Summer 2012, a report from Greece 23 / 08 / 2012

by GEORGE CAFFENTZIS

1. Arrival in Thessaloniki. It is July 5 and I just have arrived in Thessaloniki full ofquestions concerning the political situation in Greece. My trusted and knowledgeablefriend meets me at the airport. In response to my impatient questions he immediatelybegins the tale of what happened in Greece and in Thessaloniki in particular over the lastyear, as he drives us into the city.

Some of the story I knew from the media reports and my conversations with familymembers in Greece. It is the official economic story. Incomes for most working classfamilies are down 40% while prices (for gasoline and electricity) are increasing by 30%or more, old taxes are increased, new taxes are being imposed and unemployment is at1930s Depression levels.

Moreover, my friend describes the classic scenario of structural adjustment, the state isforcing workers to pay more in taxes while not paying its own bills to its providers andcontractors. The University of Thessaloniki has, for example, refused (until furthernotice) to pay its contractors for work already done and it is not paying approvedexpenses of the faculty. This brought me back to my time in Nigeria in the mid-1980swhen I was working as a professor of philosophy there during the first round ofstructural adjustment! I would follow my paycheck from office to office hoping to get itand cash it before it bounced.

This is hardly an environment for generating “growth” but it can be one that attractsinvestors looking for bargains…or, at least, the government is rumored to be on the vergeof selling everything it is now committed to operating from schools to hospitals to transitsystems to water distribution, if it can find a buyer.

All this is being done with the finesse of a psychological warfare team from the IMF(trained to impose structural adjustment programs around the world since themid-1980s). The present scenario is that at first the population is terrorized (with

massive cuts that look like they will drive you into penury, shame and absolute disaster),then there is a moment of holding back, so the cuts can be absorbed and normalized a bit(after all, there is often some extra, unreported income circulating around a family thatcan be netted in the moments of emergency), and, in the meantime, finding likelyscapegoats and cracks of division among potentially threatening social forces.

The scapegoating and division is the part of the story that my friend tells that has beenmissing from the story of Greece in the Financial Times and other official media. Itneeds to be told, for it explains why there has been so little resistance to the spendingcuts, tax increases and general silence since February and the run up to the two elections(after years of resistance that inspired the world). It is a story of the crisis of the streets ofGreece and of the composition (or better, de-composition) of the Greek working class.The story in my friend’s account has two foci—Athens and Thessaloniki—where the leftopposition to the structural adjustment of Greece has been divided, weakened, andfrightened into a defensive position after a long period (beginning in December 2008) ofhaving some control of the streets.

The Athens part of the story is alarming, but predictable. We all know that the GoldenDawn Party, which is openly supporting Nazi policies “for Greek conditions,” had adramatic increase in the votes it received in the last two elections. Whereas it had lessthan 1% (where 3% is the minimum required to have any Parliamentary representative)of the votes before the elections, it now has more than 7%. This was a major electoralcoup, but still it is a minor party. However, my friend noted that 50% of the Greek policevoted for the Golden Dawn. I.e., from the point of view of the repressive arm of the state,the Nazi approach to social and economic is their politics. This situation, of course,opens up many vistas of horrors, especially for the official targets of the Nazi politics,immigrants. These immigrants, according to the Golden Dawn, are somehow part of avast plot hatched by foreign bankers (with the Greek politicians as their traitorousaccomplices) to destroy Greece and to take possession of its wealth. This modern Greekvariant of the old Nazi myth of the international bankers’ conspiracy (with the Jewishpart deleted in public for now) is crossed with a new social movement practice ofclaiming to “protect true Greeks” from the “encroachments” of immigrants (e.g., by goinginto hospitals and intimidating immigrant patients or by going into schools andfrightening immigrant children). This “Casa Pound” tactic (coming out of the recent turnof fascist groups in Italy to open up social centers to rival those of the left) has beencarried out in Athens with great effect. There are many immigrant neighborhoods whereresidents are afraid to go out at night for fear of being attacked.

