The Greek Left Takes Stock of the Commons

If the Greek experience of the past two years shows anything, it is that conventional Left politics, even with massive electoral support and control of the government, cannot prevail against finance capital and its international allies.  European creditors continue to force Greek citizens to endure the punishing trauma of austerity politics with no credible scenario for economic recovery or social reconstruction in sight. 

After the governing coalition Syriza capitulated to creditors’ draconian demands in 2016, its credibility as a force for political change declined. Despite its best intentions, it could not deliver. The Greek people might understandably ask:  Have we reached the limits of what the conventional Left can achieve within “representative democracies” whose sovereignty is so compromised by global capital?  Beyond such political questions, citizens might also wonder whether centralized bureaucratic programs in this age of digital networks can ever act swiftly and responsively.  Self-organized, bottom-up federations of commoning often produce much better results.    

Pummeled by some harsh realities and sobered by the limits of Left politics, many Greeks are now giving the commons a serious look as a political option. This was my impression after a recent visit to Athens where I tried to give some visibility to the recently published Greek translation of my book Think Like a Commoner.  In Greek, the book is entitled Κοινά: Μια σύντομη εισαγωγή.  Besides a public talk at a bookstore (video here), I spoke at the respected left Nicos Poulantzas Institute (video with Greek translation & English version), which was eager to host a discussion about commons and commoning. 

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Andreas Karitzis on SYRIZA: We Need to Invent New Ways to Do Politics

This is a time of great confusion, fear and political disarray.  People around the world, including Americans afflicted by a Trump presidency, are looking for new types of democratic strategies for social justice and basic effectiveness.  The imploding neoliberal system with its veneer of democratic values is clearly inadequate in an age of globalized capital.

Fortunately, one important historical episode illuminates the political challenges we face quite vividly:  the protracted struggle by the Greek left coalition party SYRIZA to renegotiate its debt with European creditors and allied governments. SYRIZA’s goal was to reconstruct a society decimated by years of austerity policies, investor looting of public assets, and social disintegration.  The Troika won that epic struggle, of course, and SYRIZA, the democratically elected Greek government, accepted the draconian non-solution imposed by creditors.  Creditors and European neoliberals sent a clear signal: financial capital will brutally override the democratic will of a nation.

Since the Greek experience with neoliberal coercion is arguably a taste of what is in store for the rest of the world, including the United States, it is worth looking more closely at the SYRIZA experience and what it may mean for transformational politics more generally.  What is the significance of SYRIZA’s failure?  What does that suggest about the deficiencies of progressive politics?  What new types of approaches may be needed?

Below, I excerpt a number of passages from an excellent but lengthy interview with Andreas Karitzis, a former SYRIZA spokesman and member of its Central Committee.  In his talk with freelance writer George Souvlis published in LeftEast, a political website, Karitzis offers some extremely astute insights into the Greek left’s struggles to throw off the yoke of neoliberal capitalism and debt peonage.  Karitzis makes a persuasive case for building new types of social practices, political identities and institutions for “doing politics."

I recommend reading the full interview, but the busy reader may want to read my distilled summary below.  Here is the link to Part I and to Part II of the interview. 

Karitzis nicely summarizes the basic problem: 

We are now entering a transitional phase in which a new kind of despotism is emerging, combining the logic of financial competition and profit with pre-modern modes of brutal governance alongside pure, lethal violence and wars. On the other hand, for the first time in our evolutionary history we have huge reserves of embodied capacities, a vast array of rapidly developing technologies, and values from different cultures within our immediate reach. We are living in extreme times of unprecedented potentialities as well as dangers. We have a duty which is broader and bolder than we let ourselves realize.

