By Kostas Lampos PhD
As the saying goes, “Before it pours, it rains”. And it is true that the cause of all evil that happens in the socio-political level is the morbidity of someone, or some brains that fantasize that they are messiahs destined to ‘save society’ from other bad messiahs who also use a thousand lies to deceive and exploit. So every new party of young rescuers build, with the help of foreign experts on opinion control and the ‘national philosophers’ of the local systemic intelligentsia, their own ideology, which is always presented as a new type of magic potion that includes healthy doses of ‘leftism’, ‘anticapitalist’ alchemies with which they promise everything to their political clientele, the modern political-partisan fairytales aficionados.
They promise the Greece of the 21st century[1]. They even go so far as to promise direct democracy (with plenty of capital), but in installments and always careful not to mention anything regarding the cause of the misfortune of the working class and thus of humanity’s tragedy, which is none other than the consisting social inequality that occurs from the methods and policies of the production and distribution of goods, which in turn stems from the forcibly occupied and illegally patented private property over the means of production.
It is private property on the means of production that determines the production and distribution of goods, which creates and recreates the power of the few over the many, which produces economic inequality, poverty, hunger and destructive wars for the sole purpose of increasing the profitability of capital and the private property of the capitalists.
Therefore when politicians and political parties do not speak about this reality and instead promise equality, justice and a better than their opponents political mediation between the inhuman and destructive capitalism and the working society, they commit a conscious political deception of society.
But this is exactly what politicians are paid for. This is their job. To deceive the workers on behalf of their employers, the oligarchs in the capitalist system. And this ‘profession’ will only be abolished in conditions of real direct democracy, where political ‘power’ will be held alternately for a limited time only (and with impending immediate recall) by all citizens without exception.
To operate this system of delusion, the individual competing capitalist groups maintain professional politicians’ production farms, acting on behalf of the capitalists and displacing the causes of the ‘misfortunes’ of society, from the capital (which hides behind its’ civilian staff and more specifically the bourgeois parliamentary troupe) to the victims, the voters, who are no more than mere spectators in the parliamentary system theatre show.
A theatrical mob where expendable hypocrites professional politicians star alternatively in the roles of the far right, right, center right, centrist, center-left and leftist government, the opposition and willing wildcards wearing the masks of the fascist, the racist, the neoliberal, the centrist and the leftist, working as surrogate institutions and as tin men where, when and if they manage to align behind ‘their political programs’ more than 3% of the electorate, to form a single-party or multiparty governments with the sole purpose of laundering capitalism while hypnotizing society with the illusion of democracy and political participation.
A society that in the last decade, seems to be finally fed up with the hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of bourgeois parliamentarism. People all over the world are fed up with the crimes of capitalism and with the compromised and deadlocked policies of the dogmatic traditional leftists and the petty bourgeois Left who espouse an Orwellian Soviet type of State control. All these people who poured out in the squares of the largest cities of the world and spontaneously declared their demand for direct democracy show that society is finally fed up[2].
It was a first modern attempt, a rehearsal of societies to move from the position of the object of exploitation by capitalism to the position of the subject of history and the end of capitalism. And even as a rehearsal, it was a nightmare for capitalists.
To make this nightmare disappear the capital employed the usual ‘leftist wizards’, ‘new social democrats’, “radicals” aching for power, ‘self-proclaimed and on duty connoisseurs of game theory’ and several mass media opinion makers that all worked together to persuade society to abandon the squares and the calling for direct democracy, and return to their couches and in the scheme of representative democracy in the prospect of the new messiahs-saviors that would avenge society against the old bad political messiahs.
So a new political deception scene was set up, a circus featuring magicians who would tear the Memoranda of allegiance with one “swift strike”, and ‘would make the capitalist market dance on our tune”.
Of course the new scene would include special courts leading to scaffoldings for their corrupt political opponents as well as “restore the minimum wage and pension” in the levels of the “golden” era.
Therefore the always quick-to-trust and always betrayed people (the so called ‘sovereign people’ according to the bourgeoisie) decided, stunned as it were, to ‘delegate political power’ to the new ‘left’ illusionist and his political gang which consists of naive or cunning politicians and adventurers, wrapped in the straitjacket of the right-wing defense minister.
Very soon, this newly founded government began to sign new memoranda, worse than the previous ones, selling off the national wealth for the next 99 years on the grounds that these are less than the four hundred years of slavery to the Ottoman empire and legislate immediate cuts in salaries and pensions and the uprooting of the remaining workers’ rights and restricting pluralism and any civil liberties.
Worst of all, however, is that the ‘first left-wing government of Greece’, hooked on political power, chose to side along the economic elite and leave the society that put them in power (the opposite choice would have required the abandonment of the government, the outspoken critique against capitalism and the support of the forces of Labour, Science and Culture of Greece, and furthermore of Europe and the whole world for their political independence and the formation of a broad anti-capitalist front with a clear view to social self-management on the basis of common ownership and classless democracy).
Instead they did something even worse. They chose to mingle in the inter-imperialist competition between Germany and the United States of America for the exclusive control of the European Union and the global hegemony, while abandoning their promise of concentrating their efforts to a change in the EU, from an organization controlled by the elite, into a United Europe of Peoples and the direct-democratic society.
