Indignant Politics in Athens – Democracy Out of Rage

 The historical fact that Athens was the birthplace of
democracy has been haunting the crowds assembled for nearly two months in the
city’s Syntagma (Constitution) Square, right across from the House of
Parliament, protesting undaunted against the government’s incapacity to
represent and protect the interests of its own society. The consistent invocation
of Athenian democracy by the crowds is hardly the result of patriotic longing
for glorious ancestry. The people are haunted by a historical fact that, though
imprisoned in its own myth, has emerged with radical contemporary significance as
the last line of defense against the violation of people’s basic dignity.

 

Thus, the question of Athenian democracy is suddenly no
longer confined to academic discussions but put to the test in real living conditions.
Over several weeks, thousands of people emerging from the anonymity of
sprawling urban life have come together to inhabit a public space, day and
night, and to organize it around a collective political interrogation. They
have been named the indignants, after
a similar initiative in Spain and the best seller pamphlet by French Resistance
elder Stéphane
Hessel Indignez Vous! (2010), but for
many of them indignation has been focused, in unprecedented fashion, on
exemplary self-organization and self-education in the ways and troubles of
radical democracy.

 

In just a matter of days, a whole other city was organized on
the footsteps of the old Royal Palace that houses the Parliament, particularly
in Syntagma Square proper, what came to be known as the “lower square.” In the
“upper square” directly in the face of Parliament now guarded by several rows
of Praetorian guards in full riot police gear, the assembly of people is like a
wave formation and varies in numbers from day to day, depending on specific Parliament
activity. Here, crowds from all walks of life, often without previous activist
experience, show up to hurl their anathema on their elected representatives en
masse. The chant structure – most common cries are the ubiquitous “Thieves!” or
“Burn this brothel of a Parliament” – is not unlike what one hears in football
stadiums. The tenet is animated primarily by the desperation of economic
weakness which permeates the whole society: the number of suicides of bankrupt
middle-aged men, fathers of families, has skyrocketed. Yet, the politics of
this totalizing ritualistic renunciation remains thoughtless and, although it
may accurately express the breadth of indignation all around, it is equally
accurate to say that it can never lead to any sort of alternative constituent
power.

 

In the “lower square,” however, a whole other scene of
collective self-organization has been established: a first-aid station under a
tent and then a proper hospital in the entrance of Syntagma metro station; a media
center operating the website www.real-democracy.gr,
in addition to voluminous other press work; a radio station, also streaming on
the web; a neighborhood organization center that coordinates similar activity
in various parts of the city; a translation center for non-Greek visitors,
activists, and foreign correspondents; full functioning stations of daily needs
(kitchen, bathrooms); a performing arts center; a central organization table
that handles the day-to-day requests by individual people for the agenda to be
discussed publicly; and a number of designated areas in the square where people
sharing a specific concern can gather separately. All such groupings remain
rigorously unaffiliated with any identified political agency or party. All
organized party or official group insignia is banned – a measure that raised objections
from various radical leftist groups. A general assembly takes place every
evening, where people’s turns to speak is governed by lot and only allowed a
minute and a half for positions to be developed, while direct public argument
between two individuals in exclusive dialogue form is disallowed. These
measures, inspired obviously from Athenian tactics (though by no means mere
copies of such ancient modes), serve to guard against demagoguery and monopoly
of discussion.

 

The order, vigor, and freedom with which positions are
stated and negotiated publicly is indeed a sight to behold. All proceedings and
decisions made in the assembly are posted every morning after the night session
on the square’s website. Even a cursory look at the history of the discussions
– although nothing can match the actual experience of being part of this
process day to day – registers the profound commitment of people to question
and think together, even while extensive argument is essential.

 

It’s not surprising that the key focus of discussion in the
square’s general assembly has been the demand for immediate democracy. The term deliberately carries the double
reference: the demand for democracy now and the demand for democracy in
unmediated fashion. The people’s realization as to the incapacity of the entire
political system – party structure, institutions of parliamentary
representation, autonomy of law and justice, etc. – has been spreading across
the societal spectrum since the events of December 2008. The very electoral
process, once a rather festive occasion for public contention dear to every Greek,
no longer inspires anyone but the last holdouts of clientelism hoping to get
their due reward by some sort of reversal in the governing party in power.
Hence, great discussions have been conducted about the problem of
representation vs. delegation relative to the assembly itself and the general
self-organization of life in the square, including the difficult prospect of
more generalized action in the near future.

