A canonical example of how much the lack of a Plan B can hamstring a revolution is— well, pick any revolution you’ve ever heard of! They’re almost always spasms and so you get the usual spastic result, history as fuck-up, as pinball machine, as nightmare. But consider this one example, which is actually an example of how the lack of a Plan B can stop a revolution from even starting in the first place, despite the crying need for one, so it’s especially relevant for us now: meaning Greece and the failure to Grexit, back in the early years of the century. Greece had fallen into arrears in paying its debts to the European Union central bank, also the World Bank, and a raft of private bank creditors. These global financial powers then put the screws on. They told Greece to quit giving its citizens pensions and health care and so on, so the Greek government would be able to afford to pay back the international lenders who had so foolishly extended credit to such a bad risk. Syriza, the party in power in Greece at the time, refused to do this. The so-called Troika, representing international finance, insisted they do it. They couldn’t give in on this one, or all the little PIIGS would run off, meaning Portugal Italy Ireland Greece and Spain.
So who was going to lose here, the Greek population or international finance? Syriza put the question to its people in the form of a poll. The Greek people voted by a large majority to defy the Troika and refuse austerity. Syriza then promptly accepted austerity and the EU’s leash, going belly-up and begging for a bail-out.
Why did Syriza do that, why did they betray the wishes of the people who elected them? Because they had no Plan B. What they needed at that moment was a plan that would get them out of the EU and back to the drachma. They would have needed IOUs of some sort to stand in and do the job of money while they printed new drachmas and made all the other necessary changes as they transitioned back to a country in control of its own currency and sovereignty. And in fact there were people in Syriza working furiously to design that Plan B, which they called Plan X, but this turned out to be a case of too little too late, as they couldn’t convince their colleagues in government to risk trying it.
So, in the absence of such a plan ready to be enacted, Syriza had to cave to the EU and global finance. It was that or chaos, which could have meant starvation. People in Greece were already hungry as it was; unemployment was 25 percent, 50 percent for the young, and the austerity regime already imposed earlier by the Troika meant there was no money for basic social services, for relief. The government of an advanced nation, a European nation, the cradle of civilization blah blah blah, was reduced to choosing hunger and unemployment rather than starvation and chaos— those were their only choices, because they hadn’t made a Plan B.
This time, our time, when the whole thing broke all over the world, there had to be a Plan B.
What was it? Big parts of it have been there all along; it’s called socialism. Or, for those who freak out at that word, like Americans or international capitalist success stories reacting allergically to that word, call it public utility districts. They are almost the same thing. Public ownership of the necessities, so that these are provided as human rights and as public goods, in a not-for-profit way. The necessities are food, water, shelter, clothing, electricity, health care, and education. All these are human rights, all are public goods, all are never to be subjected to appropriation, exploitation, and profit. It’s as simple as that.
Democracy is also good, but again, for those who think this word is just a cover story for oligarchy and Western imperialism, let’s call it real political representation. Do you feel you have real political representation? Probably not, but even if you feel you have some, it’s probably feeling pretty compromised at best. So: public ownership of the necessities, and real political representation.
Details can be arranged on a case-by-case basis, and even though the devil is in the details, they are still details, a matter of making the pieces of the puzzle fit. These details can be worked out, and often they already have been. The Zurich plan, the Mondragón system, Albert and Hahnel’s participatory economics, communism, the Public Trust plan, the What’s Good Is What’s Good for the Land plan, the various post-capitalisms, and so on and so forth; there are lots of versions of a Plan B, but they all share basic features. It’s not rocket science. The necessities are not for sale and not for profit.
One scary thing, there has to still be money, or at least some exchange or allocation system that people trust, which means
