The Global Life of Austerity: Comparing Beyond Europe 9781785338717

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The Global Life of Austerity

Critical Interventions: A Forum for Social Analysis General Editor: Bruce Kapferer Volume 1 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AND GLOBAL CRISIS Critical Perspectives Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 2 GLOBALIZATION Critical Issues Edited by Allen Chun Volume 3 CORPORATE SCANDAL Global Corporatism against Society Edited by John Gledhill Volume 4 EXPERT KNOWLEDGE First World Peoples, Consultancy, and Anthropology Edited by Barry Morris and Rohan Bastin Volume 5 STATE, SOVEREIGNTY, WAR Civil Violence in Emerging Global Realities Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 6 THE RETREAT OF THE SOCIAL The Rise and Rise of Reductionism Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 7 OLIGARCHS AND OLIGOPOLIES New Formations of Global Power Edited by Bruce Kapferer Volume 8 NATIONALISM’S BLOODY TERRAIN Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition Edited by George Baca Volume 9 Identifying with freedom Indonesia after Suharto Edited by Tony Day

Volume 10 THE GLOBAL IDEA OF ‘THE COMMONS’ Edited by Donald M. Nonini Volume 11 Security and Development Edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie Volume 12 MIGRATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND TRANSNATIONALIZATION A Critical Stance Edited by Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist Volume 13 War, Technology, Anthropology Edited by Koen Stroeken Volume 14 ARAB SPRING Uprisings, Powers, Interventions Edited by Kjetil Fosshagen Volume 15 THE EVENT OF CHARLIE HEBDO Imaginaries of Freedom and Control Edited by Alessandro Zagato Volume 16 moral anthropology A Critique Edited by Bruce Kapferer and Marina Gold Volume 17 THE GLOBAL LIFE OF AUSTERITY Comparing Beyond Europe Edited by Theodoros Rakopoulos

The Global Life of Austerity Comparing Beyond Europe

( Edited by

Theodoros Rakopoulos

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Paperback edition published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Berghahn Books All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any infor­ mation storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78533-870-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-78533-871-7 ebook

Contents Introduction: Austerity, Measured Theodoros Rakopoulos 1 Austerity: An Economy of Words? Keith Hart 17 Performing Austerity: Greece’s Debt Crisis and European Integration Cris Shore and Sally Raudon 32 Austerity, Socialism, and the Capitalist Anti-Market Patrick Neveling 48 Debt, Vultures, and Austerity in Argentina Victoria Goddard 60 Austerity Wars: The Crisis of Financialization and the Struggle for Democracy Jaime Palomera 74

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On Austerity and Structural Adjustment: Continuity and Difference across Space and Time Theodore Powers 91 Austerity in Portugal: The ‘Middle-Classification’ of the Public Space, Migration, and the Silences of History José Mapril and Ruy Llera Blanes 103 (De)stabilizing the European Austerity Debate: Lessons from Post-crisis South Korea Elisabeth Schober 115 Austerity and ‘the Discipline of Historical Context’ Don Kalb 130

Introduction Austerity, Measured

( Theodoros Rakopoulos

This volume aims to show that austerity is not an isolated phenomenon, a specific instance situated in recent events in Europe. On the contrary, the book argues that structural adjustment policies, an agenda that goes back quite some time, have served as a backdrop to the currently generalized austerity configuration. Scrutinizing such policies teaches us that austerity has a historical depth and geographical spread that are vaster than what is commonly perceived. Indeed, how ‘European’ a term is this ‘dangerous idea’ (Blyth 2013)? In order to appreciate the phenomenon as it has been recently developing in European settings, we need to attempt comparisons with structural adjustment, the global normative order of capitalism.1 This aim is served by the anthropological make-up of this volume: ethnographic analyses focusing on places in and outside Europe show the broader makings of austerity. The chapters, therefore, explore the term beyond its current political and intellectual confines. Anthropology is perfectly equipped to examine this global life of austerity via its comparative approach, a sometimes forgotten premise of the discipline. It is important to investigate how austerity events ethnographically

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unravel and to compare how cases elsewhere have preceded, foregrounded, or even ‘inspired’ European austerity measures. Specifically, the book puts forward an intensely comparative endeavor, exploring different cases where austerity policies, broadly defined, have been applied. By austerity policies I mean an agenda that aims to hit not only the public sector but the public sphere at large. It is expressed in a series of cuts to sectors of the economy that benefit the public at large—education, health, and similar facets of a state’s budget. Austerity measures affect social cohesion, exacerbating inequalities. What is more, austerity is a time mechanism, as Bear (2015) also suggests, that adjusts the workings of the social—for instance, the rhythms of labor—according to strict deadlines of fiscal obedience. In that process, austerity measures measure social life, adjusting it in order to satisfy the payments of debt. Working toward paying debt installments becomes a goal for all members of society. Austerity is, therefore, a way in which society at large, regardless of stratifications or culpability, is called on to pay an indebted state and/or banking system. As state debt (or sovereign debt) is itself the outcome of states shouldering investment banks’ mishaps, austerity works as a form of financialization of everyday life. I thus perceive austerity in the broad sense, as a policy dogma that aims to change social formations and re-evaluate the worth of people’s lives. Such an approach allows us to situate the phenomenon in a broader historical and geographical context, as it allows for comparative work across different ethnographic instances. The contributors of this volume share, in their common endeavor, an epistemological position that is in line with the anthropological premise to think beyond Eurocentric schemes of reference. Austerity has been heatedly debated in recent years because governance regimes in (mainly) Western Europe

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and North America prescribed it as an antidote to the global economic crisis of late 2008, now one decade in the making. In the wake of that crisis, and particularly of what became a series of sovereign debt crises, especially in Southern Europe, austerity became the policy of choice to tackle what policy makers thought was irresponsible spending. This was no novelty: in fact, Africa, Latin America, and Asia had experienced austerity long before the IMF wave reached European shores. Just like in those places, adjustment has taken a toll on European economies. Austere, frugal budget plans have contributed to deepening crisis in the conventional sense of the term—unemployment and economic stagflation, accompanied by social desperation. Writing about austerity (Muehlebach 2016), exploring the potentials it allows (Papataxiarchis 2016), and even suggesting alternatives to it (Bear and Knight 2017) have been a focus for anthropologists in recent years. However, little has been written regarding how we come to place ‘it’ in the world, and why anthropology provides an excellent vantage point to scrutinize austerity’s real effects in space and time. The main contribution of this volume is to examine precisely what this location work—putting austerity in its broader context—implies. In practice, we postulate that austerity is located in more places than usually perceived. It is a global phenomenon that has taken a specific formation in the current Southern European case (Rakopoulos 2019), but cannot be associated only with places like Greece. To appreciate it, there is a need to situate it in a more comprehensive scheme of things, including a more encompassing attention to debates about debt (see Peebles 2010). For this reason, I see austerity not as a break from but as continuity with its preceding conditions, a point that radically differentiates this volume from earlier anthropological takes on the matter. For instance, when introducing a collection on austerity that draws from Southern European

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ethnographic material, Knight and Stewart (2016: 8) discuss how crisis can “bend time.” The authors define austerity thus: “Austerity differs from endemic underdevelopment and poverty, in that it applies to situations where societies or individuals that formerly enjoyed a higher standard of consumption must now make do with less. It plunges societies into the converse of counterfactual history” (ibid.: 2). The collection thus aims to show how people in Southern Europe “are making sense of economic turmoil” (ibid.: 13). The authors propose that austerity brings forward “dynamics of reversal” (ibid.: 2) concerning perceptions of time, due to the breach it brings to the lives of people. For Greece, Knight (2015: 2–3) notes how “nearly three decades of prosperity were quite suddenly replaced by austerity and perpetual crisis.” Laura Bear (2015) similarly compares the nationalist welfare imaginary of an India of the past with a radical shift brought about by austerity. While useful, some of these and other, similar analyses seem to emphasize historical breach partly because they report on subjects who enjoyed stable employment. However, in ‘pre-austerity times’, this material condition was representative of only a fragment of the population almost everywhere. In Greece during the 2000s, for example, instead of ‘exotic’ holidays in the Maldives or Mauritius, described as a routine consumption trend (Knight 2015: 1–2, 35, 157–158), precariousness, unemployment, and the informal economy reigned supreme. In fact, institutional precarity was a structural condition in Europe long before austerity settled in (see Peacock 2016). Access to conspicuous consumption was at any rate rare and remained a question of class. During years of fieldwork among people of working-class and lower-middle-class environments in urban Greece, I met no one who thought of traveling to the Maldives or Mauritius during the time of ‘prosperity’. The problem here becomes the social strata

