Bookchin’s municipalist ideas, once rejected by communists and anarchists alike, have now come to inspire the Kurdish quest for democratic autonomy.

Photo by Uygar Önder Simsek.

The introduction to the new book The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2015), explains how Murray Bookchin – born to Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City in 1921 – was introduced to radical politics at the age of nine when he joined the Young Pioneers, a Communist youth organization. This would be the start of his ‘life on the left’ in which he would turn from Stalinism to Trotskyism in the years running up to World War II before defining himself as an anarchist in the late 1950s and eventually identifying as a ‘communalist’ or ‘libertarian municipalist’ after the introduction of the idea of social ecology.

Even though Bookchin never even attended college – except for a few classes in radio technology right after World War II – he wrote dozens of books and published hundreds of academic articles, besides founding several journals and setting up the Institute for Social Ecology in 1974. Possibly his most important contribution to radical politics was to (re)introduce the concept of ecology to the arena of political thought.

Bookchin opposed the ideas and practices of the emerging environmentalist movements, accusing them of advocating mere “technical fixes” of capitalism, counter-posing it to an ecological approach that seeks to address the root causes of the systemic problem. In his view, capitalism’s fatal flaw lay not in its exploitation of the working class, as Marxists believe, but rather in its conflict with the natural environment which, if allowed to develop unopposed, would inevitably lead to the dehumanization of people and the destruction of nature.

The Next Revolution includes the 1992 essay The Ecological Crisis and the Need to Remake Society. In it, Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.” For an ecological society to develop, first the inter-human domination must be eradicated. According to Bookchin, “capitalism and its alter-ego, ‘state socialism,’ have brought all the historic problems of domination to a head,” and the market economy, if it is not stopped, will succeed in destroying our natural environment as a result of its “grow or die” ideology.

For years, Bookchin sought to convince anarchist groups in the US that his idea of libertarian municipalism — which, in his own words “seeks to reclaim the public sphere for the exercise of authentic citizenship while breaking away from the bleak cycle of parliamentarism and its mystification of the ‘party’ mechanism as a means for public representation” — was the key to making anarchism politically and socially relevant again.

Libertarian municipalism promotes the use of direct face-to-face assemblies in order to “steal” the practice of politics back from the professional, careerist politicians and place it back in the hands of citizens. Describing the state as “a completely alien formation” and a “thorn in the side of human development,” Bookchin presents libertarian municipalism as “democratic to its core and non-hierarchical in its structure,” as well as “premised on the struggle to achieve a rational and ecological society.”

Much to Bookchin’s frustration, many anarchists refused to adopt his ideas, unwilling to accept that, in order to remain politically relevant and be able to make a real revolution, they would have to participate in local government. Despite having politically matured in the company of Marxists, syndicalists and anarchists, Bookchin soon developed and maintained fundamental critiques of all of these currents, leading not only to the development of his own idea of social ecology but also leaving him with many critics on the left.

Kurdish resistance

In the late 1970s, while Bookchin was struggling to gain recognition for the value and importance of his theory of social ecology in the US, an entirely different struggle was emerging on the other side of the world. In the mountainous, predominantly Kurdish regions of southeastern Turkey, an organization was founded that would eventually come to adopt and adapt Bookchin’s social ecology.

The organization called itself the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK after its Kurdish acronym, and in 1984 it launched its first attacks against the Turkish state. These first operations were soon followed by others and eventually developed into a three-decade long armed struggle that has still not been resolved.

The PKK was inspired by Marxist-Leninist thought and fought for an independent Kurdish state that would be founded upon socialist principles. The traditional Kurdish homeland encompasses territories in modern-day Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, but had been carved up in the early 20^th century, when a deal was struck regarding the division of former Ottoman-Turkish territory in the Middle East between France and the United Kingdom. The borders between Turkey, Syria and Iraq were laid down in the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916.

Despite the utopian desire of one day seeing the different Kurdish territories united, the struggle of the PKK focused primarily on the liberation of North Kurdistan, or Bakur — the Kurdish territories occupied by the Turkish state. Over the course of the 1990s, however, the PKK slowly started to drift away from its desire to found an independent Kurdish nation state and started exploring other possibilities.

In 1999, Abdullah Öcalan — founder and leader of the PKK — became the subject of a diplomatic row between Turkey and Syria, from where he had been directing the PKK’s operations after having been forced to flee Turkey two decades earlier. Syria refused to house and protect the rebel leader any longer, leaving Öcalan with little choice but to leave the country in search of another refuge. Not long after, he was arrested in Kenya and extradited to Turkey where he was condemned to death — a punishment that was later changed to life imprisonment.

Öcalan’s capture was a breaking point for the PKK’s independence struggle. Shortly afterwards, the organization revoked its claims to an independent state in favor of demanding more autonomy at the local level. In jail, Öcalan began to familiarize himself with the works of Bookchin, whose writings on social transformation influenced him to give up on the ideal of an independent nation-state and rather pursue an alternative course he termed ‘Democratic Confederalism’.

Several years earlier, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the PKK had already started to critically reflect on the concept of the nation state. None of the traditional homelands of the Kurds were exclusively Kurdish. A state founded and controlled by Kurds would thus automatically host large minority groups, creating the potential for the repression of ethnic and religious minorities in the same way the Kurds themselves had been repressed for many years. As such, a Kurdish state increasingly came to be seen as a continuation of, rather than a solution to, the existing problems in the region.

Finally, having analyzed the interdependence of capitalism and the nation state on the one hand, and between patriarchy and centralized state power on the other, Öcalan realized that real freedom and independence could only come about once the movement had severed all ties with these institutionalized forms of repression and exploitation.

Democratic Confederalism

In his 2005 pamphlet, Declaration of Democratic Confederalism, Abdullah Öcalan formally and definitively broke with the PKK’s earlier aspirations of founding an independent Kurdish nation state. “The system of nation states,” he argues in the document, “has become a serious barrier to the development of society and democracy and freedom since the end of the 20^th century.”

In Öcalan’s view, the only way out of the crisis in the Middle East is the establishment of a democratic confederal system “that will derive its strength directly from the people, and not from globalization based on nation states.” According to the imprisoned rebel leader, “neither the capitalist system nor the pressure of imperialist forces will lead to democracy; except to serve their own interests. The task is to assist in developing a grassroots-based democracy … which takes into consideration the religious, ethnic and class differences in society.”

Soon after Öcalan’s call for the development of a democratic confederalist model, the Democratic Society Congress (DTK) was founded in Diyarbakir. During an assembly in 2011 the body launched its Call for Democratic Autonomy in which it demanded autonomy from the state in the fields of politics, justice, self-defense, culture, society, economics, ecology and diplomacy. The reaction of the Turkish state was predictable: setting out on a path of confrontation and criminalization, it immediately banned the DTK.

It is no coincidence that the idea of Democratic Confederalism, as developed by Öcalan, shows many parallels with Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology. In the early 2000s Öcalan had begun to read Ecology of Freedom and Urbanization Without Cities while in prison and soon after declared himself a student of Bookchin’s. Through his lawyers, Öcalan attempted to set up a meeting with the radical thinker to figure out ways in which Bookchin’s ideas could be made applicable to the Middle Eastern context.

Unfortunately, due to Bookchin’s poor health at the time, this meeting never took place, but he did send a message to Öcalan in May 2004: “My hope is that the Kurdish people will one day be able to establish a free, rational society that will allow their brilliance once again to flourish. They are fortunate indeed to have a leader of Mr. Öcalan’s talents to guide them.”

In return, and as a form of acknowledgement of Bookchin’s critical influence on the Kurdish movement, a PKK assembly honored him as “one of the greatest social scientists of the 20^th century” when he died in July 2006. They expressed their hope that the Kurds would be the first society to establish democratic confederalism, calling the project “creative and realizable.”

Dual power, confederalism and social ecology

Over the past decade, democratic confederalism has slowly but surely become an integral part of Kurdish society. Three elements of Bookchin’s thought have particularly influenced the development of a “democratic modernity” across Kurdistan: the concept of “dual power,” the confederal structure as proposed by Bookchin under the header of libertarian municipalism, and the theory of social ecology which traces the roots of many contemporary struggles back to the origins of civilization and places the natural environment at the heart of the solution to these problems.

Dual Power:

The concept of dual power has been one of the main reasons why Bookchin’s body of work was rejected by anarchist, communist and syndicalist groups. Rather than advocating the abolition of the state through an uprising of the proletariat, he suggested that by developing alternative institutions in the form of popular assemblies and neighborhood committees — and notably by taking part in municipal elections — the power of the state could be “hollowed out” from below, eventually making it superfluous.

Bookchin’s disposition towards taking over and building institutions of power stems from his analysis of politics as opposed to statecraft. According to Bookchin, “Marxists, revolutionary syndicalists, and authentic anarchists all have a fallacious understanding of politics, which should be conceived as the civic arena and the institutions by which people democratically and directly manage their community affairs.” What normally is referred to as “politics” Bookchin views as “statecraft,” or the kind of business professional politicians occupy themselves with.

“Politics,” by contrast, rather than a kind of inherently evil practice that so many left-wing revolutionaries believe needs to be abolished, is in fact the very glue that binds society together. It is something that needs to be organized in such a way as to prevent any abuse of power. “Freedom from authoritarianism can best be assured only by the clear, concise, and detailed allocation of power, not by pretensions that power and leadership are forms of ‘rule’ or by libertarian metaphors that conceal their reality,” Bookchin writes in his essay The Communalist Project.

The Kurdish embrace of Bookchin’s idea of dual power is clear from the DTK’s mode of organization at the different levels of society. The general assembly of the DTK meets twice a year in Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of North Kurdistan. Of the 1,000 delegates, 40 percent are elected officials who occupy different positions within government institutions, whereas the remaining 60 percent come from civil society and can be either members of one of the popular assemblies, representatives of NGOs or unaffiliated individuals. Decisions made in the assembly are promoted in the city council by those members who occupy seats in both organizational bodies.

Confederalism

The confederal system is also clearly manifested in the organizational structure of the DTK. In The Meaning of Confederalism, Bookchin describes confederalism as “a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies, in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities.” This explanation is an almost perfect fit with the situation on the ground in many places in the Kurdish region — in Turkey as well as in northern Syria.

