Beyond Crisis

Description

The government led by Syriza in Greece, elected in January of 2015, seemed, at least in its initial months, to be the most radical European government in recent history. It proclaimed itself as the 'government of hope' and became a symbol of hope throughout the world. It represented for many the proof that radical change could be achieved through institutional politics. Then came the referendum of July 2015, the vote to reject the austerity imposed by the banks and the European Union, followed by the complete reversal of the government's position and its acceptance of that austerity. The dramatic collapse of the Syriza government's radical discourse showed the limits of institutional politics, a lesson that is apparently completely overlooked by the enthusiastic followers of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders. But it also poses profound questions for those who reject state-centred politics. The anarchist or autonomist movement in Greece has been one of the strongest in the world yet it

Sujets

• Ideology
• Political economy

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 05 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629635347
• Langue: English

Extrait

In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the moment of transition. We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to transform itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history.
Series editor: Andrej Gruba i
Recent and featured Kairos books:
Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society by Michael Albert
In, Against, and Beyond Capitalism: The San Francisco Lectures by John Holloway
Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore
We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway
Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance by Phil Cohen
Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici
Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger
Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism by Silvia Federici
Building Free Life: Dialogues with calan edited by International Initiative
For more information visit www.pmpress.org/blog/kairos/

Beyond Crisis: After the Collapse of Institutional Hope in Greece, What?
Edited by John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos
2020 PM Press.
First published as: . , ( Pera apo tin Krisi. Met tin kat rrevsi tis thesmikis elpidas, ti? ). Athens: Futura, 2017.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
PM Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humaniades Alfonso V lez Pliego, Benem rita Universidad Aut noma de Puebla in the production of this book.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-515-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964736
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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Contents
PREFACE
Disillusion. Yet

