Showing posts with label crisis/κρίση. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crisis/κρίση. Show all posts

Friday, 7 March 2014

Κωστής Καρπόζηλος: Παγιδευμένοι στην ιστορία

Οι άνθρωποι δημιουργούν την ίδια τους την ιστορία, τη δημιουργούν όμως όχι όπως τους αρέσει, όχι μέσα σε συνθήκες που οι ίδιοι διαλέγουν, μα μέσα σε συνθήκες που υπάρχουν άμεσα, που είναι δοσμένες και που κληροδοτήθηκαν από το παρελθόν. Η παράδοση όλων των νεκρών γενεών βαραίνει σα βραχνάς στο μυαλό των ζωντανών. Και όταν ακόμα οι ζωντανοί φαίνονται σαν ν’ ασχολούνται ν’ ανατρέψουν τους εαυτούς τους και τα πράγματα και να δημιουργήσουν κάτι που έχει προϋπάρξει, σ’ αυτές ακριβώς τις εποχές της επαναστατικής κρίσης επικαλούνται φοβισμένοι τα πνεύματα του παρελθόντος στην υπηρεσία τους, δανείζονται τα ονόματά τους, τα μαχητικά συνθήματά τους, τις στολές τους για να παραστήσουν με την αρχαιοπρεπή αυτή, σεβάσμια μεταμφίεση και μ’ αυτή τη δανεισμένη γλώσσα τη νέα σκηνή της παγκόσμιας ιστορίας. Έτσι ο Λούθηρος φόρεσε τη μάσκα του απόστολου Παύλου, η επανάσταση του 1789-1814 ντύθηκε διαδοχικά τη στολή της ρωμαϊκής δημοκρατίας και της ρωμαϊκής αυτοκρατορίας και η επανάσταση του 1848 δε βρήκε να κάνει τίποτα καλύτερο από το να παρωδήσει πότε το 1789 και πότε την επαναστατική παράδοση του 1793-1795. Έτσι κι ο αρχάριος που έμαθε μια ξένη γλώσσα τη μεταφράζει πάντα στη μητρική του και μόνον όταν αρχίσει να χειρίζεται την ξένη γλώσσα χωρίς να θυμάται τη μητρική του και μάλιστα να ξεχνά τη μητρική του γλώσσα, θα μπορέσει να αφομοιώσει το πνεύμα της καινούριας γλώσσας και να δημιουργήσει σ’ αυτήν.
-Κ. Μαρξ, Η 18η Μπρυμαίρ του Λουδοβίκου Βοναπάρτη


Στις 27 Νοεμβρίου του 2013 ο Αλέξης Τσίπρας με ένα σύντομο κείμενο στον Guardian ανακοίνωσε ότι θα είναι υποψήφιος της Ευρωπαϊκής Αριστεράς για την προεδρία της Κομισιόν.[1] Η επιλογή του Κόμματος της Ευρωπαϊκής Αριστεράς φαντάζει λογική: ο Αλέξης Τσίπρας προέρχεται από τη χώρα που βρίσκεται στην προεδρία της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης, εκπροσωπεί την κοινωνία που έχει υποστεί τις σοβαρότερες συνέπειες από την κρίση της Ευρωζώνης και συμβολίζει την αριστερά εκείνη που κατάφερε να αναδειχθεί σε υπολογίσιμο αντιπολιτευτικό πόλο έναντι των κυρίαρχων πολιτικών της λιτότητας. Με την υποψηφιότητα του επικεφαλής του ΣΥΡΙΖΑ το Κόμμα της Ευρωπαϊκής Αριστεράς φιλοδοξεί να προβάλει τη δυνατότητα διεξόδου από την κρίση της Ευρωζώνης σε μια εκλογική αναμέτρηση που θα λειτουργήσει ως πανευρωπαϊκό δημοψήφισμα για το ίδιο το μέλλον της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης.


Η σύγκριση ανάμεσα στις ευρωεκλογές του 2009 και του 2014 υπογραμμίζει τις πυκνές ενδιάμεσες εξελίξεις που τροποποίησαν τους όρους διαβίωσης εκατομμυρίων πολιτών, αλλά κυρίως αποσταθεροποίησαν τις βεβαιότητες γύρω από την αέναη ανάπτυξη του δυτικού κόσμου στη μετά το 1973 εποχή. Το 2009 οι καθησυχαστικές διαβεβαιώσεις για τον προσωρινό χαρακτήρα της κρίσης και οι προσδοκίες της επικείμενης επανόδου στην κανονικότητα είχαν διαμορφώσει ένα κυρίαρχο κλίμα αυτοπεποίθησης για τις προοπτικές και τις αντοχές της Ευρωζώνης. Ο πολιτικός χάρτης των Ευρωεκλογών αποτύπωνε την παγιωμένη κυριαρχία σοσιαλδημοκρατών και χριστιανοδημοκρατών, αφήνοντας μικρά περιθώρια για τις ριζοσπαστικές ή συντηρητικές αντιπολιτεύσεις στο κυρίαρχο ευρωπαϊκό αφήγημα. Σήμερα, ο κλυδωνισμός του ευρώ, του πυρήνα της ευρωπαϊκής ενοποίησης, και η αδυναμία των κυρίαρχων πολιτικών να εγγυηθούν τη διέξοδο από τις πολιτικές της λιτότητας δημιουργούν πρόσφορους όρους για την απελευθέρωση φυγόκεντρων δυναμικών που έως τώρα είχαν «εθνικό» χρώμα. Συμπτωματικά, οι ίδιοι οι όροι της αναμέτρησης του Μαΐου του 2014 ενισχύουν την προοπτική αναδιάταξης του ευρωπαϊκού πολιτικού χάρτη, καθώς η Συνθήκη της Λισσαβόνας προωθεί τη δημιουργία πιο συνεκτικών ευρωπαϊκών σχηματισμών από τις χαλαρές ευρωκοινοβουλευτικές ομάδες. Στο έδαφος αυτό διαγράφεται η ανησυχητική ανάδυση ενός ισχυρού αντιδραστικού άξονα στον ευρωπαϊκό Βορρά, ο οποίος εκτείνεται από την παραδοσιακή άκρα δεξιά (Γαλλία) έως τις σύγχρονες εκδοχές του εθνικού ευρωσκεπτικισμού (Μ. Βρετανία).

Λίνα Μανουσογιαννάκη
Στον αντίποδα του αντιδραστικού ευρωσκεπτικισμού, το κείμενο του Αλέξη Τσίπρα επιχειρεί να τονίσει τη δυνατότητα μιας προοδευτικής εναλλακτικής πρότασης, η οποία θα μετασχηματίσει την αγανάκτηση των ευρωπαϊκών κοινωνιών σε προοπτική διεξόδου από την κρίση. Παρ’ όλη την επιμονή στη δυνατότητα της αριστεράς να «φτιάξει μια καλύτερη Ευρώπη» το κείμενο αποτυγχάνει να περιγράψει αυτό το κινητοποιητικό όραμα. Ο λόγος που αποτυγχάνει δεν οφείλεται στην έλλειψη ριζοσπαστικότητας της ευρωπαϊκής αριστεράς ή στην κοινοτοπία των διατυπώσεων γύρω από τις καταστροφικές συνέπειες της κρίσης, αλλά στην αδυναμία του Αλέξη Τσίπρα να συνοψίσει πειστικά την εναλλακτική πρόταση με όρους ρήξης με το παρόν. Αντίθετα, ο πυρήνας του κειμένου εγκλωβίζεται σε μια παλινδρόμηση μεταξύ του ενοχλητικού παρόντος και του καθησυχαστικού παρελθόντος: «η Ευρώπη [μπορεί] να σταματήσει τη σοκαριστική παραβίαση των ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων αναμορφώνοντας το κράτος, αποκαθιστώντας την ανάπτυξη και δημιουργώντας υψηλής ποιότητας, σταθερές θέσεις εργασίας, με τις πρόνοιες που ιστορικά συνέβαλαν στη διαμόρφωση του ευρωπαϊκού κοινωνικού μοντέλου». Αν ήταν ζήτημα διατύπωσης, δεν θα είχε ιδιαίτερη σημασία. Ο τόνος όμως του Αλέξη Τσίπρα αντιστοιχεί σε μία γενικευμένη επιστροφή της Ευρωπαϊκής αριστεράς στο παρελθόν. Παγιδευμένη στην ιστορία η ευρωπαϊκή αριστερά προσπαθεί να περιγράψει τη ρήξη με το παρόν καταφεύγοντας σε σχήματα ιστορικών αναλογιών και σκιαγράφησης του μέλλοντος μέσω του οικείου παρελθόντος. Στην τελευταία σύνοδο του Κόμματος της Ευρωπαϊκής Αριστεράς στη Μαδρίτη διαδοχικές αναφορές σε «ένα νέο σχέδιο Μάρσαλ», σε «ένα νέο New Deal», στην «πρόταση διοργάνωσης ενός Ευρωπαϊκού Συνεδρίου για το Χρέος όπως αυτό του Λονδίνου του 1953» και η νοσταλγία του «Ευρωπαϊκού Κοινωνικού Μοντέλου» φάνηκαν να επιβεβαιώνουν τον αστεϊσμό του Γιώργου Σταθάκη ότι το οικονομικό πρόγραμμα της αριστεράς είναι «η έκθεση Πόρτερ του 1947».

Οι συστηματικές αναφορές στο σχεδίου Μάρσαλ προσφέρονται για έναν παρενθετικό προβληματισμό σχετικά με την απροβλημάτιστη ενσωμάτωση της γενέθλιας πράξης του Ψυχρού Πολέμου στη ρητορική της ευρωπαϊκής αριστεράς. Ταυτόχρονα, στο πεδίο των εγχώριων εντυπώσεων είναι αξιοσημείωτη η βαθμιαία μεταβολή του παραδείγματος από το έμπλεο πάθους «νέο ΕΑΜ» του πρώιμου αντιμνημονιακού μετώπου στην κατά τι πιο διαχειριστική «έκθεση Πόρτερ». Τέλος, η αναβάθμιση του μεταπολεμικού κοινωνικού μοντέλου σε πρότυπο για τη μελλοντική έξοδο από την κρίση δημιουργεί μια τεράστια αντίφαση: η αριστερά του 21ου αιώνα εμφανίζεται να υπερασπίζεται μια παράδοση, τη στιγμή που έχουν οριστικά εκλείψει όλοι οι ιστορικοί παράγοντες που την είχαν καταστήσει δυνατή: τα συνεκτικά εργατικά συνδικάτα, η ηγεμονία του κεϋνσιανισμού, οι οικονομικοί όροι της μεταπολεμικής ανάπτυξης και η ύπαρξη μιας φαινομενικά ισοδύναμης εναλλακτικής πρότασης στην ευρωπαϊκή Ανατολή με κέντρο τη Μόσχα.




Λίνα Μανουσογιαννάκη

Όλα αυτά όμως παρά τη σημασία τους είναι επιμέρους ζητήματα μπροστά στο κύριο: τον εγκλωβισμό της αριστεράς στην ιστορία. Το πρόβλημα αυτό δεν αφορά κάποιες τάσεις ή πρόσωπα εντός της αριστεράς. Εκτείνεται από τις πιο διαχειριστικές της πτέρυγες, οι οποίες νοσταλγούν το απολεσθέν κοινωνικό συμβόλαιο που εξασφάλιζε την απρόσκοπτη κοινωνική τους ευημερία, έως τις πιο ριζοσπαστικές που ανασύρουν από τον ιστορικό τσελεμεντέ ανάλογες «στιγμές» –επιλέξτε ελεύθερα μεταξύ 1917, 1936, 1968, 1973 κ.ο.κ.– για να αναζητήσουν διδάγματα για το παρόν και να αντλήσουν έμπνευση για το μέλλον. 

* * *

Στη διαδρομή της αριστεράς μέσα στον χρόνο η επίκληση της ιστορίας αποτέλεσε κύριο στοιχείο ιδεολογικής –και ψυχικής– συγκρότησης. Η πεποίθηση ότι ο ιστορικός χρόνος εκδιπλώνεται γραμμικά προετοιμάζοντας μέσα από τις διαδοχικές «εποχές» την έλευση της επαναστατικής στιγμής, η οποία θα οριοθετούσε τη μετάβαση από την προϊστορία στην ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας, παρήγαγε μια εκθαμβωτική παράδοση εμπιστοσύνης στην ιστορική εξέλιξη.[2] Οι πολιτικές και κοινωνικές πρωτοπορίες του 19ου και του 20ού αιώνα στηρίχτηκαν στην αναμονή της ωρίμανσης των συνθηκών, της υπομονετικής προεργασίας για την ευλογημένη ώρα της ιστορικής ρήξης, της πίστης στον επικείμενο και προδιαγεγραμμένο κοινωνικό μετασχηματισμό που αντιστοιχούσε σε επιστημονικά θεμελιωμένα στάδια της ανθρώπινης εξέλιξης. Οι απολογίες των επαναστατών στα παγκόσμια στρατοδικεία, ανεξαρτήτως τόπου και χρόνου, αποτυπώνουν τη βαθιά πίστη στην ιστορία: τη βεβαιότητα ότι οι θυσίες, και οι ήττες, του παρόντος συνιστούν το προανάκρουσμα της νομοτελειακής επιτάχυνσης του ιστορικού χρόνου. Οι ακροτελεύτιες λέξεις της απολογίας του Φιντέλ Κάστρο το 1953, «καταδικάστε με. Δεν έχει σημασία. Η Ιστορία θα με δικαιώσει», συμπυκνώνουν τον κινητοποιητικό ρόλο της ιστορίας στη συγκρότηση του επαναστατικού βολονταρισμού και την πεποίθηση των επαναστατών ότι η εμπρόθετη δράση τους επιτάχυνε την ατμομηχανή της ιστορίας προς τον επιθυμητό, και αντικειμενικά αναπόδραστο, στόχο.

Οι παρατηρήσεις αυτές όσο και αν φαντάζουν έκκεντρες προσφέρουν τη δυνατότητα να σκεφτούμε πάνω σε έναν καθοριστικό μετασχηματισμό: η αριστερά του 21ου αιώνα περιγράφει το μέλλον όχι επικαλούμενη πλέον τη νομοτέλεια της ιστορίας, αλλά αντιστρόφως μέσα από τη νοσταλγία του παρελθόντος. Τι έχει μεσολαβήσει; Αναμφίβολα μια πρώτη απάντηση εδράζεται στη χειραφέτηση της αριστεράς από τις αδήριτες βεβαιότητες γύρω από την ιστορική εξέλιξη όπως είχαν διαμορφωθεί, και διαστρεβλωθεί, μέσα στον 20ό αιώνα. Η χειραφέτηση αυτή υπήρξε κύριο παρεπόμενο του τέλους του Ψυχρού Πολέμου. Η κατάρρευση της Σοβιετικής Ένωσης όχι μόνο απονομιμοποίησε τις βεβαιότητες της δογματικής αριστεράς, αλλά συμπαρέσυρε τις ανάλογες των εναλλακτικών, αντιπολιτευτικών ρευμάτων που προσέβλεπαν σε μια νέα επαναστατική διαδικασία και για τον λόγο αυτόν χαιρέτιζαν με ενθουσιασμό κινήματα όπως της Αλληλεγγύης στην Πολωνία. Το 1991, το τελευταίο έτος του 20ού αιώνα, εκτός από τις ορατές πολιτικές συνέπειες για την αριστερά, οριοθετεί και το τέλος των προσδοκιών γύρω από τη νομοτελειακή ιστορική εξέλιξη των ανεπτυγμένων κοινωνιών. Η αριστερά λοιπόν του 21ου αιώνα, απαλλαγμένη από το βάρος της ιστορικής προσδοκίας, φαίνεται να επανασυνδέεται με την καταχωνιασμένη ρήση του Μαρξ «η ιστορία δεν κάνει τίποτα». Αυτή η εξέλιξη που φαντάζει αρχικά χειραφετητική οδήγησε όμως σε έναν νέο, διαφορετικού τύπου, καταναγκασμό: αποστερημένη από την πίστη της νομοτελειακής εξέλιξης, η αριστερά αναζητά έμπνευση στην ιστορία με τη μορφή της νοσταλγίας για τον οριστικά απολεσθέντα παράδεισο, είτε με τη μορφή του σοσιαλισμού του 20ού αιώνα είτε με τη μορφή του μεταπολεμικού κοινωνικού κράτους που μας διαμόρφωσε – βιολογικά, ψυχολογικά και διανοητικά.


