“The right kind of austerity is the best thing in the world. Another word for “good” austerity is “economic sustainability”. But the wrong kind of austerity is extremely harmful. The question was never to spend or not to spend.”
What Syriza gets right
There are some things that the Syriza movement gets absolutely right. First and foremost it is the ethical and pragmatic question of the Greek debt. There is no reason to treat national economies as individual people with their own debts and individual budgets. Because they are just not. They are part of a transnational economic, globalized system – a system that produces winners and losers, accumulation of capital and labor and vast swathes of desolate zones. Greece is not a person who “owes” this or that to Germany or France. It is a node in a system that has crashed the Greek economy and subdued it to a fiscal form of domination.
The Greek population is not “responsible” for all those abstract flows and dynamics. All that talk is the product of a reified idea of the collective we call “nation state” and of a basic misunderstanding about how the economy works. Syriza and related movements on the Left and Right are completely justified in their resistance against the debt. It is unjust and counterproductive to all the parties involved, because insisting on this debt has few gains for Germany, great losses for Greece and it fundamentally undermines the European project and its legitimacy (which also means that Germany loses out in the long run).
The second thing that Syriza gets right is its general suspicion towards austerity measures. Now, this is said with a very big caveat, namely that austerity is anything but a binary question of yes-no. The right kind of austerity is the best thing in the world. Another word for “good” austerity is “economic sustainability”. But the wrong kind of austerity is extremely harmful. The question was never to spend or not to spend. The question is to understand the fundamental structures of the economy and act upon them in a deliberate, non-linear fashion. This means that you may need an economically active government in order to tackle crisis by creating a wide range of opportunities for the economy to gain more complexity, finding more pathways to activate people in genuinely productive ways.
What Syriza gets wrong
The first thing to understand about a movement like Syriza is from what general perspective or narrative (analytic and emotional) it is coming: both its leadership and its political mandate in the electorate.
More than anything, Syriza is a movement against the austerity measures and the power balance in the European Union. Its chief narrative goes something like this:
The evil international capital has attacked and robbed the Greek people in order to make a few people rich, ruining the lives of so many innocent, honest folks. Now a few a heroes are arising, with the courage and clarity to call a spade a spade, and to do the right thing, which was really obvious all along: go left! Just say no to the rich and powerful and start giving it all back to the people.
This is a core narrative. Because it is analytically so faulty, its ability to produce desired effects in the real world is very limited.
The first thing to note about this narrative is that it draws its main legitimacy from a resistance against the “neo-liberal” European Union. But if you look at the mandate from the electorate, the legitimacy of Syriza is simply the combination of being the Left alternative (like to social democrats) that is EU-aversive (not like the social democrats).
So the faulty narrative set aside, the reason that Syriza is getting all the action and the moderate center-left almost none, is simply that they represent a popular combination of being Left, and having a narrow, nationalist view on how to fix the economy. The Syriza movement is a displaced center left. Its legitimacy among its supporters is largely the same as the other popular movements against the EU. It is parallel to Podemos in Spain (although Podemos is a somewhat more progressive version). But, more relevantly, it is the parallel of right wing movements such as Alternative für Deutchland in Germany, UKIP in the UK – and the Independent Greeks in Greece. And yes, the first move of Syriza was to gang up with none other than the Independent Greeks (a more conservative version of UKIP).
[highlight-green]See also:
Beyond Piketty
Agony and Ecstasy[/highlight-green]
The parallel to these right wing movements is the simplistic and populist resistance to the EU within the frames of a national mindset. What we need to understand is that both Syriza and Alternative für Deutchland are the same popular impulse: “No man! We’re not gonna let some greedy bureaucrats and big business run off with our gold and share it with those nasty Greeks/Germans! We’ll stand up for the common people and stick together with our own national economy and its interests!”
Alternative für Deutchland and Syriza are fundamentally the same movement! They have the same drives, the same logic, the same simplicity and bad-guy theory! Just so happens one is Left and South of the fence, the other is Right and North of the fence. What these movements don’t see is that neither has the solution for the fundamental transnational problems of the economy and that they are both likely to antagonize and vilify each other to the detriment of everyone involved.
And what is worse, perhaps, is that both movements are built on quicksand. Neither actually has an ideology more efficient and superior to the prevailing green social liberalism of European politics. They have an electoral mandate to defy the European Union, and “save the common man” (with opposite measures) and they mistake this for a mandate to radically transform society. They have no such ability or mandate, and they will fail at any such attempt. They will also fail at saving the economy.
What Syriza gets really wrong
The thing about Syriza and similar movements is that they haven’t updated their view of culture, democracy, the economy, international politics or technological development.
They do not understand that you can’t just stimulate away with a new wave of spending, unless you have a very specific and intelligent plan for how that would create long-term, lasting value. If you start fighting capital within the borders of little Greece, capital just flees. If start spending without having the fundamentals of your economy right so that you actually gain a strong position on the international market, you get inflation and a patron state with passive client citizens – which is where this mess started in the first place. And if you let Germany and the US get all the high quality growth, you are outcompeted again and you will be back in a worse crisis than when you started.
Getting off the Euro so that Greece can use inflation might be a short term remedy for this, but really this is a solution that is bound to backfire.
What needs to be done is to write off the debt and to gather international, long term support for cultivating a Greek economy that offers sustainable, genuine value to the European and global markets. Such value can be:
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- A cultural development towards higher value memes, so that the art, ideas and services of the country become symbolically valuable on the global market.
- An increase in the collective intelligence by deepening or refining democratic self-organization and participation.
- A refinement of the complexity of the economy so that the relative position of the economy is improved and people are activated in ways where they create genuine, long-term value for themselves and others.
- That the country gains more favorable relations with the surrounding world, not on a governmental level but in the real world, by offering things and services that are highly valued by other populations. Green energy, progressive health care, social entrepreneurship – these things may be good candidates.
- That the country takes decisive steps to entering the Bio-Info-Nano-Cogntive (BINC) age, which includes stimulating the founding of companies within these areas and making sure there is an abundance of research going on.
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All of these are long term goals. They are not in opposition to anything like the EU. They require not angry resistance, but a cool head, an open heart, imagination, analysis – and the friendship of neighboring countries and populations. The achievement of such goals is not helped by an antagonistic, downright stupid, black-white narrative about the evils of global capital.
“What needs to be achieved is a fundamental remake of the Greek economy, its position on the world market, and the functionality and intelligence of the Greek democracy.”
What needs to be achieved is a fundamental remake of the Greek economy, its position on the world market, and the functionality and intelligence of the Greek democracy. From such a position, the more radical currents of Syriza may actually find a home: shorter workdays, better social security, perhaps even basic income. These things are achieved by the common effort of many countries and economies. They cannot be achieved by denying the economic relations and realties of today and fantasizing about the magic powers of socialism in one country. We have heard that before.
The radicalism of Syriza today is understandable, but quite misplaced and misrepresented. The movement has very little real possibility of changing Greece, let alone Europe. We must, unfortunately, see it for what it is: another populist movement with a shaky popular support, a weak analysis of our times, and a poor plan for its country.
Calling a spade a spade. Sorry.
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‘Mathematics’ by Mos Def:
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Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of ‘The Listening Society’, ‘Nordic Ideology’ and the upcoming books ‘The 6 Hidden Patterns of History’ and ‘Outcompeting Capitalism’. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps. You can follow Hanzi on his facebook profile here.