Introduction John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos
ONE
Beyond Hope: Prospects for the Commons in Austerity-Stricken Greece Theodoros Karyotis
TWO
The Government of Hope, the Hope of Government, and the Role of Elections as Wave-Breakers of Radical Prefigurative Political Processes Leonidas Oikonomakis
THREE
Capital Is the Catastrophe of Humanity: We Must Break It. And We Are the Catastrophe of Capital: It Must Break Us. In Other Words: Greece John Holloway
FOUR
On Antimemorandum Struggles and Democracy That Is (Not) on the Way Giorgos Sotiropoulos
FIVE
Crisis, State, and Violence: The Example of Greece Panagiotis Doulos
SIX
Whose Lives Matter? Nationalism, Antifascism, and the Relationship with Immigrants Dimitra Kotouza
SEVEN
Imperialism and Internationalism in Neoliberal Modernity Panos Drakos
EIGHT
Crisis and Negativity: On the Revolutionary Subject in Times of Crisis Katerina Nasioka
NINE
Anti-Epilogue John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
Preface
Disillusion. Yet
Disillusioned anger stalks the world and threatens to destroy us all.
Syriza lost the election at the beginning of July 2019. Of course it did. Its fall opened the way to the return of the right-wing New Democracy Party, now with a more aggressive program than ever.
Left (or left-ish) governments have a huge responsibility. It is not just that they disappoint us, it is much more than that. They pick up people s hope and anger and channel it into defeat and disillusion. That disillusion does not kill the anger, but it pushes it in a different direction, and that new direction is often terrifying, taking politics and state violence into realms that were barely conceivable ten or twenty years ago. In the United States Obama disappointed and opened the way to the barbarous, warmongering fool, Trump. In Brazil, Lula (and later Dilma) disappointed and let come into power the unimaginably awful Bolsonaro. And now Tsipras, after all his promises of a radical Government of Hope, has destroyed those hopes with his reversal of policies after the referendum of July 2015 and has opened the door to the regenerated New Democracy.
This is not the old game of alternating between left and right governments, which used to be understood as the hallmark of a healthy democracy. Since 2008 the game has changed. The huge upsurge of anger in all the world that resulted from the collapse of the financial system and, much more, from the attempts to rescue the financial system gives a new sharpness to political conflict. The anger has flowed against the established power structures but in different ways. Some anger has swung toward the left, calling for radical change in the system, but some swings toward the right, calling for strong leaders, strong national boundaries, exclusion of ethnic minorities, more control, more authority, more racial purity. The institutional Left may succeed in channeling the first type of anger into electoral victory and hope for meaningful change, as Syriza did. But the institutional Left is bound to the state and to the reproduction of capital, so, inevitably, it betrays the hopes it promised to fulfill, it breeds disillusion. It is easy then for the disillusioned anger to just go home and close its eyes or to swing to the right and support nationalist-authoritarian solutions. And those solutions cause untold misery in the present and take us a step closer to human extinction, possibly in the near future.
Disillusion stems from the institutional Left. Yet If we only blame the Left for not completing the role it is made for, we give no answer to the present waning of anticapitalist struggles, the social demobilization, and the re-emergence of the Right s law and order doctrine all around the world. We just rephrase the question. This book, from its very beginning, aims to go further than the currency of Syriza, to go beyond rephrasing the question. Our argument is that to be true to the hope and anger that fills so many of us, we must break from the suffocating logic of the institutional Left, from left parties and fairer distribution and better social services and a different balance between locality and center. It is a deeper change that we need if we are to defeat the disillusioned anger that threatens to destroy us all.
What can we do? The eternal question-but there is no eternity for human existence, just a probably shortening time of life on earth. What can we do? Read the book and send us your answers.
John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos
Athens and Puebla, July 2019
Introduction
John Holloway, Katerina Nasioka, and Panagiotis Doulos
Hope is on the way. And now hope has gone away, leaving a trail of disappointment and depression. The crisis is here. The storm is here. And it has broken out in full force.
Is this all? Was that really hope that left? Or was it illusion, making way for true hope? Or should we just come to terms with depression?
Hope is on the way. This is the slogan with which Syriza won the Greek elections on January 25, 2015. The result was rupture with the two-party system (PASOK-New Democracy) that had dominated Greek political life since the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. Syriza s rise to power was supposed to bring a new type of politics-and not just new policies -emerging from a radical situation. Indeed, for a period of time and with very few losses compared to other left-wing governments, it managed to conserve a militant rhetoric. And, thus, the government of Syriza, led by Alexis Tsipras, became the sweetheart of the global Left. With Greece in the world s spotlight, intellectuals flocked to the country to express their political support to the Government of Hope. Then came the July referendum, the massive No, and the hurrahs. And after that, devastation; the collapse of hope.
But let us go a bit further back in time, before the institutional date of the elections of January 25, 2015; let us travel to the explosive, anti-institutional date of December 6, 2008. On that day, Alexis Grigoropoulos is shot down by a uniformed police officer (another death in the body count of democracy). The revolt that breaks out changes the experience of resistance in Greece forever. It opens up a huge cycle of questions and practices on how to change things, how to take our lives in our hands-but, above all, on what we want this life to be like when we have it in our hands. Rage against the wretchedness of capital, of money, of the state, of patriarchy, of the institutions, of political representation and assimilated social roles. It all explodes just as the world begins to panic over the outbreak of the world crisis triggered by the bankruptcy of banking giant Lehman Brothers. The images of the crash had been broadcast across the entire planet a few months earlier, on September 15, 2008. Those who claimed the 2008 revolt in Greece was an isolated local incident breaking the link that connected it to capital s global onslaught are the same who now speak of the Greek experiment.
In the years that followed, a cycle of struggles-or, rather, various cycles of more or less intense struggles-opened and closed in Greece (forty-two general strikes from 2010 to 2015 and thirty-one massive protest events during the 2010-2012 period, as Leonidas Oikonomakis mentions in his chapter). The announce