Abstract
Kevin Ovenden is a London-based journalist, writer and socialist activist who has closely followed Greek politics, society and culture for over 30 years. In this book he seeks ‘to tell the story both of those six months [after the election win of Syriza in January 2015] and of the rise of Syriza as a party of the radical left. In so doing it tries to illustrate the major strategic debates that experience has animated about the future of progressive politics and of the left’ (p. xvii). The future of the left, according to Ovenden, lies in a via media between two opposing paths that have emerged from the Greek crisis: a purist ‘anti-party’ path that repudiates the party machine and its compromises, and the reliance upon parliamentary representation over grassroots movements as the means of effecting radical reform.
The title of the opening chapter, ‘Between Things Ended and Things Begun’, is borrowed from Walt Whitman and signals the paradigm shift in Greek (and perhaps European) politics inaugurated by the 2015 Syriza victory. Or at least that’s how many interpreted the situation at the time, while others were more sceptical. Ovenden himself notes this sense of wariness by beginning the chapter with the immediate reaction of a retired pharmacist in Greece: ‘We won. I actually don’t know how I feel: we’ve never won before’ (p. 1). It was indeed the case that a leftist party of this sort had ‘never won before’. As Ovenden states, ‘It was the first time in the history of Greece that such a force had won an election and formed an administration under its own name’ (p. 2). Ovenden goes on to explain that Syriza belongs not to the social democratic stream of the left (that position has been occupied in post-’74 Greece by PASOK), but to the more radical, communist-inspired tradition of the left. To provide some context, Ovenden briefly recounts the tumultuous political history of Greece over the 20th century (though I think more detail could have been given here) before proceeding to provide a short but reasonably informative account of the political landscape of Greece during the austerity years, leading up to the 2015 election. Towards the end of the chapter, Ovenden contends that what is truly radical in the rise of Syriza to power is that it has offered: a glimpse of a new way entirely of doing things, one where ordinary people begin to formulate their own answers and own ways of organising. They have created not just protest movements, but have pointed to how we may organise in new ways our lives, the economy and society as a whole: a politics of participation, not merely of representation by politicians with more left-wing policies. The possibility of such a radical break from the old is a central theme of this book. (pp. 19–20)
Chapter 2 charts the origins and meteoric rise of Syriza. As Ovenden notes, ‘Syriza was formed in 2004 and just scraped over the threshold to enter parliament in elections that year. Eleven years later, it was in government and the dominant party in Greek politics’ (p. 21). In the 1990s, Ovenden observes, Synaspismos (from which the bulk of Syriza later was formed) had an ‘inbetweener’ status, lying somewhere between PASOK (the party of moderate social democracy and bearer of the Papandreou legacy) and the KKE (the communist left, carrying the legacy of persecution and resistance during the civil war). Ovenden thus places Synaspismos in the Eurocommunist wing of the left: ‘That strand, emerging out of the Western European Communist parties, had taken seriously the implications of the official turn by the Soviet Union in the 1950s to a doctrine of decades of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist West’ (p. 22).
The advent of the global financial crisis in 2008 ushered in a period of ‘breakdown and breakthrough’. After PASOK’s election win in 2009, George Papandreou signed the first austerity memorandum with the Troika of lenders – and this gave rise to a wave of mass strikes and demonstrations. One form this took in Greece was the ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’ movement, which Ovenden illustrates with a personal anecdote: the author was in a car with friends, and when they approached a toll-booth, the driver ‘promptly stopped the engine, got out of the car, walked up to the barrier, forced it up, got back in and off we drove – waving at the woman in the booth. She beamed a smile back.’ The justification offered was: ‘Oh we don’t pay. Not for the privatised tolls. The money goes straight to the oligarchs. It doesn’t go to the public purse’ (p. 30). Thus we have ‘the beginnings of a sundering of trust between the popular masses and the old political monoliths and personnel’ (p. 29).
