[D66] The courage of hopelessness

[J.N.]

Veelprater en veelvraat Žižek wordt steeds hopelozer politiek gezien,
leest nu Agamben. Van “air of defeat” naar "air of hopelesness". Zijn
lezing van T.S. Eliot heeft geen enkel juiste voorspelling opgeleverd...
In de politiek heb je splits, de filosofie turns, in de software
'builds'. De nieuwe turn van Zizek geeft het failliet van zijn
Lacano-Hegelo-Hitchcock discours aan. Een hoop as.



Slavoj Žižek on Greece: the courage of hopelessness

Greece is not being asked to swallow many bitter pills in exchange for a
realistic plan of economic revival, they are asked to suffer so that
others in the European Union can go on dreaming their dream undisturbed.

by Slavoj Zizek Published 20 July, 2015 - 07:00

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A street cleaner in Athens. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that
"thought is the courage of hopelessness" - an insight which is
especially pertinent for our historical moment when even the most
pessimist diagnostics as a rule finishes with an uplifting hint at some
version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true
courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences
of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream
of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, it functions as a
fetish which prevents us thinking to the end the deadlock of our
predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at
the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train
approaching us from the opposite direction. There is no better example
of the need for such courage than Greece today.

The double U-turn that took the Greek crisis in July 2015 cannot but
appear as a step not just from tragedy to comedy but, as Stathis
Kouvelakis noted in Jacobin magazine, from tragedy full of comic
reversals directly into a theatre of the absurd – is there any other way
to characterise the extraordinary reversal of one extreme into its
opposite that would bedazzle even the most speculative Hegelian
philosopher? Tired of the endless negotiations with the EU executives in
which one humiliation followed another, Syriza called for a referendum
on Sunday July 5 asking the Greek people if they support or reject the
EU proposal of new austerity measures. Although the government itself
clearly stated that it supported No, the result was a surprise: the
overwhelming majority of more than 61 per cent voted No to European
blackmail. Rumors began to circulate that the result – victory for the
government – was a bad surprise for Alexis Tsipras himself who secretly
hope that the government would lose, so that a defeat will allow him to
save face in surrendering to the EU demands (“we have to respect the
voters’ voice”). However, literally the morning after, Tsipras announced
that Greece was ready to resume the negotiations, and days later Greece
negotiated a EU proposal which is basically the same as what the voters
rejected (in some details even harsher) – in short, he acted as if the
government has lost, not won, the referendum. As Kouvelakis wrote:

“How is it possible for a devastating ‘no’ to memorandum austerity
policies to be interpreted as a green light for a new memorandum? … The
sense of the absurd is not just a product of this unexpected reversal.
It stems above all from the fact that all of this is unfolding before
our eyes as if nothing has happened, as if the referendum were something
like a collective hallucination that suddenly ends, leaving us to
continue freely what we were doing before. But because we have not all
become lotus-eaters, let us at least give a brief résumé of what has
taken place over the past few days. … From Monday morning, before the
victory cries in the country’s public squares had even fully died away,
the theater of the absurd began. …

The public, still in the joyful haze of Sunday, watches as the
representative of the 62 percent subordinated to the 38 percent in the
immediate aftermath of a resounding victory for democracy and popular
sovereignty. … But the referendum happened. It wasn’t a hallucination
from which everyone has now recovered. On the contrary, the
hallucination is the attempt to downgrade it to a temporary ‘letting off
of steam,’ prior to resuming the downhill course towards a third
memorandum.”

And things went on in this direction. On the night of July 10, the Greek
Parliament gave Alexis Tsipras the authority to negotiate a new bailout
by 250 votes to 32, but 17 government MPs didn’t back the plan, which
means he got more support from the opposition parties than from his own.
Days later, the Syriza Political Secretariat dominated by the left wing
of the party concluded that EU’s latest proposals are "absurd" and
“exceed the limits of Greek society's endurance” – Leftist extremism?

