No. Oxi. Simply that.

No, No, No. Three No’s. Three dates: July 5, 2015; December 6, 2008; September 15, 2008. Three ruptures.

Start from there, from the ruptures. The walls of the world are closing in upon us and we must fight to keep the windows open, the windows that open out to another world, other worlds, different realities: real worlds that exist in our refusals, our struggles, our dreams, our experiments, our ability and determination to do things differently.

Worlds in which people are not locked up in a stadium and repressed by police just because they flee from war, in which ports and airports and water are not handed to the rich so that they can become richer, worlds in which the future of humanity is not sacrificed to capital’s insatiable hunger for profit. Sensible worlds, obvious worlds, worlds not based on money, worlds that today are repressed and ridiculed, worlds that exist in the mode of being denied.

The worlds we want to create, and are creating, are worlds-against, worlds that go against the horrors of existing society, their grammar is negative. That is why we must start from No, from No, No, No.

Not an empty optimism, for each opening has been followed by a closing, each No has been followed by a Yes; but the No is never completely extinguished, the opening pushes back. Nothing worse than acceptance, nothing worse than the inane “well, they did their best, didn’t they? What more could they have done?”, nothing worse than the pathetic “courage of hopelessness” advocated by Žižek in a recent reflection on the Greek situation.

I. July 5, 2015

Watch a presentation of this essay at the Direct Democracy Festival in Thessaloniki.

The first No is that which still resounds in the air: the great Oxi of July 5, a night when all the world danced in the streets. An absurd, ridiculous No, a No of hope, a No of dignity.

Writing in 1795, William Blake imagined the reactions of the Kings of Asia to the revolutionary upsurge in Europe. He imagined the Kings calling on their counselors:

To cut off the bread from the city,

That the remnant may learn to obey,

That the pride of the heart may fail,

That the lust of the eyes may be quenched,

That the delicate ear in its infancy

May be dull’d, and the nostrils clos’d up,

To teach mortal worms the path

That leads from the gates of the Grave.

The prolonged period of negotiation between the Eurozone governments and SYRIZA was that: not just a negotiation but a humiliation, an attempt to kill the pride of the heart, to teach mortal worms the path that leads from the gates of the grave. The No of July 5 was a No to the humiliation: a flaring of the nostrils, a sharpening of the ears, an awakening of the lust of the eyes, a cry that shouts to the four winds “with no disrespect for the worms, we are more than that and there is more to life than the march to the grave.”

The great No of the referendum did not lead anywhere, perhaps it could not lead anywhere. The governments (including the SYRIZA government, joining now with the other eighteen) replied just over a week later: “Sorry (very sorry, in the case of SYRIZA), but we do not understand what you say, you are speaking the wrong language, using the wrong grammar. What is this word ‘No’? You are speaking Nonsense. You live in a world of make-believe. The Reality of the world is that the choice in the referendum was between YES and YES. The Reality is that there is no option other than conforming.”

The No of the Greek referendum remains the starting point from which we try to understand the world.

A No drowned, a hope smothered. And yet it remains our starting point, the point from which we try to understand the world. In that No we recognize ourselves, in that No we look for our humanity. That No is our language, our grammar. The great Oxi still resonates in the air, just as a kiss hangs in the air after the lovers have gone home. It resonates profoundly, filled with the echo of that earlier No, that earlier nonsense, the great rupture of almost seven years ago: December 2008.

II. December 6, 2008

The shooting of the 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos on December 6, 2008 provoked one of the loudest screams of No that has been heard in this century: No to police violence, No to discrimination against the young, against migrants, against women, No to a system built on frustration, on frustrating the lives and the potential especially of the young but of all, No to a system that dulls our senses, closes our nostrils, through unemployment and, sometimes worse, employment, No to a system built on the meaninglessness of money. No too to the stale traditions of working class struggle.

There were no demands made of the state, just a roar of fury against the state and all it stood for. Rage was interlaced with hope, but the relation was fragile and there was no institutional mediation. It was certainly not a hope that change would come through the next election, but there was an underlying hope that the world could be different, that it might be possible to bring down the world of capital and repression and injustice.