Nonetheless, as Ovenden points out, ‘At the end of 2010 there was broad consensus among the parliamentary parties that the debt had to be paid’ (p. 31). But as the crisis deepened, despite the EU-IMF rescue, this consensus fragmented and difficult questions began to force themselves upon the populace: Should we even try to repay all the debt? Should we continue with the euro and EU membership? When, therefore, the Greek parliament proceeded early in 2012 to approve a second bailout and a new package of austerity measures, it was no surprise that the May–June elections of that year showed an increase in support for anti-austerity parties of the far left and right. In the June elections Syriza captured 27 per cent of the vote, but New Democracy (under Samaras: ‘the old chauvinist charlatan’, p. 36) still managed to assemble a coalition with PASOK and the smaller Democratic Left party (Dimar) to pursue the austerity program.
Ovenden closes the chapter by looking at the remaining two-and-a-half years, prior to 2015, when Syriza ‘looked like a government in waiting’ (p. 37). Syriza made a commitment at this time to stay in the euro and to fight for anti-austerity from within the system – an ‘excruciating contradiction’, as Ovenden admits (p. 39). However, this did not impede Syriza’s rise, which was driven in large part by its promise ‘to a politically alert but wearied working-class electorate that a Syriza government was indeed going to be a break from the past’. And ‘it worked’, given especially ‘the contempt in which millions of people held the established time-servers’ (p. 41).
Chapter 3 (‘Their Austerity and Our Resistance’) concentrates on the effects of austerity on the youth of Greece, and the various resistance measures taken in response to austerity. The impact of the crisis on the young has, of course, been catastrophic. ‘From 2008 to Syriza’s election victory some 200,000 young people left Greece in search of work abroad’ (p. 45). And a large portion of those who remained in Greece have been unable to find work, with the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds exceeding 50 per cent in 2015. Ovenden makes two interesting observations in this context. Firstly, ‘it is young women who have suffered higher rates of soul-destroying unemployment’ (p. 47). Secondly, ‘Youth unemployment on all measures remained impervious to every “liberalisation” of the labour market’ (p. 48).
Ovenden begins his account of the resistance movements with the 2008 uprising provoked by the police shooting of the 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos on 6 December of that year. While the KKE leadership, in line with parliamentary protocol in Greece, condemned the violent protests, Syriza (and its then newly elected leader, Alexis Tsipras) broke with tradition in expressing sympathy for the rioters. As a result, ‘There was an enormous outcry in the media’ (p. 52). Ovenden then turns to the protest movements that arose in response to the austerity policies, beginning with the workers’ movement in May 2010, which was followed by ‘wave upon wave of strikes – there were one-day general strikes every month and a half throughout 2011’ (p. 54). Strikes were supplemented with occupations, from the Spanish-style occupation of the squares to the occupation of ERT, the national broadcaster (Greece’s equivalent of the BBC). But in uncritically extolling these resistance measures, Ovenden’s prejudices and partisanship become apparent. The question of the legitimacy of the use of violence is here especially relevant. For example, Ovenden often emphasizes the brutality of the police and government, but never stops to consider what has provoked this, e.g. are the police merely reacting to the violence of the protesters? And why is it permissible for priests to bless Molotov cocktails but not for police to employ tear gas and batons? The culture of violent protest, or even just pointless violence (as often encountered on Greece’s soccer fields), is not probed and questioned. Further, in discussing the government’s closure of ERT in 2013, Ovenden fails to provide the necessary context to this decision. Why was the government compelled to take such drastic measures? Was ERT underperforming, mismanaged and corrupt to such an extent that it needed to be completely overhauled? Ovenden’s refusal to address these questions gives the lie to Paul Mason’s claim in the Foreword that Ovenden has avoided ‘the filter of ideology’ (p. xi).
Chapter 4, entitled ‘The Monstrous Legacy of Racism’, considers the rise of xenophobia during the austerity years in Greece, and places the responsibility for this not merely on the far right (e.g. the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn) but also on the cynical tactics of the mainstream centrist parties seeking to maintain legitimacy under the strain of their austerity policies. Ovenden traces the legacy of racism to the decades prior to austerity where, in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘an overarching pathologising of Muslims began to seize every government and security state apparatus across Europe’ (p. 71) – and, as Ovenden shows, Greece was not immune to this. This set the stage in the summer of 2011 for ‘the first toxic deployment of racism for naked political ambition’, when PASOK minister Andreas Loverdos lay the blame for the rise of HIV/AIDS in Greece on illegal immigrants from Africa and Eastern Europe. This was followed in early 2012 with the ‘sweeping operation’ of Operation Broom, seeking to clean the streets of Athens ‘of women held to be the alien prostitutes who were infecting the salubrious Greek family man’ (p. 79). That same year, on 4 August (a highly symbolic date on the far-right calendar, recalling the day on which the Metaxas dictatorship came to power in 1936), a second xenophobic operation came into effect: Hospitable Zeus, which (despite its name) sought to round up anyone faintly resembling an immigrant.
