The Greek Experience

This past week or so has seen some telling events around the globe that are worth watching in light of the Grand Thesis of this blog.  Almost simultaneously was the death of King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia and the deposition of Yemeni President Sadi by a Shiite faction named for their leader, Abdulmalik Houthi.  The third event is the election of Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party as Prime Minister of Greece, to the utter dread of European financial elites.  What happens next is anybody's guess, it's why we play the games after all, but my interest lies in not only what it portends but what it says about how contemporary politics shake out ideologically in a society under duress.

That Greece is under duress is certainly beyond dispute.  With a 25% unemployment rate, with nearly 60% of Greeks aged 18-24 unemployed, AND with half of all Greeks living below the poverty line, "under duress" seems like a nice way to put it.  At issue now is the Greek public debt and the austerity program imposed on it by creditors that has not enabled Greece to do anything but suffer under a form of national debt peonage.  Greek membership with the EU and whether or not it will or should be continued is the major question Greek political parties now arrange all their positions around, and 36% of them went with the radical left coalition of parties that make up SYRIZA. 

Greece has, like virtually every parliamentary system, a pretty healthy list of political parties.  The two dominant parties since World War II have been the New Democracy center-right party and Pasok on the center-left.  Syriza, as a coalition of Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Greens, and Socialists, won at the expense of Pasok, which only took about 3%.  The results of the election are in the chart below and show an interesting admixture of new and old parties with both left and right radicals gaining against the old regime of Pasok and New Democracy.  The emboldened radicals can be generally classified into Marxist, or Marxian, and Nationalist/Patriotic camps with a decidedly anti-Neoliberal platform as represented by New Democracy.  Golden Dawn, the only neo-Nazi party on the ballet, won almost 6% despite the inconvenience of having its candidate in prison for business fraud (most certainly a trumped up charge).  This last is instructive of how blinkered societies under duress can get when it comes to voting.

A lot of characters of the alphabet have been used lately on what the implications of this election could be, and I personally don't have a strong view on the relative strength of all the possibilities, but ripples in the fabric of the West will be felt.  The size of the ripples and how strong the ripple effect is depends on at least two main considerations.  One is miscalculation of the impacts of a Greek exit from the Euro zone, or from it's currency, and how financial markets deal with that.  The other is the direct financial impacts of a credit write down by western financiers of Greek debt, if that were to occur, and how many other debt addled states like Italy or Spain would expect the same sort of arrangement if it does occur.  One thing is clear, though, in considering all of this is that Greece can in no way pay the debt it owes to Western banks.  Something will give here and it matters a lot who or what gives. 

But I would consider this election to be a preview of what is to come.  The broad parameters of the left/right split in Greece is not terribly different from other nations, in Europe especially but even in the U.S., in terms of ideological perspectives that are employed.  Greece is, of course, at the breaking point, but other nations aren't so far behind them.  In the event of a deep recession, or even the slow bleeding of the current conditions of near zero growth and falling prices, eventually other nations will be forced to default or to negotiate a substantial debt forgiveness.  Whatever the case, somebody pays, and it would be the lenders in the form of the world's largest banks in conjunction with the governments and central banks of the rich economies (read Germany, US, UK, etc.). 

This very readily fits into the broadly defined left wing narrative based on Marxian/liberal analysis.  The notion of class struggle as described by Marx can be easily overlaid on the current situation that the Greek case exemplifies.  In other words, it is believable for a desperate polity.  In a Marxian political platform there is a whole lot of hope that can be applied, as is the case with the promise(s) of Tsipras in Greece, of a new era of fairness and equitable distribution of wealth that can form the basis of a just and peaceful society.  He has no stated intention or desire to leave the European Union,  He also has not stated anything like I have said in this blog about economic growth for industrial capitalism having come to an end.  Nor does he say anything about resource depletion and a need to reduce consumption.  So Greece is holding on to hope that a return to the benefits of EU membership can be had again at some point once the debt overhang problem is resolved.  But the EU itself is one strained beast and desperate in its own way on a much bigger scale.

This is where nationalism enters the picture, and the logic of it fits a likely narrative of the future when the scale of human systems shrinks.  Nationalism is exclusionary by definition and so is willing to shut out the don't haves.  It's parameters are bounded by socio-cultural markers of relatedness.  That it has an ugly past, what with Fascism and Nazism, is well known, but it actually sprang from the Romanticism of the 19th century and informed much of the artistic expressions in music, painting, and literature of the time.  The story of how a self absorbed, non-other-people-hating 19th century composer crafting delightful melodies based on folk melodies of his home country turned into the most violent and atrocity filled conflict in human history is a very long one, but it happened.  As a consequence, nationalism has been a dirty word since the end of World War II.  And it's no wonder that it has, but really nationalism has been just a manifestation of an innate human tendency to positively identify with a group of people you didn't choose to be a member of, and the survival of which your own is heavily dependent on.

So the political lines of the present and extending into the future I see as a battle between the class struggle revolutionary and universalist model of Marxism and the circle the wagons fuck the other guy tendencies of some new form of Nationalism.  The ability of a democracy to encompass these tendencies will be severely tested once the growth model has proven not to work.  The Greek experience is a test run of how this could conceivably unfold.  People around the world are looking for different ways of doing things and they tend to use more well worn paths in choosing radical alternatives.  There are certainly other possible ways, and in this I am decidedly more on the left, but presenting dubious green-growth models of a high tech future does not feel correct.  And nobody, not even or especially the Greeks, want to contemplate having something less than what they already have based on a notion that they have too much.  Therein lies the rub.