Alain Badiou and Stathis Kouvelakis on Syriza and whether a radical
break from the eurozone is possible
*Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras via Jacobin.* [On Jacobin][1],
French journalist Aude Lancelin and political philosopher Alain Badiou
are joined by Syriza central committee member Stathis Kouvelakis in
conversation about the retreats, confrontations and contradictions
within Syriza and the necessities of politics and strategy in the
mobilization of Syriza’s negotiations with the European Central
Bank. Read David Broder’s translation of the conversation: > **Aude
Lancelin** > It’s a little over eight weeks since hope arrived in
Greece with the election of Syriza, a formation of the radical left
determined to break with Europe’s austerity policies. > Today, it
looks like there’s a very uneven test of strength under way, with
the troika reasserting its authority (even if with a euphemistic new
name) and the Greek government having to juggle a terrible liquidity
crisis (which Stathis is going to tell us about), with its future
prospects now looking very difficult indeed. > So a first question for
Stathis: can we say that Alexis Tsipras and Syriza as a whole were too
optimistic in terms of the amount of pressure they thought they’d be
able to put on the European institutions — starting with the
European Central Bank, which was the first to strike after Tsipras’s
election? > **Stathis Kouvelakis** > I think that Syriza — its
leadership, and also its activists — knew that this wasn’t going
to be a walk in the park. I think that what happened was largely to be
expected — and I am not the only one to think that. > Syriza’s
election provoked a collective attack from the European institutions,
with the ECB being the first to strike. Indeed, following the ECB’s
February 4 decision to shut off the main tap funding Greece’s banks,
the Greek government really had its back up against the wall in its
discussions with its so-called European partners. (I could hardly
think of a less appropriate term, given that they are in fact its
enemies, resolute enemies who are extremely determined to defeat it.)
> So it had to cope with this very difficult situation, and when it
finally signed the February 20 deal it faced the prospect of the banks
not being able to open the following week. Since the start of the
election campaign, there was constant movement of liquidity
withdrawal, and the beginning of a banking crisis, which accelerated
with the ECB decision. > This is a classic problem: all left-wing
governments in the world who were determined to change things ended up
faced with this kind of obstacle. At the heart of this question, is
Syriza’s, or its leadership’s, decision to break with austerity
within the framework of the European institutions, and, more
particularly, within the terms of the eurozone. This was the basis
Syriza was elected on, and this has been its line throughout the last
three years in particular. > Now we can say that we’ve seen the
limits of this strategy. We’ve seen that these European institutions
are not receptive to this kind of political or democratic argument,
which says “we’re an elected government with a mandate to carry
out, and you’re our central bank, and we can expect you to do your
work and let us do what we were elected to do.” > This is not at all
what it is about. These institutions are there in order to lock in
extremely harsh neoliberal policies, to lock in the troika supervision
of entire countries. And that’s exactly what they’ve set out to
do, forcing the Greek government into making retreats — very serious
retreats — in the February 20 agreement. And indeed the troika has
made its reappearance, renamed as “the institutions,” and at this
very moment the teams of troika experts are in Athens scrutinizing
Greece’s accounts. > What’s new though, as compared to before, is
that there has actually been a bras-de-fer — and it’s still
continuing. Syriza has been forced to make a retreat — and indeed,
within the terms of this strategy it simply had no other choice.
“Within the terms of this strategy,” to be clear. > Now the
European Commission has even tried to order the Greek government to
hold off passing two bills that are currently being discussed in the
Greek Parliament: one on so-called humanitarian measures, to deal with
an emergency situation and meet some basic pressing needs; the second,
concerning people who are behind on their tax payments. > And the
government has decided to press ahead. So ultimately that’s what’s
different about Syriza: that there really is a confrontation underway.
There has been a retreat — we have to be clear on this — but the
confrontation isn’t over yet, and it will particularly be fought in
the next few months, over summer, which will be decisive. And we have
to reflect, and put an alternative approach in place in order to avoid
a repeat of what was decided in February. > **AL** > Alain Badiou, are
you surprised by this turn of events? > **Alain Badiou** > I should
say right from the start that in this kind of situation, I don’t
want to wade in like some sort of know-it-all — the skeptic who can
see everything in advance. I hate that kind of posture. After all,
here we’re dealing with uncharted territory, and when you’re
addressing something new, by definition you need to look at how it
develops, its inflections, the contradictions it raises. > But this is
the question I want to pose Stathis: Syriza’s project is to produce
a rupture with the old policies — not only that, a rupture with the
policies that dominate Europe as a whole, and indeed the whole world.
