Fortunately, one important historical episode illuminates the political challenges we face quite vividly:  the protracted struggle by the Greek left coalition party SYRIZA to renegotiate its debt with European creditors and allied governments. SYRIZA’s goal was to reconstruct a society decimated by years of austerity policies, investor looting of public assets, and social disintegration.  The Troika won that epic struggle, of course, and SYRIZA, the democratically elected Greek government, accepted the draconian non-solution imposed by creditors.  Creditors and European neoliberals sent a clear signal: financial capital will brutally override the democratic will of a nation.

Since the Greek experience with neoliberal coercion is arguably a taste of what is in store for the rest of the world, including the United States, it is worth looking more closely at the SYRIZA experience and what it may mean for transformational politics more generally.  What is the significance of SYRIZA’s failure?  What does that suggest about the deficiencies of progressive politics?  What new types of approaches may be needed?

Below, I excerpt a number of passages from an excellent but lengthy interview with Andreas Karitzis, a former SYRIZA spokesman and member of its Central Committee.  In his talk with freelance writer George Souvlis published in LeftEast, a political website, Karitzis offers some extremely astute insights into the Greek left’s struggles to throw off the yoke of neoliberal capitalism and debt peonage.  Karitzis makes a persuasive case for building new types of social practices, political identities and institutions for “doing politics.”

I recommend reading the full interview, but the busy reader may want to read my distilled summary below.  Here is the link to Part I and to Part II of the interview.

Karitzis nicely summarizes the basic problem:

We are now entering a transitional phase in which a new kind of despotism is emerging, combining the logic of financial competition and profit with pre-modern modes of brutal governance alongside pure, lethal violence and wars. On the other hand, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have huge reserves of embodied capacities, a vast array of rapidly developing technologies, and values from different cultures within our immediate reach. We are living in extreme times of unprecedented potentialities as well as dangers. We have a duty which is broader and bolder than we let ourselves realize.

But, we haven’t yet found the ways to reconfigure the “we” to really include everyone we need to fight this battle. The “we” we need cannot be squeezed into identities taken from the past – from the “end of history” era of naivety and laziness in which the only thing individuals were willing to give were singular moments of participation. Neither can the range of our duty be fully captured anymore by the traditional framing of various “anti-capitalisms”, since what we have to confront today touches existential depths regarding the construction of human societies. We must reframe who “we” are – and hence our individual political identities – in a way that coincides both with the today’s challenges and the potentialities to transcend the logic of capital. I prefer to explore a new “life-form” that will take on the responsibility of facing the deadlocks of our species, instead of reproducing political identities, mentalities and structural deadlocks that intensify them.

Karitzis takes issue with the premise that the Greek people could stop austerity and transform neoliberal politics simply by mobilizing people in the streets and winning elections.  The premise of SYRIZA’s political strategy was that “the only thing that seemed to matter was who and what group would have more influence and hold the key-positions in the government and the state….The implicit premise here was that the crucial point was to be in the government taking political decisions and then, somehow, these decisions would be implemented by some purely technical state mechanisms.”

But of course, securing state power is not enough.  Karitzis says he later “came to the conclusion that one major failure of the Left is that it lacks a form of governmentality which matches up with its own logic and values. We miss a form of administration that could run basic social functions in a democratic, participatory and cooperative way.”

One reason that SYRIZA failed, he believes, is that “the appointment of government officials was dictated by the outcome of the internal power games [within SYRIZA] during the previous period, and their mandate was to do whatever they could do in vague terms without having concrete action plans that would support a broader government plan. In the same vein, there weren’t any organisational “links” that would align government actions with the party functioning and the social agents willing to support and play a crucial role in a very difficult and complex conjecture.”

In short, SYRIZA assumed that a traditionally structured political party working in the conventional polity would be able to overcome elites. Ultimately, this failed, said Karitzis:  “Deprived of any real tool for reshaping the battlefield, the government and the party gradually moved from fighting against financial despotism towards merely a pool of political personnel with a good reputation that could reinvigorate the neoliberal project.”

The fundamental problem is that the left is clinging to old, conventional modes of “doing politics,” said Karitzis – and these modes are incapable of overcoming the political realities of financial capital: “The non-existent reality that government and party officials were clinging on to was built on the assumption that the elites were committed to accepting the democratic mandate of an elected government.”

