Euclid Tsakalotos takes over as Greek finance minister from Yanis Varoufakis. Demotix/Wassilis Aswestopoulos. All rights reserveDefeat is an important and multivalent aspect of left political thought and praxis: one that involves engaging with the political actuality and potentiality of the ‘always already’ and the ‘not yet’, as well as the fraught interface and very dialectical contradiction between these two temporal registers.
This is an account of ‘defeat’ in leftwing politics in the aftermath of the Syriza-led coalition government’s forced capitulation of July 13, 2015. As we mourn the defeat that the left government in Greece suffered at the hands of global finance capitalism, we have yet to make way for reclaiming political thought. As we struggle to process the depression, desperation, and anxiety that follows defeat, we might well consider what ‘defeat’ as a political concept means.
Since July 13, 2015, the left is confronted with what Walter Benjamin called the “critical state of the present”, whereby what is brought to crisis is not the status quo, but rather the forces engaging in its subversion; a state in which “the status quo threatens to be preserved”[i]. Against this background, we might ask: what would it mean to think critically of the present as loss or to ask how this loss could become the condition of a new political agency? Furthermore, what has the left succeeded in not only despite but also through its defeat? What have the neoliberal sovereign powers of Europe lost as a result of the Greek left government’s “defeat”? What can we do politically with this defeat, despite its debilitating logic? What spaces of possibility has it already opened up?
