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The Eurogroup emergency meeting came to an abrupt end at 12 a.m. Brussels local time, after 9 hours of excruciating debates.  The vacuum of information caused by the Eurogroup’s closed-doors meeting fostered a twilight zone of sheer terror for some – most of the Greeks –  and patchwork of divergent rumours were abundant: that the Germans would oppose any kind of deal; that, according to a few tweets, the opposition turned into a Finnish ultimatum, and that the Grexit was finally precipitating and imminent.

Within this void, various countries’ positions formed stark opposites. Compare the eternal French “joie de vivre” and the Italian “end to humiliation” with the Finnish, German and Dutch tough-on-Greece stance. All of this underlines that, whatever the outcome of the Eurogroup talks this week, the European project has capitulated and this might merely be the visible tip of a much more profound crisis. The specter of Greece haunts Europe.

A modernization of the Greek economy? The New Greek Proposition

The proposition that the new Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos tabled Thursday wasn’t in itself that different from the propositions that were deemed inacceptable by his ex-colleague Varoufakis not more than a week ago and which were also massively refused by the Greek public.

The new Greek proposal consists in its main outlines of cuts to pensions, which have already dilapidated since the onset of austerity measures in Greece, a rise in the sales tax (VAT), the progressive phasing-out of the VAT exemption for Greek islands, and the privatization of the last of the Greek public assets i.e. the port of Piraeus, which has been a point of contention.  Within the this potpourri of austerity on steroids the only silver-lining – if any –was to be found in the propositions of rising the corporate tax rate and the abolition of the exemption of taxation for ship-owners; a relic of the fascist dictatorship of colonels. These latter proposals were already turned down in previous negotiations by the Eurogroup.

Euclid Tsakolotos
Euclid Tsakolotos. Photo from Sinn Feid, Flickr CC by 2.0.

The emphasis was put on the “modernization” of Greece, by putting in place  necessary measures and adjustments to move Greece forward. This being said, drastic efforts have been put in place over the past few years to ensure that end; however the European Union has been unwilling to help with the said “modernization,” especially in terms of its financial framework, its taxation system and coming to its aid in its fight to prosecute tax evasion. The amount of Greek euros held in financial safe-havens like the London, Luxembourg and Switzerland in general, is incalculable.

Tsipras and the coup of the extreme-center

It might seem extraordinary, schizophrenic even, that, in less than a week, the Greek position, which seemed to be at the pinnacle of its power, invigorated by a crushing “Oxi” vote and the resignation of one of the main political leaders of the political opposition Antonis Samaras, capitulated to the rapacious force of the creditors. But to think anything different was failing to see the prophetic signs that those who had pillaged Greece for the past five year – some might say for decades – had any will to relinquish their hold of the Greek economy.

Thursday, as the first outlines of the new Greek proposition were tabled and the new package was put for before the Greek parliament to be voted upon, even the Greek prime minister couldn’t hide the calamity that was before Greek legislators.

“Between a bad and a catastrophic choice, we are forced to choose the first […] it’s not easy but we have to,” Tsipras said. During a tense and fratricidal debate, 251 MPs, many from the ranks of the governing coalition and those of the neoliberal extreme-centre (Potami and New Democracy) voted in favour of the new proposition. Notably, Tsipras lost the foundations of his governing majority and a split within SYRIZA (of its left platform) is imminent. The anti-austerity majority rising from the still fuming victorious Oxi vote was thus transformed, within the space of a few days, into its most dreaded enemy: a reconstituted, reinvigorated, extreme centre.

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The Eurogroup meets

From financial waterboarding to financial strangling

But this “strategic retreat,” as some have dubbed it within the European left, was the obvious outcome of the negotiations from the moment ex-finance minister Varoufakis resigned amidst the elation of the crushing victory of the Oxi camp as the final votes were being counted in last weeks referendum. The stance that Tsipras took, that a strong Oxi vote was a tactical maneuver to strengthen the Greek negotiating position didn’t materialize. Instead, the hounds of austerity saw the referendum as a provocation.

