PROLETARIAN CONSCIOUSNESS AGAINST ETHNO-POPULIST RESENTMENT
By the Friends of the uprooted pavements
Translation into English: Cognord
And here we have arrived at the “principle of justice”, that pathetic Rosinante,
on which the Don Quixotes of history gallop to improve the world,
only to come back with both their eyes bruised.
Rosa Luxemburg
The horrific death of 57 people in the train collision at Tempe (Τέμπη) two years ago, captured in the most brutal way the reality of the deadly violence that is structurally exercised by capital and its state against workers and those who are forced to use deregulated, dismantled and devalued services for their basic needs.
The devaluation of labour power and life over the last fifteen years has been carried out in the interest of capitalist profitability and in attempts to mitigate the capitalist crisis – always at the expense of our class, with thousands of victims and unmeasurable suffering. We are not only referring to the dead in the wagons of a railway system with a collapsing infrastructure and non-existent safety mechanisms – a collapse not only known but actively pursued by the entire political personnel of capital that has ruled in recent years (ND, SYRIZA, PASOK). We also refer to the tens of thousands of deaths in the hospital wards of the broken and understaffed health system – we do not forget those who died from lack of oxygen because there were no ICUs, doctors and nurses in the regional hospitals during the pandemic outbreak. We also refuse to forget the thousands of workers who died prematurely in workplaces, factories, construction sites, streets and offices due to inhumane and extremely intensive working conditions, and the thousands of migrants murdered at sea and land borders.
The wave of social indignation that has been swelling lately was expressed in the demonstrations of unprecedented participation on the 26th of January and in the increasing calls for participation in the general strike of February 28th. This does not only represent the protest of a broad social section against the crime of state and capital in Tempe but is also an expression of accumulated anger against the total misery which dominates all spheres of wage exploitation, social reproduction and life in Greece in recent years.
However, the last fifteen years of defeat and retreat have not only been years of devaluation of labour power and of the dismantling of public services. The very concept of class struggle and collective organisation has been devalued. The basic element and result of the capitalist social crisis, its management and the failure of our struggles has been the fragmentation and disorganization of our class, its collective forms and expressions. The path to class consciousness has not become smoother. As a consequence, discontent is increasingly expressed through distorting populist forms of opposition to “corrupt elites” who allegedly conspire to bring about the downfall of the “nation and its children,” and against which the “Greek soul” is juxtaposed.
In this context, the struggle against government policy gets dominated by a discourse against cover-ups and corruption, systematically promoted by the conservative ethno-populist faction of the ruling class (visible in parties like Hellenic Solution, Plefsi Eleftherias, etc.) who attempt to take a leading role in the protests. It is possible that some conspiracy and a cover-up in relation to the existence of contraband fuel (leading to the explosion during the train collision) has taken place. But the truth is not a matter of disclosure but of understanding. Premature deaths and the daily trivialisation of our lives will not be stopped by a court of law, a justice system or media revelations. Corruption coexists with the capitalist rule of law, dialectically defined as its opposite: institutionalised legitimacy. The rule of law is affirmed as the official order in the face of the ‘threat’ of corruption. No change of government and no court is going to improve the world. We cannot rely on the justice of rulers but only on the collective power of our class. Focusing on the cover-up and corruption, while sidelining the economic, social, and ideological terms and conditions that make them possible, works to undermine and disorientate the development of a movement that could target the real power of capital, through the organisation of struggles in the workplaces, education, transport and healthcare of the working class, a movement which could impose the satisfaction of our needs for a liberated life until “death shall have no dominion”.
It is clear that state administrators prefer an ethno-populist, conspiracy-minded pole as its opponent and this is why they feed it in every possible way through lack of transparency and communication management. This allows them to play the ideological card of “stability” and “rationality” (i.e. the instrumental rationality of capital against those it exploits), set against the “irrationality” and “political expediency” of their opponents, without any of this threatening to undermine their (parliamentary) domination.
Besides, at the global level too, the emerging post-fascist pole is precisely the political form of the transformation of broad mass indignation about the conditions of social existence into carceral populism, nationalism and racism, none of which challenge in the least the dominant forms of authoritarian liberal capitalism. Instead, this “opposition” complements these forms, acting as a lever to normalise policies once considered extreme and unacceptable, while at the same time creating a false opponent to legitimise them.
This is precisely where the greatest danger lies: instead of uniting our mobilizations in opposition to the deep systemic causes that render proletarian life under capitalism worthless (from Tempe to Pylos and from premature deaths and severe injuries at work to price hikes and low wages), instead of that being the link that leads to the general strike, there is a real danger that the mobilisations over the deadly violence of the state in Tempe will be constituted and united around the demand for supposed ‘cleansing’ and justice – by the courts of the very system that lies at the root of all our problems.
Such a development will have no other effect than to strengthen the same reactionary political forces that are currently emerging around the world. These forces do not promote a (theoretical and practical) critique of capitalist reality but are based on the dissemination of a dense set of beliefs (clichés and platitudes) that do not call for better understanding but refer to something we (supposedly) “already know”. Attempting to unite a critical mass of competing individuals around a common (national) identity and common enemies ends up concealing the reality of domination and exploitation that lies at the basis of these narratives. The politics of identity and denunciation can never have a proletarian, anti-capitalist character. Instead of constituting the proletariat as a revolutionary class, a mass formation is constructed that will, in the next moment, turn more or less violent against the weakest – as it happened in Bolsonaro’s Brazil or Milei’s Argentina.
This development is already obvious in the calls circulating in the so-called “social media” which spread, on the one hand, the extreme right-wing discourse against “political parties” by appealing to an indivisible “national unity” and, on the other hand, in conspiracy theories of provocateurs, pre-emptively targeting those who will choose to clash with the state’s security forces as “undercover cops” and agents of the government.
The constitution of a proletarian movement in the given conjuncture presupposes that we stand critically against the transgressive, ethno-populist subject which appears to be in the process of being formed and its moralistic, denunciatory framework. Instead, in this one as much as in other struggles which emerge where the working class reproduces itself, in the streets of the metropolis, in the workplaces, in the health care and transport sector, we must recognize and strengthen that tendency which sets its sights at the core of capitalist social relations.