Δεν πρόκειται για ζήτημα επαναστατικότητας ή ρεφορμισμού. Πρόκειται για το αδιέξοδο της ριζοσπαστικής σκέψης, η οποία αδυνατεί να φανταστεί το μέλλον με όρους ριζικά διαφορετικούς από αυτούς εντός των οποίων διαμορφώθηκε. Η αριστερά μετά το 1989/1991 αποδέχτηκε ότι ο ρόλος της θα εξαντλείται στην άρθρωση κοινωνικής κριτικής από την άκρη του πολιτικού φάσματος και ικανοποιήθηκε –στην εγχώρια εκδοχή της– από την επαρκή κοινωνική και εκλογική της αναπαραγωγή. Σε μια εποχή περιορισμένων προσδοκιών, η ενατένιση του μέλλοντος μετατράπηκε σε μια χιλιαστική προφητεία, η οποία εξυπηρετούσε τη συνοχή των χαρούμενων πιστών, παρότι ακόμα και οι ίδιοι στο περιθώριο της επίσημης κομματικής ρητορικής κορόιδευαν μεταξύ τους τη μεταφυσική πλέον αναμονή της «επαναστατικής στιγμής». Το «σύντροφοι, ευτυχώς ηττηθήκαμε» δεν αφορούσε μόνο τους πολυάριθμους «πρώην», αλλά διαπερνούσε την ίδια την ανασυγκρότηση των υπολειμμάτων τις ιστορικής εμπειρίας του 20ού αιώνα.


Λίνα Μανουσογιαννάκη

Η παροντική κρίση, και η εν γένει αμφισβήτηση της ηγεμονίας που διαμορφώθηκε μετά το 1991, αιφνιδίασε την αριστερά και εντέλει επιβεβαίωσε τη λαϊκή ρήση «να προσέχεις τι εύχεσαι, γιατί μπορεί να σου συμβεί». Τα μεγάλα γεγονότα ήρθαν, αποκαλύπτοντας όμως ταυτόχρονα τις ανεπάρκειες της αριστεράς στο ερώτημα ενός εναλλακτικού πολιτικού προγράμματος. Η αριστερά του 21ου αιώνα εμφανίζεται σήμερα να περιγράφει την κρίση ως ιστορικό μετασχηματισμό του καπιταλισμού και την ίδια στιγμή να υπονοεί τη δυνατότητα επιστροφής στην κανονικότητα που διαμόρφωσε το μεταπολεμικό ευρωπαϊκό κοινωνικό μοντέλο. Η αντίφαση αυτή υποσκάπτει τη δυνατότητα προβληματισμού και διατύπωσης οραματικών στόχων που θα υπερβαίνουν τη στενή διαχείριση, πάνω στις ταυτόχρονες μεταβάσεις και τους μετασχηματισμούς του κυρίαρχου οικονομικού, κοινωνικού και πολιτικού συστήματος. Δεν χρειάζεται να είναι κανείς ιδιαίτερα ριζοσπά
στης για να αναρωτηθεί κατά πόσο βρισκόμαστε εντός του τέλους μιας ιστορικής εποχής. Τον Ιούλιο του 2013 το περιοδικό New York παρουσίασε στο ευρύ κοινό τις σκέψεις ενός γηραιού οικονομολόγου, ονόματι Robert Gordon, ο οποίος ισχυρίζεται ότι βιώνουμε το οριστικό τέλος της εποχής της βιομηχανικής επανάστασης, καθώς καμία τεχνολογική ή άλλη μεταβολή εξέλιξη δεν μπόρεσε να ανανεώσει την ασθμαίνουσα δυναμική του δυτικού καπιταλισμού. Με τα λόγια του αρθρογράφου: «Η πρώτη και η δεύτερη βιομηχανική επανάσταση δεν έχουν προηγούμενο στην ιστορία της ανθρωπότητας. Ποιος μπορεί λοιπόν να υποστηρίξει με βεβαιότητα ότι θα συμβεί ξανά κάτι ανάλογο; Η ύφεση επομένως της παγκόσμιας οικονομίας την οποία βιώνουμε από το 2008 ίσως να μην είναι απλώς το αποτέλεσμα της φούσκας των ακινήτων ή της ακραίας περιπλοκότητας και της υπερεπέκτασης των χρηματοπιστωτικών αγορών, ή το γενεακό τραύμα που προκαλεί η συνταξιοδότηση των baby boomers, αλλά αντίθετα μια μικρή πρόγευση μιας πολύ ευρύτερης μεταβολής, η αργή εκπνοή ενός γεγονότος μοναδικού στην ιστορία. Ίσως η σπασμωδική ανάκαμψή μας μετά την κρίση να μη συνιστά απόκλιση».[3]

Το ερώτημα κατά συνέπεια της εποχής μας δεν είναι κατά πόσο η αριστερά είναι ικανή να περιγράψει τις συνέπειες της κρίσης –μια τακτική που έχει εξαντλήσει το ενδιαφέρον της, εφόσον άπαντες συμφωνούν– αλλά κατά πόσο θα μπορέσει να συνταιριάξει τη χειραφέτησή της από τις νομοτελειακές αναμονές του μέλλοντος με τη σκιαγράφηση ενός μέλλοντος ριζικά διαφορετικού από τις παρούσες συνθήκες. Πρόκειται για μια σύνθεση εξαιρετικά δύσκολη, η οποία προσκρούει σε υπαρκτές αδυναμίες, παραδόσεις ετών και κυρίως στον δυσεπίλυτο κόμπο από τη σύζευξη του ουτοπικού εγχειρήματος και της δυστοπικής εξέλιξης του 20ού αιώνα. Ταυτόχρονα όμως είναι η αναγκαία συνθήκη για μια αριστερά η οποία θα μπορεί να παράξει εκείνο το κινητοποιητικό όραμα που αναγνωρίζει το βάθος των μετασχηματισμών και αναγνωρίζει σε αυτούς τη δυνατότητα ενατένισης ενός ριζικά διαφορετικού μέλλοντος. Η υπόθεση αυτή δεν αφορά αποκλειστικά τις ηγεσίες και τους υπάρχοντες σχηματισμούς της αριστεράς. Οι μυλόπετρες της συνείδησης –το παρελθόν και το παρόν– έχουν μέχρι στιγμής γεννήσει έναν κατακερματισμένο γαλαξία κοινωνικής κριτικής αποδεσμευμένο από τις απαιτήσεις των κανονιστικών εγχειριδίων, των στρατεύσεων που δεν φαίνεται να παράγουν νόημα και των μεγαλόστομων διακηρύξεων που συγκινούν μόνο τους αφελείς. Τα πιο ριζοσπαστικά τμήματα της γενιάς της μετάβασης, που γνωρίζουν από πρώτο χέρι τις συνέπειες της κρίσης, έχουν παραμερίσει τη νοσταλγία του παρελθόντος, την προσκόλληση στα τοτέμ του κινήματος και την αφόρητη ρητορική για τα «όνειρα» που χάνονται στους καιρούς της ύφεσης. Με τον τρόπο της και αυτή η στάση είναι παγιδευμένη στην ιστορία, καθώς αντικαθιστά τη νοσταλγία του παρελθόντος με την επίγνωση της ιστορικής ήττας του χειραφετητικού οράματος. Η προκαταβολική απαξίωση του μέλλοντος και η κυνική υποτίμηση των δυνατοτήτων του –η δημοφιλία του νεολογισμού «σταλεγάκιας» στις τάξεις μας είναι ενδεικτική– παράγει μια παραλυτική καθήλωση με σημαντικές πολιτικές επιπτώσεις.[4] Και όμως. Η ανασύνθεση της ουτοπικής σκέψης του 21ου αιώνα έχει μάλλον περισσότερα να κερδίσει από τον σκεπτικισμό έναντι της ιστορίας, παρά από τη διαρκή αναπόλησή της. Αρκεί οι φιλοδοξίες των σκεπτικιστών να μην περιορίζονται στην επιβεβαίωση των δυσοίωνων προβλέψεών τους.

* * *

Σημειώσεις

1. Alexis Tsipras, «Austerity is wreaking havoc, but the left can unite to build a better Europe», εφ. The Guardian, 27.11.2013.^
2. Για το θέμα: Αντώνης Λιάκος, Αποκάλυψη, Ιστορία και Ουτοπία: οι μεταμορφώσεις της ιστορικής συνείδησης, Πόλις, Αθήνα 2011.^
3. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, «The Blip», New York, 21.7.2013.^
4. Βλ. Αιμόφιλος Τ. Ινφλουέντζας, Ξερόλας vs. Σταλεγάκια, http://aimof.blogspot.com/2008/03/jer.html.^

[Αναδημοσίευση από το περιοδικό ΛΕΥΓΑ, 13, Χειμώνας 2014, http://www.levga.gr/2014/02/blog-post_17.html

Tuesday, 25 June 2013

Autonomy: an idea whose time has come

by Jerome Roos

http://roarmag.org/2013/06/autonomy-revolution-movements-democracy-capitalism/

June 23, 2013

Post image for Autonomy: an idea whose time has come

The global struggle for real democracy exposes the divorce of power and politics at the heart of the capitalist state. Autonomy is the only way forward.
You may resist the invasion of an army, but you cannot stop an idea whose time has come.
~ Victor Hugo
EDITOR’S NOTE: A revised and properly referenced version of this essay is now available in PDF format (more pleasant to read) on Academia.edu. We will keep the original version online on ROAR, but we strongly advise you to read the updated PDF version!

As the ongoing uprising in Turkey and the mass protests in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Brazil confirm, the wave of struggles that kicked off with the Arab revolutions of 2011 is still in full swing. However, it is also clear that, two years hence, the “dangerous dreams” of the Arab revolutionaries, Europe’s indignados and America’s occupiers largely remain unfulfilled. In Europe, the austerity mantra is still being uncritically praised and dutifully imposed by governments of the left and the right. In Egypt, Islamist forces have successfully managed to hijack the revolution by taking state power and suppressing its epochal promise of radical emancipation. In the United States, meanwhile, the bodies that once assembled on Wall Street seem to have dissipated back into their previous state of social atomization.
In the present conjuncture, an old but important question arises — both for the movements that kicked off in 2011 and for the ones currently underway in Turkey, Brazil and elsewhere: what is to be done? According to some, including prominent leftist thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, the spontaneous and autonomous character of the new revolutions poses a number of risks. Most importantly, these critics argue, the lack of centralized leadership and the fetishism of horizontality that define these movements risk condemning them to an ephemeral existence with limited influence on concrete political outcomes. Without the necessary structuring leadership of what Badiou and Žižek call the Master – presumably in the form of a radical party – the protests are bound to resemble nothing more than flash mobs, marked by temporary explosions of carnivalesque contestation that ultimately do little to undermine the deeper power relations that constitute capitalist society. In the most cynical of these interpretations, the new revolutions could even end up reinforcing capitalism.

Today’s Movements: Advancing Socialism Without the Politics? 
In an article for Levantoday, David De Bruijn echoes some of these criticisms, even if he is arguing more from a realist point of view than a Marxist-Leninist one as such. First, he correctly argues that the Tahrir uprising of 2011 was actually much more closely connected to the anti-austerity protests in Syntagma than most observers at the time were willing to recognize. But, after this basic observation, David moves on to conclude that perhaps the sources of similarity between these movements — which Leonidas Oikonomakis and I consider to be part of the same movement family, which we refer to as the Real Democracy Movement — are also precisely their main weakness. In fact, the ongoing wave of ‘occupy’ protests, including the anti-austerity protests in Europe and the Taksim uprising, may signify the Rebirth of History, but they ultimately do so by proposing the return of socialism without the politics:
Today’s protestors do not affiliate themselves with parties or programs; they do not enter the political arena to obtain particular political goals, or even to actually alter the system entirely. The common refrain is that politics ‘are all hopeless anyway’. As such, today’s protesters want socialism in the abstract: ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ like equality, fairness and non-materialist modes of existence, but not any particular potentially feasible practice embodying these values.
It is a critique that the Occupy movement is very familiar with, of course. First, the mainstream media and political establishment chastised the protesters for failing to articulate any clear demands; then the institutional left joined in, criticizing grassroots activists for refusing to organize themselves into a party and to aim for state power. It is a similar line of critique as the one that has been leveled at the autonomous Zapatista rebellion in Mexico, the spontaneous popular uprising in Argentina and the leaderless alter-globalization movement in Europe and the United States, all of which helped to animate the world’s most important anti-capitalist struggles around the turn of the century. In fact, it is a critique that goes back much further than this, extending from Marx’ thundering polemics against the anarchism of Proudhon and Bakunin to Lenin’s scathing critique of Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of revolutionary spontaneity; and from the Stalinist crackdown on the anarchist militias of revolutionary Catalonia to the contemporary Marxist critique of the events of May ’68.
It is quite interesting to note, in this respect, that there is a long-standing and somewhat curious coalition between the theorists of the institutional left — represented in this case by radical thinkers like Slavoj Žižek — on the one hand; and the liberal political establishment in democratic capitalist society on the other. Both have consistently criticized the Real Democracy Movement for its refusal to respect the organizational exigencies of party politics; both argue that, to be taken seriously, the activists should cast aside their revolutionary illusions and accept the basic rules of the game. Without representation in parliament, they argue, no one will listen to them. If only the protesters would get their hands dirty and do some politics, these two strange bedfellows seem to agree, we can at least start a conversation.

The Divorce of Power from Politics
But of course that is precisely what the activists do not want. They do not want to engage in a dialogue with the political establishment because they consider the entire system upon which it rests to be fundamentally undemocratic. Moreover, the refusal to engage in the representative politics of capitalist democracy is by no means limited to moral considerations: it is not simply a “soft” and “fluffly” rejection of politics in favor of values. In fact, most of the organizers behind the grassroots movements of the past two years recognize that moving through traditional party structures and state institutions is likely to do their movement more harm than good. This is ultimately a strategic consideration as much as it is a moral or ideological one. Look no further than Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, to see what happens to revolutionaries — in this case a former member of various Marxist guerrilla groups during Brazil’s military dictatorship — when they take state power. Or look at the Papandreou dynasty in Greece. Or the Miliband family in the United Kingdom. The examples are endless.
Here, we need to make an important distinction that radically alters the basis of our analysis about relevant forms of revolutionary organization under conditions of global capitalism. It is commonplace to claim that politics is ultimately about power. When politics is seen in this way, the refusal of today’s movements to get bogged down in representative politics is indicative of a failure to recognize the social reality of extant power relations and skewed power structures. The problem with this line of reasoning is that it conflates two concepts that are closely connected but nevertheless crucially distinct. In a word, we need to take our political economy seriously and distinguish politics from power. Zygmunt Bauman notes that politics is about deciding what is to be done, while power is about the ability to actually do it. In that respect, the nation state and representative democracy are full of politics but devoid of power.
In the analysis of structural power that forms the theoretical backbone of my PhD research and my own social activism, the nation state is no longer a valid or effective basis for transformative political action (for more on this, check my latest conference paper for a take on how the structural power of financial capital has transformed the nature of political activism in the European debt crisis). The worldwide crisis of representation is precisely an outcome of the realization among disaffected voters that elected representatives have ceased to represent their interests, and that this is a problem not of the representatives themselves but of the system of representation as such. What people everywhere are starting to recognize is that voting is pointless if elected representatives do not have the power — or the collective will — to put into practice the promises they make in the lead-up to the elections. What people are starting to realize, in other words, is that power has been divorced from politics, leaving the politics behind in a hopelessly vacuous rhetorical universe.
So rather than ignoring the question of power, the Real Democracy Movement actually exposes it for what it really is: it reveals the emperor of democratic capitalism to be naked. As Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN put in, “in the cabaret of globalization, the state shows itself as a table dancer that strips off everything until it is left with only the minimum indispensable garments: the repressive force.” All around us, we can see the meaningless garments of representative democracy lying abandoned on the ground — the parliaments, the voting booths, the campaign posters — but the emperor who used to wear them has long since migrated elsewhere. From time to time, the state still dresses itself up in the destructive boredom of “free and fair” elections, but the imperial power that once allowed it to translate their outcome into meaningful action has all but evaporated into a de-territorial realm of diffuse capitalist sovereignty. This is the essence of politics without power, and the movements of 2011 are merely the latest and most concerted attempt on the part of the general population to point this out.