But, we haven’t yet found the ways to reconfigure the “we” to really include everyone we need to fight this battle. The “we” we need cannot be squeezed into identities taken from the past – from the “end of history” era of naivety and laziness in which the only thing individuals were willing to give were singular moments of participation. Neither can the range of our duty be fully captured anymore by the traditional framing of various “anti-capitalisms”, since what we have to confront today touches existential depths regarding the construction of human societies. We must reframe who “we” are – and hence our individual political identities – in a way that coincides both with the today’s challenges and the potentialities to transcend the logic of capital. I prefer to explore a new “life-form” that will take on the responsibility of facing the deadlocks of our species, instead of reproducing political identities, mentalities and structural deadlocks that intensify them.

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Lessons from SYRIZA’s Failure: Build a New Economy & Polity

Last year SYRIZA, the left coalition party elected to lead the Greek government and face down its creditors and European overlords, lost its high-stakes confrontation with neoliberalism. Greece has plunged into an even-deeper, demoralizing and perilous social and economic crisis, exacerbated by the flood of Syrian refugees. 

So what does the SYRIZA experience have to teach us about the potential of democratic politics to bring about economic and social transformation?  Andreas Karitzis, a former SYRIZA member and former member of its Central Committee and Political Secretariat, provides a rich and penetrating analysis in an essay at OpenDemocracy.net. "The SYRIZA experience':  lessons and adaptations" crackles with shrewd, hard-won political insights explaining why SYRIZA failed to prevail and the necessary future strategies for transformational change.

SYRIZA failed to stop the neoliberal juggernaut, Karitzis argues, because it thought it could work within the established political structures and processes.  But the gut-wrenching drama showed that conventional democratic politics is futile when state sovereignty is trumped by international finance.  SYRIZA's ultimate acceptance of the Troika's deal "arguably betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the popular classes and those fighting against financial despotism," says Karitzis.  He now calls on the left to develop a new "operating system," or what some have called "Plan C": 

We know that the popular power once one inscribed in various democratic institutions is exhausted.  We do not have enough power to make elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions.  More of the same won't do it.  If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it's not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; we need to reshape the ground.  And to do that we have to expand the solution space by shifting priorities from political representation to setting up an autonomous network of production of economic and social power.

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How democratic is the Greek referendum?

Picture by PowderPhotograpy on flickr.

Picture by PowderPhotograpy on flickr.

In a blog post in 2013, questioning whether there was a case against citizen engagement, Nathaniel Heller provoked: “Would TARP have worked had US policymakers taken the time to poll a million Americans via SMS to solicit their opinions on whether it was a good idea? I doubt it.”

Two years later and we are faced with a similar situation: in the light of current circumstances, how appropriate is the Greek referendum? Alexander Trechsel, a professor at the European University Institute and one of the major experts when the issue is direct democracy, recently published an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine giving four reasons as to why this referendum is a bad idea. With Alexander’s permission, I am re-posting the English version of his article:

It could hardly get any more dramatic in the negotiations between the EU and the Greek government. The clock is ticking and if no solution can be found during this very week a Southern European country, member of the Eurozone, will go bankrupt – with unforeseeable consequences for Greek citizens, but also the rest of Europe. This Tuesday at midnight, a first deadline has expired, with Greece not having paid its dues to the IMF. Clearly, things do not look well.

Until now, this “Greek drama” was staged involving institutions and their representatives: the European Commission, the IMF, ECB, the Greek government, Alexis Tsipras, Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Jean-Claude Juncker, Christine Lagarde, Mario Draghi as well as a series of finance ministers and experts. The cast was complex, but it fit onto a list no longer than a few pages. With the Greek government’s surprising decision to put the final offer by the creditors – the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF – to a referendum vote, the very logic of the play has changed. It looks as if it will now be up to a majority of Greek citizens to decide on the fate of their country, presumably in a binary yes-no vote, on a question that has yet to be formulated and on an offer that might have expired by the time the vote takes place. At first sight this seems to be a dignified process for the country where, after all, democracy was invented. A more careful look, however, unveils a rather less glorious image. Indeed, there are at least four fundamental problems that the proposed “people’s verdict” may give rise to.

