Syriza and the Peaceful Co-existence with Capitalism

I

Shortly after Syriza's victory, leftists in Canada, the US, and other imperialist states became obsessed with a particular article about Yanis Varoufakis, this party's finance minister, regarding his claim about being an "erratic marxist."  The message was clear: here was a party in power that was unashamed to speak of marxism and so, because of this lack of shame, it must be marxist.

For the mainstream left at the centres of imperialism Syriza represents a possibility, a way to make revolution through the ballot box, that confirms the revisionist thesis: communism is possible through reform, through the peaceful co-existence with capitalism, and a mass movement can be mobilized through free elections.  According to this argument only one factor is missing in these countries that are not Greece: an electoral party capable of representing the left––as Syriza supposedly does––and thus the solution is to build this party.

And yet the manic sharing of the Guardian's article about Varoufakis' erratic marxism obscures the fact that this finance minister is marxist in name rather than concept, and even his commitment to the former is conflicted.  This is the same Varoufakis who is now being celebrated by the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, those ideological organs devoted to imperialist capitalism, and who has argued for the maintenance of austerity: Greece's relationship with the European Union must be maintained, the Greek working class should learn to live "frugally", and a new agreement with the country's creditors (rather than an abolition) will be pursued.  On the one hand an endorsement of the importance of marxism; on the other hand a collaboration with capital.  And still this article about his "erratic marxism" is being shared by online leftists.

II

The Movement of the Squares was a popular and spontaneous rebellion, demonstrating the Greek masses' rejection of capitalism.  Mass rebellions, however, always produce a situation in which the most structured and unified organizations involved in these rebellions will possess the potential to sieze hold of the movement and direct its energy.  Syriza was the result of a coalition of the most organized groups involved in this rebellion and thus, unlike groups such as the KKE that avoided the Movement of Squares altogether, the organization that could provide the masses with a direction and meaning to their revolt.  Rebellions always seek a focus, direction, a meaning that consummates and justifies resistance.  

The people, in their creative and angry resistance to capitalism, demand an answer to the question: how do we get rid of that which has caused us to rebel?  Syriza provided an answer, and one that echoed precisely what citizens of so-called "democratic" societies have been taught to believe as correct from the moment they become cognitive: a new electoral party that would defeat austerity after being voted into power.  Moreover, since Syriza emerged from organizations involved in the rebellion this answer was treated with more seriousness than had it been given by a party without any grass roots links: if it had been disconnected from the rebellion and proposed the same answer it is extremely unlikely that the masses would have voted in such high numbers, providing Syriza with a landslide victory.  The question asked by resistance masses is always asked within the resistance itself; nobody cares for the answers provided by those who stand apart from the masses.

Hence, the theory of the mass-line explains Syriza's temporary popularity as well as why it will end up betraying the most revolutionary demands of the rebellion.  It emerged from the masses and brought an answer to the masses; its electoral victory was the result of mass work amongst those openly resisting the ravages of capitalism.  Rather than returning to the masses with a revolutionary solution, however, it simply transformed this mass support into an electoral drive.

III

Of course there was no possible way that Syriza could transform the mass support into anything other than becoming another party within the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.  The most organized elements of the rebellion possessed significant political differences, ranging from left liberals to marxists, and were therefore capable of only becoming a united front against austerity.  United fronts are important, indeed they are necessary, but it is a mistake to think a united front is an organization capable of leading the masses.  It is a bigger mistake to elect a united front in the hope that its base-line unity will hold within the halls of bourgeois political power.

We are already seeing the cracks in its unity as it fails to deliver the promise that made it a coalition in the first place: an end to austerity.  As large portions of this coalition recognize that they cannot end austerity simply by being elected to the political seat of a bourgeois dictatorship (because what power do they have without their own institutions, their own military power?) they will abandon this promise, settling for paltrier and paltrier reforms.  Other portions of the coalition are already disenchanted now that Syriza has been forced to accept that austerity is the norm.  Why Syriza's "communist tendency" ever thought that austerity measures could be rejected by a party elected into a bourgeois mode of production––how it could have the power to negotiate with finance ministers when it possesses no power beyond the constitutional framework of bourgeois legality––demonstrates a certain level of myopia.  At least, unlike those communist groups whose international allies still think it is possible to make demands of Syriza, as if it can possibly listen, some members of Syriza are openly admitting the error of seeing Syriza's election as a solution to austerity.

