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. But at the time, to show you once again what the media system is here, whenever any of us formulated these ideas at the time, they said: ‘this is crazy; we don’t know who you are; you don’t know what Europe is; forget it; this is a unique street, this street of austerity’. All this is attested to in the record of the television discussion shows during that period. And this explains, in a way, the flow towards us: because memories are short, of course, but not that short. And so people recognize now that these Syriza people were saying then what everybody now is saying.

LP: So what happened on the Greek left politically that set the stage for this creativity? The radical elements in your programme have not been in your programme only since 2009. It’s always been in your programme. Where does this come from? AB: Those ideas have been lingering for decades, but they became important in the midst of the crisis. If we ask what are the roots of these ideas, and of Syriza generally, we should start counting from 1989. During the Gorbachev era, the old Communist Party was forced to enter into alliance with the other parts of the left. It was for only a short moment, which the Communist Party quickly retreated from, but this led to a big split. The one side became the KKE we have now. And the other side was Synaspismos, the major force behind Syriza today, which mainly for electoral reasons formed an alliance with smaller groups from the broad communist tradition, including from Trotskyist or Maoist backgrounds. The ideological identity might not have been very clear, but as we also came together in strikes and in the streets, this formed the seed for what is happening now. Despite all 124 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 kinds of internal tensions from time to time, this coalition stabilized itself, gave the sense to everybody that we all could work together. And this was a new kind of experiment in Europe; you couldn’t imagine some years ago that the Maoists, the Trotskyites, communists of different currents, feminists, all of this and all of that, would have succeeded in stabilizing their political alliance as they did in Syriza. Now, this is an especially interesting case, because Synaspismos was regarded by the other groups as a little bit too reformist. But when the moderate right wing of Synaspismos broke away and formed the Democratic Left a few years ago, this clarified that the majority of Synaspismos itself was not reformist. Another thing you might be interested in is that social movements in Greece have normally been politically centralized. What I mean is that it’s very rare that you have in Greece grassroots movements, not related to a party organization of the left. So it has been a new experience for us these two last years with demonstrations on a scale never witnessed before. These were different from the old kind of protests that were directly organized by one of the parties, or at least closely related to them. In the recent mobilizations, everybody was very careful not to say this is a Syriza demonstration, this is an Antarsya demo, just follow our flags and things like that. So people started to respect this political diversity. And I think this was an important part of how we got to where we are today.

LP: And the zeitgeist that goes with the politics of protest demonstrations today, which reflects the anarchist rejection not only of the state but of parties, is that here? AB: Absolutely. And yet, we know – not from polls, because such things are not counted there – that almost all anarchists are actually voting, which was unimaginable a year ago for them. Some justify it by saying that the rise of the extreme right requires protection against, so we vote for Syriza. But this is a kind of ideological justification. What they are really realizing is that what fighting means right now is to vote. When an anarchist student told me, there’s no movement, I realized what he meant is that there are no demonstrations in the streets during the election. It’s absolutely peaceful if you walk around Athens right now. Everything is about the elections. But the fight is inside this and not outside of it, even if from a ‘classical’ point of view there is no movement. So the big question: how this non-movement creates havoc in capitalism in general? That anarchist student I had the discussion with later told me he started to understand that movement is not just you go on a demonstration. True, without the one, the demonstrations, you can’t have the other, the radical kind of electoral choice there now is here. You have to understand the dialectics of this. THE RISE OF SYRIZA 125

