exposures

Two major exposures of the US-led neo-imperialist war machine hit the Internet in the last two weeks: first, the Washington Post published “Top Secret America,” a two-year investigation by journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin. Then, WikiLeaks released “Afghan War Diary,” a collection of 91,000 internal military logs and reports that document, from day to day, some six years of US and NATO operations. The WikiLeaks documents were vetted and published conjointly with the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times.

 

And what, after a day of media frenzy and frisson, has been the impact? Salon.com, in a notice posted Thursday and headlined “Why we ignored two huge stories,” evidently thinks there will be little to no impact: Both stories, writes Michael Barthel, “have landed with a resounding thud.” If it can’t be summed up in few soundbites, and if there is no direct scandal or titillating visual porn-factor, then Americans can’t be bothered.

 

That is a chillingly cynical judgment that goes far beyond justified pessimism. The response of the clearly furious US state indicates that the administrators, generals and politicians see things differently. They fear the fallout, and with reason. Despite White House claims that the WikiLeaks documents reveal nothing new or alarming, the snippets that have so far been published and discussed reveal glaring gaps between the official, spin-doctored version of this scandalously under-reported occupation and the destructive realities. Among other things, we now learn of “Task Force 373,” a previously unknown assassination unit, of drone problems, and of high-level resistance to the war from within Pakistani military and intelligence forces.

Moreover, two things are likely to be indisputably confirmed as more of the WikiLeaks archive is analyzed in detail:

First, the war is causing far more civilian casualties than has so far been admitted. When the actual field logs are scrutinized, the mistakes, abuses, excesses and massacres that are glibly written off as “collateral damage” are shown to be, instead, the necessary result of military occupation as such, with its irreducible and structurally-produced fear, hatred and paranoia.

Second, the strategy for “winning hearts and minds” and therefore the war, is failing and must fail, since Afghanistan demonstrates yet again that foreign military occupations have no legitimacy among the occupied.

In short, the question that must emerge from these documents is: “Why are ‘we’ there?” They expose the occupation as unjustifiable in all but the most naked and cynical imperialist terms. They are obviously a potent weapon for an antiwar movement, if there is one that knows how to use them.

That movement, such as it is, has been mostly invisible for years. But now it has another chance to refocus itself and public attention on the war machine and its central connections to every social struggle – a theme ("enforcement") that has been repeated so many times in these posts that I won’t tax patience by doing it again now.

 

Instead, two points, one urgent and the other grave:

The US state is going after Pfc. Bradley Manning, who it suspects of leaking the Afghan war logs; Manning has been detained pending trial for previously leaking the notorious video of a 2007 massacre in Iraq perpetrated by the crew of a US Apache helicopter gunship. And the state is going after Julian Assange, the editor of WikilLeaks. The warlords need to make an example of both. Their strategy has now emerged: they will try to discredit and destroy WikiLeaks by charging that Assange has put US soldiers and Afghan informers at risk, and that he therefore has “blood on his hands.” This inversion of reality, in substance unworthy of serious response, must be unequivocally and robustly refused. Hands off Bradley Manning and Julian Assange! Prosecute the abuses and massacres brought to light, not the messengers.

Solidarity, in the form of public defenses and hat-passing for legal fees, will no doubt have to be organized in the time-tried ways. But let’s go further now, and remember what others have done and organized in similar wars.

In 1960, after public exposure of widespread torture used by French forces in their colonial war against the Algerian independence struggle, the French state put on trial a network of French citizens who gave material support to the FLN. In that context, French intellectuals – including Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Maurice Blanchot, Henri Lefebvre, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Pierre Vidal-Naquet – wrote, endorsed and circulated a text called “Declaration on the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War" - the so-called Manifesto of the 121.

And in 1981, Edward Thompson and Dan Smith published an American edition of Protest and Survive, a collection of texts calling for nuclear disarmament and abolition. For that volume, Daniel Ellsberg, the Rand whistleblower who dealt the Vietnam War a major blow by leaking the top-secret study known as the Pentagon Papers, contributed a text titled “Call to Mutiny.” Enough said.