The first move of the Eurogroup through the European Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) was to maintain their stranglehold on the Greek public, through withholding funds that should have enabled Greek banks to reopen within this past week. This position was no different from the ELA’s position to cut all funding to Greek financial institutions from the day the referendum was called.

Using such tactics, which have come under none or very little criticism through the European partners, as ex-finance minister Varoufakis announced the morning of the referendum, was a move with the objective of terrorizing and subduing the Greek people into voting in favour of the dictum of the Eurogroup.

With all the frenzy of a Grexit, few have noticed that Greece has been de facto under a financial embargo, which has pushed it to the fringes of the Eurozone and was a consequence of European policy and not the hidden agenda of the Greek government.

Tsipras speaks
Tsipras speaking

A symbolic death for Europe

Two dynamics have been lethal for the Greek cause within the negotiations.

First: The Eurogroup reigns supreme. Europe, having pushed its weight around, has proven that it is the only relevant instance, that its members are the real deal brokers behind the curtains, and that’s where power lies within Europe outside of the public sphere: in a place at the antipodes of democracy.

Second: the Greek referendum had a huge symbolic importance but unfortunately not much more than that. The Oxi of 61% of Greeks within the current framework of the European Union is only binding to those that care for the notions of democracy and popular sovereignty. Those notions are alien to the Schäubles and Dijsselbloems of this world.

Many have stated the cataclysmic consequences of a Grexit for Greece, but little have measured the consequences this entire process has had on the future of the European project. While making his way through the hoards of journalists awaiting some newsworthy shred of information, Dijsselbloems stated that it was “still very difficult because of the lack of confidence that reigns between lenders and the Greek government.”

The European institutions have proven right – some would say once again – the Eurosceptics in their view that the EU has a complete disregard for the democratic will of the peoples it supposedly represents. The distrust between the peoples of Europe and the European institution has taken various forms. “Fascistoid” and xenophobic political formations have capitalized on this lack of confidence. The EU that sought to “modernize” Greece is in need of a profound “modernization” itself, which is why, today, the downfall of Greece might not necessarily mean the downfall of the EU. However, for the sake of a brighter future, it must mean its demise.

As Zoe Kostantopoulou said addressing the Greek parliament, “The No of the Greek people stands above us all.” “No”s in more languages than one will come in future and that’s the specter that haunts Europe.

News

It has been a little bit more than a week since the horrific shooting took place Charlie Hebdo’s offices, at 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert in Paris. It’s also been a little bit more than week since I wrote my last article – and boy has it felt like an eternity. On that day, it seemed as though the sky was falling on our heads, and the whole world had lost any sense of gravity. Ferocious debates broke out throughout the world, igniting fires at every corner. But the one that was lit in the aftermath of the January 7 attacks that still blazes today – an abyss of fire, straight outta hell – is the one divides us comrades of the Left.

Almost immediately after the attacks, the hashtag “#jenesuispascharlie” made its appearance, the manifestation of a section of left-wing people –mostly Anglophone here in Canada – who had trouble coming to terms with Charlie Hebdo’s lapidary sense of humour and razor-thin usage of satire. Within the past week many cried “racism” and “xenophobia.” They were appalled, even scandalized by the “racist rag” that was Charlie Hebdo, and how it perpetuated French imperialism and French neo-colonialism.

The violence perpetrated against Charlie Hedbo didn’t appear out of nowhere. Nothing exists in a social vacuum and surely, Charlie Hebdo reinforced (either willingly or unconsciously) the violence, the racism, and the xenophobia in French society. That was their argument – although they condemned the attacks, they couldn’t come around to defending the satirical publication for these reasons.

 

je suis charlie
Photo by Thierry Ehrmann, Flickr CC.

 

On the other hand, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of disciples of the ‘Word of the Market’ – capitalistic fundamentalists – which Charb and all the others at Charlie Hebdo had fought with the blatant, in-your-face passion which was their trademark, joined the ranks of the newly sanctified #jesuischarlie crusade, along with xenophobes, racist brutes, and fascist skinheads, who had finally found their call to holy war.

