The Rise of Syriza: an Interview with Aristides Baltas

THE RISE OF SYRIZA: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARISTIDES BALTAS This interview with Aristides Baltas, the eminent Greek philosopher who was one of the founders of Syriza and is currently a coordinator of its policy planning committee, was conducted by Leo Panitch with the help of Michalis Spourdalakis in Athens on 29 May 2012, three weeks after Syriza came a close second in the first Greek election of 6 May, and just three days before the party’s platform was to be revealed for the second election of 17 June. Leo Panitch (LP): Can we begin with the question of what is distinctive about Syriza in terms of socialist strategy today? Aristides Baltas (AB): I think that independently of everything else, what’s happening in Greece does have a bearing on socialist strategy, which is not possible to discuss during the electoral campaign, but which will present issues that we’re going to face after the elections, no matter how the elections turn out. We haven’t had the opportunity to discuss this, because we are doing so many diverse things that we look like a chicken running around with its head cut off. But this is precisely why I first want to step back to 2008, when through an interesting procedure, Synaspismos, the main party in the Syriza coalition, formulated the main elements of the programme in a book of over 300 pages. The polls were showing that Syriza was growing in popularity (indeed we reached over 15 per cent in voting intentions that year), and there was a big pressure on us at that time, as we kept hearing: ‘you don’t have a programme; we don’t know who you are; we don’t know what you’re saying’. So our response was to come forward with a programme that would allow us to show clearly what we stand for. In the event, when we published the programme in early 2009, not a single newspaper in Greece, not a single TV station, not a single journalist ever mentioned the existence of this book. This shows the quality of the media in Greece. Now, I want to point out a number of things about this programme. First, it was formulated collectively, in the sense that, although there was a THE RISE OF SYRIZA 121 committee responsible for formulating it over a year, it was done through a kind of open discussion with many groups, which offered suggestions from different points of view. We tried to synthesize them and then returned our drafts to them for comments, so it was re-discussed up until the moment we came up with the finished product. And I think it was a very interesting collective experience of how you can gather ideas of many people related to all the social arenas, and synthesize them in a kind of unique book. So this is one aspect. The second thing I want to say about this programme is that in the introductory chapter we tried to somehow trace an idea of socialist strategy in light of a number of methodological principles. We didn’t present the view, let’s say, in the sense of a theory predisposing us to take power by an uprising or by a general strike or by I don’t know what. But we wanted to follow the social movement itself as it developed. Hence, we tried to participate in the movement and present our views so as to try to guide it while at the same time learning from it and following its objective rhythms. I think the phrase that would catch this idea is from Antonio Machado, the Spanish poet, who says: don’t ask what the road is; you make the road while you walk on it. LP: Just to clarify, you were in this process before the uprising of the students erupted in December 2008? AB: That’s a phenomenon which in my view nobody has really understood as yet. Yes, we were in the process of creating the programme beforehand. And we took the decision not to discuss the uprising in the book, because we could not foresee its outcome and full historical dimensions. But we took it into account. For example, this uprising might have led to a real revolt, might have led to a seizure of power. We felt we should be ready for, and open to, even this kind of eventuality. But also to be ready when the thing cooled down, as we all understood it might well do. So it is not the main thing that we wait for this kind of uprising. It’s not preparing uprisings or things like that, but, as I said before, to try to follow step-by- step what is really happening in society. This is, I think, a way to get out of the old dilemma ‘reform or revolution’ while keeping fixed the strategic goal, namely socialism. In terms of the programme’s content itself, it first of all reflected the fact that we realized at the time what was happening in society had very much to do with what we call in Greece public space. There were important local movements, for example, to protect the city square as a place for people to walk in, to protect the trees there against the building of parking lots, or to protect a bigger area in Athens from the building of a big stadium, things 122 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 like that. And in these kinds of movements, ‘real people’ participated – and in this respect the distinction between ‘real people’ and ‘people of the left’ is one that does need to be made. We discovered that there is an interesting new, let’s say, dividing line within society between those who are for the public sphere, as it were, and those who stand for the private interest. So we tried to develop an idea of the public sphere –radically different from a statist conception – as what we should go for. A second dimension of the content of the programme followed from this, since this went together with distinguishing enterprises in the public sector from state enterprises that can be very badly run, with all kind of corruption. This is the kind of state enterprise we don’t want. But the situation in Greece is also such that what we have to take on here is the destruction of a state which is absolutely corrupt, beyond possible measure corrupt. So our own programme can be read also as saying that we’d like a society like Sweden, or like even Germany, because these kinds of problems – corruption, distinction between following rules and not obeying rules, etc. – have more or less been solved there. Of course, nothing’s perfect in Sweden or Germany, far from it, but they have more or less solved this kind of problem. So the radicalism of Syriza is also a kind of rationalizing force seeking to accomplish something that has been accomplished elsewhere in Europe by a bourgeois society. So you can read our programme both ways. And I think that’s good, because, in a given context, such a view can be quite acceptable to conservative forces in other societies. And given this, there was a third dimension to the content of the programme: the idea is that you must have the economic foundation of what we mean by public sphere. We called this the economy of needs – and the programme was about promoting economy of needs against promoting economy of profit. Of course, need is a big word. We didn’t enter a theoretical discussion of how need is defined and all that, but this was sufficient to make the point clear. And so with these ideas, and together with the standard idea that Greece is part of Europe – part of the whole world, of course, but what’s happening here especially influences what happens in the rest of Europe – we developed our idea of strategy. Whether change happens with an uprising or with elections or anything in between, or because something happens in a different country, we were conceptually ready to receive this and participate in this. Our ideology, which in the deepest sense is key to the coherence of a genuinely left group, is a non-dogmatic Marxism, one open to all kinds of new views, from Foucault to Žižek, to what you will. We try taking all this into account. We don’t close off the future into a theoretical box. These are, according to me at least, the main ideas of the programme. THE RISE OF SYRIZA 123 LP: Especially because of the hinge point around nationalizing and socializing the banks, it looks like you have a well-developed economic strategy. AB: I’m not an expert on that, although I can give you perhaps general conclusions. Regarding how we treated particular issues such as the banks and all that, well, the crisis had already started by the time we formulated the programme. It started, as we know, from United States subprime loans, then the Lehman Brothers default, and then it spread to the sovereign debt phase. At that time, we were perfectly ready with proposals for Europe and for Greece, perfectly ready. I mean in terms of what was happening to the banks at that time, what was happening in capitalism as a whole, what was happening in Europe, we had the best analysis, with solutions like the ones they’re discussing now: the European bonds or the moratorium for the debts, all these ideas which are just now becoming part of the public debate all over Europe and the United States.

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