“Seek ye first for food and clothing, then the kingdom of God will fall to you also”

G.W.F. Hegel, letter to Knebel, 30 August 1807

We watch in horror, as the global explosion of the Sars-CoV-2 virus continues. The spreading medical emergency starkly reveals the real wages of neoliberalism and its extractive austerities. Gutted national healthcare systems that put profit over lives have left millions of people without access to medical care – a de facto death sentence for many. Every day now, we see where that leaves us in a pandemic. The healthcare crisis unfolds within a larger context of crisis: the underlying economic crisis of late capitalism and the planetary ecological crisis of late capitalist modernity. In the Covid19 emergency, the next crisis to arrive, before the medical crisis is over and just as the economic one begins to kick in, is likely to be a crisis in the capitalist food system.

The growing, picking, processing, packing and delivery of our food is vulnerable at many points in the long supply and delivery chains that stock the shelves in our grocery stores. Farmworkers, food processors and delivery workers are asked to work in unprotected conditions that often make social distancing impossible. Pickers on the industrial farms, many of whom are undocumented or precarious migrants, typically travel from squalid work camps to the fields in tightly packed buses. Workers at Amazon, the largest corporation dominating the end-delivery chains, have begun walkout strikes as Covid19 spreads through their warehouse workplaces. It is hard to see how breaks and bottlenecks in the global flows of food will be avoided without cynically sacrificing the workers who feed us. We need to understand and anticipate this, because food is at the center of life and social reproduction. The struggles for food sovereignty that will soon come to the fore will not only help to keep us alive – they highlight values of care, mutuality, gender equality, and climate and environmental justice that can orient the fight against fascism  and the refusal to go back to normal, when all the dead are buried. If the Covid-19 pandemic is pushing us to think an alternative form of social and natural symbiosis, food production is an essential facet of this operation, even more, a nodal point for its utopian and practical dimensions.

For an End to Big Agriculture

The capitalist food production system is ecocidal and genocidal; paradoxically, extinction is its immanent drift. The rupture of Covid19 is at least an opportunity to overthrow a destructive and unsustainable mono-industrial paradigm and replace it, everywhere, with more localized systems of polyculture and agroecology. Founded on the 17^th century slave plantation system and forced on the world from the 1950s on under the obscene misnomer “the green revolution,” the current capitalist food system is dominated by large transnationals that grow cash crops for export on huge monocultural farms and neo-plantations. These “Big Ag” monopolies are fossil fuel dependent, are heavy with pesticides and chemicals, waste precious water (70-90 % of all freshwater used by modern society!), drive bees and other needed pollinators as well as birds and other small predators to collapse and extinction, and discharge toxic runoff that causes red tides and dead zones when it reaches the seas. Moreover, capitalist food production is fully implicated in driving global warming and climate chaos:

Agriculture is also the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions from society, collectively accounting for about 35 % of the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide we release….The energy used to grow, process and transport food is a concern, but the vast majority of emissions comes from tropical deforestation, methane released from animals and rice paddies, and nitrous oxide from over fertilized soils.

We must add that this food system, which eats its own tail in a classic dialectic of enlightenment, is embedded in imperialist relations. More or less in step with the rise of neoliberalism, the World Bank, IMF and Big Ag capital have forced every country in the world to attack its bases of food sovereignty in small-hold farming and to chain itself to the world commodity markets. The global debt system was the lever to force this new phase of “original accumulation,” with deadly applications of violence to repress local resistance to these new enclosures, especially in the Global South. All this arrives every day, in our kitchens and on our plates! The idiocy of this “consensus” may soon be returning to haunt us, just as the idiocy of destroying public health structures returns in the continuous blare of sirens around New York City’s overwhelmed hospitals. Finally, in what should be the nail in the coffin of capital’s control over our food, Rob Wallace, author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, has taught us exactly how the capitalist food system is implicated in the cross species jumps that loosed Sars-Cov-2.

For Agroecology and a Food Sovereignty Popular Front

There are better ways, and the struggles to defend and spread them have been ongoing for many decades – indeed, as our Indigenous comrades tell us, for 500 years! Traditional growing practices preserve hard-won local experience and knowledges and tend to work with, rather than try to dominate, local ecologies. As a result, their decentralized polycultures are far more sustainable, frugal, versatile and resilient – just what we need in our food systems in a time when climates are weirding in response to capital’s flogging of the planet. In Europe and the Global North, organic “foodies” and Slow Food enthusiasts are often perceived as luxury hobbyists of the privileged classes. In fact, these lifestyle trends are distant echoes of the intense grassroots struggles for food sovereignty being waged across Latin America and Africa by the largely Indigenous-led network La Via Campesina, in Brazil by the Marxist-inspired Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and in India by numerous peasant movements.

La Via Campesina in particular has coined and elaborated the idea of food sovereignty into a program for justice from below. It claims an inalienable right of all peoples to define and realize their own food systems, and to defend those systems from coercive invasions and extractive enclosures by imperialist capital. The international network of small and cooperative farmers, peasants, pastoralists and fisherfolk have also worked out and broadcast a body of practices and values they named agroecology. Similar in some respects to permaculture, agroecology embodies a whole approach to social reproduction based on values of care, mutuality and – let’s not be afraid of the word – kinship with the natural world. Many scientists have understood that agroecology offers more sustainable practices than industrial monoculture, and as a result the UN has to some extent appropriated and advocated for the concept, giving it a top-down, technocratic inflection that La Via Campesina has had to criticize. Agroecology is not just a set of practices that can be monetized for profit or adopted without changing anything else in anthropocentric, patriarchal capitalist class society:

Agroecology is a way of life of our peoples, in harmony with the language of Nature. It is a paradigm shift in the social, political, productive and economic relations in our territories, to transform the way we produce and consume food and to restore a socio-cultural reality devastated by industrial food production. Agroecology generates local knowledge, builds social justice, promotes identity and culture and strengthens the economic viability of rural and urban areas.

The urgent point is this: the knowledge commons for sustainable local alternatives to capitalist food production already exist and are readily accessible and sharable. Certainly, agroecological and permacultural approaches are possible in Greece. We only need to ensure that collective projects in this direction are grounded in solidarity with grassroots struggles for food sovereignty and climate and environmental justice – and in a communist horizon for a just and classless world. This is also to say, that acro-ecology is not a backward-looking idealization of the past, it is a forward-looking practice that can be in tune with the best aspects of the current techno-scientific knowledge and capacities. 

Food Sovereignty, Migrant Rights and Anti-Fascism

In the current crises, the struggle for food sovereignty brings forward the exploitation of migrant farmworkers and links up directly to the current terrain of anti-fascist struggle. As already noted, the workers whose labor power is exploited in the fields, slaughter yards and packing houses of capitalist agriculture are very often undocumented or precarious migrants whose status makes them especially exposed to extreme exploitation and coercive violence. Certainly this is true in Europe and many parts of North America. Their workplaces were always likely to be toxic, but now with Covid19 they are often forced to labor in mortal danger. Adequate protections, including face masks, gloves, sanitation gear and testing is a matter of life and death for the women and men who bring our food to table.

We can and must say more: racist anti-migrant and anti-refugee scapegoating is the common denominator of the hard-right turn in global politics. Indeed, racist nationalism dominates the toxic concoction that is resurgent fascism, and has been widely adopted in the rhetoric and policies of rightist governments around the world. This turn reflects tendencies towards authoritarian statism that, among others, have been long developing and were noted and forecast decades ago by Nicos Poulantzas. And it now unfolds in a situation of multiple systemic crises whose class character was vividly described by Mike Davis as a “planet of slums” and whose political logic Christian Parenti has analyzed incisively as “the politics of the armed lifeboat,” which tends towards full-blown “climate fascism.” Such is the moment we live in. We need to be clear about the links between all of these crises and social struggles, and shape our actions across them.

Toward Dual Power

Food sovereignty is the material and metabolic basis for an organized counter-power to capitalist terror and climate fascism. There have been many helpful discussions of mutual aid and calls for dual power initiated by autonomist comrades in the social emergency of Covid19. And Marxist feminist comrades have called for us to meet the emergency with a “social reproduction revolution.” Now we need to anticipate the coming crisis of the capitalist food system, and begin discussing how we will prepare our reaches for food sovereignty. To consider this a backup plan to help get us by in lean times misses the point. The dominant capitalist classes are certainly preparing to force us back into our places, however far this deadly pandemic goes. Before it exploded, anti-austerity insurrections were already rocking the global system; for the moment the solidarity of social distancing has emptied our streets and arrested the face-to-face and breath-to-breath forms of our politics. This will change, but fallout from Covid19 is still just beginning. The danger of disruptions to the food supply and delivery chains is real, for the reasons indicated above. Even in social distancing, we need to begin the discussions about what we will do, if that happens. Bread riots, a trigger of past revolutions, will come; will there also be pitchforks?

