Somos de calle

Yiannis Bournos (Mitglied im Vorstand der griechischen Linkspartei SYNASPISMOS)

In the middle of a crisis burst, it is very difficult to talk about anything else, about other aspects that –although being surely linked to the economic level- however exceed the discussion about interest rates, inflations and banking systems and extend to more strategic discussion about the present and the future of the European radical Left.
No matter what, this is the turning point for such discussions. Now, that the Left is “expected” and “obliged” by many dominant, corporate media actors to show “responsibility” and “pragmatism”, in order to convince (whom –the oppressed classes and social groups or the anchormen/women of political talk-shows?) that she is ready to become an active part of the solution, instead of remaining an active denouncer of the problem.
Our political intervention and counter-proposal inside the social antagonism must answer to a basic question: What direction does our set of proposals have? In other words, do we propose policies just to overcome the crisis and return to a more “tranquil” and just a bit more “social” neoliberal status quo? Or do we try to elaborate on answers and methodologies that may lead to an intensification of the class and cultural struggle inside the crisis, in order to intensify the crisis itself and lead neoliberal capitalism to even bigger dead-end situations?
The second tactic can easily be accused of expressing a pure, modern Machiavellian logic, especially if “analyzed” by the circle of people who –until some minutes ago- used to be the arch-preachers of the “total financial freedom” doctrine.
Apart from the institutional or “para-institutional” round-tables, summits and bureaus, there is also reality in this continent. The generalized reality of precarity and precarization, poverty and environmental darkness. Also, in a micro-climax, there is also the daily anxiety for tomorrow, the constant dissatisfaction for the quality of our life, the “syndrome of mere expectation”, which forces us to psychological crises and sentimental emptiness.
If the current answer of the European radical Left is confined to a “more social/ flexible Stability Pact”, then we definitely lose the “radical” and the “Left” out of our birthmarks and we become ecstatically willing to seek for our political survival through purely bureaucratic norms and “values”, a bunch of useless political (?) organisms, who aim at their self-reproduction apart from the needs and the demands of those, in the name of which they were born.
Under the current economic, social and political situation, if we lose the opportunity to offer our societies the chance to breathe the essence of a different world today, then we’ll simply add another lost golden opportunity to start realizing social change tomorrow, like the many we’ve kicked away in the past. Now, that even Sarkozy hypocritically speaks about the need for interventions by the (capitalist) State, which aim at socializing the debt and safeguarding private profit, it is high time that our Left –side by side with the urgent and necessary defense of the social state and welfare systems inside the capitalist State- attacks the foundations of the neoliberal construction and dares to challenge the inevitability of this system’s reload.
This battle must not limit itself to rates and percentages, because then it excludes the cries and aspirations of those who are most offensively being attacked and/or have no voice and leaves them out of the public debate. We have to reinvent or reinforce channels of interacting and engaging with those classes and social groups. In other words, we urgently need to use attractive and “user friendly” tactics of breaking isolation, incapability and hesitation towards collective action of the bases of our societies.

• Those men and women who die in the Mediterranean coastline everyday or survive to be treated as slaves or potential criminals and be thrown out of our divine continent, as if a new, modern crusade has begun, this time within the borders of the old continent.
• Those men and women, who are born, raised, educated and/or trained to become a part of the new urban lower middle-class precarious army. Although carrying heterogenous identities, they can be seen as potentially one of the most dynamic social groups, that has proved to carry common, strong and potentially or partly anti-systemic values and reflexes whenever they ‘ve been strongly attacked by the State, through reactionaly legislatory/ operational reforms (e.g. in education or modern employment). Although deeply invaded and influenced by the dominant ideology and its commercialized, lonely life-styles, the public university still remains one of the biggest social spaces that hosts and allows social and political exchange, experimentation and energetic conflict.
• Those men and women who reach their fifties or sixties to wake up one day being unemployed or forced to work under daily personal contracts or even to move to a neighbor country, in order to seek for precarious and underpaid employment and fulfill their personal and/ or family needs.

This fight must also extend to the field of ideology and civilization. It is not enough for European radical leftists to feel happy, because readers return to Marxist writings. It is necessary that we start elaborating on smaller and bigger paradigms of direct democracy, networking and social interaction that can and must be applied now, today, starting from our personal daily practice and extending to larger collective experiments.
These might refer to different ways of living together, realizing alternative economic patterns in smaller and wider local circles, spending our free time in free-public spaces, using our creative forces to organize “guerrilla” cultural and informative events, offering unconditional access to intellectual production, knowledge and new technologies, challenging the fixed neoliberal model of the modern heterosexual, nuclear, precariously existing and dangerously overspending family through new ways of coexistence and even architecture and housing.
Small drops of a different world that hit the core of the neoliberal capitalist construction, reveal small, even fragmented images of our strategic target for the world, color the current dark mood of ordinary people and offer them the chance to rethink their stance towards life and politics. Because these examples are absolutely and deeply political and because constructing socialism in the 21st century has nothing to do with bureaucratic authorities, fixed models of dominance or “fresh products” of the mainstream political communication. It has to do with bringing up a new, authentic and true hope for change, through the direct involvement and participation of the oppressed ones to the planning and realization of these very paths to change.