There was a hope, but a desperate hope, a hope tinged with despair. One of the many manifestos circulating in the streets of Athens in those days gives an feeling for the movement:

The revolt was, in fact, a revolt against property and alienation. Whoever did not hide behind the curtains of their privacy, whoever found themselves in the streets, knows this very well: shops were looted not to re-sell the computers, the clothes, the furniture but for the enjoyment of the catastrophe of that which alienates us—the phantasmagoria of the commodity. […] The pyres that heated the bodies of the insurgents in the long nights of December were full of products of our labor liberated, disarmed symbols of a once powerful imaginary. We simply took that which belongs to us and threw it on the fires together with all that it signifies. The great potlatch of the previous days was a rebellion of desire against the imposed canon of scarcity. This revolt was, in fact, a rebellion against property and alienation. A revolt of the gift against the sovereignty of money. An insurrection of anarchy, of use value against the democracy of exchange value. A spontaneous rising of collective freedom against the rationality of individual discipline. (Flesh Machine/Ego Te Provoco)

This statement is not necessarily “representative” but it does give a feeling for the movement of December 2008 and the years that follow. It is a language that does not fit, a nonsensical language from a world of make-believe, the language of a world that does not yet exist, that exists not-yet in our revolts.

Years of marches and protests and riots followed, and violent repression too. The anger pushed beyond the protests to calls for a radically different society, rage led on to the search for other ways of living, through the creation of social centers, community gardens, factory occupations, local assemblies—both as ways of tackling immediate practical problems of survival and creating the basis for a different world.

Rage led on to the search for other ways of living, through the creation of social centers, community gardens, factory occupations and local assemblies.

But the protests and the experiments brought their difficulties and frustrations. The hundreds of protests, both by the traditional and the anti-authoritarian left, made no impact at all on government policy, already subject to the dictates of the Troika of creditors (EU, IMF, ECB). A particularly significant date was February 12, 2012, when hundreds of thousands demonstrated in the streets, more than fifty buildings were burnt down in the center of Athens, police cars were set on fire, tear gas was used far beyond the legal limits, the Parliament was surrounded by a police guard and the deputies voted to approve another package of austerity.

It was on this ground that the spectacular rise of SYRIZA took place. SYRIZA succeeded in giving these expressions of rage-and-hope a focus. “Vote for us and we shall really make things different, we shall break with the austerity policies imposed by so many governments, we shall stop the repression and the corruption.” Six years of rioting and creative alternatives had made little difference: the politicians had voted to accept the austerity measures. Now it was time to make that hope effective, to give it a realistic way forward.

The rise of SYRIZA was the result of the fact that the years of anti-state, anti-party militancy had not led to any clear results. Of course many of those who voted for SYRIZA had never taken part in the movement of 2008 or the riots and experiments of the years that followed; but many of those who had taken an active part certainly voted for SYRIZA in January of 2015.

SYRIZA’s rise was a result of the fact that the years of anti-state militancy had not led to any clear results.

SYRIZA inherited the legacy of those years of militancy and focused it, and in the process transformed it. It changed the grammar of the protests and brought it back to, or at least closer to, the grammar of orthodox politics. The protests of 2008 and after moved on the edge of impossibility and invention. They were a de-totalizing movement, an angry breaking of the system. The hope was always on the edge of hope-less despair, but it was a hope that refused to come to terms with the existing system, a hope that could only be an absolute call for a different world and a rejecting of this one.

The enemy was the world-as-it-is (what we might call capital, but many did not use that term) and there was no demand that could meaningfully be made of that world. If we think of it as a game, it was a game in which the rules either did not exist or were being invented in the process of playing. There was no possible dovetailing with the party-political system.

The rise of SYRIZA gave a definition to hope, but in the process it narrowed it down. The enemy now was not capital, but neoliberalism, understood as the dominance of a particularly aggressive form of capitalist politics. The demand was for the ending of austerity. The end of capitalism was set aside as being entirely unrealistic. As Varoufakis explained in a talk in Zagreb in 2013, the end of capitalism might be desirable in the long term, but the aim now must be to fight for changes within the system. This was to be a politics of the possible, a realistic politics. Hope was a central rallying-call, but hope was to be the realistic call for a change of politics and the ending of austerity.

