Oligarchy, Expropriative Accumulation, and the Left

1. The conjuncture
2. Questions and methodology of approach
3. Expropriatory accumulation and oligarchy
4. The notions of Left and Right
5. The case of Syriza: a liberal extreme Right

Expropriatory accumulation and oligarchy

The policies followed in 2010-19 in Greece, continuous in their objectives
and inspiration even if implemented by different governments, can be
subsumed under the notion of expropriatory accumulation, or
accumulation by dispossession, developed by David Harvey. This extreme
form of capital accumulation happened mainly in favour of German and
French oligarchic financial interests, with the help of the strongest part of
the local bourgeoisie and mainly through mechanisms such as odious debt
which can also be seen as a modern form of tribute, the so-called
privatisations but in fact spoliations, the pseudonymous austerity, and the
violent destruction of forms of social protection previously secured by
workers through their class struggle. A part of this is what Costas
Lapavitsas calls financial expropriation, that is extracting financial profit
directly out of the personal income of workers and others.

Expropriatory accumulation cannot occur in a democratic political

framework, and thus it brings to the fore the question of whether we are
living in democracies. As Marxist analysts, and famously Johannes
Agnoli, noted, "in the face of mass society and mass political demands, the
right to make decisions is reserved for minorities. These rights are, of
course, constitutionally regulated. In turn, ‘liberal democracy’ finds its true
character within circumstances that are determined by the constitution
itself. The true characterization of ‘liberal democracy’ is thus
constitutional oligarchy. All other characterizations are distinguished by
their unquestionably useful, and that is consensus creating and therewith
pacifying, or peace-making, deceitful publicity […] the question is
whether the developing supranational oligarchies (the economic, the
political, and the cultural) will consider it necessary to submit themselves
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to the inherited, bourgeois rules of constitutionality. The acuteness of the
social conflicts which loom on the horizon, seems to raise much doubt that
this will indeed be the case”.

Modern oligarchic theory also includes a non-Marxist wing that can be

usefully studied, especially for the technical senses in which it uses the
term ‘oligarchy’. It posits that in societies with extreme concentrations of
wealth, this wealth empowers individuals in ways that produce distinct
kinds of oligarchic politics not captured within a generic pluralist
framework. In conditions of extreme economic stratification, an oligarchic
realm of power and politics involving concentrated wealth is unusually
resistant to democratic remedies. Extreme material inequality produces
extreme political inequality. We do not mean here simply the rich, or the
capitalists, but a very small group, let’s say the 1% of the 1%, or even
smaller groups. Scholarly interest focused on these extraordinarily
powerful people when it was noticed that they influence policy, especially
tax policy and more particularly tax haven policy, in ways in which
‘simple’ capitalists cannot. Thomas Picketty and Gabriel Zucman, their
political moderation notwithstanding, offer us precious empirical data on
this.

The notions of Left and Right

Political terms such as ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are classic cases of the so-called
‘essentially contested concepts’, whose proper use by definition involves
endless disputes about their proper use. However a temporary answer
might start from the definition given by the late political theorist Norberto
Bobbio, a liberal Leftist who has written a standard introduction to the
matter.

Bobbio viewed the Left, roughly and in its widest possible meaning, as
that part of the political spectrum that prioritizes equality next to liberty,
while the Right puts forward different values and principally inequality.
The Left is a designation wider than socialism, which means the political
camp proposing socialization and common ownership of the means of
production. It is also much wider than Marxism, a communist political and
philosophical current calling for abolition of capital and state.

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If we want to put it into a nutshell, and to keep in our sight both political
and economic power, state and capital, but avoiding technical Marxist
terminology, we can say that the Left is those who work to transfer power
and resources from the few to the many, from the strong to the weak, from
the rich to the poor. Conversely the Right is those who strive for the
accumulation of power and resources in the hands of the few, strong, and
rich, and deprive of them the many, weak, and poor. Matters don’t change
if such procedures are dressed in meritocratic, culturalistic, productivistic,
or other languages justifying discrimination.