A clear example is the situation in Diyarbakir, where the council movement is particularly well established. In the book Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan, the situation is explained by members of the Amed City Council (Amed being the Kurdish name for Diyarbakir):

Amed has thirteen districts, and each one has a council with its own board. Within the districts there are neighborhoods, which have neighborhood councils. Some districts have as many as eight neighborhood councils. And some places have councils even at the street level. In the nearby villages, there are communes that are tied to the city council. So power is articulated deeper and deeper into the base.

As Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Akkaya write in Confederalism and autonomy in Turkey: “the DTK is not simply another organization, but part of the attempt to forge a new political paradigm, defined by the direct and continual exercise of the people’s power through village, town and city councils.”

It is worth noting that this new political paradigm is not only advocated by those initiatives that exist outside of the institutionalized political realm, but also by pro-Kurdish political parties such as the Democratic Regions Party (DBP) and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The ultimate goal is not to establish Democratic Autonomy exclusively in the Kurdish regions, but at the national level too, both in Turkey and Syria.

Social ecology

Bookchin’s theory of social ecology is characterized by the belief that “we must reorder social relations so that humanity can live in a protective balance with the natural world.” A post-capitalist society cannot be successful unless it is created in harmony with the ecological environment.

Bookchin argues that “the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.” Social ecology moves beyond the traditional Marxist and anarchist view of how to organize a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society in that it places the need to avert an impending ecological catastrophe at the heart of contemporary social struggles.

For the Kurds, traditionally a rural people living on agriculture and animal husbandry, maintaining the ecological environment is as crucial as creating an egalitarian society. State-driven destruction of the environment in their mountainous homelands and on the fertile Mesopotamian plain is occurring on a daily basis.

The most obvious example is the GAP project in Turkey, in which dozens of mega dams have either already been built or are under construction. The project is presented as bringing development to the region in the form of employment opportunities at the construction sites, better irrigated mega-farms producing cash crops for export, and providing day jobs for the expropriated small farmers and an upgraded energy infrastructure with the construction of several hydroelectric power plants.

What is perceived as “development” by the agents of the state is experienced in an entirely different way by the people who see their homes and villages flooded, the free-flowing rivers turned into commodities, their lands being expropriated and bought up by large corporations and used for the industrial-scale production of goods that serve no purpose but to enrich the farm-owners in their faraway villas. These large-scale, highly destructive mega-projects expose the urgent need for local control over local environments.

But whereas wresting the natural environment away from the destructive claws of ever encroaching capitalist forces entails a direct confrontation with the state, a crucial first — and potentially even more revolutionary — step involves the abolition of hierarchy at the interpersonal level. Since, as Bookchin argued, the domination of humans over nature stems from the domination of one human over another, the solution has to follow a similar trajectory.

In this regard, the emancipation of women is one of the most important aspects of social ecology. As long as the domination of man over woman remains intact, the treatment of our natural environment as an essential and integral part of human life — rather than a commodity to be exploited for our benefit — is still far away.

In this regard, the emancipatory projects currently underway in Kurdish society are a hopeful sign. Although in many cases social relations within Kurdish families and society are still guided by age-old customs and traditions, radical changes can already be observed. As one activist of the Amed Women’s Academy put it in an interview with Tatort Kurdistan:

Kurdish families still aren’t really open to the new system, Democratic Autonomy. They haven’t yet internalized it. We, the activists, have very much internalized it and it’s our responsibility to make change, to impart the ideas of Democratic Autonomy to families, even if it’s only in small steps. We can start talking about it at home the way we do outside. When our families see how seriously we take it, that will affect them. Of course, discussions are often very difficult. Doors get slammed, people shout. But a lot of perseverance and discussion has also begun to create change in families.

Listen, learn and follow

The developments in Kurdistan — and especially in Rojava, the Kurdish region in northern Syria — have tickled the radical imagination of activists around the globe. The revolution in Rojava has been compared to Barcelona in 1936 and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico. The radical left needs its own mythology as much as everybody else, and in this sense Rojava, Barcelona and Chiapas serve as hopeful reminders that there is an alternative; that it is possible to organize society in a different way.

However, by merely placing these instances of radical organization on a pedestal, as a beacon of hope to be revered when times get rough, our support for these struggles is often not very different from the support we display when we cheer on our favorite football team on TV. The Zapatistas in the jungles of Chiapas and the Kurds on the Mesopotamian plains have come a long way by relying on nothing but their own strength and determination. Their relative isolation has allowed for the development of their radical alternatives, but for these experiments to survive in the long run they need more than supporters and sympathizers. They need partners.

“Global capital, precisely because of its very hugeness, can only be eaten away at its roots,” Bookchin writes in A Politics for the Twenty-First Century, “specifically by means of a libertarian municipalist resistance at the base of society. It must be eroded by the myriad millions who, mobilized by a grassroots movement, challenge global capital’s sovereignty over their lives and try to develop local and regional economic alternatives to its industrial operations.”

Bookchin believes that if our ideal is a Commune of Communes, the natural place to start is at the local political level, with a movement and program as the “uncompromising advocate of popular neighborhood and town assemblies and the development of a municipalized economy.”

Ultimately, the best way to support the struggles of the Kurds, the Zapatistas and many other revolutionary movements and initiatives that have sprung up across the globe in the past few years, is by listening to their stories, learning from their experiences and following in their footsteps.

A confederation of self-organized municipalities, transcending national borders and ethnic and religious boundaries is the best bulwark against the ever-encroaching imperialist powers and capitalist forces. In the struggle to achieve this goal, there are worse examples to follow than the ideas set out by Murray Bookchin and the practice of libertarian municipalism.

Joris Leverink is an Istanbul-based freelance journalist, editor for ROAR Magazine and columnist for TeleSUR English.

Days after Syriza’s capitulation to the Troika, radicals from across the world gathered in Athens for a historic conference on the future of democracy.

Image: ‘Hope Dies Last’ (by the great WD).

When hundreds of intellectuals and activists convened in Athens on Thursday July 16 for the Democracy Rising conference, the city was still covered in graffiti emblazoned with “OXI,” the Greek word for ‘no.’

A relic of a hopeful moment flattened just days before, the defiant slogan urged Greek voters to reject another round of austerity measures demanded by Europe’s financial establishment, the so-called Troika of creditors comprising the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

On July 5, a landslide percentage of Greek voters—in step with their left-led coalition government Syriza—voted against the program in a referendum. A week later, Europe’s financial technocracy politically strangled Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras into accepting a €86 billion bailout in exchange for a belligerent and immiserating program of spending cuts, tax hikes, union crackdowns, pension cuts, legislation repeals, and fire-sale privatization of national assets.

Tsipras may despise this deal, but he is nevertheless committed to carry it out despite opposition from Syriza’s left wing. On July 16, the night before the conference’s opening plenary, protests erupted when Greek Parliament passed a first set of bailout measures with 21% of Syriza MPs voting against it. The next day, Tsipras purged his cabinet of rebels. Since then, he again relied on support from opposition parties to push another round of bailout reforms through parliament and has blocked a bid from dissenters to end the bailout negotiations and return to a national currency.

Given these circumstances, the conference’s optimistic title took on a grimly ironic character. The memorandum effectively imposes an economic dictatorship on a popularly elected government. It demonstrates that the European project—currently determined by zombie obedience to neoliberal market logic and vindictive austerity policies—is fundamentally incompatible, not only with the social justice policy of a left government, but with democracy itself.

This is the conclusion, if there is one at all, to be drawn from Democracy Rising, which took place over four days at the University of Athens’ School of Economics and Policy, the same building students occupied on February 21, 1973, helping to kick off the Polytechnic uprising that brought down Greece’s military junta months later.

Given Greece’s critical role as the battleground over the future of radical politics and renewed impetus on the left to seek concrete political alignments, Democracy Rising understandably attracted tremendous attention. Organized in partnership with the University of Athens by the Global Center of Advanced Studies, a new graduate school under the presidency of theory superstar Alain Badiou, the conference’s proceedings reflected—with varied success—its host institution’s aspirations to reconcile activism and intellectual production.

Against the backdrop of a thoroughly postmodern political situation where “no” means “yes,” Democracy Rising forced an encounter between theory-oriented metapolitics of leftist academics and debates from Syriza insiders negotiating a labyrinth of urgent and maddeningly complex questions: Did the capitulators narrowly avert an economic emergency with potentially dire humanitarian consequences? Or did they betray their popular mandate by acquiescing to the same policies that Greek voters—with Syriza’s cheerleading—had rejected just days before? How badly does Syriza’s genuflexion dampen hopes for a greater European Left? Would exiting the Eurozone free Greece from debt vassalage or plunge the country deeper into bankruptcy and proletarianization?

Democracy Rising didn’t produce definitive answers, but a collective sense of battered hope and delicate solidarity, reflecting the confusion of a divided Greek left as it tries to regroup. The historical exigencies of the Eurozone crisis transformed a forum for theory and philosophy into a contentious and occasionally explosive site of realpolitik, leveling the ground between the ivory tower and the sausage factory of parliamentary democracy.

After long days at work, a weary but determined Zoi Konstantopoulou, speaker of the Hellenic Parliament, addressed the opening session of the conference. “These are very difficult times for those of us who believed there was a limit to this anti-democratic, anti-European, anti-human policy.”

One of Tsipras’s most vocal opponents within the party, Konstantopoulou is the muscle behind the Greek Debt Truth Commission, which, with the help of political scientist Eric Touissant, published a preliminary report in June declaring Greece’s debt “illegal, illegitimate and odious.”

In his welcoming address, the Greek Minister of Education Aristides Baltas defended Tspiras’ surrender. If he hadn’t compromised, he said, bank closures would have prevented ships from delivering drinking water to the Greek islands. He argued that, even with Schäuble & co. gripping Greece’s purse strings, Syriza could still help working people by assisting the country’s growing grassroots organizations, social movements and solidarity networks. Costas Douzinas, professor of law at the University of London, also urged his comrades to “critically support” the Syriza government.

On the other hand, British-Pakistani activist and leading left-wing intellectual Tariq Ali called Tspiras’ capitulation a betrayal of the Greek people, underwritten by a fetishization of the single currency and a “fatal trust” in the EU, which he likened to a dysfunctional family headed by a German patriarch “schooled in the old disciplinary ways of Prussia.”

