With the Syriza-led government locked in no-blink negotiations with Greece's creditors, especially Germany, it might be time to revive an old slogan of the left: Rosa Luxemburg's "socialism or barbarism." Restated for the 21st century, "socialism" simply means that a people's judgments about its own economic life -- the kind of work people do, the kind of security they enjoy, the kind of dignity they feel -- come before the supposedly iron rules of the international economy. It would also be fair to call it "economic democracy."
The condescending view of the Greeks as somehow not understanding economic reason and the direction of history writes off this kind of economic democracy as infeasible, archaic, and probably senseless. Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza, the anti-austerity party at the head of Greece's new government, has described its "mission" as "the radical transformation of society across Europe, based on socialism and democracy." All of this convinces many observers that Syriza is a symptom of fantasy. Sometimes the diagnosis is directed at the Greeks themselves ("Don't they know socialism is over?"), sometimes to their admirers in Western Europe and the U.S. ("When will they stop idealizing other people's revolutions?"). More sympathetic commentators praise Syriza for being more realistic than it sounds and seeking a "responsible" way to finesse Brussels, Berlin, and Greek's creditors and ease the country out of a punishing austerity without changing the ground rules.
Syriza's government has a chance to reverse the lens. Economic democracy (or, as Syriza calls it, socialism) is politics that puts human needs first and accepts that market-based destabilization, impoverishment, and humiliation are not natural disasters or comeuppance for bad behavior but forms of political violence.
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Syriza has an extraordinary uphill fight, both institutionally and ideologically. Their humane program sounds utopian to most ears. The "socialist" parties of Europe have committed themselves to the European project, which they, like Polanyi's old idealists, believe is the key to peace and prosperity -- so much that they are willing to double down on it at the cost of poverty and antagonism. And the interdependence of European fiscal rules, banking regimes, and so forth creates an obstacle course with a series of tripwires that could sink Greece's domestic banks or otherwise make things even worse.
Syriza is often described as an anti-austerity party, which sounds merely reactive. It is true that the party's support is a response to the disruption, insecurity, and humiliation that budget cuts and unemployment have visited on ordinary Greeks. When Tsipras talks about "an economy that will focus on people's needs" and "a welfare state that ensures education, health, and dignity for all," these rather abstract ideals have very concrete opposites: unemployed young people desperate to flee the country, pensioners pawning their coats and digging through trash for food, taxpayers whose money leaves the country in the form of debt service. Doesn't Syriza's "socialism" just mean "Not this!" -- as it did for many socialists in the 19th century, reacting against the fresh hell of the factory economy?
Maybe. But understanding the Greek situation this way prejudges practically every important question. It treats the current fiscal arrangements of Europe as hard facts, economic logic as hard rationality, and the impulse toward a different social world as a feeling, an emotional response to hard times. In that world, when Syriza declares itself a socialist party, it is announcing that it is unqualified to handle real power and responsibility. On this take, Syriza's voters are, almost by definition, emotional and reactive.
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To see the world differently, it helps to go back to a tradition of thinking that developed before the total dominance of today's conventional economics. That tradition is long and rich, though any effort to use it today requires updating.
Partly by chance, in the week of Syriza's victory, I was rereading and teaching economic historian Karl Polanyi's 1944 classic, The Great Transformation, a touchstone work of non-Marxist democratic socialism. Polanyi asked how Europe had gone mad and bloodthirsty in the 1930s. His answer: For decades, the spread and rigorous enforcement of laissez-faire capitalism had been destabilizing communities, endangering and humiliating works, and despoiling the natural world. Under the artificial and draconian partial economic integration that the gold standard put in place, countries saw these crises amplified while their governments' power to address their crises was diminished. Humiliated, bewildered, and alienated, national populations struck back, either scrambling to recover a lost (and idealized) past or straining toward an imagined (often unattainable) future. Fascism was the worst product of this episode, which Polanyi described as spontaneous self-defense by "society."
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Jedediah Purdy: Socialism or barbarism? Syriza, economics and democracy