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that one focuses on and the extent to which research chooses to reflect the middle class’s ascribed monopoly on enunciation (see Mapril and Blanes, this volume). Even if austerity takes middle classes by surprise, it implies continuity and intensification instead of a breach with the past. In Greece alone, during and alongside the ‘growth’ of the 2004 Olympic Games, there lived a multitude of underemployed young people, the ‘generation of the 700 [per month]’ (cf. Palomera, this volume). Austerity did not change things: it maintained the domestic order of stratification and deepened the problems of the precariat—now a ‘generation of the 400 euros’. Inequality soared because repaying the sovereign debt became the sole focus of political and administrative activity. The whole of society was called on to participate in the repayment, regardless of differing degrees of capacity to withstand cuts and taxation. Under the pressure of market jargon, the semiotic field concerning the term ‘austerity’ has been narrowed in ways that cannot fully convey the meaning of the concept. The aim of anthropological inquiry thus becomes to shed light on the obfuscated lexicon of austerity. This light is informed by the concerns of people living under austerity, current or erstwhile. As recounted by Keith Hart and Elisabeth Schober (this volume), both Britain in the 1950s and Korea in the 1990s share a past and a present of austerity policies. Austerity is thus a thing of the past as well as a certain legacy that shapes contemporary policies across the world. The volume therefore surveys what had been happening before austerity got the world’s attention. “We did not call it austerity back then,” notes Hart in his chapter on post-war Britain. The comparative effort here entails bringing together different sites that lived through austerity measures avant la lettre, before it became known as ‘austerity’. The moniker under which cutbacks in the

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public sector were usually known was ‘structural adjustment’, or simply ‘adjustment’.2 In light of this, I would define austerity as a form of structural adjustment that is fiscally concerned. It has been developing recently within a monetary and financial context—the Eurozone—that does not allow Keynesian alternatives. Austerity thrives precisely in the naturalization of numbers, that ‘economy of words’ (Holmes 2013). The pundits of austerity present it as morally neutral, as a remedy for fiscal malaise, to use medical terms (see also Powers, this volume). Despite the fact that the remedy is proven to be deleterious, it keeps on being prescribed. The issue here is the construction of economy as a naturalized phenomenon that is performatively created through a particular moral normativity. This is what Don Kalb’s discussion of “lies and silences” and Keith Hart’s historical examination of the meanings of the “need for fiscal discipline” show in this volume. The definition of austerity as a fiscally concerned adjustment that affects the developed world calls for investigating what ‘adjusting’ means as well as the model that societies are adjusting themselves toward. In that regard, we are looking at previous and parallel processes of structural adjustment, both in and outside of Europe, in order to make better sense of austerity anthropologically. In doing so, the volume’s chapters explore painful processes of class domination, as adjusting applies a uniform understanding of economy across diverse socio-cultural cases.

‘Taking the Bullet’: The Volume’s Chapters While it is significant to curve a specific analytical lens attentive to changes that austerity brings about, it is also important to pay attention to the capacity of austerity to

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prevent change. In this volume, Patrick Neveling argues that austerity is an enduring ‘event’ that does not suspend but actually maintains order. It thus should not be seen as an exceptional breaking point, but rather in a continuum with ongoing global processes that have been present long before 2008 or 2010. Few Mauritian interlocutors seem to abide by the notion of rupture from a historical linearity of exploitation, as they have lived through structural adjustment since the dawn of post-colonial times. Neveling shows that we need to understand domestic political circumstances as well as foreign financial institutions’ directives of austerity in the historical scale of establishing Mauritius as an independent, fragile island nation. He is joined in this observation by the insights of Schober, Powers, and Mapril and Blanes (this volume). Commenting on our inability to account for austerity’s global formations, Neveling concludes that “anthropology’s understanding of austerity is closely related to the history of a given place.” In the Mauritian case, this means being reminded of how world-making transnational institutions (World Bank, IMF) have founded and imposed structural adjustment in the post-colony. Currently, austerity is a normative plan to extend structural adjustment to areas previously immune from the reach of financial institutions. Much of the discussion on austerity that centers on Europe’s middle classes seems to understand the phenomenon as an unprecedented attack on these newly vulnerable people. As part of this process, terms that would normally be of analytical value are turned on their head. This is a process of reshuffling values and hijacking the moral normativity of ordinary people. As Kalb and Chris Shore and Sally Raudon show, it happened in Northern Europe with the demonization of Southerners, broadly defined. In Portugal, according to José Mapril and Ruy Llera Blanes, this process implied that a specific segment of the

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population, the middle class, was allowed the possibility of ‘enunciation’, of representing society at large. This is a discursive formation of austerity, indicative of how both austerity and objections against it are constructed as part of a process of silencing. Instituting precarity in the lives of workers has been a conscious strategy underlying many countries’ ascension into the European Union, including Iberia. Restructuring economies through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and deindustrialization impacted the lives of peasants, workers, and migrants, who experienced the staggering austerity processes a whole generation before the discussion on middle-class hardship entered the public sphere as ‘austerity’. Mapril and Blanes challenge the main perception of austerity and crisis as ruptures, revealing the longue durée of a silent austerity process that existed long before fiscal discipline was introduced in the early 2010s in Southern Europe. The authors move away from a trope in the literature, where austerity is understood as an adversity affecting mainly the middle classes. Such discourse that confuses rather than explicates recalls what Marx noted on ideology. Kalb uses a Marxian lens to discuss this ‘economy of words’, a term introduced by Douglas Holmes (2013). Kalb argues that using austerity as a remedy for crisis in Europe distorts the real workings of the world’s political economy. The situation indeed constitutes what Blyth (2013: 57), using Marxian wordplay, calls the “ordoliberalism” of the “German ideology.” This normative liberalism, with its technocratic language, is pervasive in the hearts and minds of Europeans (ibid.: 138–139; see also Muehlebach 2016: 12; cf. Hart, this volume). According to Kalb, the Holmesian ‘economy of words’ approach is inadequate. Holmes’s usage of ‘the public’ overestimates the actual inclusiveness of the term, neglecting austerity’s main victim: the social majority. Moreover, his approach to money does not appreciate its

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capitalist aspect as “limited public currency.” Kalb calls for attention to be paid to class politics and to the “historical context” where the social is caught in a web of carefully crafted lies, just as Mapril and Blanes call for such scrutiny ethnographically. In Kalb’s terms, “austerity luxuriates in (self-)deception” as it obfuscates “blatant class politics.” Jaime Palomera contends that this situation often reflects new grassroots politics becoming institutionalized, as occurred with the Podemos, a Spanish political party. Accounting for the politics of the precariatized middle classes, Palomera analyzes austerity as a regime that hit those who were once privileged. However, he also places austerity in broader settings, according to the role of historical contextualization that Kalb reserves for anthropology. In the Spanish case, this role implies a concern with the process of class formation in turbulent times, in the Thompsonian sense. If by class formation we mean a capacity to defend collective interests on a mid- to long-term basis, the picture gets complicated. The incipient formation of class sentiment in Spain was co-opted by traditional party politics. This had to do with the tension in solidifying a grassroots movement while building a party at the same time. What is more, this loose electoralpolitical alliance reflects precisely the post-class formation of discontent that austerity brought about. The dominant vocabulary avoids explicit class categories; instead, those that prevail are ambiguous, including ‘common’, ‘decent’, ‘normal’ people versus ‘elites’ or ‘corruption’. This ideological manipulation seems to win over many Europeans in general, as Shore and Raudon argue for the Greek case. The authors show how austerity is meant to be performed from below: it is a normative audit culture (Strathern 2000), and those imposing it expect that it must be lived up to. Shore and Raudon examine the narrative construction of the Greek crisis, specifically exploring the

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ways in which EU policy makers framed and represented the ‘Greek problem’ and its solution. They argue that austerity undermines the fabric of Greek democracy and society by “turning the state of ‘crisis’ into the ‘new normal’” (cf. Eriksen 2016), and that it also redefines “the very telos of European integration.” After all, austerity pundits are now established at the heart of a Eurocratic life model (see also Shore 2012). This suggests a shift from an ideal of a European Union based on solidarity, peace, and cohesion to the ideology of austerity, which accelerates social fragmentation and produces an increasingly disunited, unequal, and conflict-ridden Europe. The solidifying element of such ideology is the euro, a currency similar to the gold standard (Blyth 2013: 87). Keith Hart recalls how he learned that money is a rationing device long before he started studying it. His chapter reminds us of another type of austerity in a different era, where solidarity and “shared sacrifice” were Britain’s social glue: “Austerity then did not mean cutting levels of private and public expenditure, but sharing deprivation on an egalitarian basis.” He thus provides the longue durée history of the idea, coupled with a concern about money and the lack thereof (see also Hart 2017). Hart’s take on Holmes’s study of central banking also argues for demystifying the politics of austerity discourse. This is not a matter of a language-centered approach, but of a historical anthropology of the power regime behind austere budget choices. Hart wonders how tenable the European Central Bank’s crafting of austerity measures can be: “The ‘economy of words’ sometimes works, usually on a temporary basis … Which interests shaped [ECB President Mario Draghi’s] policy and why? A cultural analysis cannot provide answers.” This observation, like Shore and Raudon’s, questions the phenomenon’s moralization. Austerity not only passes as necessary, but masquerades as virtuous.

