^{Leadership, Class Reality, and the Need for a Historical Community}

By Nicholas Alexiou*

The recent articles by Alexis Papachelas and Manolis Velivasakis raise an issue that genuinely demands serious discussion: What might the future of the Greek American community look like, and what institutions can ensure its political, social, and cultural continuity?

Alexis Papachelas argues that Greece needs a new generation of diaspora leaders capable of keeping the Diaspora alive and strengthening its influence within the American political system. As positive examples, he cites young and dynamic Greek Americans involved in the Hellenic American Leadership Council (HALC), the National Hellenic Society, and other organizations. Both organizations perform real and useful work. HALC operates primarily in political advocacy, lobbying, and the training of emerging leaders, while the National Hellenic Society focuses on preserving cultural heritage, philanthropy, and connecting younger generations with Greece.

Their selection as models, however, also reveals a particular conception of leadership: the elevation of professionally successful, politically connected, and economically powerful Greek Americans, who are assumed, almost as a matter of course, to be able to represent the community as a whole. The question is which social strata this model expresses, who it excludes, and by what democratic legitimacy success and access to centers of power are converted into a right of communal representation.

Manolis Velivasakis agrees with Papachelas’s diagnosis and proposes the creation of a new nationwide institution, a “New Filiki Eteria,” which would coordinate existing organizations, cultivate new leaders, and serve the interests of Greece, Cyprus, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Both articles correctly recognize the exhaustion of the old model of representation. The Church, despite its substantial historical contribution, can no longer represent by itself the social, political, and cultural plurality of the Greek American world. Many traditional organizations have lost a significant part of their social base, while their activity is often exhausted in social events, internal rivalries, and contests over titles and offices. Younger generations are drifting away, the Greek language is receding, communities are being transformed, and the old geographical concentrations of Hellenism are dispersing.

This observation, however, is not enough to explain the crisis. The fundamental problem with both approaches is that they reduce what is a social, institutional, and historical crisis primarily to a crisis of leadership. The solution is sought in the emergence of individuals who are more capable, selfless, and coordinated. If the right people can be found and persuaded to set aside their personal ambitions, then, according to this logic, the Diaspora will acquire unity, strategy, and political power.

This is a voluntarist interpretation of history. It overestimates the power of individual will and underestimates the social relations within which individuals and institutions are formed. Marx, one of the founders of classical sociology, observed that people make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. They act within inherited relations of production, institutions, ideologies, and relations of force.

In his 1972 reply to the British philosopher John Lewis and Lewis’s humanist conception of Marxism, the French philosopher Louis Althusser argued precisely against the idea that history is the work of a free and all-powerful human subject. People act historically, but they do so within social relations that they did not create as individuals and that determine both the limits and the possibilities of their action. The driving force of history is not abstract human will or the moral quality of leaders, but class struggle.

The crisis of the Diaspora, therefore, cannot be attributed primarily to a shortage of capable or selfless individuals. It must be sought in the social contradictions, institutions, and mechanisms of power that produce, select, and legitimize particular types of leadership. Political analysis cannot be replaced by a catalogue of moral or psychological failings.

When communal recognition depends upon wealth, donations, social visibility, relations with the Church, proximity to the Greek government, and access to American politicians, competition over titles and offices is not merely a matter of personal deviation. It is a predictable result of an entire system of communal power.

Institutions do not choose their leaders at random. They produce those who fit their structure and values. An institution that recognizes the large donation as the principal form of service will elevate the affluent donor. An institution that measures success by access to Washington will elevate the lobbyist and the professional operator of power. An institution based on personal connections will reproduce closed circles. A generational change without a transformation of social and institutional relations will simply renew the same dominant group.

Here a deeper theoretical weakness appears. Both articles speak of “the Diaspora” as though it were a single person, possessing a common will, common interests, and one mission. Yet the Diaspora has never been a homogeneous social body. Common Greek ancestry does not erase class, political, gender, cultural, and generational differences.