The link between both the “anti-racist” leftists (or as Zizek calls them, ‘liberals‘) and the right-wing opportunists and their facistoid crusaders, is that they were all wrong!

First of all, even though this point has been reiterated time and time again – here’s an excellent Ricochet article – Charlie Hebdo was anything but a racist publication. I will not reiterate here all the facts that prove that CH wasn’t a racist publication, or go into details about the particular nuances of their satire, but let me be clear: Charlie Hedbo isn’t a “racist rag.” There are those on the left that didn’t even know what Charlie Hedbo was prior to the attacks. Two minutes after seeing one of their covers, they decreed with their almighty “super radical” powers that CH was a “racist rag.” Charlie Hebdo and the CH team worked with SOS Racism in France and campaigned actively for the rights of the sans-papiers, fought against anti-Roma discrimination in France and was vocal against the Israeli perpetual oppression of the Palestinian people, it was known generally to the French public was CH was a left-wing, anti-racist, publication. This being said this doesn’t absolve Charlie Hebdo and the CH team of their overemphasis on Islam, in the context of the war of terror, which as has been said before, played in many ways into the Islamophobic and xenophobic rhetoric that has been and is dominant in French society and that must be condemned. The fact that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks many journalists of CH quit the publication because of Philippe Val’s editorial line that promoted depictions of the Prophet Mohammed and Charlie Hebdo descent into Islamophobic straits, is a manifestation of the tensions that existed. Unfortunately the best example of the over emphasis on Islam and Muslims is that CH decided once again to depicted the Prophet on the front cover of their latest issue, which is mistaken and wrong in my view.

This is a complex issue and there is, in my view no clear cut answer. Sometimes it is easier to condemn and to excommunicate, as it is easier to give a clear-cut simple answer to a very complex question: a simple answer that can create a unifying discourse that criticizes Islamic fundamentalism and every religious fundamentalism, while at the same time denounces Islamophobia, xenophobia and racism; a discourse that protects minorities, religious or not, that also denounces religious fundamentalism and its intolerance, its worst misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic aspects.

Pas charlie

Charlie Hedbo used, at least in my view, an interesting tactic: they analyzed various discourses – public, religious fundamentalist, fascist, the most dominant ones – used them against themselves. Charlie Hebdo twisted, turned, and transformed racist stereotypes and rhetoric to transcend them. Charlie Hebdo is filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of cartoons and caricatures, that shredded to pieces the racist, neoliberal and austerity discourses that were and still are prevalent in French society.

Many on the left decided to overlook such aspects in their criticisms, perhaps out of ignorance or maybe out of malice, or to advance some sort of agenda.

One thing is clear though, the attack against Charlie Hebdo’s offices reopened a blistering wound, a schism that has plagued the left for the past few decades: the inability for left-wing forces to reconcile “identity politics,” which can be broadly defined as anti-racist, anti-xenophobic, struggles for recognition, as Axel Honneth defined them, and the struggle against fanaticism of all stripes, against the economical fundamentalism of capitalism. What these tragic events do offer for the left is an opportunity to unite. One positive aspect of the #jenesuispascharlie hashtag is that it opens up a period of reflection for all of us on the left, and it begs the question: How can we fight fanaticism without becoming fanatics ourselves? How can we fight sectarianism, without becoming sectarian ourselves? The answer is to be found in a reformulation of traditional leftist internationalism which has been on the back-burner for too long!