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Theodore Powers helps us to further question sitespecific austerity critiques, this time in South Africa. In his chapter, the volume is again making the case that the crisis in Greece should not be seen as an isolated event. Studying the spread of infectious disease begs for comparison with regions that do not have a historically nested welfare state. However, Powers’s medical anthropology is not making unsubstantiated claims in its comparative approach: his chapter reminds us of the limitations of certain comparative attempts. The uneven development in public investment in health between the Global North and the post-colonial Global South hinders research: we simply do not have enough hard data for the post-colony to measure how structural adjustment affected epidemic diseases and the public health catastrophes that most African countries go through. This applies for Powers’s own region of ethnographic engagement, South Africa­—a country organized on statistical precision that is facing an HIV/AIDS/TB epidemic. Powers critically engages with comparison while analyzing the austerity–structural adjustment nexus. On that note, Victoria Goddard looks at the formation of ajuste (an Argentinian adjustment program) as a phenomenon in an indebted state outside the European context. The export-oriented Argentina took a different path from its European counterparts. Its Kirchner administration, in line with other Mercosur nations,3 pursued redistributive policies for consecutive years. However, due to its extractive and agricultural economy, the country was vulnerable to commodity slumps, and the peso was susceptible to deflation. Like Kalb, Goddard analyzes sovereignty contraposed to the interests of financial capital. Sovereignty here is about defending the people’s livelihoods. As Goddard reports from the streets of Buenos Aires, the moral obligations entailed in any debt were central to the public

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discussion. When “vulture funds” became an issue, creditors were exposed for immoral conduct. Unlike the case in Western Europe and the UK, where moral obligation sided with the creditors (cf. Graeber 2009), here we have an interesting reversal of the blame game—this time with a clear idea that sovereignty is meant to protect livelihoods. This reminds us, for instance, of the way in which Iceland addressed its crisis, acknowledging the immoral conduct of the bankers involved (Durrenberger and Palsson 2015). However, some crises are used as an example for European adjustment. Elisabeth Schober’s chapter views the austerity condition through the lens of worker desperation after South Korea went through IMF adjusting in the 1990s. A few years before the crisis, Asian “tiger economies” were “still being hailed as the models of how rapid economic development is to be done.” During the 1997 crunch, however, these same countries were “recast as prime examples of crony capitalism.” This is therefore a case in which the process of constructing austerity in Europe was shaped by earlier examples from elsewhere. Similarly to Southern Europeans, who are currently subjected to moralizing claims about their putative laziness, East Asian populations were told during the wake of that earlier crisis that the downturn was essentially “of their own making.” In the recent round of austerity affecting Europe, South Korea would come to play a role in public debates, with the image of obedient Koreans who ‘took the bullet’ of austerity in the 1990s being used to discipline European workers. Schober shows how phrases like ‘taking the bullet’, ‘no gain without pain’, and ‘burden sharing’ became paradigms for Western commentators looking to East Asia for answers to the Eurozone crisis. As she sees it, these pundits were “inadvertently spot on in their curious choice of words.” Schober uses the Korean labor activist paradigm to offer an ethnographic diagnostic of

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austerity-related moralizing discourses, but also of ways in which people resisted these developments. The goal of this volume is to help readers appreciate the long history of austerity’s ‘economy of words’. Rather than a quintessentially Western phenomenon, linked to the Eurozone crisis, austerity has a historical trajectory (see also Susser 2014), and over the course of recent history it has interacted with significantly larger geographical areas. We need to consider people, time, and place (anthropology, history, and geography) when thinking about austerity in relation to the economic crisis of late 2008, as this is a recent episode in a longer story and a specific instance within a wider geography. I argue that in order to understand austerity, we should pay attention to the broader contexts that it expresses and to which it belongs. These contexts are broad in both temporal and spatial terms. European austerity is maintaining previous regimes of precarity and cutbacks and is adapting measures applied elsewhere in the world under structural adjustment programs. The enduring event of austerity stems from the ways in which structural adjustment has been established. In particular, the ways in which ‘adjustment’ has become moralized globally have set up a framework for the construction and acceptance of austerity. The larger narrative of adjustment takes the form of ‘austerity measures’ in the case of the European sovereign debt crisis. Austerity’s current dominance is part of an older narrative. As Hart (this volume) notes, in a sense “austerity was the default slogan of conservative rulers for two millennia or more, and domestic self-sufficiency was the norm.” There is comparative potential in exploring the interrelation between austerity and structural adjustment, especially since the former is a local configuration of the latter. There is equally as much interest in investigating ways to mobilize and resist austerity measures, as new forms of

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solidarity come to life (Rakopoulos 2016). Meanwhile, we must “reveal the cracks in the austerity paradigm. Before long, the alliance of government and business to repress popular economic interests will not be protected by an economy of words” (Hart, this volume).

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Social Anthropology Departments of Bergen and Oslo, who hosted the development of this collective work, especially the ERC-funded Egalitarianism Project in Bergen, led by Bruce Kapferer, as well as Bruce himself for valuable comments on the volume. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers as well as to all the volume’s contributors.

Theodoros Rakopoulos is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. He has worked ethnographically in the Palermitan hinterland of Sicily and in urban Greece, and he has published widely on issues including co-operatives and co-operativism, the solidarity economy, land management, labor and moralities, the Mafia, talk and silence, and conspiracy theory. He is the author of From Clans to Co-ops: Confiscated Mafia Land in Sicily (2017). His recent publications also include “The Social Life of Mafia Confession” (Current Anthropology, 2018) and the introduction to a special issue of History and Anthropology titled “Reimagining Wealth: Anthropological Explorations” (forthcoming, co-authored with Knut Rio).

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Notes 1. In fact, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) preceded the very idea of neo-liberalism itself. 2. In the Argentine case, the term for structural adjustment was ajuste, as described by Goddard (this volume). 3. Instituted in 1995, Mercosur  is a South American trade bloc whose purpose is to promote free trade. Its functions have been amended and changed many times since its founding. Now a full customs union and trading bloc, its members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Although a member, Venezuela has been suspended since December 2016.

References Bear, Laura. 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bear, Laura, and Daniel M. Knight. 2017. “Alternatives to Austerity.” Anthropology Today 33 (5): 1–2. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durrenberger, E. Paul, and Gisli Palsson, eds. 2015. Gambling Debt: Iceland’s Rise and Fall in the Global Economy. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2016. Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change. London: Pluto Press. Graeber, David. 2009. “Debt, Violence and Impersonal Markets: Polanyian Meditations.” In Market and Society: The Great Transformation Today, ed. Chris Hann and Keith Hart, 106–132. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hart, Keith. 2017. “Capitalism and Our Moment in the History of Money.” In Money in a Human Economy, ed. Keith Hart, 3–14. New York: Berghahn Books. Holmes, Douglas R. 2013. Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knight, Daniel M. 2015. History, Time, and Economic Crisis in Central Greece. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Knight, Daniel M., and Charles Stewart. 2016. “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe.” In History and Anthropology 27 (1): 1–18. Muehlebach, Andrea. 2016. “Anthropologies of Austerity.” History and Anthropology 27 (3): 359–372. Papataxiarchis, Evthymios. 2016. “Unwrapping Solidarity? Society Reborn in Austerity.” Social Anthropology 24 (2): 205–210. Peacock, Vita. 2016. “Academic Precarity as Hierarchical Dependence in the Max Planck Society.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (1): 95–119. Peebles, Gustav. 2010. “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 225–240. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2016. “Solidarity: The Egalitarian Tensions of a Bridge-Concept.” Social Anthropology 24 (2): 142–151. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2019. “Reversing the World: What Austerity Does to Time and Place.” Focaal. Forthcoming. Shore, Cris. 2012. “The Euro Crisis and European Citizenship: The Euro 2001–2012—Celebration or Commemoration?” Anthropology Today 28 (2): 5–9. Strathern, Marilyn, ed. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge. Susser, Ida. 2014. “Austerity: New York City (1975) and Detroit (2013).” Anthropology Now 6 (3): i–iv. Special issue titled “Austerity and Resistance in the Midwest,” ed. Ida Susser and Molly Doane.

