(photo: Reuters)

FEW academics have yet grappled with the mass protests that have overtaken Greece. In an interview with the Athens News, sociologist Nicos Mouzelis (photo) suggests that the movement may be as short-lived as a falling star. But he also says it could have a far-reaching impact on culture, creating a sense of civil society, and pushing reform.

 

“These movements resemble May ’68 and the new social movements of Seattle and Genoa in that they are all very diffuse in terms of organisation. I don’t think they have great durability because they are against [formal] organisation, it happens by internet. They don’t focus on a bureaucratic organisation which could coordinate all these movements around the world,” Mouzelis says. 

 

The London School of Economics professor emeritus believes the Syntagma protests are against bureaucratisation, parties and trade unions on the grounds that sooner or later such organisations serve their own narrow interests, ignoring the rank and file.

 

So have parties and trade unions reached their limit in the democratic experiment? “To some extent,” he responds. “In Greece and Portugal they are very clientelistic. Whenever they relate to civil society movements, they try to control and integrate them into their own structures,” he adds.

Clearly, the leftwing professor does not share the crowd’s propensity for direct democracy, which he says is not feasible in a complex society. 

 

“But such practices of participating, discussing and passing resolutions change the political culture. They reinforce civil society, which is very weak in Greece,” Mouzelis underlines. “Civil society here,” he explains, “is almost eliminated by the fact that a party logic penetrates all institutional spheres. It makes everything partisan, from universities and professions to sports and the arts.”

 

While the protest movement insists parties have reached an impasse, that doesn’t mean parliamentary democracy can work without parties. “People want these parties to regenerate radically or want new parties to emerge. Yet, the Syntagma protesters don’t want to transform into a party, for the time being,” Mouzelis observes.

 

A solution to the parties locked into old patterns is to make Greek parties more democratic and to overcome the extreme clientelism and populism characteristic in southern Mediterranean countries.

“Apart from that, you can have a strong civil society. This occupies a space between the state and the economy; it wants to change things and operates under neither party logic nor market logic. To some extent these protest movements do this, and it can change the balance between parties and civil society,” he explains. 

 

“The power of the parties to penetrate civil society is currently so great that democracy doesn’t work well. The answer is to strengthen civil society, rather than direct democracy,” Mouzelis suggests.

 

He sees the protests as a response to neoliberal capitalism, although he claims that centre-left and communist parties had already warned of the decline of social rights. 

 

 

But with Greece’s traditional social democrats (ruling Pasok) having implemented the most extreme neoliberal austerity programme, many of the party’s voters feel they have no one to turn to. “A large part of Pasok opposes flexible labour relations and the decline of social rights. But if there is a global neoliberal system, you cannot create a really social democratic situation within one country,” Mouzelis notes.

 

While accepting that the mass protests today exert strong pressure on the government and political system, the sociologist insists it won’t last long and that the impact is in changing values. “People somehow look at themselves in a different way. Now for the first time they can participate in something without joining a party, and somehow they can change the world,” he says, noting how the May ‘68 movement affected gender relations and changed the culture and values of society. 

 

What would Mouzelis advise the organisers if they finally chose to go formal? “I’d tell them to form democratic local and transnational organisations, like non-governmental organisations (NGOs) - you don’t have only a global market and system of governance, but also a global civil society with highly bureaucratised NGOs. In global civil society these new movements can play an important role and collaborate to some extent with NGOs. It needn’t be bureaucratic. It can be decentralised, but with a nucleus.”