But the power wielded by financial elites is only superficially democratic.  It consists

simply in tolerating – on behalf of the elites – a situation where people without considerable economic power have access to crucial decisions. SYRIZA knew how to do politics based on the premise that the institutionalised (in the past) popular power was not exhausted. By winning the elections, the remaining institutional power – mainly in the form of state power and international respect of national sovereignty – would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity (in all versions of how that would happen, within eurozone, leaving eurozone etc).

Based on the premise that the framework within which politics is being conducted 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 doing politics only in this way today.

The sheer incapacities of existing “democratic structures” to deliver relief became “both hilarious and tragic,” said Karitzis.  During the summer of rising public protests and SYRIZA’s confrontations with the Troika, “It was obvious to me and others that we were engaged in an escalation that was not supported by anything that would make the lenders accept a compromise. The traditional, democratic means are simply outdated for doing politics in the new European despotism (although, if embedded in a different methodology of politics, they can still be very useful).”

In the end, SYRIZA leadership could not prevail and so it “shifted the central features of its assessment regarding how best to serve peoples’ needs: from ‘non-compliance with financial despotism’ to ‘stay in power.’ What happened after the agreement is just the natural outcome of this process of adjustment.”

One reason that SYRIZA could not achieve the change it wanted was because “the elites – by extracting important powers and decisions on crucial issues from the democratically structured institutions of the bourgeois state – have managed to gain control over the basic functions of society.  It is up to their anti-democratic institutions to decide whether a country will have a functional banking system and sufficient liquidity to run basic services or not.”

This leads Karitzis to some cold, grim advice for the Left:  “In Europe a new kind of despotism is fast emerging, combining the logic of competition and profit with pre-modern institutions and forms of power…..Twenty years after the fall of the ‘actually existing socialism’ we are experiencing the fall of the ‘actually existing liberalism,’ so to speak.”

Changing the way we do politics

So what is the way forward?  Karitzis argues that we must overcome the “squeeze effect” – the ways in which “the political system is amplifying the confusion and the feeling of despair within Greek society.” This has rendered the political realm incapable of addressing “the real life conditions of the population and [is] entirely impenetrable to the peoples’ anxieties and demands.”  He adds:

The negative social consequences and psychic implications caused by austerity and social decline cannot be reflected at the political level, they cannot be represented, democratically expressed, and positively transformed in such a way that contributes to social stability and cohesion. Without a minimally proper function of political representation in place, these social and psychic wounds – in the form of negative and (self-)destructive dispositions – are spread across all social networks of interpersonal relations shaking social cohesion in a deeper way.

SYRIZA was the last gatekeeper of the political functioning through its non-compliance with the financial despotism that the Troika represents. That was SYRIZA’s most precious role over the years that contained the Greek society from a deep decline. The implosion of the political system – via SYRIZA’S choice to remain in power  – is the key factor in shaking social cohesion in a deeper way today.

SYRIZA’s capitulation in effect “normalized the financial coup,” said Karitzis, ratifying the premises of neoliberal politics and governmentality throughout Europe. “SYRIZA’s choice deprived the popular classes of a crucial tool after a 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 properly 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.”

I think this may be one of the hardest challenges for the left to accept – that existing “democratic” structures, however venerated and enduring, cannot yield transformational results. “Modern societies are just waking up from the ‘end of history’ illusion [that “democratic capitalism” is the inevitable end-point of political evolution],” said Karitzis.

“The new political movements (square movements, Occupy movements, etc.) are the first glimpses of such an awakening. They are also making use of whatever exists around them, like SYRIZA, Corbyn, Sanders etc. But, we must upgrade our forms of organization and action significantly and modify radically the mentality and methodology of mobilisation. So, we are in the beginning and we must proceed decisively and effectively towards new and better adapted ways of organizing and fighting.

Karitzis bluntly concludes:  “The amount of power we can reach through the traditional political practice is not enough to pave the way for the restoration of democracy and popular sovereignty in Europe. If this is our current predicament, then the urgent question is not find a ‘right answer’ but to set up a new conceptual framework of doing politics both within the state and outside of it which is relevant to the current situation.

But, we should be aware that this path requires a different mentality and qualities from the ones we used to deploying through traditional political action. If we look at the horizon of the political practice of the Left we will see that it contains movement-oriented and state-oriented approaches: organizing movements, demonstrating and fighting in the streets pushing demands to the state and voting, trying to change the balance of forces at the parliamentary level and hopefully form a government of the state. If we look closely we will notice that both of these approaches – and, thus, the entire horizon of our political practice – are mostly shaped around the traditional institutional framework of representative democracy that situates the state at the center of political power.