This basic distinction -the few rich and powerful versus the many poor and
weak- is relevant both inside a state and in the interstate environment.
Historically political formations have appeared, that favoured a relative
democratisation of power and income inside their own society coupled
with imperialistic policies. The British Fabians and Eduard Bernstein
comes to mind here, but also forces such as post-war social democrats and
American Democrats. A real Left would work for equality not only inside
borders but also on the world stage. In complex power formations such as
the European Union, a real Left would be against the de facto hierarchy
that has developed after Maastricht.

Wealth protected from oligarchic depredation does not always have to

flow downwards. It can simply buttress certain middle strata, without
regard for the needs of the poor, or institutions such as the Church.
Historically this has been the Right-wing route, a constant of conservative
declarations and invocations since the nineteenth century, the utopian
dream of a socially stable and harmonious capitalism cleansed from
predators. Today it is awkwardly termed ‘Right-wing populism’.

This ‘Right-wing populism’, resurgent all over Europe more or less since
the imposition of the euro, is often considered part of the Extreme Right.
Indeed it showcases many of the latter’s trademarks: antidemocratic,
racist, nationalistic, misogynist, nativist, xenophobic, antisemitic, hateful
in general and culturally attavistic. The solid burghers deemed worthy of
preservation would better not belong to any of the many lesser categories
of humans.

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All these obnoxious traits however are not necessarily connected with the
Extreme Right. Historically they characterized the mainstream Right as
well, before its politics became politically correct, at least in public, which
in most countries happened in living memory. Enoch Powell, Jean-Mari
LePen, and the Opus Dei were in their prime, and till quite recently in fact,
not outliers but representative of a good part of conservative opinion and
pillars of the Right-wing establishment. Today’s conservative Extreme
Right smells quite similar to the good old unreconstructed Right tout
court. It looks like a Right that has not moved with the times.

On the contrary, those who moved a lot after 1992 are previous centrists -
liberal, conservative, or even nominally socialist- who crystallized within
the confines of the Washington Consensus what is called now the ‘extreme
centre’. Whatever their preferred names, this should rather be seen as
another extreme Right, a liberal extreme Right, even according to
Bobbio’s exclusive definition.

How do we discern between the Right and the extreme Right, or the Left
and the extreme Left? One would connect such distinctions with the pace,
the comprehensiveness, and the degree of the transformations sought. We
might safely say that those who promote a realist strategy for swift,
systematic, and massive transfer of power and resources from the few rich,
strong and powerful to the many poor and weak are the extreme Left,
while those choosing to promote the opposite are today’s extreme Right. In
fact policies imposed in the last decades all around Europe and certainly in
the European Union can safely be characterised, on these criteria, as
extreme Right policies. And the political forces that consistently promote
them can be called extreme Right forces, whether they prefer to describe
themselves as conservative, liberal, or even socialist and leftist. The
extreme Right today comes in liberal, conservative, and fascist flavours,
the latter when in promotes a mass movement.

By promoting financial expropriation in favour of a financial oligrachy,

plus the social polarization and authoritarian governance that necessarily
accompany it, and also supporting all wars and interventions ever dreamt
by the American neoconservatives, nominal moderates implement today a
systematic, massive, and multifaceted transfer of power and resources
from the many to the few, from poor to rich, from the weak to the
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powerful. No wonder they make the old Right look appetizing and even
benign by comparison, at least in the eyes of strata who are being
downgraded.

Today’s so-called liberal or conservative policies are typical of the

Extreme Right, even when rhetorically justified by recourse to lofty ideals.
Worse, by preaching TINA and feeding cynicism they also legitimize the
development of Extreme Right mass movements and open up political
space for the mobilizing variant of the Extreme Right, which is what was
known in the Twentieth Century as fascism.

Behind the rise of the fascist wing of the Extreme Right today lie liberal
and conservative political mechanisms, and also neoliberal and
neoconservative policy choices that have become mainstream while in fact
they are quite extreme, in the sense of pertaining to the political and
economic program of the Extreme Right.