But IMF itself (in this case a voice of minimally rational capitalism)
made exactly the same point: an IMF study published a day earlier showed
that Greece needs far more debt relief than European governments have
been willing to contemplate so far - European countries would have to
give Greece a 30-year grace period on servicing all its European debt,
including new loans, and a dramatic maturity extension…

No wonder that Tsipras himself publicly stated his doubt about the
bailout plan: "We don't believe in the measures that were imposed upon
us," he said during a TV interview, making it clear that he supports it
out of pure despair, to avoid a total economic and financial collapse.
The eurocrats use such confessions with breathtaking perfidity: now that
the Greek government accepted their the tough conditions, they doubt the
sincerity and seriousness of their commitment. How can Tsipras really
fight for a program he doesn't believe in? How can the Greek government
be really committed to the agreement when it opposes the referendum result?

However, statements like those from IMF demonstrate that the true
problem lies elsewhere: does EU really believe in their own bailout
plan? Does it really believe that the brutally imposed measures will set
in motion economic growth and thus enable the payment of debts? Or is it
that the ultimate motivation for the brutal extortionist pressure on
Greece is not purely economic (since it is obviously irrational in
economic terms) but politico-ideological – or, as Paul Krugman put it in
the New York Times, "substantive surrender isn’t enough for Germany,
which wants regime change and total humiliation — and there’s a
substantial faction that just wants to push Greece out, and would more
or less welcome a failed state as a caution for the rest.” One should
always bear in mind what a horror Syriza is for the European
establishment – a Conservative Polish member of the European parliament
even directly appealed to the Greek army to make a coup d’etat in order
to save the country.

Why this horror? Greeks are now asked to pay the high price, but not for
a realist perspective of growth. The price they are asked to pay is for
the continuation of the "extend and pretend" fantasy. They are asked to
ascend to their actual suffering in order to sustain another's
(eurocrats') dream. Gilles Deleuze said decades ago: Si vous etez pris
dans le reve de l'autre, vous etez foutus. ("if you are caught into
another's dream, you are fucked"), and this is the situation in which
Greece finds itself now. Greeks are not asked to swallow many bitter
pills for a realistic plan of economic revival, they are asked to suffer
so that others can go on dreaming their dream undisturbed.

The one who now needs awakening is not Greece but Europe. Everyone who
is not caught in this dream knows what awaits us if the bailout plan is
enacted: another 90 or so billions will be thrown into the Greek basket,
raising the Greek debt to 400 or so billion euros (and most of them will
quickly return back to Western Europe - the true bailout is the bailout
of German and French banks, not of Greece), and we can expect the same
crisis to explode in a couple of years.

But is such an outcome really a failure? At an immediate level, if one
compares the plan with its actual outcome, obviously yes. At a deeper
level, however, one cannot avoid a suspicion that the true goal is not
to give Greece a chance but to change it into an economically colonised
semi-state kept in permanent poverty and dependency, as a warning to
others. But at an even deeper level, there is again a failure – not of
Greece, but of Europe itself, of the emancipatory core of European legacy.

The No of the referendum was undoubtedly a great ethico-political act:
against a well-coordinated enemy propaganda spreading fears and lies,
with no clear prospect of what lies ahead, against all pragmatic and
"realist" odds, the Greek people heroically rejected the brutal pressure
of the EU. The Greek No was an authentic gesture of freedom and
autonomy, but the big question is, of course, what happens the day
after, when we have to return from the ecstatic negation to the everyday
dirty business – and here, another unity emerged, the unity of the
"pragmatic" forces (Syriza and the big opposition parties) against the
Syriza Left and Golden Dawn. But does this mean that the long struggle
of Syriza was in vain, that the No of the referendum was just a
sentimental empty gesture destined to make the capitulation more palpable?

The really catastrophic thing about the Greek crisis is that the moment
the choice appeared as the choice between Grexit and the capitulation to
Brussels, the battle was already lost. Both terms of this choice move
within the predominant eurocratic vision (remember that the German
anti-Greek hardliners like Wolfgang Schauble also prefer Grexit!). The
Syriza government was not fighting just for a greater debt relief and
for more new money within the same overall coordinates, but for the
awakening of Europe from its dogmatic slumber.