LP: Yet once the student uprising waned, and the moderate parliamentary types left Syriza to form the Democratic Left, your electoral standing fell back to some 5 per cent from the highs of 2008. And it did not revive immediately when the great wave of protests erupted in Greece over the last few years. What suddenly changed this year? Was it something you did? Was it a way of talking you discovered after the new government signed the second Memorandum setting out the conditions for austerity and structural adjustment agreed to with the so-called troika of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund? Was it how you responded to this in February and March? Or was it more that you just happened to be standing there while, as Lenin said about what the Bolsheviks realized in 1917, ‘power was lying in the street’? AB: I think there was one big moment in the campaign. There clearly was a slowly rising movement towards us even before the election campaign started. We had clearly been the most consistent opposition at all levels, inside the parliament and outside, in theory and in practice, and people, even polls, recognized this. And during the electoral campaign we noticed this movement towards us really growing. We started from 4 per cent, then 6 – and the initial expectation in the first week was optimistic – we’ll get 10 per cent. The second week, even more optimistic – we will get 12 per cent. But by the third week something really changed when our leader, Alexis Tsipras, suddenly said in an interview on the web, ‘we want to lead a government of the left’. At the moment he formulated it, everybody said, what do you mean government of the left, who will form it, what does it want, etc. But instead of falling back, Tsipras said, yes, we want the government of the left. We are ready. We on the left are not afraid of taking power. Nobody expected that such a stance would create the kind of mood it did. Most people in the party initially thought that if you put it like this, they will say you are crazy, you aim beyond your means. But this stance of Tsipras made a big difference. And I think the move from 12 or 13 to over 17 per cent reflected people saying, here’s a force which takes this possibility of governing the country seriously. We don’t care if they are leftists or revolutionaries or whatever. We like this kind of talk. We have tried the other people already, so let’s try these people, and see whether, in everyday things, they are honest and good people and clever people, and if they have the expertise. It was transforming the negative myths of the movement into something positive and something new, pointing a way out of the old corrupt structures of politics and the state that made the difference. 126 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

LP: So a very heavy burden of responsibility has come upon you in only a few months really. Even in April, you had no sense you might be forming a government. AB: And what is worrying is that the party through the election campaigns has become even more amorphous than it used to be, because there are all kinds of things now which cannot be centralized in the standard way. As we respond to the needs of the moment, it adds to the amorphousness of the whole thing. For example, at a meeting yesterday I tried to formulate what I think Syriza’s line for the election is, but it might not be exactly the line, just more or less the line.

LP: Okay, let’s turn to this. What is the line more or less? AB: The line more or less is what we do the next day after we are elected. If you follow the TV shows during these days, there is an incredible fight over words. We are saying that we can end the Memorandum; the Democratic Left is saying we will hook ourselves on the Memorandum to change it; the New Democracy says we will renegotiate the Memorandum; and Pasok also says something along those lines. All these people on TV are fighting over words. So the big issue is what do we really mean, what is the content of the words? Our line is, as I understand it, forget about those words. We say we will form a government, and when we have a majority we will strike out the laws, the particular laws which have had such a terrible bearing on social life, on minimum wages, on work relations and things like that. These will be the first steps of our government. If the European Union says you can’t do this, you have to abide by the Memorandum, then it’s up to them to find the means, both politically and legally, to expel us. Indeed, if they do try that, it would be legally and politically very difficult to do. So this is the line as I understand it. But you will hear it put differently, whether it is a party economist or a Syriza spokesman on TV. There’s a kind of fuzziness about the details of the line, and for good reasons. A group of our economists visited both the Bank of Greece and the Ministry of Finance. They got some information. They understood that the government has no Plan B for the country if an accident happens to the banking system or whatever. And so it’s a very slippery situation given the financial state Greece is in. I am confident in the expertise of our economists. I think they’re much better than the economists of other parties on all levels, there’s no question about that. But in all conscience, I think we cannot say more, we cannot be more precise, until we can really look at the situation closely. There have been newspaper reports that say there is €2 billion hidden somewhere within THE RISE OF SYRIZA 127 the state – it appears someone discovered this mysterious fund somewhere which nobody touched before.

LP: That would make a big difference. AB: It makes a big difference. And on top of that there are all kinds of hidden games between those who are corrupting themselves and corrupting others inside the state. Unless we have a clear picture of that, we cannot in all honesty say what we will be able to do in any significant detail.

LP: By one calculation, if you remove the payment on the debt completely, you only have a 1 per cent deficit. AB: Perhaps even less. But we will have to wait for the next weeks and see what happens.

LP: But whether it turns out you have more or less room for manoeuvre, when you yourself say you are not an expert on economic policy, on economic strategy, this worries me, because this is going to be the first test of what you can do in government and where you will strike the compromises, especially if there is no clear Plan B in terms of what you will do if you are forced out of the Euro. AB: It could be said that capitalism itself at this stage has no, as it were, Plan B. Neoliberal capitalism with all the offshore companies, and the hedge funds and all that, has no real plan B even in the sense of returning to a kind of Keynesianism.