My friend said that the electoral Left believed that it would be adequate to take a standagainst the troika – the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank(and now the World Bank which would make it more a carriage than a troika) – to winstate power. But clearly such an approach did not defang the racist and anti-immigrantsentiments that were circulating and amplifying in the Greek proletariat in the last fewyears. Electoral leftists, though not condoning anti-immigrant pogroms of course,thought it best to keep a low profile on the issue in the interest of “a greater unity” thatwas shaping up during the struggle against the austerity policies of an increasinglyauthoritarian European Union.

In fact, the electoral Left’s strategy with respect to the rise of openly Nazi-sympathizingpolitics in Greece has backfired again and again. Thus, when it began to appear that theGolden Dawn Party was going to have a better than expected showing in the firstelection, a number of socialist politicians gravely warned against this development andcalled on the Greek public to reject the party at this polls. This appeal seemed to onlybring more voters to the Golden Dawn because, perhaps, they were acting according tothe adage of “an enemy (the Golden Dawn) of my enemy (PASOK) is my friend.”Similarly, after a now-famous TV show where a Golden Dawn supporter beat up anelderly female journalist, who was a Communist Party official, right in front of thecameras, the CP called on Greek voters to turn against a party represented by such thugs.The second election’s results showed that such appeals were fruitless, indeed the CPended with about 4% of the vote while the Golden Dawn had almost twice as much (morethan 7%).

In the midst of the electoral campaigns in the Spring of 2012, violent attacks onimmigrant neighborhoods continued unopposed by either the Greek state or the socialmovements (with a few exceptions). Indeed, though Pakistanis and Bangladeshis weremost often attacked. But even Egyptians (who were specialized fishermen with legalstatus in Greece for decades) found themselves, to their own amazement, on thereceiving end of racist violence. Only the most aggressive and well-organized elements ofthe immigrant population were able to defend themselves, but with the consequence thatthis led to an inward fracturing of the larger immigrant community as well, with theattitude of “save what you can of your own” dominating.

There is nothing mysterious about the power of the racist elements officially representedby the Gold Dawn Party. It, of course, relies first, and foremost, on the complicity of thepolice who look the other way when attacks on immigrants take place. Indeed, thestatistic concerning the electoral preference of the majority of the policemen mentionedabove implies that there is plenty of communication and cooperation between racistmilitants and the official state. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are seeing theformation of a para-military organization that extends the state’s “monopoly of violence”far beyond its official borders. Such “institutions,” of course, have proven essential to theexecution of structural adjustment policies all over the world.

So, although the left-wing alliance, the Syriza Party, had an even greater electoral successthan the Gold Dawn (leaping in a few years from negligible status to becoming the mainopposition party in the Parliament with 28% of the vote), this electoral success can beblown away like a house of ballot cards in the next election whereas the racists have beenbuilding “on the ground” cadres and a real penetration in proletarian communities withthe cover of the police. My friend warned that if there isn’t a response ”on the ground” bythe Left, parliamentary and/or non-parliamentary, an even graver disaster beckons.

The second source of the racist right’s power is its connection with the world ofcriminality (from the drug trade to the sex trade to the immigrant trafficking trade) thatgives it access to a lot of ready and unaccounted-for money. For the racist is never at aloss in “working with” while exploiting the “inferiors” as long as they are recognized to beinferior, i.e., as petty drug dealers and/or addicts, as prostitutes, as undocumented

workers. For example, it is known that a number of supporters of the racist right areinvolved in moving immigrants from Turkey to Greece and from Greece into Italy (thecost for the former service is 400 Euros and for the latter it is 4000 euros). So the attackson immigrants in Greece put added pressure on them to leave Greece ASAP and to comeup with the hefty price of admission to Italy and beyond. One part of the immigrant cyclefits in with the other part quite deftly.

The complex mixture of police, racists and criminality creates a great power on theground and can become a decisive force during an emergency (social, political and/oreconomic). But the lineaments of this combination are nothing new. We find them in1848-51 in Paris and in the 1920s in Germany, and so we should not be surprised thatthey are appearing in Greece, especially in Athens, in the midst of the crisis.