The case of Syriza: a liberal extreme Right

I argue that Syriza’s policy can in no way be construed as Left-wing, or
even social-democratic, and its correct characterisation is a liberal
extreme Right policy. I further argue that Syriza can never return to the
fold of the Left, as wide a meaning as one may give to this term. It lacks
both democratic structure and links to organised labour, and its leadership
depends, in its bids for power, mainly on keeping the favours of an
unstable coalition of liberal European politicians, the ECB and assorted
financiers, local oligarchs, and client middle strata mainly from the state
sector. Few trust them, and somersaults are their trick of trade. If desperate
they may bring back in circulation their debased leftist rhetoric or even
auction their support to China, but they will never meaningfully change
their policy in favour of labour because they cannot do this, they want not
to do this, and they. They even don’t imagine doing this. As has been
aptly stated, Syriza by now “has been transformed into a managerial
organization of state power, with the key aim being its own preservation,
while ignoring social demands from below. It has been absorbed by the
political establishment it was meant to challenge”.

Syriza shows no signs, or even intention, of challenging the antidemocratic

framework of policy making. This antidemocratic framework is usually
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discussed in relation to the destruction between 2010 and 2015, through
the Memoranda and the overturning of the OXI in the referendum, of the
formal aspects of popular sovereignty. As regards important particulars,
such as the financial policy, the ability and propensity of the unelected
ECB to trump policies of the elected governments of Eurozone countries
has been duly noted. The growth of the fascist extreme Right, notably of
the Golden Dawn with the energetic if usually covert help of the Syriza
government, is but a complementary aspect of this process, an insurance
policy in case the official repression mechanisms prove insufficient to
quell popular rage. State repression is less necessary as long as the many
poor and weak are still reeling under the shock of betrayal, but between
2015 and 2019 new mechanisms have been put in place for its resumption
by the successor government headed by the traditional Right-wing New
Democracy party, possibly in coalition with Syriza.

A real Left must mobilise for building democracy by catering to the

people’s needs, establishing popular sovereignty, and breaking the
oligarchy, three indivisible elements from a leftist perspective. The current
answer of the New Right is to divide these elements, trying to build new
bridges between the oligarchy and the battered middle strata, and positing
that restitution of sovereignty is enough. Focussing on sovereignty though
leaves out who exactly comprise the sovereign people, and for this reason
conservative political theorists, especially in countries like Russia, often
call now for ‘sovereign republic’. Building upon this answer, and also
throwing into the mix elements of nationalism, racism, nativism,
misogyny, and traditionalism, the conservative New Right hopes to
capture the popular reaction to the current oligarchic offensive of the
liberal extreme Right. The women, the poor, the newcomers, the national,
religious, or sexual minorities, and everybody deviating from the prevalent
norms must be sacrificed in order to buttress the middle class of each
nation, in ways adapted to the needs of local bourgeoisies, hence the
Right’s ‘euroscepticism’ that however always stays within limits.

If the Left does not deconstruct the conservative answer in time, it will be
sidelined again. We must show that there is no popular sovereignty
without destruction of the oligarchy, if not of capitalism itself. We have
entered a non-democratic era, and the sooner the Left digests this fact the
better. Most important is to explain plainly that this New Right has no
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political project able to counter the Liberal and so-called ‘mondialist’
oligarchy. Building political alliances around the social block dominated
by the failing middle class, the enraged Noikokyrei as we call them in
Greece, is futile because the middle strata never ever in history managed to
stem the advance of big capital. Only the Left can build a social block able
to offer a political answer to the liberal onslaught, by rallying the middle
strata under the working class hegemony.

All the questions posed at the start of this presentation could be condensed
in one: Can the Left ever preside over a policy of expropriative
accumulation in favour of oligarchic capital? The answer, subsuming the
answers to them all, cannot but be a resounding NO. This is an extreme
Right policy, massively in favour of oligarchic capital and on the expense
of labour. It can only be implemented by extreme Right political forces.
Syriza, whatever its esthetics, since 2015 chose to take its place among
them. The Left will not resurge before we reflect on this basic fact and act
accordingly.

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