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11 Transformative Power Lessons from the Greek Crisis and Beyond hilary wainwright In a context of uncertainty and flux, it helps to start from the specific. My starting point is the rise of Syriza, the radical left coalition rooted in the movements resisting austerity that has become the main opposition party in the Greek Parliament. Syriza’s ability to give a focused political voice to the anger and despair of millions has made a breakthrough from which we can learn. This is a matter not only of its soaring electoral support, which rose from 4 percent of the national vote in 2009 to 27 percent in June 2012 on the basis of a refusal of the policies imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Commission (EC), and the European Central Bank (ECB), but also of the fact that this electoral mandate is reinforced by organized movements and networks of solidarity that Syriza has been part of building. This is not to imply that Syriza’s success is stable or that its momentum will necessarily be maintained. One of its seventy-one MPs, the ex-Pasok member and trade-union leader Dimtris Tsoukalas, warns that “votes can be like sand.”1 Threatening winds will blow persistently from a hostile media determined to exploit any sign of division; from national and European elites creating an atmosphere of fear towards the left; and from an aggressive fascist party exploiting xenophobic tendencies in Greek society with some success, having won 7 percent in the polls. Syriza does not provide a template to apply elsewhere; it is a new kind of political organization in the making. Reflection on its rise, however, which has taken place alongside the collapse of support for Pasok (from around 40 percent of the vote in 2009 to no more than 13 percent in 2012), throws the present quandary of the left, especially in Europe, into relief. Such reflection also stimulates fresh thoughts on forms of political organization that could help us find ways out. The quandary is this: On the one hand, there is the inability of social-democratic parties to stand up to, or even seriously to bargain over, austerity for the masses as a solution to the financial crisis. To varying degrees these parties are demonstrating their inability to rise to the challenge of a visibly discredited neoliberal project. The decay in party democracy and culture, moreover, combined with an entrenchment of market-driven mentalities, has meant that in social-democratic parties the forces of renewal are negligible or very weak. On the other hand, most political organizations of the radical left, with the notable exception of Syriza, are in weaker positions than they were before the financial crisis of 2008. In addition, the traditional forms of labormovement organization have been seriously weakened. There has been an impressive growth of resistance and alternatives of many kinds, many of them interconnected and many, like Occupy, besmirching the brand of an already dodgy-looking system. But through what strategic visions, forms of organization , and means of political activism they can produce lasting forces of transformation is an open question under active and widespread discussion. In other words, while the right, in the form of neoliberalism, was ready for the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the left in the North, when faced with capitalism coming as near to collapse as it can—given its ability to call in state guarantees—has been unable to find appropriate ways of building a dynamic of change driven by its alternative values and directions for society. Syriza in its current form has been forged in the intense heat of the most ruthless turning of the screw of austerity. Syriza is going to face many problems, both within its own organization, as it changes from a coalition of parties and groups to becoming a party with its own direct membership, as well as in the face of new pressures that will come from its opponents inside and outside Greece. However, after interviewing a wide range of activists and reading interviews and reports by others, I have a grounded belief that the long and difficult process of developing a framework of rethinking political organization beyond Leninism and parliamentarism is producing qualitatively new results. Many of the political resources that shaped Syriza’s response to the present extremities and led it to a position in which it is uniquely—but still conditionally —trusted by so many people in Greek society are the outcome of...

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