The Greek Tragedy

Costas Douzinas

Abstract
Missing? To Come??

Few events in recent European political history have baffled the commentariat more than the widespread Greek insurrection or riots (according to right-wing analysts) of December 2008, and those last month [May 2010], when a quarter of a million people took to the streets and the Greek Parliament was stormed by trade unionists and other demonstrators. The catalyst for the 2008 events was the unprovoked police killing of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos on 6 December in a bohemian district in downtown Athens next to the polytechnic and the law school, both associated with student militancy for some 60 years. The catalyst for the 2010 events was the imposition on the Greek people of the harshest austerity measures ever seen in modern Europe. The Greek government accepted a loan from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union that could tide over repayment of its debt (but would not resolve the underlying problem), and in return, it adopted measures that will lead to a deep economic depression and destroy the post-war social contract. The reaction of the Greek people was expected, but would not have been as immediate and powerful had the 2008 events not happened. Within hours of Grigoriss killing, huge protests, occupations, and demonstrations broke out all over Greece. In an unprecedented move, large numbers of secondary pupils occupied some 800 schools. Daily marches to police stations, parliament and ministries were accompanied by sitins, street demos, theatre disruptions, the raising of a banner calling for resistance, and the burning of the Christmas tree in Syntagma Square. Violence against banks and luxury shops was limited and no casualties were reported. Opinion polls had half the population supporting the protests. Solidarity protests throughout Europe created fears of the protests spreading and French Premier Nicolas Sarkozy had to pull back a school
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reform bill. The insurrection led to a plethora of anxious interpretations. Many often contradictory causes were put forward: economic (unemployment and neo-liberal economic measures), political (persistent corruption and failure of education), cultural or ideological. But the most prominent reaction of commentators was incomprehension mixed with incredulity. No political organisation directed the insurrection, no single ideology motivated it, and no overwhelming demand was put forward. The persistent question What do the kids want? often led to the conclusion that the events were not political because they could not be integrated into existing analytical frameworks. What united the protestors was a refusal, a No more, and Enough is enough. Is this a new type of politics after the slow decay of democracy? The urban space has always been a site of conflict. From the riots of early modernity to the Bastille, the Paris Commune, the Reform, Suffragette and Civil Rights Movements, to May 1968, the Athens Polytechnic 1973, and the Prague and Bucharest Uprisings, the street has changed political systems, laws and institutions. In this sense, the December insurrection was a recognisable form of street resistance. But this was no ordinary protest. Imagine Westminster and Whitehall under siege everyday for two weeks. A condensation of causes, strategies, and actions turned December into the Greek May. As events developed, the insurrection took on an impetus of its own, drawing in ever-larger numbers in a snowballing effect that kept unsettling every attempt at explanation or pacification. The listing of possible causes could not help understand the effects. The before and the after became indistinguishable; causes, effects, and actions were intertwined into a knot that could not be easily unravelled. In the same way that the coming of the insurrection could not have been predicted, its happening could not be controlled and its long terms effects are only now becoming clearer. This was a type of political action that could not be simply explained from what predated it or reduced to the sum of factors that made it possible. It was precisely the rejection of routine politics that turned the insurrection into an event, in the technical sense of philosopher Alain Badiou. Every social and political situation has an infinite series of elements, classes, groups and people with different interests and ideologies, customs and habits. But in the midst of this plethora of differences, there is an empty place, a void which, while invisible for the dominant forces, supports the stability of the totality. This void lies close to the most anonymous and vulnerable. An event is precisely a type of political action, which does not belong to the standard matrix of the situation