But we know that the elites have already shifted the center of gravity of political power towards anti-democratic institutions and repositioned the state within the institutional neoliberal European order. The elites have managed to gain total and unchecked control over the basic functions of society. In order to be in a position to pursue or implement any kind of policy one may consider as being the right one, we need to create a degree of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions. Without it we will not be able to confront the hostile actions of the elites and their willingness to inflict pain on a society that dares to defy their privilege over crucial decisions. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground…..

Karitzis advises “shifting priorities: from political representation to building popular power…. Instead of being mainly the political representative of the popular classes in a European framework designed to be intolerant to people’s needs, we must set up an autonomous Network of Production of Economic and Social Power (NESP). A network of resilient, dynamic and interrelated circuits of co-operative productive units, alternative financial tools, local cells of self-governance, community control over infrastructure facilities, digital data, energy systems, distribution networks etc. These are ways of gaining a degree of autonomy necessary to defy the despotic control of the elites over society.

“Is this feasible? My hypothesis is that literally every day the 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 financial competition. Moreover, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have so many embodied capacities and values from different cultures within our reach.

“Of course we are talking about elements that may not be developed sufficiently yet. Elements that may have been nurtured in mainstream contexts and that are often functionally connected to the standard economic circuit. 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 a Left that has a clear, systematic and strategically wide orientation. In the worst case, 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, decidedly reclaiming their autonomy.”

Kartizis argues that the Left reflexively “reproduces priorities, mental images, methods and organizational habits that they already know are not sufficient or adequate anymore. This means that there are implicit, deep-rooted norms that shape crucially the range of our collective actions, rhetoric, decisions and eventually strategy. It’s not important what we think, it’s what we know how to do that matters. And the latter is a product of our collective imagination, methodology and organizational principles.”

In short, we are stuck in an old framework.  How can the Left (and others) expand and change the notion of “political representation”?  Karitzis says we should “explore novel ways of performing the function of political representation in order to restructure existing ones and upgrade significantly the political leverage of the popular classes. For example, putting forward a project of shaping political representation as ‘commons’ could give us valuable insights towards new ways of performing political representation…..The question is what it means to do politics in order to produce popular power without presupposing the traditional democratic functioning and in order to restore it by newly transforming it.”

The stakes are very high, says Karitzis, because “the domination of extreme right-wing forces in Europe will be the end-product of neoliberalism and austerity. It will be their nastiest consequence, the endgame of the decline of Europe. European countries will fight each other, not over who is going to rule the rest of the world, as in the past, but over who is going to be less miserable in a declining region. The signs of collapse of the standard economic circuit are obvious in Greece but not only there. There is a growing exclusion of people from the economic circuit — having a job or a bank account, having a ‘normal life.’ Modern society in general is in decline, and 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.”

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* George Souvlis: On Syriza’s strategy after the defeat of the new memorandum agreement: can we perhaps historicize this defeat by separating it in two different moments? The first one is between two electoral periods, 2012 and January of 2015. Which were the main pitfalls of the party during this period?

Andreas Karitzis: As you can imagine, there are various levels of analysis for this question. I will focus on examples of internal party functioning that reveal the underlying conditions in terms of political imagination, methodology and organizational principles that shaped the range of our preparation, rhetoric, decisions and the eventual strategy.

In the summer of 2012 – in the midst of a joyful atmosphere that comes with being the major opposition party – there was a fundamental issue, at least to my mind, we had to address: the allocation of human and financial resources. We had the opportunity to employ several hundred people, mainly due to having a larger parliamentary group than before. The allocation of human and financial resources is not a secondary issue but the material basis of one’s political strategy. However, instead of engaging in a serious assessment of the present and future needs of the party and an operational distribution of resources (for social organizing, the growth of neo-Nazi groups, trade-union organising, preparation for being in government and for the negotiation process, and so on), there was instead an attitude of “business as usual”. The traditional political imagery, methodology and priorities prevented SYRIZA from assessing the importance of the “material” conditions for its political strategy of countering austerity and neoliberalism. SYRIZA didn’t focus on this crucial issue of preparing for government, and instead reproduced outdated organizational modes and habits.

