Question of Strategy

Syriza : Balancing Reform and Radicalism
Hilary Wainwright

[Hilary Wainwright discusses how to transform the state and why radical politicians find it so difficult to maintain their radical momentum once in parliament or the council chamber. How could this change? This is a shortened version of a longish article originally appeared in socialist register 2013]

In a context of uncertainty and flux, it helps to start from the specific. So the starting point is the rise of Syriza, the radical left coalition rooted in the movements resistingg austerity that has become the main opposition party in the Greek parliament. Syriza's ability to give a focused political voice to the anger and despair of millions has made a breakthrough from which one can learn.

This is a matter not only of its soaring electoral support, which rose from 4 per cent of the national vote in 2009 to 27 per cent in June 2012 on the basis of a refusal of the policies imposed by the IMF, the European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB), but also of the fact that this electoral mandate is reinforced by organised movements and networks of solidarity that Syriza has been part of building.

This is not to imply that Syriza's success is stable or that its momentum will necessarily be maintained. One of its 71 MPs, the ex-Pasok member and trade union leader, Dimtris Tsoukalas, warns that 'votes can be like sand'. Threatening winds will blow persistently from a hostile media determined to exploit any sign of division; from national and European elites creating an atmosphere of fear towards the left and from an aggressive fascist party exploiting xenophobic tendencies in Greek society with some success, having won 7 percent in the polls.

Syriza does not provide a template to apply elsewhere; it is a new kind of political organisation in the making. Reflection on its rise, however, which has taken place alongside the collapse of support for Pasok (from around 40 per cent of the vote in 2009 to no more than 13 per cent in 2012), throws the present quandary of the left, especially in Europe, into relief. Such reflection also stimulates fresh thoughts on forms of political organisation that could help the left find ways out.

Failure of social democratic parties
On the one hand, there is the inability of social democratic parties to stand up to, or even seriously to bargain over, austerity for the masses as a solution to the financial crisis. To varying degrees these parties are demonstrating their inability to rise to the challenge of a visibly discredited neoliberal project. The decay in party democracy and culture, moreover, combined with an entrenchment of market-driven mentalities, has meant that in social democratic parties the forces of renewal are negligible or very weak.

On the other hand, most political organisations of the radical left, with the notable exception of Syriza, are in weaker positions than they were before the financial crisis of 2008. In addition, the traditional forms of labour movement organisation have been seriously weakened. There has been an impressive growth of resistance and alternatives of many kinds, many of them interconnected and many, like Occupy, besmirching the brand of an already dodgy-looking system. But through what strategic visions, forms of organisation and means of political activism they can produce lasting forces of transformation is an open question under active and widespread discussion.

In other words, while the right, in the form of neoliberalism, was ready for the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the left in the North, when faced with capitalism coming as near to collapse as it can—given its ability to call in state guarantees—has been unable to find appropriate ways of building a dynamic of change driven by its alternative values and directions for society.

Syriza in its current form has been forged in the intense heat of the most ruthless turning of the screw of austerity. Syriza is going to face many problems, both within its own organisation as it changes from a coalition of parties and groups to becoming a party with its own direct membership, as well as in the face of new pressures that will come from its opponents both inside and outside Greece. However after interviewing a wide range of activists and reading interviews and reports by others, the author has a grounded belief that the long and difficult process of developing a framework of rethinking political organisation beyond both Leninism and parliamentarism is producing qualitatively new results.

Many of the political resources that shaped Syriza's response to the present extremities and led it to a position in which it is uniquely—but still conditionally—trusted by so many people in Greek society are the outcome of considerable learning from the trial and error of other radical parties across Europe and the experience of the European Social Forum.

Transforming the state
If anything the problem of transforming the state is undoubtedly a major issue. This is a major issue for Syriza as it campaigns and prepares for office in and against a notably corrupt and anti-democratic state.

The economic dimension here is crucial. Political change is seriously hindered if it lacks a base in non-capitalist relations of production, including the production of services and culture, however partial and incomplete. At the same time, it must be said that a conflictual engagement in as well as against the state is a necessary condition for systemic change. Such an engagement has to be rooted in, and accountable to, forces for democratic change in society. Without a strategy of this kind to transform and, where necessary, break state power, transformative struggles will recurrently lapse into containable counter-cultures and their potential for the majority of people will be unrealised.