My friend notes, however, that there is an aspect of the present that has otherpredecessors: pre-1917 Russia for one, since it is marked by the appearance ofself-described “nihilist anarchists.” According to my friend, these anarchists have takenas their immediate opponents, not the symbols or instruments of the state, but thosethey have been calling “social anarchists.” The supposed justification being that the“reformists” (aka, “social anarchists”) stop everyone from realizing that the true struggleof this period is to be determined as much by the will to use force as by any technology.These convictions, according to some, have led to a “war among the rebels” on Greece’sstreets, especially in Thessaloniki.

This division among the anarchists has given the police the opportunity to use a newtactic. They have decided to identify the factions as two separate criminal organizationsthat are fighting for territory in Thessaloniki. On the basis of this legal hypothesis thepolice have recently arrested 18 from each side, but they released the arrested after a fewdays detention. The political eyes of the city and beyond are looking carefully to see if thepolice have hit upon an effective tactic to demobilize some of the most powerful forcesthat could be arrayed against the previous austerity Memorandum with the troika andthe future cuts in social spending.

The cause of this situation is presently unknown, though it has become the source ofmuch recrimination and debate in extra-parliamentary circles in Greece. Could it be theproduct of a tactic from the bag of “dirty tricks” now found in police practice around theworld? It might be, of course, or then again it could be a genuine outgrowth of this timeof despair and futility for some young Greeks who had been promised so much ascitizens of “a new post-Cold War Europe” and now have become the butt of degradingracist jokes emanating from Northern Europe. How can one comfortably brush asidenihilist sentiments – let’s destroy it all! – unless one appeals to the many who refuse tobe treated as collateral damage of an action that puts such sentiments in action?

On the basis of my friend’s account, I conclude that the resolution of the “big” questionsof political economy then – e.g., whether remaining in the euro zone is an advantage tothe Greek working class (immigrants-especially-included)? – depend upon the forces inthe field, including the class’ unity (or lack thereof). Thus these issues ride upon the backof a field of forces appearing as the police-protected, Nazi-like pogroms of immigrantsand “a war among the [anarchist] rebels.” The pogroms and “war” will have consequence

for any effort to chart an anti-capitalist direction out the crisis. So I urge the readers ofthis account to cast a cold and sober eye on the proceedings on the streets and incourtrooms of Greece in the coming months as the crisis deepens.

2. Discussion with Comrades in Athens

I arrived in Athens on July 11 and stayed for a week giving talks and interviewingcomrades in the city. I put together a collective account of the crisis that had muchoverlap with my Thessalonikian friend’s, though there were important additionalinsights that should prove useful.

The first thing I asked about was the resistance to the austerity/structural adjustmentmeasures in Greece. The comrades gave the example of the manifold resistance to adiabolical taxation trick developed by the Greek government in its desperate effort tosatisfy the conditions of the Memoranda. The trick was to attach a tax bill on to thealready increased electricity bill. Thus, if you did not pay your tax, your electricity wouldbe turned off, even though you had paid the electricity portion of the total bill! This wasnot an idle threat. Although such a measure was not yet massively applied, everyoneseemed to know of individual cases. This trick generated an enormous outrage in themore than forty neighborhood assemblies in the Athens metropolitan area as well asthroughout the country.

This led to both legal and extra-legal responses. As for the latter, in one neighborhoodthere were about 2000 families that refused to pay the tax bill (out of an area thatcomprised about 50,000 families) while in all the country there were refusal rates up to35%. The varied refusal rate was, of course, due to the memory of experiences of struggleand the level of support that could be relied on in each of neighborhoods. This could beseen in the neighborhoods that traditionally voted for the Greek Communist Party (KKE)like Ikaria. The KKE along dozens of other leftist and anarchist ones supportednon-compliance with the hybrid electricity/tax and their members helped organizegroups of electricians to reconnect people whose electricity was shut off due to theirrefusal to pay the tax portion of their bill.