The rupture in normality also brings its opportunities – call it “disaster communism” or whatever you like. Many are aware now, and many more are learning it through the pandemic, that capital’s logic of accumulation is a dead end – literally as well as metaphorically. Degrowth, with a communist-autonomist horizon, is the actual imperative, given the deep structural crisis of planetary meltdown. Degrowth does not mean primitivism nor it is against the development of humanity’s creative forces. It means sustainable symbiosis, thus, a different form of social and environmental justice. Neo-fascism will be the form of desperate violence aiming to block any social transition that threatens capitalist class power. We know this. Either we resign ourselves to go back to our places and work away at our own mutual destruction, or we push this break further, exactly where social reproduction meets anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.

Growing tomatoes, herbs and earthworms on the balcony is no doubt a wonderous thing. But what is called for now is to collectivize the possibilities in all directions. The point is that food sovereignty is the material and metabolic (energy) basis for everything else, as we would quickly realize if we began to go hungry. Agroecology and permaculture are real possibilities in Greece, which need to be explored and built out from below. Some comrades are already actively engaged in this direction. And again: this can’t be a mere withdrawal to rural communes, it has to be a reorientation that feeds the struggles. For now, we should start discussing and sharing knowledge and practices and brainstorming possibilities.

Simple models for collectivizing growing can be organized among friends and small groups and planted wherever there is access to land. Access may be through family plots in villages or, in extremis, by other direct and time-tested means. Growing co-ops can be set up to share the work on a part-time basis, as was done before in many difficult moments of history. Urban gardens will undoubtedly be appearing in unexpected places. The deeper values of agroecology, in their close connection to social struggle and the long resistance to capitalist enclosure, can orient this turn. Whatever happens, we should build out these possibilities as far as we can, because doing so will both support and enact the politics of solidarity and mutuality that we believe in.

VOID NETWORK (Athens-Greece) written by Gene Ray and George Sotiropoulos

*George Sotiropoulos is Doctor of Political Theory and author of A Materialist Theory of Justice: the One, the Many, the Not-Yet.

*Gene Ray is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 and Beyond.

________________________________ 

SEE ALSO

Sustainable Ways of Living: Food Production & Distribution- Mutual Aid

Interviews with comrades in Frankfurt practicing collective food production and alternative ways of distribution based on mutual aid and social awareness, experimenting with ecological, alternative and sustainable ways of living. Research by VOID NETWORK / Tasos Sagris & Sissy Doutsiou https://voidnetwork.gr

READ ALSO

The post Feeding Dual Power: Food Sovereignty, Anti-Fascism and other Pandemic Struggles appeared first on Void Network.

• S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’[1]

[includes spoilers]

To the reader who has seen what has been justifiably called a “cultural Behemoth”, Eliot’s phrase may not seem an entirely accurate depiction of the series’ ending. After all, a capital is practically burned to the ground, in the penultimate episode, by what is the equivalent of a modern weapon of mass destruction, a flame throwing dragon; so, there is certainly something of a “bang” involved. Yet, it is noteworthy that the show unravels its plot in such a way that it does not end with an epic battle between Good and Evil, as many would probably expect. Put in the context of the huge stakes that the story has patiently built in previous seasons, the last episode truly has the tonality of a whimper. Considering the extremely noisy finales of many blockbuster films today, this is not necessarily regrettable. At the same time though, it is impossible to ignore a conservative mood driving the less-epic-than-anticipated finale. This is not the conservativism of Eliot though; rather, as Žižek has quickly noted, it is the tepid conservatism of a liberal mindset. To this point however, another needs to be added: that the conservatism of the finale is tampered by a progressive twist, the transition to elective monarchy, which is also liberal at its heart.

To be sure, Game of Thrones (just like George Martin’s books on which it was based) is not “liberal” in any obvious, straightforward manner. In fact, when the whole series is considered, the opposite would seem to be the case: passions have the upper hand over reason, individual autonomy is hard-pressed between familial obligations and status constraints, consensus consistently gives way to violence as the ultimate arbiter of rivalries and conflicts. And yet, the way the fundamental issues of power and justice are resolved – arguably, the twin themes around which the whole narrative revolves and develops – is at its heart liberal. In other words, the way the series’ creators decided to close a story that hardly qualified for a liberal narrative of gradual-but-steady-progress towards a more enlightened state of being, betrayed a fundamentally liberal sensitivity. In delivering, thus, its “liberal-conservative-progressive” conclusion, Game of Thrones gives a good glimpse of the poverty of the liberal imagination, its inability to stay faithful to radical potentials which are immanent to a situation or even appreciate how significant sociopolitical change occurs.

Setting aside for the moment the theme of justice, Game of Thrones, as its title quite clearly suggests, is predominantly a story about power: about the desire to seize it, hold it, escape it, and about the unavoidably corruptive effects of its pursuit. There is in fact something of a Foucauldian wisdom in the way power is shown to circulate throughout Westeros and Essos (the continents where the story unfolds), in the complex relations that the protagonists enter. However, the “King’s head” has most certainly “not been cut off”[2] and power, despite the many centrifugal tendencies, is concentrated symbolically and materially in the Iron Throne, the seat of the monarch who has united the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros into a medieval type of centralized political form. Fantasy apart, this is essentially a feudal world.

In whatever form it comes, premodern, modern and more, “power corrupts”: this is both a philosophical truism and a popular cliché and if Game of Thrones was simply driving this point home it would have hardly made such sensation, no matter how much nudity, sex and gore were thrown in the mix. What rather distinguished the show from the start is the way it unfolds its central thematic line through multiple story arcs and a rich tapestry of realpolitik and intrigue. For these two aspects the series (as before it the books) has been praised, justifiably so. There is one more element though that defines Game of Thrones: there are two story lines, one intruding, the other leaking, which disrupt the story’s central thematic, whilst also affecting its direction. On the one hand, there is the story of the white-walkers coming from beyond the wall (the boundary between civilization and barbarism), who embody a force that exceeds entirely the calculative rationality of power-politics (and, it should be added, of economic reason). This story-arc acts as a dreadful reminder that all of humanity’s works and days are shadowed by a coming oblivion, towards which no argument or negotiation is possible. In this way, the narrative throws a critical light on the illusions of power and human ambition. While the white walkers come from the outside, the second story is an immanent line of flight from within power-politics, something that does not make it less subversive. This is the story-arc of Daenerys Targaryen, her becoming: from a legitimate contender of the Iron Throne to a popular-cum-messianic leader who promises to “break the wheel”, i.e., to abolish the established order of things and its entrenched hierarchies. Thus, if through the march of the white walkers justice is to disappear along with power, here it emerges as a potent force of change, marking the passage from a legal entitlement within an existing structure of right towards a radically different form of being. Overall, we have two lines of deterritorialization upsetting the narrative’s central line of meaning: one is a total deterritorialization accelerating towards the formless immanence of dead matter. The other carries the promise of a reterritorialization towards a better, more just world.

The way that these two lines could converge in the end was one of the great thrills the series offered. There was for sure one common trope: both bespoke and prepared for a violent event that would decide their fortunes. This allowed the idea of a convergence into one great, final battle. But, thrilling as it sounds, that would be impossible, and it is to the merits of the creators that they avoided the temptation. For these two lines of deterritorialization point to radically different directions. Hence, while they could conjunct, they could not be decided on a single event (other than in the sense that the victory of the white walkers would de facto destroy the dreams of a better world, which justifies Daenerys’ decision to join the forces of the Army of the Living.) The real question concerned their temporal arrangement, that is, which story would take precedence, and which would set the stage for the finale. The imperative tone that set its stakes made it seem that it was the white walkers story-arc that would come last; after all, what is more, significant than the battle between life and death? Again, it is to the merit of the series that it chose to follow the other route. For in this way (whether intentionally or not), it avoided the moralistic, apolitical assumption that there is a danger that unites us all. Given how this assumption tends to obscure the real political and social stakes in the looming environmental crisis, this is no trifling matter. Surely, without life there is no problem of justice, but without justice is life tolerable? At any rate, our own predicament is the political and social fortunes of the world, rather than a cosmic clash between Good vs. Evil, hence in its arrangement of events Game of Thrones strikes a contemporary chord.