That means asserting a very strong singularity. > So it seems to me
that we can currently see a contradiction at work between the newness
of this project and the political method used to achieve it. Its
current method is a classic one: occupying the heights of power within
the terms of constitutional/electoral legitimacy, and then proceeding
to maneuvers and negotiations with the “partners” — or as you
rightly point out, the enemies — hoping that all this can lead to an
effective resolution of the situation. > But as you say, the enemies
aren’t playing that game: that’s not their approach. And it’s
very important to understand that. So how do you think Syriza,
political forces in Greece, and ultimately the Greek people as a
whole, can engage with this situation in a different way from what has
gone before? > **SK** > Classic? Well, yes and no. If we examine the
current Greek sequence, by which I mean the last five years, we can
see that it features some very classic aspects, others much less so. >
What is less classic in this sense is the fact that Syriza would never
have come to power — having been a small party until just a few
years ago — if not for the emergence of popular mobilizations and
social movements in Greece, which are without a doubt greater in scope
than anything we’ve seen in Europe since the 1970s. And it’s no
coincidence that the other country in Europe that’s witnessed
similar mobilizations — indeed, ones that are innovative in several
regards, with the occupation of town squares, not to forget the dozens
of days of general strikes in Greece — is Spain, which also has its
own Podemos phenomenon. > So there’s an interaction between popular
mobilizations and political processes, which are also expressed at the
electoral level, and I think that’s absolutely crucial. And it’s
something new in Europe: we’d seen something similar in Latin
America in the recent period — and even earlier in Chile, with
Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity — but also more recently, for
instance, with Evo Morales coming to power in Bolivia. > But in any
case, I think it is certainly new on this continent, or at least in
Europe during the historical cycle we’re in. So, Syriza’s election
is the product of that mobilization but the temporalities of the
present cycle, the social temporality and the temporality of the
political process, are not synchronized — that would too much
asking. And that’s why politics and strategy are necessary. > Nor
are these temporalities synchronized at the European level, and
that’s something we ought to recognize. There will be no miracle
solution spontaneously emerging from below and powerful enough to
overthrow the whole balance of forces in one fell swoop; it’s more
complicated than that. > But the fact that Syriza has been able to get
as far as it has done thanks to popular movements also allows us to
say that its coming to power makes for the possibility of a new cycle
of mobilizations. And we saw as much in the weeks following its
election. > Something quite exceptional happened then, which [Prime
Minister] Alexis Tsipras himself underlined in his general policy
statement at the very beginning of February. He finished his speech by
making an appeal to the Greek people to mobilize, to take to the
streets, and to the town squares. He asked them to uphold the
constitution, invoking its final article, which is similar to the one
in the French 1793 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which specifies
that the constitution resides in the people and its patriotism, in the
French 1793 Jacobin sense, its right to rise up. > And indeed we saw
something that I thought was unprecedented by European standards, with
tens of thousands of people taking to the streets of Athens
simultaneously both to support the Greek government in this
confrontation with the [European Union], but also to put pressure on
it. And that continued right up till February 20. > This movement also
spread to a European level: February 15 was a Europe-wide day of
mobilization in support of the Greek people. In several cities
thousands or even tens of thousands took to the streets to
demonstrate, for example in Paris, but also in Rome, and other cities
too. In this recent period we’ve seen the hope you talked about also
translating into action. > **AL** > Would you say the strength of
popular support for Syriza in Greece has kept up, even though some of
its campaign promises seem to have been put on hold — or, at least,
they might face criticism on such grounds? > **SK** > The popular
support is still very strong, and indeed it amounts to a lot more than
Syriza’s own electorate. And just like in 2011 the people mobilizing
in the demonstrations came from far beyond the ranks of habitual
march-goers, or even Syriza’s own base. > At the same time, well
beyond that, Greek society in general is becoming conscious of the
difficulties it faces. It won’t be taken in by any simplistic
accounts about what’s happened. It knows that it’s very difficult
and that there’s an enormous amount of pressure and that the power
relations are heavily unbalanced. > So now we’ve arrived at a
different point, but I think we need to re-establish the conditions
for continuing precisely this interaction — between movements,
popular mobilizations, and the battles that will follow on the
institutional level in Europe and internationally. > **AB** > I
totally agree with what you just said, and that really gets to the
heart of my question. Which is about whether this political novelty
— and politics, as we’ve been saying, doesn’t mean just the