“I don’t think [the Syriza] government can last too long after this,” Ali said plainly. His sharpest knives, however, were reserved for the hypocrisy of Europe’s financial elites—“these jokers who teach lessons to the Greek people like Juncker, who runs a Ruritanian duchy called Luxemburg which is the biggest tax evasion center in Europe.”

The battle over Syriza escalated on the second day of the conference, when economist Costas Lapavistas, a Member of Parliament and delegate of Syriza’s Left Platform, delivered a combustible speech calling the bailout “a disastrous capitulation” to the Eurozone’s “neocolonial” and “recessionary” program. Syriza, he argued, had made a strategic error in betting on the seductive but ungovernable platform to end austerity while remaining within a monetary union “that crystallizes and encapsulates class relations.”

“It will not be possible to change Greece domestically while accepting the bailout,” he said. “What we need to do is withdraw our consent to this agreement and redesign a radical program that is consistent with our values, our aims, and what we told to the Greek people… and that program is impossible without an exit from the euro.”

Lapavistas laid out an exit strategy that includes default on the national debt, nationalization of the banks, and the conversation of all prices and obligations to the new currency at a rate of 1:1 (he expects devaluation to settle at 15-20 percent). The plan, he said, would create a difficult recession initially, but he expects positive rates of growth to appear after 12 to 18 months as the dormant Greek productive sector regains control of the domestic market.

His speech caused pandemonium in the lecture hall, and was met with applause and obscenities in almost equal measure. Lapavistas’s plan, countered Douzinas, “could be the longest suicide note in the history of the left.”

Lapavistas’s projections are contestable, but his plan was the most concrete alternative to the neoliberal austerity doctrine that emerged from the conference. On July 31, Tspiras admitted he had charged former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis with drafting a contingency plan to exit the euro, but claimed it was only an emergency measure. While the prospect of leaving the euro seems increasingly distant, a revolt within Syriza may lead to new elections in September or October, and, with them, a renewed possibility of Grexit.

On Sunday, Stelios Elliniadis of Syriza’s Central Committee spoke candidly to organizers from other European Left parties including Germany’s Die Linke, Ireland’s Sinn Fein, and Spain’s Podemos. He implored them to learn from Syriza’s mistakes. The party, he said, lacked both a serious exit strategy and a plan for staying in the Eurozone and governing within its iron cage. “We failed to have a deeper understanding of the will of the people. The leading group in the Syriza government was surprised and, I should say, scared by the result.”

This post-OXI moment is a time of introspection and self-criticism, but also one of solidarity—a notion that will become increasingly significant whether Greece exits or continues to struggle under the dead hand of Eurozone policy. Leo Panitch, Professor of Political Economy at York University, criticized armchair quarterbacking from those outside Greece and urged Syriza to expand grassroots solidarity networks.

Catarina Principe, a Portuguese activist and member of Portugal’s Bloco de Esquerda, and Eoin O Broin from Sinn Fein maintained skepticism towards the euro while also criticizing inflammatory and divisive rhetoric against Syriza’s leadership. “The EU is showing the cracks in the European project,” Principe said. “They can only accept so much democracy, so much equality.”

Activists Astra Taylor and Laura Hanna drew global connections between the situation in Greece and the student debt and mortgage crises in the US, urging the indebted to challenge creditor morality through economic disobedience. Several panelists reiterated the importance of solidarity tourism, encouraging sympathetic travelers to vacation in Greece.

In a highly politicized Greek society, these conversations spilled beyond the university. At a sidewalk café in the leftist neighborhood of Exarcheia, journalists and activists talked late into the night, inventorying Syriza’s recent failures and weighing the pros and cons of a post-euro Greece. “We mourn together. We don’t sleep at night,” said Mihalis Panayiotakis, a journalist and member of Syriza’s digital policy committee. Despite troubles on the left, he maintains hope that exiting the euro may offer a way out of peonage and austerity.

“People ‘want’ to stay in the Eurozone for the same reasons shopkeepers ‘want’ to remain under some mobsters’ protection racket,” he said. “It’s not because of hope, it’s because of fear.”

“This is the first time someone tried to articulate an alternative to global capitalism,” said journalist Matthaios Tsimitakis. “We failed. So what? There’s a clear class root to the referendum. The rich voted for ‘yes.’ The poor voted for ‘no.’ Maybe people have changed. Maybe it’s not the end.”

Chloe Wyma is a freelance arts and culture critic and a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Follow her on Twitter at @chloewyma.

Fearful of Kurdish electoral gains in Turkey and military advances in Syria, Erdogan pushes for war with the PKK to secure his own political future.

Turkey stepped up its campaign against the PKK on Saturday when it bombed the Kurdish village of Zergele in Iraqi Kurdistan, killing at least six civilians and displacing hundreds. Turkish airstrikes have targeted PKK positions across their bases in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan since July 24 in an intense offensive which government-linked sources claim has killed 260 PKK militants so far. But the bombing of Zergele vilage marks the first airstrike to have targeted civilians in Iraq, and has led to further scrutiny of Turkey’s new policy against the Kurdish militants.

Zergele, a village high up in the Qandil region, had become symbolic for an altogether different reason. Back in March 2013, when the PKK declared a ceasefire and the peace process supposedly began, Zergele was the village where the PKK handed over their last Turkish prisoners to a Turkish delegation. Eight prisoners, six of them Turkish soldiers, were released as a gesture towards peace. The senior PKK commander who was in charge of handing over PKK’s remaining prisoners, Heval Dersim, said: “Today we are handing these eight men to the Turkish government on the orders of Abdullah Öcalan. This is a humanitarian gesture and proof of our good will toward peace between Ankara and ourselves.”

Since the tragic Suruç massacre, which claimed 32 lives after a suicide bomb was planted by a former ISIS fighter, Turkey has launched a full frontal assault on its Kurdish minority. Not only has the bombing of PKK bases been resumed for the first time since the summer of 2011, but a brutal crackdown of Kurdish and leftist activists has taken place across Turkey, with the state arresting over 1,300 people in the last week alone. Demonstrations are being met with more severe police brutality than usual. In many neighborhoods, protesters have taken to using their own firearms to combat the police, and deaths on both sides have become commonplace.

Alongside the arrest of leftist and Kurdish activists, Turkey has also targeted some suspected ISIS cells within Turkey, as well as bombed a number of ISIS positions in Jarablus in Northern Syria. These airstrikes proceeded the attack on PKK positions, but the sheer scale of operations against the Kurdish militants shows how the offensive against ISIS is being used as a smokescreen to cover up the crackdown on the Kurdish resistance — in Turkish society as well as in the mountains.

The PKK have responded to the recent developments with their own attacks against the Turkish state. Two policemen were killed in the border city of Ceylanpinar the day after the Suruç massacre and PKK militants have attacked a number of soldiers, killing over a dozen. On Sunday, a suicide attack was carried out on a Turkish military station, where three soldiers were killed and 31 injured. The PKK have also claimed responsibility for acts of sabotage against a gas pipeline running from Iran into Turkey, blowing up a bridge near Erzurum, as well as targeting a dam near Bitlis. Many fear that this escalation of the conflict marks a return to the violence that characterized life in the Kurdish region of Turkey for much of the 1990s.

Erdogan turns on the Kurds

Erdogan’s decision to break the peace process with the Kurds comes on the back of his defeat in the latest elections. For the first time since it emerged as the country’s ruling party in 2002, the AKP fell 18 seats short of a majority. AKP’s nemesis throughout the campaign was the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP), which succeeded in passing the 10 percent threshold needed to enter parliament, taking 13 percent of the national vote.

As conservative Kurdish voters in southeastern Turkey switched their allegiance from the AKP to HDP en masse, Erdogan lost many MPs. The HDP’s instrumental role in blocking Erdogan’s bid for an absolute majority — which would have allowed him to push through a constitutional reform to increase his powers — has greatly angered the president, and Erdogan seems determined to exact revenge.

The reason for this fall in Kurdish support for Erdogan stems from both his failure to advance the peace process as well as his dubious policies in Syria. Back in October, Erdogan made an infamous speech in which he declared that “Kobane is about to fall.” This led to mass protests across the Kurdish areas of Turkey, resulting in dozens of deaths and eventually forcing Erdogan to allow the Iraqi-Kurdish Peshmerga to use Turkish territory to enter Kobane and support the Syrian-Kurdish YPG/YPJ militia in defending the city.

Erdogan has never been comfortable with the push for Kurdish autonomy that has been gaining strength in Northern Syria. As a vocal opponent of President Assad, he provided significant support to various Islamist and secular opposition forces in Syria and he allowed ISIS to conduct activity inside Turkey and cross its borders to smuggle oil and fighters.

When the YPG/YPJ secured an important victory in June, taking over the border city of Tel Abyad from ISIS, Erdogan reacted angrily and announced that “We will never allow the establishment of a state in Syria’s north and our south. We will continue our fight in this regard, no matter what the costs. We will not turn a blind eye to this.” This reaction shows how Erdogan has always been far more comfortable with ISIS-controlled territory on the Turkish border than with the Kurdish experiment in autonomy.

And so, when the US began working closely with YPG/YPJ forces in Rojava, the Kurdish-controlled region in Northern Syria, Erdogan’s unease about the situation grew further still. By striking a deal with the US, giving the Americans access to his airbases and allowing far greater capabilities for the US airforce over Turkish airspace, Erdogan has seized the opportunity to put a check on the recent Kurdish advances.

Halting the HDP’s momentum

These Kurdish advances have coincided with the success of the HDP to unite the Kurdish movement with a growing number of Turkish voters, liberals as well as leftists. Since the main opposition party, CHP, is too connected to the old Kemalist elite, who remain staunch opponents of Kurdish rights, the HDP managed to attract voters from various backgrounds on a ticket of inclusiveness and recognition of minorities. This tactic clearly paid off, allowing the HDP to secure 80 seats in the last elections.

Beyond blocking Erdogan’s grand plans for greater presidential powers, the HDP’s success also represents a new development in Turkish politics: a recognition of the faults of Turkish nationalism and a desire for change within the Turkish national identity. The party itself has been endorsed by Abdullah Ocalan, who called the HDP “the inheritor of the historical legacy of the revolutionary struggle,” and who has long argued that the struggle for democratic autonomy is not limited to the Kurds.

The rising popularity of the HDP, spurred on by the enticing charm of their co-chair Salahattin Demirtas, was one of the major reasons that Erdogan turned his back on the PKK peace process. In March, various representatives of the HDP and AKP met to announce the Dolmabahce Agreement, which was meant to kick-start a new phase of negotiations with an independent monitoring committee. However, immediately after the announcement, Erdogan rejected the agreement and claimed that “there is no Kurdish problem.”