From Betrayal to Deception: The Left Turns Right
Hence the frustration with political parties. Hence the autonomous forms of self-organization. Indeed, it seems that today the only substantive domain of politics where the state still has some power to affect a change in outcomes is the cultural politics of identity: it may no longer be able to stem flows of money across borders, but at least the state can still to some extent stop the flow of human beings — and so it does, with brutal effect, cracking down on refugees and migrants as if its life depended on it. When it comes to the economy, however, the state is structurally constrained by the ability of bankers and businessmen to move their investments around as they please: stuffing away trillions of dollars worth in profits in remote tax havens while moving investments to whoever offers the easiest regulation and greatest returns. Politicians, meanwhile, are structurally dependent on these private investors to maintain adequate growth and employment levels, otherwise they simply risk being ousted from office in the next elections. As a result, all politicians ultimately have to cater to business interests — if they do not, the market will just discipline them through divestment.
People may therefore have the right to vote, but what is the point in voting if all you get to decide upon is who will implement the policies that favor big business anyway? Populists like Beppe Grillo in Italy may scream “they’re all crooks, kick them all out!”, but what we are really seeing is not corrupt politicians betraying their voters, or the left betraying the workers, but capital gradually expanding its structural power. As the dual processes of globalization and financialization continue apace, elected politicians — both corrupt and honest ones — are simply being reduced to managers: they just take care of the state apparatus while the bankers and businessmen move their money around. This is not a problem of “betrayal”. Even if liberal voters may feel betrayed by Obama’s swing to the right, this is not just about power corrupting people (it is also about that, but not alone). Similarly, it is not just that the Workers’ Party betrayed workers in Brazil, or PASOK betrayed voters in Greece. Cornelius Castoriadis, the Greek philosopher of autonomy, was prescient when he wrote in 1955 that left-wing parties have never truly represented working people:
[S]aying that they ‘are betraying us’ makes no sense. If, in order to sell his junk, a merchant tells me some load of crap and tries to persuade me that it is in my interest to buy it, I can say that he is trying to deceive me but not that he is betraying me. Likewise, the Socialist or Stalinist party, in trying to persuade the proletariat that it represents its interests, is trying to deceive it but is not betraying it; they betrayed it once and for all a long time ago, and since then they are not traitors to the working class but faithful and consistent servants of other interests.
The Revolution’s Gradual Retreat into Reformism
It is therefore not that today’s movements are refusing to confront the difficult concept of power, but precisely the opposite. More and more people around the world are beginning to recognize that the democratic capitalist state plays a critical role in stabilizing the diffuse global system of capitalist power relations, and that the parties of the left in turn play a critical role in stabilizing the authority and legitimacy of the capitalist state. As John Holloway put it in a recent ROAR interview, “one thing that’s become clear in the crisis to more and more people is the distance of the state from society, and the degree to which the state is integrated into the movement of money, so that the state even loses the appearance of being pulled in two directions.” Whereas the temporary fixes of Keynesian demand management in the post-war years and cheap credit in the last three decades may have led voters to believe that the state did care about ordinary people, such illusions have all but disappeared in the present conjuncture of widespread capitalist crisis: not just in the eurozone but everywhere.
The position of the institutional left in this respect is extremely self-defeating. On the one hand, most state-oriented radicals, revolutionary socialists and communists would agree with the analysis that the power of capital has grown exponentially under neoliberalism and that the state is becoming increasingly submissive to the dictatorship of the markets. As Žižek himself puts it, the left’s reactionary defense of the welfare state is ultimately a hopeless endeavor: “the utopia [of today's left] is not a radical change of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the system.” In fact, he even argues that “if we remain within the confines of the global capitalist system, then measures to wring further sums from workers, students and pensioners are, effectively, necessary.” Clearly such views are difficult to square with Žižek’s support for SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece, and the latter’s defense of the welfare state. One day, Žižek’s own theoretical reflections on the Greek debt crisis force him to conclude that the prospects for leftist regimes in general are “‘objectively’ hopeless”; the next day he finds himself praising SYRIZA for its “courage to take over [and] banish the left’s fear of taking power.”
The best that leftists can hope for in such an “objectively hopeless” situation is for some modest reform: an Argentina-style debt default, the re-nationalization of some public utilities or perhaps a bank, maybe some family allowances or subsidies to help uplift the poor or bring education to the excluded; not much more. Žižek even ends up enthusiastically praising Obama’s disastrous healthcare reforms, not realizing that they basically stripped away hundreds of billions of dollars from hospitals and donated them as profits to Big Pharma and Wall Street insurance companies. Whatever happened to the good old revolutionary idea of socialism as the “social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy”? It is now clear that all state-oriented forms of revolutionary theory and practice have long since retreated into a defeatist reformism. This is not simply a sectarian jab at the institutional left: the leading radicals themselves recognize it. Speaking at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb this year, Richard Seymour — author of the blog Lenin’s Tombadmitted that “in practical terms we are all reformists now.” As a result, radical thinkers generally end up supporting political parties whose final policies will be all but radical. In fact, with enough time spent in power, their principal function inevitably becomes the stabilization of the liberal democratic state that anchors the social relations of the global capitalist order. In the process, the cycle of deception that Castoriadis identified – really a cycle of collective self-delusion — continues unabated.
While Slavoj Žižek expresses his unconditional support for a young and charismatic comrade like Alexis Tsipras — the leader of SYRIZA upon whom all radical hopes are now pinned — the latter actually goes to visit Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin to tell the German Finance Minister that he need not fear a Greek euro exit, before embarking on a charm offensive in the United States to assure the IMF and private bankers of the same, even telling an audience of businessmen, US officials and policy wonks at the Brookings Institution that “I hope to convince you that I’m not as dangerous as some are trying to say.” Apparently the disciplinary power of markets is so great that it even exerts its influence on opposition parties. “Is there anything to fear of the left wing in Greece?” the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left asked his audience of liberals rhetorically. “In what way are we radical?” By now, the answer should be clear to everyone: in name only.

The End of Domination and the Unleashing of Autonomy
So what is to be done? Rather than reproducing the capitalist state through our continued participation within it, we should destroy it. On a theoretical level, the institutional left would agree with us on this lofty abstract goal. But on a practical level they contradict themselves by continuously trying to seize it, be it through revolutionary or through electoral means — only to be repelled time and again in their objectives of establishing socialism by the exigencies of the market place: from Morales’ Movement for Socialism embracing “Andean-Amazonian capitalism” and cracking down on grassroots movements to expedite large-scale resource extraction in Bolivia, to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua repaying Somoza’s odious debts and selling their land for a nickle and a dime to the Chinese; and from the multi-billionaire Princeling descendants of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to the Revolutionary Family of neoliberal technocrats in Mexico — not a single revolutionary party that obtained state power managed to actually wield that power to bring about anything other than capitalism.
To stay true to its revolutionary roots, the radical left now needs to recognize that the struggle against capitalism can only succeed if it starts from the basis of radical autonomy from the capitalist state. Protesting alone is clearly not enough: at this point, the most it can achieve is to scare the government into mild reforms, not much more. Similarly, occupying a square or park for a few weeks or a few months or so is not enough either. Both are a start, however, as they can serve to pry open the suffocating ideological straitjacket that There Is No Alternative, swiftly activating and rapidly expanding the radical imagination of the masses. Large-scale protests, or the refusal to obey the logic of submission, cannot overthrow capitalism as such; but they can radicalize a generation of participants on the spot by revealing the framework of institutionalized violence upon which the allegedly democratic capitalist state ultimately rests. Similarly, a handful of neighborhood assemblies cannot bring about a truly free and genuinely democratic society, but it can serve as a crucial lesson in democracy to those who participate in them, helping to expand revolutionary consciousness and develop new prefigurative forms of direct democratic revolutionary praxis.
In the long-term, however, lasting forms of self-organization will need to be devised that can both replace the vacuous politics of the nation state and destroy the structural power base of global capital. Here we need to make another crucial distinction between two forms of power. John Holloway speaks of the meaning of revolution as “the end of power-over and the unleashing of power-to”, in other words: the end of domination and the unleashing of autonomy. At its most elementary level, the revolution must have as its goal the elimination of all power structures that allow the few to exert power over the many, in particular the power of capital to undermine our most basic human needs; which would immediately free everyone to be fully autonomous (i.e., rule their own destiny) and do whatever they need or want to do to live a materially and spiritually fulfilling life. While the Real Democracy Movement shares that overall objective, we should be careful not to be naïve here: the total abolition of power-over, while forever the objective of genuine revolutionary action, is simply impossible.
In fact, there will always be power-over, even if it develops in the form of virtual hierarchies within nominally horizontal organizations; what Jo Freedman referred to as the tyranny of structurelessness. This implies that the struggle to unleash the self-rule of the autonomous human being and establish an autonomous society is by its very definition always an endless one, involving a continuous fight against the corruption of its own principles and the concentration of power-over in the hands of the few — a danger that forever lurks around the corner. This, then, should be the real meaning of permanent revolution: a recognition by the masses that, in an ideal world, all forms of domination would be dissolved, but that in the real world human nature will forever be plagued by imperfections and social interaction will to some extent always know a (greater or lesser) degree of conflict — and therefore a recognition that the struggle will be endless or it will not be at all. As Subcomandante Marcos put it, “the struggle is like a circle: you can start anywhere, but it never ends.” In this permanent revolution, there is no End of History and there will never be 1,000 years of peace.
But while total human freedom and perfect equality may be fundamentally unattainable, they can be constantly expanded — not through political reform but precisely through ceaseless struggle. Political reform in this sense is just a strategy of the constituted powers-that-be to retain their structural position of domination; essentially a defensive movement involuntarily forced upon them by the insubordination of the masses. Left to its own devices, the ruling class would never let go of an effective regime of domination or a profitable mode of accumulation. It is only through the continued struggle of the masses that those in power are eventually forced to compromise. Here we are reminded of Solon’s reforms that established the first proto-democratic city state in ancient Athens. With the aristocracy threatened by a crippling debt crisis and a rebellious horde of angry debt slaves at the city gates, the oligarchs realized that the city faced either reform or revolt. And so to manage the crisis, they appointed the poet and statesman Solon, who cancelled the debts, abolished debt slavery and instituted democratic reforms, allowing poor Athenians to vote in the General Assembly and extending its political powers. His reforms served to reinforce the aristocracy’s weakened position of social dominance by expanding the ruling class to include the non-noble wealth-owners and expanding the demos to include the rural poor. Now both groups would have an incentive not to rebel against the aristocratic oligarchy.
The historical parallels are striking. Greece again has millions of debt slaves today, while SYRIZA has undoubtedly assumed the functional role of a modern-day Solon. Just as Solon’s reforms were ultimately the product of the aristocracy’s fear of the masses and not of Solon’s reformist agenda (after all, he was appointed a temporary Tyrant by the aristocratic oligarchy precisely to solve the city’s crippling debt crisis), so a potential SYRIZA government will probably end up expanding some freedoms and democratic rights while generally entrenching the capitalist oligarchy that truly rules Greece. Similarly, if any greater freedoms or democratic rights are attained under a SYRIZA government, it will be not be because of SYRIZA’s reformist agenda but because of the revolutionary stirrings of the multitude that animated the autonomous struggles at Syntagma in 2011. Leading SYRIZA supporter Costas Douzinas recognizes this.

The Stirrings of the Multitude and the Revolutionary Process
Throughout history, the only real factor to have animated the gradual and uneven but nevertheless progressive march of human freedom, social equality and democratic self-determination has been the “fear of the masses” induced by the rebellious stirrings of the multitude; or, to put it differently, by the concrete fruits of the endless struggle for human dignity. Still, this line of reasoning raises a crucial question: what meaning does the concept of “revolution” still have if it is not fundamentally re-conceptualized as a process instead of an event? Orthodox Marxists have generally equated the idea of revolution with the notion of the event: from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Chinese Revolution of 1949 and the Cuban Revolution of 1959, revolutions have tended to become associated with a clearly defined moment: the seizure of state power. Insofar as one can speak of a process, it simply leads from organizational preparations to armed struggle, and ends with defeat or the overthrow of the government.
This idea of revolution as event is perpetuated in a new guise in the work of Badiou and Žižek, who focus on the event as a moment of rupture allowing possibilities to emerge that did not exist before. In this view, and somewhat simplistically put, the Egyptian uprising that started on January 25, 2011 created possibilities that did not exist on January 24. But while the notion of the revolutionary event as a “rupture” is potentially very useful — and we will return to it later — to equate “the revolution” as such with the event would be highly problematic. After all, such a conflation only makes sense for the type of political program that stakes its entire raison d’être upon the singular insurrectionary event leading to the seizure of state power (admittedly Badiou is more subtle on this: see his latest piece on Turkey, for instance). The problem with the conceptualization of revolution as event is that it ultimately hinges upon a mystification of the notion of possibility. Where did the new possibility itself emerge from? If it arose from the moment of rupture created by the popular insurrection, then was it not always-already a latent possibility? If popular insurrections allow new possibilities to emerge, is that not the same as saying that those possibilities had so far simply remained hidden from view as the multitude’s un-actualized potentiality for revolt?
Once we posit the question this way, we are forced to recognize that the event is ultimately little more than the actualization of a set of potentialities that are created over time through a protracted process of social struggle. Revolutionary action, then, should be situated within the historical process, and may take decades or even centuries to unfold. It may be useful here to think in terms of waves. Ultimately, the waves on the ocean are nothing but a body of water in motion — even if they appear to our perception as separate and clearly identifiable “events”. In the stormy weather of capitalist crisis, when the revolutionary waves start building up in intensity, we may be tempted to forget about the slow movements of the tides and currents that push the movement of the water from below. We mistakenly assume the event of the wave to be the real revolution, forgetting that it is the total movement of the body of water we should really be focusing on. The wave is merely the actualization of a latent potentiality for movement that already lay embedded within the mass of water as such. A single wave may break down the bedrock of the capitalist state; but only after the tide and waves have pelted it with full force over an extended period of time.