The fifth chapter, ‘Lost in the Labyrinth’, describes how Syriza began to lose direction soon after its election win. Another demonstration was organized in the wake of the election, but this time in support of the new government in its battle against the Troika. Ovenden spoke with an unemployed health worker (Maria Manouli) who attended the rally with her children: ‘We’re with you, Alexis’, she said. ‘Don’t let us down’ (p. 88). As Ovenden goes on to say, ‘There could scarcely be more favourable circumstances for a government committed to a strategy of robust negotiation with the Troika to end the social disaster of austerity’ (p. 89). And yet it was from such a position of strength that Syriza fell to an ignominious low – this may have surprised the ideologically committed, but for others it was simply 1981 all over again (when PASOK swept to power as the country’s first socialist government, promising radical change and delivering inefficiency and corruption). The compromises began quickly indeed. Only a few weeks after the election the government agreed to extend the terms of the austerity memorandums for four months. This strategy, rather than buying time, ‘handed over to the Troika the revolver that would be held to the Greek representatives’ heads over five months of negotiations’ (p. 93). Seeking to play within the rules was always going to turn out badly, since the rules were biased in favour of the Troika and private sector interests. Ovenden speaks of bank nationalization as an alternative that Syriza refused, but he does not indicate what the repercussions of such a move might have been. For example, would such a move have had the effect of pushing Greece out of the euro? In any case, Tsipras’ strategy resulted in the pitiful scenarios witnessed in 2015, with the government scrambling to find the funds to pay its debts, while wages and social services bills were going unpaid. In another act of desperation, Tsipras reignited ‘the incendiary issue of German war reparations in Greece’ (p. 97). But, as Ovenden notes, this was more empty rhetoric: ‘It gave rise to no action – legal, diplomatic or agitational. All that resulted was a parliamentary committee’ (p. 98).
The sorry tale continues in Chapter 6, where the spotlight falls upon the ‘deep state’ and its relationship with the new government. What’s surprising is not that the new government valiantly tried, but failed, to use Greece’s infamous state bureaucracies to achieve its social reforms. Rather, the new government barely even tried; if anything, as Ovenden demonstrates, it capitulated to the existing machinery, which went on with business as usual. After outlining the postwar history of the para- or deep state, including its swift domestication of PASOK, Ovenden shows how the tentacles of the old order continue to wrap themselves around the rulers of the country. Ovenden does this by focusing on the ministers selected by Tsipras to take charge of foreign affairs, defence, and policing. ‘The ministers chosen’, notes Ovenden, ‘were quite simply not of the left. In fact, they were faces of the deep state and its extensions into party politics’ (p. 117). First, Ovenden looks at Nikos Kotzias, the foreign minister who advocated a continuation of existing alliances (with the EU and NATO), while fuelling Islamophobia with his warning that ‘après nous, les Jihadis’. Secondly, Ovenden discusses Panos Kammenos, the minister of defence and leader of ANEL (the right-wing nationalist party in coalition with Syriza), who has continued Greece’s tradition of excessive military spending, even while cuts are being made to pensions, hospitals and schools. Ovenden finally turns to Yannis Panoussis, the minister for police and citizen protection, who ‘puffed himself up as a man of the people against airy-fairy liberals who were undermining the police, army and good old-fashioned discipline’ (p. 128). Not a pretty picture of Syriza’s bedfellows. Indeed, with friends like these, who needs enemies?