The outcome was that it maintained the traditional priorities and party functions, as if this were a normal time of social and political activity. The inertia that came with seeing parliamentary work as the most important duty of the party, mainly under the influence of the MPs who tend to prioritize their work in political planning together with the fact that the MPs were the ones who employ all these people, created a framework that ended up with only small changes. That is, a bit more collective work within the parliamentary group, the solidarity4all institution and a minimal increase in various aspects of party functioning. Instead of having a radical rearrangement of forces, SYRIZA just improved the traditional ways of party functioning which were becoming outdated and insufficient to back up its political strategy.

Another example is the exponential deterioration of collective internal functioning. The problem I would like to underline is not the obviously negative fact of the marginalization of democratic decision-making and accountability. The problem was even deeper. During this period, the implicit premise that rapidly transformed the political behavior in the party was that the competing views within SYRIZA should be promoted via the occupation of key-positions in the parliamentary group, the government and the state, after a victorious electoral result. This premise led to marginalization of collective planning, competition between groups and individuals and the fragmentation of SYRIZA. Fragmentation deprived the political organs of the ability to collect information, assess it and deploy a complex strategy. Eventually, enormous amount of time was consumed in the efforts of the political personnel to take the lead regarding future positions in the parliamentary group and the government. Of course there was always a political reasoning justifying this move to ever increasing competition among various groups and individuals.

The interesting thing was that the decline of internal collective functioning was predicated on an implicit common premise. That is, that what is needed to stop austerity and neoliberal transformation was an electoral victory along with people supporting the government through demonstrations. Apart from that, the only thing that seemed to matter was who and what group would have more influence and hold the key-positions in the government and the state.

There was an ignorance and indifference towards issues such as the subtleties and the complexities of the implementation process when in government, the operational demands of the negotiation process (multi-level, multi-personal, highly coordinated processes etc), and the methodology and the expertise needed to mobilize people in order to develop alternative ways of running basic social functions. Let me add here that it is necessary to gain some degrees of autonomy in terms of performing basic social functions in order to stop the strategies of the elite (in any way one may think is the right one), since the latter have unchecked control over those functions and can easily inflict collective punishment on a society that dares to defy its power. Issues like these necessarily promote a collective/democratic functioning instead of fragmentation and competition and a focus on people’s capacities and methods of “extracting” them effectively in order to upgrade people’s leverage.

The underestimation of similar issues was even more striking at the Programme Committee and its working groups. It was extremely difficult (if not impossible) to restructure the forms of work from the usual articulation of lists of demands towards managerial/organizational issues regarding steps and methods to implement our policies. Instead, they were sites of political argumentation in the most general and abstract terms.

The ignorance and indifference towards questions of how you implement power was supported by the dominant rhetoric within SYRIZA: that the crucial issues are political and not technical. So all we have to do is decide what we want to do, rather than explore the ways in which we can implement them. The implicit premise here was that the crucial point was to be in the government taking political decisions and then, somehow, these decisions would be implemented by some purely technical state mechanisms.

Apart from the fact that this attitude contradicted with what we were saying regarding the corrosive effect of the neoliberal transformation of the state and the complexities of being in the EU and the Eurozone, the major problem was that a mentality like this ignores the obvious fact that the range of one’s political potential in government is determined by what one knows how to do with the state. The implementation process is not a “technicality” but the material basis of the political strategy. What was considered to be the political essence, namely the general, strategic discussion and decision is just the tip of the iceberg of state-politics. Instead of just being a “technicality”, the implementation of political decision is the biggest part of state politics. Actually, it’s where the political struggle within the state becomes hard, and the class adversaries battle to shape reality. The tip is not going to move the iceberg by itself as long as it is not supported by multi-level implementational processes with a clear orientation, function and high-levels of coordination. This is the integrated concept of state-politics that we have forgotten in practice and by doing so we tend to fail miserably whenever we approach power.

Being at the leadership of SYRIZA during the period of preparation for power, I came to the conclusion that one major failure of the Left is that it lacks a form of governmentality which matches up with its own logic and values. We miss a form of administration that could run basic social functions in a democratic, participatory and cooperative way. The fact that we are talking about a current inside the Left which includes governmental power within its strategy, the low level of awareness regarding the importance of these governmental processes (among other equally worrying weaknesses) reflects the degree of obsolescence of the Left organizations and justifies fully the need for a radical redesign of the “Operating System” of the Left.