SYRIZA gave a definition to hope, but in the process narrowed it down. The enemy now was not capital, but neoliberalism.

An important and inevitable consequence of focusing dissatisfaction-and-hope on the state was that it acquired a clear territorial element, which was not there before, or certainly not to the same extent. The riots and marches of the years after 2008 were directed against the Greek government and against the system: although the austerity policies were clearly linked to the pressures from the European Union, the struggle did not present itself in national terms. In the words of the pamphlet quoted, this was a rebellion of use value against value, not of Greece against Germany: the language of the riots is an international language.

Once SYRIZA came to power the conflict came to be redefined as one between Greece and the other countries of the Eurozone. The conflicts move from the cities to the state, from the streets to the closed rooms of inter-state negotiation. Greece itself is constituted in the transition, as a subject, as a concept. And with it, “the Greek people,” and indeed democracy itself, the rule of the Greek people.

This is not necessarily the result of a conscious decision by any of the actors: it is already inscribed in the existence of the state as a territorially defined unit. If we note that the rise of SYRIZA coincided in time with the rise of Golden Dawn, this is not to say that SYRIZA was to blame but simply that both are connected to the redefinition of the conflict in territorial terms, a shift that is truly frightening in its implications.

It is important to underline the importance of this transition, precisely because the implications are so enormous and because it is simply taken for granted and without question by the overwhelming majority of discussion, on the left as much as on the right. The movement from seeing the state as the enemy to seeing it as a possible site for change inevitably brings about a redefinition of conflict in terms of territorial or national conflict which can have fateful consequences. It is not just that the state does not work, that it bureaucratizes and demobilizes, but that it territorializes, transforms social conflict into national conflict.

The overwhelmingly negative grammar of 2008 was replaced by a positive, territorial grammar aimed at concrete change. Obviously both perspectives continued to be intertwined, but it was the realistic-positive definition of hope that was louder. Hence the great shock, the great joy of the referendum of July 5: the No was an echo of the language of December 2008. It did not share the same grammar as the SYRIZA government. It was a return to the nonsensical language of world of make-believe.

The result of the referendum did not point to any particular answer, did not lead anywhere definite. Even if many felt that Grexit, the departure of Greece from the Euro, was desirable, this was for many not really an alternative policy proposal (as it was and is in the eyes of some left-wing politicians) but rather a different way of throwing a rock through the window of a bank: an act of revolt.

The Realism of the SYRIZA government proved to be completely unrealistic.

The Realism of the SYRIZA government proved to be completely unrealistic. It led the anger-hope of the previous years on to the path of realism, but it did not go far enough to meet the real world. SYRIZA still dreamed of a fairer capitalism, and fought for months for a realistic dream that was mere phantasy.

This ended in the tragic-farcical reversal of the referendum and the total capitulation of the hope promised by SYRIZA to the reality represented by Angela Merkel and the other politicians of the European Union. “Grow up!” they said, “get real! There is no hope, just reality. There is no such thing as a fairer capitalism. Keynes is dead, long dead.” SYRIZA pushed to the limits of state action: they pushed their phantasy as far as they possibly could within the state-form, and failed.

After months of playing the game of negotiation and just when it looked, after the referendum, as if the Greek government might pull off a victory of some sort, Merkel and the Europeans announced “checkmate!” And the Greek government saw that it was so and fell to its knees. The endgame was lost. The endgame of what? Of the radical phase of the SYRIZA government certainly. Of the new left parties in Europe (particularly Podemos) probably. Of the euro and even the European Union very possibly. Of humanity, conceivably.

Checkmate. Yes, certainly, but if we remember, remember December 6, then it is very clear that we’re playing a different game. Your Reality has won just now, but ours is a different reality, a reality that exists in the mode of being denied. Our reality is the reality of the world that exists not yet, that exists in our potential, that which exists in-against-and-beyond the commodity-form, our reality is the rebellion of use value against value. (But can we eat it?)

To understand what is the “Reality” that confronts us and now stands triumphant, let us remember another date, another rupture.