After all, Syriza is simply following the path charted by Pasok.  Pasok also emerged as a coalition of a very broad left, winning a landslide victory in 1981.  Pasok also attempted to withdraw from the larger capitalist community, campaigning to reject NATO and the European Economic Community, and failed for the same reasons that Syriza is failing now.  At one point Pasok had the same finance minister as Syriza.

IV

What is more interesting for me is the way in which Syriza's victory is popularizing a certain discourse amongst the mainstream left in my social context.  With the failure of the NDP to even express social democracy, there has been a desire to build a new electoral party, like the old NDP, as if this is the solution to working class misery.  Something like Québec Solidaire and now something like Syriza.

Rather than recognizing that Syriza's victory was due to its emergence from the Movement of the Squares, there is a tendency to build a party like Syriza without a mass movement.  Or worse, wait for mass movements to appear so as to propose a Canadian-style Syriza as the answer to the questions these movements raise.  Stymied by the ideology that capitalism can be voted out of power, or at the very least that a social democratic party will produce the space in which an insurrection can occur (like the Kerensky government, but again forgetting that the Bolsheviks had been building dual power from 1905 onwards), we desire solutions that are easier and less threatening than building a comprehensive fighting party.  We like to forget, as I have argued so many times before, that committed social democrats are already willing to do this work, because this is the limit of their politics, and we will only succeed in getting swallowed by a movement of friendlier capitalism when we should be spending our energy building something more radical.

It is considered bad taste to critique Syriza, just as it was considered bad taste to challenge the limits of the Occupy movement or the Arab Spring.  But the limits of the latter are demonstrated by the existence of the former: spontaneous rebellions are limited because, without an organized revolutionary movement, those groups that are the most organized and unified will determine the meaning of these limits––these will be the pseudo-vanguards, catapulted into power because of their mass work.  In the end they will expend the energy of the masses, betraying their hopes, and history has already proven that this is the case.

The desire to treat Syriza as a left-wing solution to austerity demonstrates a very important contradiction: the realization that movementism is incapable of challenging capitalism and that some unified organization is required; the refusal to break from the same petty-bourgeois ideology that made movementism possible in the first place––the hope that capitalism can be reformed out of existence through elections and peaceful protests.  While the electoral victory of Syriza proves that only a unified party can channel the will of the masses (as long as this party emerges from the masses in the first place), it also demonstrates that any unified party, no matter what its ideology, is capable of taking hold of the masses' energy and directing it towards a particular aim.  As communists we should demand the existence of a party of the advanced guard rather than just any party and be careful not to conflate the two concepts.

V

Here it is worth pausing to consider the KKE's involvement in this series of events, particularly the way in which the KKE is now casting itself as a proper communist critic of revisionism.  A strange binary is emerging, promoted mainly by marxists in the international community: Syriza versus the KKE––social democracy versus "sectarianism".

The irony, of course, is that the KKE has been a revisionist party for a long time that has also sought to win communism through the strategy of elections.  Like Syriza, it is also an electoral party.  Like every revisionist party everywhere it believes in the peaceful co-existence with capitalism––so much so that it refused to participate in the Movement of the Squares, dismissing the militancy of the masses because "in the real popular revolution, not even one glass would break."

One wonders why the KKE did not join Syriza considering that it also believes that revolution can be accomplished according to the strategy laid out by Bernstein: through electoral victory and political reforms.  The truth, of course, is that Syriza is on the one hand a watered down version of the KKE (since the KKE still sticks to the formality of communist proclamations), and on the other hand a more militant version of the KKE (since the KKE has stood outside of radical struggles for some time, particularly outside of the recent rebellions which it dismissed as a bourgeois plot), which is to say a competing electoral party.

Point being, if the KKE ever managed to win political power through an election it would be faced with the same problems as Syriza.  Maybe even worse problems since it would never succeed in implementing even the barest fraction of its communist demands.  So why people waste time calling it "sectarian" for refusing to cooperate with Syriza, or why other people are angered at the dismissals of the KKE's "sectarianism" is a false dilemma.