Society as a Layer Cake of Historical Residues
This narrow conceptualization of the revolution as an event has important consequences for the way we interpret history. We still consider the French Revolution to be the high mark of the Enlightenment and liberalism’s rise from the darkness of feudal Europe. But it is easy to forget that the decapitation of King Louis XVI was followed just ten years later by Napoleon crowning himself Emperor, while the remainder of the 19th century witnessed the conservative aristocrats returning to power on a number of occasions. The American Revolution is similarly fetishized by liberals as the event that established the Land of the Free, but it took a civil war, the civil rights movement and nearly two hundred years of black struggle to overcome the fundamentally illiberal reality of institutionalized racism that shackled millions of African-Americans into constitutional unfreedom — not to mention the feminist struggles and indigenous struggles it took to win women and native Americans equal liberal rights.
In other words, the tide went up and it went down again: there was by no means a steady march of freedom unleashed by the great event of the modern revolutions. The “promises” of liberalism were fulfilled only insofar as the oppressed multitude actually struggled for these promises to be kept, as it did in the Haitian slave revolt. Nor did the events of the French and American Revolutions really create any possibilities that did not already exist before. The seeds of liberal democracy had already been sown by Solon — or really by the Greek debt slaves — and were passed on in philosophical terms by Spinoza, Locke and Hume to the free-market liberalism of Adam Smith; and in terms of praxis led from the Medici bankers and Renaissance painters to the Amsterdam stock exchange brokers and the Manchester industrialists. Meanwhile, all of this capitalist development was built on the back of slavery and colonial resource extraction: it was by no means simply the product of free trade and enterprise. The point is that even after the modern revolutions that established liberalism as a dominant ideology, and capitalism as the dominant mode of accumulation, fundamentally illiberal and pre-capitalist elements remained central to the material constitution of capitalist society. Crucially, that same contradictory revolutionary process continues today.
The conceptualization of revolution as an event therefore also has important consequences for how we see our own society. The revolutionary mythology of liberal ideology leads us to assume that, because the modern revolutions are already long past, our society is now truly democratic and thoroughly capitalistic in nature. While there is a moment of truth in this observation, it is clearly not the whole story. In his book Debt: The First 5.000 Years, anthropologist David Graeber makes a passing observation that has profound implications for the way we see capitalist society. While the totalizing tendencies of the capitalist mode of production certainly lead the market to encroach upon more and more domains of human interaction, many social relations actually remain profoundly uncapitalistic in nature. Just imagine how absurd it would be if your mother came up to you on your 18th birthday and charged you for all the breastfeeding she did when you were a baby; or how offended your friends would be if you invited them over for dinner at your place only to present them with the bill after dessert. Thank you very much. We logically and rightly perceive such relations to be outside of the sphere of capital accumulation. Instead of selling our souls, we share the love. And so, as Graeber puts it, we are all communists towards family and friends.
Society, in other words, resembles a layer cake made up of different historical residues with associated forms of social relations and associated practices. It contains the hierarchical social relations of domination that it inherited from feudalism; it is continuously expanding the diffuse and atomizing social relations produced by the totalizing nature of capitalist development; and even though we cannot identify any clear event that ever established socialism, our society still rests upon what Graeber calls the bedrock of “baseline communism”, which constitutes the “ground of all human social life”. Moreover, all three will continue to coexist in a revolutionary society, even if there will be a radical rearrangement of their relative importance. While baseline communism is now mostly limited to the private sphere of the oikos, or individual household, the public sphere of the agora is being increasingly privatized and usurped into the commodified realm of capitalist relations. Meanwhile, as the violent police crackdown on Syntagma, Zuccotti, Taksim and countless other squares around the world demonstrated, the state uses its hierarchical powers of domination to keep the masses from trying to re-appropriate the agora as part of the commons. One of the first objects of the revolution is therefore to reclaim the agora from the imperial expansion of the shopping mall and re-appropriate it as a public space for democratic deliberation.

Moving Beyond Capitalism: A Permanent Revolutionary Becoming
Now that we have re-conceptualized capitalist society as consisting of at least three historically-sedimented layers, and we have re-conceptualized revolution as an interstitial process of continuous social struggle, we can slowly start to see what “moving beyond capitalism” might look like. First of all, it will be part of a historical process of social struggle that hinges fundamentally upon the actualization of a mode of social interaction that is always-already latent in our current form of sociality. Rather than thinking that we have to invent something completely new that has never been thought of before, we have to conceive of our challenge as an activation of unrealized potentialities and an expansion of really-existing alternatives. In this sense, we have to recognize that a revolutionary society is already in the making as we speak — whether it be through the production and distribution of free open-source software or through the occupation of bankrupt factories and the resumption of production under workers’ control; whether it be through the formation of direct democratic rural communes and urban neighborhood assemblies, or through the creation of cooperatively-run alternative media collectives and open-source academic journals — everywhere around us there are signs that this world is already pregnant with a new one.
Furthermore, insofar as this process is punctuated by revolutionary events of rupture, these events will merely be temporary intensifications of a process that will continue underneath the surface even after those waves have subsided. Egypt’s revolution is a case in point. The immediate outcome may have been the Islamists taking power and hijacking the potential for immediate transformation, but the long-term impact of the uprising and the broader historical process it helped to unleash are yet to be written in the form of history books. It is simply too early to tell how (un)important the event truly was (or will be). To presume that we already have the definite answer in hand, as Žižek at one point insinuated when he argued that 2011 will be remembered as the “end of the revolution”, is not just a dramatic misrepresentation of reality, it is also very disrespectful to those who continue to risk their lives to take the revolution forward. Again, Žižek’s premature conclusions inadequately equate the revolutionary process with its temporary intensification during the insurrectionary event; a moment of rupture that is by its very definition limited in time, but whose ending by no means signifies the end of the process as such. Ironically, he thereby ends up echoing both the regime’s and the media’s simplistic and pro-systemic narrative of the revolution as a 17-day event.
Instead, we should see the Egyptian revolution (and the global revolutionary wave of 2011-’13 more generally) as a surface manifestation of a much deeper tidal shift — a sea change — in the vast currents of human history. Today’s wave of struggles may not yet have produced any directly visible outcomes and may end up being remembered as another “ephemeral” and ultimately “unsuccessful” 1848 or 1968; but the historical significance of the dramatic events that have unfolded during this most recent phase of struggle should always be situated in the context of a historical process. This process, in turn, is animated by a radical political project that — despite its countless detours, setbacks and contradictions — forever inclines towards the establishment of real democracy and a radically egalitarian autonomous society in which the people freely and collectively manage their own affairs, control their own production, and rule their own destiny: a process whose outcome is never determined but always-already in the making. To say that the Egyptian revolution has “come to an end” or that Occupy has “failed” to bring about any change is utterly meaningless in this respect.
Besides, the revolutionary event has a value in itself that cannot simply be reduced to any binary metric of victory and defeat (which, not coincidentally, is always measured in terms of whether the movement (a) achieved its demands; or (b) took state power — variables that are by definition completely useless when applied to autonomous movements that do not make such demands on the state nor aim for state power). In What Is Philosophy? the French thinkers Deleuze and Guattari remind us that “the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations, clinches, and openings it gave to men and women at the moment of its making and that composes in itself a monument that is always in the process of becoming.” In this sense, they argue, “the victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution’s fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal.” This view of the revolutionary event is not just an easy cop-out to deny or justify defeat: speak to anyone who participated in any of the uprisings that have rocked the world over the past two years and they will tell you that their lives have been irrevocably altered (generally for the better) following their their participation in the insurrectionary event.
In this sense, insurrections have impacts that are far more diffuse and invisible — but nevertheless just as concrete and real — than any armchair socialist or conservative critic could ever understand. They have the power to transform consciousness and permanently alter the individual’s and the multitude’s attitude towards society; but they also have the power to transform the material practices that undergird the dominant forms of capitalist sociality, thereby helping to disseminate alternative forms of social organization like the assembly, the worker-run cooperative and the commune — all of which may one day come to form the organizational bedrock of the autonomous society. Here, Castoriadis was once again correct to note that revolutionary events, even if they fail to visibly bring about any immediate changes in the material constitution of society, are still a crucial component of the revolutionary process because they contribute towards the ideological maturation of the revolutionary subject, as well as the flourishing of alternative practices and their early development into new forms of organization that may one day come to supplant the institutions of the capitalist state.

Concrete Forms of Action: Modalities of Protest
In this sense, the moments of rupture we witnessed in 2011 opened the field of possibility by actualizing a number of latent potentialities for self-organization. Most important in this respect were the modalities of protest themselves: leaderless, decentralized, horizontal, spontaneous, autonomous, and truly overwhelming. Organized through social media and at the grassroots level without the interference of any central or hierarchical organizational structures, activists still managed to bring millions of people out onto the streets at coordinated times and places. Once on the streets, new forms of solidarity and cooperation developed that allowed the decentralized swarms of protesters to secure impressive victories in running street battles with the hierarchically-organized forces of the state, while in other situations protecting and looking after one another during peaceful demonstrations. From the construction of barricades and makeshift field hospitals to the impromptu gatherings of citizens cleaning the streets the morning after a riot; and from the emergence of fully-functioning non-monetary mini-societies within the tent camps, replete with kitchens, media centers and libraries, to the spontaneous emergence of neighborhood assemblies, working groups and mutual solidarity networks — the protesters self-managed it all.
Of course, it was easy to crack down on the occupations that formed the key hubs of these movements. Syntagma, Zuccotti and Taksim all still adhered to a more centralized logic of territorial protest with which the state generally feels pretty comfortable. All the police had to do was show up on the spot and start repressing. What the state cannot comfortably deal with, however, is the radical decentralization of movements (which disperses police forces); their unpredictable spontaneity (which makes it very hard to anticipate new actions); their leaderless nature (which does not allow for dialogue or co-optation), but perhaps most importantly the irrational rationality of the multitude as such — which poses a neat inversion of the rational irrationality of capitalism. In the latter, the rational self-interested choices of individual investors produce fundamentally irrational outcomes at the collective level of the public interest, ranging from climate change to financial collapse; while the former, by contrast, focuses on the remarkably rational outcomes you achieve when millions of people begin to collectively act in a seemingly irrational way, putting their own lives on the line to bring about collective change even if it does not serve their immediate self-interest.
In his recent book on the movements, Why It’s (Still) Kicking Off Everywhere, Paul Mason rightly argues that the network, in this case, simply beats the hierarchy. Both in violent confrontations with the state and in large-scale peaceful demonstrations or occupations, as long as the numbers add up, the dispersed swarm tactics of an unarmed multitude can completely overwhelm the state apparatus and even win serious strategic victories. Ever since a 2002 military exercise showed that Iran’s swarming tactics could defeat the far-superior navy fleet of the US, American military strategists are perfectly aware of this fact. Just think of how the London rioters totally overwhelmed the police with their Blackberry-powered swarming. It is for good reason that Adbusters, which originally called for the Occupy Wall Street protests, speaks of “anarchic swarms” as the “emerging model of anti-capitalist mutiny”. It is also what a hacker-activist friend meant when he told me at Syntagma Square that “we are like bees, we operate with a hive mind.” For this reason it is not fair to criticize the activists for failing to take into account the question of power. They are playing power politics: they just contest the static hierarchical power of the territorially-delimited nation state by mobilizing the flexible power of the network. Rock, paper, scissors.
But much more than the power of swarm intelligence alone, Paul Mason even argues that “the networked protest has a better chance of achieving its basic goals because it is congruent with the economic and technological conditions of modern society.” More specifically, while the global uprisings can by no means be pinned down to one specific generation, there is no denying that the millennial generation of 20-somethings that is animating today’s global struggles grew up under radically different socio-economic and technological conditions from their parents and grandparents. The era of the printing press and TV — with their centralized, hierarchical and unidirectional forms of communication — has come to an end. The era of Web 2.0 — resting upon loose but interactive communities of autonomous networked individuals whose mutual relationships are defined by the sharing of information — has only just begun. Of course, it is a cliché to note that the Facebook and Twitter revolutions are ultimately based on capitalist technologies. Of course they are. As Marx himself recognized, the revolution cannot retreat into primitivism: it must be built on the most advanced capitalist technologies available. After all, this capitalist world is all we have — and one day it will be us who inherit its technologies, whether we like it or not.

Concrete Forms of Direct Democratic Self-Organization
While the new modalities of protest outlined above should be seen as harbingers of social change in and of themselves, we already established that we ultimately need to move beyond protest if we are to truly challenge the structural power of global capital and the diffuse nature of capitalist sovereignty. Here, the movements again provide their own prefigurative answers, which are clearly replete with imperfections and contradictions, but which may still provide us with a glimpse of what a truly democratic, post-capitalist society could look like in the future. The key “innovation” here is really a re-invention: the return to the popular assembly as a basic platform of collective decision-making and communal deliberation. I can already hear the critics groaning in the background: how could a complex society like ours ever be organized on the basis of direct democracy? Won’t we always need some form of leadership and political representation to keep society from descending into chaos? The short answer is: no. We don’t. We need organization, of course, but we do not need leadership or representation, at least not in their current liberal democratic form. We only need them now because they form the pillars of the present system: a liberal democracy without leaders or representatives would indeed implode.
But not all societies would. In fact, there are numerous historical examples of entire cities that were administered for months on end precisely on the basis of direct democratic principles, with the workers in control of their factories, workshops and offices; with residents in control of their own neighborhoods; and with all these different communities cooperating and coordinating their activities through federated workers’ councils, syndicates and/or assemblies. The Paris Commune of 1871 still stands as the high mark of revolutionary achievement in this respect — although it also represents one of the most disheartening examples of brutal military defeat. For nearly one year, the workers were in total control of the city. Neighborhood assemblies took care of all important local administration while decentralized but federated workers’ councils effectively coordinated production and distribution within the urban space. The schism between anarchists, Marxists and socialists did not yet exist, and all factions worked together closely for the establishment of total workers’ control.
Another historical example includes Revolutionary Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Here, anarchists and Trotskysts fought side by side against the fascists (and later Stalinists) while the entire city fell under workers’ control: the people armed themselves and kicked out the government; factories were placed under worker self-management; farmland was collectivized; the bourgeois hotels and restaurants were expropriated and turned into military housing and soup kitchens; the city’s public transportation system was free and run by the anarcho-syndicalist union CNT; money was abolished; wages were equalized and paid in coupons redeemable for basic commodities; all locally produced goods were free if not too scarce; tipping was forbidden as a bourgeois insult to the worker; the militias fighting on the front line were made up of men and women who fought side-by-side on the basis of full equality; the officers were addressed informally and wore the same simple ragged uniforms, slept in the same barracks and received the same pay as their soldiers; and everyone in the city called each other compañera or compañero, for comrade.
As George Orwell recounted in Homage to Catalonia, his classic work on the Spanish Revolution:
It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal.
A more contemporary example of direct democracy are the EZLN-liberated indigenous territories of Chiapas, Mexico. This summer, the Zapatista communities of Chiapas are celebrating their first ten years of autonomy since the foundation of the so-called Caracoles and Councils of Good Government in 2003. After the Mexican Army moved out of the EZLN’s zone of influence following the 1994 guerrilla insurrection, the Zapatistas organized themselves into autonomous municipalities run on the basis of indigenous customs of direct democratic self-government. The municipal assemblies send rotating delegates to the regional councils, which then decide collectively upon questions of food and income distribution and taxation. In just ten years, the system of self-government has radicalized the entire poor population into democratic participation, while administering fully autonomous schools and clinics and managing to virtually eradicate the regional problems of alcohol abuse and drug trafficking.
These concrete examples, while each is specific to its own context, teach us at least one important lesson: the establishment of real democracy will require a radical decentralization of political power towards the communities in which ordinary people live and work. In fact, it will require the destruction of any form of power-over that does not arise from the bottom-up. Still, in a profoundly interconnect world, pure decentralization alone is not enough: to administer extensive territories, large populations and complex organizations, it must be accompanied by forms of democratic intermediation between the different decentralized nodes. This is the function of the federated councils that we just highlighted from the Paris Commune and Revolutionary Barcelona to contemporary Chiapas. These types of councils are administered by rotating delegates, not elected representatives, who continue to live and work inside their own communities and who can be recalled by their communities at any time.
To make direct democracy work in a complex global society, it is self-evident that we need to move beyond the fetish of horizontalism as a pure concept and accept at least some degree of vertical integration. This vertical integration, however, always rests upon the power base of the local assemblies themselves, while the rotation of retractable delegates ensures that no new bureaucratic elite will be abstracted from the general population. David Harvey claims that such a federated system of assemblies, councils and/or communes would still constitute a state: “if it looks like a state, feels like a state, and quacks like a state, it’s a state.” But whether you call such a federated autonomous system a state or not is a rather meaningless side issue. The anarchists do not. Castoriadis did. But they are still talking about the same thing: radical self-organization from the grassroots up. It is important to remember that we are not waging a war on words here: we are waging a war against capitalism. As long as the capitalist state is replaced it does not matter much what we call its revolutionary alternative — as long as that alternative is direct democratic in nature and functional in practice.