Within the same community there are owners of capital and wage earners, major businesspeople and small proprietors, employers and workers, property owners and tenants, financially secure professionals and young people living under conditions of insecurity. There are those with direct access to centers of power and those who are represented on no board at all. There are diverse gender and sexual identities, different racial and cultural backgrounds, religious and secular people, and Greek-speaking, bilingual, and English-speaking Greek Americans.

There are also different political traditions and forms of collective action: labor and trade-union movements; feminist, antiracist, environmental, and antifascist organizations; and movements for civil and social rights. The Greek American community does not stand outside the social conflicts of American society. It is part of them.

Recognizing this plurality is not an exercise in adding yet another catalogue of social identities. It reveals the central theoretical error in both approaches: the presentation of the Diaspora as a unified subject that simply needs better leadership. Its social reality is constituted through relations of power, class antagonisms, institutions, and political conflicts. A shared national identity does not abolish class struggle. On the contrary, appeals to national unity often conceal social inequalities and present the interests of the most powerful as the interests of the community as a whole.

When we are told that “the Diaspora has acquired economic power,” we must ask: Which part of the Diaspora? When discussion turns to the “human capital” represented by successful businesspeople, scientists, physicians, lawyers, and politicians, we must ask who is excluded from this picture. And when certain “distinguished” individuals are invited to represent everyone, we must examine the social and democratic legitimacy by which they would do so.

Greek migration to the United States was, to a great extent, a labor migration. Greeks did not arrive in America collectively as a ready-made business and professional elite. They came primarily as cheap labor power, destined to meet the needs of an expanding capitalist center. They worked in mines, on railroads, in factories and workshops, on construction sites, and later in food service and small family businesses.

The social mobility achieved by part of the Diaspora is real and historically important. It was not, however, the automatic product of some distinctive Greek virtue. It was built through hard work, family sacrifice, the often unpaid labor of women and children, mutual-aid networks, labor struggles, and unequal accumulation. Not everyone advanced in the same way, nor did everyone arrive at the same social position. The success of the upper strata cannot be presented as the complete social history of the Diaspora.

From this standpoint, the proposal for a “New Filiki Eteria” requires careful examination. The historical Filiki Eteria was connected to a national liberation struggle. Today’s Greek American community, however, forms part of a complex capitalist social formation. It cannot be organized through the same historical analogy, nor can it be united around a new national myth that supposedly transcends all social contradictions.

Who would select the new organization’s “best and brightest”? Who would define their service, character, and prestige? Would they be elected by the community, or would they recognize and appoint one another within a closed circle? Would workers, young people, women, LGBTQ+ people, educators, artists, small communities, and representatives of labor, feminist, antiracist, environmental, and antifascist movements have a meaningful place? Or would participation once again be restricted to those who already possess titles, economic power, and connections to centers of authority?

The concept of “excellence” is not socially or politically neutral. In a class society, opportunities for distinction are distributed unequally. Some inherit economic resources, education, time, and networks of connections. Others begin their lives by selling their labor in order to survive. When we ignore these unequal starting points, we transform social privilege into personal virtue and social inequality into a natural hierarchy.

Without democratic election, social representation, and meaningful accountability, such an organization risks becoming the mechanism for the political unification of the Greek American economic and professional elite. “Unity” would then mean the subordination of different social voices to a single dominant strategy.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian intellectual imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime and author of the celebrated Prison Notebooks, helps us understand this distinction. Hegemony is not simply the occupation of a leadership position, nor is it produced solely through wealth and access to power. It presupposes an organic relationship with a social base and the capacity to construct a broader collective project. A group does not become the representative of a community merely by proclaiming itself an assembly of the “best.”

Also problematic is the view that the political power of the Diaspora can be built primarily through fundraising and more effective lobbying in Washington. Organized political intervention is, of course, necessary. But politics is not a public-relations technique or merely access to the powerful.

