Nicos Poulantzas argues on the last page of State, Power, Socialism that “History has not yet given us a successful experience of the democratic road to socialism: what it has provided – and that is not insignificant – is some negative examples to avoid and some mistakes upon which to reflect. […] But one thing is certain: socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all.”
It is a historical irony that Poulantzas, the Marxist theorist who tirelessly argued that the political strategy of the left should not be exhausted at the level of the state apparatus, is arguably the official intellectual of Syriza. The Nicos Poulantzas Institute (NPI) was founded in 1997 in Athens and yet the party seems more trapped than ever in a strategy that invests the total of its political energy in the goal of winning governmental power. Even on the eve of the electoral defeat of Syriza on July 7, 2019, Alexis Tsipras described the party’s strategic goal as that of the preparation for regaining governmental power, when the time comes, through a transformation of the party in the direction of European social democracy.
The raison d'être of such left parties today can be claimed to orbit around recognition and redistribution. Recognition is the normative term used to describe social struggles protesting against exclusion and discrimination on the basis of difference in terms of gender, culture, sexuality or other identities, and fighting for the recognition of the subjects in question as free and equal members of a politically organised society. Redistribution is its counterpart when it comes to the distribution of the economic resources necessary for the actualisation of one’s status as free and equal. In the ‘real world’, though, recognition and redistribution are intertwined. Cultural disrespectand economic injustices are like smoke and fire; whenever you see one, you can expect to find the other.
