From December 08 to the IMF: Three observations on an ideological operation

by Augustine Zenakos

The body of the middle class is being torn between two ways of seeing – Liberal Democracy and the Left. The following three observations aim to provide some insight into how this ideological operation is taking place. And to explain how Liberal Democracy is yet again winning – becoming, in the process, much less liberal and much less a democracy than we would wish…

Greece does have a long history of political violence. Even after 1974, after the fall of the military junta that ruled the country since 1967, political violence has not been uncommon. Political assassinations or urban terrorism, depending on one’s choice of term, were not infrequent. And neither were killings by police – the victims sometimes being seasoned anarchist militants, sometimes not all that seasoned: the killing of 15 year old Michalis Kaltezas in 1985 by policeman Athanassios Melistas, during the aftermath of a demonstration, is a case in point.

So, the initial incident that took place on Saturday, December 6th 2008, was anything but unprecedented: on the face of it, the killing of 16 year old Alexis Grigoropoulos by policeman Epameinondas Korkoneas was not all that dissimilar to the killing of 1985. What is more, what back in 1985 was a rather efficient organization, “17th November”, that retaliated by attacking policemen, in 2008 no longer existed, most of its members having been convicted and imprisoned. One might have been justified to expect an even weaker reaction than that of 1985, which did of course see riots, occupations of universities, and clashes with police, but by no means on a scale substantially more significant than what the country had been used to for many years.

What happened, however, that Saturday night in 2008 was quite different. The killing might not have been unprecedented, but the eruption that followed was. Athens, and to a large extent, other major cities, did become literally lawless. Not only was the destruction widespread, it also lasted an unusually long time, almost until Christmas.

A very frustrating element of the events of December 08 is the lack of data: We have as yet no comprehensive study as to the make-up of the rioting crowds. We know certainly, from their own literature, that anarchist groups participated. We also know that Leftist groups, and political Parties of the opposition, participated in some demonstrations. According to the police, there were a lot of illegal immigrants involved. And according to eye-witnesses, many of the rioters were school and university students, including many from the more affluent parts of the cities. But the fact remains that a sustained study, involving systematic interviews, is lacking. On the other hand, a whole lot of analysis has sought to take the place of hard data. Pages upon pages have been written with regard to what December 08 was or wasn’t. That is, until October 09.

Greece elected a new government in October 2009, and almost immediately was hit by what many call the worst financial crisis in its history. Crippled by a large deficit and unable to service its national debt, it sought the assistance of the European Union and the IMF. Harsh austerity measures have been passed, decimating salaries and pensions, which, despite persistent protests, have mostly been upheld.

It is not difficult to see the two events – December 08 and the debt crisis that begun in 2009 – as parts of the same phenomenon of a society in turmoil. In fact, the Greek Left seems to mostly perceive them as such, though the demonstrations and protests that have followed the involvement of the IMF have a distinctly different flavor to December 08. Contrary to this perception, then, I think that the two events and the response to them are markedly different – so much so that they may be taken to represent two symbolic peaks in a struggle for ideological dominance over the middle class. Moreover, in that struggle one may see wider phenomena that do not only concern Greece, but illuminate a broader need for a new way to assess liberal democracy as the dominant political paradigm of our time.

To put it succinctly: both December 08 and the debt crisis were analyzed in a variety of ways, from a multitude of political standpoints. Through it all, however, dominant designations did emerge that in the end made for unequivocal symbolizations: however else December 08 might have been presented in the mainstream media or by liberal or conservative analysts, the dominant perception was constructed in the language of the Left: it was a revolt. On the other hand, however else the debt crisis might have been presented by the Left, the dominant perception is constructed in the language of liberal democracy: an issue of individual responsibility, of not managing one’s affairs as efficiently as one should, a “breach of contract”.

One can almost visualize the body of the middle class being torn between these two ways of seeing, however difficult it may be to define exactly who belongs to the middle class. I would favor a broad definition: in this case, by middle class we may define those not represented in any meaningful way in any of the available symbolizations – neither, then, the organized unions, nor the elite of corporate executives, neither the immediate “clients” of the political parties, nor the fringe, radical Left. But almost everybody else, in short those who are not represented in power, whichever side may that power reside in. They are the prize.

The following three observations aim to provide some insight into how this ideological operation is taking place. And to explain how liberal democracy is yet again winning – becoming, in the process, much less liberal and much less a democracy than we would wish.

Breach of contract: a cultural attack

The initial response of Greece’s partners in the EU, when it was made known that the national deficit was much higher than previously thought, and that perhaps Greek governments had been misleading with their data, was typical of liberal democratic parlance: Greece did not live up to its obligations as a member state, and it should take measures to rectify the situation. It was a clear case of breach of contract: we had an agreement; one of the parties did not honor it, so now remedies must be sought, in order to bring it back into the class of legitimate partners.