In a recent interview, Demirtas stated that the reason Erdogan denounced the Dolmabahce Agreement, even though he had supported it up to that point, was because he was informed by pollsters of the growing popularity of the HDP. As a result, he vocally assumed a more nationalistic rhetoric in the lead-up to the elections, hoping to thereby gain nationalist votes.

The fact that this tactic failed massively has led Erdogan to seek revenge against the HDP. For the power-hungry president, the peace process was always a way of securing, obtaining and protecting his Kurdish support base. He seemed to believe that by investing in the development of the Kurdish region, alongside a favorable peace agreement, he would slowly assert the AKP’s position as the dominant force among Kurdish voters.

However, the rising popularity of the HDP has all but laid waste to Erdogan’s grand vision for the Kurdish regions. In this sense, the latest assault on the PKK and on Kurdish activists more generally is a result of Erdogan’s weakened position. For the president, there is little incentive to resume peace talks with the PKK since he feels he no longer needs to protect his Kurdish support base. Instead, he is hoping that, by resuming the conflict with the PKK, he can drum up a nationalist fever which will gain him enough support in a follow-up election, which he could in theory announce later this year.

The Kurdish movement responds

The recent crackdown on Kurds inside Turkey is definitely a major step back for a peace process craved by so many people across Turkey. The PKK has already responded with a series of attacks against the Turkish state and their security forces. It began with an affiliated group killing two police officers in Ceylanpinar, but since then PKK militants have targeted a number of different targets. Since July 25, the PKK has launched three attacks within Diyarbakir and many more across the Kurdish region. Most of their targets have been special forces units of the Turkish military.

The retributions started with an attack in Ceylanpinar, for which the PKK has interestingly denied responsibility. Instead, it is believed that the YDG-H carried out the attack. The YDG-H are a relatively new organization of Kurdish youths in cities across Turkey who are affiliated with PKK militants in the Qandil mountains. When both Qandil and Demirtas called Kurds out onto the street last October to protest Erdogan’s statements regarding the imminent fall of Kobane, it was the YDG-H that took the lead. Its members took to the streets with firearms and fought off the Kurdish Hezbollah, an Islamist organization that was originally set up and supported by the government to fight the PKK in the 1990s.

Unlike last October, Demirtas has resisted the urge to call for street protests, and has instead demanded that both the Turkish government and the PKK “silence their arms.” Demirtas knows that he cannot control the YDG-H, and so he is urging Turkey to avoid a return to a civil war scenario. If Turkey is pushed towards civil war, the HDP may well find themselves unable to act at all. The YDG-H may be affiliated with the broader Kurdish movement, but they are also an autonomous organization in their own right.

In the 1990s, the Kurds were so afraid of the Turkish state that they dared not speak their own language on the streets. Partly due to the HDP’s successful rise as a central force in mainstream Turkish politics, such fears have now been replaced with a sense of pride of what the Kurdish movement has achieved in 25 years. And if Erdogan continues to insist on sacrificing the peace process to entrench his own power, young and angry Kurds like those of the YDG-H will be ready to fight back.

Yvo Fitzherbert is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul. He writes for a number of different publications, with a particular focus on Kurdish politics. Follow him on Twitter at @yvofitz.

Oil is often seen as the root cause of conflict in the Middle East, but in the coming years water might come to overtake it as a key source of dispute.

Photo by João Silva.

Mesopotamia, the ‘Land of Two Rivers’, cradle of modern civilization and currently home to probably as many conflicts as there are ethnic groups, religious factions and nation states. Rebels fighting states, Sunnis battling Shias, Turks clashing with Kurds, jihadists massacring local villagers, environmental activists against national governments and states competing with one another for the region’s natural resources.

Where oil is widely considered to be one of the main causes for the region’s instability — mainly because it drew imperialist powers to the region that eagerly supported local dictators to ensure continued and unlimited access to the precious liquid — another potential source of conflict is often overlooked. Water, the first and foremost source of life in the barren desert regions of the Middle East, which allowed for the world’s first civilizations to develop on the fertile floodplains between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, is becoming ever more scarce, and the struggles to safeguard a fair share are growing fiercer by the day.

Water flows. From the mountains to the seas. Oblivious to national borders, local conflicts and the religious, ethnic and ideological backgrounds of the people who populate its banks. Rivers that sprout in one country quench thirst in another, and as such, by definition, they play in important role in the relations between the countries whose borders they so easily cross.

On several occasions over the past decades local development projects on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers have brought the three neighboring states Turkey, Syria and Iraq to the brink of war. When in 1990 Turkey blocked the flow of the Euphrates for nine days to fill the reservoir of the Atatürk dam, Iraq massed troops on its border and threatened to bomb the dam. Nowadays, tensions remain high as yet another Turkish mega-dam is about to be completed — the Ilisu dam on the Tigris river — which will severely reduce the water flow to Iraq and destroy thousands of years of cultural and historical heritage at home.

Water is cause for conflict in many instances, but it also has the potential to bring communities together to build the necessary foundations for lasting peace in the Middle East.

Hasankeyf under threat

Topping the list of concerns of many local and international campaigns against the construction of the Ilisu dam is the fate of the town of Hasankeyf. The town and its surroundings are home to numerous archaeological sites — some of which remain unexplored — that date back more than 12,000 years. The ruins of an 11^th century bridge mark the spot where the Silk Road once crossed the river Tigris and the thousands of human-made caves that dot the mountains bare witness to the unique culture of the region. All of this is set to disappear below the surface of the water once the inundation of the dam reservoir begins.

Immediately after the announcement of the project in 1997, a social movement emerged. Civil society groups, local professionals and international NGOs joined forces to oppose the project and raise awareness about the potential destruction of the natural environment, the cultural heritage and the displacement of up to 78,000 people from their homes in and around Hasankeyf.

A successful international campaign temporarily halted the project in 2009, when a number of European financiers withdrew their support after it was exposed that Turkey failed to meet the international standards of dam-building set by the World Bank to protect the environment, affected people, riparian states and cultural heritage. However, after Turkey turned to its national banks to provide the necessary funding, the project is now back on track and is set for completion this year.

Once completed, the Ilisu dam will provide approximately 2 percent of the national electricity requirements — an amount that can easily be provided by other, less destructive means, such as the upgrading of the country’s outdated transmission lines. Also, in combination with the nearby Cizre dam the Ilisu dam will serve to irrigate agricultural land, bringing much needed development to the region and providing employment opportunities for the impoverished population.

At least, that is what the Turkish government would have us believe.

More skeptical minds see a correlation between the large number of mega-developmental projects that have a devastating effect on local culture, society and the environment; the fact that a large number of these project take place in Kurdish dominated areas; and the neo-Ottoman aspirations of the current government that dreams of reinstalling Turkey as the dominant power in the region.

Development as political instrument

The Ilisu dam is part of the giant Southeast Anatolia Regional Development Project (GAP, after its Turkish acronym) which was launched in 1977 and aims to built a total of 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants by 2015, covering nine provinces in southeastern Turkey. The GAP project is presented by the government as bringing development to the traditionally impoverished and underdeveloped regions where poor living standards have caused the local Kurds to rise up against the central state for many decades.

For years, the Turkish central government, led by the former prime minister and current president Erdogan, has claimed that there is no such thing as a “Kurdish problem”, denying the fact that the country’s Kurdish population has been discriminated against on the basis of its ethnic background, and arguing that the Kurds’ hardships stem from the underdevelopment of their traditional homelands in southeastern Turkey.

The logical conclusion following this line of thought is that economic development of the predominantly Kurdish regions in the southeast of the country automatically eliminates all grudges the Kurds could possibly hold against the Turkish government.

In its pursuit to pacify the country’s Kurdish population, the GAP project is only partially successful — and not because it has brought the supposedly much-demanded development to the region. Many locals in the affected areas perceive the GAP project in general, and the Ilisu Dam in particular, as a well-thought-out scheme designed to undermine social cohesion, relocate farmers and villagers to regional urban centers, and form a “natural” barricade against the Kurdish militants of the PKK.

Across the region it is common policy for the government to pay the forcefully displaced locals the market value of their houses and plots of lands in compensation. People are then offered alternative housing in nearby settlements, newly constructed for the purpose of relocation. However, rather than being offered these houses as compensation for the loss of their homes and livelihoods, they are sold to the locals for as much as 7 or 8 times the price of their old homes.

Displaced locals are then left with no choice but to either indebt themselves to the government for the next twenty years or more to pay for these new homes — which they never wanted in the first place — or to leave for the urban centers where families end up on the outskirts of town, in municipal housing projects forced to make a precarious living from underpaid day jobs.

The GAP project has so far displaced hundreds of thousands of people who have been silenced, pacified and left powerless, their demands for fair compensation ignored and their voices silenced as they joined the precarious masses in the urban centers, competing for the chance to be exploited because an unfair wage is better than no wage at all when you have hungry mouths to feed.

Regional water wars

It’s not just within Turkey’s national boundaries that the GAP project has caused consternation. The Euphrates and Tigris rivers both originate in Turkey, but whereas Ankara considers them to be a source of national wealth and an instrument for regional development, they are the very sources of life for its southern neighbors Syria and Iraq. International law requires Turkey to consult its co-riparian states before starting the construction of big dams that will affect the flow of water, but on many occasions it has failed to do so.

The first disputes between the three nations date back to the 1960s, with the start of large-scale water development projects in the region. In 1975 Iraq and Syria massed their respective troops on the border after the completion of the Syrian Tabqua dam on the Euphrates, and in 1990 Turkey cut off the flow of the river for nine days to fill the Atatürk dam reservoir, leading to protests and threats from both Syria and Iraq who claimed that they hadn’t been informed of the plans.

The finished GAP project will reduce water flows to Syria by 40 percent, and to Iraq by a shocking 80 percent. This, in combination with the severe droughts that have hit the region over the past few years, the ongoing conflict between the Iraqi state and it allies and the militants of the so-called Islamic State, and the millions of (internally) displaced people in the region, has the potential to unleash an environmental and humanitarian catastrophe that could cause a serious food security problem, destabilizing the region for years to come.

