Of course, it is always pos­sible, and very often the case, that the dom­in­ant media claims that a “fiscal crisis” has pre­cip­it­ated mass demon­stra­tions, strikes, and new forms of polit­ical mobil­iz­a­tion in Greece. Although it is true that there is fiscal crisis, it should not be under­stood as a peri­odic dif­fi­culty that a coun­try or a region peri­od­ic­ally passes through only then to re-​enjoy the eco­nomic status quo. What is emer­ging in fast and furi­ous form is a con­stel­la­tion of neo-​liberal eco­nomic prac­tices that are estab­lish­ing a new paradigm for think­ing about the rela­tion between eco­nomic and social forms as well as modes of ration­al­ity, mor­al­ity, and sub­ject form­a­tion. And the prob­lem, that which pushes tens of thou­sands of people onto the street, is not simply the rise of tech­no­lo­gical modes of labor and new ways of cal­cu­lat­ing the value of work and life. Rather, neo-​liberalism works through pro­du­cing dis­pens­able populations; it exposes pop­u­la­tions to pre­car­ity; it estab­lishes modes of work that pre­sume that labour will always be tem­por­ary; it decim­ates long-​standing insti­tu­tions of social demo­cracy, with­draws social ser­vices from those who are most rad­ic­ally unpro­tec­ted – the poor, the home­less, the undoc­u­mented – because the value of social ser­vices or eco­nomic rights to basic pro­vi­sions like shel­ter and food has been replaced by an eco­nomic cal­cu­lus that val­ues only the entre­pren­eur­ial capa­cit­ies of indi­vidu­als and mor­al­izes against all those who are unable to fend for them­selves or make cap­it­al­ism work for them.

So when we ask why so many thou­sands take to the street in rela­tion to a “fiscal” crisis, it is because they are see and oppose an entire eco­nomic régime that amasses wealth for the very few at accel­er­ated speeds as it aug­ments the num­ber of those who live in poverty and are exposed to forms of pre­car­ity for which no insti­tu­tional pro­tec­tion still exists. When pop­u­la­tions under­stand them­selves as aban­doned to con­di­tions of induced pre­car­ity, they under­stand that they are no longer rep­res­en­ted by polit­ical regimes that are insep­ar­able from neo-​liberal forms of power and ration­al­ity. At this point, the demo­cratic claims of the state are called into ques­tion, for who is the “we” who is rep­res­en­ted by gov­ern­ments that are them­selves driven by, and driv­ing neo-​liberal forms of eco­nom­ics that rely on dis­pens­able pop­u­la­tions, sub­sti­tut­able labor (through “flex­ib­il­ity” mod­els), aban­doned pop­u­la­tions excluded from the “we” that is rep­res­en­ted by demo­cratic gov­ern­ments and insti­tu­tions. So when the aban­doned assemble and insist that they are still the “we” who demo­cracy must rep­res­ent, that their dis­pens­ab­il­ity calls into ques­tion the claim that any neo-​liberal gov­ern­ment can make to being demo­cratic. If demo­cracy is to have any mean­ing still, then, it must express the will of the people, and what we see on the ground, in the street, and that noise we hear through the squares, is pre­cisely the recon­sti­t­u­tion of the pop­u­lar will, the bod­ily gath­er­ing and insist­ence of a people who will not be dis­pensed with, and through whom we see enacted in micro­cosm social forms of rad­ical demo­cracy, which include rela­tions of equal­ity and mutual dependency.

The prob­lem is not a fiscal crisis whose bail­out will return mat­ters to nor­mal. The prob­lem is that the neo-​liberal forms of polit­ical and eco­nomic power reg­u­larly aban­don pop­u­la­tions to con­di­tions of pre­car­ity, and that this peri­odic and reg­u­lar abandon­ing of people has itself become the nor­mal. As a res­ult, the call on the streets is pre­cisely not to “fix” this fiscal crisis, but to insist that the dis­mant­ling of neo-​liberalism is imper­at­ive for the renewal of rad­ical democracy.

Greek Left Review