As Nicos Poulantzas, the distinguished Greek sociologist who lived and worked in France, demonstrated, the state is not a neutral instrument waiting to be used by whichever group organizes itself most effectively. It is the material condensation of a relationship of class and social forces. American policy toward Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, and the Eastern Mediterranean is not shaped solely by the effectiveness of lobbies. It is determined by military alliances, energy interests, defense industries, geopolitical rivalries, and the broader requirements of American power.

The idea that it is enough to imitate a successful national lobby overlooks both the particular historical conditions of each community and the structure of the state within which it seeks to intervene. Political power is not a neutral form of expertise. It is a relation of force.

It is equally important to examine what we mean when we invoke the “national interest.” It is not a self-evident or socially neutral category. It is politically constituted and often expresses particular configurations of state, economic, and geopolitical forces. Invoking it cannot be allowed to close the discussion before it has even begun.

The Greek American Diaspora is not an extension of the Greek state or a reserve mechanism of Greek foreign policy. Cooperation with Greece, Cyprus, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate is important. It cannot, however, nullify the community’s autonomy or determine its priorities from above. Greek Americans are part of American society and have social, educational, cultural, and political needs of their own.

For this reason, we need to move from the vague notion of the Diaspora to the concept of a historical community. A historical community is not merely a community that has a past. It is a community that has acquired the institutional capacity to produce, preserve, study, and reinterpret its historical experience. It knows not only its benefactors and public figures, but also its workers, women, radicals, antifascists, artists, excluded people, and unrecognized creators.

Such a community needs archives, libraries, museums, research centers, oral-history programs, publishing institutions, and strong Greek American Studies programs. It needs to teach its literature and poetry, preserve the experiences of migration, labor, and social struggle, and cultivate a critical historical consciousness. These institutions are not cultural luxuries. They are the material conditions through which a community acquires continuity and self-knowledge.

Communities produce culture, and culture reproduces communities. Without institutions of historical knowledge, a new generation of leaders may know the corridors of Washington, but remain ignorant of the paths of migration, labor, and social struggle through which Hellenism in America has traveled.

The articles by Alexis Papachelas and Manolis Velivasakis therefore open a necessary discussion. The answer, however, cannot simply be a new group of powerful individuals or yet another centralized organization. We do not need only a change of leaders. We need a transformation of the conditions through which communal power is produced, legitimized, and exercised.

The crucial question is not only who will lead. It is who will be represented, who will decide, who will be held accountable, and whose social interests will be presented as the interests of the Diaspora as a whole.

Precisely how these new institutions might be constituted in practice must be the subject of a further, necessary, and serious discussion. It would not be responsible to propose a ready-made organizational structure here, before examining the forms of representation, procedures of election and accountability, relations with existing organizations, financial independence, and the participation of different social forces. The very process of creating a new institution must be democratic, collective, and socially representative.

What we can say now is that any new organizational project must be founded on democratic representation, transparency, social accountability, institutional autonomy, and the meaningful participation of the different classes, generations, identities, political traditions, and social movements that constitute the contemporary Greek American world. It must also invest not only in political influence, but in historical knowledge, education, culture, and the institutions of collective memory.

A historical community is not built from the top down by an assembly of self-appointed “best and brightest.” It is built through collective work, social memory, knowledge, culture, democratic participation, and the recognition of class conflict. Its unity is not given, nor can it be imposed through moral appeals. It is the provisional result of an ongoing social and political process.

That is the real challenge: not simply a more powerful Diaspora, but a more democratic, historically conscious, and socially representative community.

• Nicholas Alexiou is Professor of Sociology and the founder and director of the Hellenic American Project at Queens College, CUNY.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed throughout this site do not necessarily reflect those of the COSMOS FM Board of Directors, personnel, volunteers, or sponsors,

Source : anamniseis.net