Hamid Taqvaee
The election of an
anti-austerity government in Greece is a political milestone for the working
class; a moment in the process of a struggle, which, though rooted in the urban
revolts of 2008, specifically began with the May 2010 protests against welfare
cuts. This struggle not only hasn't ended yet, but with the election of Syriza,
has entered a new and critical stage. Austerity - the issue at the heart of
this struggle - is directly related to the conflict between labour and capital,
not only in Greece, but throughout the world. This conflict will ultimately become
polarised around the question of the very survival of capitalism as an economic system. However, at the
beginning, and as long as the question of political power, from
a class point of view, has not been resolved, this conflict will retain a political character. The question is:
the perspective and politics of which class will ultimately prevail and be
established as the general expectation and perception of the mode and structure
of political power and the state?
The governmental crisis of the bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie lacks a
viable model of governance. The deadend of the traditional governments and
parties in Greece, notwithstanding the active support of the EU and all the
major international institutions, resulting in their defeat from a party they
call ‘extreme left’ and ‘destabilising’, is the clearest proof of the
bourgeoisie’s lack of a governmental alternative. However, the governmental
crisis of the bourgeoisie is not limited to Greece. The bourgeoisie’s strategic
institutions, think tanks and advisers, such as the World Bank, the IMF, the
Economist, etc., ever since the collapse of Wall Street in the winter of 2008, have
been talking about the impossibility of continuing the status quo, about a
‘crisis of democracy’, people’s desertion of the mainstream parties and a
general mistrust towards the established system of government, specifically in
the United States and Europe. They accurately show that not only is there no
prospect for improving the present conditions, but the situation is
increasingly getting worse.
In
a briefing to the World Economic Forum at Davos last year, Oxfam reported that
the minority economic elite, in collaboration with the political elite, had
driven the world to a state where “the bottom half of the world’s population
owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world”. Also, a survey by Oxfam
conducted in Brazil, South Africa, Spain, UK and the USA, showed that “a majority of
people believe that laws are skewed in favor of the rich”, and that opposition to monopolisation of power in the
hands of a privileged wealthy minority is growing.
A
Gallup survey last year found that 81% of Americans are dissatisfied with the
way they are governed, and the Economist in an editorial, entitled ‘The West’s
malaise’, warned that, with the rise of the radical left, as in Greece and
Spain, the political crisis of the West will deepen. Also, a study last year,
part-funded by NASA, predicted that if the current trend of unsustainable
exploitation of resources and the growing inequality in wealth continued, the global
industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades.
The
bourgeoisie has itself become the harbinger of capital’s apocalypse. Unlike
other times in the past, the crisis that the bourgeoisie now is facing is not a
purely economic one. It is an all-round strategic, political and social crisis.
Friedmanism’s economic model, with its corresponding socio-political doctrine,
i.e. neoliberalism and neo-conservatism, have reached a dead end, and a return
to Keynes and the Social-Democratic Welfare State is not plausible either.
This
situation has hit the world bourgeoisie with a crisis of governance, of which
Greece is a striking example. The mass abandonment by the people of the system
of government and state of the 1%, as evidenced by the result of opinion polls,
has developed into a critical political issue in Greece and Spain (and will
perhaps become one later also in Portugal, Ireland and Italy). Bourgeois
strategists are understandably worried that the crisis will spill over to the
whole of Europe and the West. And no doubt if the bourgeoisie in the West catches
a cold, in the rest of the world it goes through its death throes.
This
all-round crisis has no solution within the framework of the bourgeoisie’s
political and economic system. The ruling 1% will not give up its privileged
status and economic and political power for all the warnings and advice from their
well-wishing institutions; nor is this a requirement for the resolution of the current
crisis and for securing the conditions for the renewed profitability and accumulation
of capital. You can neither return to Keynes, nor extend democracy beyond the
power zone of the 1% who have “skewed [the laws] in favor of the rich”. The
political and economic “solutions” proposed by the more prudent institutions of
the bourgeoisie, more than anything else demonstrate the gravity and
undeniability of capitalism’s dead ends, rather than offering a realistic way
out of such dead ends.
What
is then the solution from the viewpoint of the working class, and the interest
of the 99% whose cause and fight has been tied to that of the working class?