LP: But that’s precisely the point. If you’re right in what you just said, will your economic policy be run by people who think capitalism can go back to Keynesianism? That’s the question: do they agree with you that it is impossible to accommodate the reforms in a way that will become stable within capitalism? AB: Two points here. One, we do have a Plan B. But, for reasons you understand, this cannot be made pubic at this stage. Two, what impresses me during this electoral campaign is that people in our base understand fully the situation. They’re not expecting more. They are not waiting for an immediate solution to their problems or for the big revolution. They are really down to earth, understand the difficulty and the reality both of Plan B and of Plan A, so to speak. I mean, the attitude is they can throw us out of the eurozone or whatever, but at least we keep our dignity. Ordinary people who populate our meetings say this. There’s a lot of initiatives, a lot of spontaneity and a lot of people go to our talks in every neighbourhood 128 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 in the area of Athens or in the other big cities giving voice to such attitudes.

LP: But what if you manage to strike a compromise that lets you stay in the Eurozone and then you have to mask that in the language of compromise? AB: In the ‘official language’.

LP: In the official language of compromise, are you not concerned you will thereby lead your activists away from a socialist perspective? And if you are pushed out of the EU, on the other hand, are you really so confident that ordinary people are ready for Plan B and for the sacrifices that would come with it? AB: I am confident that we will maintain our discourse in any case. I am confident in our leadership in this sense. That we might be striking a compromise will be declared openly and sincerely. And from what I have seen during the campaign, I am confident that people will understand this.

LP: Is the majority of the leadership really as radical as you are suggesting? AB: The inverse problem is the case. I mean on the central committee you have somebody who is a Maoist, somebody who is a Trotskyist of the A variety, somebody who’s a Trotskyist of B variety, somebody who comes from the communist traditions, somebody who is quasi-anarchist. So you need somebody there to balance off the strong left presence there, not the other way around. That said, the organizational structure is very amorphous – and yet despite all kinds of organizational issues, somehow we are not only surviving but thriving.

LP: But the leadership who will become ministers if you win is a different leadership than who is on your central committee, surely? AB: Not really. I hope that our ministers will have two broad aspects, one aspect being of the left and being recognized as being of the left, but also the aspect of assuring a kind of expertise. Taking over the state really means finding 10,000 people like this at every level of government. Even at the national level alone you need to find, let’s say, 1,000 people. Well, the kind of people we have in the party, they can organize a meeting, they can give a speech, and more or less talk intelligently about what’s happening in the world. But how many have ever thought of how to run a ministry? So we can have 1,000 ministers who are politically able, but very few who already have the expertise for running a state agency. THE RISE OF SYRIZA 129

LP: The other problem is you might take those people out of the party into the state and then leave the party without the talents of those people. AB: True.

LP: So in light of that let me ask you then about longer-term strategic issues. Just from what you said about the party programme, and the way it was formulated even before the crisis, there are a number of possible contradictions that you may have already faced in the making of the programme, but that you are surely likely to face now as you make a bid for state power. Maybe most important of these is the contradiction that arises because you are dealing with a state, like so many of the states that emerged out of the Ottoman Empire, that never developed a Weberian type of institutional apparatus. So what strikes me is the dissonance between socialist elements in the programme that say we need to take the banks into public control, and then at the same time elements that display an admiration for Sweden or Germany where the banking system, and the state’s relationship to it, is very much capitalist. It is possible to think that what Syriza is really most impressed with is Swedish or German social democracy, what you really want is their modern welfare state, their class harmony and corporatism, along with their type of rational bureaucracy. This is what can create an impression that these guys are really only social democrats. They don’t actually have an interest in a socialist strategy. AB: We have to understand Greek history since the revolution of 1821. The state created at that time was more or less based on what was happening in Europe and not really based on social forces and existing social relations in Greece. So this created from the very beginning all kinds of conflicts. For example, are we East or West? This has not been solved yet. I mean, some people are still saying East, some others are saying West. And if you take this at face value, you get crazy, because you have to make an impossible choice: modernization versus tradition, religion versus secular (and capitalist) modernism. This means also that whenever efforts at modernization were made in the past – of course this was capitalist modernization – there was a reaction against their implementation because nobody took the trouble of trying to synthesize these kind of forces so as to be able to come out with a viable bourgeois society of the Weberian type, as you said. So we’re carrying this burden from that time. But even this is, again, ambiguous. There are very strong community bonds in Greece. If I have a cousin, I have to help him in some kind of way. This is not entirely a bad thing, especially today, yet it is the kind of basis 130 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 from which clientelism can thrive. To give you an example, if somebody calls me and says ‘my nephew just did an exam in your class. Of course, I’m not asking you to change his grade, but he’s a very good boy, and he says he wrote well.’ So I take this phone call. If I were a Protestant, I would call the police. But I am Greek, so I say, okay, thank you for telling me. And then I grade the paper entirely independently of the phone call. If the paper passes, the guy thinks it’s because of the phone call. If the grade doesn’t pass, he gets a call from me: ‘I’m very sorry. I did my best, but I couldn’t’. This kind of ambiguity is something endemic in Greece. It’s all over the place. If you are, say, a Protestant German, you can’t understand this. But among us, we know well, without the benefit of general rules, when the line of dishonesty is crossed. To explain this in all required detail we need to have a long discussion. And from this point of view, we realize that passing laws without taking into account this kind of situation will not deal with the massive corruption we are having. What I mean is that the kind of bonds I am trying to describe cannot be easily put in the Constitution. Because of this problem coming from the past, for some people Greece appears as, well, not modern, as pre-capitalist. For many people who are for the Memorandum, the main argument is that the Memorandum will finally modernize Greece. At the cost of a generation or two, but who cares? They will be sacrificed for a future that will be modern. This is the kind of fight we have. And they are calling us populists for trying to take into account actually existing social relations and strong community bonds: either you are for modernity – capitalist, of course – or you are a populist. If you say you cannot stand any more unemployment, any lower wages, and so on, you are labelled a populist. So you can see the deep roots of this.