First, modern Greece totally lacks any referendum experience. The last time Greek voters were called upon expressing themselves at the polls other than in elections was over 40 years ago, in 1974, when the country transitioned to democracy and when a popular majority decided to give itself a Republic rather than a Monarchy for its future form of government. Since then, and unlike in most other countries in Europe, direct democracy at the national level remained inexistent. It was only with the economic crisis and the confrontation with creditors over the bailout in 2011 that then-Prime-minister George Papandreou took the referendum threat out of his hat. In his view, creditors would simply be obliged to respect the will of the Greek people. It did not come that far – Papandreou had to step down before any referendum was held. Today, this very referendum threat is once again made by Alexis Tsipras, more concretely, though, with a date fixed for this coming Sunday, July 5. In less than a week a citizenry that could not take any yes-no choice in over 40 years is now supposed to “decide” on the future of its country. In no other, modern direct democratic process are citizens given so little time to gather and process the necessary information about the proposal at stake, to debate about it and allow for an informed public opinion to emerge, let alone take a far-reaching decision. And these are necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for a referendum process to be truly democratic. Today, this very point was made in Strasbourg, by the Secretary General of the Council of Europe.

Second, Greek citizens are called upon voting in favor or against an offer by a set of external actors to keep the country solvable and to get its economy a financial boost through future investments. It is therefore not even an agreement between the Greek government and, say, another government or an international organization that is at stake, but simply a plan decided upon outside of and independently from Greece. This is very different from international treaty referendums, such as those existing in Switzerland, Ireland or Denmark, in which respective governments defend the negotiated agreements and campaign in favor of the latter. In the coming days, however, the main actors defending a “yes” in the Greek referendum process will be either foreign creditors or – maybe – the Greek opposition. This, in turn, will result in a “them” against “us” campaign, which will give nationalistic arguments the upper hand over a sober discussion of pros and cons of the proposed offer – hardly the ingredients for a mature, democratic decision at the polls.

Third, the referendum will mix up direct with representative democracy. Let us imagine a “yes” coming out of the ballot boxes. In such a scenario the government of Alexis Tsipras would possibly have to step down and new elections would have to be called upon. And what if Greek voters say “no”? In this case, not only will the country most likely go bankrupt, it will also lead to Greece’s exit from the Euro. The consequences for the Greek people would be devastating and the fate of a government having actively led the campaign towards this outcome might become rapidly sealed. In other words: whatever the choice of the voters, it will be a choice about policy as much as about government itself. And the process could well end up in an own-goal, similar to the “suicide by referendum” committed by Pinochet in Chile and de Gaulle in France. For voters, however, this does not make things easier, as they will be voting both on the plan to save Greece from insolvency and on Alexis Tsipras’ government.

Fourth, and this is possibly the worst aspect of the entire drama, calling this referendum is a desperate attempt of shifting governmental responsibility to the people as a whole. Here is a government that is unable to reach an agreement with creditors to save its country from chaos. Instead of going down in history as a political failure, this government now shifts the burden onto the citizens, hoping for them to chime into the “us” and “them” theme alongside its representatives. While the threat of a referendum may be a powerful tool during negotiations, once the cards are on the table it does hardly serve any other purpose than to let a government hide behind an alleged popular will, forged in no time and in a heated climate of nationalistic accusations. Not to be able to find an agreement in negotiations may be seen as a failure – however, to blame one’s own citizenry for the outcome, because it was its “choice” at the polls, may be seen as outright cowardice.

The only conclusion one can draw from these observations is that on July 5, Greek voters should not be called to the polls. Out of democratic respect for its citizens the government in Athens should cancel this sordid referendum process – the earlier the better.


The Neoliberal Enclosure of Greek Democracy

Half the challenge is to rip the mask from the face. Now that has happened. After months of the Troika’s unrelenting, unrealistic demands on the Greek people, it has become clear what this conflict is really all about:  maintaining the supremacy of the neoliberal market/state alliance. The Greeks must be punished for wishing to explore serious alternatives. 