There was also a legal response in the courts (that included in a number of places theassistance of municipal officials). The lawyers argued for the refusers that the hybridelectricity bill/tax was unconstitutional and that the electric company had no right to cutoff one’s electricity supply if s/he had paid their bill. It was irrelevant whether they paidtheir tax. This led to a ruling by the appeals court that supported the refusers, viz., theelectricity company could not cut off the electrical supply of a customer that had paidtheir electricity bill, even if they had not paid their tax portion. The court decided thatthe tax office had to collect the tax without this accounting trick that literally held a gunto the head of the tax-payer.

Of course, this outcome has upset the government. In response, there is increasedpressure to privatize the electricity company and to open up Greece to all sorts ofecologically and economically questionable schemes around electrical power generation.In government circles, instead of neoliberalism being the cause of the crisis,

neoliberalism (with its across-the-board privatization of state and common resources) isbeing called upon to be its solution! This “solution” is not being accepted by the many inthe population who are looking for other ways out the crisis than those offered by thenew governing alliance of the conservative New Democracy Party with the Pan-HellenicSocialist Party (PASOK) and the Democratic Left.

Inevitably, some are desperate to avoid blaming the capitalist system for the crisis andnot to see it as a threat to their livelihoods (and lives). Instead they see the crisis as aconspiracy of international bankers (not yet openly identified as Jewish) usingimmigrants to destroy the pure (and racially superior) Greek culture and wealth. Theirprogram is not national socialist, in the sense that they reject “socialism” (i.e., the stateco-managing the economy with big capital). If anything, their economic program is aform of “national neoliberalism.” They call for leaving the euro zone and expellingimmigrants (especially from Africa and the Middle East) or sending them to work camps.In practice they carry on pogroms against immigrants, and attacks on anarchists andeven against the KKE members throughout Athens in armed gangs (resembling thepara-military “Frei Corps” of the post-WWI era). These gangs include “homeland”Greeks, Pontos Greeks (from the Northern Black Sea) and, yes, even some Albanians! Ofcourse, these gangs operate with the active complicity of the police.

The political expression of these attitudes and actions is the Golden Dawn Party that Idescribed in the previous section. But my Athenian comrades note that some ofgroundwork for the emergence of the Golden Dawn Party into official parliamentarypolitics is due to at least two developments.

First, a generalized anti-immigrant attitude was supported by PASOK when it was inpower. For example, the socialist minister of health in the interim government wascontinually blaming the existence of HIV and other diseases in Greece on the immigrants(in particular immigrant prostitutes) and their “dirty” habits, continually showing photosof immigrants who were homeless and/or junkies in the streets of Athens. It was at thispoint that a campaign was started against an allegedly HIV-positive young immigrantprostitute that involved placing her photos all over the media. Inevitably, this campaignexpanded to doing the same to Greek allegedly HIV-positive prostitutes.

My comrades claim that the second support for the Golden Dawn Party has come fromthe political attitude of the Left that participated in the Syntagma Square movement ofthe summer of 2011 (where hundreds often camped out and thousands gathered nightlyin the square in front of the Parliament Building). These organizations were allcommitted to a kind of nationalist Left Keynesianism. So when the source of the debtcrisis and the question of the euro were turned into “Greek” issues by the right-winggroups that appeared there, they could not be sufficiently challenged by the Left whoshared the nationalist assumptions. So the euro and the debt could not be understood asclass matters, i.e., as attacks on the working class not only of Greece, but of all of Europe.Because the crisis was understood by the mass of people as an attack on Greeks and theGreek nation, with the New Democracy and PASOK politicians being called “traitors”rather than being called what they really are – loyal servants of collective capitalism –the Golden Dawn Party rhetoric resonated much more powerfully than it should have.This, according to my Athenian comrades, set the stage for its presence in the Parliament

in 2012.

***

These are my notes from conversations with comrades in Thessaloniki and Athens inJuly of 2012. They give a sense of the thinking of some people whose judgment I trust inthe Greek extra-parliamentary area during a period when the struggle is not expressingitself in the mass confrontations between protesters and police that we have often seenbetween December 2008 and the Spring of 2012. I, of course, do not necessarily agreewith all the views presented here. My own understanding of the situation in Greece todaycan be found in the following text of talks I gave in Thessaloniki and Ionnina on July 16and 17 of this year.