Austerity An Economy of Words?

( Keith Hart

We did not call it austerity back then. Its general name was rationing, and it began during World War II when Britain imported much of its food across hostile seas. The Labour government of 1945–1951 had to justify rationing even though cargo ships were no longer being sunk by U-boats. The country was broke, and sometimes the harvest failed. Sugar, eggs, bread, butter, meat, bacon, tea, and potatoes were rationed for varying periods, along with non-food items like soap, petrol, and clothes. Most milk was used to make cheese, known as ‘Government Cheddar’. A delightful memoir of those times, 84, Charing Cross Road (Hanff 1970) recalls the excitement of receiving a food parcel from America or Australia. But foreign gift food parcels of 5 pounds or more were soon deducted from a family’s rations in the name of equality. Austerity then did not mean cutting levels of private and public expenditure, but sharing deprivation on an egalitarian basis. The stuff was simply not available, and the priority was to ensure that inequality was not made worse. Of course, there was an illegal black market, widely believed to be concentrated in London, which boosted inequality in another way. The National Health Service

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was explicitly egalitarian. At the age of 9, I went to the hospital to have my tonsils out. My parents bribed me with two large packets of sweets. I was knocked out and the operation performed. When I woke up, I could not find my sweets anywhere. Naturally, I kicked up a fuss. The nurses explained that there were lots of poor boys in the hospital, and their policy was to share whatever came in among everyone. They later found a few (inferior) sweets for me. This was the principle of ‘shared sacrifice’, a lame descendant of ‘their finest hour’ in wartime. My personal economy hinged on being given sweets for good behavior. They were so scarce that one at a time did the job. My pocket money was threepence a week plus a rationing coupon for 2 ounces of sugar. My favorites were kept for me by a local shopkeeper. One day, my mother announced that rationing of sugar was over. I rushed to the sweet shop and ordered to the limit of my imagination— three 2-ounce packets. “That will be nine pence please.” “But I only have threepence. They told me I could have as many sweets as I like now!” “You need the money too.” That is how I discovered that money is a rationing device. The British economy as a whole had to learn that lesson when rationing ended. These conditions of chronic shortage lasted well beyond rationing. The British economy did not regain its 1939 level until 1957—and 1939 was the Great Depression! The cheese market was depressed for decades after the end of rationing, since the Milk Marketing Board’s monopoly wiped out almost all other cheese production in the country. It was hard to take, given that Britain was supposed to have won the war—indeed, had fought the Germans for a couple of years when no one else did. Where I grew up in Manchester, one in three houses was destroyed by bombing. There were large vacant areas of cinders, rubble, and broken glass, known as ‘crofts’, where we played football

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and scratched our knees every time we fell over. This mess was not cleared up until the late 1950s, if then. I could not wait to get out. The enforced scarcity of those times was later confused with the extraordinary solidarity of the war years. As a baby in a night shelter, I gave the adults something to talk about while they waited for the next bomb to hit. The rationing era was hardly a matter of life and death; it just extended economic misery for no apparent reason. The Age of Austerity 1945–1951, a collection edited by Michael Sissons and Philip French (1986), draws on authors from a similar background—provincial grammar school, good degree, national service, employment with the BBC or a quality newspaper—to provide vignettes of the social issues during those years, along with forms of consumption such as sport, films, food, and fashion. David Kynaston’s (2008) Austerity Britain, 1945–1951 is even more powerful, combining hundreds of street voices. The image on the front cover, a photograph of a woman and her boy wandering in a bleak industrial city, captures the period for me. Imagine what I felt when I searched online for ‘age of austerity’ and kept getting a 2009 David Cameron speech. He promised massive cuts in public expenditure when the Tories came to power, a huge retrenchment of the welfare state that would reverse the achievements of the post-war Labour government—in effect, restoring the inequality that we thought had gone forever. Talk about the defeat of the working class! The weird thing was Cameron’s emphasis not on public spending cuts, but on controlling public sector salaries, which he claimed had soared under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Even weirder, the Missouri Accountability Portal was wheeled out as a model for publishing all government spending online, so that citizens will be able “to review how their money is being spent.”

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Politics today, more than before, is smoke and mirrors. Language hides public and private interests and the ruling class origins of a strategy like austerity. But passive conformity to this strategy depends on a mix of opaque language and actual social power. In what follows, I ask what ‘austerity’ meant for the Romans and the Greeks and show how factions based on property in land and in money respectively not only dominated agrarian civilization for three millennia but also have persisted to the present day. I then turn to the general crisis of the inter-war period from 1918 to 1939 and finally to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, showing how both words and social power maintain the hegemony of the creditor class. In his study of central banking, Economy of Words, American cultural anthropologist Douglas Holmes (2013) claims that words are now more important than money in economics. In contrast, I hold that to demystify the politics of austerity, we must distinguish between language and the power that it expresses and conceals.

Ancient Austerity The words ‘austere’ and ‘austerity’ come from Latin when Rome was a kingdom and later a republic aiming to subdue neighboring Italian cities and finally Carthage, its North African rival. The root meaning was ‘sour’ or ‘bitter’, as well as ‘dark’ or ‘somber’, but it was later identified as a moral quality, meaning ‘severe’ or ‘unbending’. Roman conservatives made of austerity an ideology, program, and style. There was a craze among the Italian city-states at the time to import expensive Greek luxuries without worrying about how to pay for them. And so austerity for some Romans meant doing without luxuries in the name of domestic self-sufficiency. The first

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responsibility of citizens was their own home; the second was their public duties. This stance was symbolized by wearing traditional clothes of somber hue and avoiding flash and glitter. The principal advocate of austerity was Cato the Elder, who insisted that “Carthage must be destroyed.” A prominent politician, soldier, and writer, his most famous work was a farming manual, De Agri Cultura (Dalby 1998). It is a measure of Cato’s pragmatism that he highlighted the need to cultivate wine. This might seem odd for a believer in economic autarky, but wine was then the leading export commodity, and Cato valued balancing the books more than austerity. When Augustus created the Roman Empire, there was again concern that imported luxuries were undermining the Roman economy and traditional moral virtues. A leading figure in this movement was Seneca the Elder, a writer and rhetorician. His son, Seneca the Younger, was Nero’s tutor and a Stoic philosopher. In holding that virtue is ‘sufficient’ for happiness, Stoicism lent austerity some philosophical weight. Roman austerity had a strong affinity with Greek oiko­ nomia (economy), which referred to the ‘management’ of manorial estates more than that of ordinary households. Today, economy is a polyvalent term that encompasses the following: (1) order and management; (2) efficient conservation of resources; (3) practical affairs; (4) money and wealth; and (5) the market. It applies to a wide range of social units, from natural conservation to money making. A core meaning of ‘economy’ and its derivatives such as ‘economize’ is to make the best of what you have with the least amount of effort.1 Aristotle gave economy its theoretical definition. It was adopted by one side in a Mediterranean civil war that lasted for a millennium. We would call the two sides ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’—systems of property and politics

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based on control of the land and money respectively. A military aristocracy extracted rents from a servile agricultural labor force, while cities sustained by seaborne trade fed their populations through commerce. They called their systems ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’, that is, rule by the best and rule by the people. The factions contending for power in particular places formed alliances with like-minded parties elsewhere. An endless series of wars and revolutions ranged in scale from local fights to international conflicts lasting decades. Rome put an end to all this when it defeated Carthage and annexed the Eastern Mediterranean to its empire. Military landlordism triumphed over water-borne commerce. Fifteen hundred years later, merchants took on landed power again and won, this time in Northwestern Europe. England was the main site of that victory, but its ex-colony, the United States, soon took over. Marx and Engels concluded that the history of class struggle was between town and countryside, meaning money and land. Aristotle held that we were meant to live in society. He called humanity a zoon politikon, a ‘political creature’ that needs the collective order of a community, a city or polis with its rural hinterland. Society expresses both human nature and the natural world’s logic. Its core is a house occupied by a family (oikos). He had in mind the semifortified great houses of the landowners, with their slaves, retainers, craftsmen, fields, orchards, and livestock. These houses should aim for self-sufficiency (autarkia), pursuing frugal management of their resources through budgeting and thrift (oikonomia). But the great estates also needed money for luxurious expenditures and above all for their wars. So Aristotle inveighed against the market and business (khrematistike) as the anti-social pursuit of profit by individuals leading the unnatural life of trading without frontiers rather than bankrolling the local

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military. This discourse can be traced back two millennia earlier to Mesopotamia, where tribute, gift, and theft were the preferred methods for transferring goods. Market trade seems to have emerged there as an activity of wealthy, public households. It was deprecated by landed elites and suppressed when commercial city-states collapsed.

