SYRIZA rising: what’s next for the movements in Greece?

The radical social transformation of tomorrow will not be a product of the bourgeois state and its institutions of representation, but of the subversion of state institutions and the emergence of social structures of power immanent to society and inseparable from it. Under these conditions, the conquest of the bourgeois state by a left-wing bureaucracy can prove detrimental to the autonomous movements, if it does not help expand the vital spaces of development of their social power against the power of nation states and international capital. Nevertheless, our rejection of the reformist avenue advocated by contemporary left-wing parties does not entail an uncritical adoption of revolutionary politics as defined in the 20th century. In a late capitalism of immaterial and fragmented labor, of disciplining through debt and scare tactics, of opaque centers of power far removed from the population they rule, there is no Winter Palace to storm and no prospect of defeating the enemy in military terms. The neighborhood, the street and the public square have largely replaced the factory as the epicenter of social and class antagonism. Reconceptualizing community, breaking out of social isolation, creating horizontal and participatory structures based on equality, solidarity and mutual recognition, and building networks among these structures are social acts that today constitute revolutionary praxis.

Antonis Broumas en Theodoros Karyotis in SYRIZA rising: what’s next for the movements in Greece? (Roarmag)