3. Text of Talks in Thessaloniki and Athens

Stopping The Experiment

By George Caffentzis

Who will free the debtors from their bondage?Only debtors can free debtors from their bondage.Patterned on Brecht’s poem, “None or All”

Something is happening in Greece in the summer of 2012 that is unprecedented. In sucha small country millions of people are lying awake at night worrying about how they andtheir families will eat, stay warm, or have a hospital to go to in an emergency in thecoming year. This is due to an experiment run by officials at the highest financial andpolitical levels in Europe and at international financial agencies like the IMF and WorldBank. They are testing Greeks to determine what are:

* the lower physiological limits of wages and pension payments in a contemporaryEuropean country,

* the maximum amounts of state-owned subterranean natural resources, land, oceanterritory, the railroad system, hospitals that can be sold in the shortest amount of time,

*the maximum increases in the size and variety of taxes,

…without provoking revolution and/or civil war.

This is an experiment that our animal rights friends would call “cruel and inhuman.”They would consider it their moral duty to stop it if the experiment involved cats anddogs. Workers, especially Italian and Spanish workers, must join the Greeks in putting astop to this Europe-wide experiment, for they too are experimental subject, as theyshould know. However, though Merkel, Monti, Samaras, and Rajoy meet almost daily toplot the results of their experiment and prepare for the next step, there are no continuedjoint meetings or assemblies of workers’ trade unions, social movements and debtors’organizations with counter-plans and strategies. This lack of coordination and solidaritymakes for a decisive weakness in this struggle around debt.

In this talk on the crisis I will answer the following questions in order to thinkmore clearly about this need for coordination. For I believe that this crisis not asimple one of over-production or disproportion of sectors that is the product of thenormal functioning of the capitalist machine and that will pass, but that it is aplanned experiment (whose end is the primitive accumulation of a new type ofhuman being).

* Why is this experiment being done?

** How can it be done?

*** What can be done to stop it?

**** What if it is not stopped?

* This experiment is being run because the last century of social and class struggle inEurope has made the rate of exploitation and profit too low for capitalists in the Europeof the 21st century. The introduction of the euro a decade ago was a failed experimentaimed at increasing the profitability of European capital (i.e., capital employed inEurope). It has been a grave disappointment to capitalists. The currency manipulationand the cutting of “transaction costs” the euro allowed were not able to challenge thestructures that workers over many strikes, street demonstrations, and eventually warhave built to make their lives safer, less risky and longer (and cut the profits of theirbosses).

For European capitalism to survive this period of globalization, wages must be reduced,public property, instead of becoming common, must be privatized and whatever wealthworkers have accumulated to deal with emergencies must be taxed away to pay thenational debt that has been generated to prevent bank failures! Workers of all sorts,industrial and service, skilled and unskilled, undocumented and documented, materialand immaterial must be made to cut their demands and accept the minimum (withthanks!). This crisis experiment is a desperate move on the part of the capitalists, ofcourse, but its success depends on treating each country and working class one-at-a-timeand keeping them separated as much as possible.

** Often, when watching these “troika” summits in Brussels (where officials of the IMF,the European Commission and the European Central Bank meet) one gets a feeling thatthey are choreographed. This feeling is not mistaken, because there have been manyprevious structural adjustments, beginning in the former colonized world since the early1980s. By structural adjustment programs I mean those programs (often called “loanconditionalities”) that are imposed on governments in order to qualify for loans fromsome international financial agency. These programs usually involve the mass layoff ofgovernment workers, the privatization of public property and the cutting of governmentinvestment (health, education, social assistance) in the reproduction of the workingclass. Social scientists from the IMF and World Bank have studied a wide variety ofstructural adjustment programs that were imposed on dozens of countries in the 1980sthrough much of the 1990s. Indeed, at the end of the 1990s the experimenters decidedthat the very name “structural adjustment” was so hated by people throughout the“adjusted” world that they changed the name of the program to “poverty reduction

strategy papers” (PRSP). These “papers” were to be written by government officials ofcountries that were to receive loans from the IMF and/or World Bank. The Fund andBank were to oversee these papers and determine whether they showed how the loanswere to be used to “reduce poverty,” i.e., provide the institutions of a reliable capitalistterritory (including, of course, open tickets for military and police expenditure). Thesepapers were to create “ownership” for the…shall we still call them…structural adjustmentprograms and their neoliberal nostrums on the part of the “stakeholders” includinggovernment officials, private capitalists and “civil society”=NGOs.