The Originality of Keynes Commerce waxed and waned throughout the agrarian era until the market became the dominant principle of industrial capitalism. Within a framework of agriculture, exchange still commanded much theoretical attention. Economy eventually became identified with markets, which from the eighteenth century were accepted as being central to society. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith ([1776] 1961) located the motor of development in the division of labor. He could not yet envisage a breakthrough to industrial capitalism or the consolidation of Britain’s overseas empire. In all agrarian civilizations, power came from the landed property of an aristocratic military caste who feared that money and markets could undermine their control over society. Smith, however, preferred many small decisions based on self-interest to topdown economic leadership, however well-meaning: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” (ibid.: 26–27). Smith stood conventional wisdom on its head by claiming that “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (ibid.) was part of human nature and that markets were the most reliable way of increasing ‘the wealth of nations’. So austerity was the default slogan of conservative rulers for two millennia or more, and domestic self-sufficiency

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was the norm. Those who lived from money and markets were relegated to the margins. Jane Austen ([1814] 2017), reflecting the hegemony of domestic economy among the rural gentry, writes of one of her characters in Mans­ field Park that she was a poor ‘economist’, unable to manage the servants effectively. The age-old struggle between landed power and money peaked in a polarized conflict—the ‘bourgeois revolution’—to which ‘political economy’ gave theoretical expression. This clash was won by capitalists based in industrial production. By the midnineteenth century, however, they had discovered that they could not control the burgeoning urban population spawned by their revolution. In the 1860s—in the US, Russia, Britain, Japan, Italy, Germany, and France—a new regime took over based on an alliance between capitalists and the military aristocracy. The dominant social form of the twentieth century, national capitalism, grew out of this synthesis of big money and landed power. Austerity, when needed, now drew on traditional conservatism to serve money-making interests. It became a hybrid of its bipolar predecessor. Two world wars bracketed the global economic crisis of the 1930s known as the Great Depression. John Maynard Keynes attributed the economic problem to the persistence of attitudes held by his Victorian parents, attitudes that still ruled the British Treasury. The empire’s success was credited to the prudence of middle-class consumers, whose savings, invested in government bonds (Consols), swelled the national capital fund. But the solution to endemic market failure, he believed, was more liquidity, even if this meant printing worthless money. Keynes’s (1931) simple mantra in Essays in Persuasion, written between 1919 and 1931, was ‘spend, don’t save’. If austerity conserved the wealth of a few, he intended to expand popular spending power as much as possible.

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Accordingly, Keynes focused on inflation, deflation, and consequent changes in money’s value over time. Who gains and who loses when money appreciates or depreciates? In determining this, he could identify the classes and interests involved. Debtors benefit from inflation, since the monetary value of what they owe shrinks. Two classes lose out to inflation: creditors, notably banks, and savers, ranging from owners of capital to pensioners with annuities, who see the value of their assets and incomes eroded. Conversely, the main beneficiaries of deflation are creditors and savers, who have a keen interest in keeping up the value of their money, while debtors lose out. The two sides have seen big swings in their fortunes since 1945, culminating in the current dominance of creditors. Keynes died in 1945, but the decades following the war saw the wholesale emergence of developmental states in the industrial West, the Stalinist bloc, and post-colonial regions, variously inspired by his theories. For the first and only time in history, governments sought to increase the disposable incomes and public services available to working people. The world economy boomed until the watershed of the 1970s. It was a world revolution, and we are the victims of the counter-revolution it provoked.

Austerity Today: Words and Power David Graeber (2016) writes about the passivity of the British when confronted with economic policies favoring the rich. The universities, the National Health Service, and other public assets are being undermined “in the name of an economic doctrine—austerity, the imperative need for fiscal discipline—that no one genuinely believes in and whose results pretty much everyone deplores … in response to an existential crisis that does not exist.”2

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The hard times and rationing of World War II and its aftermath were “the last time Britons had acted with a genuine common purpose.” Yet there has been “virtually no public debate on austerity itself.” Graeber continues: “Phrases designed in think tanks and focus groups (‘free markets,’ ‘wealth creators,’ ‘personal responsibility,’ ‘shared sacrifice’) are repeated like incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality” (ibid.). In 2014, Bank of England economists, exhausted by the contortions demanded by their job, “issued a statement on ‘Money Creation in the Modern Economy’ that effectively destroyed the entire theoretical basis for austerity. Money, they noted, is … actually created by private banks making loans. Without debt there would be no money … [yet] politicians continued preaching their morality tales of the evils of debt exactly as they had before” (Graeber 2016). Even the IMF urged the British government to lay off, to no effect. The United Kingdom is only 300 years old, and decentralizing forces are growing stronger, not least in Scotland. All sorts of pent-up regionalisms will drive a new politics, while the ruling consensus will continue to disparage any challenge to London’s dominance. Speculation aside, however, if the case for austerity is so weak, on what does its credibility rest? Do our historical excursions offer any clues? Can we reveal the sources of power behind the smoke screen of words? The British imagine that austerity today reflects the 1940s, the last time the country had a positive sense of itself. The current malaise comes from the loss of being ranked number one in the world. Acceptance of this downgraded status is endlessly deferred. Something always turns up to postpone the reckoning: the world

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language is English (thanks to the American empire); the Internet boosts our language and global significance; economics is dominated by English speakers. A distorted version of national consciousness is thus projected onto the world. The ‘special relationship’ with the United States is a joke—the Americans did everything they could to undermine the British Empire, including the decision to starve post-war Britain. Even the French, not otherwise noted for their humility, have lost any pretension of owning a world language. I have suggested that Roman ‘austerity’ is akin to Greek ‘economy’. Both focus on saving, prudence, and thrift in a world where luxuries threaten to undermine the traditional virtues. Both were driven by class conflict, elevating aristocratic wealth above plebeian purchasing power. Austerity today is promoted, in the name of free markets, by conservatives whose main wealth is monetary. Since Reagan and Thatcher’s neo-liberal counter-revolution against the developmental states of the post-war period, encouragement of popular spending by the state is thought to lead inevitably to inflation, thereby posing a threat to ruling class dominance and to money stored as capital and credit. After the crash of 2008, vast sums of taxpayers’ money were made available to the banks through ‘quantitive easing’ to make good the collapse of credit, but in general banks invested the money in asset markets and did not lend it out to the consumer credit market. In English, both the popular and professional registers of the language of economy reinforce each other ‘naturally’. Maybe this explains one way that spurious discourses acquire credibility. In the meantime, the European Union staggers from one crisis to the next. The euro was founded on several massive mistakes, the main one being the idea that politics was unnecessary for a free market economy. There

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was also inadequate provision for fiscal institutions, and huge trade imbalances between members were ignored. The long credit boom concealed these deficiencies, which resurfaced during the financial crisis. Some Europeans claimed that this crisis was limited to Britain and the US. The Italian finance minister joked that his country would be spared since its bank managers did not speak English. Thus, a systematic response was delayed in Europe. In 2006–2007, the French and German banks bought subprime mortgage bonds when ‘the big short’ (Lewis 2010) was underway, and they invested recklessly in loans to Southern Europe, leaving them horribly exposed to bad debts when the crash came. The US had made its banks clean up their ‘toxic assets’, but in Europe the banks and their protectors hoped that losses would magically disappear if ignored. The European Commission (EC), with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—none of them elected bodies—formed a ‘troika’ to direct the vulnerable countries of Southern Europe out of the crisis. Devaluation of the currency is the quickest and least divisive way of liquidating debt. But the Eurozone countries are yoked to a fixed exchange rate mechanism, and their only options were deflation and default. Coercive measures were imposed by the troika on Portugal and Greece, among others. The resulting ‘democratic deficit’ of the new corporate regime has become glaringly obvious. When the ECB president, Mario Draghi, promised in 2012 to support the euro to the hilt, claiming that “it would be enough,” interest rates on the sovereign bonds of some beleaguered Southern European countries tumbled dramatically and the Eurozone crisis went quiet for a couple of years. But not permanently. The ‘economy of words’ sometimes works, usually on a temporary basis. Yet what made Draghi’s statement effective at the time? Which