On the other hand #jesuischarlie, has become the antithesis of everything Charlie Hebdo once stood for and maybe – let’s hope – still stands for. In the name of Charlie Hebdo a new religious fanaticism, a sort of McCarthyist witch hunt against all of those that dare to say that they aren’t Charlie has emerged. Charlie Hebdo’s crew anyways found refuge in the idea that not everybody was Charlie; that their humour, their worldview wasn’t “mainstream,” but marginal. That was their saving grace, the essence of their publication, and of their journalistic project. Thus, making #jesuischarlie into some sort of religious dogma is completely missing the point, and beyond that it’s an insult to the memories of those that #jesuischarlie is supposed honour. The core value of #jesuischarlie must be tolerance – the fact that we agree to disagree. We agree that people aren’t Charlie, will never be Charlie and, don’t have to be Charlie – and that’s just fine.

je-reste-charlie

This being said, it isn’t surprising that #jesuischarlie has become such a twisted and void slogan given the amount of tyrannical superstars, who have endorsed the so-called ‘movement.’ Some had high hopes in the aftermath of the tragic events that occurred on January 7, but by January 11, anyone that still hoped that #jesuischarlie would translate into a movement that would defy the institutional structures that continue to propagate discrimination and inequality were and remain delusional.

The fact that right-wing politician Nicolas Sarkozy used Charlie Hebdo’s tragic fate to boast his own political agenda; the fact that dictators, oppressors of free speech such as Netanyahu used #jesuischarlie to advance his call for French Jews to return to Israel; the fact that Marine LePen is using #jesuischarlie to advance her Islamophobic poison and justify the hate crimes that are rampant across France; and the fact socialist prime minister Valls is using #jesuischarlie as a trojan horse to pass the French version of the Patriot Act, in order to jail all those that have been thorns in his side for the past few years – Dieudonné – is tragic. It’s senseless, it’s disgusting. It’s so bad, that I don’t even know if Charlie Hebdo’s satires could render it justice.

So as things stand, we have a raging right-wing pole, disguised in the drapes of ‘Free Speech’, which in the name of an extreme-leftist publication has called for a Holy War under the banner of #jesuischarlie. We have leftists – only in name – who have decided to follow in their steps under the fake banner of National Unity. We also have leftists that have decided to embrace the #jenesuispascharlie rhetoric, and finally, we have those that will try as best as they can to stay true to the essence of Charlie, #jerestecharlie: those who understand the true essence of what Charb, Cabu Wolinski and Tignous stood for, understand what strain of leftism they came from.

There is one important lesson for the left to take from the tragic events that occurred last: there are many “lefts,” but nevertheless we must live with that, and work together. But most importantly out of the ruins of the Charlie Hebdo massacre comes the possibility for the left to build a Popular Front – instead of a National Union – that will reinvigorate the strain of radicalism born out of the French Revolution and build a movement that will simultaneously fight fanaticism and xenophobia.

Last Wednesday in a spontaneous moment of solidarity, I joined hundreds that had gathered in front of the French Consulate in downtown Montreal. At the end of the gathering, the crowd roared a resilient “la Marseillaise,” But what we need now isn’t La Marseillaise, what we need now is L’Internationale!

 

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The Western left is in dire straits today. Supposedly, the Left (at least the political parties on the left side of the political spectrum) is suffering from an acute sickness. Or is the Left dead?

What if the self-inflicted debacles of the Hollande/Valls administration in France, or of the Renzi coalition in Italy are not the symptoms of a sick socialist movement, but rather a clear manifestation that the Left as we know it has ceased to exist?

Up until now, debates within left-wing political formations have always been about direction, strategy, ideology and semantics. This is a tradition of the anti-establishment, or anti-capitalist movements that has varied throughout the decades and the past century.

Consider the debate between Bakunin and Marx, during the First International. Bakunin supported anarchist decentralization and horizontal organizing, while Marx argued for centralized, communist organizing, with an emphasis on the importance of the party structure. Also think of the indirect debate between Rosa Luxemburg‘s position of virulent war of movement and Gramsci‘s theory of cultural hegemony and his strategy attrition warfare during the la belle époque. And then there’s the debate between orthodoxical marxism and the New Left in the 1960s.

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The New Left in all its glory: The Weathermen during the Days of Rage in Chicago 1968

Debates concerning ideas have always been the tempo to which left-wing movements have danced and they have created the space and the horizon for the evolution and mutation of such movements. Through these debates, for example feminist, anti-racist and Queer agendas have been able to impose themselves, making left-wing movements put a greater emphasis on the notions of patriarchy, the subaltern, racism, gender and recognition. But today the left, especially the European “traditional” left, doesn’t debate ideas anymore, it debates the central idea that braids all of these different threads of struggles together: the idea of socialism.