*GS: A second period would be between the electoral victory of Syriza and the signing of the third MOU past August. What about this period? Were there mistakes and miscalculations made by the party’s leadership during this time?

AK: I think that the mistakes made during this period reveal crucial structural weaknesses of SYRIZA – and of the political left more broadly – due to the inability to adapt to the new way you must do politics in the institutionalised neoliberal framework of the EU and the Eurozone.

It seems that the weaknesses of SYRIZA in power resulted from the failed preparations in the previous period that I mentioned above. The appointment of government officials was dictated by the outcome of the internal power games during the previous period, and their mandate was to do whatever they could do in vague terms without having concrete action plans that would support a broader government plan.

In the same vein, there weren’t any organisational “links” that would align the government actions with the party functioning and the social agents willing to support and play a crucial role in a very difficult and complex conjecture. The lack of connecting processes was mainly – among other things – the outcome of a widely shared traditional political mentality that reduces, firstly, the party from a network for the massive coordination of people’s action, deliberation and production of popular power into a speech making device that supports the government, and, secondly, peoples’ mobilization from a generator of real popular power and leverage against the elites’ hostility into traditional forms of demonstration.

The government was gradually isolated and the pressure on it from various domestic and international agents initiated a process of adjustment of the new government to the existing neoliberal norms and regulations. Deprived of any real tool for reshaping the battlefield, the government and the party gradually moved from fighting against financial despotism towards merely a pool of political personnel with a good reputation that could reinvigorate the neoliberal project. In an era with a complex network of political antagonisms and class struggles, SYRIZA, as a collective agent, couldn’t even realise the form of the fight it had been involved in. This is still true for plenty of people in the Greek Left today, but things are changing and the difficulties force us to adapt.

The negotiation process and especially the way it had been understood and experienced within SYRIZA is indicative of the sloppy and cursory way that preparation for power took place, and of the inability of the party to adapt. But it also reveals the underlying premises that supported those qualities. Starting with the agreement of the 20th of February until the day that the lenders announced that the only real possibility was the continuation of the neoliberal project (1st of June), a pattern emerged regarding the way in which the government and party officials assessed what was occurring. Although the negative indications were overwhelming compared with the hopeful ones, they were focusing on the latter, distorting reality. Or better, they were replacing reality with what they hoped for; what they would have liked to be reality. I am not saying that the problem was that government and party officials were being dishonest; although some of them might be; individual dishonesty cannot explain a collective pattern.

The non-existent reality they were clinging onto was the only one in which the traditional political left knows how to do politics. And since people and collectives are determined not by what they say but by what they know how to do (a material dictum that has been forgotten in political left), it is impossible to become relevant with the real reality without a modification of methodologies, organizational principles and political imageries related to a practice that reflects reality. The problem was that collectively we hadn’t adapted sufficiently into how to do politics in reality. In the case of lack of adaptation of this kind, reality will be imposed on people and collective bodies the hard way…
This non-existent reality that government and party officials were clinging on to was built on the assumption that the elites were committed to accepting the democratic mandate of an elected government. If they do not like the policies that it promotes, they would have to engage in a political fight; opposition parties must convince the people that the policies are not desirable or successful and use the democratic process for a new government of their preference to be elected.

Supposedly, the post-war global balance of forces inscribed in the state institutions a considerable amount of popular power, rendering them quasi-democratic. This consists simply in tolerating – on behalf of the elites – a situation where people without considerable economic power have access to crucial decisions. SYRIZA knew how to do politics based on the premise that the institutionalised (in the past) popular power was not exhausted. By winning the elections, the remaining institutional power – mainly in the form of state power and international respect of national sovereignty – would be enough and it would be used to stop austerity (in all versions of how that would happen, within eurozone, leaving eurozone etc). Based on the premise that the framework within which politics is being conducted 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 doing politics only in this way today.

During that summer, the gap between the kind of politics we collectively knew how to do and the new reality grew massively, producing both hilarious and tragic events. The referendum and its aftermath was definitely the peak of this. From the “traditional way of doing politics” point of view, we were using all democratic means available. It was obvious to me and others that we were engaged in an escalation that was not supported by anything that would make the lenders accept a compromise. The traditional, democratic means are simply outdated for doing politics in the new European despotism (although, if embedded in a different methodology of politics, they can still be very useful). But it was a way for the people to step in at a historic moment and give a global message that transcends the SYRIZA government and its short-term plots.