LP: Very interesting, and it goes back to the way you defined tradition, in terms of the ambiguity of how kinship relates to corruption, and your confidence about being able to handle this. As a professor you say, I don’t confront this guy. I don’t try to get the student expelled for the influence that his uncle was trying to use on me, but at the same time it doesn’t really affect what I do. In saying you know how to handle this, it is good to have that confidence vis-à-vis the kind of attack you get from the bourgeois media about being populists against the modernizers. Nevertheless, it seems to me that dealing with this kind of tradition poses a bigger challenge, and a really difficult one. One wonders to what extent so many Communist regimes became authoritarian because there was no other way to overcome precisely this kind of traditional corruption. So the question arises, do you see such THE RISE OF SYRIZA 131 capacities developing in the party and the movement in the next years that would lead you to think that you can overcome the negative side of the traditional Greek particularities? AB: This is a very interesting question, and it’s difficult for me to answer since I am too much inside the thing. You are looking from the outside, of course. And we have to find a kind of language to discuss these issues. The left in Greece has a deep history, going back to the Civil War and the resistance movement. And through this history, it became a big national force promoting certain values. Issues such as the ones we are discussing were addressed in practice and solutions were found. We have to look closely at them. Memories of that situation linger, generation after generation. And the general atmosphere today draws on such memories to demand dignity and respect, more than money. Of course we cannot live only with dignity. But the idea moving people today is that if you destroy us, you go to hell, we will regain our dignity. And I think this goes back to 1940 and the history of the Greek left. On the basis of the dignity I have in mind, clientelism cannot, perhaps, be eradicated immediately, but it certainly cannot thrive. And from the point of view of our main opponent, when New Democracy says we should regain the ideological hegemony from the left, it is that long tradition of solidarity and of dignity that they have in mind as their enemy.

LP: Let me raise, in relation to this, a second possible contradiction. You say you’re not dogmatic, and that’s obviously a good thing. But when you said you were open to Žižek or whoever when you were making the programme, this must also have meant, however, that you needed to have a very good bullshit detector. AB: That’s interesting also, because, yes, we do have to be flexible. When we formulated the political programme, we took into account that there are all kinds of controversial points of view at play. We tried to address the concrete situation so as to lay the ground, as it were, on which theoretical divergences could be profitably discussed. Let me also add that what we consider extremely important for Greece and perhaps for the whole of Europe is the need to have a big discussion of the fate of socialism in the twentieth century, why it failed in the Soviet Union, why it failed in China and why it failed in Eastern Europe. To try to find the roots of the failure at all levels – the economic, the social, the state structure, the party, etc. Because people here have suffered a lot, from the leftist uprising during the German occupation, the Civil War afterwards, etc., the feeling runs quite deep here that the left should reply as to the why of such failures. If 132 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 it doesn’t, then it’s very natural for people to say, okay, despite you now saying you are open to a variety of views, I don’t trust you. You are not up the task. Where is the guarantee you will not do the same thing? In the programme itself, we recognized this attitude, saying that we need to open this big discussion. This involves going as far back as it takes through Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin so if even we perhaps make new mistakes, we surely do not to repeat the old ones. And what we still need to develop is the kind of deep historical work that will yield, not perhaps an all inclusive explanation, but a deeper understanding of the twentieth century history that would help us see better what is needed now for the development of socialist strategy at all the appropriate levels, and the appropriate timing for each level, with the appropriate forums for the corresponding discussions of each.

