Surplus Citizens

Struggle and Nationalism in the Greek Crisis

Dimitra Kotouza

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745337784
• eBook ISBN: 9781786803672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The crisis in Greece has elicited the full spectrum of responses - from optimism for a left parliamentary politics inspired by Syriza's electoral victory, to pessimism about the intransigence of the EU and calls for the reinstatement of full national sovereignty in Europe. In Surplus Citizens, Dimitra Kotouza questions the terms of the debate by demonstrating how the national framing of social contestation posed obstacles to transformative collective action, but also how this framing has been challenged. Analysing the increasing superfluousness of subordinate classes in Greece as part of a global phenomenon with racialised and gendered dimensions, the book interrogates the strengths, contradictions and limits of collective action and identity in the crisis, from the movement of the squares and neighbourhood assemblies, to new forms of labour activism, environmental struggles, immigrant protests, anti-fascism and pro-refugee activism. Arguing against the strategic fixation on unified identities and pointing instead to the transformative potential of internal dispute within movements, Surplus Citizens highlights the relevance of a discussion of Greece to collective action beyond it, as we continue to traverse a global financial crisis that has provoked conflicts over nationalism, immigration and the rise of neo-fascism.

PART I

Histories: Undead and Invisible Conflicts, Transformations, Crisis

1

The Making of Greek Capitalism through Race, Gender and Class

The phrase ‘undead conflicts’ in Greece typically evokes the haunting of political culture by collective traumas of the Axis occupation, the civil war and the colonels’ dictatorship. After having been seemingly laid to rest between the 1980s and 2008, these memories were reawakened in the crisis, by both the role of Germany and the intense polarisation between right and left. Given these associations, the title’s prioritisation of race and gender may seem incongruous. Yet race and gender invisibly also haunt the history of class and political struggle in Greece, along with political discourses, experiences and imaginaries in the crisis. The ‘return’ and political mobilisation of war traumas staged a conflict over competing nationalisms (German and Greek, left and right), which obscured from view, both in historical narrative and in narratives of the present, the racialised, gendered and class dimensions of these conflicts. This chapter aims to reorient our vision towards these dimensions.

‘Race’ is first in order, because the most invisible. Any literature review of the Greek social sciences will discover minimal mention of its role in the construction of ‘Greece’ and Greek national identity, let alone in the current crisis. Even though Greek ‘whiteness’ is not racialised in a straightforward way, the epistemic impact of this ambiguity is profound. It affects not only who is automatically taken to belong to national and class history, but also the seemingly objective economic question of Greece’s place within global capitalism. The responses are typically as racialised as the concept of ‘capitalist development’ itself.

Relations of race and their inter-articulation with nationalism are little engaged with by the Greek left. We are usually presented with the opposition between racist far-right nationalisms and noble, anti-racist left-wing nationalisms, the latter essential for ‘hegemonizing the very concept of “the people” that constitute the living substance of the nation to transform it into an inclusive, multiracial, multicultural, welcoming, and sovereign body politic’.¹ The vision turns away from how national unity, in the history of left strategy as well, silenced class antagonisms at critical moments, and has been founded on the hegemonic figure of the Greek man.

‘Gender’ is the second least visible, but an essential ‘filter’ for the circumscription of what nation, class, labour, citizenship, democracy, security and ‘exit from crisis’ might mean in the current context. This is because, if the history of class struggle fails to register gendered unpaid labour, if the fraternal meanings of democracy and nation are taken for granted, then we fail to imagine the exit from crisis as anything other than immunising the national-fraternal-patriarchal-class community from internal and external threats. It is unsurprising that the politics of securing the domestic (understood in both its meanings as nation and household) were successfully appropriated by the far right during the crisis.²

Finally, class: the concept in whose place the term ‘popular’ often stands nonchalantly. I ask what may be revealed if we disentangle class from the popular, that is, from nation, while avoiding assumptions about the political subjectivity of different types of workers, peasants or small business owners, to consider how different class alliances played a role in significant historical moments.

Greek political culture and polity has been historically constituted by these three dimensions, located within international and intra-European hierarchies.

Capitalist Development, Eurocentrism, Race

Within Greek Marxist historiography, the debate of how Greece’s capitalism relates to that of Western Europe is far from resolved. Two polarised positions have persisted in the past three decades. The first, most traditional and dominant position argues that Greece’s capitalism, and Greece as a nation-state, has always been in a relation of dependency on the imperialist capitalisms of the West, a relation that has caused and reproduced Greece’s underdevelopment. This has been the official position of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and of many Marxist academics,³ but it is a view that also draws on the long history of theories of imperialism and dependency that use the centre–periphery model, from Luxemburg to Wallerstein.⁴ The second perspective minimises the different characteristics and differential timing of the development of the productive forces in Greece and insists on a conception of class struggle that remains within the boundaries of every ‘social formation’.⁵ The political debate behind this polarisation is one between the nationalist anti-imperialism of traditional Greek communism and an anti-nationalist critique that emphasises the power of Greek capital over the domestic working class, as well as its expansion in the Balkans and the Mediterranean.