Creditors, having conveniently socialized their losses through taxpayer-funded bailouts, are now using their hammerlock on state power to keep the lid on neoliberal austerity. That’s their only plan:  their idée fixe. Democracy?  Political stability?  Social or humanitarian need? Secondary details. This negotiation is not about reviving the Greek economy, which has only worsened after five years of enforced fiscal austerity and credit-dependency (which is why it’s absurd to continue with the same policies). It's about which vision of the future shall prevail. 

Syriza, armed with a democratic mandate to reject further bailouts and austerity cuts, is locked in a fierce struggle pitting raw financial power and neoliberal policies against democratic sovereignty and a nascent vision of something better. We know who generally wins such struggles (e.g., Chile in 1973).  Will it be different this time?   

A lot rides on whether the Greek people, in the face of desperate circumstances, are willing to stand up to reclaim their self-determination or whether abject realities will simply force them to surrender and become a colony dependent on European creditors.

The Troika surely wants to send a strong cautionary message to the citizens of Spain, Portugal, Italy and other European countries with problematic finances. If that means imposing further unemployment, social disintegration and trauma on the Greeks, without offering a credible plan for the country’s economic revival, the Troika and its European backers are clearly willing to go there.

The Economist magazine captured this insane choice with a darkly humorous cover, “Acropolis Now.” Angela Merkel enters the “heart of darkness” of subduing the Greeks, only to discover the unanticipated costs.  “The horror, the horror.”

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The New Greek Government Endorses Commons-Based, Peer Production Solutions

All attention in Greece and global financial circles has been understandably focused on the new Greek Government’s fierce confrontation with its implacable European creditors. Less attention has been paid to the Government’s plans to help midwife a new post-capitalist order based on commons and peer production. 

A commons colleague, John Restakis, wrote about this possibility a week or so before the January 25 elections. Now, speaking to the Greek Parliament last week, the new Deputy Prime Minister Gianni Dragasakis explicitly stated that Greece will develop new sorts of bottom-up, commons-based, peer production models for meeting people’s needs.

Dr. Vasilis Kostakis, who works with the P2P Foundation’s P2P Lab based in Ioannina, Greece, has been following the situation in Greece closely.  Kostakis, a research fellow at the Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance in Tallin, Estonia, writes:

Syriza seems to be adopting policies and reforming certain laws in a fashion that resembles the Partner State Approach practices, with regard to education, governance and R&D. To mention a few:  

· opening up the public data;

· making openly available the knowledge produced with tax-payers’ money;

· creating a collaborative environment for small-scale entrepreneurs and co-operatives while favoring initiatives based on open source technologies and practices;

· developing certain participatory processes (and strengthening the existing ones)  for citizen-engagement in policy-making;

· adopting open standards and patterns for public administration and education.

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As Neoliberal Forces Lash Out, Solidarity with Syriza is Needed

Now that Syriza has prevailed in the Greek elections, a new field of battle has emerged:  the political maneuvering before debt-relief negotiations.  Syriza’s decisive victory is sending some richly deserved shock waves through the citadels of finance capital and their partners in government, especially in Europe. 

Not since the 2008 financial crisis have neoliberal policies and politicians suffered such a stinging public rebuke – through democratic elections, no less.  The financial establishment and leading politicians around the world want nothing more than to staunch the damage. They clearly wish to isolate the new prime minister and undermine his party’s leadership.  They would also love to kill in the cradle many socially minded initiatives that Syriza plans (protections against home foreclosures, restoration of pensions, basic healthcare, etc.).

Hence the fierce media propaganda war now underway to defame Syriza and lock in a negative set of images and ideas about it. I keep hearing the term “radical left” a lot (funny, the press never called austerity politics a program of the “radical right”).  British Prime Minister David Cameron recently warned, “The Greek election will increase economic uncertainty across Europe” – as if that hasn’t been the case for years.