Emmanuel Valls, the current prime minister of the French socialist government, didn’t create many ripples when he stated earlier this year that it was about time the French Socialist Party came to terms with what he called the modern world. His vision of modernizing the Socialist Party was to change its ontological conception and drop the whole notion of socialism to the extent of dropping the word from its name.

This has already happened in Italy where once the strongest Communist Party on the continent, outside of the Soviet orbit, which at its peak boasted one million card carrying members, decided to drop its Communist label and opt for a more modern appellation, re-branding itself the Democracy Party of the Left. This maneuver was then as it is now the manifestation of a roller-coaster magnitude slide to the right.

Dropping the word Communist threw the flood-gates wide open. First the non-Marxist-Leninist lefties and socialists joined the fray, then its was the social democrats, then confused and dazed centrists who still considered themselves progressive, but actually were neo-liberals at heart but couldn’t come to terms with it (kind of like the Liberals here in Canada) and finally anyone and everyone who like the color red or later on fancied pink.

Partito_Democratico_Logo.svg
This used to be the Italian Communist Party

The story of the Italian Communist Party is like the story of Jesus transforming water into wine, only that in this case it’s about wine being transformed into water. With every new section of adherents further from the Communist ideological base, the new Democracy Party of Left became more and more diluted until it finally reconstituted itself along neo-liberal ideological guidelines. Today the ideological differences between Matteo Renzi and  the remainders of Silvio Berlusconi’s political group are non-existent, both are the guardians of an austere status-quo.

In the aftermath of WWII in eastern Europe, Stalin had operated a similar strategy. To impose the hegemony of his Stalinist communist affiliates in the newly self-proclaimed people’s republics, Communists parties would side during the first set of “open” elections with left-wing non-communist political groups to fend off the fascist threat and thus succeed in outlawing them. Then they would cut off any centrist opposition and so on and so forth until there would be no opposition left.

At the end of this process Stalinist ideology and the Kremlin’s line reigned supreme. This was known as the salami-slice strategy.

In 2014 its seems that the Brussels or maybe the Frankfurt line reigns without any constraints or limitations. The opposition that should have been offered by existing left-wing governments or by socialist parties is dead, these political formations have slowly been devoid from any of their founding ideological principles, they are the walking-dead of neo-liberalism.

In a context such as this strange things can happen, such as a Socialist prime minister addressing the Business TV awards and telling the 1% audience with a rather soothing and gentle tone that he would make sure that next year they would capitalize even more on the plight of the French working-class. Such a turn of events has pushed many commentators to disbelief and denial.

Fédérique Lordon had to publish in Le Monde Diplomatique of September of this year, a lengthy article entitled The Left Cannot Die to feel better about the whole ordeal. Unfortunately, in most cases, when debating if something can or cannot die then the thing in question (in this case the left) is probably already dead.

But amidst this windfall of Socialist auto-destruction there are some glimmers of hope. The breach opened by the tragic suicide of the traditional left has allowed in some places such as Greece and Spain new movements with new ideas to breed.

The death of the left as we knew it has allowed a new generation of anti-capitalist, progressive and alternative perspectives to enter the political scene, this apparent ontological death carries within itself the power to give birth to a new ontological premises for left-wing movements. So maybe “socialism” must die, for socialism to thrive.

A luta continua,

NewsPolitics

A specter is haunting democracies throughout the world. A barely visible cloud, an entangling nebula is settling in throughout large swaths of modern political rhetoric. Many pundits and opportunistic spokespeople are saying that the Ghost of Ideology from days long past is speaking from beyond the grave, and that it has resurrected and is walking among us again.

But, surely the question we must ask ourselves is, “Did ideology ever die in the first place?”