 

I repeat, this is not an academic discussion, though there
is no doubt that it engages everyone in a process of self-education in the most
distilled political sense of paideia.
This process is entirely self-cognizant and articulated explicitly: a new
generation of citizens is being formed and the political demand is not the
short term protest against the social and economic strangulation of the
Memorandum brokered with IMF and EU banks allegedly in order to stall the
inevitable bankruptcy of the country. The demand at Syntagma is ultimately not
economic but political: the radical alteration of Greek political culture. You
hear it repeatedly articulated in the assembly: even if in the unlikely chance
that the Greek government were to stand up to the totally debilitating terms of
the Memorandum – the world’s major economists, who are otherwise not in the
service of specific institutions, all agree that the Memorandum casts a death
sentence on Greek economic life and all but seals the inevitability of the
bankruptcy it claims to stall – the people will not vacate their position in
Syntagma Square; the goal is to emancipate ourselves from the order of current
political institutions.

 

In issuing and pursuing this demand, the Syntagma movement
is exposing the blatant hypocrisy of Europe’s political and economic elites,
who have relentlessly maligned Greece as the primary culprit for the current
economic collapse (though no one needs to be an economist to know that the
crisis is systemic in global capitalism as such). No doubt, the last twenty
years stand witness to uncontrolled behavior of abusive self-interest and
disregard for any sort of public responsibility across the spectrum of Greek society.
Politicians, doctors, lawyers, judges, entrepreneurs, real estate developers, and,
of course, the ever increasing army of civil service bureaucrats and
professional syndicalists seeking and gaining the benefits of a clientelist
state, have all been implicated together in a web of lucrative but utterly
careless para-economy, supported since the 1990s by an ever more entrenched
undocumented immigrant labor force.

 

However, to acknowledge this historical fact does not
absolve Greece’s detractors in European and American media and policy centers of
irrepressible opportunism in their often inaccurate and indeed vulgar
(unabashedly Orientalist) pronouncements. Nor does this hide the fact that all
such derisory perspectives are propelled by societies and economies that suffer
similar phenomena of political corruption and fiscal irresponsibility, societies
and economies that could not themselves withstand such austerity measures
without totally collapsing. It is now plain to see that the Memorandum produces
fire sale conditions of Greek public assets (not just businesses but most
unacceptably land), the execution of which signifies de facto the transfer of
Greek sovereignty to the very same ruthless speculation machinery that
celebrates the heyday of finance capitalism while driving whole societies to
ruin. In this respect, there is nothing unique about the Greek crisis
specifically. All such crises in finance capitalism, starting arguably with the
Asian crisis of 1997, were engineered as great profiteering opportunities.

 

From this standpoint, although Greece is a small economy in
global terms, the stakes are high because it pertains to the Eurozone itself.
Perhaps this full cognizance of such stakes can explain the unprecedented
violence with which the state apparatus responded to the citizenry’s
democratically conducted defiance. On three occasions, June 15 and June 28-29,
we stood witness to an all-out assault by riot police on unarmed citizens
assembled outside Parliament in peaceful protest. Fortunately, the very
advances in technology that states utilize as policing and surveillance
mechanisms against their own people can be used just as well in a counter mode,
providing exhaustive documentation of unprovoked police brutality and instantly
disseminating it worldwide through the ubiquitous capacity of new social media.
Photographs and videos of vicious beatings of people unarmed, in advanced age,
or wearing doctors insignia or the thrashing of people immobilized on the
ground wounded or running down the metro steps for cover from being assaulted with
tear gas or stun and flash grenades or the tear-gassing of the makeshift
hospital underground in the Syntagma metro station in closed quarters, were circulated
almost simultaneously upon taking place, as were also scenes of police throwing
stones or taunting protesters with vulgar insults, and not least the scandalous
scene of police safeguarding hooded hooligan provocateurs in what was a widely
broadcast confirmation of the known fact of police collaboration with fascist
youth groups.[1]

 

