excerpts from
[…]
Syriza and
its allies propose to fight back against the humanitarian crisis, to restore
collective agreements and labour rights, to create a fair tax system and to
democratise the political system. A Syriza government will make Greece a credible
player and will make the survival of the country and the people a precondition
at the outset of any negotiations. The government will commit the country to a
new path, rejecting corruption and patronage, opting instead for a new type of
development in the interests of all. It will propose a European Conference on
Debt to partially cancel the debt. The reimbursement modalities for the
remaining part can facilitate an economic recovery through a large public
investment programme – which should not be included in the Stability and Growth
Pact – and a response to urgent social needs. At European level, it will
propose a “European New Deal” for human development and environmental
transition. Throughout Europe, we need to break with the rationale which is destroying
Europe’s collective social gains and fuelling the rise of nationalism and
right-wing populism. We need a new project, based on inclusive development,
cooperation and democracy.
Throughout
Europe, we believe that such a change in Greece will not affect the future of
the Greek people alone. A victory for Syriza will allow Greece to escape from
the current catastrophic situation but it will also represent green shoots of
change for Europe. Breaking with austerity policies would be a signal, a source
of hope for those who want to stand tall. At the same time, if Syriza is voted
into power, its government will need massive support from the people of Europe
in the face of the pressures from the financial markets and political forces
which fear any departure from the obsolete framework of capitalist
globalisation.
Across
society, from wide political and social forces, from many organisations and
walks of life: we do not accept the pressure brought to bear to prevent the
Greek people from exercising their free choice. Those exerting this pressure
today share responsibility for the perpetuation
of harmful ‘shock therapy’ at all costs.
Throughout
Europe, we are assuming our responsibilities, supporting those engaged in struggle,
changing the balance of power, waging the
battle of ideas and uniting all those who want to build – alongside the Greek
people – a social, environmental and democratic Europe. We stand with the Greek
people because their battle is also ours.
[…]
excerpts
from:
Srećko
Horvat
[T]here is a
growing pan-European left power that is able to subvert and potentially disrupt
the existing state of affairs. Negri and Mezzadra argue that the European
elections in May 2014 are essential: "The issue of wages and the issue of
income, the definition of rights and dimensions of welfare, the topic of
constitutional transformations related to single countries and to the European
constituent issue can, today, only be addressed at a European level. Outside of
this sphere there is no such thing as political realism."
While the
French philosopher Alain Badiou so persistently insists on
"subtraction" from the state, for Negri it is clear that the
forthcoming elections create a space for the imposition of a new
"political grammar". And that is why Badiou, his sharp text published
in Radical Philosophy, was wrong when speaking about the left's
"contemporary impotence".
Badiou first
accuses Costas Douzinas of "avowed optimism", arguing that there is
nothing new in what Douzinas, in his book Philosophy and Resistance in Crisis,
called a "new political subject". For Badiou, the demonstrations in
Tahrir Square in Cairo and Athens' Syntagma Square are nothing but "the
communist invariants". Here, there is no point going into Badiou's
critique, it is simply enough to press Ctrl+F and find what is missing
throughout his text: the word Syriza. Badiou does not ever mention the great
political success of Alexis Tsipras's radical left party that leads all opinion
polls in Greece.
Our
contemporary impotence lies not so much in the fact that all these "communist
invariants" failed to change the balance of power, but that one part of
the left is not willing to accept the risk of engaging in institutional
struggle, even at the cost of failure or defeat.
[…]
"Our
contemporary impotence" comes exactly from this: on the one hand, we find
the old left melancholy when it comes to waging concrete struggles in the
existing institutions and in the streets and squares, and on the other hand,
there is the masturbation on a utopia that will never come true.
Here we
should use Badiou's own words and the lesson of his master [maître], Mao
Zedong, who used to say: "No investigation, no right to speak!" In
other words, to investigate a problem is, indeed, to try to solve it. The European
elections offer an opportunity not only to new political parties but also
to popular movements who can have their direct representatives in the existing
institutions, with the goal to deliver at least minimum demands for social
justice and effectively confront the policies of the Troika.
What we need
today is a combination of the old Gramscian difference between the
"war of position" and the "war of manoeuvre". It is
becoming more and more clear that a movement without a party is impotent, and
that a party without a movement can only repeat the failures of the past. We
need both.
[…]
excerpts
from
‘For five
years Greece has been like a patient slowly bleeding’
Helena Smith
[…]
“Unless they
are stupid, or rich, no Greek has children anymore,” snarled Mavros who has
been forced into the taxi driving business to make ends meet. “My predicament
has denied me having the second child I always wanted.”
It has also
brought him face to face with the unravelling of a country that, five anguished
years later, is torn between the agonising choice of yet more austerity, or
voting in young insurgents who could put it on a devastating collision course
with the EU and IMF, the creditors keeping it afloat.