For we must realize that though there have been dozens of governments that have signedoff on receiving loans from the World Bank and IMF, these governments have notnecessarily implemented the loan conditionalities, either because they genuinely wantedto, but faced enormous opposition (e.g., Saddam’s Iraq, where the veterans of theIraq-Iran War refused to accept austerity programs in the late 1980s, leading to the firstGulf War) or just the governments’ leader was interested in scamming the Fund andBank (e.g., Liberia’s Doe who brought in World Bank officials to oversee governmentaccounts while he fed them statistical “evidence” that was simply cooked by Doe’saccomplices in government agencies in order justify more loans; once the scameventually was revealed, the US government decided to support Charles Taylor in theLiberian civil war in the 1980s).

These experiments in structural adjustment require a detailed history of their own, sincethey led to the death (either directly or indirectly) of millions of people. That is right,these programs with such a clinically sounding name are murderous. Directly, thesedeaths were due to the consequences of not having subsidized basic food rations, orfreely available health-care (either curative or preventative, e.g., SAPs led to the end ofmalaria control investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to millions of additionaldeath). Indirectly, these deaths were due to civil wars that have arisen with the WorldBank’s “pro-extractivist” policies that have made the foreign investment in extractivistindustries preferred vehicles for GNP growth.

The reason why the Great Experiment is passing here in Greece, perhaps, is becauseEuropean (especially Greek) workers can’t quite believe that this is really happening tothem. For (with the exception of the widespread, but politically limited,anti-globalization movement), when the structural adjustment programs were beingapplied to African, South American and Asian peoples, European and North Americanworkers were not concerned, if indeed they took the time to notice them at all. “That wasfor the dark-skinned people,” they might have thought, assuming that such policieswould not be applied to them! That is why the present reaction to the application ofstructural adjustment programs in Europe (especially in Greece) is approached withhorror.

Indeed, I find this reaction similar to the horror that Hitler and the Nazis generated inEuropean workers. Aime Cesaire, the great communist poet and politician fromMartinique, analyzed this horror with great insight in the 1950s (see his Discourse onColonialism). He argued that this horror is based on the fact that Hitler and the Nazisapplied to Europeans tactics and ideologies that European capitalists and colonialistsnormally used against the colonized people. For example, King Leopold of Belgium’s

policies let to the death of four to six million Congolese in the late 19th century. What,besides differences in detail, can be drawn between his work-to-death camps (and Irefuse the word “genocide,” as if the problem in the Leopold’s Congo had something todo with Congolese genes!) with Auschwitz? Similar Nazi consequences can be drawn forother aspects of colonial rule that involved, for example, taking ownership of vastterritories by fiat and enclosing them after driving the indigenous population tohinterlands and mass death due to disease and starvation. What, beside difference indetail, differentiated these colonial land policies and the Nazi lebensraum policy ofclearing large areas of conquered territory in preparation for the arrival of Germanneo-peasants in the victorious post-war future?

That was the horror of Hitler, and this is the horror of Merkel: the structural adjustmentprograms that were used to attack and transform the economies and humanity inso-called underdeveloped countries in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s, has finally becomereflexive: the fellow citizens of the structural adjusters are being structurally adjusted.That is why there is so much outrage and unprecedented fear, for this is not supposed tobe happening…after all, Greeks joined the EU in order to be treated like human beings,which means unlike Africans, Latin Americans or Asians! In fact, Greeks are learningnow that the price of complicity with racist division makes it inevitable that racistbehavior will be direct at you! This being a simple application of that famous dialecticalprinciple of “What goes around, comes around.”