If the structure of the narrative was compelling the execution suffered. The last season has been rightly criticized for failing the stories, mainly under pressure of time constraints. However, even if it had been told better, the end would remain conservative, or as Žižek has it, “liberal-conservative”. For the target in the last season is the prospect of radical change and the violence it inescapably entails. Daenerys incinerating the people of Kings Landing is entirely forced, and no reference to madness or a subtext patriarchy can redeem it. This plot-twist was necessary however in order for the audience to get emotionally estranged from the character and the revolutionary justice she embodied (or so she claimed). For, especially at a time such as our own, where class discrepancies are astutely felt, the burning of nobles and slave-owners could only be experienced as right. Hence, the burning of laymen needs to be turned into a necessary next step. Not to let the association be missed, this is made clear in Tyrion’s pep talk to Jon Snow, to convince him to assassinate Daenerys.

To be sure, that violence can develop its own dynamic and run rampant; also, that revolutionary justice has a despotic aspect, are valid, historically testified insights. But this is why they deserve nuanced theoretical reflection. At its best, liberalism is an insightful warning on the dangers of undifferentiated power, especially one armed with conviction. But the dialectics of violence, justice and power escape it, and it is not a coincidence that the series’ liberal conclusion typically confuses revolutionary dictatorship with fascism (Daenerys is depicted as a fascist leader in front of her Army). Moreover, this inability of liberal thought is not only because of its conservativism. It is only when liberalism’s progressive dimension is given its due that its poverty becomes properly elucidated.

In resolving for elective monarchy as “the breaking of the wheel”, Game of Thrones reveals how narrow the horizons of the liberal imagination are. There is also an element of naivety, since rational consensus has rarely resolved anything of world-historical consequence. In England for one, the unnamed model of the new regime installed in Westeros, political compromise passed through civil conflict and the defeat of every radical democratic alternative. And the same is true of representative democracy, which is dismissed by the nobles but clearly alluded as an even more desirable form of polity. The real poverty of the liberal imagination is that it cannot even pay proper tribute to its own historical constitution.

Then again, the summary dismissal of the prospect of plebs getting the right to vote and, even more, the frustration of the messianic promise of a savior-Queen point to a radical alternative. Nothing is ever given to the plebs. In good old Marxist terms, their emancipation will come from their own activity. But this is a story Game of Thrones could not have told.

[1] Collected Poems 1909-1962, (Main edition), London: Faber & Faber, 2002.

[2] M. Foucault, “Truth and Power”, Essential Works 1954-1984 vol.3: Power, ed. James, D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al, London: Penguin, 1994, p.122

George Sotiropoulos / Void Network

George Sotiropoulos holds a PhD in Political Theory. He is a member of Void Network. Recently he published the book A Materialist Theory of Justice: The One, the Many, the Not-Yet (published by Rowman and Littlefield International). You can find info about his Greek language book here 

The post No Other World Is Possible: Game of Thrones and the poverty of the liberal imagination- George Sotiropoulos / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

From the 2005 French riots in the suburbs of Paris and all over France until the Greek social revolt from 2008 to 2012, from the Tunisian and Libyan social explosions, the Tahrir square revolt, the indignados movement in Spain and Gezi Park in Turkey, from the panamerican Occupy movement to the riots of Ferguson and Baltimore none of these revolts led to a revolutionary change of organisation of the economy and social life.

A series of insurrections prepares and brings us closer to a revolutionary change. But we have yet to answer the questions: What could revolution in the 21st century be? How can we create a common ground so to prepare it?

Personally speaking, I don’t see a revolution coming in the near future and I wonder why, especially in this historical period of savage capitalism. All of us—men and women, intersexes and transexuals, gays and lesbians, don’t want to hazard the comfort and safety that capitalism offers us. Why? Because we are afraid of radical change in our lives. There are limitations, dividing lines in the society –  and the individual persons who compose society refuse to overcome the economic, the social and the cultural web of the current societies. These limitations are solid and massive constraints as they have been constructed from the 16^th century – the era of agrarian capitalism  – until today’s neoliberalism. It is difficult to smash them, to dream even that we can smash them as inside these limitations many of our dreams and desires have taken a form—unfortunately a form which is produced only by the means of money and hierarchy, work and repression.

What are these limitations? The acceptance of the established reality. The established reality of the neoliberal society, its comforts, its anxieties and its misery. The established reality of a society where inequality is important and useful for its economical development. The established reality of the conservative way of thinking and living where freedom is welcome in shop therapy, in short holidays in the Alps, in a drunk Saturday, in a concert of a new band for hipster bourgeois kids uninterested in the political becoming.

It is easier to support the dominant absurdity of commercialized human life. You know what it is, you know your place inside this world, even if you are not satisfied you know how to move around, how to get what you need, how to find what you are searching for.You are searching for normality.

The revolts of our era need to deny the putrid feelings that prevent and embarrass our deepest desires for freedom and celebration of life. The presupposed predetermination of austerity, unhappiness, anxiety, self-destruction and wickedness, weakens the people’s dream to be happy and self-complete or manipulate the human desires into already established exploitative forms. The pursuit of happiness that is claimed by everyone must destroy the spectacle, the plastic needs, the synthetic misery and the stupid world of hobbies and obligations.

There are thousands of people watching the decay of happiness in terms of a lack of healthy relationships, lack of social solidarity, mutuality, freedom of expression, and even a lack of every-day existential experience of human love. People watch the abysmal darkness of obligatory monogamy creating relationships based on lies and doubts, the lust for money and the lust for authority that drive society to debt, austerity, enslavement, depression and pessimism. The same persons who desire revolution and social justice, the people who cry for the dead Palestinians, for the poor people in Africa, for the homeless people in Athens and New York or who feel angry about the economic exploitation by the IMF, still they believe that nothing can happen, nothing can really change. They believe that the big demonstrations, the riots, the counter-propaganda cannot influence the political decisions or even reach the rest of the society, that all the strategies of the radicals and the methodologies of the insurgents are dead ends unable to bring any serious improvement to our daily life. This contradistinction inside each one of us restores and re-establishes normality.

The domination of the state and established economy functions deeply inside the human mind. On the other hand, the desire for freedom is hidden everywhere in the mind and in the human body. How can we energize this desire and metamorphose it into a war machine?

There are people who are working and living as uniformed robots without wondering about the meaning of existence and how neoliberalism and capitalism function in their own lives. They are satisfied with their lives even if for the last 4-5 years they have been obliged to drag the banking debt of all Europe inside their sleeping pills and their anti-psychotic medication. The antidote of life’s deficit is to explore and discover life’s real wealth, the wealth of enjoyment, of creativity, of sharing, of love, of emancipated relations beyond and without property, money and success. What are we going to say to all these people? How will these people gather in the streets and how will they find answers for their questions? How have they chosen this life? There is also one more question. Which ethos and morality inspire life? I don’t refer to the bourgeois habits and be haviours. The wave of the insurrection will swallow them.

All these people are socially isolated. The people blame themselves for their psychological and economical situation without understanding the social causes of these problems and they feel inadequate because the difficulties that they face in everyday life are visible at an individual, psychological level – then – they behave as contemporary slaves who are working hard, helping the system to function because they believe that they owe  the system – they owe the government- their own life. People feel alone and unable to live their lives based on self-organized structures, revolutionary plans, egalitarian social projects and propositions. People around us deny the possibilities of success of self-organization and our propositions for abolishing the state – state and capital became the only possible mechanisms of human progress, social evolution and human life. We need a new social – political spirit, an existential power that is capable of cultivating and expanding our thoughts and practices. How can we re-appropriate  the scientific conclusions and the tools of technology to transform our curiosity, our ignorance, and our fears into liberated desires and new forms of living experiences?