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from which it emerges. The December insurrection disrupted the settled state of recognized differences: what was invisible, unspoken, and unspeakable (under the pre-existing rules) came to the fore. This made the insurrection difficult to comprehend. It turned these events from a usual protest by students or workers into something new, which both retained the characteristics of urban resistance and politics, and overtook them by radically changing the situation. The antagonism that became suddenly visible in Athens resulted from the tension between the structured social body with its political representatives and, on the other side, groups, causes, and interests radically excluded from the political order: huge numbers of people who cannot formulate their most essential demands in the language of a political problem and have nobody to represent them. In this sense, the insurrection was an expression of political agency at its degree zero. The protesters do not say I want this or that, but simply Here we are, we stand against. Not We claim this or that right, but We claim the right to have rights. They seem to be saying that We, the nobodies, the schoolkids, the students, the unemployed, the generation that must survive on a salary of 600 Euros, are everything. Before the event, political change was a matter of policing and consensus. After the rift, politics returns to a certain normality; its terrain has changed, however, through the appearance of new politicized subjects and the re-arrangement of the rules of political participation. For Badiou, the event is evanescent; its very purpose is to disappear. In February 2009, I was writing in The Guardian and in Greece that the insurrection only retrospectively can be recognized as an event, if people, some people remain true to that next to nothing that came temporarily to visibility and voice. This is a wager on all of us. Whether the insurrection becomes an event or remains just that (important as that is) depends on those who after its disappearance will give it a name and will remain loyal to the idea of re-writing the rules of political visibility. It looks as if the prediction is in the process of being confirmed. A name was given: the New December. It evokes the legendary battle in December 1944 between British-led troops and the left-wing guerrillas who had liberated some 80% of Greece by 1943. And from Spring 2010 political visibility and the meaning of politics are being re-defined. Things moved fast after December. Thoroughly discredited, the neo-liberal right wing government disintegrated two years into its term. Early elections were called in October 2009 and the social-democratic PASOK party was easily re-elected after a five-year absence (the socialists has dominated Greek politics since the election of Papandreou pre in 1981). PASOK ran its election campaign promising to reverse neo-liberal

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privatisation and de-regulation and to strengthen social justice through extensive re-distributive measures. There is money, Papandreou kept saying, we will make Greece the Denmark of the Mediterranean. Four months later, every single promise lay in tatters. Under instructions from the EU, the IMF, and the ECB, the public sector has been decimated, civil servants and pensioners have had 30% pay cuts, and VAT has been raised by 4%. The economic causes of the Greek debt and deficit have been widely discussed. They are of two types: the neoliberal economic model of the last 20 years with its excessive reliance on growth based on financial markets, real estate values and debt has brought the whole of Europe to its knees and is the main contributor to the Greek tragedy. Secondly, the two ruling parties have used the Greek state to strengthen their political hegemony. Clientelism, nepotism and corruption, tax evasion, and, even more importantly, lawful tax avoidance offered by the ruling political to the economic elites have added to the woes (ship-owners based on Pireas receive some 58 tax breaks which makes the British non-dom furore look like small change). Political scientists bemoaning the apathy, lack of interest, and increasing voter abstention claim that the repeated breaking of manifesto promises is a major reason why citizens turn away from politics. On this basis, the Greek case will become a textbook example of political rather than statistical dissembling. It is morally unimaginable how professional politicians can live with such a violent reversal of promises or hope to go on being taken seriously. But what does losing the trust of citizens mean when the country has lost the trust of the markets? Ralph Miliband, one of the great radical thinkers of the last century, describes in his State in Capitalist Society how Labour governments soon turn into pillars of the established order, making a more valuable contribution to the strengthening of the capitalist state than their opponents (this is a book the younger MilibandsRalphs sons, both MPs with the Labour Partyseem intent to prove right). Unfortunately, it is a thesis universally applied. In Greece, it fell upon a socialist party to decimate the post-war welfare state it had helped build. But the radical re-structuring of the social bond goes further. Neo-liberalism is not just a pernicious economic model; it is a global ideology and world-view making people understand their lives and relate to others as infinite appropriators and desiring machines and turning politics into the administration of economics. While the economic catastrophe is now clear to all, its political repercussions have been largely ignored. The politics of neo-liberalism takes economic and moralistic forms. In the former, politics becomes an activity resembling the market-place. Individuals, interests, and classes accept the overall socio-economic