LP: Yet this leads me back to your strong admiration for Northern European social democracy. When you speak of the failures of the left, given the roots of Synaspismos and the other groups that formed Syriza, it is natural that you speak in terms of having to come to terms with Stalinism, with the broader failure of Soviet-style communism, and indeed with the problems with the Leninist, Trotskyist or Maoist traditions even more broadly. As indeed you should. But given the electoral path that you’re on, it seems to me the more relevant failure to look at now is the failure of European social democracy, in the sense of its having giving up on socialist strategy. AB: You’re absolutely right. I think that’s a very good point. But you cannot have a social democratic party of the kind you mean in Greece due to the corruption here and other historical factors. I mean this quite literally. If you look at our party members from the top leaders to grassroots members, they are incapable of wanting a social democratic party of the European variety. They are too aware of what Pasok did: despite its ideological agenda and its rhetoric, once it entered the state within a short period it instituted clientelism at a level not approached before and immersed itself in corruption of the worst kind.

LP: And you’re not worried about that happening to Syriza? AB: To individuals, it might happen. Institutionally, we find ourselves in a new situation. The social structure of Greece precludes social democratization of the Northern European type. There are not many second generation workers in this country, let alone third generation workers. We do have an alliance between the traditional and new petty bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the working class, on the other, and not only because of the Memorandum THE RISE OF SYRIZA 133 and the austerity politics. It is something which started long before with trying to force down the throat of society accumulation and promoting large business, killing the small guys. And this is our big bet: whether we are going to have the kind of policies which are going to strengthen this kind of alliance vis-à-vis the banks and the big guys. Another related point: intellectuals here are massively on the left. In contrast to what’s happened in Anglo-Saxon or northern European countries, the intellectuals here are integrated into the left. Forty per cent of those within the universities, and perhaps more among the actors, the directors, the musicians are on the left. And the discourse promoted by these people is now more sophisticated and more creative than ever before. Which also means that the expertise for running a new kind of state is there already within society, in fact, much more than it was in Russia or China or Cuba. But the main point I want to make is the following. Looking at the situation right now, we might even say that if we take the government, then the revolution will start! I mean this in the following sense. There are already solidarity networks being built across the country: people who have exchanged goods, doctors who take people free, teachers who teach free or exchange an hour of teaching for a sack of potatoes. This kind of thing is developing at the grassroots level. It’s as if people now want a government to further develop this. So if we reform the government and if we keep, let’s say, the left flank of our coalition absolutely fixed, firm, then things will develop from below in a socialist sense. Taking over this or that building which is used by nobody, developing these kinds of parallel social networks, linking all this to social welfare and things like that. So from the point of view of strategy, even having a government obliged to make concessions to the European Union would not prevent our participation in the social movement promoting these ideas and social developments further.

LP: This brings us to yet another potential contradiction, this one in relation to your own base. It pertains to public space versus private space. When I was here in 2008, a group of construction workers were picketing outside the Synaspismos office because you had opposed the building of a stadium. This was a reflection of working-class interest. Obviously, this exposed a contradiction with your own base in terms of the tack you took in the programme. How big a problem will this be should you have to form a government? How much are you prepared for that type of confrontation between the public and the private, not just in terms of facing off with the bourgeoisie but from your own base in working communities? 134 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013

AB: I don’t know. There is no general answer for that. On the stadium problem, for example, after you left, there was a kind of understanding that what we are saying was the correct thing.

LP: And that came out of intensive discussions with the construction workers? AB: Partly. It also came up with a clarification of our position, on the one hand, and a kind of retreat by those who were pushing these people in this direction. Because there were big interests pushing workers in that direction. I mean promoters of the big construction projects who tried to mobilize the sentiment behind a big soccer team in Athens that has a great following.