When so called liberal states resort to massive police
violence, they testify to their own social and political weakness. (Greek
government weakness specifically was confirmed in the ease with which it was
manipulated by Israeli interests to prevent the new Gaza flotilla from
departing Greek shores; the two events took place concurrently.) In tear-gassing
its own citizens, the Greek government made evident two things at once: its
desperation at having lost its own citizens’ consent to power and its servility
to those external forces (the demands of global capital) that increasingly seem
to determine its course of action. Subsequent responses by government officials
in the face of all this evidence showed an embarrassing incapacity to
understand the basic implications of their position. Worse yet, they made
explicit their directives against the Syntagma movement as such. However, by
all accounts so far, the attempt to dismantle the activist organization in the
square has failed. In the current conditions, overt police repression, even if
brutal, does not seem to mobilize the sentiment of fear that usually drives away
the non-activist masses that occasionally resort to peaceful demonstrations. In
this case, the widespread and indiscriminate rage of people out in the streets overcomes
their fear, even in potentially life-threatening conditions.

 

Having said that, the continuing function of democratic life
in the square is ultimately threatened by physical exhaustion and spiritual
fatigue. Since the last assault, numbers have decreased in the lower square.
More worrisome is the laxness (motivated no doubt by the assembly’s spirit of
inclusiveness) that has allowed the space to become refuge for vagrant drug
addicts, availing themselves of public amenities but incapable of participating
in the shaping of public space. Given the government’s explicit desire to
vacate the square in the name of restoring its tourist profile, this laxness is
sure to become a perfect pretext for clean-up operations.

 

The biggest challenge of the “immediate democracy” movement
is to fill the vacuum of governmental politics within a context of severe
social and political anomie. The rapidly spreading array of incapacitated
institutions promotes an ever more thoughtless politics of rage, which is patently
anti-democratic and drawn toward reactionary nationalist, even fascist and
surely racist, indiscriminate action. Such is the tenet in the crowds occupying
the “upper square” always on occasional and unorganized instances, predicated on
particular sessions of Parliament – in that sense, literally reactionary. Moreover,
the anomie effected by the bankruptcy of Greek political institutions favors
actions of out and out provocateurs, whose project is to hasten the imposition
to law and order measures by fanning fears for democracy’s instability. This
comes as an added obstacle to the perennial problem of all anarchist or
autonomy movements to overcome their own fear of assuming the responsibility of
decision, of constituent power.

 

In order for the experience of the “immediate democracy”
movement to bring about conditions of real change in Greek political mores, the
aversion toward daring to change things even within parliamentary rules, while
retaining the pulse of radical interrogation, needs to be overcome. This issue
has been explicitly and self-reflexively posited in the general assembly
meetings but its realization remains at the moment nebulous, if not doubtful.
What is certainly beyond doubt is that a whole generation of Greek youth, the
very same ones who conducted the insurrectionary events of December 2008, has
been indelibly marked by the Syntagma assembly. And the conjunction of this specific
double experience – from the politics of rage and indignation to immediate
democracy – will inevitably become a major part of Greece’s political culture
as the society traverses the perilous paths of economic and political
bankruptcy.

 

Postscript: In response to the events at Tahrir
Square in Cairo, I had written of the rare occasion of radical political change
when the people, en masse, withdraw their consent to power (http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/02/15/withdrawing-consent/).
Such a step has not been taken in the Syntagma case, although there is no doubt
that the imaginary unleashed by Tahrir played a crucial role in the Syntagma
formation – as did, demonstrably, the Athens events in December 2008 on the
radicalization of youth in various parts of the Arab world. The recent
resurgence of the people’s demands for real democracy in Egypt, after what
seemed to be a setback to military bureaucratic ways, suggests that the
temporality of radical events is never indeed momentary – this is ultimately a
Leninist notion, even in Alain Badiou’s mind – but rather riveted by
multiplicity, interruptibility, heterochronicity, reiteration, and in the end,
re-institution. The most important element of the Syntagma demand for
“immediate democracy” is precisely the symbolic explosion of this immediacy as
it comes to be mediated by the effect of its own occurrence much like radiation
permeates and displaces the explosion of the bomb. Even while brimming with
rage or indignation, even when only what is immediate has retained a modicum of
meaning in the precession of an otherwise meaningless life, one must learn to
remain patient, persistent, and ever more inventive in one’s commitment.

Editor’s note: This essay also appears on al-Jazeera as “Democratic Dreams Rage in Athens”

 

——

 

Stathis Gourgouris
is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature and Director of the
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.