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Pluto Press - Euclid Tsakalotos , Christos Laskos

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135 pages

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Syriza's victory in the recent Greek general election shook the foundations of the Western political establishment and gave hope to the millions suffering the austerity measures imposed by the European Troika. Millions asked, how did this happen and what is it about Greece that created such a centre of radicalism?

This insider's account, from Syriza's Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos and economist Christos Laskos, shows that that the narrative of Greek exceptionalism is a myth. The blame game that has been played by the EU powers is an ideological tool used to shift attention from the disillusionment and anger at the European and global capitalist economic order.

By alienating an entire nation of people, the Troika has revealed the internal contradictions of the modern neoliberal establishment, as well as the inadequacies of the earlier social-democratic Keynesian regime. Tsakalotos and Laskos suggest that there is very little that differentiates Greece from other countries struggling under austerity, and that parties such as Syriza could usher in a new, democratic and socialist era across the continent.
List of figures and tables

Introduction: The Greek Crisis In Context

1. Neo-Liberalism As Modernization

2. The Greek Economy And Society On The Eve Of The Crisis

3. The Eurozone Crisis In Context

4. From Crisis To Permanent Austerity

5. The Underdogs Strike Back

6. Out Of The Mire: Arguments Within The Greek Left

Notes

Index

Sujets

Economic History

Political economy

Economics

Business

Union européenne

Greece

Europe

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Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	05 septembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849649520
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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Crucible of Resistance
CRUCIBLE OF RESISTANCE
Greece, the Eurozone and the World Economic Crisis
Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos
First published 2013 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos 2013
The right of Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3381 6 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3380 9 Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4951 3 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4953 7 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 8496 4952 0 EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
To Evi and Heather
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Greek Crisis in Context
1
Neoliberalism as Modernization
2
The Greek Economy and Society on the Eve of the Crisis
3
The Eurozone Crisis in Context
4
From Crisis to Permanent Austerity
5
The Underdogs Strike Back
6
Out of the Mire: Arguments within the Greek Left
Appendix
Notes
References
Index
Acknowledgments
This book develops many of the themes of our two previous books written in Greek. We would like to thank Ka.Psi.Mi. publications for permission to use some of the material in those books. Michalis Veliziotis and Spiros Papakonstantinou provided excellent research assistance throughout the writing of the book and the book has benefited greatly from their input.
A large number of people, both activists and academics, contributed to the Greek books and we are grateful for the opportunity to thank them again here. For this particular book, many took the time to discuss the large number of new issues that we wanted to raise. Special thanks are due to John Milios, Heather Gibson, Andreas Kakridis, Dimosthenes Papadatos, Nikolas Sevastakis and Christos Simos. Haris Konstantatos, Elias Chronopoulos, and Andreas Xanthos were kind enough to share their valuable insights with respect to some of the social and political movements discussed in Chapter 5 .
The ideas of this book have been tested over the last five years or so in countless open political meetings, discussion groups, conferences, student gatherings and other fora where literally thousands of people have expressed a remarkable interest in discussing the causes of the current crisis and the nature of left-wing alternatives or what Erik Olin Wright has labelled Real Utopias. Our book would have been very different, not to say much poorer, without the contributions and insights of those that attended such gatherings.
Finally, we owe a debt to our partners, Evi and Heather, for their forbearance once again throughout both the gatherings and the writing of the book. It is to them that we dedicate this book. We would also like to thank Christina Tsochatzi for invaluable help in preparing the book for publication
Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos
Introduction:
The Greek Crisis in Context
This book makes four interrelated arguments about the nature of the Greek crisis, and how it relates to the world economic crisis and especially to that of the Eurozone. Our major contention is that Greece is far from being a special case. The severity of the Greek crisis is not, as is often asserted, the result of either underdevelopment, or the failure to promote neoliberal structural reforms. On the contrary, the Greek crisis represents a crisis of a particular neoliberal political settlement. It follows that one needs to understand not only the underlying causes of the world economic crisis that broke out in 2008, but also why the economic and financial architecture of the Eurozone was inadequate to meet the challenges set by such a crisis. The problematic nature of that architecture also needs to be addressed in terms of its neoliberal foundations – the alternative conceptualization that the root cause lies in an incomplete fruition of the neoliberal modernizing drive within the Eurozone as a whole lacks even the superficial appeal of the similar argument made for Greece.