The Two Temporalities of Revolt
So if these are some of the concrete examples of direct democratic modes of self-organization that have existed throughout history, and if the revolution is about the long-term process in which these potentialities become actualized and these practices gradually mature and expand, then what will our own future society look like? People still come up to us and say: “you don’t have a model, you have no idea what you want, there is no programmatic content to your revolution.” My answer to such silly statements is simple: do you think a 15th century Florentine banker or Genovese merchant had even the slightest clue what financialized global capitalism would look like in the 21st century? Do you really think they could have foreseen the proliferation of complex financial derivatives, a market worth $600 trillion by 2009, whose principal product is entirely immaterial and doubly or triply abstracted from the original asset upon which it supposedly rests? Do you think the people whose trades took about as long as it took a ship to sail from Pisa or Genova to London or Bruges had even the slightest clue that one day their industry would be dominated by computerized high-frequency trading, with its lightening-speed transactions in which lasers send buy-and-sell orders down an intercontinental optical fibre at 26 terabits per second, just to save a few milliseconds on a transaction that could potentially result in hundreds of billions of dollars in additional profits? Clearly such an insinuation seems preposterous. The future is the future precisely because it has not yet happened: how are we supposed to know what socialism, communism or real democracy will look like a hundred years from now? We are only just re-embarking upon the historical trajectory, starting a process that will take years to get underway and decades if not centuries to complete. We ourselves have many unanswered questions, and so preguntando caminamos – we walk by asking.
This is what John Holloway and the Zapatistas mean when they talk about the two temporalities of revolt. First, there is the Ya Basta! Enough! We can no longer live in this disaster of a system! Not only is it burdening us with debt, stealing the fruits of our labor, evicting us from our homes, marginalizing the poor, amplifying social inequalities, commodifying our knowledge, commercializing our bodies, privatizing our public spaces, appropriating our schools, roads and hospitals, destroying our cultural heritage, reducing us to mindless consumers, undermining our children’s development, preventing the self-actualization of our human potential, annihilating our environment, destabilizing our climate, and quite simply making our lives miserable — but through the combination of all of the above it is also gradually destroying the very possibility of living a materially and psychologically fulfilling life on this planet. The first temporality of revolt is therefore in the now: we must break away from capitalism now — immediately, this instant! The only way to do so is to stop reproducing it in our daily lives and to engage in different, non-capitalistic practices.
But such an immediate change in practice can never be complete and can never be enough to revolutionize society as such: if left to itself it will remain a kind of lifestyle anarchism at best. This brings us to the second temporality of revolt, encapsulated in the Zapatista saying that “we are going slow because we are going far.” This is about situating our struggle within the historical process. It is about recognizing that for all the immediate urge to break from capitalism now, extant social institutions and dominant power relations will simply make it impossible for us to break out and attain complete autonomy within this very instant, or even tomorrow or next year. In this sense, the rejection of representative politics by the Real Democracy Movement is not an “escape” into a form of political apathy or a retreat into lifestyle politics: it is an immanent recognition of the fact that we must combine an immediate rejection of the system with the embrace of the type of organizational forms that can eventually replace it: the assembly, the syndicate, the workers’ council, the commune, you name it.

Bending the Moral Arc of the Universe
Now we can start to see that the critical claim made at the beginning of this article, that the movements want “socialism in the abstract” without “any particular potentially feasible practice embodying these values”, is not true — just as the idea that autonomous movements will always be ephemeral is not true. In fact, there are numerous concrete forms of direct-democratic self-organization occurring around the world as we speak, many of which have proven capable of lasting for years if not decades, from the Councils of Good Government in Chiapas to the worker-run factories of Argentina, and from the autonomous rural communities of the Movimento Sem Terra in Brazil to the participatory budgeting initiatives in the same country. Right now, popular assemblies are popping up all over Brazil and Turkey, while Greece now has its first worker-managed factory in Thessaloniki as well Europe’s first worker-run TV station. These examples are far from widespread enough to generate the type of radical social change that we are ultimately aiming for, but they are the first steps in a revolutionary process that will take decades to unfold — but which we must embark upon right now if we are to at least maintain the possibility of living a dignified life in on increasingly undemocratic and inhospitable planet. These are the echoes coming back to us from the future, prefiguring another world that may still lie ahead of us. We would be foolish not to heed their call.
But whether or not the project of autonomy succeeds and real democracy is ever established, one thing is now crystal clear. The era of parties is over. They are dead. Finished. Relics of a liberal polity whose content has long since evaporated into the misty realm of capitalist sovereignty. In the process, democratic elections have become a bad joke about the vanity and impotence of political representatives and their empty electoral promises. No one takes them seriously anymore. Instead of casting their votes at the polls, the youth are now hurling molotovs at police. Athens, Rome and Constantinople burn as the masses cry out to be heard amid the deafening silence of the establishment’s contemptuous complicity in the degradation of democratic institutions. The nation state is equally finished, even though it will linger around in increasingly authoritarian form for quite some time, drawing on the cultural politics of identity to divide the multitude and keep it from realizing its true power. The left fares no better. The road to state power now lies strewn with the radical pretensions of nominally socialist parties, thrown off in dutiful worship at the altar of the marketplace, only to be picked up again by the next candidate once the seasonal cycle of electoral self-delusion restarts the same sickening, stale political marketing campaigns all over. In such times of universal deceit, only radical autonomy from the state can take the revolution forward.
At the same time, we need to be realistic: the only meaningful alternative we have — the project of autonomy — is by no means ideal either. There can never be a fully autonomous or genuinely democratic utopia, and even the march towards it will always be a long and arduous one. Society is forever in flux and the temptations of power can never be fully exorcised. But as a young Tzotzil community organizer in Chiapas told me a few months ago, “autonomy is not perfect, but it’s the only thing we’ve got.” Democracy can never be pure and freedom will never be absolute. But they can be expanded and improved. Martin Luther King Jr once said that “the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” For King, there was a God behind this moral magic. But now that the gods and kings have abandoned us, only we can do the bending. Luckily, the multitude is stirring everywhere and the global revolution remains in full swing. The ones who desperately cling on to power can keep sending their armies of riot police at us — but they cannot stop the idea whose time has come.

Jerome Roos is a PhD Researcher at the European University Institute and Founding Editor of ROAR Magazine.
A revised and properly referenced version of this essay is now available in PDF format (more pleasant to read) on Academia.edu.

Saturday, 3 March 2012

Για την υπεράσπιση της κοινωνίας και της δημοκρατίας στην Ελλάδα

http://www.koindim.eu/



Έκκληση για την υπεράσπιση της κοινωνίας και της δημοκρατίας
στην Ελλάδα

Το κείμενο αυτό υπήρξε προϊόν της πρωτοβουλίας μιας ομάδας πολιτών από διαφορετικούς χώρους οι οποίοι συμφώνησαν ως προς την αναγκαιότητα να ακουστεί συγκροτημένα και μαζικά μια τεκμηριωμένη, κριτική φωνή τόσο μέσα όσο και έξω από την Ελλάδα. Συμφώνησαν ότι είναι απολύτως απαραίτητη μια παρέμβαση που θα αναδείξει με ένταση στην ελληνική και ευρωπαϊκή κοινή γνώμη τρία μείζονα θέματα, σε μια συγκυρία όπου το κυρίαρχο δίλημμα «λιτότητα ή χρεοκοπία» έχει δώσει τη θέση του στο απολύτως αρνητικό άθροισμα «και λιτότητα και χρεοκοπία»:

1. Την κατάρρευση του κοινωνικού κράτους και την όξυνση των κοινωνικών ανισοτήτων

2. Την υπονόμευση των δημοκρατικών θεσμών και των δικαιωμάτων του πολίτη

3. Τη διάλυση του ευρωπαϊκού οράματος και την αποσύνθεση της ευρωπαϊκής ενότητας

Η πρωτοβουλία αυτή δεν έχει ως στόχο μόνο τη σύνταξη ενός ακόμη κειμένου και τη συλλογή υπογραφών, παρόλο που έτσι ξεκίνησε. Θέλει να δημιουργήσει ευρείες συσπειρώσεις και να διαδώσει παντού το μήνυμα ότι το «ελληνικό πρόβλημα» απλώς προειδοποιεί για τον κίνδυνο που διατρέχουν βασικές ευρωπαϊκές κοινωνικές και πολιτικές αξίες. Και, επομένως, μας αφορά όλους και όλες.



Στόχος είναι όσοι και όσες υπογράψουν το κείμενο να εμπλακούν, εφόσον το επιθυμούν, σε κοινωνικές δράσεις, σε μια δυνητική συνέργεια με φορείς και χώρους που από πρώτο χέρι γνωρίζουν, καλύτερα από όλους, τι πραγματικά συμβαίνει στην Ελλάδα σήμερα και που ενδιαφέρονται να εργαστούν για μια κοινωνική και δημοκρατική Ευρώπη. Στην κρίση κανείς δεν είναι μόνος του. Απάντηση στους αποκλεισμούς είναι η συμμετοχή. Απάντηση στην ηττοπάθεια και την απαισιοδοξία είναι η δράση.


Μέλη του προσωρινού συντονιστικού είναι οι: Λίνα Βεντούρα, Έφη Γαζή, Βαγγέλης Καραμανωλάκης, Χριστίνα Κουλούρη, Γεράσιμος Μοσχονάς, Στρατής Μπουρνάζος, Αντώνης Λιάκος, Γιάννης Παπαθεοδώρου, Ελένη Τάκου, Δημήτρης Χριστόπουλος.


Για την υπεράσπιση της κοινωνίας και της δημοκρατίας
Κείμενο υπογραφών



Η ελληνική κοινωνία δοκιμάζεται τόσο από την κρίση όσο και από τις αδιέξοδες συνταγές αντιμετώπισής της. Υποχωρούν θεσμοί που συγκροτήθηκαν μέσα από πολλούς αγώνες και θυσίες στη μεταπολεμική Ελλάδα: οι κοινωνικές ασφαλίσεις, το σύστημα δημόσιας υγείας και περίθαλψης, η εκπαίδευση, οι συγκοινωνίες, το φυσικό και αστικό περιβάλλον, η δυνατότητα ασφαλούς διαβίωσης, στοιχειώδη δημόσια αγαθά που συνιστούν την ελληνική εκδοχή ενός ήδη λειψού και απαξιωμένου κοινωνικού κράτους κατεδαφίζονται, με αποτέλεσμα η κοινωνία να οδηγείται στην ασφυξία.



Προβάλλεται εκβιαστικά το δίλημμα: λιτότητα ή χρεοκοπία; Ωστόσο, δεν πρόκειται για δίλημμα αλλά για αρνητικό άθροισμα: και λιτότητα και χρεοκοπία. Η ανά τρεις μήνες απειλή αποβολής της Ελλάδας από την ευρωζώνη είναι ηθικά ανοίκεια και οικονομικά καταστροφική, γιατί ενισχύει την βαριά ύφεση, μετατρέποντας την Ευρώπη σε κεντρικό παράγοντα αβεβαιότητας, οικονομικής αστάθειας και βαθέματος της κρίσης. Η ίδια η Ευρώπη διαμορφώνει τις συνθήκες ώστε η Ελλάδα να μην τηρεί τις δανειακές της υποχρεώσεις.

Κάθε μέρα γίνεται πιο φανερό ότι η συγκεκριμένη πολιτική αντιμετώπισης της κρίσης, που κορυφώνεται με το Μνημόνιο 2, δεν είναι μια πορεία διάσωσης και εξόδου ούτε άρσης των χρόνιων παθογενειών του ελληνικού πολιτικού και οικονομικού συστήματος, αλλά μια πορεία καταστροφική, βασισμένη στην κοινωνική αδικία. Την κρίση δεν την υφίστανται όσοι εκμεταλλεύτηκαν το κράτος και το δημόσιο συμφέρον επί δεκαετίες, αλλά οι πλέον ευάλωτες κοινωνικές ομάδες. Βρισκόμαστε μπροστά σε μια πρωτοφανή επιχείρηση αναδιανομής πλούτου και ισχύος, που υπονομεύει το ευρωπαϊκό κοινωνικό μοντέλο, δημιουργώντας ακραίες οικονομικές και κοινωνικές ανισότητες. Ταυτόχρονα, επανεμφανίζεται δυναμικά ο εθνικισμός ενώ εντείνονται ο ρατσισμός και η ξενοφοβία.

Η ψευδώνυμη χρήση της έννοιας της «μεταρρύθμισης» είναι ενδεικτική για την αδυναμία υπέρβασης της κρίσης. Και αυτοί ακόμη που ήλπιζαν ότι η κρίση θα αποτελούσε ευκαιρία εξυγίανσης και τολμηρής θεσμικής ανανέωσης αντιλαμβάνονται πλέον ότι οι επιβαλλόμενες «μεταρρυθμίσεις» διαλύουν την κοινωνία. Ο λόγος που κυριαρχούσε στο εσωτερικό και εντείνεται στο εξωτερικό είναι ηθικολογικός, τιμωρητικός και ενοχοποιητικός. Κάθε αντίρρηση και κριτική επισείει την κατηγορία του «λαϊκισμού», του «συντεχνιασμού» και του «αντιευρωπαϊσμού». Αφού πρώτα στιγματίστηκε η μεταπολίτευση και το πνεύμα δημοκρατίας που έφερε στον τόπο, παρακολουθήσαμε και τον εξαγνισμό της άκρας δεξιάς, με τη συμπερίληψή της στην κυβέρνηση. Παράλληλα, πυκνώνουν οι προτάσεις για κυβερνήσεις «αρίστων», για συνασπισμούς τεχνοκρατών που θα «σώσουν» τη χώρα. Πρόκειται για ισχυρές αντιδημοκρατικές και αυταρχικές τάσεις, που εκμεταλλεύονται, με λαϊκιστικό τρόπο, τα δικαιολογημένα αισθήματα αποτροπιασμού απέναντι στην παλιά τάξη πραγμάτων που καταρρέει. Ωστόσο, σε αντίθεση με έναν ρηχό «εθνικά υπερήφανο» λόγο εναντίον των δανειακών συμβάσεων, δεν νοσταλγούμε, βέβαια, αυτή την τάξη.

Ελλάδα και Ευρώπη βυθίζονται σε μια αλληλοτροφοδοτούμενη κρίση, που δείχνει όχι μόνο τις θεσμικές αδυναμίες της Ένωσης, αλλά και τη διαχείρισή της από τις συντηρητικές ηγεσίες με νεοφιλελεύθερες συνταγές. Όσο και αν μοιάζει δύσκολο, οφείλουμε να εργαστούμε για μια κοινωνική και δημοκρατική Ευρώπη, που θα προβάλλει τις ιστορικές και πολιτικές της αξίες, δίνοντας νέο περιεχόμενο στην παγκοσμιοποίηση — άλλωστε, η λύση δεν μπορεί να είναι εθνική, αλλά πρέπει να ανταποκρίνεται στις διαστάσεις της ηπείρου μας, και όχι μόνο. Σήμερα ταπεινώνουν τους Έλληνες, αύριο τους υπόλοιπους λαούς, σπέρνοντας δυσπιστία και μίσος ανάμεσά τους. Πρόκειται για μια καταστροφική στιγμή στην ευρωπαϊκή ιστορία. Έτσι, η αλληλεγγύη προς την Ελλάδα συνιστά πολιτικό διακύβευμα για όλη την προοδευτική Ευρώπη.