Leaving aside all the – often rather reasonable – claims against the legitimacy of the agreement itself, a very interesting phenomenon began to emerge: the intensifying criticism of Greece’s financial problems in the international Press started shifting from the technocratic to the cultural: little by little, Greece became not a formerly legitimate partner that had not lived up to an agreement, but one inherently unable to live up to one, the argument being that as Mediterraneans (Southerners, Easterners…), Greeks are neither hard-working nor efficient, nor bound by the proper ethic of a contemporary Western society that assumes the duty of the citizen to pay taxes, to obey the law, and to tell the truth. The deficiency was then not technical, but cultural. The examples are many, the highlight being, of course, the cover of the German “Focus” magazine, depicting Venus de Milo with a raised middle finger. The very designation PIIGS – a very serious joke, indeed – might even be sufficient in order to see this development at work: by invoking the cultural disadvantage, Greece and other countries are exoticised into an appropriate object of reform.

There are several consequences of this shift into cultural stereotyping, but perhaps the most serious among them was a strengthening of an idea that could be termed the “Greek exception”. In order to understand this, one has of course to be familiar with the particularities of Greek nationalism and the construction of the modern Greek identity through the 19th and 20th centuries: refusing to identify wholly with either the East or the West, modern Greece has largely defined itself not only as the parent of Western Civilization – claiming an unbroken lineage from classical times, through Byzantium, and into the modern era – but therefore also as a singular state, one that inherently does not “belong”, but is unavoidably a misunderstood, often vilified, object of envy. The point is that this exceptionalism resurfaced, through the recent crisis, in the language not only of fringe far-Right groups, but also of Right Wing parliamentary Parties, and even of the main opposition Party (the one that had been in government until October 2009), seeking to resist what was termed a loss of sovereignty to outsiders. (A curious twist in this might be that although the main opposition Party voted against IMF involvement in the Greek parliament, the far-Right party supported the government, but only through the very same argument of the need to rebuild the country’s independence, pride, and unique position of cultural superiority against European intruders.)

What was intended then as a call for the “modernization” of Greece, through the shift toward the cultural, provoked a regressive, if not downright reactionary, response in strengthening exactly the forces that through their exaggerated and obsessive defense of Greek exceptionalism do in fact legitimize that very call for “modernization” and stand in as willing examples of what needs to be “reformed” in Greece.

Because this is finally the point: if the choice is between exceptionalism and the liberal democracy of global capitalism, most progressive minds in Greece are siding with the latter. Liberal democracy and neoliberal economics manage to pose as exactly that which their ideological make-up claims they are: perhaps not the best, but the only rational choice available at the moment, the least evil way of doing things and going forward.

Against violence, wherever it may come from

Though December 08 was too eruptive to invite serious conceptual opposition at that time, in the months that followed, one of the critical themes that sprung forth – perhaps for the first time in Greece’s history of political violence – was a widespread, unconditional condemnation of violence, wherever it may come from. Demonstrations through 2009 that involved violent protests served to strengthen that condemnation, which peaked with the deaths of four people, in April 2010, in a bank that was allegedly set ablaze by anarchist protesters.

Commentators and politicians in all media and on all sides shared the view that any kind of violence would henceforth be unacceptable, leaving the fringe anarchist groups pretty much alone in debating the possibilities of further revolt. There are several interesting developments that relate to this conceptual shift, but what I find most interesting at the moment is neither the intensifying, uninhibited campaign against urban terrorism and the subsequent erosion of civil liberties, nor the related critique against the state monopoly on violence. What I find truly disturbing are the conceptual consequences of this unconditional condemnation, the possibilities, or rather the restriction on possibilities, of language that it fosters.

Democracy is conceptualized as a space of consent. What makes this space consensual is a relic of liberalism’s radical roots, the very notion that outside this space there is another, from which it is possible to subvert consensus, whenever it ceases to be such, whenever the consensual space becomes oppressive. The very conceptual possibility of consent exists only because the possibility of subversion exists. This outside space, the conceptual space from which subversion is possible is not legitimate within the confines of Democracy, but it is a prerequisite for its existence. Violence is then a conceptual prerequisite to consent, because what does consent really mean otherwise?

The truly worrisome effect of this unconditional condemnation of violence is that it finally sees violence only as a means without an end, extinguishing any liberal radical heritage and transforming any process of reaching consensus into a series of affirmative but non-performative gestures. Dissent is separated from its target, the reversal of a specific power-relation, and is relegated to the status of “opinion”. (Isn’t that what they say? Anyone can have their own opinion in a democracy…)

Social struggle: a failure of language

Protests and demonstrations through 2009 and 2010, though almost an everyday occurrence in the streets of Athens, have achieved remarkably little. Concessions on the part of the government have been scant.