The case of the Ilisu dam represents in a nutshell the importance of water and the many different shapes that political issues can take when it comes to question of ownership, access and control of natural resources and river flows.

The Euphrates and Tigris rivers, as many of their tributaries, are a source of life as well as conflict. They irrigate arid plains and make life possible where otherwise none could have flourished. At the same time, they can be exploited to push certain agendas, break up communities, and use as leverage in political negotiations. Most importantly, however, they have the potential to bring sustainable peace to the region.

With the region in flames, the Syrian civil war continuing unabated, the militants of the Islamic State proceeding to launch attacks on multiple fronts — most recently with the capture of Ramadi, a city on the banks of the Euphrates in Iraq’s central Anbar province — and the Kurdish peace process in Turkey threatening to derail, the need for cooperation between states, and more importantly, between communities, is now more urgent than ever.

From the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq to the Kurds in Turkey, the struggle for equal access to the Earth’s resources is connected across ethnic, religious and national boundaries. As such, it provides a unique opportunity to raise awareness about the interdependence of the region’s communities, forging bonds that transcend the interests of central governments and international powers.

Joris Leverink is an Istanbul-based freelance journalist, an editor for ROAR Magazine and columnist for TeleSUR English. This article was originally written for TeleSUR English.

Social media are monitored and controlled by large corporations. Can they also facilitate the kind of self-organization that defines radical politics?

When I started my PhD in 2011 there was a strong feeling that radical politics was changing. On the one hand, there was more of it. The Arab Spring, the indignados, Occupy: they all made it seem like direct action and direct democracy, were moving out of the ghettos of what remained of the alter-globalization movement. With mass assemblies and a radical DIY (or even DIO: Do It Ourselves) politics, something was changing across the world. In the face of austerity and totalitarianism, an actual alternative was being prefigured.

At the same time, the tools of these protests and uprisings came into the spotlight. Not only the democratic mechanisms of decision-making but also the digital infrastructures that, many argued, were facilitating what was so promising in these movements.

Social media was increasingly seen as an essential element in how large groups were able to organize without centralized leadership. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were allowing people to mobilize not as hierarchical structures like trade unions and political parties but as horizontal networks. Individual activists and sub-groups enjoyed a tactical autonomy while remaining part of a larger whole.

Almost four years have passed, and now at the end of my PhD the gloss to this narrative has to a large extent worn off. Some elements of the 2011 uprisings have been consumed by the tragedy of civil war and renewed dictatorships, while others have dispersed.

But of course, four years is not a long time in the grand scheme of things, and the examples of Podemos and Syriza suggest that perhaps these movements are in fact evolving and developing new strategies. While the story of mass mobilization and radical social movements is by no means over, what has been disputed perhaps more than anything else in the last four years is the promise that lay in the tools of the 2011 uprisings.

Social media, once held up by some as the very essence of contemporary radical politics, is now seen in a harsher, less forgiving light. A number of experiences have underlined the implicit hierarchies and inequalities that were reinforced by social media.

Others have pointed towards the ways in which social media exploit, for profit, our online behavior. The Edward Snowden saga has shown how vulnerable our online organizing is, as has the repression of social media-based activism seen in Turkey and elsewhere.

But among these critiques of social media, is there something that can be salvaged? Can platforms like Facebook and Twitter be useful in radical politics, and if so how? Perhaps we don’t need to abandon social media just yet. Perhaps it can, in one form or another, still facilitate the kind of organization that was so promising in 2011 and that continues, in many ways, to define radical left politics.

The promise of social media

Social media platforms are often discussed as means of communication, self-expression and forming public discourse. As well as this, however, social media platforms — and communication practices more generally — also act as infrastructures that support the actions we take. They allow us to share information and resources, and to make decisions that can then be enacted.

In this way, communication practices can also be understood as information management systems. This is a concept borrowed from the world of business and management and refers to any system, normally electronic and increasingly digital, that facilitates organization. Work email and intranets are of this sort. They don’t just let people talk to one another but also contribute to getting tasks completed.

What social media might offer when viewed as information management systems, as platforms that facilitate certain forms of action, is a way to make radical and anarchist forms of organization more like the participatory and democratic structures that characterized the 2011 uprisings and radical left politics since at least the Zapatista rebellion, the alter-globalization movement in the 1990s and, even earlier, the radical feminism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Social media can provide the infrastructure for both democratic decision-making and autonomous action, with activists given access to resources and information that may enable them to act in ways that more hierarchical communication structures reduce to command and control processes.

While there are significant critiques of social media from activists and scholars alike (focusing on privacy and surveillance, corporate and state control, the political economy of free labor and the psychology and behavior that is encouraged by the architecture of mainstream platforms), I want to suggest that there is still a potential inherent in social media owing to the nature of the communication practices it supports.

These practices can be described as many-to-many communication. They are potentially built on conversations with multiple actors that reflect some of the necessary foundations of the participatory democracy of radical Left politics. Social media can, therefore, be seen as systems that facilitate radically democratic forms of organization and that can support the kinds of autonomy and horizontality that have in part been seen in the 2011 uprisings.

This is the promise of social media. And it is a promise that may yet be fulfilled. If social media present opportunities for horizontal, conversational communication, and these types of communication are consistent with the ways in which we try to imagine non-hierarchical social relationships and decision-making structures, then social media can be considered as having at least the potential to be a part of a radical left politics.

Internal and external communication practices

As part of my PhD research I interviewed a number of activists involved in the Dutch radical left and anarchist scene. The pictures they provided of the communication practices of the groups they were involved in can be used to work through some of the ideas around many-to-many communication, its relationship to radical politics and the promise of social media.

Internally, the radical left groups in question all more or less conform to the many-to-many communication model. Much of this communication is done through face-to-face meetings at which members aim to reach consensus on the topics being discussed and the decisions that need to be made.

In terms of social networking technologies, however, activists spoke of the email listservs and online forums that have been common to radical left politics at least since the Battle of Seattle in 1999 and the beginnings of the alter-globalization movement.

While none of the groups used newer, mainstream platforms like Facebook in their internal communication practices, one of the groups did use the alternative social networking site Crabgrass as a core part of their discussion and decision-making infrastructure. Crabgrass was developed by people connected to the RiseUp collective that provides secure email addresses for activists. It aims to facilitate social networking and group collaboration with a specifically radical, left-wing bent.

Externally, many-to-many communication practices became much rarer. While most of the groups use Facebook and Twitter, they use them primarily as extensions of their websites, which in turn act mainly as extensions of their printed newspapers.

The three exceptions to this highlight the abilities of both mainstream and alternative social media platforms to play this role. One group, involved in community organizing, was active on Facebook not only in sharing articles and announcements but also in responding to comments and engaging in discussions with other users.

Another made use of crowd-sourced mapping in a way that reflects the scope of many-to-many communication to support autonomous action. The third example of using social media in line with this participatory ethos came from one group that printed comments and responses from Facebook and Twitter in their newspaper, facilitating some level of conversation between the group and those outside it.

Institutionalizing autonomy

The many-to-many communication social media facilitates, insofar as it allows for conversation rather than merely the broadcast of information (or even orders), is intimately connected to a radical left and anarchist vision of organization. If prefiguration, the realization of the goals of politics in the here and now, is taken as one of the core concerns of radical social movements, then a commitment to many-to-many communication might need to be seen as just as important as the commitment to democracy and equality.

It has the potential to empower activists to take autonomous action and the bedrock of participatory democracy. In this way, social media platforms can contribute towards freeing activism from the top-down structures of political parties and trade unions.

But is there another way of looking at these types of organization and of the structures suggested by social media and many-to-many communication? I mentioned at the start of this article that social media and the examples of the 2011 uprisings have lost some of what made them so attractive at the time. Activists are, it seems, increasingly (and perhaps rightly given the limitations) wary of both networked organization and networked communications. In the last year or so, however, radical politics has shifted somewhat.

In place of social movements that are completely opposed to, and autonomous from political parties, the rise of Podemos and Syriza, and indeed the surge of support for the Greens in England and Wales and the Scottish National Party in Scotland, might point to a return of the mass party as an element of radical left social movement strategy.

Podemos and Syriza, by many accounts, have become the institutional articulations of mass social movements. They haven’t replaced them and are clear that they aim to act as parliamentary wings subservient to those movements (although the current tensions in Syriza suggest that this is much more problematic that some might make out).

In the case of Podemos, this has meant a continuation of the radical, direct democracy of the 15-M movement and the party has relied on social media and many-to-many communication not in getting its message across to voters but in defining the very content of that message and of its policies.

Social media might continue to have a role in radical left politics after all. The many-to-many communication practices it supports can be, at their best, prefigurative of the goals of radical politics, of democratic and participatory decision-making. As information management systems, facilitating concrete action, the examples of the radical left groups involved in my PhD research point towards this conclusion.

Both mainstream social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, and alternative platforms, such as Crabgrass and n-1, can be an important part of radical left politics, whether in the form of mass social movement mobilizations or the articulation of those movements in more democratic political parties.

Thomas Swann is a PhD student in the University of Leicester School of Management and member of the Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy. His research focuses on radical left organization, social media and organizational cybernetics. Follow him on Twittter via @ThomasSwann1.

In Spain, where the government bails out banks, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) bails out families and defends their right to housing.

In February 2009, after the Spanish government had shown itself incapable of enforcing Article 47 of the Spanish Constitution — declaring that “all Spaniards have the right to enjoy decent and adequate housing” — a citizens’ assembly was held in Barcelona to establish the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, or the PAH (Spanish: Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca), a social movement which would wait for neither government action nor market corrections for this right to be enforced.

The PAH’s immediate aims are simple — the prevention of the systematic eviction of tens of thousands of debtors across Spain — but its larger dream is bolder: the achievement of the socio-economic conditions in which the human right to housing may be secure.

It is the ceaseless energy of this grassroots platform, its repertoire of organizing tactics, and its ability to bring disaffected and disadvantaged people together that has made it so popular amongst Spain’s mass of indignados and so feared by its minority class of bankers, developers and investors whose interests are secured by the casta suits of the governing PP and the opposition PSOE — or the PPSOE, as one PAH organizer put it.

It is this movement of people which we in the international left should look to for both inspiration and instruction in the fight against austerity. And it is for this reason that this article has been written: to paint us a portrait of the PAH and to give us a glimpse at how it operates — how it feels, how it looks, how it speaks — in its oldest branch of Barcelona.