Second, the Washington Post report, which has gotten far less attention, is equally devastating on a different front. Priest and Arkin document the rapid growth of the US intelligence apparatuses after September 11 – what amounts to a new, covert branch of government, a “top-secret world so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

“Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies [now] work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.” An estimated 854,000 people now have top-secret security clearances for this work, and the equivalent of three new Pentagon buildings have been built for it.

Remembering that this covert parallel apparatus is just one part of a war machine the budget of which, at $1.5 trillion, eats up half of every tax dollar, we have here an astounding social fact that is screaming for attention.

It ought to provide a strong basis for productive discussions and debates with the Tea Party, for the spook agencies have just pulled off an amazing expansion of the repressive state bureaucracy. Up to now, tea partiers have been happy to write the war machine a blank check. The bulk of them are probably immune to reason on this issue and will remain irremediably militarist come what may. But these anti-state tax revolters ought at least to be confronted with this contradiction – on their own terms and with their own arguments. The basic facts about the military-fiscal black hole is a wedge of truth that, driven with cogent arguments, should wake at least some of them up and plant some doubts among their imperial fantasies.

Past posts here have extensively addressed the rise of the national security-surveillance state in the US and in general. As a mainstream mapping of its physical contours, the Washington Post series helps to make this continent of secrecy more concrete and subject to critical evocation.

GR

“Top Secret America,” Washington Post, 19-21 July, 2010.

”Afghan War Diary,” WikiLeaks, 25 July 2010.

Julian Assange at the Frontline Club, London, 27 July 2010; and on DemocracyNow, 28 July 2010.

co-opting zero

Co-opting the Anti-Nuclear Movement

by Darwin BondGraham

No medium of propaganda is as powerful and effective as film.  Think of the classics, the most notorious efforts to sway the public with the electrifying and collective passion of cinema: racial apartheid was justified in the US with Birth of a Nation.  The Soviets glorified their revolution with The Battleship Potemkin.  Then there was Triumph of the Will.

A typical propaganda film tugs at emotions and invokes fears.  It invokes dark threats to "the people," and it offers up solutions extolling state and corporate power.  Unlike a political documentary it will not criticize the state or corporations.  Instead it will celebrate great men as our leaders and saviors.  Distinct from a run-of-the-mill political documentary, a propaganda film butchers the complexity and contradictions that permeate politics and real life, presenting things in simplistic moral terms.  Functionally, propaganda is mobilized to secure popular support for a primary, often hidden agenda that is not apparent in the film's narrative.  Propaganda is a tool used by elites to secure the consent of the masses, channeling their anxieties.

Now hitting theaters is one of the most dangerous propaganda films produced in decades.  Countdown to Zero "traces the history of the atomic bomb from its origins to the present state of global affairs."  A promotional blurb on the film's web site claims that it "makes a compelling case for worldwide nuclear disarmament, an issue more topical than ever with the Obama administration working to revive this goal today."

Before I go any further in explaining Countdown as a propaganda film I should note that not all propaganda need be the product of a secretive and manipulative council of elites behind some curtain.  Instead, the many contributors to Countdown and its promotional efforts have different motivations and intentions.  What makes this film a coherent piece of propaganda is its medium, style, and likely effects on the US political climate.  There are powerful actors who will use it for nefarious ends.

On its surface Countdown to Zero is about nuclear disarmament, but deeper down the film is making a very specific case that isn't about disarmament at all.  Its political function will prove to be quite different.  Countdown is joining a suite of political campaigns and other propagandistic efforts, the point of which is to build support for increased US spending on nuclear weapons, as well as a more belligerent foreign policy, based around Islamophobic depictions of "terrorists" and "rogue states."  Countdown is likely to be used by hawks to drum up support for military action against Iran, North Korea, and other states that would dare to transgress the current near-monopoly that a handful of states have on the bomb.

To understand how this is possible, one has to break through the simplistic and moralizing presentation of issues in the film and its promotional materials, and explore the complex political situation into which it is being launched.

The first and most important thing to understand is that the Obama administration does not have a disarmament agenda.  Because the entire moral thrust of the film rests on this notion, it's important to dispel it right off the bat.  Obama and his military advisers have made their nuclear ambitions abundantly clear on multiple occasions.