existence and the actions of the state, but also the interaction, and
the mobility of the interaction, between popular movements and the
state – is playing out in a new and unprecedented fashion. > I am
well aware that the Greek situation has all sorts of significant,
interesting, even unprecedented characteristics, from that point of
view — absolutely. And even across a period of several years: we can
remember the 2008 insurrections, etc. So the story in Greece is a
story of popular movements, of uprisings, people taking to the streets
across a number of years, that’s true, I totally agree. Syriza —
and Podemos, each operating according to its own register — are a
product of this singularity of recent years, not only with regard to
classic politics but also in terms of “inventing” politics . . . >
The question that’s bothering me , I might say, perhaps excessively
motivated by the eventual outcome of the [François] Mitterrand
government, is the following one: when Mitterrand was elected — and
this victory had also been on the horizon throughout the 1960s and
1970s — tens of thousands of people took to the streets to celebrate
his victory. > But very quickly we saw the emergence of a type of
government action that very quickly abandoned all that, little by
little retreating into the traditional workings of the state order,
giving in to conjunctural imperatives. And that broke this movement.
All that happened within about two years. Now with Syriza we’re not
two years in yet, but all the same I’m rather haunted by this image.
And I certainly hope, very much so, that this time around won’t be a
repeat of what happened then. > You wrote in one of your pieces that
the danger here is that if popular mobilization isn’t able to
control the state’s actions, via the mediation of the organization
that this movement created or made possible, state institutions
themselves will bring everything back under control. > I was very
struck, at the time of the Mitterrand period, by the speed with which
we saw, with which we could read, this kind of “statization.”
Particularly when it came to economic and financial policy: remember,
Mitterand had an extremely ambitious program of nationalizing central
parts of the French economy, most of the banks, etc. — and indeed he
did so. > But despite all that, I think that in the long run a
political method, a way of being political, is all-determining, and
that’s why I asked you — whose readings of Syriza I find so
fascinating — if it does express a new type of relation — new for
Europe in recent times, at least — between state processes and
popular movements. For me that’s the heart of the question. > **AL**
> All the same, the Syriza leaders are very different in profile from
Mitterrand: Tsipras came from a radical left, or even communist,
background, whereas Mitterrand’s political coloration, as a
longstanding politician at the end of his career, was much muddier. >
**AB** > It was less clear, yes, but even so, the Communists were in
the government, and its stated objectives were much more radical than
those of Syriza today. For the moment its political program is mainly
negative — “no to austerity,” “another way is possible,” but
its contours are not very specific . . . it makes no explicit
challenge to private property, though that’s at the heart of the
communist tradition. > But I’m not worried by that, I understand
perfectly well that the question of its immediate program initially
has to be proven through its first decisions in government. What
interests me in the new scenario is precisely the possibility of a new
dialectic between the popular movement and state actions, which is why
I asked you about it, that’s the new and different thing. Syriza’s
leadership is made up of new kinds of organization, but that leaves us
with the question of whether its way of engaging with the state is
new. > **SK** > I agree with what Alain Badiou just said. Just one
word on the program: I think that a program’s radicalism is best
measured in terms of the conjuncture, and not in the abstract. >
**AB** > That’s right. > **SK** > And in the current conjuncture,
even very modest or moderate demands take on what I would even call
revolutionary dimensions. As we can see, today to demand the
cancellation of the debt is to draw a sharp demarcation line,
disorganizing the enemy’s forces. And this enemy also knows where
the dividing line, the point of conflict, now lies. > We need to
inflict defeats on neoliberal policies, and the Greek example shows
that movements and mobilizations are the indispensible condition and
the starting point of this process, but they do not alone suffice. We
have to take over the state but without being wholly taken over by the
state. That’s the whole problem. > I was in France throughout almost
the entire Mitterrand period, and I was struck by the fact that the
only sector of society to mobilize — indeed, very soon after the
Left’s victory in 1981 — were the car workers. And for the most
part, indeed these car workers were immigrant workers. > **AB** >
Which the government explicitly attacked. > **SK** > Exactly, that was
when Pierre Mauroy [the prime minister during the first three years of
Mitterrand’s presidency] made statements such as the claim that
these strikes were being manipulated by Iran, by Islamists, etc. >
**AB** > It was a crucially important episode. > **SK** > Yes, it was
a crucially important, particularly in the sense Alain Badiou has been
talking about, the question of political method. If a government makes
clear that a part of its own base — indeed, a highly emblematic one