No one left behind

Most people’s first encounter with the PAH will be through its weekly welcome assemblies held in Barcelona’s tightly-knit barrio of Hostafrancs, where upon entry you’ll be greeted with a friendly smile and, if you’re a first-timer to the meetings, you’ll be given a paper rose made with a Catalan flag tied to its stem. As you adjust to the sweaty heat generated from the  80 or so people squashed into the PAH headquarters, all waving their hand-held fans to keep the heat at bay, you might notice that a good deal of the participants and a large majority of the organizers are women.

On a letter printed and placed onto the doors of the assembly hall, a PAH participant thanks her new friends for providing the warmth and love that only a mother knows, for helping her to help herself and then to help others, for bringing dignity and hope back into her life. These are the elements — dignity, respect, mutual-aid — which define a welcoming assembly, and are seen by the PAH to be absolutely integral to the participants’ struggle to reclaim their right to housing.

Tears are not uncommon in these assemblies, especially when the veterans are invited to stand up to tell the newer participants of a recent victory they’ve had: their stories are always moving, the responses always touching, and you see that the PAH really is a family, a place where the pain and gain of one is felt by all.

For those most in need of emotional support there is a smaller closed assembly where people may come to tell their story in an open environment of mutual respect and listening, where people may come to see that others are experiencing and feeling the very same as they do, where they can see that the guilt is not theirs, that they can still hold their heads high.

If the heart of the PAH is the welcoming assembly, then the head must be its actions and coordinating assembly, which meets once a week to keep the gears of the movement oiled. But before this assembly even begins to discuss the host of actions the movement has in gestation, it must decide on the day-to-day responsibilities of the attendees. Everyone present is asked to contribute to one small but essential part of the PAH — one pair to help out with cleaning, another to update the calendar, someone else to record minutes, another to keep track of time while someone else moderates — and all are rotated every week.

For anyone schooled in more bureaucratic forms of social and political groups, this process — which is as true of the more routine tasks as those duties with more responsibility — may seem tedious and unimportant, but it is of course the process which matters here; the process of participation, of mutual support and of self-organization which define the PAH as an organization where everyone has a role to play, where everybody leads and none are left behind.

Tom Joad’s inheritors

Once into gear the assembly can cover much ground, and within a couple of hours of one particular meeting the group had already discussed three major campaigns. First was the Citizens’ Legislative Initiative, or the ILP, a major joint campaign between the Barcelona PAH, the Alliance Against Energy Poverty and the Observatory for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which has gathered around 140,000 signatures in Catalonia calling for emergency measures to combat the social crisis created by mortgage evictions and utilities cut-offs.

The ILP draws on a mechanism allowing citizens’ proposals to be voted on by Catalan parliament, requiring 50,000 signatures to be effective, meaning that the Barcelona ILP has nearly tripled the required amount of petitioners. The ILP, which will be voted on today, July 23, proposed five measures which could stem the flow of around 50 families per day from their houses to the streets or to precarious housing. They demand that any remaining debt of the evictees be liquidated, allowing them a second chance to rebuild their lives.

They furthermore demand that empty apartments held by banks be used as emergency housing for evictees, while for those facing eviction they demand the right to a ‘social rent’, which means that indebted homeowners may pay only what they can pay, and that cut-offs of water, gas and electricity must end immediately, with the state stepping in to assure access if the companies cannot respect the rights of their customers. If the ILP passes parliament this July, the PAH and its social partners will have scored a truly enormous victory for thousands and thousands of families across Catalonia.

It will be an important victory because the PAH knows that their fight is one which must also confront the myriad of factors that compound Spain’s housing crisis, including the squeeze of rising energy bills arriving in the mail from private utility companies (‘monstrous’ organizations, as one PAH organizer described them) and the cuts in healthcare and education that have accompanied previous cuts in wages and benefits. Meanwhile, the explosion of ‘flexible’ contracts means that credit is impossible to get by for many, endangering people’s ability to pay their monthly rents or mortgage payments on time.

What’s more, this crisis exists in a global context where international investment and financial companies like Blackstone (see the video #BlackstoneEvicts) and Goldman Sachs buy up tens of thousands of empty apartments at heavily discounted prices from banks. One of the largest deals secured by Blackstone involved some 40,000 apartments in Catalonia alone, with a real value somewhere near 6.4 billion euros, which were purchased for the sum of 3.6 billion euros: if the banks can give Blackstone a discount, the PAH asks, then why can’t they give the people one?

This is why the PAH has begun organizing alliances with similar movements in the UK, the US and soon perhaps in Brazil, where the Movement of Workers without Roofs is facing the same investment banking foes as its counterparts in Spain. The fight being fought from Barcelona’s barrios, from London’s New Era Estate, from the US boroughs, from anywhere where “there’s a fight so hungry people can eat,” Tom Joad’s inheritors will be there.

The PAH’s Obra Social

But far away from the negotiations with the banks, from the political labyrinth of the Catalan parliament, from the long hard work of building national and international alliances, the bread and butter of the PAH remains the prevention of eviction and homelessness.

When all efforts of the debtor fail, when all negotiations and offers are rejected, after lies are told and myths are spread to scare people into making strangling payments (that, for example, the debt may be paid by the children; that, for instance, a migrant might be forced to return to their home country for a failed mortgage), then the PAH’s Obra Social (Social Work) will step in to ensure that the family will not end up on the street — sleeping, perhaps like so many thousands of others in Barcelona, in the ATM vestibules of the very banks that evicted them.

The Obra Social is the body which — when the bank is not prepared to find alternative housing for the tenant, when there is no room at anyone’s inn — will help the evicted family occupy one of the thousands of empty apartments owned by the banks. But to say that the banks actually ‘own’ these empty flats is, as one PAH organizer put it, entirely misleading, for it was the Spanish people who bailed out these banks during the crisis, and it is therefore the Spanish people who own these properties.

The PAH has a simple slogan: the government bails out banks, our platform bails out people. Here the shibboleth of private property becomes particularly naked and grotesque when, as in Spain, you have one of Europe’s greatest number of empty apartments and its greatest rate of evictions. Can we still imagine a world where this does not occur, where human rights finally come to trump contractual rights? The members of the PAH certainly can.

Timothy Ginty is a freelance writer completing a master’s degree in World History at the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. You can read his blog, Lives and Times, here.

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To learn more about the PAH, the documentary Seven Days with the PAH (Siete Días en la PAH), is available (with English subtitles) here, and you can download the book Vidas Hipotecadas (in Spanish) here.

The Polanyian preoccupation with the social limits to the expansion of the market is really just a distraction from our own investment in the status quo.

Image shows Steve Lambert’s art installation Capitalism works for me!

It is now sometimes hard to remember — and for the generation that is now in college and wasn’t necessarily reading the opinion pages at the time, it may seem nothing short of perverse — but there was a period following the onset of the crisis when progressive commentary on economic and financial life was pervaded by intense optimism about the future. As overleveraged financial structures crumbled, progressive intelligentsia rang the death knell for the neoliberal principles that were so obviously responsible for the problems.

At the height of the crisis in September 2008, the excitement about the ‘return of the state’ was palpable. That the bailouts had some morally problematic aspects did of course not go unnoticed, but those were nonetheless seen as secondary in importance to the basic lesson they taught: that the capitalist economy does not regulate itself and needs the state. The future seemed to belong to public regulation and Keynesian intervention.

In the social sciences, such reasoning has become closely associated with the revival of the work of Karl Polanyi. The key concept here is that of the ‘double movement,’ which sees history as evolving in cycles: periodic ‘disembedding’ movements, when the speculative and individualizing logic of the market becomes unmoored from its social and political foundations, will be followed by ‘re-embedding’ movements, when society regroups and once again subordinates markets to the public good.

This model sees financial crises as powerful reminders of the inability of markets to regulate themselves, and accordingly takes them as political turning-points. The influence of this model of capitalist development has been significant throughout the neoliberal era, but has grown dramatically since the financial crisis, with some of the most prominent public intellectuals embracing it. Indeed, anyone who has misgivings about the role of markets and financial institutions in contemporary life and consults the social science literature for some deeper insight will soon encounter the name of Karl Polanyi.

The schema of the double movement has turned out to be just about the poorest guide to the post-crisis development of capitalism that we could have had.

Neoliberalism recharged

Instead of a break with the politics of financial expansion and hands-off regulation, what we got was a neoliberalism recharged. Not only have left-wing progressive reform agendas faltered almost everywhere, the past years have in fact seen a dramatic turn to austerity. In order to make sense of this state of affairs, progressive intellectuals have turned to the idea of regulatory or cognitive capture: it is the iron-fisted hold of financial elites on regulatory institutions and the mindsets of policymakers that has prevented the re-embedding movement from materializing.

But of course the disproportionate influence of elites on public policy is hardly a new phenomenon and is in many ways more symptom than cause. What needs explaining is precisely how the privileges of the financial sector have survived amidst widespread concerns about its legitimacy and intense hostility towards bankers. We are currently seeing the bizarre emergence of an academic growth sector devoted to explaining the failure of social reality to conform itself to social scientists’ fantasies of a re-embedding movement — a curious imitation of the financial sector’s own ability to profit from failure.

These kinds of post-crisis debates have been unable to come to terms with the considerable popular appeal and democratic legitimacy of neoliberalism. This has been most visible in the United States, where the Tea Party movement played a crucial role in bringing austerity to the top of the political agenda.

The movement originated in the widespread concern that the American government had become heavily involved in the picking of economic winners, and its central aim is to restore an America founded on republican values, where the undeserving were not pampered with bailouts. This phenomenon of ‘neoliberal populism’ manifests something that progressive commentators have profound difficulty relating to: the moral force of the orthodox image of the market and the ethical appeal of austerity as a means of purifying capitalist institutions.

The disembedding metaphor underlines this disconnect: it sets far too much store by the claims of the ‘dismal science’ as a guide to actually existing capitalism and places far too much emphasis on the morally corrosive aspects of the market.

Organizing our own oppression

The issue here isn’t just of academic interest: the growing stature of Polanyi’s work among social scientists reflects the more general tendency among progressive intellectuals to adopt as serious explanation what is little more than journalistic opinionating and left-of-center moralizing. In keeping with this style of political commentary, progressive commentators have gone out of their way to downplay the significance of neoliberal populism, dismissing it as irrational sentiment manufactured and manipulated by conservative elites.