The political anarchist movements, the anarchist collectives, the autonomous political and social organizations and the individual anarchists should be very careful and serious in front of the open eyes of the society. The people are not stupid, the people are feeling fear of change but societies are always in search of new practical solutions and open possibilities. Many arguments between activists and people who participate in various social movements open a discussion about the lack of a clear and concrete goal of the anarchists and practical ways to achieve that. We can’t change a society by pursuing goals that are vague or abstract. “Freedom” by itself cannot serve as a goal, because different people have different conceptions of what constitutes freedom and of the relative importance of different aspects of freedom. The same is true of other abstract ideas such as equality, mutuality and self-organization. The movement needs clear and concrete goals, so that everyone involved will have approximately the same understanding of what our goals and solutions actually are. It seems that the movement’s original goals may become blurred if not completed perverted. The unique solid base is everyday human life as we imagine it, as we want it and as it is. This is the unique criterion that can be used to orient us and to prevent emancipatory concepts from becoming abstract meanings cut off from the existential experience of our every-day life.

Once a revolt becomes powerful enough to achieve its objectives, it should achieve its objectives as soon as possible before the participants get tired and return to their standard lives and their safe apartments. When an objective is vague or abstract, it is too easy to pretend that the objective has been achieved or that progress toward it is being made, when real achievements are minimal, when nothing really changed. The building of a new society and its social structures is endless.     We need to devote our personal time to build new structures through mutuality and non-hierarchy. Which are these structures – specifically which are these “counter-structures”?  And why do we need “counter-structures” rather than abstract ideas? Because it is a matter of common, everyday experience to change people’s behavior – people’s habits. Did the revolts of our era produce important, lasting changes in human behavior and experience of every-day life?

The power-structure of modern society stabilizes and changes human behavior through the mass media with the help of police, academics and skilled professional propagandists. A kind of information via mass media has been used to besot the youth to crawl with a sentiment of resignation. The ambiguity of corporate information and commercial massive entertainment events deceive and usurp the richness of knowledge. The revolts of our era are also against these personas that the society of the spectacle produces endlessly, against the ethos of the spectacle and against the celebrities of pop culture, the commerce and the businesses of capitalism. The aim of this endless process of assimilation of any kind of human activity by the spectacle is to praise the absence of personal cultivation, to ostracise literature and poetry, to manipulate emotional education, to bury the willingness for adventure under the violence of social vagrancy, to turn love into porn, revolt into hooliganism, spirituality into religion, psychotropic experimentation into drug addiction, creativity into art industry, desire for knowledge into academic authority, need for participation into the apathy of representation. Personal cultivation  is worthless to the market.

A self-determined group of committed and intelligent revolutionaries  outside the established power structures can transform human ambitions through counter-culture , counter-propaganda and actions but only if that group is powerful enough to undertake a massive propagation of a real transformation of needs and desires, a transformation of the meaning of life and of what living is worth.

Even where human life is constructed and controlled by professional propagandists of established reality, however, that conditioning in not permanent. The established conditioning is reversed when the capitalist propaganda ceases in moments of social crises or when the established manipulation of opinion is replaced by massive counter-culture and counter-propaganda that promotes contrary ideas and practices which can be attractive simultaneously to adventurers and shy people, to intellectuals and hooligans, to sexy girls and digi-nerds, to unemployed and workaholics, ideas and practices that brings life much further than the limitations of established reality and humans much further than the limitations of established social identities. Destroy the established reality! This is always possible. Don’t be afraid to take this step!

The changes that we want to create will sustain and develop with further effort on the part of the movement. This effort emanates from a philosophical search and arrives at a solid social structure of real life solidarity, total freedom, critical thought, constant free distribution of products, education, health care. While both ideas and organization for practical action are necessary components of any rational and successful effort to change a society, the people who fight for practical action need to be the same individuals as the theorists who develop and propagate the ideas. Both the theory and action should walk together so that the “theoretician” and “activist” live together in the same body. We must break the established separations.

Sometimes people are afraid of revolution, even those who consider themselves revolutionaries. Because they are going to lose something. Because during the time of a big revolution, they think that they are going to lose the stability of their everyday life – their houses, their money, their jobs, their small little worlds, their secret private normalities. If we look back at history, the big revolts and the revolutions happened because the people did not have something to lose, or it had already been taken from them. There is inside all of us a whole world of necessities and certainties that we have to demolish and bring down for the grace of the emancipated humanity. There is a wall around us and in between us that is covered with advertisements, luxuries, fashion and celebrities that we have to bring down. Bring down the wall of the spectacle!

 Inspired by the article “Eight Theses on the Affective Structure of the Present Conjuncture” by the Institute for Precarious Consciousness published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desired Armed no.75 we can affirm that the dominant system has a dominant way to answer the resistances of each era. So, this time the resistance needs strategies to dissolve the assimilation of the dominant system. The first wave of social movement was a blow against misery.  Working conditions became better and capitalism offered a rich life with open possibilities and access to merchandises. Many cars, many shampoos, many loans, many credit cards. The movement’s tactic of the sixties and seventies or even up to the present days are based on ways to escape from capitalistic normality. Situationists pioneered a whole series of tactics directed against boredom.

On the other hand the millennium is an era of global anxiety. We fight boredom with sabotage,  reclaim public space, DIY culture, free festivals, hacker culture, lessons of collective orgasm. Contemporary savage capitalism offered us an escape from  boredom – The Anxiety – “I am too busy”, “I don’t have time to meet with my friends”, “Ι don’t know what will happen to me tomorrow”, people cannot make longterm plans anymore, they avoid making commitments and promises, everything is ephemeral and instability is the new social contract. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, enjoyment are now laced with anxiety.

Wherever you stand in every place on earth, you are a receiver or a transmitter of a universal anxiety. Anxiety to be successful, to be beautiful, to be thin, to pay the house loans, to not be fired from your job, to sustain your family and your marriage, to avoid having a certain future because of the austerity measure, to survive day by day in a social environment of instability, intense antagonism and insecurity.

Our desires are stretched and manipulated by capitalism. Our desires are lead into stupidity.

The mass media, the amusement industry and mass culture turn all our needs and all our desires into merchandise. The different forms of conservatism of established religion are selling psychological stability through different forms of delusion. Catholicism, Puritanism, Protestantism, Orthodox church, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism destroy our spirituality.

In a period of social instability all forms of established reality (state, market, academia, religion, law, banking system, mass culture) are re-appearing as guarantors of normality promising social stability even though they are the causes of global anxiety.

The luxury of stupidity creates apathy, loneliness, dominant behavior, jealousy, hate, possessiveness, ignorance, attachment, greed, aversion and exploitation. The stupidity is seen in the absence of critical thought: you are living somewhere that you didn’t choose in a way you don’t understand the workings of, nor the reasons for the things that are happening to you. The stupidity is seen in the mechanical re-production of the same personalities, the same choices and the same decisions.

There is an increase of unimportance that spreads all around the world through anxiety and constructs the established authority. The exaltation of modesty is always a privilege of the ruling class. Modesty and resentfulness are best friends in our days. The repressed desires, the depressed hidden feelings, your personal guilt for the failure of not being rich and famous and rich, the compulsion of work, the power of the verb “having” instead of “being” are millennium stars sparkling in the mud of apathy, coldness, hysteria and disappointment.

The revolutionary powers are the powers of Eros. The power of the state is the death of the anarchist desires for freedom of mankind. The path from controlled to uncontrolled desires is the situation where the people can experience their passions at their Zenith.

In the era of contemporary totalitarianism, the passions can endanger or destroy the relationships even of emancipated persons. Sex, drugs, free love, enjoyment, dancing, travelling, poetry, art, insurrection,  creativity, refusal of wage slavery, BDSM, gender experimentation, neo-nomadism, collective life, polygamy, squatting, guerrilla struggle, political agitation, group sex or riot can be emancipatory and in the same moment psychologically and existentially destructive for the person.

But there is always the possibility of  situations where these same passions would not destroy the person but emancipate him or her from the morality of Christianity, the morality of conservatism, the morality of capitalism. We must be aware of both the limitations and the powers of our own passions.

The I, the self, is already designed to function inside a specific social organization. This social structure reproduces itself through the internalization of the order that created the structure.

Situations where the passions expand and revolt against the establishment are also bound themselves to the existing order. The people who create and participate in the revolutionary situations need to be able to create their own orders far from the dominant civilization.

The revolutionary passions ought to stem from a whole social -political movement that includes all the human activities in everyday life.