Απέναντι στον κυρίαρχο άκριτο και εντέλει ταξικό λόγο οφείλουμε να προτάξουμε την κριτική σκέψη, την καθημερινή εμπειρία και τις ανάγκες των πολιτών, ιδίως αυτών που πλήττονται άδικα από την κρίση. Όσοι και όσες υπογράφουμε το κείμενο, επιθυμούμε να συμβάλουμε στη διαμόρφωση ενός ισχυρού μετώπου υπεράσπισης της κοινωνίας και της δημοκρατίας. Μια μεγάλη συμπαράταξη, που θα φέρνει κοντά ανθρώπους από διαφορετικούς χώρους, με στόχο να αποκαταστήσει το νόημα των λέξεων, τη δημιουργική επικοινωνία ανάμεσα σε κοινωνικούς χώρους και πολίτες με διαφορετικές εντάξεις, που συμμερίζονται τις θεμελιώδεις αρχές της δικαιοσύνης, της αλληλεγγύης και της δημοκρατίας, τις συντεταγμένες δηλαδή της ιδιότητας του πολίτη σε ένα φιλελεύθερο και δημοκρατικό πολίτευμα.

Απορρίπτοντας τη λογική του «μονόδρομου», τα ανιστόρητα στερεότυπα που ενοχοποιούν την ελληνική κοινωνία καταρρακώνοντας τη συλλογική αξιοπρέπειά μας, επιδιώκουμε να αναδείξουμε, εντός κι εκτός Ελλάδας, τις συνέπειες της κρίσης. H ελληνική κρίση είναι μέρος μιας συνολικότερης κρίσης, η οποία αλλάζει θεμελιακά την ιστορική εποχή που ζούμε. Σ’ αυτήν τη μεταιχμιακή περίοδο είναι σημαντικό να συνειδητοποιήσουμε ότι διακυβεύονται τόσο η έννοια του κοινωνικού, όσο και η δημοκρατία και τα δικαιώματα του πολίτη.



Call for the Defense of Society and Democracy in Greece

We are a group of citizens who have come together from a variety of political backgrounds with a common purpose: the pressing need to articulate a coherent and persuasive critical voice that will be heard loudly both inside and outside Greece. In the context of a contemporary moment in which the central dilemma “austerity or bankruptcy” has given way to the entirely nihilistic formula “austerity and bankruptcy”, our initiative aims to make a powerful intervention in Greek and European public opinion, highlighting three major issues:

1. The collapse of the welfare state and the intensification of social inequalities

2. The undermining of democratic institutions and civil rights

3. The waning of the European vision and the dismantling of European unity

The goal of this initiative is not just to produce another statement about the ‘crisis’ or to collect signatures for an online petition, even though it started that way. We plan to form a broad network to spread the message everywhere that the so-called ‘Greek problem’ merely presages the dangers at stake for fundamental European social and political values. Therefore the ‘Greek problem’ concerns us all.

Our hope is that all who choose to sign this petition will become involved, if they so desire, in social action, ideally in collaboration with other groups who know firsthand what is going on in Greece today and who are interested in working together for a social and democratic Europe. In a time of crisis, no one is alone. Participation is our response to exclusion. Action is our answer to defeatism and pessimism.

Α CATASTROPHIC MOMENT IN EUROPEAN HISTORY

Greek society is suffering both from the crisis and from the responses to it, which have reached a dead end. Major social and political institutions that were created with enormous struggles and sacrifices in post-war Greece – collective bargaining agreements, social security, the public health system, public education, public transport, the natural and urban environment, the right to live a safe existence – are being destroyed. The welfare state is being dismantled and public services are disintegrating due to lack of funding and personnel cuts. According to Eurostat, almost one third of the population are at the risk of poverty and numbers are increasing rapidly. Essential public goods are no longer available. Households are going bankrupt one after the other. Society is being led to suffocation.

The people are being blackmailed: they face the dilemma of austerity or bankruptcy? Yet, this is hardly a dilemma – it is rather a negative aggregate: austerity and bankruptcy. Instead of saving the country and correcting the chronic illnesses of the Greek political and economic system, the policies that are being implemented are plunging Greece into recession and increasing its debt. All predictions by the EU, the IMF and of the Greek government have been proven blatantly wrong. In 2011, the recession reached -6.8% of GDP (compared to the original prediction of -2.6%!). The tri-monthly threat of Greece’s expulsion from the eurozone is economically catastrophic, as it strengthens the recessionary dynamic, transforming Europe into a central factor of instability and deepening the crisis. The EU itself shapes the conditions so that Greece is not able to fulfil its debt-related obligations.

Those who had hoped that the crisis would be an opportunity for rationalization and institutional renewal have by now realized that the “reforms” help contribute to the dismantling of an already inefficient state and, at the same time, lead to the disintegration of society. The crisis does not affect those who have exploited the state and public interest for decades, but the wage and salary earners (who always paid their taxes) and the most vulnerable social strata. We are confronted with an unprecedented process of upward redistribution of wealth and power that undermines the European social model by exacerbating the most extreme economic and social inequalities. The dominant discourse, both in Greece and in Europe, is moralistic, guilt-ridden and punitive. This strengthens nationalism, racism and xenophobia.

Both Greece and Europe are sinking into a co-dependent crisis which illustrates not only the institutional weaknesses of the EU, but also the dead end of neoliberal recipes. The continuation of failed policies is not in the interest either of Greek society or of the EU and the European taxpayers. It is only in the interest of financial capital and of the speculators, Greek or foreign. Without growth, the repayment of the public debt (or, at least, of its largest part) is simply impossible. The combination of new loan packages and violent austerity is the same as throwing money into a bottomless pit. It will lead to a disorderly default which will affect the low and middle classes in Greece (the rich have already sent their money abroad) as well as the European taxpayers (who will be expected to pay the bill of resulting destabilization of the European bank system). The rescue operation has proven to be a farce. It is becoming a crime.

Greece and Europe are caught up in a vicious economic circle. Policy change is necessary in order to exit it. No matter how difficult, we must work towards a social and democratic Europe, a Europe that will reconfirm its best historic and political values, and give a new orientation to globalization. The solution today cannot be at the national level, but must correspond to the scale of our continent. The Greeks are humiliated today, and perhaps tomorrow this will be the case for other peoples; already mistrust and hatred threaten the process of the creation of a common European identity. This is a catastrophic moment in European history.

The Greek crisis has significant Greek causes. Yet, it is part of a broader crisis that is changing the foundations of the historic epoch we live in. In this period of historical juncture the ideas of social justice, of democracy and of human rights are at stake. The undersigned Greek citizens invite you to join us in the creation of a strong common front for the defense of society and of democracy. Solidarity with Greece is a political challenge for the whole of Europe.




Appel à la défense de la société et de la démocratie en Grèce


Ce document nait suite à l’initiative d'un groupe de citoyens d’horizons différents décidés de lever, de façon structurée et collective, une voix critique et documentée, à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur de la Grèce. Ils se sont également mis d'accord quant à la nécessité d'une intervention qui attirera l’attention de l'opinion publique grecque et européenne sur trois sujets d'importance majeure, dans un contexte où le dilemme capital "austérité ou faillite" a été remplacé par l'addition négative "austérité et faillite", à savoir :

- le démantèlement de l'état social et l'aggravation des inégalités sociales

 - l'affaiblissement des institutions démocratiques et des droits du citoyen

 - la crise de sens de la construction européenne et la désintégration de l'unité européenne

 L'objectif de cette initiative n'est pas la préparation, pour l’énième fois, d’un document qui recueillera des signatures, même si elle a commencé comme ça. Cette initiative veut devenir un point de convergence de dynamiques multiples et faire passer le message que le "problème grec"' ne fait qu'avertir du danger que courent plusieurs valeurs européennes fondamentales au niveau social et politique. Par conséquent, cette initiative nous concerne toutes et tous.

 Son objectif consiste à faire participer ses signataires, dans la mesure où ils/elles le souhaitent, à des actions sociales, en collaboration étroite avec des acteurs et des milieux, qui connaissent directement et mieux que quiconque ce qui se passe réellement en Grèce aujourd'hui, et qui veulent travailler pour une Europe sociale et démocratique. Pendant la crise, personne n'est seul. La participation est la réponse aux exclusions. L'action est la réponse au défaitisme et au pessimisme.



UN MOMENT DESASTREUX POUR L’HISTOIRE DE L’EUROPE

La société grecque est éprouvée aussi bien par la crise que par les solutions pour en sortir, vouées à l’échec. Des institutions créées à grand-peine et avec d'énormes sacrifices dans la Grèce d’après guerre sont en nette régression : parmi elles, les conventions collectives du travail, la sécurité sociale, la santé publique, l’éducation, les transports, l’environnement naturel et urbain, le droit de vivre en sécurité. Suite au manque de financement et à la réduction du nombre de fonctionnaires, l’Etat social s’effondre et les services publics se désintègrent. Selon les sources officielles d'Eurostat, en 2010 le risque de pauvreté a atteint 27,7% de la population. Un après l’autre, les ménages se déclarent en faillite. La société entière est vouée à l’asphyxie.

Un dilemme se profile, tel un chantage : austérité ou faillite? En fait, il ne s’agit pas d’un dilemme, mais d’une addition négative : austérité et faillite. Les politiques adoptées, au lieu de sauver le pays et de corriger les pathologies chroniques du système politico-économique grec, le plongent dans la récession et dans l’augmentation de la dette. Toutes les prévisions de l’U.E, du FMI et des gouvernements grecs ont été démenties avec fracas. Contrairement à la prévision initiale de -2,6%, le PIB a chuté de 6,8% en 2011! La menace, tous les trois mois, de l’exclusion de la Grèce de la zone euro a des répercussions économiques désastreuses, car elle renforce la dynamique de la récession et transforme ainsi l’Europe en facteur central d’instabilité économique et d’approfondissement de la crise. L’Europe crée elle même les conditions afin que la Grèce ne puisse pas respecter ses obligations concernant ses dettes.

Tous ceux qui espéraient que la crise serait une occasion d’assainissement et de renouvellement institutionnel se rendent compte aujourd’hui que les «réformes» démantèlent un état déjà inefficace tout en détruisant, dans le même temps, la société. Ceux qui subissent la crise ne sont pas ceux qui ont exploité, pendant des décennies entières, l’état et l'intérêt public, mais les salariés (qui ont toujours payé leurs impôts) et les couches sociales les plus vulnérables. Nous nous trouvons face à une tentative - sans précédent - de redistribution des richesses et du pouvoir, qui mine le modèle de la société européenne, en créant des inégalités économiques et sociales extrêmes. le discours qui prévaut - aussi bien en Grèce qu'en Europe - est moraliste, punitif et culpabilisant. Ceci renforce le nationalisme, le racisme et la xénophobie.

La Grèce et l’Europe plongent dans une crise inter-dépendante, qui souligne non seulement les lacunes institutionnelles de l’Union, mais aussi l’impasse des recettes néolibérales. Poursuivre une politique d'échec ne profite ni à la société grecque, ni à l’UE, ni aux contribuables européens. Elle profite uniquement au capitalisme financier et aux spéculateurs grecs et étrangers. Il est impossible de rembourser la dette (ou du moins sa plus grande partie) sans croissance. Combiner un nouvel endettement à une austérité rigoureuse équivaut à essayer de remplir un seau troué avec des pièces de monnaie. Cela mène en effet à un arrêt désordonné des paiements  au détriment des classes populaire et moyenne grecques (n’oublions que les classes aisées ont déjà exporté leurs euros à l’étranger), ainsi que des contribuables européens (qui seront appelés à payer les frais de la déstabilisation du système bancaire européen). L’opération de sauvetage a tourné au fiasco et elle est en train de se transformer en crime.

Aujourd’hui la Grèce et l’Europe participent à un cycle économique vicieux. Pour en sortir il faut envisager un changement de politique. Même si cela paraît difficile, nous devons travailler en faveur d’une Europe sociale et démocratique, qui ravivera ses meilleurs valeurs historiques et politiques et donnera une nouvelle orientation à la globalisation. La solution ne peut pas être nationale. Aujourd’hui, les Grecs sont humiliés, demain d’autres peuples le seront également. La méfiance et la haine sont en train de détruire le chemin vers la formation d’une identité européenne commune. Il s’agit d’un moment désastreux pour l’histoire de l’Europe.

La crise grecque a des causes grecques importantes. Néanmoins elle fait partie d’une crise plus générale, qui est en train de transformer fondamentalement le moment historique que nous vivons. Moment limite pendant lequel il est important de se rendre compte que ce sont le sens de la justice sociale, la démocratie et les droits du citoyen qui sont en jeu.

Nous, citoyens grecs, vous appelons à joindre votre voix à la nôtre, en contribuant ainsi à la formation d’un puissant front de soutien de la société civile et de la démocratie en Grèce. Parce que la solidarité envers la Grèce est aujourd’hui un engagement de tous ceux qui croient que les valeurs qui sont en jeu en Grèce les concernent également.



Aufruf zur Verteidigung von Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Griechenland

Dieser Text ging aus der Initiative einer Gruppe von Bürgern unterschiedlicher Herkunft hervor, die ein gemeinsames Ziel verfolgen: Wir halten es für dringend notwendig, uns gemeinsam sowohl innerhalb als auch außerhalb Griechenlands Gehör zu verschaffen, und zwar so nachvollziehbar und kritisch, dass es uns gelingt, andere zu überzeugen.

Im Lichte der derzeitigen Ereignisse, in der das zentrale Dilemma „Sparen oder Bankrott“ immer mehr der nihilistischen Formel „Sparen und Bankrott“ Platz zu machen scheint, zielt unsere Initiative darauf ab, im Rahmen der griechischen und europäischen öffentlichen Meinungsbildung insbesondere auf drei Themen eindringlich hinzuweisen:

 - Auf den Zusammenbruch des Wohlfahrtsstaats und die Verschärfung der sozialen Ungleichheit.

- Auf die Untergrabung der demokratischen Institutionen und der Bürgerrechte.

- Auf die Zerstörung der europäischen Vision und der Einheit Europas.

Es geht bei unserer Initiative nicht darum, einen zusätzlichen Kommentar über die „Krise“ abzugeben oder noch eine Unterschriftensammlung für eine weitere Online-Petition ins Netz zu stellen, auch wenn so alles begann. Uns geht es darum, ein weitreichendes Netzwerk zu bilden und so alle darüber zu informieren, dass das so genannte „griechische Problem“ in Wahrheit nur ein Vorbote der Gefahren ist, die dazu führen, dass die sozialen und politischen Grundwerte Europas auf dem Spiel stehen, weswegen das „griechische Problem“ uns alle betrifft.

Wir hoffen, dass Sie sich, wenn Sie diese Petition unterschreiben, auch - sofern Sie das wünschen - an sozialpolitischen Aktionen beteiligen, am besten gemeinsam mit andern Gruppen, die aus erster Hand wissen, was gegenwärtig in Griechenland passiert, und die daran interessiert sind, für ein soziales und demokratisches Europa zusammen zu arbeiten. In Zeiten der Krise ist niemand allein. Auf Defätismus und Pessimismus reagieren wir durch entschlossenes Handeln.

