This is the fourth and final installment of an article documenting the fallout of Syriza's turnaround on austerity and debt. Read the first, second and third installments.

Nostalgia-driven Modernization

There is, moreover, a fundamental oxymoron at the heart of Syriza’s political project. On the one hand, its conception of social change, as simply a defense of the pre-austerity “golden years” of Greek capitalism, is making it advocate for policies that are oddly in line with those of the old political regime. On the other hand, it could be argued that Syriza’s real project, a lot like that of European social democracy in the post-war period, is not the gradual overcoming of capitalism, but its rationalization and modernization.

In reality, Syriza dreams of turning a feudal, parasitic and colonially-minded Greek oligarchic upper-class into a real agent of production, investment and employment, which would promote economic growth as a precondition for prosperity. At the same time, it aspires to be the political force that guarantees this capitalist modernization.

Let us take an example that has been talked about a lot in the Greek context – that of the radio frequencies. The Greek oligarchic mass media, in their rentier mindset, consider the airwaves their “birthright.” They occupy them arbitrarily, emitting as they please without paying a cent for their use. What would be the alternative models of allocation of this common resource?

The traditional communist left would nationalize the radio frequencies – i.e., bring them under state control – and allocate them according to a set of criteria of perceived ‘public interest’. In a commons-based or post-capitalist approach, by contrast, the users would self-manage the radio frequencies, collectively setting the rules and limits of use, thereby permitting the existence of community media, now driven to extinction by commercial TV and radio stations.

So what is Syriza’s much-advertised position? To auction the use of the radio frequencies to the highest bidder, thus imposing the law of supply and demand onto this field. By what perverse twist of logic is enforcing the laws of the market considered a “left-wing” policy when it comes to crushing oligarchic power?

Although the rationalization of a corrupt and clientelist state can be a welcome change, we should never confuse this with the move towards a post-capitalist future, which has been the raison d’être of emancipatory politics ever since its inception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

At the same time, we should also be cautious about celebrating the state-centric “Plan B” of national economic reconstruction outside the Eurozone, advocated by the left-wing opposition, which includes Syriza’s splinter party Popular Unity, led by former Energy Minister Lafazanis. Popular Unity represents another top-down perception of politics, which aims to guarantee growth and jobs through the reassertion of national control over fiscal and monetary policy.

This conception still envisions sovereign Greece as a competitive economy in the international markets, without challenging the underlying assumptions of a “return to growth” and the expansion of production, consumption and credit. And arguably, being competitive today invariably means to attract investment by compressing the living standards of workers in favor of capital, while “growth” can only be achieved through environmental and labor deregulation, the commodification of nature, and a continuous reliance on the fossil fuels that are heating up our planet.

A reasonable alternative course of action would have been to envision a form of political decentralization, food autonomy, an alliance with the forces of society against capital, and a promotion of the commons as an alternative source of prosperity. Unfortunately, the only place the commons have in the plans of the Greek left is as a “safety net”, a method of social containment which will prevent eruptions of popular discontent and will give the government an inexpensive instrument to exercise social policy while at the same time dismantling the welfare state.

Is the left nowadays prohibited of dreaming of a world beyond capitalism? Has the desire for productive reconstruction, growth-fueled prosperity and the welfare state as a mechanism of social inclusion become the horizon of emancipatory thought today?

The State as Vehicle or as Obstacle

It is true that in this cycle of mobilization against capitalism’s mutation into an all-pervading totality, an old debate within the emancipatory movements has been reheated, and two different – and seemingly incommensurable – conceptions of the state and its relationship to social change have come to the fore.

On the one hand there is the conception of the state as the last frontier of democratic control, the last bastion of power accessible to the common man, before we enter the uncharted territory of corporate domination and opaque centers of power imposing their rules on social life. Much of the contemporary left is plunged into a nostalgia of the European post-war settlement, where the state mediated class conflicts and established the necessary consensus for capitalist domination. That arrangement is taken as the yardstick by which to judge social progress in present-day Europe.

Despite the failures of the twentieth-century left – reformist and revolutionary alike – in turning the state into an instrument of social emancipation, a vision still persists that the conditions of our emancipated future, the new social relations that will shape our post-capitalist life, can be regulated into being through the seizure of state power.

On the other hand there is the opposite perception, which suggests that even in its more benign forms the state is an instrument of domination and of the professionalization of politics, effectively usurping society of the ability to govern itself. Advocates of this vision propose to either fight against the state or act despite the state.

While we should resist the idea that we can somehow “smash the state” – the state is a social relation rather than a thing, so simply “smashing” it entails a host of practical problems – we should also reassess the idea that we can simply ignore state power; that building our new social realities in the shell of the old world suffices to eventually do away with the structures of domination altogether.

The Question of Power Remains Unresolved

Although the bottom-up transformation of social reality is a sine qua non for overcoming capitalism – a fact too easily overlooked by the institutional left – the question of the capitalist totality, of resisting, subverting and confronting the powers that be, is too complex to be addressed by a disparate and unconnected assortment of grassroots post-capitalist endeavors. The debate on political organizing, on collective action, on transgressing the dominant institutions, on confronting power, is as timely as ever.

The state is neither the fount that social relations spring from – as much of today’s left-wing thought seems to imply – nor a force we can simply ignore or destroy. And, given the token nature of representative democracy, the state is not something that can simply be “captured” either.

To approach self-determination, organized society should find creative ways to constitute itself as a counterpower, without becoming absorbed within the existing institutions of power. There is no doubt that the movements’ relationship with the state, even with a nominally “progressive” government, should remain autonomous, confrontational and antagonistic. However, militant and creative ways of penetrating and subverting the institutions have been proposed by many emancipatory traditions, most prominently libertarian municipalism.

It is not the objective of this article to establish a doctrinal one-size-fits-all approach regarding the relationship between movements and institutions. Each movement, according to its territorial and historical circumstances and the conjectural correlation of forces, can decide on a strategy of subversion, overriding, infiltration, cooperation, confrontation or penetration in regard to the dominant institutions.

However, we should beware the transformation of the party, initially approached as an “instrument” of the movement, into an organizational and discursive center point. Confronting the social power of capital calls for the permanent mobilization and involvement of society; getting sucked into the discourse of state administration and electoral politics entails a visible danger of incorporation of movements into the dominant political order.

Indeed, the ordeal of the Greek left has demonstrated the limits of the state-centric approach to social change. The social imaginary of a return to a fair and inclusive capitalism lies in tatters. This can lead to a long winter of depression for the people under attack by the forces of capital, but perhaps this stage of collective disillusionment is inevitable. Sooner or later, the field will be open for the real agents of social change: tangible, everyday collectives and individuals rooted in concrete struggles at the local level, disrupting the flow of power and bringing forward alternatives.

This is the real constituent power, and it has to be independent of the dominant order, not subdued to state and party priorities. Eventually, as the divorce between Syriza and the social movements is being consummated, we have to accept that social transformation will be a conflictive and contradictory process – not simply the outcome of bringing all social forces under the hegemony of a progressive political party.

If we are to avoid the mistakes of the past and prevent the emergence of another messianic electoral force, we should place emphasis on organization, communication and linking our disparate proposals and groups into a coherent counterpower. The antagonistic movement should mold itself into the diverse and broad prefigurative project of a transition beyond capitalism, extending its reach into all areas of social life, to confront on the ground the enormous social power of capital.

Theodoros Karyotis is a sociologist, translator and activist participating in social movements that promote self-management, solidarity economy and defense of the commons. He writes for autonomias.net.

Originally published by Roar Mag