— is seen as its enemy, and that it considers such a mobilization as
a threat, then the process is clearly going in the wrong direction. >
The other important level at which the Mitterrand government failed
was, indeed, the European one. The choice it faced at the time was
whether to exit what was then called the European Monetary System —
meaning, continuing with a policy of active state intervention, in the
direction traced by the nationalizations and giving a stimulus to the
economy – or else to remain within the European framework and make a
neoliberal turn. > And it went for the second option. All things
considered, Syriza’s options today are not really that different.
Either it takes a path of rupture with the European framework — and
the contours of that move would have to be explored, that’s the main
challenge for Greece’s political and social forces today — or else
it will have to give in, which would be a very heavy defeat with
potentially disastrous consequences. Not only for Greece, but also for
the whole political struggle going on in Europe at the present moment.
> **AL** > Indeed, I wanted to talk about the euro, as you’ve just
referred to. Some observers would have us believe that Tsipras wanted
to buy these four months — that is, before the next round of
negotiations in June — precisely in order to secretly prepare the
ground for eventually pulling out of the eurozone. Or you hear at
least some people saying that. > You know what is happening inside
Syriza. So what exactly is the balance of forces between the
internationalists — in the broad sense, that they stick to the idea
that a break with Europe is unthinkable — and those, including
yourself, I believe, who don’t agree with staying in the eurozone at
whatever cost and regardless of the consequences. > **SK** > I have
just a little objection to one term you used there. I can’t accept
it being said that those who insist on staying within the eurozone,
including the Syriza comrades with that kind of position, are
internationalist while the rest of us are not. Even if I think that
these comrades are internationalist, and this is also the way they
think of themselves. > Personally I would say that the European
Central Bank has nothing to do with internationalism, I don’t see
the slightest hint of internationalism in Mr Mario Draghi, and I think
internationalism is on the side of those are now opposed to Mr Mario
Draghi, his politics, and everything he embodies — including him
personally, physically. > This question of the euro has always been
the object of intense debates within Syriza. And it’s posed as
follows: there’s this view that given that leaving the euro would
lead us into very serious problems — and this is true — for
instance in terms of its potential effect on purchasing power and the
country’s productive activity, we are better off trying to fight our
battles within the existing institutions. The idea is to base
ourselves on public support and the movements that are out there, and
fight a battle that takes advantage of the current contradictions in
Europe. But now we’ve seen that this doesn’t work. > The four
months we’ve “won” are not four months of breathing space. The
country is still under extreme pressure and constant blackmail. In
fact, the Greek state is on the brink of not being able to pay its
bills, and it faces a continuing series of loan repayment deadlines
— by no means did the deal put a stop to this infernal machine of
debt. > It is quite possible that next month it will find itself
unable to pay civil servants and pensions, and face a situation of
insolvency. The same goes for the Greek banking system, which is
extremely precarious. But I think the line is changing. > The day
before yesterday Alexis Tsipras gave a really noteworthy interview to
a Greek newspaper, which asked him if he had an alternative plan in
the event of a liquidity crisis. To quote almost word for word, he
replied, “Of course, we have an alternative plan. Greece does not do
blackmail, but nor will we accept blackmail from others. The country
has a lot of possible options; of course we don’t want to reach such
an impasse, but . . .” > So that’s where we are at the moment, in
sum. In my view, there’s no other way, and that also goes for the
European negotiations. If the enemy — and it is an enemy — knows
in advance that there is a line that you won’t cross, he’ll
naturally focus all his pressure exactly there. And that’s exactly
what’s happened, and will continue up to the point of besieging
Greece and forcing its capitulation. > For Europe’s political elites
and the economic interests they represent, it’s vital not only to
force Syriza into a retreat, but to humiliate it politically. Such a
political humiliation would also be a shot across the bows of Podemos
and all the social and political forces in Europe that challenge
austerity policies: “See what happened to the Greeks? That’s
what’s in store for you if you try and do the same.” > **AL** >
But how much of Syriza is prepared to make such a break? To quote an
interview you gave in January, before the election I think, to Jacobin
magazine, you said that for some Syriza leaders, “avoiding the break
with the euro at any cost acted as almost a mythical guarantee for an
internationalist and socialist perspective.” And that’s what’s
orienting Syriza’s policy at the moment. So what’s the balance of
forces among these tendencies — how many people agree with your
line? > **SK** > It’s really hard to describe a balance of forces,
in such a tense situation, because what we really have is fluidity.