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interests shaped the policy and why? A cultural analysis cannot provide answers. Although comparison with the 1930s is commonplace these days, 1914 is a better historical analogy for our times. We can still learn much from Keynes’s writings in the interwar years and from the policies of post-war decades that bear his name. Who benefits most from deflation? People with lots of money. Why have interest rates been maintained near zero for so long? Because those who would conserve their money’s value control the decision-making bodies. For a while after the financial crisis, it seemed that the Keynesian system had been resurrected—the state was again the lender of last resort, and public works programs were proposed as a way of boosting family incomes. But all the money went to the banks who then refused to lend it out, thereby fueling another boom in asset markets that did nothing for jobs and family incomes. Their minions in the media and politics never questioned the austerity dogma. The full brutality of Europe’s post-crash neo-liberal economy was exposed by negotiations over Greece’s right to stay in the Eurozone during the summer of 2015. The Greeks, led by Yanis Varoufakis, invoked platitudes guaranteed to endear their European masters. Everyone knew that the Germans had the decisive say. At one point, the ECB showed its hand by forcing the closure of the Greek banks. Bloodcurdling threats came out of Northern Europe. Senior EC officials behaved like feudal barons insulted by peasants who did not know their place. The final terms of settlement were wildly implausible and humiliating to the Greeks. The Eurozone’s problems are permanent, to say nothing of terrorists, refugees, and Europe’s disappearing share of the world’s population. Passivity in the face of a cruel and unequal economic regime does not mean that people have internalized austerity politics. Folk memories of the first half of the twentieth

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century—the slaughter of World War I, the mass unemployment of the inter-war years, the bombing of cities, the starvation diet of the late 1940s—are still vivid. The last half-century has seen massive improvements in the standard of living of what used to be the rich countries. It is not perverse to believe that some cuts now could help to stave off a return to those extreme times, to save an economy that teeters on oblivion. Maybe at an unconscious level people are waiting for the upheavals when European dominance finally gives way to a new world order. Meanwhile, democratic socialists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders reveal the cracks in the austerity paradigm. Before long, the alliance of government and business to repress popular economic interests will not be protected by an economy of words.

Keith Hart is an anthropologist and self-taught economist. He is the International Director of the University of Pretoria’s Human Economy Programme and edits Berghahn’s The Human Economy Series. He contributed the idea of an informal economy to development studies and has published extensively on money. His recent edited books include Economy For and Against Democracy (2015) and Money in a Human Economy (2017). With Chris Hann, he co-authored Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique (2011). He is currently preparing a memoir, “An Education: Self in the World.”

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Notes 1. This section draws on Hann and Hart (2011). See also Hart and Sharp (2014: 7–9). 2. Graeber (2016) adds that even Prime Minster David Cameron, who drove austerity, has privately denounced the decline in his local public services.

References Austen, Jane. (1814) 2017. Mansfield Park. Charleston, SC: Create– Space Independent Publishing Platform. Dalby, Andrew. 1998. Cato on Farming: De Agricultura. Totnes: Prospect Books. Graeber, David. 2016. “Despair Fatigue: How Hopelessness Grew Boring.” The Baffler 30. http://thebaffler.com/salvos/despair -fatigue-david-graeber. Hanff, Helene. 1970. 84, Charing Cross Road. New York: Grossman. Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart. 2011. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hart, Keith, and John Sharp. 2014. “Introduction.” In People, Money and Power in the Economic Crisis: Perspectives from the Global South, ed. Keith Hart and John Sharp, 1–18. New York: Berghahn Books. Holmes, Douglas R. 2013. Economy of Words: Communicative Imper­ atives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keynes, John Maynard. 1931. Essays in Persuasion. London: Macmillan. Kynaston, David. 2008. Austerity Britain, 1945–1951. London: Bloomsbury. Lewis, Michael. 2010. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. New York: Penguin Books. Sissons, Michael, and Philip French, eds. 1986. Age of Austerity 1945–1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Adam. (1776) 1961. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen.

Performing Austerity Greece’s Debt Crisis and European Integration

( Cris Shore and Sally Raudon

The current era has been characterized as an ‘age of austerity’ for Europe as neo-liberal monetary and fiscal policies of the Eurozone’s powerful Northern nations have sought to remake Europe’s peripheral economies in their own image, following what Rakopoulos and others have described as financial capitalism’s neo-imperialism. By austerity we mean the conditions created by sustained government policies aimed at deficit reduction through fiscal tightening, harsh public spending cuts, and reduced wages and pensions (Blyth 2013). This chapter reflects on the impact of austerity on Greece and its implications for the European Union (EU). More specifically, we examine the narrative construction of the Greek crisis and how EU policy makers—and Greek politicians—have framed and represented the ‘Greek problem’ and its solution as a European austerity paradigm (Douzinas 2013; Theodossopoulos 2014). We argue that austerity is not only undermining the fabric of Greek society, turning the state of crisis into the ‘new normal’; it is also fundamentally redefining the very telos of European integration. From an ideal of a European union based on solidarity, cohesion, peace, and tolerance—with strong leanings toward Keynesianism and social Catholicism—austerity is

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creating an increasingly unequal, disunited, socially fragmented, and intolerant Europe. Brexit and the success of anti-immigrant parties across Europe are arguably tangible expressions of this shift (Green et al. 2016). Austerity impacts on far more than just the economic and financial sectors. As we argue, it is an economic and moral technology that entails a far wider project of social and political reform. What is distinctive about austerity policies in the context of the Eurozone crisis is that when desperate states sought cash, the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—collectively known as the ‘troika’—insisted on austerity policies in exchange for loans. In Greece, many citizens understood the pursuit of austerity in exchange for bailout loans as both punitive and a surrender of sovereignty—or, as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called it, “blackmail” (De Jong et al. 2015). By contrast, many EU political leaders see the Greek crisis as largely self-inflicted, a product of years of public finance ‘incontinence’, chronic corruption, a culture of tax evasion, and the excesses of Greece’s self-serving political elite. Public opinion in Northern Europe typically constructs Greeks as irresponsible spendthrifts who ought to live on the money they earn, not bailouts funded by European taxpayers (Saunders 2015). Many Greeks also blame the breakdown of their economy on the incompetence and venality of their national politicians and on the wealthy Greek capitalist class, many of whom live abroad and invest their money in safe overseas tax havens. However, they also acknowledge—along with several mainstream economists—that public spending soared as a direct result of Greece adopting the single currency and the low interest rate environment that followed. Consequently, the solution to the Greek crisis is seen to lie not simply within Greece itself but in a series of

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disciplines and institutions beyond Greece. The priority for the EU is to save the single currency and the project of monetary union, whatever the costs to Greeks or citizens of other peripheral countries. In its new status as a troika client, responsible government in Greece has become highly circumscribed under unique constraints to the extent that a special committee was created to oversee Greek spending, with powers of ultimate veto, in return for the third bailout. Tsipras (2015) sought unsuccessfully for the European Parliament to be included as a gesture toward transparent democracy. Surrendering Greece’s economic sovereignty to the troika was seen as a necessary price to ensure the stability of the Eurozone. Taking up this idea of ‘necessity’, we explore how austerity has been narrated and how these narratives compare with accounts of people’s actual lived experiences. We draw on scholarly analysis (Douzinas 2013; Theodossopoulos 2014) and reports, political releases and speeches, media coverage and other gray literature—particularly in the period from late 2014 to mid-2015—in order to trace the dominant discourses and silences of these texts and the anthropological themes they illuminate. In doing so we ask, what can an analysis of these discourses about Greek austerity tell us about changing power relations in Greece and in its relationship with the EU? What are the social and cultural effects of living in conditions of sustained austerity? And what does the Greek drama reveal about the future of the European project?