Therein resides the authentic greatness of Syriza: insofar as the icon
of the popular unrest in Greece were the protests on the Syntagma
(Constitution) Square, Syriza engaged in a Herculean labor of enacting
the shift from syntagm to paradigm, in the long and patient work of
translating the energy of rebellion into concrete measures that would
change everyday life of the people. We have to be very precise here: the
No of the Greek referendum was not a No to “austerity” in the sense of
necessary sacrifices and hard work, but a No to the the EU dream of just
going on with the business as usual.

The country's former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, repeatedly made
this point clear: no more borrowing but an overall rehaul needed to give
the Greek economy a chance to rebound. The first step in this direction
should be an increase in the democratic transparency of our power
mechanisms. Our democratically elected state apparatuses are thus more
and more redoubled by a thick network of “agreements” and non-elected
“expert” bodies which yield the real economic (and military) power. Here
is Varoufakis’s report on an extraordinary moment in his dealings with
EU negotiator Jeroen Dijsselbloem:

“There was a moment when the President of the Eurogroup decided to move
against us and effectively shut us out, and made it known that Greece
was essentially on its way out of the Eurozone. /…/ There is a
convention that communiqués must be unanimous, and the President can’t
just convene a meeting of the Eurozone and exclude a member state. And
he said, ‘Oh I’m sure I can do that.’ So I asked for a legal opinion. It
created a bit of a kerfuffle.

For about 5-10 minutes the meeting stopped, clerks, officials were
talking to one another, on their phone, and eventually some official,
some legal expert addressed me, and said the following words: ‘Well, the
Eurogroup does not exist in law, there is no treaty which has convened
this group.’ So what we have is a non-existent group that has the
greatest power to determine the lives of Europeans. It’s not answerable
to anyone, given it doesn’t exist in law; no minutes are kept; and it’s
confidential. So no citizen ever knows what is said within… These are
decisions of almost life and death, and no member has to answer to anybody.”

Sounds familiar? Yes, to anyone who knows how Chinese power functions
today, after Deng Xiaoping set in action a unique dual system: the state
apparatus and legal system are redoubled by the Party institutions which
are literally illegal - or, as He Weifang, a law professor from Beijing,
put it succinctly: “As an organisation, the Party sits outside, and
above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person
to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party
exists outside the legal system altogether.” (Richard McGregor, The
Party, London: Allen Lane 2010, p. 22) It is as if, in McGregor's words,
the state-founding violence remain present, embodied in an organisation
with an unclear legal status:

"It would seem difficult to hide an organization as large as the Chinese
Communist Party, but it cultivates its backstage role with care. The big
party departments controlling personnel and the media keep a purposely
low public profile. The party committees (known as 'leading small
groups') which guide and dictate policy to ministries, which in turn
have the job of executing them, work out of sight. The make-up of all
these committees, and in many cases even their existence, is rarely
referred to in the state-controlled media, let alone any discussion of
how they arrive at decisions."

No wonder that exactly the same thing happened to Varoufakis as to a
Chinese dissident who, some years ago, formally brought to court and
charged the Chinese Communist Party for being guilty of the Tienanmien
massacre. After a couple of months, he got a reply from the ministry of
justice: they cannot pursue his charge since there is no organisation
called “Chinese Communist Party” officially registered in China.

And it is crucial to note how the obverse of this non-transparency of
power is false humanitarianism: after the Greek defeat, there is, of
course, time for humanitarian concerns. Jean-Claude Juncker immediately
stated in an interview that he was so glad about the bailout deal
because it would immediately ease the suffering of the Greek people
which worried him very much. Classic scenario: after a political
crack-down, humanitarian concern and help… even postponing debt payments.