Society is always pushing you to turn into something other than what you want to be. Society attempts to make you someone else, a copy, a simulacrum. It is necessary to realize that we are not here to fulfill the expectations of anyone else. It is safer to follow society, the priests, the politicians, the teachers because society does not create problems for you when you ‘re with it. But it is dangerous to follow yourself because society will not be there to support you.We need to search, to understand, to analyze the social conditions in order to offer the benefit of Anarchy to humanity. The imposed obligations constitute a strategy of priests, teachers, politicians, economists, bankers, businessmen and policemen in order to control your desires, in order to keep humanity enslaved forever. They destroy your capacity to live, to love, to delight. There is a secret. If you can make humanity feel guilty, you remain strong. The culprit is always ready to serve the strong . The culprit does not have enough courage and passion to be a rebel, that’s the secret. Only a passionate human being can be revolutionary. As member of Void Network I can say that we want to create spaces of emancipation, situations of revolt, events of personal and collective enthusiasm so that the people feel empowered to collectively question their personal lives and fight to change the social relationships. We want to share the amazing passionate moments where the common people become revolutionary beings.  Our uprisings need to find a ground that can be a way against and beyond Western thinking, its anxieties and its comforts. We fight for radical social change, transformation of everyday life and the liberation of the existential experience of human being.

 Sissy Doutsiou / Void Network – Athens 

https://voidnetwork.gr

Sissy Doutsiou is a poet, actress and activist. She is co-founder of the Institute for Experimental Arts and member of Void Network from 2004. Read also “The Limitations of Antisexism”, another essay of her that you can find at the book “We Are an Image from the Future- The Greek Revolt of December 2008” (AK Press 2010) You can read the essay here: https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-admin/post.php?post=5917&action=edit

The post DESTROY ESTABLISHED REALITY! Sissy Doutsiou / Void Network appeared first on Void Network.

Abstract:

It is widely known that Greece faces one of the most precarious and transformative periods of its modern history. Greek society has come to learn, in a baleful manner, that crisis is the sequence of its former political inefficiencies and a slump that must be overcome. The pressure of this awareness leads people to deface previously established social convictions about the self and the world. In this procedure, social and mass media articulate and (re)produce discourses from above, below and the past so to capitalize the present for a new and solid horizon for the future. This article challenges five beliefs that circulate in the Greek public sphere inculcating their incontrovertible realities: the end of Post-Polity era (the ‘former’ political status quo of Greece known as Metapolitefsi), the revival of ethno-socialist movements, the debt crisis of eurozone countries, youth’s stand for social change and the role Greece plays in this global financial turmoil comprise the contents of this critical debate. What I suggest, is that apart from the obvious misfortunes of crisis, the performative effects of the imposed vision of the well-regulated state brings forth collective feelings of offence and oppression in such ways that old divisive ideas about Greece are awaken, reducing the country to a zone of social change in which the subject renegotiates its sense of individuality and community.

Introducing a precarious state

The name Metapolitefsi has come to identify the last 30 years of civic life in Greece. In Greek it means the transition from one regime to another or from one way of being involved in politics to another. In the contemporary collective consciousness though, the name embeds the fall of junta in 1974 and the institution of parliamentary democracy. For British historian Mark Mazower (2000: 7), the name is connected with Greece’s ‘return to some semblance of tranquility’ after ‘Europe’s bloodiest conflict between 1945 and the breakup of Yugoslavia’ among the Left and the Right that started even before the Second World War. The seven-year junta, he observes, was the last bloody chapter of this civil conflict and, for that, Metapolitefsi embodies the promise of a new governmental state deprived of the terror of ideological persecutions and national disunity.

The term Post-Polity I use, aspires to capture the three-fold quality of the name Metapolitefsi that itself obscures due to its historical weight: the political changeover of the year 1974 (what is widely accepted in the Greek public sphere), the transition of one regime to another (the etymology of the word itself) and the promise the preposition post (Meta) withholds, both as an effort to heal past wounds and a quest for a new future. The Post-Polity regime that characterizes the last 30 years of Greece is indeed so grounded to this promise, that it is unattainable to fully understand the political transitions that happened within – such as Greece’s dedication to the European vision and the ideal of the socio-democratic welfare state – or the collective feeling of distress that have grown since 2009 due to the austerity measures taken as to deal with the so called ‘debt crisis’, without taking seriously the resurgent discourses about the ‘end of Metapolitefsi’ that characterize today’s political rhetoric. In the present year of 2012, Greece is under the International Monetary Fund’ s (IMF) instructions for structural reforms inherent to the neo-liberal paradigm and, as a result, a new horizon is procreated ‘from above’ with multiple side effects in the way people deal with their current predicament.

June’s 2012 election results evinced the five-year Greek depression’s simmering trends; yet they still came with a shock for the public sphere. They were a shock, above all, because of the destined way the results affirmed themselves: the striking fall of the once dominant socialist party, the change of the two-party system after the youth, the ‘indignants’ and many other frustrated people’s turn to the radical left, and the rise of the ethno-socialist movements are some of the tangible events registered in the Greek social body. At that time, voters and candidates, dazzled in front of the T.V. screens, ruminated over the ‘already’ predicted yet seemingly unforeseen outcome. Fated and expected as they were though, the Greek election results still mask the presence of all these rampant and perilous events that color the current socio-political setting: anti-immigrants attacks by armed para-state nationalist groups, forest arsons on the eve of the election and stock market sabotages with en masse capital flight affirm and expose the frightful financial and political web. This unnerving scene cannot be seen as a consequence of Greek crisis alone, but as a constitutive feature of this transitory period. Still, ‘Greek crisis’ can be a flexible field for apprehending and communicating the symptoms of this contemporary social change.

The post that never comes: ‘I’m living a dream, don’t wake me up!’[2]

Since the arrival of the IMF and the official announcement of crisis, debates about the end of Post-Polity era has dominated the political discourses. At the same time, the ‘post’ of the Post-Polity regime was speculatively linked to the causes of the current misfortune and the IMF’s proposed reforms. In brief, the ‘end of Metapolitefsi’, has marked today’s collective imaginary, in reference to crisis only – a condition I would like to discuss as a starting point for my reflections. The German literary critic Andreas Huyssen discusses the ‘end of modernism’ in a similar manner. He sees postmodernism as a field of collective memory for the imaginative production of modernism. ‘The problem’, as he says, ‘is not what modernism really was, but rather […] how it functioned ideologically and culturally after World War II’ (Huyssen 1986: 186). In a way, the post for Huyssen has been introduced in the context of a disengaging process and has served for the production of knowledge(s) displaced from the modern myths of progress and rationality. In a similar fashion, I believe that the post of the Post-Polity era exists only as a performative gesture of retrospective accusation that functions as a political tool for the discomfiture of the Post-Polity societal claims for a socio-democratic welfare state, and for the acceptance of the sacrifices needed to reform the Greek society – in the neo-liberal paradigm – for its return to much awaited political and financial stability.

Thereby, the identity of that post media usually portray to make the need of a new structural paradigm more plausible and appealing doesn’t indicate an already here present. It rather belongs to a manifold process of incriminating Greece’s recent political past, aimed to support the abrupt importation of neo-liberal reforms formerly considered ‘extreme’; disclosing, at the same time, the empowerment and encouragement, in a local level, of ‘the same global rhetoric about horizons of long-term economic growth’ (Guyer 2007: 410). Thus, this incrimination process serves for the penalization of the epistemic and ideological platform of the Post-Polity regime, leading all previous governments to a rampant criticism in terms of corruption, misappropriation and embezzlement. In result, the identity of that post as an outcome of this incrimination performance synthesizes and channels a public demand for a complete political change; a demand though, in which the ideological platform of these streamlined accusations is delicately masked.

To understand the identity of the post of the Post-Polity era in accordance to the sensitive issue of the societal claim for change, we have to ruminate over the imaginative construction of the past by the media and their capacity to effectively channel public’s discomfort and complaints. It is imperative in order to understand the massive salary and pension reductions – in some cases exceeding the 50 per cent – the increase of working hours, the extensive dismissals of bureaucratic personnel, the increase of personal taxes and the discontinuing of many social provisions; measures impossible for a previous government to take, and now enacted in only three years time. Because, for a society to accept the dismissal of all its social accomplishments, means to feel critical for the whole infrastructure that made them possible in the first place. So, Greece performs this ‘new’ identity of the post, by preserving a collective trauma (i.e. corruption, as the bankruptcy of Post-Polity’s promises) so to recast the image of its past and to extort a different – yet once criticized – field of innovations. Thus, the post of the Post-Polity is not a temporal event but an affective condition grounded in the population’s unconfessed complicity for the failures of Greece’s former political and economical life. A complicity (re)produced dialogically with the praise of a lawful and congruous state in the liberal market context.