There are also many attacks on the coalition government as unprincipled and expedient, particularly after Syriza made a coalition government with ANEL (a conservative party whose acronym translates as “independent Greeks”).  ANEL is socially conservative but it is also extremely hostile to big capital and the current banking system.  It is more radical than Syriza in that it wants to nationalize banks and throw out the Greek oligarchy.

I thought it was telling, in its account of the elections, that the New York Times gave the last word to the neoliberal Peterson Institute for International Economics.  A fellow there counseled Greece to move to the political center because “it would show that these protest movements ultimately recognize reality – which is that they are in the euro, and they have to play by the rules.”  Otherwise, he warned, “things could get a lot worse.  Very, very quickly.” 

“Play by the rules,” “face reality” – or things will get “a lot worse.” Worse than the slow-motion social disintegration that austerity is already imposing on the Greeks?  Such advice is darkly humorous in light of the rule-breaking, reality-defying audacity of banks, financial institutions and investors.

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The Greek Elections, the State and the Social Economy

Tomorrow’s election in Greece could be a significant turning point in the fight against neoliberal austerity politics and an opportunity to inaugurate commons-based alternatives – from peer production to co-operatives to social economy innovations – with the support of the state. Needless to say, it is a complicated situation, not just the political and cultural dynamics within Greece, but the ambition of stepping off in new directions beyond those sanctioned by the European and global financial establishment. 

Fortunately, John Restakis provides some excellent and subtle insight into the Greek situation in a recent blog post on the Commons Transition website (which is worth visiting in its own right!).  John is past Executive Director of the BC Co-operative Association in Vancouver and  has spent many years in community organizing, adult and popular education, and co-op development.  He also lectures widely on the subject of globalization, regional development and alternative economics.

John’s piece is worth reading not just for its assessment of the Greek crisis, but also for the larger challenge of moving commons-based peer production and social alternatives into the mainstream.

Civil Power and the Path Forward for Greece

By John Restakis

With the prospect of a Syriza government, everyone is wondering what the future holds for Greece.  Whether disaster or deliverance, or just the normal chaos, it is hard to ignore the potential for game-changing repercussions from a Syriza government. On the street however, embittered by the failures of governments in the past to change a corrupt and dysfunctional political system, few people are expecting big things from Syriza. The feeling of popular cynicism and fatalism is palpable. How different will Syriza be?

One thing is certain. If Syriza does what it says, it will be forging a courageous and desperately needed path in Europe, not only in opposition to the austerity policies that are devastating the country, but to the neoliberal ideas, institutions, and capital interests that are their source and sustenance. For such a path to succeed, an entirely different view of economic development, of the role of the market, and of the relation between state and citizen is necessary.

It is in this context that the social economy has become an important aspect of Syriza’s plans for re-making the economy. Like other parties of both the right and left in Europe, Syriza is taking cognizance of the role that the social economy can play in the current crisis. Even the Cameron government in the UK, the epicenter of European neo-liberalism, has promoted the social economy as a sector with a strategic role to play in job creation, in improving public services, and in reforming the role of government. In the last election, Mutualism and the Big Society were its slogans.

It all sounds very nice, until it becomes evident just how little right wing governments understand, or care about, what the social economy is and how it functions. For the Cameron government co-operatives, and the social economy more generally, became a cover and a means for public sector privatizations, for weakening job security, and for reducing the role of government. Thousands of public sector workers have been coerced into joining pseudo-co-operatives to save their jobs. Under the current government, the same is beginning to happen in Greece with the newly formed KOINSEPs. This is a travesty of the nature and purpose of co-operatives whose memberships must always be voluntary, whose governance is democratic, and whose purpose is to serve their members and their communities for their common benefit – not the ideological aims of government. It’s a lesson that few governments understand.

For the right, the social economy is often viewed as a final refuge for the discarded of society and the victims of the capitalist economy. It is one reason why the right advocates charity as the proper response for the poor. Never solidarity or equity. More recently, the rhetoric and principles of the social economy have been used to expand the reach of capital into civil spaces. For these reasons co-operatives and social economy organizations in the UK, and elsewhere, have condemned the distortion of social economy principles for vested political interests. But what are these principles?