Drawing lessons from local democratisation
It is necessary to draw particularly on the experience of the radical left of the Labour Party in governing London in 1982-86; and that of the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) in opening up decisions about new municipal investment to a citywide process of popular participation in Porto Alegre from 1989 until 2004. Despite these cases being well known, their lessons for political organisation have yet to be fully distilled.

What is significant is that their achievements—each of the city experiments involved a redistribution of resources and, for a period, power and capacity, from the rich and powerful to the poor and marginalised—depended on opening up to and sharing resources with autonomous sources of democratic power in the cities concerned. In other words, they combined initiatives for change from within government structures with support for developing wider, more radical sources of power outside.

But it was very significant that not only had such a strategic orientation failed to change the Labour Party in the UK, it also turned out that neither did the PT in Brazil adopt such a dual strategy once it was elected at the national level, which partly explains the limits of the Lula government in fulfilling many expectations it had aroused for radical social change.

In the Greater London Council (GLC) and Porto Alegre experiments political parties used their electoral mandates to move beyond the constraints imposed by the existing system and instead to strengthen and spread challenges to that system. The spirit they embodied can also be seen in widespread campaigns by public service workers and users against privatisation that involve effective strategies to change the way that public services are managed and public money administered, dragging political parties after them.

All these experiences have underlined the importance of struggling to create non-capitalist social relations in the present rather than defer them to 'after winning power'. Lessons from these local experiences, however, can help the rethinking that is necessary of what political organisation needs to be like in a context of plural sources of transformative power.

In drawing these lessons, it is essential to bear in mind that there are further distinct problems in changing state and quasi-state institutions on national and international levels. To understand the wider significance of the way these local political experiences combine a struggle as representatives within the local state with support for democratic movements and initiatives outside, people need to distinguish between two radically distinct meanings of power.

These are on the one hand power as transformative capacity and on the other hand power as domination—as involving an asymmetry between those with power and those over whom power is exercised. Historically, mass social democratic parties have been built around a benevolent version of the second understanding. Their strategies have been based around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet what they identify as the needs of the people.

Both the experiences of the GLC in the early 1980s and the PT in municipal government in the 1990s were attempts to change the state from being a means of domination and exclusion to becoming a resource for transformation by campaigning for electoral office in order then to decentralise and redistribute power. Syriza is attempting the same project at a national level.

Syriza and the dynamics of social change
The most distinctive feature of Syriza, in contrast with traditional parties of the left, is that it sees itself as more than simply a means of political representation for movements, but as being involved practically in building the movements. Its political instincts make responsibility for contributing to the spread and strengthening of movements for social justice a high priority.

In the weeks following the election of 71 Syriza MPs in June 2012, its leaders stressed the importance of this as central to 'changing people's idea of what they can do, developing with them a sense of their capacity for power', as Andreas Karitzis, one of its key political coordinators, put it. While the party believes state power is necessary, it is clear that, in Karitzis's terms, 'what is also decisive is what you are doing in movements and society before seizing power. Eighty percent of social change cannot come through government.' This is not just talk.

This view of strategies for social change influences how Syriza is allocating the considerable state resources it is receiving as a result of its high level of parliamentary representation. The party will get 8 million (almost triple its present budget) and each MP is allocated by the parliament five members of staff.

The idea at the time of writing is that a high proportion of the new funds should go to solidarity networks in the neighbourhoods—for example, to employ people to extend initiatives such as social medical centres, to spread what approaches have succeeded, to link, online and face to face, people in the cities with producers of agricultural goods. Funds will also go to strengthening the capacity of the party in parliament, but a greater proportion will be directed towards Syriza's work in building the extra-parliamentary organisations for social change.

Of the five staff allocated to MPs, two will work for the MP directly. One will work for policy committees that bring together MPs and civic experts and two will be employed by the party to work in the movements and neighbourhoods.
Behind these priorities is a learning process arising from the vulnerability shown by left parties in other European countries to letting parliamentary institutions, with all their resources and privileges, pull them away from the movements whose political voice they had intended to be.

Committed to movement
From its origins in 2004 at the height of the alter-globalisation movements (which had a particularly strong impact in Greece), Syriza was at least as concerned with helping to build movements for change in society as with electoral success. There was also a learning process through the European Social Forum and then the Greek Social Forum.

This contributed to not only Syriza's clear strategic view of the limits of state power for social transformation, but also a self-conscious insistence on norms of pluralism, mutual respect and openness to the new ways in which people were expressing their discontent and alternatives.