This shift to the right wing and neoliberalism forced the ‘left government’ to side with neogermanism[3] or Americanism[4] in turns, until they were forced to resign from the illusions regarding their position and potential power to the political chessboard and to finally become an example to be avoided, which helps Americanism and global capitalism in their goal of turning the peoples of Europe to extreme right-wing parties and autocratic governments, and potentially to a fascist and racist nationalism that would turn us to the 19th and 20th century fascism regimes, if a stop is not put promptly to this downward spiral.
All this resulted in SYRIZA losing its’ political clientele and the electorate, at least as shown by opinion polls, to turn again to the reconstituted conservative and reactionary directions since, as dictated by the supposed ‘common sense’ according to public opinion makers, all the politicians are ‘the same’.
Faced with these developments Tsipras remembered his leftist populism in an effort to cheat the Greek People anew, offering ‘constitutional reforms,’ ‘Polls’ and ‘Peoples’ initiatives’, falsely copying the illusory Swiss model cleptocracy, which has been the destination of the stolen public capital funds from all corners of the planet as well as all the capital obtained from illegal activities in order to be rinsed and camouflaged under the supposed ‘direct democracy’ in the service of global capitalism[5].
Mr. Tsipras pretends to ignore that the main feature of direct democracy are not the referendums which are particularly popular in dictatorial regimes and in the bourgeois representative democracy, but the communal ownership and social self-created conditions of fairness, equality before the law and social equality.
He pretends to ignore that in conditions of extreme economic and social inequalities and torn societies where the economic oligarchs with their political dynasties and their gangs have all the power, the supposed referenda are there only to make society an accomplice to their criminal policies, since they know that voters can be manipulated. But even when that manipulation fails, then the secondary political power succumbs to the primary economic power, as it happened last year with the ‘operetta referendum’ of Mr. Tsipras, who turned the NO into a YES in less than a day and with the terms set to him by the ‘big bosses’.
Mr. Tsipras has come a long way in a very short time in the wild capitalist West and has distanced himself so much from the, I guess pure, leftism of his youth that is impossible to return to it. But even if he tried, no one would believe him anymore. Therefore all he has left is a ‘heroic exodus’ with all the risks involved in such a choice.
Otherwise in order to keep the power he is forced to harden even more the already tough policies dictated by the centers of capitalist globalization and develop into a kind of Balkan type of Benito Mussolini that every day that passes will arouse more and larger sections of Greek society against him and will be recorded in history as a conscious traitor not only of the global left, in the sense of direct democracy, and those who believed in him, but the whole country and Hellenism.
From this experience the victims of capitalism, of its’ bourgeois democracy and its’ urban and petty ‘left’, must draw their own conclusions. The forces of Labour, Science and Culture must realize that the work of the social liberation cannot be entrusted to the contractors of their exploiters, cause then they are doomed to have the fate of the mythical Sisyphus.
They, the forces of Labour, Science and Culture, must understand that the scientifically valid and socially useful knowledge, the liberating technology and the rising humanist culture of the 21st century (all legacies of all the past generations), can make possible the creation of a better world, if they are freed from the clutches of the economic elite as has always been the vision and the effort of the progressive and liberating forces in human societies. This will be a world based on common ownership, proportional economic and social equality, and classless democracy[6] without which there can be neither democracy nor freedom, nor valid future for humanity.
No more right and ‘left’ alchemies. No more fake democracy, unemployment, poverty, hunger and inhuman and destructive wars just to grow the profits of the 1% of the world population in the expense of the 99% of humanity.
No more capitalist barbarism[7]. Now is the time for a New Enlightenment, a New Ecumenical Humanist movement that will sweep away all the negative elements of the old regime of inequality, through local, regional, national and universal direct democratic radical anticapitalistic assemblies of local and national societies and humanity as a whole, to enable through simultaneous procedures of self-institution, the birth of a classless democratic society, the only real form of direct democracy.
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[1] Lampos Kostas, Greece in the Threshold of 21st Century, (Fight for the territorial integrity, national survival and Direct Democracy), in:http://lefthumanism.blogspot.gr/2013/12/greece-in-threshold-of-21st-century.html
[2] See also: Lampos Kostas, Direct Democracy and Classless Society – The long road of humanity towards social equality and Humanism, NISIDES publishing house, Salonica 2012 (Greek publication).
[3] See Lampos Kostas Neogermanism. The new nightmare of Europe? POLITES, 35 / February 2012 and 36 / March 2012 and http://www.neakriti.gr/?page=newsdetail&DocID=1225116. And: Neogermanismus: Der neue Alptraum Europas? in: http://lefthumanism.blogspot.com/2012/
[4] Lampos Kostas, Americanism and globalization. Economy of Fear and Decline. PAPAZISIS, Athens 2009.
[5] See at: Lampos Costas Myth and reality the Swiss ‘Direct Democracy’ POLITES, 42 / October-November 2013 and on: http://tvxs.gr/news/user-post/gia-mytho-kai-tin-pragmatikotita-tis-elbetikis-amesis-dimokratias
[6] Lampos Kostas, ‘Classless Democracy and Humanism in the 21st century’, -Direct Democracy in the 21st century, Nisides, Salonica 2013
[7] See also, Lambos Kostas, ‘God and Capital –an essay on the relationship between religion and power’, Koukkida publishing house, 2015, and 2016 (2nd edition).