So forget this dilemma since the problematic in Greece should not be reduced to "Syriza versus the KKE" simply because the latter refused to join the former's coalition, or that that the former's activities are now being rightly critiqued by the former––whose own strategy would lead it into similar compromises.  Rather, we need to look at what is required of any communist when faced with a mass rebellion.  These are opportunities to make a revolutionary movement stronger and allow it to develop its own hegemony.  The KKE did not take advantage of the Movement of the Squares because it has not taken advantage of militant rebellions for a long time; it has isolated itself from those factions of the working-class who are willing to put their bodies on the line so as to resist capitalism, the factions required for any revolutionary movement to become a vanguard.  Syriza took advantage of this rebellion but not in a revolutionary manner: it was the result of participants who decided to embark on a path that could only lead to compromise.

Therefore, when critics of the KKE's "sectarianism" complain that the KKE has isolated themselves from the most radical elements of the working class movement they are correct; they are incorrect in assuming that the building of Syriza was necessary or could accomplish anything useful for a revolutionary movement.  Similarly, when KKE supporters complain that Syriza is going to betray this very same working class and create a disaffection for the left they are also correct; they are incorrect in assuming that the KKE presents a viable alternative since the KKE, having isolated itself from the most radical sectors of the Greek working class, has nothing to betray in its own revisionist practice.

Neither Syriza nor the KKE are useful models for anti-capitalist struggles elsewhere.  The communist movement that has developed through world historical revolutions rejected both reformism and revisionism long ago.  We would do well to learn from revolutionary history.

VI

A tangent: Sebastian Budgen's interview with Stathis Kouvelakis was revealing, particularly in that it set up the terms of the narrative that frames Syriza for the mainstream left.  First we have the binary between Syriza and the KKE, discussed above.  Budgen frames this binary in the following terms: the left should be understood as divided between reformists and revisionists––the former are proper leftists, the latter are "ultra-leftists".  But since when was it "ultra-left" to be a communist electoral party that believes in a peaceful transition to socialism?

Secondly, we have the Trotskyist dogma of the errors of "Stalinism" and "socialism in one country" which is meant to justify the victory of a reformist party as the only truly left solution to the misery of the Greek masses.  Why?  Because of course there cannot be a revolutionary break with the EU and imperialism since this would amount to creating "socialism in one country"!  The best Greece can do is embark on a reformist path, with its communist organizations holding revolution in permanence and hoping that similar small steps towards socialism will be taken across the world so that a global insurrection will happen in tandem.  Both Budgen and Kouvelakis believe the truism of the errors of "socialism in one country" apparently unaware of how it might be a problem.

Thirdly, the immediate reification of Syriza as a revolutionary party to the point that any resistance to Syriza's governance is conceived as agent provocateur behaviour.  Like those protestors already beaten and arrested in Greece––they must be agent provocateur's like those involved in Kronstadt, like those petty-bourgeois "revolutionaries" who attempted to assassinate Lenin and sabotage the Bolshevik government!  (To be fair, I am not arguing that Syriza approved of the beating and arrest of the aforementioned protestors.  The fact that they would have no say in this matter because the institution of the police is not a people's institution, however, demonstrates the strength of my main arguments.)  So when Syriza fails to combat austerity, and the masses are still in open rebellion, will their rebellion to the austerity now sanction by Syriza constitute counter-revolutionary activity?  This is complete nonsense, but telling nonetheless.

And fourthly, Kouvelakis is now expressing doubts about Syriza.  Does this mean he is an agent provocateur, as Budgen suggested?  Let's hope not…

VII

Let's pause for a moment to consider the importance of Syriza's victory at this historical conjuncture. For while it is correct to recognize that its victory should not be misunderstood as the ascendancy of a revolutionary party––let alone a victory that can accomplish the very things Syriza stood for––it can and should be recognized as significant rather than dismissed altogether.

A party that ran on the platform of being "the left" and promised an end to neo-liberalism, a rejection of the EU, and a promise to combat capitalism succeeded in mobilizing the masses.  Although this party mobilized the masses for the ballot box so as to push it into the government of a bourgeois dictatorship this is still significant because it demonstrates that, even at the centres of imperialism, anti-capitalist organizations are popular.  Despite all of the anti-communist jingoism, the claim that the word communism cannot even be used for fear of disaffecting the general population Syriza succeeded in achieving a majority government despite the fact that it possessed a significant communist core who refused to not call themselves communist.  The fact that even the rightist elements of Syriza talk about being "erratic marxists" without losing popularity is significant.

