Crisis, Movement, Strategy: The Greek Experience ed. by Panagiotis Sotiris (review)

This edited volume brings together contributions from different strands of left-wing politics and academia in an attempt to offer an account of the two Structural Adjustment Programs imposed on the Greek State by the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during the period 2010–2015. There has been a fad in recent years for analyzing the politics of resistance against neoliberal reforms in Greece. Two edited volumes encapsulate this trend very well: Nikos Serdedakis and Stavros Tombazos’s Facets of the Greek Crisis: Contentious Protest Cycle and Institutional Outcomes (2018), and the very interesting volume by Dimitris Dalakoglou and Georgios Angelopoulos, Critical Times in Greece: Anthropological Engagements with the Crisis (2018). Although the book at hand is a product of this particular intellectual context, it stands out by posing some interesting puzzles for left-wing politics that transcend the period under scrutiny.

The essays in the first part of the book focus on crisis diagnostics and take issue with the orthodox neoliberal readings of the Greek crisis, as well as with some progressive interpretations. Collectively, the essays begin by pointing out the discrepancies in those accounts and, subsequently, put forward an alternative explanation of the Greek crisis from the vantage point of Marxist theory. Fundamentally, the neoliberals attribute the Greek debt crisis to the twin deficits imbroglio: the fiscal deficit and the current account deficit, both present from 1980 onward. The former is the outcome of an oversized and unproductive public sector, while the latter derives from the introverted and uncompetitive character of the Greek economy. The solution for neoliberals lies in cutting down the public sector, privatizing appropriate industries, and creating an investment-friendly environment through deregulation. While neoliberals consider the Greeks responsible for the crisis, the progressive explanations propose a different culprit: the European Monetary Union (EMU). At its inception, the EMU was described as a non-optimal currency area that produced trade imbalances among its member states. For a time, these imbalances were offset by the manna of cheap credit that fell from the heavens of the global financial markets. The 2008 global crisis, however, exposed the bloated public debts in the southern European Union states and the nakedness of the EMU emperor was revealed. The solution proposed in this case was either reform of the EMU or exit it.

Staying true to the teachings of their founding father, Karl Marx, the economists in this volume—Stavros Mavroudeas, George Economakis, Maria Markaki, Ioannis Zisimopoulos, George Androulakis, Alexios Anastasiadis—turn the aforementioned theories on their head. Twin deficits are not the root of the problem; rather, they are among its symptoms. The real problem is capitalism and its tendencies. Hence, the chronic fiscal deficits of the Greek state are the outcome of its structural tendency to subsidize the private sector in various ways in order to avert a crisis of over-accumulation. The whole picture turned bleaker as capitalists socialized the costs of their reproduction by paying far less in taxes than they received in public expenditure. On top of this, they forged a class alliance with the middle classes based on tax evasion. As a result, tax proceeds plummeted and this was the principal reason for the increase of public debt. As far as the second of the twin deficits is concerned, the current account deficit is caused by the imperialist process of value extraction from the Greek economy by the leading economies of the EU. Greek exports are low-technology products with a low income elasticity of demand and requiring little capital to produce, whereas imports from Greece’s competitors within the EU are the exact opposite. This asymmetry derives from the different structures of the production process within the various economies and has little to do with the financial edifice of the EMU.

Reasserting this imperialist tendency at the political level, the EU devised a crisis management governance structure designed to encroach upon the sovereignty of member states in need, like Greece...