Some PIIGS Are More Equal than Others

by Augustine Zenakos

As we are bracing ourselves for another strike by the Unions of Civil Servants, tomorrow (in one of what will undoubtedly be a series of protests that will follow the Greek Prime Minister’s announcement of measures for the economy), I begin to realize there is a peculiar kind of reaction being shaped: though I have no statistical data and thus no way of knowing how widespread it really is, looking at blogs and social media, but also the mainstream Press, one gets the impression there are a lot of people out there that are losing their patience with the protesters.

These reactions to the protests usually take the form of quite plain common sense analysis: “These people [i.e. farmers, public sector employees, union members etc] have been milking the state for ages. I am tired of being the only one who works for a living. They are used to privileges that are unfair, simply because their local MP wanted to do favors to their trade union. We should have known there would be a time when corruption, clientelism, and false data would catch up with us. The EU and the foreign Press are right. We are the ones that messed up and we have to pay for it. We can’t expect the German taxpayer to bail us out. These people better assume their responsibilities.” And so on.

I have to say I feel for those that react in this way. We have something in common. For example, when my colleagues and I started to organize exhibitions, one of the first issues we came up against was clientelism in the Ministry of Culture. We decided that we had to do things in a different way, and built the first large scale non-profit visual arts periodic exhibition in the country, funded mainly through private sources. Let me not act like a saint here, the reason for this might not have been so much our moral stature – let alone our belief in ‘neoliberalism’ or the free market, as we have often been accused –, but our pragmatism: we did not have the contacts, anyway, in order to benefit from the state-sponsored feast. So, we did something else, until things shifted a little bit, edged on by the General Secretary of the Culture Ministry, who, in an incident one never tires of relating, reacted to the publication of a video with him getting a blow-job by one of his employees, by jumping out of a fourth floor window. (He lived, by the way.) Things shifting meant there was a temporary difficulty in taking care of the usual clients, and we finally managed to get some funding – about 12% of our budget – but the point remains: we were never asking for a favor, we were administering a serious endeavor that under every rule should have got the Ministry’s support, but didn’t, because we didn’t know the way to go about it. (I will not bore you with the maze of bureaucratic nonsense and the Kafkaesque series of appointments with different ministry officials that we have had to endure over the five years of our previous government, only to later find out about a whole list of NGOs, run by various ministers’ acquaintances, that got funding in the millions.)

So, based on personal experience, I have every reason to abhor the Greek state’s way of doing things, and to sympathize with what seems to be a rising reaction against those interest groups that oppose any and every corrective measure.

I do think, however, it is a rather shallow – though justifiable – reaction. I would argue it is in fact not a reaction based on a true political outlook, but rather a process of reverse aesthetisization, a stereotyping of the protesters into a convenient but arbitrary whole that encompasses everything that bothers us about ‘old Greece’ and the way it appears: discourteous, insular, uncultivated, slow, unglamorous, provincial – ‘analog’ in a digital age, one would be tempted to say. I would argue that our issue is mostly an aesthetic one. In being aesthetic it can, of course, form a political space, and in a way it is doing so, though without a serious questioning of what this space is becoming.

It stands to reason, though again it is an impression lacking data, that the ones reacting are mostly young or middle-aged professionals, fairly highly educated. They mainly work in areas such as digital technologies, economics, sciences, the Media, communication, or culture – ‘exotic’’ lines of work for the Greek middle class, such as it was, up to ten or fifteen years ago, and even today to some extent. Some of them live and work abroad, and those that live in Greece feel like they are here by choice: getting fed up and moving away is always an option. They have traveled and have seen different places, and they speak at least one foreign language fluently. They feel comfortable with other nationalities, and are often familiar with other countries’ idioms, history and sense of humor. In short, they take pride in being self-sufficient, productive, educated and cosmopolitan. And they feel that the country they come from has embarrassed them for way too long. They know they don’t deserve to be PIIGS, and they resent being in this position.

It is no wonder, then, that in the protesters they see everything they detest: the antiquated, paradoxical public services; the surviving state monopolies; the over-subsidized farmers who block the roads; the civil servants who give them attitude behind a glass panel, while taking off every day at 13.30; the people who make a career out of trade unionism, before they move on to running for MP; the tax officials who will take a bribe in order not to hassle you. And all this, dressed up in the unyielding, strange language of the Greek Communist Party and the populist trade unions that sounds like something that should be played on a gramophone. All this just looks bad, sounds bad, feels bad. It may seem cruel, but anyone who has spent a little time with a homeless person might get a sense of what this is like: you might feel for the homeless in an abstract sense, but once they start breathing in your face, you just want to go home.

Yet, there is a great danger in the way this reaction to the protests is taking shape. Its aesthetic constitution leaves it without a substantial political backbone. As a result, what is in truth an emotional reaction, becomes usurped by an ideology, that of open markets, abstract human rights, ‘individual’ responsibility, simplistic cosmopolitanism, and increasing biopolitical control. Common sense becomes a mask for what is essentially a programme that purposefully obscures the differences between state and society, economy and prosperity, country and people, models and bare bodies.

The fact is that the people I am describing, to whom I confess I belong, are being tricked by their relative social superiority into an unholy pact; they are being in effect flattered into submission. In reality, the distance that separates them from the arbiters of economic orthodoxy in Europe is far greater than the one that separates them from the protesters. The protesters may be wearing the wrong clothes, using the wrong words, and they may have a lot of bad habits. And some of them are without a doubt liars and manipulators. But a lot of them do suffer. This is not a lie. And nobody has convinced us that anything being done will alleviate their suffering. Nobody is telling them anything else but to shut up and suffer.

In the words of a blogger I often read: “The EU isn’t attacking Greece, or neglecting Greece, as Stiglitz claims. Greek capital will do well out of this. It will benefit from suppressed wages, will probably make a tidy profit from sold public assets, and will enjoy the continued access to Balkan and Eastern European labour markets that membership of the EU brings. It’s a not an attack on Greece. It’s a class war.”

Deeply disappointed as I am with the contemporary Greek Left, I would personally have avoided the expression ‘class war’ – quite often, I find, it creates more hassle than I need. But seeing it written, I can’t help thinking it is right. And the Left – for all its poor taste, its antique ways, its unfortunate language and sad strategic choices – is right, too.