More generally, to the extent that progressive intellectuals have engaged with the ethical charge of neoliberal capitalism, they have tended to focus on its paradoxical alliance with (neo)conservatism and the religious right. In this interpretation, private enrichment has been legitimated through appeals to conservative values, and large sections of the American public have been curiously unable to see through this hypocrisy. At the limit, this gives rise to the kind of despair at the people’s irrationality that is expressed in the title of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas?

To understand the attachment to neoliberalism as a kind of cognitive impairment is hardly a promising starting point for engaging it in a serious way. As a result, the left’s debate on austerity has remained superficial, revolving around the notion that it represents nothing but an ideological program imposed on populations from above and remaining largely silent on the question of how austerity discourses have been able to gain such traction in democratic polities.

The democratic character of our political systems is of course compromised in myriad ways, but — at least in a Western context — neoliberalism does not operate in a way that is primarily authoritarian. Its distinctive strength is its ability to lure us into organizing our own oppression.

Framed in psychological terms, progressive perspectives on austerity ‘externalize’ the problem, attributing problems to the nefarious machinations of scheming elites in order to disavow our own connection to it. The result is a critique of austerity that is moralistic, depicting it as a wrong policy or cognitive mistake without meaningful social or psychological roots.

That the capture concept is a neoliberal invention — it was pioneered by George Stigler, a founding member of the Mont Pelerin society — should alert us to a blind spot in the progressive critique of neoliberal capitalism. The neoliberal project is itself already fundamentally a critique of the ways in which public institutions have been captured by special interests. It looks to austerity as a means to restore an authentic republican ethos, a self-reliance that is not cynically utilitarian but responsible and accountable, capable of serving as the backbone of political community.

And here it is precisely the progressive-liberal character that is seen as the principal obstacle: it features as the embodiment of moral corruption, as elitist, condescending do-goodery that facilitates lazy, hedonistic dependency. The progressive critique of neoliberalism, then, operates somewhat unreflexively in the slipstream of the neoliberal assault on progressivism.

The power of austerity

Of course, the neoliberal management of austerity has often been a highly technocratic and depoliticized affair. But what needs explaining is precisely how democratic publics have come to embrace such self-limitation. Similarly, it is true that only the US has experienced a full-fledged movement of neoliberal populism. But the turn to austerity policies in the post-crisis Eurozone could never have been effective had it not been for the remarkable speed with which the focus of at least Western European public opinion was redirected from almost visceral disgust with financial elites to a general acceptance of key tenets of austerity policy — that budgets need balancing and debts need to be paid.

Explaining the power of austerity therefore requires an ability to critically penetrate an economic imaginary that enjoys considerable ethical appeal and democratic traction. The Polanyian preoccupation with the idea that there exist inherent social and political limits to the expansion of market logics, and its reliance on conspiratorial explanations for why those limits are not being enforced, are really just distractions from the real question of why we are so invested in the logic of neoliberal capitalism.

It is reflective of the malaise of present-day progressivism that it can only understand formulations such as the latter as encouraging a retreat from political action. In practice, it is of course precisely the advocacy of policy change that is associated with a dismissive attitude towards the spate of critical energies that have flourished since the crisis, counseling cautious accommodation to austerity politics no matter how minute and short-lived the discounts on offer.

That ethos serves to demobilize rather than energize resistance, and a meaningful critical engagement of neoliberal capitalism is premised on a break with a distinctly progressive-liberal way of thinking about economic life that is epitomized by the prominence of Polanyi’s ideas.

Martijn Konings teaches at the University of Sydney and is the author of The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (2015).

Journalist Owen Jones recently asked whether it is time for the left to abandon the EU. In this episode of #TalkReal, four guests discuss the question.

Syriza’s strategy to end austerity within the Eurozone has failed. What does this mean for the future of the Greek left and the anti-austerity movement in Europe?

In the past weeks, the masks have really fallen: the structures and legitimacy of the Eurozone are now thoroughly broken. Has the time come for the left to abandon the single currency, or even the EU? And what role are grassroots movements to play in the reconstruction of a radical transnational project against austerity and for a democratic and socially just Europe?

These are some of the questions discussed in this episode of #TalkReal, recorded in Athens during the GCAS World Conference, Democracy Rising. Featuring: Costas Douzinas, acclaimed Greek intellectual close to Syriza; Margarita Tsomou, Greek performer and commentator based in Berlin; Jerome Roos, writer and founder of ROAR Magazine; and Srecko Horvat, Croatian philosopher and member of the board of European Alternatives. Host: Lorenzo Marsili, director of European Alternatives.

The bombing of the Amara Cultural Center was meant to inspire fear and keep people from acting in solidarity with Kobane. We must not let ISIS succeed.

Image: the faces of some of the victims of the bomb attack.

The bomb attack that took place at midday on Monday, July 20, at the Amara Cultural Center in Suruç will go down in history as a tragedy. Suruç is a border-town within 15 kilometers of Kobane, and has been the center for relief operations and the logistical hub of all support activity.

To many, Amara was a place of sanctuary and refuge for refugees fleeing the conflict in Kobane for many months. It acted as the base of coordination for the relief effort at the dozens of refugee camps scattered across the city, and as a center for international solidarity and delegations visiting the area.

Throughout the conflict, which began last September, journalists and activists have come to offer their support, and Amara was their home. I spent many weeks at the cultural center over numerous trips to the border, and it was a place which brought everyone together.

In addition to being a hub for people coming from outside, the center also acted as a refuge for children. Many workshops were arranged for the kids, and in the central room a children’s art exhibition was permanently on display. Cay was continuously drank as people sat in the middle of the room and discussed the political developments across the border in Rojava.

A specific target

The bomb specifically targeted a solidarity group called the Socialist Federation of Youth Associations (SGDF). Its young members had come to lend a hand in the rebuilding effort, and planned to cross into Kobane where they would take part in the building of a children’s playground. The victims of the massacre were predominately from Istanbul, and many were students.

SDLP are the youth wing of the socialist ESP (Party of the Oppressed), the party which formed an alliance with the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) before the elections. The HDP’s co-president is Figen Yüksekdağ, a founding member of the ESP. From the traditional Turkish left, the ESP’s alliance with the HDP and the Kurdish movement in general represents the advances made in creating solidarity across pre-existing ethnic divides between Turks and Kurds.

The HDP consciously sought out alliances with the Turkish left, and in this sense, the deliberate targeting of SGDF is a direct attack on the recent convergence of the Kurdish and Turkish left. The slogan with which SGDF led the delegation says it all: “The values of Kobane are the values of the Gezi Resistance.”

The delegation that the SGDF were involved with was an attempt to extend solidarity for the people of Rojava beyond ethnic affiliations. Many of the victims of the massacre came from Alevi backgrounds, whilst another young man came from the traditional nationalist stronghold of Trabzon on the Black Sea.

Amara, moreover, was the base for activists from across the world, a sort of embassy for international allies of Kobane and Rojava more generally. For journalists, Amara was the first introduction to life on the border. Interviews were arranged through the center, and it was also where journalists were arranged to be smuggled into Kobane.

For these reasons, we can see the attack on the SGDF delegation as an attack on the international solidarity which has been built around Kobane’s resistance. The center itself is intrinsically linked to the struggle across the border in Kobane, and the attack is a clear attempt by the Islamic State to dissuade such international solidarity from taking place. We must not allow ourselves to be scared into submission.

Suicide bombers and Turkey’s ties to ISIS

Over the last two months, we have witnessed an increase in ISIS revenge suicide bombings on the Kurds, seemingly in direct response to the recent defeats the Kurdish liberation forces (YPG/YPG) have inflicted upon ISIS in northern Syria.

In Diyarbakir during an election rally for the pro-Kurdish HDP, a Turkish citizen who had previously fought for the Islamic State in Syria detonated a bomb, killing four. A few weeks later, ISIS jihadists entered Kobane from the Turkish border-gate and proceeded to massacre over 200 citizens — their second-biggest massacre in Syria, according to the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights.

In all three of these attacks, Turkey has either been complicit or utterly negligent. As evidence of Turkey’s involvement with ISIS steadily grows, it has become increasingly apparent that the Turkish government is not on the side of its own Kurdish citizens, and would much rather support the Islamic State in order to weaken the Kurdish experiment in democratic autonomy in northern Syria.

This situation points towards an increasing spillover of the Syrian civil war into southern Turkey. While the Syrian Kurds continuously battle the Islamic State (making major gains over the last two months), the fear is that ISIS, with the implicit support of the Turkish government, will continue to carry out suicide attacks against the Kurds inside Turkey. Following the tragedy that took place in Suruç, many Kurds blame the Turkish government and its security forces for not doing enough, and are demanding retribution from the PKK.

Need for international solidarity

Both the massacre in Kobane in late June and this latest bomb attack in Suruç are an attempt by the Islamic State to keep Kobane in a desperate, war-torn, destroyed state. Local authorities have begun to rebuild the city — and the attacks are clearly intended to inspire fear and keep people from acting in solidarity with Kobane.

As international allies of the Rojava revolutionaries, we have a duty to fulfill the aims of the SGDF delegation: to help rebuild the city of Kobane.

The international solidarity towards Kobane has done an extraordinary amount of good for the Kurdish resistance in the canton. It has given fighters and citizens hope. The Amara Cultural Center represented this strong desire for international solidarity. It welcomed international visitors and sought to internationalize the conflict beyond those immediately affected by the war. We must not let ISIS have their way and be cowed into inaction out of fear of further terror.

One survivor of Monday’s attack, Merve Kanak, posted this message on her Facebook page:

They killed the people we sang with on the bus. They killed the people we danced with. They killed the people we talked with, those we were surprised to see there, those we worked together with. They killed the people we had breakfast with in the garden of Amara, the people we smiled with, we ate watermelon with. They killed the people we discussed politics and theories with. They killed the people who had different political ideologies, but who were united by the reality of the revolution. We were all good people. We all came there to realize a dream. We had toys with us, three bags each, do you understand?

Our hearts are heavy today. Tomorrow, we will rebuild.

Yvo Fitzherbert is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul. He writes for a number of different publications, with a particular focus on Kurdish politics. Follow him on Twitter at @yvofitz.

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A new campaign has been launched to raise funds for the reconstruction of Kobane. You can donate here: https://www.firefund.net/.