Prospect of socialism and a state based
on people’s councils
Working-class
and revolutionary communism responds to the issues of the world today by
socialism vis-à-vis capitalism and by council power, i.e. direct intervention
of people in politics and the running of society, vis-à-vis democracy. This is
a solution from the standpoint of the working class on behalf of the camp of
the 99% who have been crushed under capital. This is not a solution to save
capital, but a solution to save the overwhelming majority of the people, to
save the ‘global industrial civilisation’, and the earth itself from the danger
of destruction.
Since
the end of the Cold War in 1991, bourgeois states and ideologues, pointing to
the failed experience of state capitalism, i.e. bourgeois communism, in the
former Eastern bloc, have tried to portray socialism and a state based on
direct participation of the people in political power through their councils as
something evil. However, the more we move away from the time of the collapse of
the Eastern bloc and the Cold War rhetoric, the more such propaganda loses
credibility. Not only is the time for spreading illusions about the ‘miracles’
of democracy and the free market over, even the most ‘reputable’ institutions
of capitalism describe the monopoly of power and wealth in the hands of a tiny
minority as explosive and unsustainable. People too, not through any
educational work by communist groups and parties, but through their own
experience have come to realise the necessity of breaking the monopoly of the
1% on wealth and political power.
Life
itself has pushed the necessity of the political and economic expropriation of
the bourgeoisie onto the centre stage of intellectual and political discourse.
This reality expresses itself more than anything else in the mass movements of
the past several years, in the so-called Arab Spring revolutions and the Occupy
Movement in the West. The ousting of dictators allied to the camp of democracy
in the west, with the slogan of Freedom, equality, human dignity, joins up with
the power of organised people in the Occupy Movement and with the demand for
the abolition of the above-people state. The Occupy Movement declares that the parliament,
the army, the Wall Street and the banks are in the hands of the ruling 1%, and
extends the model of Tahrir Square occupation to the occupation of streets and
squares in European and North American cities, offering models of ‘direct
democracy’ by the people. The monopoly of power and wealth in the hands of the
1%, about which the Economist, Oxfam, the World Economic Forum at Davos and the
World Bank warn, is challenged in people’s own practice on the streets. The
Arab Spring is unable to go beyond the ouster of dictators, and the Occupy Movement
rises and then winds down. But this is only the beginning of the road, and not
its end. These protests and revolutions, which are unprecedented in the recent
history of the West and the Middle East, are merely pre-seismic tremors in the
world system of the bourgeoisie; a system, which by the admission of the
bourgeoisie’s own global institutions, is driving the world towards an explosion.
Getting rid of some
of the western-backed dictators in the East, giving identity and political
expression to the camp of the 99%, and declaring war on the world’s ruling 1%
are the first achievements of these political pre-seismic tremors.
Greece at a
historical crossroads
The developments in Greece should be placed and studied within
this world confrontation between the camps of labour and capital. What is happening
in Greece differs in form from the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement.
However, in substance it is of the same kind, and is in the continuation of
those movements.
Masses of people rise up in protest in the midst of an
economic crisis in a country, which, as Alexis Tsipras has put it, has been picked
as a guinea pig for the austerity programmes. From 2010, around the same time
as the Occupy Movement and the beginnings of the Arab revolutions, mass strikes
and protests break out against austerity. People in their own experience see
that the prescription which the ruling 1%, along with the states and banks and
their internal and international centres of decision-making, have issued as a
‘solution’ to the crisis is not only failing to mitigate the problem, but by
the passing of each day is making life harder and more unbearable. So people’s protests
escalate, resulting in the end in the election of a leftist government, as a
representative for the anti-austerity movement. However, this achievement,
which, as noted earlier, marks a turning point in the recent history of struggles
of the people of Greece, is still not even the final political victory of those
struggles.
