Editor's note: this article was first published by To Paron (in Greek) and is reproduced here with the permission of the author. Translation by TPPI.
The ‘age of the Memorandum’ was presented, as much by the domestic vassal-agents as the ‘troika’ and euro-priesthood, as an historic opportunity to restore the correct functioning of the state and ‘modernize’ institutions and the productive base of the country.
The Greek economic base, the institutional framework of labour relations and the general culture which dominated over the last decades was deemed by top ministers of the government of George Papandreou immediately following the 2009 elections as a later incarnation of the ‘soviet model’, which persisted while according to the same individuals the rest of the world ‘gradually integrated’ with the neoliberal norms of the market.
The state machinery was never rationalized, but dismantled and shrunk. Even the revenue services, which are of paramount importance in order to combat tax evasion, were merged and weakened… State structures in the fields of health, education, social services and institutions of justice and culture were merged and eliminated on a pan-Hellenic level. In many areas of the country, the state of public services is reminiscent of the 1950s.
The productive ‘rationalization’ had two main goals: First the destruction of small and medium business, given that 900,000 business and activities of that sort was considered outdated and unproductive. Today hundreds of thousands of businesses shut and hundreds of thousands of hero business owners and their families have been left in the wind, without pensions, without even health insurance.
The second main target concerned the ‘soviet type’ intervention of the state in the economy. The target was not theoretical, it did not arise simply from the fundamental neoliberal principles. It exclusively concerned the sell-off of public assets, the basic networks and infrastructure of the country. And this because the terms of the repayment of the debt came under English law and the country waived its fundamental right to veto the seizure of public assets and national wealth.
The political-economic framework of ‘diaploki’ [the intertwining of business, media and political power] rules the country in practice. Parliament does not legislate, but formally ‘legitimises’ decisions previously taken by the ‘troika’ and our lenders. The judiciary itself is in dire straits.
Judicial decisions, mainly of lower courts, cancel the illegal laws and the unlawful ministerial acts which directly violate personal and social rights of citizens and social groups, but at the ‘highest levels’ of judicial authority there are often reversals… The government is attempting to promote even direct transactions with the judiciary, unilaterally adopting the implementation of decisions for judges, while provocatively ignoring other sectors which are included in the same decisions…The example of the cleaning women [laid off by the Finance Ministry] is the pinnacle of the utter contempt towards judicial decisions which is expressed by the stance of the pro-memorandum coalition government.
Classical basic principles, democratic institutions, the fundamental personal, political and social rights which characterized the bourgeois-liberal democratic basis throughout almost the entire 20th century, today amount to a memory.
The middle class is collapsing together with the productive base which supported it. The right to personal property, the protection of bank deposits, labour rights, collective negotiations and contracts were abolished within four years.
The financial oligarchical structure and its political agents shaped a POSTCAPITALIST DICTATORIAL MODEL. They replaced the collective-oligarchical state of the soviet model with the financial structure and the interlinked modern economic oligarchs. They tied up, degraded and seized a large portion of revenue and the wealth produced, not only from the working class and the small and medium economic activity but from a large section of the middle class.
The parliament-based dictatorship which they imposed amounts to the historic ‘obligatory’ type of ‘democracy’ needed to promote this model. The oligarchical structure of financial power however needs an ‘ideology’ as well – a widely accepted ‘interpretation’ of the modern world.
This ‘interpretation’ is exhausted on the ‘one way street’, and on the ‘common understanding’: there is no alternative: destruction is an inevitability, the effect and result of the unrestrained ‘abuses’ and of the ‘corruption’ of citizens. The self-blame, widespread fear, insecurity, cancelling of the future amount to basic ingredients of the single-minded interpretation. There are, in any case, the ideological-propagandist mechanisms of the media to provide daily reminders to the ‘undisciplined’ and ‘anti-memorandists’.
As ‘lab rats’ we are living today the most extreme, the most autocratic form of a modern oligarchical power structure. Not only were the distortions of productive and economic structures not dealt with, not only were institutions and administrative mechanisms not rationalized, but the damage that has accumulated may be irreversible.
From that point of view, the neoliberal totalitarianism not only has nothing to envy from the ‘soviet model’ but, to the contrary, it has clearly surpassed it in practice.
Menelaos Givalos was born in Athens in 1944. He was a prominent member of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK). He is an Assistant Professor of Political Sciences at the University of Athens. He researches issues of political philosophy, sociology of education and methodologies of the sciences. He has published several books inlcuding Science, Knowledge and Method – Nisos, 2003, and Political Socialisation and the Educational Environment – Nisos, 2005). Additionally he has published studies which concern the problems of globalisation, issues of managing otherness as well as scientific approaches to questions of history and sociology which are linked to contemporary methodological problems.