What I said in this interview is that I think the Greek situation is
one where there’s no middle course between rupture and capitulation.
> This isn’t a scenario that plays out in one instant, it lasts some
time — but there’s also a limit how far it can go on, and in my
view it will be resolved one way or the other in the next few months,
by the summer. This short, dense period will see the resolution of a
lot of issues and contradictions both within Syriza and in Greek
society more broadly. > **AB** > I wonder, though, whether in reality
the choice you present as being at the end of the current scenario,
its future horizon, of doing everything that staying in the euro
demands and thus letting the enemy know that one way or another
you’re ultimately going to capitulate — entirely so, giving in on
all of your main principles as far as the enemy demands — is not in
fact constitutive of the current situation. > On the other hand, the
question of where the Greek people will find the possibility of
resolving the current situation is a lot more complex and unclear.
Something that really struck me in the recent period is [former French
President Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing shifting toward a view
supportive of Greece leaving the euro. > He’s no friend of yours in
terms of the rupture and all that, but he said things anyone might
find reasonable, that Greece should leave the euro and go back to the
drachma, so it could undertake major devaluation, and, in that
context, little by little reduce the debt. > So even a man like him
can say that all things considered, Greece leaving the eurozone would
be best for everyone concerned . . . doubtless it would cause problems
in Greece, but you’d have to take care of that, and ultimately we
could see what the lay of the land is after you’ve devalued your new
currency. > I mention that in order to emphasize that the tension over
this issue is a question of tactics, a conjunctural question
concerning your relationship to Europe — but what would be the
political, popular, programmatic basis for such a measure in terms of
your positive vision of Greece and the future of the Greek people?
This is a question which is being very much debated at the moment,
also in various technical aspects, of leaving and devaluing or staying
and persisting. > So what I’m asking is how you see the next phase,
or a bit beyond — and some would say that communists’ task is
always to see the phase after next! I’m interested in what you see
as coming after this current battle, even if I can understand that
this itself has all its own ins and outs and raises all sorts of
tensions both within and outside Greece. > **SK** > We’re in a
moment of crisis. At such a moment even the adversary, not only our
side, is hesitating between various different strategies. For the
moment, though, the dominant strategy isn’t the one you mention,
though it does exist: part of the German elite also agrees with
Giscard’s position, that it’d be better to cast off the Greeks,
from some points of view even at any cost. > But what the dominant
forces in Europe really want now is to shake down the country. They
want to keep Greece in the “iron cage” and force Syriza to do what
all the other governments of the Left in Europe ended up doing. They
want to show that Syriza is just the same as all the others, that
it’s inevitable, that there is no other way. That’s their real
strategy, to show that Tsipras is no different from [French President]
François Hollande, no different from [former Italian Prime Minister]
Romano Prodi, no different from what we recently got from the
social-democratic left across Europe. > As for the question of
possibilities, there’s an expression you use in your book The
Rebirth of History that really struck me, where you say that we’re
not in the moment of the possible, but of the “possibility of the
possible.” > And, honestly, that came into my mind the evening of
the Greek election, because one of my Syriza friends said that the
people hadn’t really voted for hope, so much as for the hope of
hope. I believe that’s where we’re at, in a phase where our task
is to break out of the straitjacket. And it’s then that the question
of possibility will really be posed, in the flesh, if you will. > I
would also pick up on another of the themes you raise in your
writings. Like you, I believe we need an idea, and that there’s no
other word for that idea but communism. But for me communism isn’t
just an idea, it’s also, if you like, the real movement. > **AB** >
Of course. > **SK** > So there’s a tension there. And I think that
the Greek situation perhaps allows us to pose this question once
again. Not in simplistic and naïve terms as imagining that Syriza
“is” communism — I am not saying that at all. But rather, that
the sequence we’re currently living through, this experience and the
various elements underlying it, allow us to return to this question
because it offers elements of an answer. > Not a ready-made answer,
but elements that allow us to work on it once again — including a
point that you’ve notably left aside, namely taking over the state.