The Performativity of Austerity The social costs of austerity are both palpable and measurable. Since the EU’s austerity policies were implemented, Greece has experienced a 200 percent increase in HIV

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infection; overall unemployment has climbed to approximately 25 percent, while youth unemployment stands at over 50 percent; there has been a 25 percent rise in homelessness and a 60 percent rise suicide rates—all while the provision of social services shrank dramatically, including a 40 percent reduction in health services (Stuckler and Basu 2013; see also Powers, this volume). Austerity of this kind is a form of ‘structural violence’ (Farmer 2004) that produces profound social suffering. A third of Greeks live “at risk of poverty or social exclusion,” a figure that has doubled since 2008 (Eurostat 2014). Media reports highlight increasing reliance on food banks, people turning to charities and NGOs for basic primary health care, cases of financially strapped Greek parents giving up their children for adoption, and ‘performative suicides’ (Davis 2015). Put simply, austerity has come at a colossal humanitarian price. Less visible, however, are the effects of the “silent, personal Grexit” (Saunders 2015) that is transforming Greek society. Net annual migration reached over 50,000 in 2013 and has continued at that level ever since (World Bank 2015). This equates to about five people for every thousand leaving Greece, often to work in richer EU countries. Even more important than the rate of emigration is the age profile of those leaving. Commentators have described this as a ‘brain drain’ of Greece’s young and educated that is unsustainable and threatens to undermine its education system and future workforce (and taxation base). As Saunders (2015) puts it: “It’s the worst sort of extraction, the worst sort of punishment. It’s not just the parents losing their kids, it’s the most important investment the country has made in the last few decades. This human capital is being bloodied out of the country at a fast pace and we don’t have any measures to stop that.” Over 100,000 skilled Greeks, mostly young and highly trained professionals, have migrated to work in Germany,

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the United Kingdom, and the Gulf states. While this helps lower Greece’s high unemployment figures, it has produced massive social suffering and what some experience as a kind of theft of the future (see Knight and Stewart 2017). For instance, some 5,000–7,000 Greek doctors have left since the crisis began, further exacerbating the health care crisis (Saunders 2015). For many Greeks there is a double injury in this structural violence: Germany, the architect of austerity, is also the beneficiary of this exodus of skilled labor. Greece’s suffering has not gone unrecognized by all EU leaders. French President François Hollande publicly acknowledged that Greece “had paid a heavy price to stay in the euro” (Callus and Vinocur 2015). Poul Thomsen, an IMF official overseeing the Greek austerity program, called for greater official and governmental sensitivity to the fact that Greece had already taken substantial steps toward economic reform at “a great cost to the population,” warning that “social tolerance and political support have their limitations” (Smith 2012). Even the IMF acknowledged that its forecasters had “significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline in private consumption and investment associated with fiscal consolidation” (Blanchard and Leigh 2013: 5). It published an internal memo describing Greek debt as unsustainable, acknowledging that even under optimal circumstances substantial portions of its huge debts will need to be wiped (IMF 2015). Days after SYRIZA’s election victory in September 2015, Reza Moghadam (2015), who had been the director of the IMF European Department until 2014, wrote that the austerity plans and debt repayment targets were based on “over-optimistic assumptions on Greek growth, inflation, fiscal effort and social cohesion” and urged Europe to halve Greek debt. However, any write-off of Greece’s debt

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was seen as unacceptable by Germany and other lenders who feared that non-payment to creditors would set a dangerous precedent. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (2011) set out his country’s position unambiguously, writing in the Financial Times that austerity was the only cure for the Eurozone, “however politically painful,” as it would be an even greater risk to allow the crisis “to infect the eurozone as a whole and threaten the euro.” Schäuble framed Greece’s financial problems as a disease requiring drastic medical intervention. Tsipras thus rightly described Greece as a “laboratory for austerity” (CNBC 2015). Since 2010, its citizens have endured severe structural readjustment policies that have forced people to accept what was previously thought unacceptable: huge salary cuts, loss of pensions, and the choice that highly qualified professionals face between unemployment, emigration, or working in supermarkets and call centers. While Greece’s travails under neo-liberal austerity are arguably no greater than those previously inflicted on countries in the Global South (see the chapters by Goddard and by Powers, this volume), they nonetheless represent a significant development in the history of the EU, given its claims about building a union based on European solidarity, citizenship, and cohesion. Economist Paul Krugman deplored Greece’s situation as “a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for” (De Jong et al. 2015). Fellow economist Thomas Piketty warned that “we risk sacrificing Europe’s social model, its democracy, indeed its civilization on the altar of a conservative, irrational austerity policy” (Wire 2015). Other leading economists have also pointed out that the austerity imposed on Greece has not worked as intended and that the German and French stance is absurd, given their own histories of debt relief. Indeed, Piketty joined several senior economists in an open letter

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to Merkel, condemning austerity as a clear failure on economic, rational, and moral grounds (see Piketty et al. 2015). By insisting on harsh fiscal adjustments, pension reforms, and tax increases, the troika’s bailout has plunged the Greek economy further into recession, its economy shrinking even as new bailouts are set in motion. However, many Greeks see a hidden agenda behind this contradiction. As Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, the founder of the right-wing antiausterity Independent Greeks, declared: “They [the troika] want to wreck us” (De Jong et al. 2015). Whether intentional or not, some would argue that austerity is part of the political rationality of neo-liberal governmentality (see Kalb, this volume). Another local effect of austerity has been the dramatic rise in nationalist and extremist political parties. On 25 January 2015, Greeks voted to reject the troika’s terms in a national referendum, and the left-wing popularist party SYRIZA won two elections—the second with a completely new twin-track agenda of embracing-while-rejecting austerity. Greece was expected to miss debt repayment deadlines, and the troika held firm that another debt ‘haircut’ was not on offer. Greece looked perilously close to leaving the Eurozone. Detailed plans for Greece’s exit from the Eurozone (or ‘Grexit’) were drawn up as EU leaders braced themselves for the worst. While loss of sovereignty was the major trope within Greek political discourse, the ‘contagion’ of Greek debt and the domino effect of a Grexit dominated the narrative of troika leaders. Merkel insisted that it was essential to sustain financial pressure on Greeks to ensure that Greece continued implementing austerity reforms (Seith 2013). The ECB’s president, Mario Draghi, insisted that the ECB was “ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro” (see ECB 2012), and that those speculating about Greece’s

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membership in the Eurozone “vastly underestimate the amount of political capital that has been invested in the euro” (Boesler 2013). However, Draghi also asserted that the Eurozone remained at risk unless member states surrender more of their sovereignty to pan-European institutions with greater powers over EU member states.

Crisis, Cohesion, and the European Project Typically, Greece’s debt problem is presented in terms of a narrative of financial crisis, framed by the risks that financial insolvency poses. However, it is more illuminating to approach this as a socio-political rather than an economic catastrophe, as this more accurately reflects people’s lived experience. Indeed, for many Greeks, the words ‘crisis’ (from κρίνειν, to decide) and ‘catastrophe’ (καταστροϕή, overturning, sudden turn, conclusion) have become the new normal. Paradoxically, crisis is no longer an exceptional or liminal state but rather a permanent precarity that is both collective and individual (Standing 2011). Austerity has also created new delineations of old hierarchies, particularly with the re-emergence of old core-periphery dualisms. The EU project of European integration was traditionally constructed in terms of the ideals of cooperation and social inclusion—an egalitarian family of nations that pooled their sovereignty for mutual benefits. Instead of an ideal of equal member states, what has been reasserted, even exaggerated, are old dualisms: North and South, rich and poor, creditor and debtor, productive and lazy, core and periphery. A new form of paternalism and clientelism has emerged between creditor and debtor states, with the former elevated to an ever-higher sovereign status and the latter reduced to a ‘debtors’ prison’. Significantly, SYRIZA

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campaigned against “turning Greece into a ‘German colony’” (Seith 2013). Agamben (2012) has described the Greek crisis as a battle of ‘mentalities’, arguing that the EU’s export of the Protestant work ethic to Southern Europe demonstrates that the EU project’s professed goal of economic unity is a fiction concealing special interests (see also Höfer 2013). Agamben is wrong here, for European integration was always first and foremost a political project. Political unification was the goal; economics and monetary policy were the instruments for its achievement (Moro 2013; Shore 2000, 2012). And while the neo-Keynesian vision of a ‘social Europe’ once championed by Jacques Delors and an earlier generation of European leaders may have withered, the goal of political unity continues to shape EU policy, although it is now couched more in terms of the monetarist vision of Ordoliberalism. Austerity has ensured that the moral cloud of personal debt has been applied to entire populations. However, financial debts, like debts of other kinds, are morally contradictory (Peebles 2010). Only certain kinds of personal debt attract criticism in modern capitalist cultures, depending largely on the perceived risk, source, and urgency of the debt. Over the twentieth century, debt came to be understood as essential to personal and business finance. People understand buying a home or starting or growing a business to be achieved through taking on—and repaying—debt. Debt is morally positive when it is focused on investment (where the return is greater than the outlay) and when fearful risks are avoided. For instance, commercial entities reframe an abundance of debt as ‘leverage’, and transactions involving acquisitions made by aggregating substantial debts—leveraged buyouts—are admired for their breathtaking audacity. However, when risks do eventuate, the morality of debt shifts. Individuals

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who cannot repay debt are judged to be reckless and imprudent, victims of hubris or folly, or objects of pity and anxiety. Rather than being a moral good and a consequent source of positive social status, unpayable debt is a risk to people’s health and well-being. For individuals, then, debt can be virtuous or contemptible, depending on its source, the risk of default, and the perceived agency of the party undertaking it.