The return of the damned as (mass-mediated) democracy’s self-punishment

The imaginative construction of the Post-Polity era was heralded in with the establish-ment of the democratic constitution. At the time of the 1980s, the opening of the press and television market to private interests, attached Post-Polity governments to the tele-visual way of conversing with people and to mass media holders’ political and financial interests. In the affective condition of the post, this notion of ‘financial interests’ pertains to a grid of secret, masked and undercover agreements that is not only used for the incrimination of Greece’s most recent political past, but also for the mystification of the current situation in terms of conspiracies and concealed – global or otherwise – plans.[3]Consequently, one of the manifestations of the political strategy to implicate Post-Polity in the ordeals of the present is a sound distrust towards political life as a whole, in addition to the general disregard of the (social)democratic welfare.

In the Greek public sphere’s collective imaginary, democracy’s corruption is felt, first and foremost, in the collapse of expectations that were cultivated by the two main Post-Polity parties. Previous election slogans remain engraved on voters’ memory, such as ‘The citizen first’, ‘Greece first’, ‘Hat-in-hand’[4] and ‘People won’t forget what the Right stands for’[5], they are now internalised in the affective condition of the post and are inverted from their initial meaning producing a nervous turn towards nationalistic and patriotic movements; particularly towards the one that vaunts for authenticity: Golden Dawn. The slogan ‘The citizen first’[6], as the last ‘lie’ of the Post-Polity era becomes, in a reflective way, the ground for questing that promise’s literal sense through the shadows and the ghosts of the now wounded democratic system. In other words, mass-mediated democracy’s promises are quested through the constitutive Other of Post-Polity’s regime, which is the ‘reprehensible’ ethno-socialist ideal.[7]

This turn to patriotic movements is, obviously, coherent with the ultra right-wind streams of fanaticism that dominated Greece in the years after the civil war (see Mazower 2000). The Post-Polity regime had denoted, in a reserved way, the termination of the ideological divisions through Greece’s devotion to the European social-democratic ideal. And despite its incrimination, most people are not willing to ‘remind’ themselves the post civil-war traumas.[8] Since Golden Dawn’s allocutions are disjoint from previous military languages, the ‘politics of memory’ which permeate the political disputes of Post-Polity create a political space in line with the affective condition of the post. Namely, Golden Dawn’s rhetoric of hate on leftists, corrupted politicians, gays, foreigners, artists and academics, is based on an accusation of national betrayal due to financial, diplomatic or other partialities. [9] This is the common ground that relates the incrimination of the Post-Polity regime with the fanatic ruffle of Golden Dawn: the affective condition of guilt being embedded in the madness of revenge.

Thereby, Golden Dawn, the political party/movement that, as mass media portray, cannot be controlled by ‘democracy’ shines through the darkness it promises and its unlawful attacks against the corrupted political system. In voters’ consciousness, Golden Dawn becomes the par excellence agent of blackmail that places the ‘citizen-punisher’ into parliament life. It also becomes the carrier of the reformed model of ‘citizen’, a one that needs protection from the mass media, which are presented by Golden Dawn as an instrument of the threatening global forces that lead people to precarious states with their conspiratorial policies of nation, race and gender boundary disturbance. The paradoxical relationship of hate between Greek mass media and the Golden Dawn party reveals the power and the limits of modern mass mediated democratic system, in which the claim for the ‘lost’ democratic ideal brings forth inglorious movements for democracy’s complete and apocalyptic disablement.

Greece in a ‘state of emergency’ or the state of exception as a condition of crisis

It was after the elections of 2009 that Greece entered into economic ‘crisis.’ Its public announcement came from the lips of the newly elected prime minister himself, G. A. Papandreou, who declared that Greece now was in a ‘state of emergency.’ On his invitation, consultants from the European Union (EU) and the IMF arrived in Athens in no time to help the government take the necessary steps to decrease the deficit and improve the economy overall. This governmental discourse on Greece’s ‘state of emergency’ – as Greece’s state of exception from the markets – was necessary for today’s crisis to take shape and for the stigmatization of the Post-Polity regime as responsible for it. Additionally, the vision of a lawful, modern and Europeanized state became the rule for this ‘state of exception’ to take shape, presaging and arranging a field of changes and reforms which without crisis wouldn’t have been possible; and to which not only Greece but all European countries must conform. Mass media and political agents were the main channel for this grand narrative to take form and until now the vision of a modernized state is still the one that acts as a metaphor for a desired outcome.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses Carl Schmitt’s concept of ‘state of exception’ to investigate the exceptional measures taken in periods of political crisis. He believes that the legal measures taken in states of exception cannot be easily understood from a legal point of view. For him, they are political, insomuch as the state of exception entails the paradoxical position of presenting itself as the legal form of that which can have no legal form. He, then, stresses the importance of the condition in which the state of exception becomes the rule, so the exceptional measures turn into government techniques and, as a result, the once familiar form of political constitution loses its traditional distinctions (Agamben 1998: 122). In a way, since this evasive state becomes the rule, an opening for a space devoid of law occurs where different power relations may become proximate As he puts it, the state of exception is the provenance of every juridical placement since it opens up a space for the stabilization of a new kind of order (Agamben 1998: 19).

Using Agamben’ s analyses, we may say that the Greek government’s decision to except Greece from the markets, due to its inability to fulfill its debt obligations, and put it under IMF’ s patronage, as the figurative schema which supervises and controls them, is not just part of a procedure that disciplines or re-programs Greece (what both ill or well disposed discourses tend to put forward) but rather a part of one, that tests the ability of the EU to sanction the new principles of its restructuring. A speculation that leads us to think that the abrupt reforms Greece is forced to adopt belong to a political intention of reforming European governance. So, in a way, Greece, the last geographical and financial frontier of the EU becomes, simultaneously, the barometer of European deficiencies and the laboratory of multiple strategies for EU reform. In this sense, the ‘advanced European country’ as the rule for the ‘state of exception’ to take shape becomes the exception itself, for Greece becomes now the lawless space in which the ‘new European country’ is procreated. The fact that G. A. Papandreou declared with such ease ‘either we change or we sink’ to every European council denotes that there is a vision of a new financial, governmental and state order at stake, which is continuously being exceeded as a trace, although never denominated as such.

Thus, we may assume that the danger of Euro’s collapsing doesn’t just show the ‘structural’ problems of the European countries, but, much more, it shows the liberating ‘structural’ solution of a more coordinated, flexible and effective governing mechanism. The language Europeans officials use, such as the statements German and French prime ministers frequently make about a ‘European government’, a ‘trans-European executive authority’ or a constitution of a federation like the United States of America (USA) don’t belong to an abstract vision of European consummation, but they hold a very specific projection of a modernized European future, which is being anticipated in the present as a virtual horizon through this crisis. In this fashion, the ‘event of crisis’ is not just an objective social and economic matter needing attendance, but a bio-political laboratory of key signifiers that connect everyday life with the projection of the future.

Youth’s stand for change: ‘In these elections, we hide our grandparent’s ID cards!’[10]

Greek society is filled with outbursts of riots each and every time a package of austerity measures passes the parliament. Images of the most raging scenes are traveling around the world declaring, in a way, that the Greek public denies to submit to a change imposed ‘from above’. We might say that this disobedience belongs, in some measure, to the same spirit of demanding political change, as the one that Theodore Roszak (1968) finds in the ‘counterculture movement’ which flourished in the USA and Western Europe in the 1960s. In his effort to make sense of the huge wave of confidence people had in changing the world, Roszak observes that 50 per cent of those populations was below the age of 25. In respect to his observation, I ought to note, that Greece of 2012 has 50 per cent of its population over the age of 40;[11]and it is this part that accomplished its life-goals at the Post-Polity era. That means that a great deal of the Greek population operates with an outward mark of obeisance towards the austerity policies, in fear of losing its vested interests; while simultaneously, the young productive force embodies this part of society that craves for change, as it suffers the unbearable violence of austerity.