Ein katastrophaler Augenblick für die europäische Geschichte

Die griechische Gesellschaft leidet nicht nur unter der Krise, sondern auch unter den Reaktionen darauf, die in eine Sackgasse münden. Wichtige soziale und politische Institutionen, die nach dem Krieg in Griechenland unter enormen Anstrengungen geschaffen wurden, wie Sozialversicherung, öffentliches Gesundheitswesen, öffentliche Bildung, öffentliche Verkehrsmittel, eine natürliche und urbane Umwelt und das Recht einer sicheren Existenz, sind im Begriff zerstört zu werden. Der Wohlfahrtsstaat wird demontiert und öffentliche Dienstleistungen werden wegen mangelnder Finanzmittel und durch Personalabbau immer weniger. Laut den amtlichen Daten von Eurostat ist ein Drittel der griechischen Bevölkerung bedroht zu verarmen, eine Quote, die sprunghaft ansteigt. Güter für die öffentliche Grundversorgung sind nicht mehr erhältlich. Immer mehr Haushalte werden zahlungsunfähig. Der Gesellschaft wird die wirtschaftliche Grundlage entzogen.

Das Volk wird erpresst: Es wird vor die Wahl zwischen einem rigiden Sparkurs und einem Staatsbankrott gestellt. Und wenn man ehrlich ist, hat es nicht einmal die Wahl, sondern es bekommt eher beides: ein Sparpaket gepaart mit dem Staatsbankrott. Anstatt das Land zu retten und die chronischen Probleme des politischen und wirtschaftlichen Systems Griechenlands zu lösen, bringt die derzeit verfolgte Politik Griechenland in eine Rezession und erhöht den Schuldenberg. Alle Vorhersagen von EU, IWF und griechischer Regierung wurden eindeutig widerlegt: 2011 schrumpfte die Wirtschaft um -6,8% (entgegen der ursprünglichen Prognose von - 2,6% (!)). Die alle drei Monate wiederkehrende Drohung, Griechenland aus der Eurozone auszuschließen, ist wirtschaftlich katastrophal, da es die Dynamik der Rezession begünstigt, Europa zu einem zentralen Faktor der Instabilität macht und die Krise verschärft. Die EU selbst schafft die Konditionen, unter denen Griechenland außerstande gesetzt wird, seine Schulden zu begleichen.

 Diejenigen, die hofften, die Krise sei eine Möglichkeit der Sanierung und institutionellen Erneuerung, haben inzwischen begriffen, dass diese „Reformen“ den Zerfall des bereits zuvor ineffizienten Staates begünstigen und gleichzeitig zu einem Zerfall der Gesellschaft führen. Die Krise bekommen nicht die zu spüren, die den Staat über Jahre ausbeuteten und gegen das öffentliche Interesse handelten, sondern die Arbeitnehmer (die stets ihre Steuern zahlten) und die verletzlichsten Mitglieder der Gesellschaft. Wir werden mit einer beispiellosen Umverteilung des Wohlstands und der Macht nach oben konfrontiert, was dem europäischen Modell widerspricht, weil sie zu einem extremen sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Ungleichgewicht innerhalb der Bevölkerung führt. Der beherrschende Diskurs ist in Griechenland wie in Europa moralistisch, strafend und beschuldigend. Dies verstärkt Nationalismus, Rassismus und Fremdenfeindlichkeit.

Sowohl Griechenland als auch Europa versinkt in einer interdependenten Krise, die uns nicht nur die institutionelle Schwäche der EU vor Augen führt, sondern auch zeigt, dass die neoliberalen Rezepte in eine Sackgasse münden. Die Fortsetzung einer gescheiterten Politik liegt weder im Interesse der griechischen Gesellschaft noch im Interesse der EU und des europäischen Steuerzahlers. Sie liegt lediglich im Interesse des Finanzkapitals und der Profiteure, seien sie nun aus Griechenland oder aus dem Ausland.  Ohne Wachstum ist die Rückzahlung der Schuldenlast (oder zumindest eines Großteils davon) schlichtweg unmöglich. Die Kombination von neuen Rettungsschirmen und brutalen Sparpaketen ist in etwa so, als würde man Geld aus dem Fenster werfen. Dies führt zu einer ungeregelten Unterbrechung von Zahlungen, worunter vor allem die unteren und mittleren Schichten Griechenlands zu leiden haben (die betuchten Schichten haben ihr Geld längst ins Ausland geschafft!).  Genauso trifft es die europäischen Steuerzahler, die dafür herhalten müssen, die Hauptlast der Destabilisierung des europäischen Bankenwesens zu tragen. Die Rettungsaktion hat sich als Farce erwiesen. Tendenziell wird sie zum Verbrechen.

Griechenland und Europa sind in einem wirtschaftlichen Teufelskreis gefangen, aus dem wir nur durch eine Änderung der Politik herauskommen können. So schwierig es auch sein mag, sind wir alle verpflichtet, auf ein soziales und demokratisches Europa hinzuarbeiten, was die besten ihrer historischen und politischen Werte bestätigen wird, indem wir der Globalisierung eine neue Orientierung geben. Die Lösung kann nicht auf eine Nation begrenzt sein. Heute werden die Griechen gedemütigt, morgen wird dasselbe Schicksal anderen Völkern zustoßen. Schon jetzt sind das Misstrauen und der Hass an die Stelle der Gestaltung einer gemeinsamen europäischen Identität getreten. Das ist ein katastrophaler Moment in der europäischen Geschichte.

Die griechische Krise hat signifikante griechische Ursachen. Gleichzeitig ist sie jedoch Teil einer umfassenderen Krise, die die Grundlagen der jetzigen Epoche ins Wanken bringt. Wir stehen derzeit an einem Scheideweg, die Vorstellung von sozialer Gerechtigkeit, Demokratie und Menschenrechten steht auf dem Spiel.

Als griechische Bürger fordern wir Sie dazu auf, Ihre Stimme mit der unsrigen zu vereinen und zur Bildung einer starken gemeinsamen Front für die Verteidigung der Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Griechenland beizutragen. Denn die Solidarität mit Griechenland ist eine politische Herausforderung für alle diejenigen, die daran glauben, dass die Werte, die in Griechenland auf dem Spiel stehen, sie selbst auch angehen!



Appello in difesa della società e della democrazia in Grecia


Questo testo è il risultato di un iniziativa di un gruppo di cittadini di provenienza varia, convinti della necessità di esprimere collettivamente e in modo strutturato una voce documentata e critica, dentro e fuori della Grecia, per portare all’ attenzione dell’ opinione pubblica greca ed europea, in una congiuntura dove la scelta imposta «austerità o bancarotta» si è trasformata in una somma al negativo: “austerità e bancarotta nello stesso tempo”,tre temi di importanza capitale:



1.      il disfacimento dello stato sociale ed il conseguente esacerbamento delle disuguaglianze sociali

2.      l’ erosione delle istituzioni democratiche e dei diritti dei cittadini

3.      il venir meno dell’ ideale europeo e la dissoluzione dell’ unità europea


Scopo di questa iniziativa non è solo la stesura di un ennesimo testo e una raccolta di firme, anche se questo ne è stato lo spunto iniziale; essa vuole costituire un punto di convergenza di dinamiche a vari livelli e far passare il messaggio che il “problema greco” non è che un avvertimento del pericolo che incombe sui valori fondamentali sociali e politici europei e quindi ci riguarda tutti.



L’ obiettivo è che tutti i firmatari del testo si impegnino, se lo desiderano, ad agire in sinergia potenziale con i vettori e gli spazi sociali che di prima mano conoscono, meglio di chiunque altro, quello che avviene realmente oggi in Grecia e che sono interessati a dare il loro contributo per un Europa sociale e democratica. La crisi non lascia nessuno indenne. La risposta all’ esclusione è la partecipazione; la risposta al disfattismo e al pessimismo è agire.


UN MOMENTO DEVASTANTE NELLA STORIA EUROPEA

La società greca è messa à dura prova sia dalla crisi che dai rimedi senza via di uscita che le sono imposti per affrontarla. Assistiamo ad un grave degrado delle  istituzioni sociali e politiche create con lotte e sacrifici indicibili nella Grecia del dopoguerra: i contratti collettivi, la previdenza sociale, il sistema di sanità pubblica, l’istruzione, i trasporti pubblici, l’ambiente  naturale e urbano e il diritto a una esistenza sicura. Lo stato sociale e i servizi pubblici si stanno sgretolando per la mancanza di sovvenzioni e la riduzione del personale. Un terzo della popolazione, secondo i dati forniti da Eurostat, si trova al di sotto della soglia di povertà. Servizi sociali essenziali non vengono più forniti. Le famiglie si indebitano e sono sull’ orlo del fallimento. La società sta sprofondando.

Si è posti di fronte a un dilemma ricattatorio: austerità o bancarotta ? Ma non si tratta di un dilemma bensi di una somma in negativo: austerità e bancarotta nello stesso tempo. Le politiche messe in pratica, invece di mirare al salvataggio del paese e alla correzione delle patologie croniche che affliggono il sistema economico e politico greco, portano alla recessione e all’ aumento dell’ indebitamento. Tutte le previsioni dell’ UE, del FMI e dei successivi governi greci sono state clamorosamente smentite. La recessione nel 2011 ha toccato il -6.8% del PIL (a fronte della previsione iniziale del -2.6% !). La minaccia proferita ogni tre mesi di espellere la Grecia dall’ eurozona  ha delle ripercussioni catastrofiche sul piano economico in quanto rafforza la dinamica di recessione e trasforma l’Europa in un fattore di instabilità economica e di aggravamento della crisi. E’ l’Europa stessa che crea le condizioni che impediscono alla Grecia di rispettare gli impegni riguardo al debito.

Chi sperava che la crisi avrebbe costituito un’ opportunità per risanare e rinnovare le istituzioni, prende atto ormai con rassegnazione che le “riforme” stanno disintegrando uno stato inefficace e la società allo stesso tempo. Il peso della crisi non ricade su quelli che per decenni hanno sfruttato lo stato e l’interesse pubblico, bensi’ sui salariati (che peraltro hanno sempre pagato le tasse) e sulle categorie sociali più sfavorite. Siamo confrontati ad una ridistribuzione della ricchezza e del potere senza precedenti che sovverte il modello sociale europeo esacerbando le inegualianze economiche e sociali. Il discorso dominante – sia in Grecia che in Europa – è moralista, punitivo e colpevolizzante ed ha come conseguenza un rafforzamento del nazionalismo, del razzismo e della xenofobia.

La Grecia e l’Europa stanno affondando in una crisi congiunta che mette in rilievo non solo le debolezze istituzionali dell’Unione, ma anche le strategie neoliberalistiche senza via d’uscita. Il persistere delle politiche fallimentari non è utile nè alla società greca, nè all’ UE e nemmeno ai contribuenti europei; conviene soltanto al capitale finanziario e agli speculatori greci e stranieri. Senza crescita è praticamente impossibile estinguere il debito (o almeno la maggior parte di esso). La combinazione di nuovi indebitamenti successivi e di programmi di austerità imposti con forza equivale a buttare denaro in un pozzo senza fondo e porta inoltre ad una sospensione disordinata dei pagamenti, che ricadrà sulle fascie popolari e medie greche (le classe abbienti hanno già portato i soldi all’ estero) e sui contribuenti europei (che saranno chiamati à pagare le spese della destabilizzazione del sistema bancario europeo). Il salvataggio che si è rivelato un fallimento rischia di trasformarsi in un crimine.

Oggi la Grecia e l’Europa sono avviate in un circolo economico vizioso, per uscire dal quale è necessario cambiare politica. Αnche se si tratta di un compito gravoso, dobbiamo lavorare per una Europa sociale e democratica che riconfermerà i suoi valori storici e politici migliori, riorientando al contempo la globalizzazione. La soluzione non puo essere circoscritta al livello nazionale. Oggi sono i greci ad essere umiliati, domani toccherà ad altri; già la malafede e l’odio si sostituiscono al processo di formazione di una identità comune europea. Ci troviamo in un momento devastante nella storia europea.

All’ origine della crisi greca ci sono importanti cause autoctone. Εssa fa tuttavia parte di una crisi più grande, che modifica sostanzialmente l’ epoca storica in cui viviamo. In questo periodo di transizione è fondamentale prendere coscienza che sono in gioco non solo la nozione di giustizia sociale, ma anche la democrazia e i diritti dei cittadini.

Da cittadini greci facciamo appello a voi affinchè uniate la vostra voce alla nostra e insieme contribuiamo a creare un fronte solido per la difesa della società e della democrazia in Grecia. La solidarietà alla Grecia è oggi una sfida politica per coloro che credono che i valori oggi in gioco in Grecia riguardino noi tutti.



Llamamiento en defensa de la sociedad y la democracia en Grecia

El presente texto es producto de la iniciativa de un grupo de ciudadanos de varios ámbitos, quienes se pusieron de acuerdo sobre la necesidad de hacer escuchar de forma coherente y masiva, una voz fundamentada y crítica tanto dentro de Grecia como afuera de ella. Coincidimos en que es absolutamente necesaria una intervención que demuestre con fuerza a la opinión pública griega y europea tres cuestiones mayores, en una coyuntura en que el dilema dominante “austeridad o quiebra” ha sido reemplazado por la suma totalmente negativa “austeridad y quiebra a la vez”:

1.El colapso del estado social y la intensificación de las desigualdades sociales

2.La erosión de las instituciones democráticas y de los derechos del ciudadano

3.La corrosión de la visión europea y la desintegración de la unidad europea


Esta iniciativa no tiene como objetivo solo la redacción de un texto más y la recolección de firmas, a pesar de que así empezó. Pretende crear amplias cohesiones y difundir a todas partes el mensaje de que “el problema griego” es simplemente una advertencia sobre el peligro que corren básicos valores sociales y políticos europeos. Y por eso nos concierne a todos y a todas.

El objetivo es que todos los y todas las que firmen este texto se involucren, si así lo desean, en acciones sociales, en una potencial acción conjunta con agentes y ámbitos que conocen de primera mano, mejor que todos, qué es lo que realmente está pasando hoy en Grecia y que se interesan en trabajar para una Europa social y democrática. En la crisis nadie está solo. La respuesta a la exclusión es la participación. La respuesta al derrotismo y al pesimismo es la acción.

UN MOMENTO CATASTRÓFICO EN LA HISTORIA EUROPEA

La sociedad griega está puesta a prueba tanto por la crisis como por las recetas sin salida que se le presentan como solución. Instituciones construídas a través de muchas luchas y sacrificios, en la Grecia de la posguerra, caen: los contratos colectivos, los seguros sociales, el sistema de salud pública, la educación, los medios de transporte, el medio ambiente natural y urbano, la posibilidad de una vida segura. El estado social colapsa y los servicios públicos se desintegran por falta de financiamiento y por la reducción del personal. Según Eurostat, casi un tercio de la población está en riesgo de caer bajo la línea de pobreza y los números están incrementándose rápidamente. Bienes públicos elementales dejan de ser provistos. Los hogares quiebran uno tras otro. A la sociedad la conducen a la asfixia.

Se impone como chantaje el dilema: ¿austeridad o quiebra? Sin embargo, no se trata de un dilema sino de una suma negativa: austeridad y quiebra a la vez. Las políticas seguidas, en vez de salvar el país y de corregir las patologías crónicas del sistema político y económico griego, lo hunden en la recesión y en el endeudamiento creciente. Todas las previsiones de la Unión Europea, del FMI  y de los gobiernos griegos fueron rotundamente desmentidas. La recesión del 2011 fue de -6,8% del PIB (en lugar de la previsión inicial de un -2,6%). La amenaza, cada tres meses, de la expulsión de Grecia de la eurozona es económicamente desastrosa, porque refuerza la dinámica recesiva convirtiendo a Europa en factor central de la inestabilidad económica y la profundización de la crisis. La misma Europa crea las condiciones para que Grecia no pueda cumplir sus obligaciones con sus acreedores.

Los que esperaban que la crisis iba a ser una oportunidad para el saneamiento y la renovación institucional,  se dan cuenta que las “reformas” están desintegrando un estado ya poco eficaz y al mismo tiempo disuelven a la sociedad. La crisis no la viven los que se aprovecharon del estado y del interés público durante décadas sino los asalariados (que siempre pagaron sus impuestos) y los grupos sociales más vulnerables. Estamos ante una operación jamás vista de redistribución de la riqueza y del poder, que socava el modelo social europeo creando desigualdades económicas y sociales extremas. El discurso dominante, tanto en Grecia como en Europa, es moralista, punitivo y culpabilizador. Esto fomenta el nacionalismo, el racismo y la xenofobia.

