The Greek Election Results

The long-awaited results of the elections for the vouli of the Hellenic Republic are in. In all media, the battle was presented as simple two-sided affair: for or against the austerity policies imposed by the Western European creditor governments and supported by the comprador classes in Greece itself. This was further complicated in electoral terms by the plurality bonus law passed in the last pre-crisis session of parliament, which awards the plurality winner a 50 MP bonus over and above their proportion of the vote. This was transparently intended as an arrangement to assure that PASOK or ND, the two dominant parties, would have to share power as little as possible and to guarantee an oligarchic identical two-party rule in the style of the United States, without having to resort entirely to plurality district-based systems. The bons hommes of ND and PASOK did not count on their support ever seriously falling below the level that would guarantee them power in this way, and yet this is what the current crisis of capitalism has achieved. At the final tally, even with the plurality bonus ND+PASOK stand together at 149 seats, just short of the 151 majority; the first time in post-dictatorial history in Greece that the two parties have not even managed a majority together, let alone separately. Continue reading “The Greek Election Results”

What Use The Law?

It is a well-known quote, almost by now worn to the point of cliché, that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread”.(1) Most people know this to be a true analysis of what the ‘liberty, equality, property and Bentham’ of the liberal order amounts to; but to see this manifest itself in practice is something to which we in the Western world have perhaps become unaccustomed. The salient point is not even so much that the pure equality before the law itself may hide considerable inequalities of class and status, but at least as much that the supposed neutrality and ‘safeguards’ of legal procedure may turn out to result in very different outcomes in similar cases. It is important to note these cases, as they don’t show impurities and imperfections in an otherwise fair system, as the liberals would have it, but show their true significance as the inevitable results of deep structural problems. Continue reading “What Use The Law?”