This picture becomes a lot evident during the months running up to the June 2012 election. that were marked with massive protests, riots and acts of disobedience. The confirmation of the belief for ‘discipline’ found Greeks tacitly divided, facing, through this ‘involuntary’ choice of austerity, memories of this ‘long forgotten’ polarization between the Left and the Right. Through the 30 years of Post-Polity, these oppositions may had been smoothed over, but, as Danforth and Boeschoten (2012) have shown, there are still strong communities of memory – people that have witnessed the civil war – that ‘would vote’ for stability only to ‘forget’ the past. That is, this belief for discipline fully embodies the memory of past national misadventures, while the youth, in an ironic way, incarnate the part of the population that crave for change; even in the cost of dismantling the relative peace made in the Post-Polity era.[12] Thus, being young in modern Greece means to feel a minority force in the construction of Greece’s future. For a young person, to live in Greece means to partake in the collective depression of seeing his/ her expectations and demands be set aside for the sake of older people’s (bank accounts) safety and their fear of new national misadventures. Hence, current prime minister Antonis Samaras’ rhetorical campaign dwelled on the catastrophic scenario of Greece’s exit of eurozone is not such a surprise; as timid and divisive (and alien to the youths) as it was, it intended to reach the terrified ears of the seniors. It was also of no coincidence that in his first post-election speech he was eager to thank ‘the masses of youth that supported him’.

Half of Greece’s population has experienced the post-war, post-occupation and/or post civil-war traumas. It grew up out of ‘nothing’, yet with plenty of opportunities to make its dreams possible. It also grew up with the need to escape rural life and the desire to live the modern urban, consumerist (and with one or two kids) nuclear family life. Greek families, as shown in respective ethnographies, are formed with the principle of ‘honor’. That is, the collectivity of the family is bounded when the individual’s shares and interests conjoint with the safekeeping of the family’s private sphere. Many theorists (Campbell 1983, Herzfeld 1987) have pointed ‘honor’ as an indicator for both structural continuity and social change. Despite differences, all commentators will agree that massive urbanization and industrial modernisation have shifted the ways ‘honor’ is manifested, yet it is still a way to understand the boundaries of the family by means of individual action. Yet, in the site of crisis, this ‘peculiar Greek individualism’ (Abdela 2002: 218) is presented in ambivalent terms. Because the boundaries of the family seem to frame both of these contradictory tendencies of muffled safety and rabid escapism; denoting the multiple articulation of ‘honor’ itself which family’s private sphere retains.

On one hand, the image of the paternalistic Greek family gets blurred in the misty shadow of crisis and reveals an opportunistic dimension which face such a concern for its offspring’s future, that it even accepts their sacrifice. On the other, the idea we have of the overprotective behavior of the Greek family shatters with the ‘event of crisis’, as ‘honor’ is detached from the strict connotations of the family’s private sphere’s interests. Through these multiple shiftings in individual concerns, the ‘young’ are forced to claim a space of ‘adult’ decisions and deny a juvenile precariousness, nourished by their elders. For the adults, a sense of sacrificing the most sacred gifts like security and (paternalistic) protection is produced, with their offspring as the first victims, who now ought to re-learn how to be modern. Thus, current youth’s stand for social change is not just clashing with some restraining and conservative forces (what can be easily conceived through the mainstream ideological platforms) but with an attitude of passive impartiality that shares this uncofessed complicity for the ‘failures’ of the past. Crisis, as it seems, is another plateau of modernization where the Greek subject reconfigures its individuality and sense of community. It is a contemporary rite of passage for Greek society; a process of violent adultness for all generations.

Greece, the cradle of the world.

In an article of his that was popular within the Greek public, British historian Mark Mazower (2011) says that Greece’s national history goes hand in hand and sometimes presages the great changes of the modern western world. The 19^th century great empires’ fall, the adventure and collapse of Nazism, the European cold war division, the expansion of the EU and now the crisis of the worldwide financial system spark are, as he points out, resultants of modern Greek history. At the same time, the little country of Greece acquires the heroic and tragic role of being ‘in the forefront of the fight for the future.’[13]I don’t find the real role of Greece in the worldwide theatre of changes that important; to my mind, each country partakes with a different role and degree of tragedy in this play. But, what I really find interesting is that Mazower takes up a philhellenic tradition in a time of war; representing Greece’s various resistances ‘as the noblest of causes’[14].

In a non-committal way, this popular article belongs to a storehouse of help that encourages the revival of the Greek spirit, by internalizing in the collective imagination the belief of a ‘Great Greece’ that holds the capacity of an explosive way of participating in ‘worldwide negotiations’. Having the feeling of this capacity means to cultivate, in a collective manner, the conviction that not only Greeks are capable of, but it is incumbent upon them to counteract against any assault to their private/national domain. The ability to unilaterally terminate the memorandum and to refuse paying off the debt, as well as the ‘invitation’ of an ultra-right wing ethno-socialist party in a European parliament, belong to the same reactionary context fed by a tank of allegories that share a common psychic denial best understood with the psycho-analytical themes of sublimity, egocentricity, narcissism, fear of loss, inability to accept criticism and various vindication fantasies.

What I actually want to say here is that the existential fear of a country in crisis, once it internalizes the capacity of assaulting the worldwide financial web, makes it ‘dangerous’ insofar as this country reflexively increases its metonymic power to protect itself by means of attacking the joints of the skeletal structure which finds itself entrapped in. So, to visualize the characteristics of a country in a precarious state, one has to bear in mind this shrewd oscillation between the capability of an explosive reaction and attending the exhortations for legitimacy. In that sense – and in a diametrical opposition to Mazower’s view – for a country to be ‘the cradle of the world’ means to be a screen for projecting the worldwide circulating needs for change and, at the same time, a camera that projects for itself the eventualities of crisis as a virtual horizon for the whole world. Greece as the cradle of the world is the crisis’ point of no return. And it resounds the crisis’s center since it has been reduced to a laboratory of multiple and contradictory narratives and metaphors of an imminent future through the most common conspiratorial stories of the hidden, yet terribly tangible, global financial relations.

‘Capitalizing’ these five thoughts

In illustration of what I have said, I am tempted to use another ‘common’ belief, one that is not only ‘Greek’ but, on the contrary, it resounds the global image of the modern and well-regulated state in the market’s context. It is the one saying that societies ought to control, as a moral stance, the financial steering wheel of their country. In the event of crisis, we can see that what this stereotype conceals is the disconnection of the steering wheel from the rest of the vehicle’s navigation system and its participation in automated, by ‘invincible’ programmers, steering movement transmission systems. In the context of Greek crisis, it is a matter of trust of a faded and frayed map, with a very great obligation involved in society’s part, to show a brave, authoritative and confident attitude. In other words, it means that what the Greek society has to prove is not that it can take the ‘right direction’, but rather that it can take on its back the burden of change imposed by the ‘international fund community’, as an after-effect of the harsh prescription for stability. Stereotypes like this, are not just vehicles for imposing, ‘from above’, the vision of a well regulated state, but they zigzag in monstrous rhythms in and out of multiple private and public spheres, producing ambivalent images of the self and the world (see Athanasiou 2007; Guyer 2007).

For the subject, the event of crisis becomes a zone for renegotiating the idea of self and community. The violence of this process is not just evident in the reduction of salaries and expenses, as politics of reform. It is presented in the products of this shrewd oscillation between the vision of a well regulated future and the apocalyptic dystopias of the present. This oscillation is an evidence of the contradictions of the eurozone figure as well. Because for Greek society to be in this crisis means to occupy EU’s margins and at the same time cry with all its strength about its inefficiencies. For the same reasons, EU learns through this crisis how to reinstate its authoritative and paternalistic role, by trying schemes and models for an updated inter-national paradigm. Therefore, the post of the Greek Post-Polity era is something more than Greece’s passing to a regime of risk and precariousness. It means that Greek society is living the parallel eventualities of crisis in which novel horizons are reflexively projected as the European rescue plans are being tested. In this condition, Greece becomes a social zone for reconfiguring its sense of orientation through facing the same divisions, exclusions and ideal projections which haunt its past and have made its present possible. And yet, the sense of its present is linked to the future as an image governed by the forces that control the financial steering wheel of the country. Ultimately, to capitalize on the present amidst a condition of crisis means to force a specific value onto the future; a value that conceals all the social and financial relations that produce it and sustain it.

Bibliography:

Abdela, E. (2002) “For Reasons  of Honour”: Violence, Emotions and Values in Post-Civil-War Greece. Athens: Nefeli.