The administration's Nuclear Posture Review in no significant way changed the nuclear force structure or use doctrines.  The NPR makes it abundantly clear that US national security is founded on the nuclear "deterrent" and that no one in government will seek to reduce the role of nukes in the foreseeable future.

The recently negotiated New START treaty does not significantly cut the US and Russian arsenals.  In fact the treaty language secures an allowance for US "missile defense" programs as well as the "prompt global strike" weapons system while consolidating the US stockpile and reaffirming existing strategic agreements with Russia that are about balance.  As noted by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the irony here is that the Senate's possible ratification of New START is premised on the Obama administration's pledge to fund US nuclear weapons programs upwards of $180 billion over the next ten years, something even George W. Bush could not accomplish.  The down payment for the next fiscal year includes a $624 million surge in nuke spending, for a total of $7.01 billion.  The administration foresees spending more than $1 billion each year to refurbish and upgrade existing warheads and bombs.  To support New START requires accepting these huge infrastructural and programmatic investments in nuclear weapons, far into the future.

To put it more simply, the debate in Washington revolves around two camps fighting over how large an increase in nuclear weapons spending there will be.  At this point in time all agree on expending billions more.  All agree on building a new plutonium pit factory, a new uranium processing facility, a new components factory, and five other major capital projects in the nuclear weapons complex to extend the US nuclear enterprise half a decade or more into the future.  Most agree on procuring a new class of nuclear equipped submarines.  Most agree on new ballistic missiles.  Everyone seems to be fine with upgrading warheads and bombs.

Some conservatives are uncomfortable with the cosmetic cuts to the stockpile that will be made under the auspices of New START.  Senate Republicans have circled their wagons to demand greater funding increases in consideration of ratification, and given all of the agreements they have with the Democrats and the Obama administration over expanding the weapons complex, they are actually correct.  In order to carry out this bi-partisan nuclear arms buildup, quite a bit more than a $1 billion per year boost (at its peak) will be needed for the NNSA's budget, especially as inflation eats into the real value of future year budgets.

Determining the future of the US nuclear weapons complex is a tricky balancing act for the foreign policy elite because it is embedded in a larger set of much more important goals.  The overriding goal of foreign policy for the United States, with respect to nuclear weapons, is to maintain control of nuclear weapons and materials.  Forget lofty ideas like disarmament.  Lofty moral oughts only matter with respect to the realpolitik of geo-strategy (and this is where Countdown comes in, as we shall see).

To elite strategists who will decide at the end of the day, the power of nuclear weapons only matter within, and comprise a small part of, a much greater geopolitical game.  Henry Kissinger made this very point in 1957 with his first book, the subject being the role of nuclear weapons in US foreign policy.  Controlling resources, energy supplies, and access to geo-strategic regions for US corporations and allies is the primary goal of US foreign policy, and this requires a stable imbalance of powers, with the US the weightier.

Nuclear weapons are problematic today because they remain a necessary means of overpowering other nations and intimidating foes, but they have also become a liability as other states threaten to go nuclear in order to restore balance to a unipolar world.  A blatant display of American hypocrisy is seen as a major weakness for the maintenance of American power by liberal imperialists like Obama.  Conservatives like Senator Jon Kyl would rather just avoid soft power altogether and stick to a hard-nosed defense policy.

This is why US policy with respect to Iran seems so disjointed and paralyzed.  Iran possesses immense energy resources, it straddles a region of geo-strategic importance, and its influence and power is growing.  For US elites, Iran must be controlled at all cost.  A nuclear Iran would make this much, much more difficult.  Regime change is the goal, just like in Iraq.  Nonproliferation as an end in itself seems to offer the most justifiable reason for using force and "rebuilding" nations (remember that it was the reason given for the 2003 invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq).  But with its Bush-era reputation of seeking new nukes, liberals fear, the United States can hardly coerce or attack Iran in the name of nonproliferation.  The US being the world's preeminent nuclear power with no interest in disarming, that would be bald hypocrisy.  But then again the US will not disarm, for this would be anathema to the needs and goals of the foreign policy elite.  What to do?

Into this mix arrives Countdown to Zero and similarly crafted propaganda pieces.  Countdown's major achievement is repackaging the strategy of anti-nuclear nuclearism into a sexy and thrilling propaganda film full of special effects and heart-pulsing music.  It will invoke fear of nuclear weapons to justify aggression, war, and the extension of US control over much of the rest of the world.