Providing a constant reminder of the political methodology they were trying to avoid was the KKE, one of the last orthodox Communist parties in Europe, self-confident in its self- imposed isolation and wary of contamination with 'unorthodoxy'. Syriza activists, by contrast, were very much part of the open, plural, curious culture of mutual learning promoted by the European Social Forum, and it was explicitly one of their goals that their new political coalition be infused with it. The effects of this were clearly seen in how Syriza related to the youth revolt after the police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008, not pushing a line or seeking to take control. And they acted in the same way when the protests gathered in Syntagma Square and beyond through 2011.

Syriza activists contributed their own principles—for example, not allowing any anti-immigrant slogans—and applied these with others, anarchists for example, to find practical solutions through the general discussions. The youth wing of Synaspismos had a workshop near the beginning of the Syntagma protests to explain and discuss this non-instrumental, principled approach.

Syriza is also shaped by the converging culture of the different generations and traditions that make up the coalition. The younger generation, now in their late twenties or early thirties, came to the left independently of any 'actually existing' alternative. The older leadership had been part of the resistance to the dictatorship in the late 1960s and 1970s. Many of them became the left Eurocommunists of the 1980s.

Both generations were active in the alter-globalisation and social forum movement. This meant that the collective processes of knowledge and cultural production in the movements resisting neoliberal globalisation, both inside Greece and internationally in the 1990s, were central to the personal political development of Syriza activists rather than being a sphere in which they 'intervened' to promote an alternative that had already been worked out elsewhere.

Syriza activists at all levels are emphatic about going beyond protest and of having alternatives that are convincing to people who are discontented with the corrupt Greek state and the 'troika' of the EC, the IMF and the ECB. This has led to an emphasis on support for initiatives that could make an immediate difference now rather than waiting for Syriza's election to government. For instance, as the cuts destroy the public health system, doctors and nurses in Syriza are involved with others in creating medical centres to meet urgent social needs and at the same time pushing for free treatment in public hospitals and campaigning to defend health services.

Syriza is also bringing together sympathetic frontline civil servants with teachers, experts and representatives of parents' organisations to prepare changes in the organisation of the Ministry of Education to make it more responsive to the people and to release the stilled capacities of state employees who genuinely want to serve the public.

It is also mapping the social and cooperative economy in the country to identify how it can be supported politically now as well as to determine what kind of support it should have when the party moves into government to realise Syriza's goal of an economy geared to social needs. The party's responsiveness to the steady rise in self-organised forms of solidarity economy amidst the crisis, recognising its potential in terms of constructing an alternative direction for society, is reminiscent of what Andre Gorz's meant when, in outlining the strategic concept of non-reformist reforms in his Strategy for Labor, he stressed the importance of 'enabling working people to see socialism not as something in the transcendental beyond but as the visible goal of praxis in the present'.

When Alexis Tsipras declared that the party was ready for government, based on an unequivocal rejection of the economic policy memorandum, it concentrated the minds and organisational discipline of Syriza activists. The movement style and culture of the organisation gave way to a single- minded campaign in which loyalties to this or that group or tendency in the Syriza coalition weakened and a new closeness emerged.

But complaints also emerged about a certain opacity of when and where decisions were made and how to influence them, and fears expressed that the large parliamentary group could reinforce this if it becomes too autonomous. And there is recognition of the danger of Tsipras becoming a celebrity symbol on which the future of the party can end up becoming dependent, weakening internal party democracy and diluting debate—shades of Lula in Brazil, shades too of Andreas Papendreou in 1981. Although the coalition is united on the importance of its claim on government, much thought is being given to how to share leadership, maintain accountability to party and movement activists, how to sustain a critical politicised culture of debate, challenge and strategic militancy; to avoid in other words becoming 'another Pasok'.

Rethinking the franchise
Syriza's experience gives a practical focus to recent discussions in the alter- globalisation movement about whether, in liberal democracies, to engage in, as well as struggle against, the political system—and, more specifically, whether to seek political representation for more than propaganda purposes, and if so with what forms of organisation.

Syriza's self-conscious combination of organising for government with spreading the capacity for change autonomously from the political system—through solidarity work in the community, agitating at the base of the unions, campaigning for social and political rights, as well as against racism and xenophobia and so on—raises anew the question of whether the vote is still a resource for social transformation or a perpetual source of disillusion and alienation.

In other words, can representation in the existing institutions of parliamentary democracy, along with efforts to change these institutions, strengthen the wider struggle to bring somehow an end to capitalist power - the power of the financial markets, private banks and corporations, all intertwined with and guaranteed by state institutions? The answer is positive, albeit highly conditional.

