Syriza in Power

Reflections of an Accidental Politician

Costas Douzinas

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509511587, 9781509511570
• eBook ISBN: 9781509511617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Amid the turmoil of economic crisis, Greece has become the first European experiment of left rule in a sea of neoliberalism. What happens when a government of the Left, committed to social justice and the reversal of austerity, is blackmailed into following policies it has fought against and strongly opposes? What can the experience of the Syriza government tell us about the prospects for the Left in the twenty-first century?

In this engaging and provocative book, Costas Douzinas uses his position as an 'accidental politician', unexpectedly propelled from academia into the world of Greek politics as a Syriza MP, to answer these urgent questions. He examines the challenges facing Syriza since its ascent to power in 2015 and draws out the theoretical and political lessons from one of the boldest and most difficult experiments in governing from the Left in an age of neoliberalism and austerity.

Part I
Resistance Rising

1
From Utopia to Dystopia and Resistance, a Short Run

Michael Anderson's science fiction Logan's Run (1976) opens with these words: ‘Sometime in the twenty-third century, the survivors of a war, overpopulation and pollution are living in a great domed city, sealed away from the forgotten world outside. Here, in an ecologically balanced world, mankind lives only for pleasure, freed by the servo-mechanisms which provide everything. There's just one catch: “Life must end at thirty unless reborn in the fiery ritual of carousel.” ’ The film offers a standard description of utopia. A society cut off from a threatening environment lives secluded in a land of peace and plenty. There is no conflict, people are happy, needs and desires are fully catered for. People can call in sex partners or go to orgy rooms but they cannot have long-term relationships. All utopias, however, have a little flaw that eventually turns them into dystopias. The dome dwellers are programmed to accept that life will be ‘renewed’ at the age of thirty. Implanted ‘life-clocks’ with changing colours following the advancing age of their holders prepare them for ‘lastday’, their thirtieth birthday. Assembled at the ‘carousel’ to be ‘reborn’, they are exterminated.

The cosmopolitan utopia of perpetual peace, human rights and a life of plenty, promised in 1989, followed a similar pattern. Unlimited and continuous growth would be delivered by the close link between globalization, neoliberal capitalism and a light type of liberal democracy. The reality was different. After the flight of industry and agriculture to the developing world, debt for consumption became the growth strategy of the West. In our post-Fordist societies of services, possessive individualism and consumerism fuelled by credit and debt became sole criteria of success. Life-long savings were turned into financial ‘products’; working people became shareholders directly or though the investments of insurance and pension funds. Proliferating individual and consumer rights deepened the fake socio-economic integration. Desire, rights and morality became intimately linked. Every desire could become entitlement, every ‘I want X’ ‘I have a right to X’ and ‘it is moral to X’.¹ On the surface, the interests of working people and capitalists started converging. In reality, the income and inequality gap grew to unprecedented levels. The sub-prime mortgages disaster showed that financialized capitalism must ‘invest in the bare life of people who cannot provide any guarantee, who offer nothing apart from themselves.’²

Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben have explained how, in a biopolitical world, power is exercised over life. It extends from the depths of consciousness to the bodies of individuals. Whole populations are targeted on the basis of characteristics such as gender, race, health, age or profession. Collective strategies of power are supplemented by ‘technologies of self’. People are asked to adjust their behaviour through practices of self-improvement and discipline in the name of individual happiness, health, success and collective well-being. Two types of strategy target the self. The first inscribes needs, desires and expectations in the individual, making her feel free, autonomous, creative. Only as disciplined by the symbolism of power do people acquire the imaginary of freedom. The second targets populations with policies on birth rate and life expectancy, sexuality and health, education and training, work and leisure. This double-pronged register aims at disciplining and controlling behaviour. Biopolitical power pays little attention to ideas: you can be a Communist or an anarchist as long as your behaviour and comportment follow the prescribed life choices.

Greece is a textbook case of the complex entanglement of population control and the disciplining of individuals. After entry to the Euro, the government promoted extreme hedonism. Conspicuous consumption was the neoliberal dream. Easy and cheap loans, rewards for market speculation, rapid increase of real estate values became instruments of economic policy as well as criteria of social mobility and individual well-being. The moral imperative of the period was ‘enjoy’, ‘buy’ and ‘live as if this is your last day’. Satisfying desire was mandatory, linking psychological drive with policy direction. This distorted economic model came to an end in 2009. Austerity reversed priorities and imposed a brutal administration of population and individuals. The ‘rescue’ of Greece became tantamount to a return to fiscal ‘probity’. Public spending cuts, tax hikes and privatizations were the tools. People had been told for twenty years that the main concern of power was their economic success and happiness. Now the earlier policies were overturned. The politics of personal desire and enjoyment turned into a strategy of saving the nation by abandoning its individual members. Population was everything; the individual nothing. Mandatory individual pleasure turned into a prohibition of pleasure.