While the film's title and a lot of the fanfare surrounding it emphasizes the "zero" message of disarmament, Countdown is actually an alarmist portrayal of dark-skinned men, Muslims, "terrorists," and other racial or ethnic bogeymen who we are told, over the span of 90 minutes, are seeking nuclear weapons to use against the American people.  A related theme in the film is the demonization of Iran and North Korea which are portrayed as dangerous rogue states with ties to terrorist organizations, and who must be controlled, against whom military action may be warranted -- or else.  Or else what?

One of the main "experts" in Countdown to Zero, Joseph Cirincione frames the take home message at the outset by invoking a very post-9-11 Bush administration theme:

"That day changed our sense of security and how we view the world.  We learned how vulnerable we are to the destructive acts of a determined few.  Just think how worse it would have been if the terrorist had nuclear weapons."

Cirincione is not just any expert.  He is the doyen of the Democratic Party's NGO apparatus that shapes nuclear weapons policy through foundation funding of grassroots groups and elite policy shops.  Cirincione is president of the Ploughshares Fund.  In spite of its name, Ploughshares' mission these days actually involves beating ploughs into swords.

Throughout the 1990s, but especially during the George W. Bush years, Ploughshares and its circle of foundations called the Peace and Security Funders Group increasingly narrowed the range of acceptable anti-nuclear activism, while simultaneously ghettoizing the field so that the work of various NGOs became less and less applicable to social justice and economic development issues, and increasingly focused on abstract global problems and hypotheticals, such as the possible use of nuclear weapons.  In the process, discussions of the injustices of the global political economy and how nuclear weapons fit into it were silenced.  Anti-nuclear activism became increasingly specialized, boring, and disconnected from issues that affect people's everyday lives.  Arms control eclipsed abolition as the rallying cry.  Those NGOs that obeyed the consolidation period survived with funding and access to media, so long as they kissed the ring.

Ploughshares was at the center of it all.  Today the Fund's priorities are shaped by its board of directors made up of Democratic Party donors, other foundation executives, and liberal academics.  The Fund's advisers include men like George Shultz, the former Bechtel president who served as Reagan's Secretary of State, and former Defense Secretaries William Cohen and William Perry.  The last is actually a board member of the for-profit corporations that manage the nation's two nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos and Livermore.  You figure it out.

Ploughshares' adviser and propagandist Jeff Skoll is president of Participant Media, one of the production companies behind Countdown to Zero. The film's co-producer, the World Security Institute (a major recipient of Ploughshares Fund dollars), tapped its Global Zero project membership to narrate the film through dozens of interviews with the likes of elder statesmen and NGO executives like Cirincione who are very friendly to the Obama administration's nuclear buildup.

Participant Media is a full service propaganda shop for liberal campaigns, producing both documentaries and dramas.  In addition to the benchmark documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Participant is responsible for some very excellent and thoughtful films like Syriana, Food, Inc., and The Cove.  And this is where complexity comes in.  Some of the producers and voices featured in Countdown to Zero have wonderful intentions, and all of them are probably genuinely concerned with, and fear, the possible day that nuclear weapons might be used, whether by a state or by a criminal group.  Herein also is the propagandistic danger of Countdown to Zero.

Albert Camus once wrote that "the evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding."  Backed with a lot of foundation money, the producers of Countdown to Zero have paid organizers across the US to do considerable outreach for the film, whipping up interest on Facebook and other social media and generally co-opting the energies and intentions of many anti-nuclear activists.  Countdown premiers July 23 and will be shown in theaters across the US.  Many screenings are being organized by activists whose intentions are unimpeachable, if naive.

What audiences are going to learn from Countdown to Zero is that nuclear weapons are a threat today because the bad guys might get a hold of them.  They'll learn that al-Qaeda is seeking nuclear weapons, which is their sworn duty; that highly enriched uranium is easy to smuggle; that "we are on the verge of a nuclear 9-11"; that tens of thousands of pounds of uranium are stored under virtually no security around the globe.  In other words they'll learn that dark scary men, Muslims, "terrorists," and anarchists are trying to kill them with nuclear weapons, and that nations like Iran and North Korea will gladly assist them.  Their feelings of revulsion for nuclear weapons will be stimulated and channeled against these dark enemies of civilization.