The absence of a political party acting as the
representative and leader of people’s struggles in the revolutions in the
Middle East and in the Occupy Movement was a critical weakness in those
movements and revolutions and the key reason for their inability to capture the
political power. Such a weakness did not exist in the struggles of the people
of Greece. Syriza is in fact the party and representative of Greek people’s
protest movement against economic austerity, and for this reason the election
of Syriza is an important advance for this movement. But this progress is
neither entrenched nor even irreversible. To firmly establish this victory, one
has to go beyond the anti-austerity movement. The question then is: go beyond
in what direction and with what slogans and aims? The global framework
mentioned above gives a clue to the answer: the question of Greece is not a
local or national one, and not, in the first instance, an economic one. It is
in fact a critical and concrete example of the governmental crisis of the
bourgeoisie, to which one can only respond by the working-class alternative of
political power, i.e. direct exercise of the will of the people organised in
their organs of power.
Greek society has risen up against economic austerity. It
must, however, also be able to respond to the question of the laws, relations
and mode of governance of society, which currently “are skewed in favor of the
rich”. Without resolving this problem, the question of economic austerity will
also ultimately remain unanswered. Occupation of squares and state institutions,
and the activation of mass movements such as Direct Democracy Now!, have been a prevalent feature of the Greek
protests right from the start, and inspired by the global protests and
revolutions. With the election of Syriza, this direct participation of the
people becomes critical.
The political significance
of the economic measures
In Greece today, as in all societies in transition and undergoing
revolutionary developments and crises, one could say politics is the basis of the economy, not the other way round. Any
economic measure is bound to result in political struggles between the main
social classes, pushing laws, relations and methods of government and the whole
state apparatus to the centre of the struggles. If people around the world are
expressing their mistrust of the existing system of government in opinion polls,
in Greece they have started to act against the system. People of Greece have
the power to offer a model of a viable system of government, the key to which is
people’s intervention and direct exercise of power.
The empowerment of Syriza has so far taken place through
the power of the people on the streets, even if its rise to power came about through
parliamentary elections. Syriza has won political power by its active support
for, and participation in, strikes and street protests. However, this cannot
and should not mean the end of the street protests and the return of people to
their homes.
As I pointed out in the article ‘Which way forward for
Greece’ in the previous issue of the International,
with each step which Syriza takes towards revoking the austerity programmes,
the question of the capitalist system of production also inevitably arises and is
pushed to the centre of class confrontations; issues such as the attractiveness
of Greek markets for foreign capital, capital’s profitability, the capacity of various
capitals in Greece to compete with similar sectors internationally, securing funding
for the welfare programmes, the taxation system, etc. This is an objective and inevitable
process, which will take the society from ‘no to austerity’ to ‘no to
capitalism’.
The problem first asserts itself in the form of the
incompatibility of the capitalist system with the most basic welfare needs of
the people. Thus, the question of the control and monopoly of the 1% over laws
and politics and the structure of the state, i.e. over the question of
political power in the broad sense of the term, and not merely the cabinet, is
highlighted and pushed onto the society’s agenda. The immediate anti-austerity
measures which the Syriza government has introduced so far are an important
achievement. However, even the continuation of such measures will depend upon the
strengthening of political power in the hands of a force that is willing and
able to go all the way to the end, i.e. the complete political and economic
expropriation of the bourgeoisie. Such a force can only rely on the force of
people organised in their mass organs of power. It is for this reason that the
role of organised and active people becomes crucial not only for defeating the
austerity programmes, but also for subverting the bourgeois state, for
undermining the political power of the capitalist 1%.
Greece stands today at the crossroads of world events. It
has the capacity to change from ‘a guinea pig for austerity programmes’ to a
model of socialist solution to the political and economic crisis of capitalism.
In this process, Syriza and the current government will no doubt undergo a
transformation. One should hope for, and vigorously work towards, the
strengthening of the force within Syriza which is reliant on the organised power
of the people, and which represents the people not only in the fight against
austerity, as it has done so far, but also in the formidable struggle against
the political domination and state of the capitalist class. However, even failing
this, the people and workers of Greece have shown that they are ready and willing
to move forward in the decisive battles that lie ahead. This struggle will
create its leadership too.
The presence of women in the
struggle against the Islamic regime of Iran over the last 36 years has been
palpable. During the past year, the
fight against the veil, the push back against the “morality” police harassing
women in the streets, widespread demonstrations against acid-attacks and an
active presence at universities and in industrial actions by teachers and
nurses have been at the forefront of the struggle against the Islamic regime of
Iran.