And by that I’m talking about more than elections — to become the
government is something quite different from holding state power! But
we need to take over the state in order to win victories, to break off
the straitjacket, and to break with the internalization of defeat. >
Across a whole period the radical left has suffered from this,
internalizing its subalternity, and to overcome this situation we need
victories — not one, but several victories. What happened in Greece
was not the victory, but it was one victory, and one that points in
this direction. > **AB** > I totally agree. I myself experienced
Syriza’s coming-to-power in exactly the sense you describe, as a
victory that clearly changes the regime of possibilities in Europe
today. Certainly. I wasn’t among those of our friends who talked
about voting Hollande with a view to perhaps opening up some new
possibilities, only to find out eventually that wasn’t the case at
all — I could see that much, at least! > To put it in more schematic
terms, in this matter there are three terms and not only two. There
are the end goals, there is the movement, and then there is the
procedure by which we engage with the state. Naturally this is only
possible thanks to the movement, yet at the same time in reality it is
executed or realized by clearly identifiable, organized political
actors. > And in Greece, Syriza is the name for the new way in which
politics is organized, in terms of the relation between popular
movements and the state, a relation that it has itself transformed.
That’s a more abstract way of describing the situation. > So my
question is what you think will become of this dialectic, not just
right now but also in the near future. So I can see Syriza’s
engagement with the state, the beginning that represents, with its
involvement electoral process — and if something good comes of that,
then great! Then I can see what remains of popular pressure and
popular mobilizations in Greece. These movements were, however, in
decline before the election. It’s not like Syriza won the election
because they were on the rise. > **SK** > Of course. > **AB** >
That’s the way thing usually go. In France in June 1936, the great
social movement came after the election, in Greece it came before, but
in neither case were these moments synchronized. But anyway, what I
don’t see clearly is the third term, by which I essentially mean how
the other two terms are articulated in the figure of the political
movement, which in the last analysis means Syriza — it is the
political movement, and it’s taken on a very important role. >
I’ve been following what you’ve been writing very closely, and to
me it seems that Syriza is somehow fragile. That’s something
that’s really struck me about it. By that I don’t just mean the
disparate origins of its component parts, but the fragility resulting
from what is probably a still minimal agreement among these different
elements, an agreement that probably isn’t up to the task of
immediately addressing the conditions of the party’s engagement with
the state. > The conditions, as you rightly put it, for really taking
power, for really taking over the state. So I wonder what you would
have to say about the relation of these three terms, from Syriza’s
point of view, as it were. > **SK** > I think Syriza allows us to make
some progress in terms of dealing with the question of the party form.
Of course it is a project in becoming: one that still has open
prospects ahead of it, and which is itself a site of contradictions.
So we have to find a way of dealing with all that. > Syriza is an
attempt to bring together the revolutionary movements and radical left
cultures inherited from the twentieth century, and make them work in a
common endeavor. But sometimes it seems like these cultures coexist
without yet succeeding in producing a new political culture, even if
there has been some progress in that direction. [1]:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/04/greece-syriza-euro-austerity/
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras via Jacobin.
On Jacobin
,
French journalist Aude Lancelin and political philosopher Alain Badiou
are joined by Syriza central committee member Stathis Kouvel...