*** What can be done to stop the Great Experiment?

Although nationalist attempts to stop structural adjustment policies have not provedpromising in the past, the political will to intervene and stop the experiment seems at themoment to be in the hands of nationalists in Europe. There is a nationalism from theRight and one from the Left. In Greece the anti-structural adjustment Right advocatesare popularizing their effort by the tag “for Greeks only.” In practice they organize racistpogroms (especially in Athens) periodically orchestrated by the police. These right-wingnationalists (the Nazi-like Golden Dawn, in Greece) and some regionalists (like theNorthern League in Italy) appear to many, especially in the midst of widespreadunemployment, increasing poverty and massive bankruptcy of small businesses, as beingable to respond to immediate political and economic problems. Of course, we easilydismiss these fascist provocations empirically, since one cannot (with serious evidence)claim that immigrants are the source of European-wide state deficits or major bankfailures or even unemployment among Greek, Spanish or Italian citizens.

Nationalists on the Left (with a Keynesian persuasion) would argue not againstimmigration, but the lack of autonomy of the Greek government’s macro-economicpolicy as the source of the crisis. They, like the right-wing “extremists” argue for leavingthe Euro-zone, but in their case, the answer is fiscal policy that can deal withunemployment and the lack of effective demand. But such a “Keynesianism in onecountry” approach is theoretically problematic, since the Greece of the present day is notan autarkic economy situated in outer space. It would need to have outside allies bothdefensively and as supporters to face the determined efforts of the powers that be toundermine its effort at default.

Indeed, if we want to see what can actually undermine the structural adjusters is bylistening to their worst fears, and that is a debtors’ cartel. For debt repayment dependsupon isolating and making the debtor feel both morally ashamed and practicallyvulnerable. Once the debtors are united, however, they can “turn the tables” on thecreditors and liberate themselves. We can see why debtors’ solidarity is a path toliberation, because debt is not simply a way for a creditor to get rich, but in the world ofcontemporary capitalism, it is a way of controlling individuals’, societies’ andgovernments’ behavior. The whole desire of getting out of debt is not simply to havemore disposable income, but to liberate yourself from the control of creditors!

The great experience we have witnessed of a successful reaction to structural adjustmentreforms has been in South America in the last fifteen years. It had its roots in theanti-debtors’ social movements there that eventually transformed official politics in theform of the Chavez, Lula, Morales and Kirchner administrations that were able to escapethe clutches of the IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment demands, to start a newtype of social reform capitalism (that many call “socialism for the 21st century”). Thesemovements and the governments they pushed were in communication and coordinatedacross borders, often because of their indigenous composition.

The problem with this example, of course, is its statist expression and its oftenproblematic denouements, but this does not negate the immediate lesson, it is only withan international connection of workers’ movements that the power to refuse beingisolated in one’s debt can be achieved. That is why it is top priority that Greeks not beisolated and at the very least coordinate with European, especially Italian and Spanish,working class organizations.

**** What if the Grand Experiment is not stopped?

There is a tradition in the philosophy of science that sees the experiment not as anobjective vehicle to test theories, but as a way of “torturing” Nature (and Society), to useFrancis Bacon’s metaphor, to produce results desired by the experimenter. In adevelopment of this conception, Giambatista Vico noted, in an anti-Cartesian moment,that “We only know what we make.” So too we are witnessing a Great Experiment in themaking of a new neoliberal humanity through the crisis. Will the neoliberal model ofwhat it is to be a human being become definitive for the next fifty years?

A decisive defeat of working class struggles in this period will not only involve amultitude of personal pain, but a collective loss of what was once thought to be thesedimentation of workers’ struggles over the last century and a half, i.e., the end of“progress” from the proletarian perspective. A defeat in Greece will reverberate aroundthe world and undermine workers’ struggles everywhere. Marx argued that the value oflabor power had a “moral and historic element,” i.e., it was not defined by somephysiological index like calories consumed per day. Thus a defeat in preserving the valueof labor power of the dimensions we are witnessing in Greece over the last two years willhave a profoundly depreciative impact not only on wages, but also on what “value“ and“labor power” and humanity will mean across the planet. It will bring out the two-sidedaspect of the slogan, “We are all Greeks!”

Can we free each other from capital’s cages?

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