The peculiarities of class structure in the country are similarly unresolved, entangled as they are in political debates, many of which concern the restructuring under way since 2009. Theoretical models of dependency tend to present Greek capitalism as suffering from underdevelopment and a weak bourgeoisie that is unable to drive development forward, because of ‘pre-capitalist’, ‘patrimonial’ and ‘clientelist’ forms of government,⁶ as well as because of its ‘dependency’ on foreign capital. Underdevelopment is also attributed to strong state intervention in the economy and to an ‘extensive’ rather than ‘intensive’ mode of development that has tended to spawn a large number of small capitals instead of a few large ones.⁷ An alternative view is given by the work of Milios,⁸ which places more emphasis on the internal class struggle within the country. Still, even Milios and Sotiropoulos refrain from doing away with oppositions between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ social formations that are taken to contain ‘pre-capitalist modes of production’.⁹

These analyses are unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. First, they remain within ontologies of social relations between entities that are defined by the boundaries of states or national communities as if these are transhistorically given. Key power relationships either take place between states or between classes within states, and it becomes impossible to see how, for example, class conflict can transcend state boundaries in forms other than the model of a national struggle against imperial domination. Second, both accounts understand capitalism within a linear Western European model of development as the norm, and as the measure against which other economies are compared. Third, and this is especially true of mainstream Greek anti-imperialism, they fail to reflect upon the cultural and racialised dimensions of international hierarchies, and thus reproduce orientalist modernisation discourses of ‘clientelism’, ‘corruption’ and ‘patrimony’. These weaknesses carry implications not only for the analysis of class relations in the region, but also for understanding their racialised and gendered dimensions, which are often invisible or at least underexplored in these accounts.

The problem with a developmentalist perspective has long been highlighted by postcolonial critics. Despite many episodes of conflict between Marxist and postcolonial thinkers,¹⁰ authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Massimiliano Tomba have worked on combining the critical insights of Marxism and postcolonial critique. Drawing upon Ernst Bloch’s conception of non-simultaneity, they emphasise the different coexisting temporalities of capitalism,¹¹ beyond a Eurocentric progressivist teleology that periodises capitalism on the basis of concepts of absolute and relative surplus value or formal and real subsumption.¹² Tomba’s work on multiple temporalities shows that capitalism is compatible with different forms of labour, including (racialised) slavery and (gendered) non-waged labour.¹³ These do not merely co-exist with one another, but are reciprocally implicated within networks of trade and relations of competition that establish a variety of exploitative forms. ‘Exceptions’ and differentials in the forms of exploitation are constitutive of capitalist competition and the international hierarchy of the division of labour: global capitalism by definition cannot be homogeneous. Tomba quotes George Caffentzis’ argument that ‘“new enclosures” in the countryside must accompany the rise of “automatic processes” in industry, the computer requires the sweat shop, and the cyborg’s existence is premised on the slave’.¹⁴ These ‘exceptions’, such as the contemporary existence of slavery, pockets of subsistence agriculture and workshops using antiquated technologies are not peripheral to the dynamic of capitalist expansion but are necessary parts of it.

Yet, the labour of developing a viewpoint beyond Eurocentrism without magnifying cultural difference in a way that reproduces orientalist imaginings can be a treacherous task. Chakrabarty promotes a ‘subaltern historiography’ against ‘universalist narratives of capital’, which assume that ‘capitalism necessarily brings bourgeois relations of power to a position of hegemony’.¹⁵ He is interested in how ‘non-rational’ political and cultural forms survive in global capitalism, arguing that there is a living experience, a ‘history 2’, a ‘politics of human belonging and diversity’ that coexists with capital’s logic but is not subsumed by it. This ‘history 2’ of lived experience exists within the time of capital but disrupts its unity. Thus, Chakrabarty criticises as ‘historicist’ E. P. Thompson’s argument that time-discipline would be internalised in the ‘developing world’ sooner or later.¹⁶ Indeed, the ‘protestant work ethic’ may be best understood as a culturally and historically specific phenomenon and not as the universal cultural essence of capitalism worldwide. But we should also be wary of repurposing orientalist stereotypes of ‘laziness’ as instances of anti-capitalist resistance in the peripheries. The notion of an unsubsumed cultural-temporal experience, which can even be thought of as a site of resistance, can potentially conceal the power relations at play. As we will see in the case of Greek workers in the current crisis, the charge of a culture of ‘laziness’ preceded the act of resistance, and was not used to cultivate a work ethic, but, more materially, to forcibly impose time-discipline through workforce rationalisation, flexibilisation and wage cuts. In turn, the resistance itself often adopted the logic of hard work, through the creation of co-operative self-employment structures, in which the self-imposition and internalisation of time-discipline is required for market survival. It is important to note that the imposition of time-discipline can be far more rigorous under conditions where absolute surplus value has to be extracted in small non-industrialised businesses and workshops, particularly under conditions of high u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Squares and Frontiers
• Part I Histories: Undead and Invisible Conflicts, Transformations, Crisis
• Part II Becoming Surplus: Struggle and Its Limits
• Part III Nationalism, Biopolitics and Struggle at the Borders
• Conclusion
• Index