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balance and use politics to pursue marginal improvements of interest and profit. In the second, politics is presented as a process of argumentation where rational consensus about public goods can be reached. Approached as a neo-liberal marketplace or as a town-hall debate, neo-liberal politics pronounces conflict finished, pass, impossible, and, at the same time, tries to foreclose its appearance. Its replacement by a collaboration of truth-telling economists, modernizing bureaucrats, and patriotic media turns the state into the muscleman for the market internally (exemplified by police coercion and brutality) and a superficially tolerant enforcer of humanitarianism externally (as seen in the recent humanitarian wars). But conflict does not disappearthe neo-liberal recipes increase inequality, fuel antagonism, and turn the anger against immigrants and the undeserving poor. It is precisely this attitude to politics that the political elites introduced to Greece. None of the unprecedented measures was discussed or approved beyond a small number of government insiders. Their imposition was presented as the inescapable result of greedy market action and perfidious European inaction (which lies behind the markets greed). They are presented as a humanitarian campaign to save the victims of a natural catastrophe. Neo-liberal economists, experts and the mainstream media pronounced that there is no alternative and then launched one of the most sustained campaigns to persuade the public. Austerity and honesty, salary cuts, and moral righteousness constitute the universal neo-liberal recipe. It takes a harsher form in Greece than in Ireland or Iceland because the (economic) punishment must match moral laxity. While billions were given to the banks socializing their debts, the Greeks on 800 Euros a month, who never saw a penny of state largesse, are now condemned to collective punishment for the misdeeds of their rulers. The moral infamy of collective responsibility which was rightly not applied to the German nation is now visited on the Greeks. To paraphrase Berthold Brecht, you go to prison if you fiddle with your benefits but you get huge bonuses if you bankrupt a bank. Two strategies were used to present this controversial cure, which is worse than the disease, as a matter of scientific objectivity. The first asserted that the neo-liberal diagnosis and recipe is the only available truth. Understanding the problem (its history, causes, and context) and discussing alternatives was peremptorily dismissed as ignorant or nave. But even in Britain, the cradle of neo-liberal idolatry, a large number of senior economists insist that the worst thing to do in a recession is to cut public spending. Greece is predicted to have 4% growth this year before the new measures have kicked in, while 33% of the 1824 age group are unemployed.

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This is a virulent type of postmodern cynicism. For real politics, on the other hand, the idea that there is no alternative does not exist. Democracy is precisely the expression of disagreement and conflict, a form of life through which the most imponderable problems can be put to debate and testing, solutions can be found and then acted upon. This is precisely the reason why the experts and commentators had to pre-empt public opinion by announcing that the most controversial problem of our times belongs not to political judgement and normative evaluation but to the truth-telling discourse of experts. The attempt to cow people before the mystical knowledge of experts and disqualify alternatives was followed by a strategy of the normalization of the extreme. It was the poor mans version of the politics of fear developed in the Anglo-American war on terror. Greece is at war, said Papandreou at the height of the crisis. But whom do they fight? The only conclusion is that the Greek government under foreign mandate is fighting the Greeks. Fear is accompanied by a paroxysmal nationalism, which rhetorically attacks the foreign agents of Greek travails while adopting all their commands. Greece, we heard, has lost its sovereignty; it is like the Titanic, a guinea pig, a proud country resisting the Germans, etc. This was crowned by the tragic kitsch of the anonymous wage earner who accosted the Prime Minister to offer his salary, and the OAP Nana Mouskouri who gave her MEPs pension for the salvation of the homeland. The IMF and the European Commission now insist that improvement in competitiveness must follow. Deep salary cuts, the undermining of social rights and further labour market flexibilization will be imposed on the private sector after the decimation of the public. These measures are part only of a wholesale radical restructuring of life. Its effects will be more radical and long-lasting than any economic measures. And this was something that those who had participated or welcomed December cannot accept. The term legitimation crisis describes the mass loss of trust in the (always fragile) social contract, which can no longer mobilize popular assent to a balance of power so palpably and unfairly stacked against the interests of the majority. Such crises arise when the omnipresent gap between rulers and ruled becomes an unbridgeable chasm, and the claim of political elites to represent the public interest no longer convinces. This is happening right now. The general strike and the huge demonstration in Athens on 5 May 2010 marked the beginning of the fight-back. Large sections of the population, traditionally voting for the two ruling parties, are increasingly detached from the political system. Some PASOK MPs and many trade-unionists have broken away from the government and

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participate in the escalating campaigns. Social disgust at the political elites is changing from passive disengagement into active force. The established media have been worrying that the Greek economic disease will spread to the rest of the Eurozone starting with the PIIGS (the debate in the Western media has been laced in an unprecedented way with racism and Orientalism). Economists suddenly realized that the Euro may be at risk and perhaps even the Union itself. What they had not predicted was that what is at risk is the anodyne post-politics that has dominated Europe. Greeks will not accept becoming a permanent IMF protectorate or the absurdly unfair terms it demands. Perhaps the closest parallel to the current crisis is not the 1930s crash but the collapse of the Italian political system in the 1990s. Greece is entering a prolonged legitimation crisis, which could rebound on the rest of Europe. It could be that neo-liberal Europe has picked the wrong link with which to test its muscle. The end or purpose of politics is social justice; when it loses that end, politics comes to an end. This is where we stand today: the Greeks fight for the survival of politics. In turning from guinea pigs into the vanguard of the counter attack, they will be offering a service to the world as important as that of the invention of democracy. BIRKBECK COLLEGE