Ideology — as a word — is used for the most diverse purposes nowadays. It can mean almost anything in the current state of world affairs. Ideology is seen as the equivalent of a political agenda or religious dogma; thus, the religious extremism of ISIS and the “neo-fascistoid” elements of Greece’s Golden Dawn or  France’s Front Nationale become conflated. Ideology has also become individualised; ideology is not a systemic development anymore, but rather a personal one. Individuals can build their own ideologies.

On the other hand, we apparently live in a “non-ideological” world. Modern day apostles have announced, in a very Nietzschean manner, “Ideology is dead”.
bush_mission_accomplished_uss_abraham_lincoln_reuters_img

At the same time, ideology has been “democratized” to the extent that it doesn’t mean anything anymore and has been declared irrelevant in the context of the advent of a non-ideological world.

Ideology can only be understood as a system of symbolic representations. It is, first and foremost, the articulation of a world-view through symbols. For instance, the current dominant global ideology of neo-liberalism uses growth, free trade, free markets, free enterprise and representative democracy as its symbols.

For many contemporary commentators, ideology was buried under the ruins of the devastation it created. From this vantage point, the death of ideology marked the end of a century of ideological struggles, which brought about war, famine and misery to most of mankind. The bi-ideological, and bipolar struggle that defined the Cold War is over. Capitalism is triumphant, all is well, ideology is dead, good night and good luck!

President Bush and President Gorbachev

But it is exactly when you think that you are roaming through the desert of ideology, exactly when the absence of ideology is supposedly self-evident, that is exactly when you’re submerged in ideology. You’re in the thick of it and can’t get out.

In his most recent public interview broadcasted on French national television 2 weeks ago, Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed his intention of reentering the French political scene. During the one hour interview Sarkozy made the case for a new “non-ideological” political movement that would move beyond the drawn fault line of left versus right. For Sarkozy, the main problem with the current Socialist regime was its ideological stance. I couldn’t disagree more. If anything, with the nomination of Manuel Valls as prime minister and his relentless grab for power, the Socialist government has proven that they too abide to this logic of a so-called non-ideological stance.

The problem with this discourse is that ideology, far from having disappeared from the French political scene, has, within the past few years, reinvigorated itself and has become so omnipresent that it now appears to be invisible, even non-existent. And this, because the majority of the French population has internalized the dominant ideology of austerity as being the ultimate truth — as has the majority of human beings on this planet.

In reality a non-ideological stance doesn’t exist. The political project to move beyond the ideological dichotomies of left versus right, of liberalism versus socialism — in the economical sense — doesn’t amount to anything more than a mirage of wishful thinking. Sarkozy is ideology at its purest form.

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Protesters against austerity in France

The left — read here socialists — might have abandoned their ideological attire, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t ideological. In many ways socialist parties throughout the European Union have shedded their social vision and have become another one of those -isms without a suitable prefix. Within this new political dimension of fluid -isms, the driving force is the market and the free circulation of capital, better known as austerity. Differences are non-existent, but one ideology clearly reigns all mighty.

This abandonment of ideology by left-wing movements has allowed extreme-right movements to fill in the void and appear as alternatives. The story is the same throughout Europe, but also with the Tea Party in the US, the Reformists here in Canada, and Modi in India. These neo-nationalist and neo-liberal movements may take various forms, specific to the context to which they belong, but their raison d’être is the same, to fill in an ideological void.

Sarkozy can proudly parade his “non-ideological” message, and he will encounter no dignified opposition, because the ideologically left-wing alternative is dead — if it isn’t dead, then it’s in tatters. From the ruins of this ideological surrender, we must strive to rebuild an alternative dialectic; the ontological survival of the “Left” depends on it. The battle against neo-liberalism and the rise of neo-fascism is, first and foremost, a direct assault on their symbolic mobilizers: The key words, like growth and jobs, that are at its symbolic foundation. Only though this deconstruction can come the construction of a true alternative. Now, more than ever, it is imperative that an alternative ideology be built from the ideological ruins of the Left’s upcoming self-destruction.

A luta continua.