The policies of austerity which, at least after the initial period of the crisis, came to dominate, and not only within the Eurozone, point to a hardening of the neoliberal political and social order. The space for responding to demands and aspirations from below seems to have drastically narrowed even compared to the period of neoliberal hegemony before the crisis. Such a hardening may suggest either that elites have isolated themselves from the realities of the lived experiences of the many or, alternatively, that they lack the confidence to incorporate ideas and solutions stemming from outside their narrow circle – Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek may have been useful to elites in the dark days of the social-democratic consensus, but they are unlikely to provide much of a road map in the conditions of the present crisis. This lack of plasticity suggests that the final resolution to the crisis is unlikely to entail a return to either the neoliberalism of the pre-2008 period or the earlier social-democratic Keynesian consensus. We need to recall that there was no return to the status quo ante in the two previous major crises of capitalism in the 1930s and 1970s. Thus, we might be moving either in the direction of a far more authoritarian capitalist settlement, or to a long period of transcendence of some of the essential features of capitalism. The interest of the Greek case lies in the fact that the very acuteness of the crisis has brought to the fore both potentialities.
THE ARGUMENT STATED
For the purposes of exposition these arguments can be summarily presented in the form of four theses.
Thesis 1: Non-Exceptionality
The dominant narrative, and not only within Greece, suggests that Greece is in many ways an exceptional case with respect to the events that unfolded after 2008. This narrative is made up of three distinct, but interrelated, threads. Firstly, even liberal critics of European austerity policies, such as Paul Krugman or Martin Wolf, suggest that fiscal irresponsibility is the root cause of Greece’s economic woes. Whereas many other European economies, such as Spain and Ireland, did not exhibit any evident fiscal looseness on the eve of the crisis, this cannot be said of Greece, where the financial crisis can be seen as the result of a fiscal crisis and not the cause.
Secondly, the cause of fiscal irresponsibility is linked to fundamental flaws within Greece’s long-standing clientelistic political system. In particular, it is suggested that a nexus of political parties, the state, and sectional interests have led to a political settlement that can only be kept afloat by ever-increasing deficits and debt. Corollaries of this argument suggest that Greece is a prime example of a society that ‘consumes more than it produces’, or that is far more interested in ‘distributing the pie rather than increasing its size’.
Thirdly, both the fiscal crisis and the skewed political arrangements are to be understood in terms of Greece’s failure to develop and modernize. In particular, it is argued, Greece was more or less untouched by those ‘structural’ (code for neoliberal) reforms that dominated the agenda in the rest of the world from the 1980s onwards. A bloated and inefficient state, an inflexible labour market, and product markets ridden with regulations and discriminatory practices resulted in an uncompetitive economy as evidenced in large current account deficits and increasing net foreign debt. In short, by 2010, when the Greek crisis exploded onto the world scene, the chickens had truly come home to roost.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this narrative, not least in terms of legitimizing the policies of austerity, which were inaugurated in 2010 when Greece was forced to agree the first adjustment programme with its official creditors. What we have, in effect, is a version of Angela Merkel’s Calvinist fable, in which the unrighteous need to be punished for their past failings – both for their own good and ‘pour encourager les autres’. Within Greece itself, the crudest version of this theme was promoted by Theodoros Pángalos, a long-standing and prominent politician with PASOK (Greece’s socialist party) who had served in nearly every centre-left administration since 1981, whether populist or modernizing, and his memorable phrase ‘we all had our snouts in the trough’. 1 Pángalos sought to implicate wide sections of the population that had benefited, even if in some cases in rather minor ways, from clientelistic politics. But crudeness does not rule out effectiveness. This exercise in creating collective guilt, implicating the whole ‘culture’ of the population, was a continuous and powerful refrain on the part of those intellectuals within the dominant narrative who backed the policies with which the elites proposed to address Greece’s longstanding economic, political and cultural shortcomings in the age of crisis.
Our own narrative could hardly be more different. We will argue that Greece was, by 2008, well on the way to establishing a neoliberal economic order and a corresponding form of political governance. To be sure, the Greek economy an