In the broadest terms, the condition is based, organisationally and culturally, on an understanding of citizenship as social and situated. In today's societies, ridden as they are with inequalities, this implies an engagement with electoral politics while at the same time strongly challenging what has become of the universal franchise: an abstract, formal political equality in a society that is fundamentally unequal.

Many property-less men and women and their allies who struggled for the vote imagined that exposing, challenging and overcoming unequal and exploitative relationships would be at the heart of parliamentary politics. For the Chartists and many suffragettes, the vote was the opening of a new phase in this political struggle, not a plateau on which to remain. Political representation meant for them a means of 'making present' in the political system struggles over social and economic inequality.

The ability of the British establishment, often with the complicity, tacit and overt, of Labour's parliamentary and trade union leaderships, to contain this potential dynamic is only a well documented example of a phenomenon common in different forms to liberal democracies.
The result is a narrow form of representation in which citizens are treated as individuals in an entirely abstract way rather than as part of embedded social, and at present unequal, relationships. It is a political process which consequently tends to disguise rather than expose inequalities, and protects rather than challenges private economic power.

Radical democratic roots
This tendency has regularly come under challenge by later generations. They have taken up the radical democratic goals of the pioneers by seeking to break the protective membrane of parliamentary politics and open politics up to the direct impact of struggles that are shifting the balance of power in society.

There is much to learn in this respect from two experiences, the radical Labour administration of the Greater London Council and the PT government of Porto Alegre. Both their political leaderships in practice built their strategy for implementing a radical electoral mandate on sharing power, resources and legitimacy with citizens organised autonomously around issues of social and economic equality.

These municipal politicians started from the recognition that the inequalities they were elected to tackle—of economic power, race, gender and more—needed sources of power and knowledge beyond those of the state alone.

In both cases, the mandate was for a politics that would learn from and not repeat the compromises, national as well as local, of the past. In the case of the GLC, the left leadership of the London Labour Party, influenced by a fierce controversy in the national party, was determined to avoid the failure of the 1974-79 Labour government to implement a radical electoral mandate.

This strong political will, along with a direct involvement in community, feminist, trade union and anti-racist movements, led the would-be GLC councillors to reach out to many organisations that broadly shared their aims and involve them in drawing up a detailed manifesto. This became the mandate of the new administration after Labour won the GLC elections in 1981. It was a key reference point in conflicts with public officials both in County Hall and across the river in Thatcher-led Westminster and Whitehall—a source of moral legitimacy for the radicalism of the GLC's policies.

In the case of Porto Alegre, the 'taken-for-granted' way of running the municipality had involved local party elites making mutually beneficial deals which reproduced a structural corruption and secrecy that ensured that the council effectively served, or at least did not upset, the economic interests of the 15 or so families who dominated the local economy as landowners and industrialists.

The PT's mission, as part of its commitment to redress the gross inequalities of the Brazilian polity and economy, was to put an end to this. Under the leadership of Olivio Dutra, it committed itself to working with neighbourhood associations and other grassroots democratic organisations to open up the council's budgetary, financial and contracting procedures.

In both cases, the strategies were effective in achieving many of their goals —so much so that in different ways the vested interests they challenged took action, equally effectively in their reactionary terms. These experiences and, in particular, the crucial relationships between autonomously organised citizens and the local state were the product of particular historical circumstances.

Both the British Labour Party and the Brazilian Workers' Party were the product of labour and social movements and progressive intellectuals but their divergent historical origins were based on differing understandings of democracy and hence of their strategies towards representative politics.

While the PT was created to give a radically democratic lead to the struggle against dictatorship, the Labour Party was founded to protect and extend workers' rights and social provision within a parliamentary democracy. The Labour Party began from an almost sacrosanct division between the industrial and the political, respectively the spheres of the unions and of the party. The rules governing the relationship have had a significant flexibility; otherwise this 'contentious alliance' would not have survived.

By the 1950s this division of labour had produced a profoundly institutionalised abdication of politics by the trade unions to the Labour Party, which increasingly saw legitimate politics as taking place only within narrowly parliamentary confines. The unions could lobby and as part of the Labour Party pass resolutions proposing what governments should do. But for them to take action directly on political issues, including broadly social ones, was out of bounds. ooo  [source : Red Pepper]

Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 30, February 3- 9, 2013

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