “immediate democracy” movement is to fill the vacuum of governmental politics within a context of severe social and political anomie. The rapidly spreading array of incapacitated institutions promotes an ever more thoughtless politics of rage, which is patently anti-democratic and drawn toward reactionary nationalist, even fascist and surely racist, indiscriminate action. Such is the tenet in the crowds occupying the “upper square” always on occasional and unorganized instances, predicated on particular sessions of Parliament – in that sense, literally reactionary. Moreover, the anomie effected by the bankruptcy of Greek political institutions favors actions of out and out provocateurs, whose project is to hasten the imposition to law and order measures by fanning fears for democracy’s instability. This comes as an added obstacle to the perennial problem of all anarchist or autonomy movements to overcome their own fear of assuming the responsibility of decision, of constituent power.

In order for the experience of the “immediate democracy” movement to bring about conditions of real change in Greek political mores, the aversion toward daring to change things even within parliamentary rules, while retaining the pulse of radical interrogation, needs to be overcome. This issue has been explicitly and self-reflexively posited in the general assembly meetings but its realization remains at the moment nebulous, if not doubtful. What is certainly beyond doubt is that a whole generation of Greek youth, the very same ones who conducted the insurrectionary events of December 2008, has been indelibly marked by the Syntagma assembly. And the conjunction of this specific double experience – from the politics of rage and indignation to immediate democracy – will inevitably become a major part of Greece’s political culture as the society traverses the perilous paths of economic and political bankruptcy.”

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