Grecia y Europa se hunden en una crisis que se retroalimenta y que muestra no solo las debilidades institucionales de la Unión sino también el fracaso de las recetas neoliberales. La continuación de esta política fracasada no conviene ni a la sociedad griega ni a la Unión Europea ni a los contribuyentes europeos. Conviene solo el capital financiero y a los especuladores, griegos y extranjeros. Sin desarrollo, el pago de la deuda (o por lo menos de su mayor parte) es simplemente imposible. La combinación entre paquetes de nuevos préstamos y austeridad violenta es equivalente a tirar dinero en un pozo sin fondo. Además conduce al default incontrolado, el cual van la pagar las clases populares y medias en Grecia (las clases acomodadas ya han sacado su dinero al exterior) y los contribuyentes europeos (que serán llamados a pagar el costo de la desestabilización del sistema bancario europeo). La operación de salvación mostró ser un fiasco. Y tiende a convertirse en un crimen.

Grecia y Europa participan hoy en un círculo económico vicioso, la salida del cual presupone un cambio de política. Por más difícil que sea, debemos trabajar para una Europa social y democrática que confirme sus mejores valores históricos y políticos dando una nueva orientación a la globalización. La solución no puede ser nacional. Hoy se humilla a los griegos, mañana les pasará lo mismo a otros pueblos. Ya la desconfianza y el odio reemplazan el proceso de formación de una identidad europea común. Se trata de un momento catastrófico en la historia europea.

La crisis griega tiene causas nacionales importantes. Es, sin embargo, parte de una crisis más global, que cambia radicalmente la época histórica en que vivimos. En este período de transición es importante que nos demos cuenta que están en juego tanto el concepto de la justicia social como la democracia y los derechos de los ciudadanos.

Como ciudadanos griegos los llamamos a unir su voz a la nuestra contribuyendo así a la formación de un frente poderoso en defensa de la sociedad y la democracia en Grecia. Porque la solidaridad hacia Grecia es hoy un desafío político para todos los que creen que los valores que están en juego en Grecia los conciernen también a ellos.



Apelo pela defesa da sociedade e da democracia na Grécia

Esse texto foi redigido por cidadãos com diferentes sensibilidades políticas que concordaram na necessidade de ser ouvida uma voz crítica de maneira fundamentada, organizada e massiça dentro e fora da Grécia. Concordam que é absolutamente necessária uma intervenção para chamar a atenção da opinião pública sobre três questões cruciais que são ocultadas pelo dilema “austeridade ou falência” que, na verdade, se transforma na soma negativa “austeridade e falência”

1. A destruição do Estado social e o aumento das desigualdades sociais

2.      Os riscos para as instituições democráticas e os direitos do cidadão

3. O abandono da visão da integração europeia e o desmantelamento da união entre os países

Essa iniciativa começou com a redacção de um texto e a colheita de assinaturas, mas pretende ir além, criando uma ampla frente para difundir a tese de que o “problema grego” é um indicio do risco ao qual estão expostos os valores básicos, sociais e políticos, da Europa. Por isso diz respeito a todos nós.

Desejamos que as pessoas que assinarem o texto estabeleçam, caso o queiram, contactos com iniciativas e grupos que conhecem directamente a realidade da Grécia e desejam trabalhar para a construção de uma Europa democrática e social. Ninguém está só na crise. A resposta à exclusão é a participação. A resposta à resignação e ao pessimismo é a acção.



UM MOMENTO DESTRUTIVO NA HISTÓRIA DA EUROPA

A sociedade grega é atingida tanto pela crise como pela ineficiência dos remédios sugeridos. Estão sendo ameaçadas instituições construídas com lutas e sacrifícios no pós-guerra: convenções colectivas de trabalho, sistema de saúde pública, ensino público e gratuito, transportes, mecanismos de tutela ambiental, segurança pessoal. O Estado do Bem-estar social está sendo demolido e a administração pública desmantelada pela falta de financiamento e de pessoal. Um terço da população grega, conforme dados oficiais da Eurostat, encontra-se abaixo do limite da pobreza. Bens públicos básicos deixam de ser oferecidos. As famílias não podem pagar suas dívidas. A sociedade é asfixiada.

Formula-se um dilema em forma de chantagem: “Austeridade ou Falência”. Na verdade, não se trata de dilema, mas de soma negativa: Austeridade e Falência. As políticas adoptadas não ajudam o país nem corrigem as disfunções crónicas do sistema político e económico. Afundam a Grécia na recessão e provocam aumento da dívida. Todas as previsões da EU, do FMI e do governo grego foram desmentidas. A recessão em 2011 chegou a 6.8% do PIB (sendo a previsão inicial de 2.6%!). A cada três meses temos nova ameaça de expulsão da Grécia da zona do euro, algo economicamente destrutivo, pois gera mais recessão, tornando a Europa um factor central da instabilidade económica e da crise grega. A Europa faz com que a Grécia não possa honrar suas dívidas.

Quem esperava que a crise permitisse a correcção de erros e a renovação institucional constata que as “reformas” desestruturam um Estado já ineficiente e destroem a sociedade. Não sofrem da crise aqueles que por décadas aproveitaram-se do Estado e do “interesse público”. Sofrem os assalariados (que sempre pagaram os seus impostos) e os grupos sociais mais fragilizados. Estamos diante de uma operação sem precedentes de redistribuição da riqueza e do poder que ameaça o modelo social europeu e gera extremas desigualdades sociais e económicas. O discurso que predomina na Grécia e na Europa é moralista, acusatório e punitivo. Isso favorece o nacionalismo, o racismo e a xenofobia.

A Grécia e a Europa afundam em uma crise que se retroalimenta e demonstra não só as fraquezas institucionais da Europa, como também os impasses do modelo neoliberal. A continuação da fracassada política não interessa nem a sociedade grega, nem a UE e os contribuintes europeus. Só favorece o capital financeiro e os especuladores, gregos e estrangeiros. O pagamento da dívida (ou pelo menos de uma parte) é impossível sem desenvolvimento económico. Por isso, a combinação dos pacotes de novos empréstimos com a brutal austeridade significa jogar recursos em um poço sem fundo. Isso causará a falência desordenada, prejudicando a classe média e baixa na Grécia (os mais ricos já depositaram seus recursos no exterior) e os contribuintes europeus (que deverão arcar com as consequências da destabilização do sistema bancário europeu). A operação de resgate foi um fracasso. E há risco que se transforme em crime.

A economia da Grécia e da Europa entraram em um círculo vicioso, do qual só se sairá com a mudança de política. Por mais que seja difícil devemos trabalhar para a construção de uma Europa social e democrática que confirmará seus melhores valores históricos e políticos, dando um novo rumo à globalização. A solução não pode ser meramente nacional. Hoje os gregos estão sendo humilhados, amanhã ocorrerá o mesmo com outras nações. A desconfiança e o ódio impedem o processo de criação de uma identidade europeia comum. È um momento catastrófico na história da Europa.

A crise grega tem importantes causas nacionais. Mas faz também parte de uma crise mais ampla que modifica profundamente as características do período histórico.  Nesse momento de transição devemos entender que estão em jogo o conceito de justiça social, a democracia e os direitos dos cidadãos.

Como cidadãos gregos pedimos que unam suas vozes às nossas, contribuindo ao surgimento de uma ampla frente de defesa da sociedade e da democracia grega. Porque a solidariedade com a Grécia é um desafio político para quem acredita que os valores ameaçados na Grécia dizem também respeito a ele mesmo.




Yunanistan’da toplumu ve demokrasiyi korumaya çağrı


Elinizdeki bu metin farklı görüşlerden oluşan ancak eleştirel ve verilere dayalı bir yaklaşımın hem yurtdışında hem Yunanistan'da duyulması gerektiği inancında birleşen  bir grup vatandaşın öncülüğünde hazırlanmıştır.  Bu grubun üzerinde fikir birliğine vardığı aşağıdaki üç noktanın hem Yunanistan’da hem yurtdışındaki kamuoyuna vurgulanarak duyurulması gerektiği inancıyla yola çıktı. Bu müdahele ana ikilemin “kemer sıkma önlemleri veya iflas” olmaktan çıkıp“hem kemer sıkma önlemleri hem iflas” raddesine geldiği bir konjonktürde gerçekleşmektedir. Dikkat çekilmesi gereken üç nokta şöyledir:

1. Sosyal devletin çöküşü ve sosyal eşitsizlikteki artış

2. Demokratik kurumların ve yurttaşlık haklarının gördüğü zarar

3. Avrupa vizyonunun yıkımı ve Avrupa’daki birliğin çözülmesi

Bu girişim– böyle başlamasına rağmen- imza için bir yeni metnin dağıtımından öteye geçmeyi amaçlıyor. İnisiyatifin isteği daha geniş kitlelerle birliktelik sağlayıp, “Yunanistan sorunu”nun aslında Avrupa’nın temel sosyal ve siyasi değerlerinin önündeki tehlikenin eninde sonunda hepimizi ilgilendiren bir sorun olduğuna dikkat çekmektir.

Amacımız, metni imzalayacakların - istedikleri sürece ve derecede – Yunanistan’daki sorunları birinci elden deneyimleyen, bilen ve sosyal duyarlılığı olan demokratik bir Avrupa için çalışmak isteyen bir ekiple sosyal eylemlere ve hareketlere katılmalarıdır. Kriz dönemlerinde kimse aslında yalnız değildir. Dışlanmaya verilecek cevap katılımdır.  Mağlubiyet ve olumsuzluk psikolojisine verilecek cevap harekete geçmektir.



AVRUPA TARİHİNDEN YIKICI BİR KESİT

Yunan halkı krizle olduğu kadar krizle baş etme adına uygulanan çıkışsız reçetelerle de sınanıyor. Savaş sonrası Yunanistan’ında ciddi mücadeleler ve fedakârlıklar sonucu, toplu sözleşme, sosyal sağlık sigortası, kamu sağlık sistemi, eğitim, ulaşım, doğal çevre ve şehircilik, güvenli yaşam gibi alanlarda elde edilen kazanımlarda gerilemeler yaşanıyor. Sosyal devlet yıkılıyor, bütçe kısıtlamaları ve çalışan sayısında azaltmaya gidilmesi kamusal hizmetlerin aksamasına yol açıyor. Eurostat’ın açıkladığı resmi verilerine göre, nüfusun üçte biri yoksulluk sınırının altında yaşıyor. Temel kamu malları ihtiyaçları karşılayamaz hale geliyor. Aileler gün geçtikçe borç batağına saplanıyor. Toplum darboğaza sürükleniyor.        

 Tasarruf mu yoksa iflas mı ikilemi tehdit unsuru olarak kullanılıyor. Ama işin aslı ortada bir ikilem yok, söz konusu olan olumsuzluklar toplamı: hem tasarruf hem iflas. İzlenen politika, ülkeyi kurtarmak ve Yunanistan’ın siyasal ve ekonomik sisteminin yıllardır süren hastalıklarını tedavi etmek şöyle dursun aksine ülkeyi krize ve borç batağına itiyor. AB’nin IMF’nin ve Yunanistan hükümetlerinin bütün öngörüleri sansasyonel bir biçimde çürüdü. Durgunluk, 2011 yılında (% -2.6 olan ilk tahminlerin aksine!) GSYİH’nin % -6.8’i olarak yansıdı. Yunanistan’ın Euro bölgesinden atılmasına dönük üç ay boyunca süren  tehditler ekonomik olarak yıkıcı oldu, çünkü bu durum Avrupa’yı istikrarsızlık ve krizi derinleştiren ana faktör haline getiriyor ve bu da durgunluk dinamiklerini güçlendiriyor. Yine aynı Avrupa anlaşmaları Yunanistan’ın borç yükümlülüklerini yerine getirmesini engelleyecek bir biçimde düzenliyor.

 Krizin sağlamlaşma ve kurumsal yenilenme için bir fırsat yaratacağını umut edenler, “reformların” zaten etkisiz olan bir devleti çürüttüğünü, aynı zamanda toplumu parçaladığını artık idrak eder durumdalar. Krizden etkilenenler on yıllardır devleti ve kamu yararını sömürenler değil daima vergilerini ödeyen maaşlı insanlar ve artık korunmasız olan toplumsal gruplar oldu. Uç noktalarda ekonomik ve sosyal eşitsizlikler yaratarak Avrupa toplum modelini yıkan, zenginlik ve gücün yeniden dağıtıldığı açık bir saldırıyla karşı karşıyayız. Yunanistan ve Avrupa’da hâkim olan söylem ahlakçı, cezalandırıcı ve suçlayıcı. Bu durum milliyetçiliği, ırkçılığı ve yabancı düşmanlığını güçlendiriyor.

Yunanistan ve Avrupa birbirini besleyen bir kriz girdabı içine batıyor ve bu durum Avrupa Birliği’nin kurumsal zayıflıklarını göstermenin yanı sıra neo-liberal reçetelerin çıkmazını da gösteriyor. Başarısız politikaların devamı ne Yunanistan halkının, ne  Avrupa Birliği’nin ne de Avrupa’da vergi veren vatandaşların yararınadır. Bu sadece Yunanistan’lı ve yabancı mali sermayenin ve spekülatorlerin menfaatinedir. Kalkınmanın olmadığı bir ortamda borçların geri ödemesinin (veya hiç değilse bir bölümünün geri ödemesinin) yapılması mümkün değildir. Borç ve yardım paketlerinin tamamı ve kemer sıkma politikaları dipsiz kuyuya para akıtmakla eşdeğerdir. Bir yandan halka, orta sınıfa (üst sınıfları halihazırda paralarını yurtdışına çıkarmışlardır) ve Avrupa’da vergi verenlere (ki bunlar Avrupa banka sisteminin dengesizliğinin yol açtığı kayıpları ödemekle yükümlü olacaklar) mal olacak kontrolsüz ödeme durdurmasına doğru gitmekte. Kurtarma operasyonu tam bir fiyaskoyla sonuçlandı. Ve suç olmaya doğru ilerlemekte.

Yunanistan ve Avrupa ekonomik bir kısır döngünün içindeler, ve bu döngünün kırılması farklı bir politikanın geliştirilmesiyle gerçekleşecektir. Ne kadar zor olsa da tarihi ve siyasi değerlerini ortaya koyan, «Avrupalılaşma» nosyonuna anlam veren ve küreselleşmeye farklı bir yön veren sosyal ve demokratik bir Avrupa için çalışmalıyız. Bugün çözümün adresi ulusal düzeyde değildir. Bugün, belki yarın başka halkların da başına gelebileceği gibi Yunanistanlılar küçük düşürülmekte ve hâlihazırda şüphecilik ve nefret ortak Avrupa kimliği oluşturulma sürecinin yerini almaktadır. Avrupa tarihinde felaketle eşdeğer bir noktadayız.

Yunanistan krizinin önemli yerel nedenleri var ancak şu anda yaşadığımız durum, tarihi dönemi temelden sarsacak daha geniş çaplı bir krizin parçası. Bu kritik dönemde sosyal adalet kadar demokrasi ve vatandaş hakları da tehlikeye atılmaktadır. Yunanistan vatandaşları olarak sizleri sesinizi bizimle yükseltmeye ve böylece Yunanistan toplumunu ve demokrasiyi destekleyecek güçlü bir cepheye destek vermeye çağırıyoruz. Çünkü Yunanistan’a gösterilecek dayanışma, Yunanistan’da tehlike altında olan değerlerin kendilerini de ilgilendiren bir sorun olduğunu düşünenler için siyasi bir gereklilik.










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