Greece
Very interesting POV on the emerging situation in Greece. Amazing that the soon-to-be ex-government cancelled the referendum after a meeting with the Troika, I wonder how far off a military coup is, given the reorganization of the military and the disregard the masses have for the political parties, both left and right. The last round of protests included fighting between the communists and the youth, the communists basically standing in support of the government, at least from what I read on this blog http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/ . I just wonder how much austerity people will put up with or be forced to endure in a state with absolutely no legitimacy, or so it seems. Looks like the neoliberal chickens are coming home to roost and all the pretenses of democracy are being shattered, not only in Europe but across the entire Atlantic zone.
It is as if intertwined crises are accelerating, events feed upon one another, escalating patterns of confrontation in a context where familiar ideas, tactics and strategy no longer apply. Like antibiotics, an adaptive, path dependent neoliberalism has become immune and resistant to its cures and treatments. Gramsci in Prison Notebooks discussed agency and instrumentality using the metaphor of the modern prince, the Party being the modern prince, displacing the individual actor with the collective. Perhaps Gramsci`s formulation needs to be revised and a new metaphor of a post-modern prince needs to be thought through in keeping with the nature of the current period, a negation of the negation responding to the re-configured role of the nation-state in a globalized world of connectivity.
The evolving constellation of inter-connected and converging crises of governance seem to be non-linear in nature, but following a progression in tempo, echoing and reverberating against hard surfaces of ecological limits,suggesting a fascinating interplay between non-human agency and the human: hurricanes, freak snowstorms, flooding related to global climate change while a crisis of accumulation congeals on the human terrain. There seems to be a predictable pattern in the unpredictability.Bruno Latour`s actor network theory (ANT) potentially fits the moment. The "ants" are acting, revealing an emergent intelligence and self-organization in a series of actions, linked via the internet. Smart memes of protest tactics go viral, are appropriated, and resent broadly, analysed, talked about, and transformed like a jazz standard with improvised riffs, path dependent resistances paralleling neoliberalization and its path-dependent logics. It appears to me that narrative frameworks are an attempt to snatch order and meaning out of disparate events and actions. Reading blog postings and feeds there is a rough unshaped quality to fast moving events. I keep thinking of the Communist Manifesto these days, refracting the various snippets through this retort establishes some predictability in the unpredictability, when strategic intelligence, situational awareness,and tactical agility rather than linear itemized strategic plans are the currency.
Some very nice photography of recent events in Greece.