Now that Syriza has caved in to the creditors, the need for grassroots mobilization is more urgent than ever. A new cycle of struggles is ahead of us.

Photo: Protesters shouted during a demonstration in front of the Greek parliament in Athens on Monday, June 29 (by Aris Messinis).

For two weeks now, political time has been condensed in Greece, and citizens live on the edge of their seats, struggling against forces that appear well beyond their control. On June 27, the Syriza-led government put the ultimatum of the creditors to a referendum and campaigned for a NO. The outcome of the referendum — a resounding rejection of perpetual austerity and continued debt bondage — will go down in history as an outstanding moment of dignity of a people under vicious attack by European creditors and the Greek elite.

Despite the patriotic overtones, this outcome was the culmination of five years of resistance to the steady downgrading of our lives. It signified breaking free of the choke-hold of the mass media, rising above fear to make the people’s voice heard. It ratified the absolute discrediting of the political elites that have been ruling since the democratic transition of 1974, which campaigned for a YES.

Furthermore, the outcome revealed a society divided along class lines: the middle and lower classes, which have so far born virtually all the cost of austerity and structural adjustment, overwhelmingly voted NO. Nevertheless, the outcome resists the attempts of all political parties to capitalize on it; it is the categorical negation of the present political and economic arrangement, the refusal which necessarily precedes all acts of social self-determination.

However, less than a week after the referendum, the Greek government submitted a new proposal of financing to its creditors, tied to a package of austerity measures even harsher than the ones rejected in the referendum. After a weekend of ‘negotiations’, which revealed a rift among Greece’s creditors, a humiliating agreement was reached early on Monday, which all but turns Greece into a European debt colony.

How was this NO metamorphosed into a YES in a matter of days?

Syriza’s dilemma

As many analysts expected, the government’s strategy of using the popular verdict as a means of pressure in the negotiations backfired. Upon returning to the negotiation table, the hardliners around German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble made clear that they are prepared to let Greece go bankrupt — with all the economic and political implications this would have for the Eurozone — rather than see the slightest crack in the neoliberal austerity discipline.

The Syriza-led government found itself in a harsh and pressing dilemma: it would either have to oversee the implementation of a new neoliberal adjustment program, or it would have to assume the political cost of a bankruptcy, with all its disastrous effects on the Greek population.

It opted for the first, thus officially putting an end to this five-month stand-off between the Greek government and its so-called European ‘partners’. The terms of the capitulation are painful, as they go against the totality of Syriza’s campaign promises: the new memorandum, even more so than the previous two, is an extreme experiment in social engineering and in redistribution of wealth in favor of the powerful. It maintains many of the unjust measures implemented by previous governments, such as ENFIA, a transversal tax on small property that has turned the lower class families into tenants within their own homes, or the abolition of the untaxable income limit for the self-employed, which makes it impossible for most skilled workers to get out of the unemployment trap.

The new deal also revamps and possibly renames TAIPED, an institution created to sell off all public assets, with all basic infrastructure, such as ports, airports and the power grid company, due to be privatized. Furthermore, the deal demands the lifting of the moratorium on home foreclosures, opening the road for a raw exercise of dispossession that threatens to create a humanitarian disaster, as we know from the Spanish experience. On top of that, it envisions an increase in indirect taxation, a hike in the prices of foodstuffs and transport as well as cuts in wages and pensions through a rise in social insurance contributions.

All in all, a package of measures designed to further compress the middle and lower classes, increase recession and unemployment, destroy the small and medium businesses, which form the backbone of Greek economy, and hand over all public assets and common goods to transnational capital. All the while perpetuating depression and increasing the debt burden, effectively crippling Greece’s economy and destroying the country’s capacity to get out of the crisis on its own feet.

The creditors went out of their way to ensure the measures are as punitive as possible. To further humiliate their opponents, they demanded the immediate voting in of reform laws and the return to Athens of the Troika supervisors, who were banished by the Syriza-led government in the early stages of negotiation.

The arguments of government officials and party cadres defending the ‘positive’ aspects of the deal are risible, as they echo the arguments of all previous governments that there is long-term prospect for the Greek economy and that the cost of the adjustment will not be transferred to the underprivileged. It is more honest to see the agreement for what it is: a large-scale operation of dispossession, a sacrifice of a whole country in order to maintain the delusions upon which the Eurozone was built.

It seems that this is the end of the road for Syriza’s ‘national salvation’ government. It will be called to vote in and implement an austerity package that not only disregards the struggle of the anti-austerity movements of the past five years, of which Syriza was once a part, but also betrays the verdict of the 61% of Greeks who voted against austerity only a week before.

Of course many would argue that this is a collective gamble gone wrong, and in front of the “partners’” blackmail the government took the least painful way out. There is no doubt that a disorderly Grexit, along with the punitive measures that would be employed by neoliberal hardliners to make an example out of the Greeks, would in the short-term be a disaster, primarily for the popular classes. In any case, political developments will be swift: the government will surely be reshuffled or replaced, and Syriza faces an internal rift that could mean the end of this party as we know it.

A contradictory relationship

For about three years, grassroots social movements in Greece had deeply contradictory sentiments towards the electoral rise of Syriza. On one hand, the prospect of a left government was an opportunity to bring the conflict to an institutional level; after all, many of the demands of the struggles were reflected in Syriza’s program and the party always kept a movement-friendly profile.

On the other hand, Syriza has been an agent of demobilization, ending the legitimation crisis that gave a protagonistic role to the social creativity and self-determination of the movements, and by promoting the institutionalization of the struggles, the marginalization of demands that did not fit into its state management project, and the restitution of the logic of political representation and delegation, which promoted inaction and complacency.

At the same time, Syriza cultivated the illusion that real social transformation was possible without breaking with the mechanisms of capitalist domination, without calling into question the dominant economic paradigm, without building concrete bottom-up alternatives to capitalist institutions, without even calling into question the country’s permanence within a monetary union that by design favors the export-driven economies of the North in detriment of the Europe’s periphery.

Syriza’s leaders detached themselves from the party base and their former allies within the movements, and stubbornly resisted a public debate on the elaboration of a ‘Plan B’ outside the Eurozone, should the ‘Plan A’ of an ‘end to austerity within the Eurozone’ fail, for fear that this would be used against them by the pro-austerity opposition as proof that they had a hidden agenda from the very start.

Unfortunately, recent developments tend to confirm the views of those who claimed that, given the extreme delegitimation and fragility of the previous government, a new memorandum was only possible through a new and popular ‘progressive’ government. This is probably the role that Syriza unwillingly ended up playing, using its ample reserves of political capital.

Lifting the veil of illusion

Syriza’s failure to deliver on any of its campaign promises or to reverse the logic of austerity lifts the veil of illusion regarding institutional top-down solutions and leaves the grassroots movements exactly where they started from: being the main antagonistic force to the neoliberal assault on society; the only force capable of envisioning a different world that goes beyond the failed institutions of the predatory capitalist market and representative democracy.

Undoubtedly many honest and committed activists are linked to the Syriza party base. It is their task now to acknowledge the failure of Syriza’s plan, and to resist the government’s efforts to market the new memorandum as a positive or inevitable development. If Syriza, or a majority part of it, decides to stay in power — in this governmental arrangement or in some other, more servile, put in place by the creditors — and oversee the implementation of this brutal memorandum, it is the task of the party base to rebel and unite with other social forces in search of a way out of barbarity, to break the ranks of a party that might quickly be turning from a force of change into a reluctant administrator of a brutal system they have no control over.

The role of the left, broadly defined, is not that of a more benevolent manager of capitalist barbarity: after all, that was social democracy’s original purpose, a project that exhausted itself already in the 1980s. There can be no ‘austerity with a human face’: neoliberal social engineering is an attack on human dignity and the common goods in all its guises, right-wing and left-wing.

I have argued elsewhere that the NO in last week’s referendum was ambivalent, and the struggle to give meaning to it has only just begun. Hours after the announcement of the result, Prime Minister Tsipras interpreted the verdict as a mandate to ‘stay within the Eurozone at any cost’. It is evident, however, that the new ‘bailout’ package obviously is outside his mandate: Plan A, Syriza’s only plan, envisioning an end of austerity without challenging the powers-that-be, has utterly failed.

Plan B, promoted in various forms by Antarsya, the Communist Party and Syriza’s own Left Platform advocates a productive reconstruction outside the Eurozone. Although increasingly popular after the inflexibility of the European project has been made evident, it is still a productivist, state-centric, top-down plan that doesn’t put into question the dominant meanings of capitalism: endless capitalist growth, an extractive economy, the expansion of production, credit and consumption. Furthermore, by promoting national entrenchment it entails the danger of authoritarian deviations.

A decisive turning point

As always, the Greek crisis is a turning point regarding the future of the European project. The Eurozone hardliners insist on blaming the people of the European periphery for the structural defects of the single currency and their own insistence on socializing private debt through the euphemistically called ‘bailout packages’. At the same time they have poisoned the minds of the people of the North of Europe with a neocolonial moralistic discourse propagated through the mass media.

The perceived loss of political power over their lives is turning many Europeans towards reactionary xenophobic parties that promise a return to the self-contained authoritarian nation-state. The European left looks on perplexed as its hopes of an EU based on solidarity and social justice vanish along with Syriza’s bid to negotiate a humane way out of the Greek debt crisis.

Now is the moment for a broad alliance of social forces to bring forward a ‘Plan C’, based on social collaboration, decentralized self-government and the stewardship of common goods. Without overlooking its significance, national electoral politics is not the privileged field of action when it comes to social transformation.

The withering away of democracy in Europe should be complemented and challenged by the fortification of self-organized communities at a local level and the forging of strong bonds between them, along with a turn to a solidarity- and needs-based economy, and the collective management and defense of common goods. The social counter-power of the oppressed should confront the social power of capital directly in its privileged space: everyday life.

Within Greece, after a full circle, the debate on our future beyond austerity has only now started. The resounding 61% rejection of austerity serves to remind us that this debate is now urgent, and the reactivation of the social movements that envision new social relationships built from below is imminent, after some years of relative demobilization. We have ahead of us a new cycle of creative resistance, of forging collective subjects and of tireless experimentation for the bottom-up transformation of our reality.

Theodoros Karyotis is a sociologist, translator and activist participating in social movements that promote self-management, solidarity economy and defense of the commons in Greece. He writes on autonomias.net and tweets at @TebeoTeo.