During the week of the referendum a massive biopolitical experiment took place: the closure of the banks; the extreme propaganda by the media, the threats by the domestic, European and international political and financial establishment; the terrorism in workplaces; the hostility and threats towards “no” supporters on interpersonal level and so on, created an environment we have never encountered before. Our opponents used all their resources and they lost! Greek people refused to voluntarily declare that they embrace a life without dignity in order to avoid a sudden death. We are talking about an extremely hopeful and important event for the battle against neoliberalism. Greek people proved that the biopolitical control and influence over people is not so powerful as we might think it is. The message was crystal-clear and gave courage to plenty of us despite the ominous predictions for the immediate future: the battle is not over yet; human societies will not surrender easily.

On the side of SYRIZA, the transformation of government and party officials had already occurred. The Greek government didn’t negotiate strictly speaking. There wasn’t a coherent negotiation strategy, no improvement of our position in time, no gaining of some leverage, etc. There was only a desperate act of postponing a decision it had to make. By the time that the referendum took place, things had changed. The leadership had shifted the central features of its assessment regarding how best to serve peoples’ needs: from “non-compliance with financial despotism” to “stay in power”. What happened after the agreement is just the natural outcome of this process of adjustment.”

Photo by Carlos ZGZ

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So what does the SYRIZA experience have to teach us about the potential of democratic politics to bring about economic and social transformation?  Andreas Karitzis, a former SYRIZA member and former member of its Central Committee and Political Secretariat, provides a rich and penetrating analysis in an essay at OpenDemocracy.net. “The SYRIZA experience’:  lessons and adaptations” crackles with shrewd, hard-won political insights explaining why SYRIZA failed to prevail and the necessary future strategies for transformational change.

SYRIZA failed to stop the neoliberal juggernaut, Karitzis argues, because it thought it could work within the established political structures and processes.  But the gut-wrenching drama showed that conventional democratic politics is futile when state sovereignty is trumped by international finance.  SYRIZA’s ultimate acceptance of the Troika’s deal “arguably betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes and those fighting against financial despotism,” says Karitzis.  He now calls on the left to develop a new “operating system,” or what some have called “Plan C”:

We know that the popular power once one inscribed in various democratic institutions is exhausted.  We do not have enough power to make 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.

What might this new solution space look like?  Karitzis argues that we “need to evaluate and explore concepts like ‘the commons.'”  He envisions “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.”

Karitzis’ analysis has obvious implications for the rest of the world, where trust in nominally democratic institutions is plummeting, elites feel free to flout the rule of law (see the Panama Papers), and bureaucracies are either predatory and incompetent.

Now that “the left” in Greece (and elsewhere) is participating in the implementation of neoliberal austerity politics, forfeiting its moral credibility, it has opened a vacuum that the extreme right is only too eager to fill:  “Nationalists and fascists have remained the only ‘natural hosts’ of popular rage and resentment,” Karitzis writes.  The acrid wind blowing across western democracy comes from implacable neoliberal oligarchs who feel no remorse about causing social misery while defying democratic governance.

This is in fact a key cause of popular despair and a reason why the left must adopt a radically new strategic approach, says Karitzis. “The neoliberal EU and Eurozone have transferred a bundle of important policies and powers that once appeared to belong to the nation state out of reach of the people…..[T]he 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.”

SYRIZA might have chosen a “tactical withdrawal” in an attempt to “reassemble our forces that could take into account the escalation of the fight provoked by elites — and form a more effective and resilient ‘popular front’ that would build its resources to challenge neoliberal orthodoxy in the future,” Karitzis argues.  Instead, it attempted to negotiate with the Troika, and failed.  The clear lesson, Karitzis concludes, is that “there is no middle ground between financial despotism and democracy and dignity.”

While it may be impossible to ignore electoral politics, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that it will the vehicle for overthrowing the neoliberal paradigm.  That is why the most strategic way forward will come from developing an alternative social economy to meet basic needs:  the joint enterprise of the movements for the commons, social & solidary economy, peer production, Transition, degrowth, and other post-capitalist movements.

Karitzis’ essay is a somber analysis of Greece’s ongoing trauma, but a smart, level-headed and strategic one.  We may be left with some stark choices in the future: “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.”  Read the whole essay here.

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