Austerity policies divide the population according to skills, age, economic, gender, race and work criteria and impose radical behavioural reform for the sake of fiscal discipline and competitiveness. The measures cover every aspect of life from basic food consumption to health, education, work and leisure. People are asked to align their behaviour with the ‘needs’ of the nation and to be subjected to extensive controls, which aim at recovering ‘social health’. The behavioural change was initially demanded of the low paid and pensioners; it eventually spread to everyone. Every new austerity wave extended the measures to ever-increasing groups of population and pulling into the vortex the middle class with the imposition of large property taxes. Population strategies were supplemented with extensive interventions at the individual level. Twenty years of individual hedonism had to be brought to a rapid and violent end. An extreme version of the ‘shock doctrine’ recipe was imposed in the hope that the violent introduction of austerity would reduce resistance and re-arrange behaviour.³ It privatized social provision making it scarce and helped individualize the disciplining process. Money, work, rights and aspirations were rationed. People were asked to find private replacement for hitherto public services and to accept that the reversal of fortunes was the just result of their sinful profligacy.

The 2006 film The Children of Man, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is an extreme parable of the Greek predicament. Humanity is facing extinction after a long period of global infertility. Britain has been deluged by refugees and has become a police state with concentration camps. A brutal war rages between the government and bands of immigrants. Kee, the only pregnant woman alive, is escorted by a state bureaucrat and radical immigrants through the war zone and the camps towards the sea where a ship will take her to a ‘human project’ trying to reverse infertility. Kee gives birth in a room provided by a Roma woman and eventually makes it to the ship called ‘Tomorrow’ and the possibility of redemption.

Greek resistance was a long journey through the austerity desert. The Pasok and right-wing governments used migrants and women to display toughness and ideological purity. A disgraceful incident came close to Cuaron's nightmare. Before the May 2012 elections, ministers launched a campaign against ‘foreign-looking’ sex workers. They were rounded up, tested for HIV and detained pending trial for unspecified crimes. Their names and photos were publicized in newspapers and websites. The practice copied the infamous British Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, which authorized the rounding up of prostitutes and women judged to be promiscuous for mandatory venereal diseases testing and subsequent imprisonment. As Joanna Bourke drily comments, ‘the legislation treated women as a whole as nothing more than contagious animals, while at the same time they identified the real “mute creatures” in class terms’.⁴ The contemporary operation added race to class and gender. The government was protecting the ‘health’ of family men from foreign sex ‘predators’. When it became known that almost all detained women were Greek and many of them not sex workers, the publicity subsided. In May 2014, Katerina, one of these women, committed suicide. She had been kept in prison for a year, prosecuted for prostitution and intention to inflict grievous bodily harm. She was acquitted and later awarded €10 a day for the period of imprisonment. In May 2016, she was followed by Mary, another of the targeted HIV women. Mary's mother wrote that their family was humiliated by health inspectors testing her grandson in his school. ‘They disgraced us publicly’, she added, ‘now the [minister who launched the campaign] can sleep at ease.’⁵ The persecution of the wretched of the crisis did not stop there. During the May 2012 election campaign, the Ministers of Health and Public Order launched a campaign to remove immigrants from city centres, calling them ‘human trash’ and accusing them of spreading infectious diseases. It was just for show; those arrested soon returned to the city centre. The right-wing government, elected in June 2012, promised to ‘re-conquer’ central Athens from the ‘invaders’. Once in power, it launched a campaign ironically called ‘Xenios (hospitable) Zeus’ to arrest and remove immigrants from cities. Detention camps spread everywhere. Calling the rounding of immigrants ‘Xenios’ indicated a certain postmodern irony if it was not ignorance of the meaning of the word.

Is there an escape from this catastrophic cycle of biopolitical neoliberalism? In John Carpenter's film They Live (1988), the protagonist John Nada – the Homeric outis, anyone and everyone – finds a pair of magic glasses. When he puts them on he sees the world in black and white. Commands appearing over the omnipresent media and subliminal advertising messages order people to obey, to consume, to conform. With the glasses on, however, the messages change. ‘What you hear is lies.’ ‘The people of wealth and power are aliens with skulls for faces.’ The sunglasses demystify dominant ideology and reveal the oppressive reality beneath the consumer heaven. The multiple resistances of the Greeks acted precisely as deconstructive spectacles.

The direct integration of workers into the debt economy can turn into the Achilles heel of late capitalism. If one of the links in the integration chain breaks the worker withdraws abruptly and violently. This can happen through the sudden loss of job, major deterioration in conditions of life or expectations, frustration of desires or promises. It is not enough. The protests, occupations and insurrections around the world from Tahrir to Syntagma, Puerta del Sol, OWS and Taksim demystified the dominant ideology and taught the power of collective resistance. Resistance disarticula...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Prologue: The Accidental Politician
• Part I: Resistance Rising
• Part II: Syriza Agonistes
• Part III: Reflections on Life as a Politician
• Part IV: The Moral Advantage of the Left
• Part V: Left History
• Part VI: From Grexit to Brexit
• Part VII: The End of Europe?
• Part VIII: Cities of Refuge
• End User License Agreement