What they'll learn about US nuclear weapons and policy, if it is discussed in any real and honest depth at all, is that better control and management is needed, a slightly smaller arsenal is desirable.  But mostly they'll learn to just trust our leaders: everything will turn out alright so long as the proper authorities are in power.  Joseph Cirincione will eagerly explain to audiences that George Shulz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn are hard at work to "secure" our nuclear weapons.  It all sounds great, but the "four horsemen," as they have come to be known, are actually among the biggest lobbyists for the surge in nuclear weapons spending and the construction of a new US nuclear weapons complex.

In a promotional video attached to the START ratification effort Cirincione urges viewers to "join this patriotic consensus" toward zero.  In a recent op-ed, he has urged Senate ratification of New START, writing, "The statesmanship demonstrated by the Consensus members today could help break the partisan blockade in the Senate and restore America's leadership on this urgent security challenge."  The capital C Consensus he's referring to is a newly formed NGO, created to translate the groundswell of public response they expect from propaganda efforts like Countdown to Zero, into sharp policy programs for government, including aggressive military action against would-be nuclear states, much of it in the name of nonproliferation.  The Consensus for American Security is one manifestation of the platform that many foreign policy elites hope will solve the contradiction in current US nuclear policy.  The mission statement of the Consensus includes, "strengthening and modernizing America's nuclear security," because it "is a vital element of protecting the United States and its allies."

Ploughshares put up the money for The Consensus for American Security . . . an organization dedicated to strengthening and modernizing America's nuclear security.  Modernizing is not an arbitrary word.  In the current policy debate over the future of the US nuclear weapons complex and stockpile, modernization means a very specific thing.  It means approving the Obama administration's program to build a pit factory, a uranium processing facility, a components plant, and other billion-dollar capital projects for the weapons complex.  It also means modernizing warheads and bombs by rebuilding them and designing new features.  And it means acquiring new, very expensive platforms like subs, bombers, and missiles.

Members of the Ploughshares Consensus include a predictable list of centrist retired military brass and statesmen, most of whom occupy revolving door positions on other foundation and NGO boards like Ploughshares, and more than a few of whom have links to the military industrial complex: George Shulz, Samuel Berger, Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, and physicist Sidney Drell, all of them strong supporters of US nuclear weapons programs and American empire.

The Consensus's second mission appears to involve stoking Islamophobia.  A special project of the Consensus, the American Security Project, is a well-funded think tank churning out reports about "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," and "Are We Winning?  Measuring Progress in the Struggle Against al Qaeda and Associate Movements."  ASP's homepage features a photograph of "terrorists" in black masks hauling an American nuclear warhead (a W-76 or W-88 it appears) on a bamboo rickshaw over a wooden bridge toward a waiting van in some distant jungle.

Countdown to Zero is one component of a larger and coherent foundation campaign to stoke up public fears about nuclear weapons for the purpose of extending a near-monopoly on nuclear weapons, and legitimating a more aggressive foreign policy aimed at regime change in Iran and elsewhere.  The consensus behind those who funded and produced the film has little to do with disarmament, and a lot to do with stabilizing the American empire.

Darwin BondGraham is a board member of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament, energy, and economic development organization based in Albuquerque, N.M. His blog is Sung a Lot of Songs.
 

Inception - Speakers

The next Cardiff sciSCREEN, on Friday August 27th at 5.45pm in Cinema One at Chapter Arts Centre, will be a screening of Inception sponsored by the Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute. The speakers will be:

• Professor Mark Blagrove
  School of Human Sciences, Swansea University
• Professor Ken Peattie
  ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS), Cardiff University
• Professor Alessandra Tanesini
  School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
• Dr Robin Smith
  Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD), Cardiff University

Their discussions will use this film to explore the psychology of lucid dreaming, business ethics and intellectual property, representations of urban environments, and the ownership of mental states.