What should one do in such a hopeless situation? One should especially
resist the temptation of Grexit as a great heroic act of rejecting
further humiliations and stepping outside - into what? What new positive
order are we stepping into? The Grexit option appears as the
“real-impossible”, as something that would lead to an immediate social
disintegration. Krugman writes: “Tsipras apparently allowed himself to
be convinced, some time ago, that euro exit was completely impossible.
It appears that Syriza didn’t even do any contingency planning for a
parallel currency (I hope to find out that this is wrong). This left him
in a hopeless bargaining position.”

Krugman’s point is that Grexit is also an “impossible-real” which can
happen with unpredictable consequences and which, as such, can be
risked. “All the wise heads saying that Grexit is impossible, that it
would lead to a complete implosion, don’t know what they are talking
about. When I say that, I don’t mean that they’re necessarily wrong — I
believe they are, but anyone who is confident about anything here is
deluding himself. What I mean instead is that nobody has any experience
with what we’re looking at.”

While in principle this is true, there are nonetheless too many
indications that a sudden Grexit now would lead to utter economic and
social catastrophe. Syriza economic strategists are well aware that such
a gesture would cause an immediate further fall of the standard of
living for an additional (minimum) 30 per cent, bringing misery to a new
unbearable level, with the threat of popular unrest and even military
dictatorship. The prospect of such heroic acts is thus a temptation to
be resisted.

Then there are calls for Syriza to return to its roots: Syriza should
not become just another governing parliamentary party, the true change
can only come from grassroots, from the people themselves, from their
self-organisation, not from the state apparatuses… another case of empty
posturing, since it avoids the crucial problem which is how to deal with
the international pressure concerning debt, or, more generally, how to
exert power and run a state. Grassroots self-organisation cannot replace
the state, and the question is how to reorganize the state apparatus to
make it function differently.

It’s nonetheless not enough to say that Syriza put a heroic fight,
testing what is possible - the fight goes on, it has just began. Instead
of dwelling on the “contradictions” of Syriza policy (after a triumphant
No one accepts the very programme that was rejected by the people), and
of getting caught in mutual recriminations about who is guilty (did the
Syriza majority commit an opportunistic “treason”, or was the Left
irresponsible in its preference for Grexit), one should rather focus on
what the enemy is doing: the “contradictions” of Syriza are a mirror
image of the “contradictions” of the EU establishment gradually
undermining the very foundations of united Europe.

In the guise of Syriza “contradictions”, the EU establishment is merely
getting back its own message in its true form. And this is what Syriza
should be doing now. With a ruthless pragmatism and cold calculation, it
should exploit the tiniest cracks in the opponent’s armour. It should
use all those who resist the predominant EU politics, from British
conservatives to Ukip in the UK. It should shamelessly flirt with Russia
and China, playing with the idea of giving an island to Russia as its
Mediterranean military base, just to scare the shit out of Nato
strategists. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, now that the EU God has failed,
everything is permitted.

When one hears the complaints that the EU administration brutally
ignores the plight of the Greek people in their blind obsession with
humiliating and disciplining the Greeks, that even Southern-European
countries like Italy or Spain didn’t show any solidarity with Greece,
our reaction should be: but is there any surprise in all this? What did
the critics expect? That the EU administration will magically understand
the Syriza argumentation and act in compliance with it? The EU
administration is simply doing what it was always doing. Then there is
the reproach that Greece is looking for help in Russia and China – as if
Europe itself is not pushing Greece in that direction with its
humiliating pressure.

Then there is the claim that phenomena like Syriza demonstrate how the
traditional Left/Right dichotomy is outlived. Syriza in Greece is called
extreme Left, and Marine le Pen in France extreme Right, but these two
parties have effectively a lot in common: they both fight for state
sovereignty, against multinational corporations. It is therefore quite
logical that in Greece itself, Syriza is in coalition with a small
Rightist pro-sovereignty party. On April 22, 2015, Francois Hollande
said on TV that Marine le Pen today sounds like George Marchais (a
French Communist leader) in 1970s – the same patriotic advocacy of the
plight of ordinary French people exploited by international capital – no
wonder Marine le Pen supports Syriza . . . a weird claim which doesn't
say a lot more than the old Liberal wisdom than Fascism is also a kind
of Socialism. The moment we bring into the picture the topic of
immigrant workers, this whole parallel falls apart.