Agamben, G. (1998 [1995]) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. tr. D. Heller-Roazen. Stanford University Press.

Athanasiou, A. (2007) Life at the Edge: Essays on Body, Gender and Biopolitics. Athens: Ekkremes (in Greek).

Campbell, J. K. (1983) ‘Traditional Values and Continuities in Greek Society’. Pp. 184-207 in R. Clogg (ed.) Greece in the 1980s. London: Macmillan.

Danforth, L. M. & Boeschoten, R. V. (2012) Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Guyer, J. I. (2007) ‘Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomics, Evangelical, and Punctuated Time’. American Ethnologist. 34 (3): 409-421.

Herzfeld, M. (1987) ‘“As in Your Own House”: Hospitality, Ethnography, and the Stereotype of Mediterranean Society’. Pp. 75-89 in D.D. Gilmore (ed.) Honor and Shame and the Unity of the Mediterranean. Washington, D.C.: American Anthropological Association.

Huyssen, A. (1986) After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Mazower, M. (ed.) (2000) After the War was Over: Restructuring the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943- 1960. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Mazower, M. (2011) ‘Democracy’s cradle, rocking the world’. The New York Times. [online]. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/opinion/30mazower.html?_r=1[Accessed 14 September 2012].

Papailias, P. (ed.) (2011) ‘Hot spots: beyond the “Greek crisis”.’ Cultural Anthropology [online]. Available at http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/432[Accessed 4 November 2012].

Roszak, T. (1968) The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections of the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.

[1] This article belongs to an effort to ground “crisis” and its aftereffects to an academic glossary and debate. An earlier version of some of the arguments made here has been published on the Cultural Anthropology website (see Papailias 2011).

[2] A famous slogan coming from a Greek advertisement for mobile services. The protagonist – a hot dog seller – promises more ingredients than the other ones, building in a way a promise-land of goods that is within a grasp.

[3] It is very common in today’s anti-memorandum parties to take on discourses of “intrusion of the banking lobby”,  “global loan sharks”, “media’s terrorism for the manipulation of voters” etc.

[4] It was one the basic instructions former prime minister K. Karamanlis (2004- 2009) gave to his ministers, to persuade the people of Greece that his government had no intention of being implicated in scandals and corruption.

[5] One of the most well known and repeated slogans of the socialist party of PA.SO.K. The slogan attacks the right-wing party, by “reminding” the society the seven years of military junta.

[6] It was the main slogan G.A. Papandreou used for PA.SO.K. pre-election campaign of 2009. At the second month of his presidency he called the IMF for financial support.

[7] I make this speculation due to the fact that Post-Polity’s ideological platform was built in difference to junta’s military governments and royalist regimes.

[8] For the ‘politics of memory’ in accordance with the Greek civil war adventure and post civil war main governmental policies, see Danforth & Boeschoten (2012).

[9] It is important to note that the main policy Golden Dawn is practicing the few months of its parliamentary service includes attacks and persecutions of immigrants and illegal vendors. Many times it responds to calls of frustrated citizens who are unable to get help from the police. One of the latest ‘rumors’ is an attack to a public hospital’s doctor who asked for a 2.500 euro baksheesh to perform an operation. Despite what is true or false, many people have cultivated an image for Golden Dawn as the punisher who will cleanse Greece from corruption. In addition, Golden Dawn says that ‘gays’ are the next target after immigrants. The first attacks on them being a fact.

[10] A slogan spread throughout the internet social networks among young people, at the time of Greece’s most recent elections.

[11] An estimation based on the 2011 Greek population census.

[12] Youths in Greece face most of the consequences of crisis. According to the National Statistical Service of Greece, the 55 per cent of the population under the age of 25 is unemployed (referring to July of 2012).

[13] With these words Mazower ends up his article.

[14] I’m using – in an ironic political way – the same words Mazower uses to describe the feelings the philhellenists had at the time of Greece’s independence war.

Acknowledgements:

I really wish to thank Athena Athanasiou, Penelope Papailias, Vanesa Ariza Olivera, Evy Vourlides, Natalie Koutsougera, Babis Kontarakis and the editors of the Unfamiliar Journal for their insights, comments, remarks and their overall help and support. Without their contribution this article would have never been possible.

Leandros Kyriakopoulos

Panteion University of Athens

Email: Leky@mail.com

You can access my papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at: http://ssrn.com/author=1706538

Leandros Kyriakopoulos is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University, completing a dissertation on psytrance festivals as heterotopias and experiences of the self as technologies of constituting humanness. His main interests include new mobility, electronic dance music cultures, new technologies, politics of place, transnationalism, identity, subjectivity.

Leandros Kyriakopoulos participates in Void Network and he took part in the creation of the book “We Are an Image from the Future / The Greek Revolt of Dec. 2008”, edited by A.G. Schwartz, Tasos Sagris & Void Network with the essay titled:

“December’s riots as mediated by the image of mass media”

you can read this essay here:  here:http://libcom.org/library/december%E2%80%99s-riots-mediated-image-mass-media

for more info about Unfamiliar Magazine were this article first published:

The Unfamiliar- an Anthropological Journal

Vol. 2, Issue 2, Winter 2012, the University of Edinburgh

26. 18-26.

The online version of the article can be found at:

http://journals.ed.ac.uk/unfamiliar/article/view/70

The post Void Network presents “THE CONDITION OF CRISIS AND THE SYMPTOMS OF SOCIAL CHANGE: FIVE FLIGHTS OF THOUGHT ON THE POST OF THE GREEK POST-POLITY ERA by Leandros Kyriakopoulos appeared first on Void Network.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Limitations of Anti-Sexism” 

by Sissy Doutsiou ( a poet, actress and 

long run cultural / social activist from

Void Network) is a part of the book

“We Are an Image From The Future

The Greek Revolt of December 2008″.

It is an essay investigating the

limits of anti-sexist’s theories and pratices. 

The text is infuenced from the feelings 

and understandings of December 2008 

riots in Greece, the social uprising 

that followed the assassination 

of 15 years old boy

Alexis Grigoropoulos by Greek Police. 

 

A review

made for this essay in digital mag.

The Anvil Review mentioned :

Doutsiou fairly represents the pleasure angle. She positions herself in expansiveness—culturally/internationally, socially, and philosophically. Her discussion about sexism and anti-sexism is in the context of anarchist activity in Greece in December 2008—a time of expanding anarchist action, relevance, and awareness—as well as her experience in various European anarchist circles. To make her points she draws on Judith Butler, Françoise Denevert, Guy Debord, Simone de Beauvoir, etc. And her argument is for sexiness, for sensuality, for contrast, and for people celebrating their own particularities.

We choose to free ourselves from normality to become the most extreme of beings. We want to break through identities established by society, by tradition, and even by anarchist spaces. .

She names anti-sexism as a specific kind of reaction to sexism, one that ends up reifying sexism itself, much in the way that Alfonso argues “Why APOC is a White-Supremacist Organization“, or how sociologist Joshua Gamson (who she quotes) posits that queer identity is necessary for queer liberation /and/ perpetuates the binary that predicates queer oppression. And her primary critiques of anti-sexism have to do with the limitations that they rely on:

Language shapes us, composes us, and forms us. Language is based not on words per se but on the use of this word and the meaning of it at a specific time and place. However, the anti-sexist hysteria [ouch!] with language, with both creating new words and not using certain words, only makes those feel guilty who express themselves using words in a colloquial manner. […] The meaning of a sentence cannot be captured solely by the definitions of the words that constitute the sentence. Those purporting to be anti-sexist only end up as jailors of semantics and detectives of the prohibited colloquial expressions.

As in the quotation above, this article acknowledges the raw components that anti-sexists work from (language, cultural events, etc) but challenges what anti-sexists make from those ingredients.

Doutsiou contrasts the simple support of the spectacle (those people who are content to take on the gender characteristics that are most simple and proscribed — sex kitten for women, macho man for men), with the anti-sexist specatacle that is the knee-jerk reaction to sexism (“women who express their aggression towards men in order to show tha they are not subjugated… men who avoid an honest aggressive dialogue with women because they must behave gently… even anarchist men and women who locate erroneous behaviors and explain them as sexist…”).

 

 

“The Limitations of  

The post “The Limitation of Anti-Sexism” by Sissy Doutsiou from Void Network appeared first on Void Network.