Advance tickets (£6) can be purchased from Chapter, via the website, or over the phone (02920 304400).

the greek laboratory

The Greek Laboratory: 

Shock Doctrine and Popular Resistance

by Stathis Kouvelakis



“There is a shadow of something colossal and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you will; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its nature may be I refuse to imagine. But what I wanted to say was this: You are in a perilous position.”
Jack London, The Iron Heel

‘Shock and Awe on Greece’
One of the ways it that seems to me more relevant for the understanding of what is happening in Greece is to use the notion recently developed by Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine. Seen from this perspective, the meaning of the Greek situation is simply that it’s the first time this so-called ‘shock’ doctrine, a constitutive element for any neoliberal purge, is put into practice in a Western European country, after having been tested, of course, many times in the past in other parts of the world and in the eastern part of the European continent, with results that are now very familiar to us. The idea of the shock doctrine is, to put it as briefly as possible, the following: it’s impossible for this neoliberal purge, or, rather, for this kind of qualitative leap in rhythm and the depth of the neoliberal purge, to be implemented, and furthermore, to be, if not accepted, at least tolerated by societies, without creating and staging an ‘exceptional’ situation, a situation of emergency, in the wake of which, somehow, normal life is disrupted and what seemed until quite recently unimaginable just happens.

‘Shock and awe’ is exactly what the shock doctrine is about: shock and awe directed within societies, targeting the social body itself, and of course within the social body, the popular classes and the subaltern groups of each social formation, at its very core. This is how the ‘normal’ time and the ‘normal’ course of events are interrupted. I’ve been to Greece many times these last months and each time I was amazed by the very concrete experience I could feel a constant acceleration of the pace of events. The acceleration was certainly dramatized by the media and the political system, but it was essentially coming from the unfolding of the objective contradictions of the situation. This event has therefore to be understood as the unleashing of violent elementary systemic forces, comparable, to quote some examples underlined by Klein in her book, wars, military occupations that follow, military coup, or the management of certain natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, for example. A major economic crisis, such as the one that is happening, is precisely an event of this type. Major here means that it is not one case of the usual cyclical recession, but rather something close to a collapse affecting the foundations of the economy of the state, of the social and political system in its entirety. It is an organic crisis, to use the term of Antonio Gramsci.

From this follows that the social and political forces in Greece have to face a new and unprecedented situation. A situation for which no one is prepared, neither on the top layers of society, nor on the bottom, on the side of the popular forces and of all those who will suffer the consequences of this economic and social hurricane. Everyone is destabilized, and this is why the outcome of the Greek situation is absolutely crucial. In a way, what I’ve said about the shock therapy is of a much more general validity. But what is specific to Greece is that, as has been suggested in very powerful terms by the previous speakers, this shock therapy and this neoliberal purge is even more necessary because we have to deal here with the weakness of the political structures and of the Greek state more specifically.

Why is the Greek State so inept?
Costas Lapavitsas very aptly spoke of the failure of the Greek ruling class. This failure can be understood in two ways. The first is the short term way. There has been an immediate failure to deal properly with the contradictions of the Greek capitalist system. The whole recent cycle of economic growth relied on a very fragile and even unsustainable basis. The analysis of these contradictions has already been outlined by Lapavitsas and his collaborators of the Research on Money and Finance group, so I will say more on this. But there also is a more long-term understanding of this failure, that I want to emphasize now.

I come from, and I situate myself, within the Marxist tradition. One of the key ways within this tradition of dealing with the state is to talk about its “relative autonomy.” Nicos Poulantzas famously elaborated a lot on this notion. The relative autonomy means that the state has the capacity to be at a distance from the different factions of the ruling class and of the balance of class forces in society. The state intervenes to constitute the overall outcome of those class forces and it is constituted itself as the condensation of that balance between class forces and class relations, as Poulantzas famously said.

The characteristic of the Greek state is precisely that this relative autonomy, for reasons that go very deep in Greek history, has been much weaker, much more limited than in other cases. The Greek state, indeed, has been in constant war with the popular classes and with its own people for many decades. What is at the very root of the weakness of the Greek state, paradoxical as it may sound to some people, is the very failure of the popular classes in Greece to reach a permanent form of representation and regulation of their interests within the state itself. All the phenomena we’ve been talking about so far in this discussion, such as the diffusion of corruption “from below”, clientelism etc, are just ways to compensate, from above and below if you prefer, this sort of weakness. This affects an essential part of the popular classes, who are deprived of a more institutionalized, stabilized form of social compromise that has been reached by the popular classes in other parts of the European continent in the context of the so-called welfare state. These classes have therefore to bypass this lack in order to reach some particularistic or fragmentary form of fulfilling certain immediate interests via practices such as those mentioned before. But this is, of course, much more the case of the ruling classes and the dominant groups. What we call corruption in Greece just means how obscene and incestuous are the relations between fractional capitalist interests and the Greek capitalist state as such.