Although there is a worry that Syriza's failures might produce a disaffection for the left amongst the popular masses––perhaps even giving up ground to the right populism of the Golden Dawn's neo-nazism––this might be the equivalent of a slippery slope fallacy: unjustified because it requires a crystal ball, and these worse case scenarios do not necessarily follow.  Syriza's failure could also produce an understanding amongst those masses that voted it into power that elections do not work, that a significant revolutionary break is required.  After all, the current disaffection with Syriza is not concerned with its leftism but about its inability to accomplish its leftist claims within the framework of electoral power.  The hope is that the anti-capitalist sentiments that Syriza was able to mobilize will surpass Syriza, develop into a properly revolutionary movement, and eclipse this moment of electoral compromise.

But yes, it is significant that people were mobilized to vote into power a government that ran on anti-capitalist principles, regardless of the limitations of these principles.  In the end, however, we need more than principles, more than an electoral movement.

VIII

Decades ago, one of the Indian anti-revisionist parties that would become part of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) called Salvador Allende's government in Chile a Casablanca of Revisionism.  The criticism was simple, and not about Allende as a person or his victimization.  Here was a person who followed the revisionist thesis to the letter, ethically and without hypocrisy: the peaceful co-existence with capitalism through elections; a socialist movement of reform.  But what was the result?  Without smashing the institutions upon which the previous order was dependent the counter-revolution immediately manifested in these institutions––such as the military, where Pinochet was a general.  Without building a movement that developed a people's army the people really did have nothing: they were swept aside by the military institution that had existed prior to, and was allowed to exist during, Allende's political victory.

So what of Syriza?  It is worth noting that even the communists within this coalition, such as Stathis Kouvelakis, have compared Greece to Chile.  They even admit that Syriza is more right than Allende's elected party.  If they have made the comparison and noted the gap between Greece and Chile then they should have derived the only possible conclusion from these premises: that Syriza will not end austerity, let alone end capitalism.

Again, what of Syriza?  I do not doubt that Syriza was devoted to its anti-austerity program and willingness to reject both the EU and NATO; I think it borders on conspiracy theory to pretend that its ideologues were secretly committed to neo-liberalism and misled the masses.  There's no point in imagining secret collaborations or conspiratorial bourgeois plots––this is not materialism, it is a concern with psychological quirks rather than structural processes.  The KKE might crow about Syriza's failures, using this as justification for its assessment about Syriza's secret bourgeois program, but this is an idealist assessment of reality: after all the KKE, if elected, would also end up collaborating because it has simply come to power through the political channels established by capital.

The main problem with Syriza is not that it wasn't devoted to its politics but that its politics could not be accomplished within the framework of bourgeois dictatorship.  Its recent capitulation to the austerity measures it sought to reject is better explained by the fact that it came to power through an election rather than a revolution because it is clear that even its finance minister is disappointed by Greece's inability to force Germany and the rest of the EU into an historic compromise.  For when Syriza came to the bargaining table with its creditors what did it come with? The promise to liquidate Greek capital and create a socialist autarchy?  Of course not, because it did not possess the means to create such an autarchy.  The very fact that it was forced to go to this bargaining table in the first place is telling: it is simply in command of already existing bourgeois institutions that are disinterested in its politics, it has to cooperate with EU capitalism because Greece is still embedded in EU capitalism.  How would Syriza pull Greece out of this capitalism and defend its borders?  With its own army, its own police, its own economic institutions––none of these things exist.  How then can it even hope to bargain, why is it bargaining in the first place?  It lacks the economic leverage and, as marxists should know by now, in the last instance the economic base is determinant.

In the end, Syriza's failure should not be viewed as a disappointment because we should not be disappointed by what we should recognize as a failure in the first place.  You cannot reform capitalism from within; at the very least you can achieve some breathing room, and maybe Syriza can provide this (however limited, but still…), but this breathing room is not a space for struggle.  A month has passed and Syriza is already following the path charted by its historical predecessors without being, for all that, even another "casablanca of revisionism"… Beneath the political standard represented by Allende, it will fall for the same reasons but not from the same heights.