Moreover, the constant protests have invited a new kind of reaction, one neatly framed in what, in liberal democratic parlance, is simply deemed to be “common sense”: These people (i.e. farmers, public sector employees, union members, and other protesters) have been milking the state for ages. We are tired of being the only ones who work for a living. They are used to privileges that are unfair, simply because their local MP wanted to do favors to their trade union. We should have known there would be a time when corruption, clientelism, and false data would catch up with us. The EU and the foreign Press are right. We are the ones that messed up and we have to pay for it. These people better assume their responsibilities. And so on.

It might, to a degree, be a justifiable reaction, but it is a peculiarly shallow one, so much so that it is indicative of the operation it conceals. I would argue it is in fact not a reaction based on a true political outlook, but rather a process of reverse aesthetisization, a stereotyping of the protesters into a convenient but arbitrary whole that encompasses everything that bothers us about ‘old Greece’ and the way it appears: discourteous, insular, uncultivated, slow, unglamorous, provincial. I would argue that the issue is mostly an aesthetic one. In being aesthetic it can, of course, form a political space, and in a way it is doing so, though without a serious questioning of what this space is becoming.

It stands to reason, though again it is an impression lacking data, that the ones reacting in this way are mostly young or middle-aged professionals, fairly highly educated. They mainly work in areas such as digital technologies, economics, sciences, the Media, communication, or culture – unusual lines of work for the Greek middle class, such as it was, up to ten or fifteen years ago, and even today to some extent. Some of them live and work abroad, and those that live in Greece feel like they are here by choice: getting fed up and moving away is always an option. They have traveled and have seen different places, and they speak at least one foreign language fluently. They feel comfortable with other nationalities, and are often familiar with other countries’ idioms, history and sense of humor. In short, they take pride in being self-sufficient, productive, educated and cosmopolitan. And they feel that the country they come from has embarrassed them for way too long. They know they don’t deserve to be PIIGS, and they resent being in this position.

It is no wonder, then, that in the protesters they see everything they detest: the antiquated, paradoxical public services; the surviving state monopolies; the over-subsidized farmers who block the roads; the civil servants who give them attitude behind a glass panel, while taking off every day at 13.30; the people who make a career out of trade unionism, before they move on to running for MP; the tax officials who will take a bribe in order not to hassle you. And all this, dressed up in the unyielding, strange language of the Greek Communist Party and the populist trade unions.

Yet, there is a great danger in the way this reaction to the protests is taking shape. Its aesthetic constitution leaves it without a substantial political backbone. As a result, what is in truth an emotional reaction, becomes usurped by an ideology, that of open markets, legalistic human rights, individual responsibility, simplistic cosmopolitanism, and increasing biopolitical control. Common sense becomes a mask for what is essentially a programme that purposefully obscures the differences between state and society, economy and prosperity, country and people, economic models and bare bodies.

The fact is that the people I am describing are being tricked by their relative social superiority into an unholy pact; they are being in effect flattered into submission. In reality, the distance that separates them from the arbiters of economic orthodoxy in Europe is far greater than the one that separates them from the protesters.

But there is no escaping it: these people are the vanguard of the middle class and are being won over by the dominant liberal democratic discourse. Their reaction to the protests has been one ranging from annoyance to rage: they just want the country to “run properly”, they want petrol for their cars, the roads to be open, the shops to be safe, the banks to lend them money.

The interesting and disquieting fact is that the demonstrations are not only ineffective in terms of material concessions on the part of the government or the IMF; they are also ineffective in terms of symbolism, failing to convince the vast majority of citizens not only of their usefulness, but also of their morality. Because, in feeling unrepresented in the protests, what the middle class is really saying is that it views them as the other side of power, another way in which peaceful and reasonable existence is hindered and controlled. The failure of the Left to see that disillusionment is far reaching in that it is a failure of language.

It seems that in Greece, in the last months, that great barrier to unchecked capitalism, the popular movement, which has seen us all through the development of our modern concepts of social justice, is drawing its last breaths.

***

In the turbulent weeks of December 08, a slogan was often heard: “These days are for Alexis”. Emotional though it might have been, and touching, I couldn’t help but think whether it was truly something to encompass what was at stake. The images that circled the world at the time were riveting, but not enough.

Several days into the riots, another slogan emerged, this one coined by anarchist groups that felt, obviously, that their time had finally come: “We are an image from the future”. Looking at the future from the current moment in time, I wish they were right.

***

This is the English version of the text that appears in the current issue Swedish magazine Subaltern. A part of it has appeared previously in this blog, albeit in slightly different form. You can order the issue on their website.