The ultimate problem is a much more basic one. The recurrent story of
the contemporary Left is that of a leader or party elected with
universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world” (Mandela, Lula) – but,
then, sooner or later, usually after a couple of years, they stumble
upon the key dilemma: does one dare to touch the capitalist mechanisms,
or does one decide to “play the game”? If one disturbs the mechanisms,
one is very swiftly “punished” by market perturbations, economic chaos
and the rest.

The heroism of Syriza was that, after winning the democratic political
battle, they risked a step further into disturbing the smooth run of the
Capital. The lesson of the Greek crisis is that Capital, though
ultimately a symbolic fiction, is our Real. That is to say, today’s
protests and revolts are sustained by the combination (overlapping) of
different levels, and this combination accounts for their strength: they
fight for (“normal” parliamentary) democracy against authoritarian
regimes; against racism and sexism, especially the hatred directed at
immigrants and refugees; for welfare-state against neoliberalism;
against corruption in politics and economy (companies polluting
environment, etc.); for new forms of democracy that reach beyond
multi-party rituals (participation, etc.); and, finally, questioning the
global capitalist system as such and trying to keep alive the idea of a
non-capitalist society. Both traps are to be avoided here: the false
radicalism (“what really matters is the abolition of
liberal-parliamentary capitalism, all other fights are secondary”), as
well as the false gradualism (“now we fight against military
dictatorship and for simple democracy, forget your Socialist dreams,
this comes later – maybe…”).

When we have to deal with a specific struggle, the key question is: how
will our engagement in it or disengagement from it affect other
struggles? The general rule is that, when a revolt begins against an
oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in
2011, it is easy to mobilize large crowds with slogans which one cannot
but characterise as crowd pleasers – for democracy, against corruption,
etc. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices: when our
revolt succeeds in its direct goal, we come to realise that what really
bothered us (our un-freedom, humiliation, social corruption, lack of
prospect of a decent life) goes on in a new guise. In Egypt, protesters
succeeded in getting rid of the oppressive Mubarak regime, but
corruption remained, and the prospect of a decent life moved even
further away. After the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, the last
vestiges of patriarchal care for the poor can fall away, so that the
newly gained freedom is de facto reduced to the freedom to choose the
preferred form of one’s misery – the majority not only remains poor,
but, to add insult to injury, it is being told that, since they are now
free, poverty is their own responsibility. In such a predicament, we
have to admit that there was flaw in our goal itself, that this goal was
not specific enough - say, that standard political democracy can also
serve as the very form of un-freedom: political freedom can easily
provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged
“freely” selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to
demand more than just political democracy – democratization also of
social and economic life. In short, we have to admit that what we first
took as the failure to fully realize a noble principle (of democratic
freedom) is a failure inherent to this principle itself – to learn this
move from the distortion of a notion, its incomplete realization, to the
distortion immanent to this notion is the big step of political pedagogy.

The ruling ideology mobilises here its entire arsenal to prevent us from
reaching this radical conclusion. They start to tell us that democratic
freedom brings its own responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we
are not yet mature if we expect too much from democracy. In this way,
they blame us for our failure: in a free society, so we are told, we are
all capitalist investing in our lives, deciding to put more into our
education than into having fun if we want to succeed, etc. At a more
directly political level, the US foreign policy elaborated a detailed
strategy of how to exert damage control by way of re-channeling a
popular uprising into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints –
as was done successfully in South Africa after the fall of apartheid
regime, in Philippines after the fall of Marcos, in Indonesia after the
fall of Suharto, etc. At this precise conjuncture, radical emancipatory
politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after
the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to make the next step without
succumbing to the catastrophe of the “totalitarian” temptation – in
short, how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

The courage of hopelessness is crucial at this point.