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New Film Documents Commons-Based Peer Production in Greece

As one of the countries hardest hit by austerity politics, Greece is also in the vanguard of experimentation to find ways beyond the crisis.  Now there is a documentary film about the growth of commons-based peer production in Greece, directed by Ilias Marmaras. "Knowledge as a common good: communities of production and sharing in Greece” is a low-budget, high-insight survey of innovative projects such as FabLab Athens, Greek hackerspaces, Frown, an organization that hosts all sorts of maker workshops and presentations, and other projects.

A beta-version website Common Knowledge, devoted to “communities of production and sharing in Greece,” explains the motivation behind the film:

“Greece is going through the sixth year of recession. Austerity policies imposed by IMF, ECB and the Greek political pro-memorandum regimes, foster an unprecedented crisis in economy, social life, politics and culture. In the previous two decades the enforcement of the neoliberal politics to the country resulted in the disintegration of the existed social networks, leaving society unprepared to face the upcoming situation.

During the last years, while large parts of the social fabric have been expelled from the state and private economy, through the social movements which emerge in the middle of the crisis, formations of physical and digital networks have appeared not only in official political and finance circles, but also as grassroots forms of coexistence, solidarity and innovation. People have come together, experimenting in unconventional ways of collaboration and bundling their activities in different physical and digital networks. They seek answers to problems caused by the crisis, but they are also concerned about issues due the new technical composition of the world. In doing so they produce and share knowledge.”

George Papanikolaou of the P2P Foundation in Greece describes how peer production is fundamentally altering labor practices and offering hope:  “For the first time, we are witnessing groups of producers having the chance to meet up outside the traditional frameworks – like that of a corporation, or state organization.  People are taking initiatives to form groups in order to produce goods that belong in the commons sphere.”

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CommonsFest in Greece: A Movement Expands

For a country suffering from economic devastation and political upheaval, Greece is not accustomed to bursts of optimism.  But last weekend provided a showcase of hopeful, practical solutiions at the second annual CommonsFest, held in Heraklion on the island of Crete.  The festival brought together a dazzling array of commons and peer production communities:  hackers, open knowledge advocates, practitioners of open design, hardware and manufacturing, open health innovators, sustainable farming experts, among many others. 

Vasilis Kostakis, a political economist and founder of the P2P Lab in Greece, noted that the “key contribution of CommonsFest has been to bring together so many components of the commons movement and raise awareness amongst them.  People had the chance to meet, talk and learn from each other with the aim of creating the seed of a larger movement.” Kostakis said that the crowdfunded festival “illustrates that the philosophy that has emerged from free software and open content communities actually extends to many aspects of our daily lives.”

The event drew hundreds of people to twenty-four talks, nine workshops and an exhibition of many commons-based technologies and projects.  Kostakis said that CommonsFest participants are preparing a forthcoming “declaration for the protection and the strengthening of the Commons” that will soon be published in Greek and then translated into other languages.  [I will add the declaration to this blog post as an update when it is available. –DB] 

CommonsFest also featured an open art space with more than 30 video works licensed under Creative Commons licenses and the screening of a new documentary, “Knowledge as a Common:  Communities of Production and Sharing in Greece,”organized by the Cinema Group from the University of Crete.  The film’s director, Ilias Marmaras, spoke afterwards.  Both events were intended to “highlight the collaboration that we can build working together as peers” and show that “the freedoms provided by the Creative Commons licenses help us share easily and create cultural value.”

Commons projects and activism seem to be really hopping in Greece:  just last week a collaborative ebook, Πέρααπότοκράτοςκαιτηναγορά: Ηομότιμηπροοπτική, was published in Greece as a free, downloadable pdf file.  The ebook presents a vision for a commons-oriented economy and society.  Print copies will be available at the end of May, at a price defined by the reader.

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