Perspectives of the popular resistance
How are we to understand now the new possibilities opened up by the structural weakness of the Greek state as they develop in the current crisis? I would point to two of them. The first has to do with the relative position of the Greek national formation within the international division of labor. I think that one of the main interests of this very important piece of research produced by Costas Lapavitsas and the group of economists working with him, is the way it updates and renews the analysis about the polarizing effects of the core/periphery division in Europe. I think we have to distinguish two levels of periphery within Europe. The first includes Greece, the Mediterranean South, the so-called ‘PIGS’, and the second is even more peripheral, it is the ‘periphery of the periphery’, and corresponds of course to Eastern Europe, the new ‘Mezzogiorno’-type, cheap labour reserve of the continent as whole. The weakness of the Greek state, in the context of the shock therapy, just means the loss of the remnants of what can be a form of “national sovereignty”. I’m not mentioning this because I want to defend any form of national sovereignty means or out of a principled hostility to any superseding of national sovereignty as such but because, in this case, it amounts, on the side of the popular classes, to the loss of elementary forms of democratic control of the state and the disorganization of the representation, of the relation of representation, between the state and the fractions of the dominant class. This downgrading of the position of the Greek state within the international system will have far-reaching consequences. It is within this context that the popular forces have to situate their own struggle, elaborate their own strategy, and build their own system of alliances on a European and on an international level.

The second consequence of that weakness of the Greek state, to put it very simply and a bit more optimistically, is that it opens up the possibility of direct intervention of the popular forces. Indeed, as we all know, Greek history and even recent events in Greece have been characterized by exactly this direct intervention of the popular forces, of the popular struggles in the political scene. What has happened today, gives us a taste of what will follow in the forthcoming weeks and months. Let me mention here some examples taken from the last decade. In 2001, an uprising of the Greek Trade Union movement succeeded in preventing the brutal and savage reform of the pension system initiated by the so-called ‘modernizing PASOK’ government of Costas Simitis. In 2006 and 2007, Greece was the only country in Europe where the student movement succeeded in blocking many of the effects of the Bologna process, and preventing the partial privatization of higher education. In 2008, as the result of the murder of the Alexandros Grigoropoulos by the police, the very legitimacy of the state was put into question in the most significant street riots and mass confrontations with the police that have happened in Europe since the 1970s.

What we have seen today happening in the streets of Athens and of other Greek cities is a combination of all those events. The two-day-long national strike organized by the unions, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating, public sector workers entering into violent clashes with the police and other insurrectionary practices. This form of social practices developing from below tend to break the existing framework of political representation, of political confrontation and of public debate. Beyong any doubt, it will be one of the major characteristics of the period to come. It will also be one of the major challenges the Greek left and the popular forces in Greece will have to face in the forthcoming future. From this test and from this challenge, they can be destroyed. This is not rhetoric but a very real eventuality: if the Left and the organized forces of Greek society are not able to meet the challenge, if they appear powerless and fragmented, they will be swept away the dislocation of social relations and the rise of despair and, probably, of the most reactionary and regressive tendencies withing society.  But if they find ways to intervene offer a genuine perspective to the people’s anger, then this perilous situation can also open up a new and unprecedented perspective for the future of the country, of the popular movement, and moreover, of the progressive forces in Europe and elsewhere.

Stathis Kouvelakis is Reader in Political Theory, King’s College London. He sends this text version of his talk for the panel held at Birkbeck on May 5, the day of a massive demonstration and general strike in Greece. On that day, three people were killed when a Marfin Bank branch on the route of the main demo march was firebombed.

GR

Inception Trailer

To whet your appetite for our next sciSCREEN event - at Chapter Arts Centre on Friday, August 27th at 6pm - here is a trailer for Inception.