This is the second of four article installments running throughout the week. Read the first installment here.

A Marriage of Convenience

Throughout the years of resistance to the neoliberal assault, two conceptions of politics played out within the social movements: on the one hand, politics as “the art of the possible,” related to the growing influence of Syriza in social struggles; on the other hand, politics as an exercise of radical imagination and experimentation, put forward by the commons-based alternatives.

Since 2010, the severe crisis of legitimation of the political system and its satellites—parties, trade unions, and so on—brought forward new political subjects and innovative projects that aimed to challenge the state and the capitalist market as the dominant organizing principles of social life, to propose new avenues towards social and economic wellbeing. Movements based on equality, solidarity, self-management and participation, which proposed innovative models of collective use and management of the commons.

Even when they do not explicitly state so, these movements are deeply anti-capitalist, as they aim to cut off the lifeline of European capitalism by weakening the market’s grip on society (through workplace occupations, solidarity economies, barter networks, food sovereignty, and the like) or by resisting attempts to commodify the natural commons (through movements against mining and water privatization, for instance).

Despite the admirable efforts of innumerable people across the country, these new commons-based movements failed to produce a political expression—and by political we should not necessarily understand electoral, but rather a unifying force to gather the disparate experiments in social creativity and bring them together into a coherent proposal of wholesale social change. Syriza took advantage of this shortcoming in the movements, allowing it to ride the wave of social mobilization in Greece and construct a solid hegemony within many social struggles in the past five years.

This hegemony, however, came at a great cost for the movements. By its nature, Syriza is much more understanding of the type of struggles that envision a stronger state as the mediator of social antagonisms. This has resulted in the curtailing of demands that did not fit into a coherent program of state management—including most projects that revolve around popular self-management of the commons.

Starting in 2012, the meteoric electoral rise of Syriza put an end to the crisis of legitimation, since it produced a long awaited institutional response to the crisis. With it came a relative demobilization, and a desire of institutionalization of the struggles. This desire was not peculiar to the Greek context: Spain is another country where powerful grassroots mobilization gave way to a desire to “storm the institutions” (“asaltar las instituciones”).

Important theorists who championed and celebrated the horizontal movements of 2011 soon found themselves seduced by the electoral rise of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, and advocated for alliances between the grassroots and the rising left-wing parties that fought for control over the state—or in Negri’s terms, between constituent and constituted power.

Constituent and Constituted Power

Negri’s theory undercuts a lot of the analyses arising amid the post-squares hangover. As expressions of constituent power, the movements aim to transform social reality and propose alternatives from the bottom up. The party, by capturing the heights of the constituted power—the state and its institutions—is responsible for bringing about widespread social change, based on the social creativity of the constituent power.

While a small part of (the old) Syriza has always had a grassroots mentality, from 2010 onwards the party has invested quite a bit of effort in consolidating its influence within grassroots struggles. Despite having only a negligible presence within trade unionism—a sphere traditionally dominated by the Greek Communist Party (KKE) and the now near-extinct PASOK—Syriza steadfastly established its presence within all grassroots social struggles.

A strategic part of this was the founding of Solidarity4All, a party-funded organization which, despite having its legitimacy as a facilitator or mediator called into question repeatedly by many grassroots groups, has had a remarkable presence and activity among the endeavors in social and solidarity economy in Greece. Its organizational capacity, its ability to have full-time paid organizers, its access to funds and the media, and a promise of political solution to conflicts, allowed Syriza to establish a conflictive but lasting hegemony within the social movements.

Despite the centripetal influence of Syriza, the Greek grassroots movements have in the past five years molded themselves into a genuine constituent power, using their radical imagination to bring into being new institutions, new social relations and new approaches to the organization of social life. The occupation and self-management of the Vio.Me factory in Thessaloniki; the self-management by its own employees of ERT, the national broadcaster shut down by the previous government; the dozens of solidarity clinics; the proliferation of workers’ cooperatives; the proposal of Initiative 136 in Thessaloniki to bring the city’s water provider under citizens’ control—these are just a few of the more visible efforts to transform society through social self-initiative.

Has Syriza also fulfilled its part in the implicit bargain, that of the administrator of a “constituted power” that will turn these experiments in social self-determination into legitimate institutions? Has Syriza's capture of state power been an opportunity for the movements to achieve institutional recognition of their demands and struggles?

The "Conquest" of State Power

Quite the contrary: it soon became obvious that Syriza's state project does not quite dovetail with the demands of a society that is exploring ways to govern itself, but also that Syriza is unwilling or unable to deliver on its own electoral promises. This realization has led to a bitter divorce between Syriza and its former allies within the movements, and has largely lifted the veil of illusion regarding top-down solutions to social, environmental and class conflicts.

Of course it is evident today that the national government represents only a tiny part of real power. There are parts of the Greek state that are permanently out of reach of the government, especially the deep state of the judicial power, which is by its nature very conservative; the armed forces, which are penetrated by the extreme right; and the state’s entrenched bureaucracy. There is also, of course, the all-pervading power of the mass media and the oligarchy that controls them.

Syriza does not only seem incapable of confronting these powers; what is more, elements within the Syriza-led government (such as the influential former Deputy Prime Minister Yannis Dragasakis) have actively aligned themselves with the domestic and international elites, thus guaranteeing the continuation of the policies of the previous governments in many areas.

This is not only a weakness inherent to Syriza: it is an indication of the inadequacy of modern representative democracy. Vast areas of real power are completely out of reach of democratic control, even for the flimsy democratic control afforded by the institutions of representation. Prime Minister Tsipras spent months reiterating that “we have the government but not the power.”

However, his vision for the active involvement of society goes as far as organizing impromptu pro-government demonstrations, as was the case during the recent debt negotiations and the mobilizations ahead of the referendum. This conception of “popular power” as an accessory to governmental power is simply a caricature of what a real popular democracy would look like.

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 on autonomias.net. Stay tuned for the essay's third installment tomorrow.

Originally published by Roar Mag