Chapter 7 (‘The Maw of the Minotaur’) considers the perilous state of affairs faced by the government as summer was nearing in 2015. Despite widespread opposition to austerity among the populace and the lack of any alternative to Syriza, the government’s retreat soon after its win placed it in a weak and compromised position. Ovenden shows how this was exacerbated by the anti-democratic tendencies of the EU and Troika, which sought ‘to grind down and to domesticate Syriza, to turn it into a harmless variant of social democracy’ (p. 139). Specifically, the goal was to divorce the party from its left wing and re-establish a party of the centre-left (after the vacuum left by PASOK), thus paving the way for a national unity, pro-memorandum government. Syriza succeeded, in Ovenden’s view, to the extent that it resisted such pressures and played to its strengths: ‘The actual path of that government in its first six months…revealed that it made progress only when its left was prepared to press its policies hard and exploit the multifarious divides among its opponents’ (p. 147).
The final chapter, as its title (‘Revolt, Retreat and Rupture’) suggests, analyses the momentous events of June and July 2015, as a failed revolt against the Troika forced Syriza into retreat and then into a rupture, both within and with the wider public. The revolt took the form of a referendum, called by Tsipras to put to the people the terms demanded by the Troika. Despite the swift reaction by the ECB, which forced the banks to close and the introduction of capital controls, the ‘No’ vote received a landslide victory. But what were people saying ‘No’ to? Ovenden disingenuously neglects to note that the question posed to the people in the referendum was essentially a meaningless one. Not only was it beyond the comprehension of most people (a serious problem, considering that voters had only one week to make up their minds), but – even more problematically – it concerned a Troika proposal that was no longer on the table. Hence, the question was open to interpretation, making the results easily manipulable by the politicians (as Ovenden himself concedes on p. 175). And so it’s no wonder that most people voted ‘No’, as the ‘No’ vote tended to be read as support for easing the burden of austerity – and who wouldn’t support that? But much else remained unclear.
Then followed the stupendous retreat, as Tsipras signed a new deal in Brussels whose terms were even more austere for Greece. ‘The outcome was a disaster’, Ovenden writes (p. 157). While Tsipras insisted that no alternative was possible, Ovenden indicates otherwise in his interesting comparative account of the interventions of three of Syriza’s leading economic thinkers. (I would have preferred an entire chapter devoted to these three formidable figures, but perhaps that would make for a different kind of book.) Firstly, the flamboyant Yanis Varoufakis is discussed, and in particular his ‘modest proposal’ to solve the eurozone crisis, which (as he stated) ‘introduces no new EU institutions and violates no existing treaty’ (quoted on p. 162). But even such a mainstream strategy proved futile. Shortly after leaving the government, Varoufakis described his negotiations with the Troika in these memorable terms: [T]here was point black refusal to engage in economic argument. Point blank. You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on…and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken…You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem – you’d have got the same reply. (quoted on p. 163)
The book ends on the hopeful note that, despite the defeats and surrenders suffered by Syriza in 2015, a genuinely radical advance has been made, which Ovenden (quoting from Marx and Engels) puts as follows: ‘the independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority’. Even so, questions remain about why these interests continue to be easily exploited even by parties, like Syriza, proclaiming themselves as their guardian. And although Ovenden’s background in journalism and activism, as well as his first-hand experience of the Greek crisis, has made an accessible and often insightful work such as this possible, I wonder whether greater light could be shed upon the ‘labyrinth’ (to borrow Ovenden’s metaphor) by loosening, if not relinquishing, ideological commitments. The debate is mired in the polarity of Left versus Right: those in favour versus those against austerity, or political autonomy versus the neoliberal agenda of the EU. We live in an age that cynically dismisses all Causes as lost causes. But there is a reason for this: ways of thinking that cannot accommodate the vagaries and frailties of life have a tendency to bring out the worst in people and states, justifying and legitimating terrible evils. (Consider only the state-sanctioned evils of communism.) In these contexts I like to return to a much-beloved Greek writer who dedicated much of his life to communism: Tasos Leivaditis (1922–88). Like many of his comrades in the postwar generation, his confidence and engagement in the leftist struggle (even to the point of many years of imprisonment and persecution) were to give way to scepticism and disillusionment. This is the inevitable result when ideology cannot compete with existential reality, with the elusiveness and obscurity of life: ‘but how many questions in this world have answers / and honesty always begins there, where all other ways of salvation have ended’ (‘The Key to the Mystery’, Handbook for Euthanasia, in Tasos Leivaditis, Poetry, Vol. 3: 1979–1990 [in Greek], Athens: Metronomos, 2015, p. 96, translation mine).