When I heard about Syriza’s victory last Monday morning, I punched the air. Luckily nobody was in the kitchen with me at the time to witness this display of uncouth exuberance. I’ve been feeling politically hopeful ever since, a rare sensation these days. But I’ve also been feeling exasperated. Why can’t we have Syriza here in Britain? It’s true that Greece has experienced desperate times since 2009. But things have been pretty bad here too, particularly for those on low incomes. There are questions to be asked about apathy, and Britishness, and different political and cultural traditions. But there are also urgent questions I want to pose about the state of the British left and what our tactics should be.

The last five years have seen a remarkable upsurge in political energy. It’s clear that after three decades of neoliberalism, something is stirring. Clearly we need to capitalise (see how neoliberal language infects us all) on this energy. But I believe there is almost always time to ask difficult questions, and in fact we need to do so if we are to succeed in the long term.

There’s a lot of vital discussion on the left right now about reinventing democracy. Mainstream politics has indeed become detached from the concerns of ordinary people. But this is because they are in thrall to financial elites: ‘whoever you vote for’, as the High Pay Centre has it, ‘big business gets in’. There’s a danger that when people refer to ‘political elites’ or the ‘political class’, this is a deflection from targeting the real economic elites. This plays very well into a right-wing, small-state agenda.

Mainstream politics is currently dominated by neoliberalism. When we say that representative democracy is ‘dead’, do we really mean that, or do we actually mean that parliamentary politics has moved en masse to the right? Syriza, and Podemos in Spain, are recapturing mainstream politics for the left. Sure, it’s early days for those parties, but their promising gains should prompt the question of whether we are throwing out the baby of representative democracy with the bathwater of neoliberalism.

There are fascinating debates going on right now about what democracy means. These debates have been going on since Aristotle. How do we have government by the people? If representative democracy were not co-opted by financial elites, if we had a viable left-wing option on the table, would we need to introduce an entirely new, participatory model?

And is reinvigorating democracy enough for us as a movement, or do we also need to articulate a shared progressive vision of what a better society might look like? Do we need to think about what decisions we make, as well as how we make them?

The new models of participatory, deliberative democracy that are emerging now are exhilarating, but I believe they raise issues that we as a movement need to address head-on. Not everyone’s voice can be heard and taken into account all of the time. People have limited time, energy and attention to devote to decision-making. Division of labour is efficient. Experts are valuable. The Internet is useful for some things, but it’s not proving very good at galvanising joined-up, sustained change. There’s a lot of evidence that it’s making us addicted, distracted and atomised.

And then there’s the thorny issue of leadership and authority. Horizontalism and the networked society are hot topics. But networks concentrate power. Nodes create monopolies, often mirroring real-world inequalities. It seems imperative to harness the new populist energy for the left, rather than UKIP, but how do we deal with the fact that populism tends to bring with it a charismatic leader – Chavez, Tsipras, Iglesias – hard to square with our belief in egalitarian process? In rejecting formal hierarchies, how do we avoid ‘soft’ ones? And without leadership, how do we resolve disagreement and take concerted action?   

Sparks keep igniting everywhere, but how do we keep the fire alight? Campaigns like Focus E15 and the New Era estate are hugely inspiring, but it’s all too easy for the attention of campaigners and the press to dissipate and move on. How can we marshal and conserve the elixir of these individual campaigns? These are all big and thorny questions, but we need to tackle them if we’re to create a politics and a society that prioritises people and the planet over profit.  

Change:How? is taking place on February 8th in London. It will be a festival of politics and ideas where speakers from Greece, Spain, Sweden, as well as Britain’s Labour, Greens, Plaid Cymru and SNP will debate and speak on these concepts and ideas alongside the stories of hundreds of others. Together we can build the good society.
www.change-how.com