The Greek
crisis has come in and out of view since it exploded, seemingly out of nowhere,
in late 2009. Like passengers on a runaway train, Greeks have held on for dear
life as the locomotive has jolted this way and that, sometimes picking up
speed, sometimes slowing down, but never enough to stop in its tracks.
[…]
Hope lies in
defiance. And it is not coming. It has already arrived. On Tuesday, Tsipras’s
exotic alliance of Marxists, socialists, Maoists, Trotskyists and greens posted
its biggest lead yet, with a poll released by the University of Macedonia
putting it 6.5 percentage points ahead of Samaras’ centre right New Democracy
party. Other polls in recent weeks have put the party consistently ahead.
[…]
At street level
what is sure is that Greeks have reached tipping point. The measures that have
been the “blood price” of aid worth €240bn have sucked them dry.
There are
quite a few people now who can no longer afford to give their relatives a
dignified funeral
The rich may
have got off scot-free – cocooned in their villas in the leafy suburbs of
northern Athens they may even have had a good crisis – but for the vast
majority this has been a war of attrition. The middle class, the glue of any
society, has been decimated, sapped by a barrage of taxes and pay cuts enforced
at the request of foreign lenders. The family network, the backbone of support
in the absence of a working welfare state, is struggling not to disappear with
it. Charities are overstretched. But, so too, are the soup kitchens and mobile
clinics battling to assist the more than one million who are uninsured. “There
are quite a few people now who can no longer afford to give their relatives a
dignified funeral,” says Costas Fountas, sipping a frappe coffee in his
wood-panelled undertaker’s office. “We had a lawyer in recently who had been
able to put on a good service for his father, before the crisis, but when his
mother died could barely pay the €300 municipal fees for the burial rights. I’d
say of the 15 funerals we have a month at least nine end up owing us.”
The
withering effects of such tumult cannot be underestimated. With unemployment
rates unlikely to drop soon and 3 million living on, or below, the poverty
line, there are few families who do not engage in some form of existential
conversation about how they will survive.
Drama in the
form of a daily staple of bad news has drained them. Prognostications of
eurozone exit have unnerved them. And global focus has humiliated them. The
loss of honour and curse of shame is such that those who do seek help – or
address their plight in public – also seek the carapace of anonymity -
including the photographer Antonis, who did not want us to use his full name.
Politicians are visibly drained, but so are newscasters and entrepreneurs,
shopkeepers and officials – indeed everyone on the Greek crisis train.
[…]
In their
perilous neighbourhood, opposite Turkey and only hours away from the Middle
East, more than 75% Greeks want to remain in the EU. Membership of the euro is
seen as the pier to which that ship is anchored.
But
Kalatzis, who spends his day in his Athenian workshop threading bracelets and
necklaces, bangles and beads is right: a great many of those who will vote for
Syriza will be motivated by protest. The formerly marginal Marxists have become
the best way of expressing distaste for the mainstream politicians whose
foolhardy policies over the past 40 years – exacted by New Democracy and the
once mighty centre left Pasok – have brought Greece to its knees. That the
international rescue programme was meant to put the country back on its feet by
2012, but has instead sent it into an austerity-driven death spiral, has
reinforced the conviction that Athens is desperately in need of a change of
direction. Unemployment was supposed to peak at 16% that year; instead it grew
to 25% while gross domestic product nosedived to Depression-era levels. Lost
time, policy U-turns and conflicting messages from Berlin – Europe’s paymaster
and in Athens’s case provider of the bulk of rescue funds – has exacerbated the
uncertainty.
Increasingly,
a sense of hope remains elusive. The prospect of yet more belt-tightening – in
exchange for yet more support – is on the horizon: next year Greece is faced
with €27bn in maturing debt that without help it will be unable to pay.
In Tsipras Greeks
detect that they may get a more robust defence of their interests when stalled
negotiations resume with creditors. “He offers the hope of hope,” says Fotini
Tsalikoglou, professor of psychology at Panteion University. “For five years
Greece has been like a patient that has been slowly bleeding. There has been
too much loss of hope and no one can live for long without hope.”
But
Tsalikoglou also worries about the rise of hate and violence Greeks are
expressing towards one another – and themselves. In an atmosphere made shrill
by the high-octane rhetoric of politicians now polarised between old and new,
left and right, pro-and-anti bailout camps, society has been coarsened and
bruised. For many the journey has been visceral and dark. Suicide rates have
skyrocketed – with helplines continuing to report a surge in people taking
their own lives – but these days they are rarely mentioned. “It’s all so bad
that the news has been de-dramatised,” says Tsalikoglou. “I fret about the
violence and hate that persists in nurturing the neo-Nazis in Golden Dawn. My
great fear is that the hope [embodied by Syriza] is not betrayed.”
[…]
Corruption
and cronyism and patronage politics are, more than ever, identified with a
system that has brought about the near death of Greece. The country has changed
inexorably – for worse and for better – and in the soul-searching sparked by
the crisis everyone knows that they now have to move on.
No comments:
Post a Comment