LP: But why I asked if it came out of intensive discussions was to get some sense of the capacity of the party to change this sentiment. I want to push this, because if you don’t form a government, it will give you much more time to develop this capacity, to build a stronger base, to develop the movement. After all, forming a genuinely socialist government already presumes having the socialist organizational capacities to support it. AB: I understand what you are saying. And I understand completely the kind of opposition we’ll be having. And to tell you the truth, I agree also that we might be in a much better position if we don’t win. But the situation is such that you cannot avoid winning the battle once you enter it. This is the problem. And, I mean, from the point of view of what’s happening in the world, we are hoping that winning will affect us positively in different ways. We are not expecting that if we win the Spanish left will also be suddenly elected. We are not as crazy as that. But given the structure of the European Union, and the very big problems they are facing, we can have allies in this situation from the objective point of view, even from the US. So there’s a kind of global phenomenon taking place here. But to tell you the truth: if we are going to form a government, we are not perfectly ready. In a sense, we are unprepared. But we are ready to assume the responsibility of winning. And we are confident that, if we win, we will not fail. We will learn quickly.

Michalis Spourdalakis: I think part of this problem is about giving space and resources to the grassroots. Citizens are often the last people to get involved, and the other problem of contradictions within the working class cannot be resolved unless we deal with this. Even its partial resolution will depend upon how much we are going to develop the whole idea of an economy of needs, which decisions are made, the way in which decisions are implemented – and whether we will gain support. This will come up every time we turn any building over to any organization on the principle THE RISE OF SYRIZA 135 of public versus private, because it fills a social need, and when we try to put some rules behind what we are doing. The same goes for the conflict within the working class. We witnessed this in the years even before the Memorandum, and certainly after the Memorandum, where the right wing put forward the conflict between public workers and private sector workers. This strategy didn’t succeed because the government soon thereafter also attacked the working class in the private sector. But we will have to face the problem in a deeper sense, not in the sense that those who organize the working class in either the private or in the public sector are more corrupt than the others, or closer to the big parties, but in the sense that those in the leadership of the unions in both spheres do make careers out of the their ties to the parties and the state. And people in general are very much against these kinds of organizations. So you have to create the space to reorganize the unions, and members will respond to this because they are frustrated by the way in which the unions are run now. There are people with all kinds of ideas, who want to serve the public, who are absolutely frustrated by the old kind of political unionism, where the union gets the power from the actual state. If you can destroy this link at the top level, at the level of the state, then the union structure starts to waver. And what we are witnessing as we speak is that the big unions, the top leaders of the unions are approaching us, are running after us to say ‘we are with you’. And we have to be really careful about that. AB: That’s what I meant before in saying that we must keep absolutely to the left flank of the political front we represent. If we keep this absolutely firm then we can make all kind of alliances without losing our identity. And up to now – which is amazing in many ways – we’ve got such a large electoral success while keeping the left flank absolutely firm. And so there is inflow from the right, from opportunists, from everybody under the auspices of our radical left kind of discourse. This is the amazing thing. That’s why the other side is so afraid of us. But from the other point of view, in terms of the actual implementation of our ideas, let’s say, against state corruption, what we get is the sense that people will be trusting us and forgive, for a period, our mistakes because they have suffered enormously from the old political system at all levels.

LP: Let me just say that whatever happens, it is clear that your success already reflects a certain confidence which the left has lacked for so long. AB: In a message somebody sent me, I don’t remember exactly from where, there was this quotation of Mark Twain: ‘They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it’. You know, this is the reason I dare to say that if 136 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2013 we get in now, we’ll be more effective than if we stayed out for another six months and form the opposition.

LP: The danger being that you will get socialized into being the ‘Official Opposition’? AB: True. Syriza will then have a triple task: (a) Immerse itself in the social movements to promote the values of socialism, help organize all kinds of solidarity networks, develop its programme in open dialogue with society, and formulate the agenda of a government of the left at both the national and international levels. (b) Transform itself into the political expression and the organizational backbone of the diverse social movements, without trespassing on their autonomy. (c) Organize itself as an ‘official opposition’ prefiguring the new kind of state organization that it will implement if and when it comes to power. But beyond this, I think the vertiginous rise of Syriza in less than three months has opened a significant breach in European and world politics. This breach concerns capitalism itself, for the European states continue on the neoliberal path of austerity and destruction of public welfare with no regard for the explosive social conditions in many European countries and with no ‘Plan B’ in sight. This situation puts socialism on the political agenda after many decades. But socialism can be actually brought about only through the struggles and the active will of the vast majority, and this must consistently inform the work of the left as its tries to redefine socialism for the twenty-first century by, among other things, criticizing consistently all failed attempts to institute it. So for all of us this represents a lot of work.