Five years into the crisis, people in Greece are weary and fed-up — and understandably so. Half a decade on, nothing is as it was; yet everything is still the same. The old political establishment has been dethroned, but the creditors are still firmly in control. The Troika has been formally ousted, but the same institutions continue to slowly strangle the country to death. Meanwhile, the little bit of hope that was rekindled by Syriza’s historic victory in January is rapidly being consumed by the existential gloom of imminent defeat.
Ironically, the creditors’ extreme demands are contributing to a rapid radicalization of anti-euro sentiments inside Greece, making default and Grexit increasingly likely. But whatever the outcome will be, the negotiations have already revealed a fundamental truth about the devaluation of contemporary political life in Europe. This, if anything, is politics as spectacle; a poorly acted play in which ordinary citizens have been steadily reduced to passive spectators, staring powerlessly at the latest headlines and shouting pointlessly at their television screens — condemned to a constant guessing game about the real intentions of their elected representatives.
For five months now, all we have been talking about is whether or not there will be a deal. But what would happen the day after? What would Syriza do if stays in the euro? What would it do if it defaults and leaves? What are Greece’s prospects for the next years, the next decade? There is life after the talks. What will it look like?
In the cacophony of this highly dichotomized debate, few seem to notice the fact that both plans essentially share the same top-down premise: if only the government succeeds in executing its chosen program, the economic recovery will be swift and things will quickly go back to the way they were before.
Of course, imposing a debt moratorium and reintroducing the drachma may restore a much-needed sense of dignity and national autonomy, making Plan B a much more progressive option than continued debt servitude under the aegis of the country’s creditors. But in the years and decades ahead even Grexit and devaluation cannot countenance the deep structural crisis of Greek capitalism.
In contrast to both Plan A and Plan B, Plan C would situate itself directly on the terrain of everyday life. It would fundamentally revolve around the mobilization of self-organized workers and local communities, the consolidation of existing grassroots organizations and the construction of new organs of popular power. Plan C would operate autonomously from either Plan A or Plan B: it would be the precondition for the success of either, yet its bottom-up approach would exist in constant tension with their dominant top-down logic.
But resilience alone is hardly enough. Greece’s foreign creditors and the domestic oligarchs would be more than happy to “outsource” their social responsibilities to others so they can continue their savage assault on whatever is left of the country’s anemic welfare state. This brings us to the second point: the potential for resistance. Self-organized movements, workplaces and communities can — once again — become the basis of fierce grassroots opposition to further austerity and dispossession. History has shown that, without such deeply rooted organs of popular power exerting pressure from below, even left governments are easily led astray.
Whatever the outcome of the debt talks, the left cannot limit its political imagination to the question of Tsipras’ steadfastness in the Brussels backrooms. A narrow preoccupation with the negotiations will only end up reproducing the same sense of distantiation and disempowerment that EU politics was meant to induce in the first place. Deal or no deal, a long struggle still lies ahead. Only a rapid intensification of the struggle from below can save beleaguered Greece — and turn it, once again, into a proud beacon of democracy for the rest of the world.
Jerome Roos is a PhD researcher in International Political Economy at the European University Institute, and founding editor of ROAR Magazine. Follow him on Twitter at @JeromeRoos.
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