The Greek Drama: A Parable for European Integration? What implications does Greece’s debt crisis have for the future of Europe? EU-backed austerity measures seem to embody a new kind of government rationality, one that may also have transformative effects on European culture and societies. Contrary to the EU’s federalist goals of overcoming nationalism, promoting ever-closer integration, and forging a pan-European identity, the Eurozone crisis and its solutions have fueled division, conflict, and growing disparities between EU member states. Yet, as noted above, they have also strengthened the trends toward economic governance within the EU, shifting power and authority toward its centralized supranational institutions such as the ECB. As one senior EC official (and German finance expert) said long ago, when asked how the EU should respond to public opposition to the euro and the EU project of ever-closer union, “the dogs may bark, but the caravan will move forward regardless” (cited in Shore 2000: 106). In any event, the caravan did move forward. Greece was not forced out of the Eurozone, although many European politicians—and some in Greece too—believe that it should have been. The Eurozone system self-corrected,

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and the much-feared ‘contagion’ did not occur. The loans have continued, and Greece’s debt has been restructured but not forgiven. While Tsipras continues to protest austerity, he has also become its agent. In 2015, SYRIZA gave voters a referendum on the troika’s third memorandum of greater punitive austerity and privatization. Some 61 percent voted against it, yet Tsipras swiftly yielded. SYRIZA’s overnight capitulation left many Greeks wondering whether this betrayal was a realpolitik compromise, or if SYRIZA’s anti-austerity rhetoric was merely a posture without substance. A new ‘European crisis’ formulated around refugees, borders, and territoriality has eclipsed the social suffering of austerity. And some Greeks have reconciled themselves to this new normal. As Alex, a hotel receptionist, summed it up: “After five years of austerity we’re getting used to it. Even if we go bankrupt, it’s okay” (Saunders 2015). Paradoxically, one key effect of the crisis has been to strengthen the institutions of European governance and the trend toward a fiscally united European state. That part of the EU project—incremental evolution toward a federal European policy—has continued. Indeed, in some respects the crisis has benefited and reinforced those centralizing trends as the price of Eurozone stability is evergreater control from Brussels (EESC 2014). In this respect, and from the perspective of Germany and the ECB, austerity has been highly productive and ‘performative’ in the anthropological and linguistic sense of an agent whose actions serve to shift social action and (re)construct people’s sense of social reality (Austin 1962; Butler 1988; Turner 1986). Critics rightly condemn austerity as an instrument of monetarist hegemony and a form of neo-colonial subjugation, but it has proved very effective as an instrument for conditioning behavior, lowering expectations, and, despite images to

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the contrary, creating a more docile and compliant labor force. The identity that austerity produces is, much like contemporary understandings of gender, “a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo” (Butler 1988: 520). This is not to negate the agency of individuals in navigating austerity and the conditions that it creates; rather, it simply acknowledges that austerity imposes structural constraints that entail elements of coercion and compulsion. Some optimists look to Greek mythology for stories of hope. Can Greece, through its own Herculean efforts and shrewd actions, succeed, like Jason and the Argonauts, in navigating the dangerous waters and taking the Golden Fleece? Or, like Prometheus, is Greece to be chained for an eternity to a mountain of debt, a country whose economy is not permitted to die or exit the Eurozone, but whose people must forever suffer the torment of fiscal austerity?

Acknowledgments This chapter was part of a wider project investigating the implications of economic and monetary union in the Eurozone led by the Europe Institute at the University of Auckland. We would like to acknowledge both the Europe Institute and the European Union Centres Network (EUCN) in New Zealand for their financial support. We would particularly like to thank our colleague, the late Professor David Mayes, for his generosity, wit, and intellectual contribution to this project.

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Cris Shore is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and Guest Professor in Public Management at the Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research (2018). His main research focus is political anthropology, particularly the anthropology of policy, the study of organizations, audit culture, corruption, higher education reform, and Europe. His most recent book (edited with Susan Wright) is Death of the Public University? (2017). He is currently completing another project (with Sally Raudon) titled The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Postcolonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the UK, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Sally Raudon is a Research Fellow at the University of Auckland and a Teaching Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington. She focuses on citizenship, the state, the body, and death. Her current research (with Cris Shore) will be published in a book forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, The Shapeshifting Crown: Locating the State in Post-Colonial New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, and in a special issue of the Round Table journal (in August 2018). She has also published on mortuary rituals in Scandinavia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom and on the effects of austerity in Europe.

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References Agamben, Georgio. 2012. “La Grèce, berceau d’une nouvelle Europe.” Liberation, 11 June. http://www.liberation.fr/planete/ 2012/06/11/la-grece-berceau-d-une-nouvelle-europe_825486. Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blanchard, Olivier J., and Daniel Leigh. 2013. “Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers.” International Monetary Fund. IMF Working Paper No. 13/1. http://www.imf.org/external/ pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp1301.pdf. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boesler, Matthew. 2013. “Mario Draghi: Zero Hedge Readers Don’t Understand the Euro Crisis.” Business Insider, 4 April. http:// www.businessinsider.com/draghi-zero-hedge-readers-dont -understand-euro-crisis-2013-4. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. Callus, Andrew, and Nicholas Vinocur. 2015. “France’s Hollande Says Euro Zone Membership ‘Up to Greeks.’” Reuters, 5 January. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/05/us-france -hollande-greece-idUSKBN0KE0H820150105. CNBC. 2015. “Greece Is an ‘Austerity Laboratory.’” Times Video, 8 July. http://www.nytimes.com/video/business/international /100000003787624/greece-is-an-austerity-laboratory.html. Davis, Elizabeth. 2015. “‘We’ve Toiled without End’: Publicity, Crisis, and the Suicide ‘Epidemic’ in Greece.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (4): 1007–1036. De Jong, David, Mark Deen, and Jonathan Stearns. 2015. “EU Demands Complete Capitulation from Tsipras.” Bloomberg, 12 July. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-12/ eu-demands-tsipras-s-capitulation-as-greek-bailout-costs-spiral. Douzinas, Costas. 2013. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis: Greece and the Future of Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. ECB (European Central Bank). 2012. “Speech by Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank at the Global Investment Conference in London.” 26 July. https://www.ecb.europa. eu/press/key/date/2012/html/sp120726.en.html.

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EESC (European Economic and Social Committee). 2014. “Greece and the EU: From Economic Austerity to Social Growth.” 21 March. http://www.eesc.europa.eu/?i=portal.en.press-releases.31311. Eurostat. 2014. “More Than 120 Million Persons at Risk of Poverty or Social Exclusion in 2013.” European Commission, 4 November. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/6035076/304112014-BP-EN.pdf/62f94e70-e43a-471f-a466-2e84d1029860. Farmer, Paul. 2004. “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” Current Anthropology 45 (3): 305–325. Green, Sarah, Chris Gregory, Madeleine Reeves, et al. 2016. “Brexit Referendum: First Reactions from Anthropology.” Social Anthropology 24 (4): 478–502. Höfer, Max A. 2013. “Viva la Siesta: Should Southern Europe Really Be More German?” Spiegel Online, 28 June. http://www.spiegel. de/international/europe/southern-europe-sees-way-of-life-underthreat-a-908109.html. IMF (International Monetary Fund). 2015. “Greece: Preliminary Draft Debt Sustainability Analysis.” IMF Country Report No. 15/165, 26 June. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2015/ cr15165.pdf. Knight, Daniel M. and Charles Stewart. 2017. “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe.” In Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe, ed. Daniel M. Knight and Charles Stewart, 1–18. London: Routledge. Moghadam, Reza. 2015. “Halve Greek Debt and Keep the Eurozone Together.” Financial Times, 26 January. http://www. ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4cdc1898-9c1c-11e4-a6b6-00144feabdc0. html#axzz3S9jr0A21. Moro, Giovanni, ed. 2013. The Single Currency and European Citizenship: Unveiling the Other Side of the Coin. New York: Bloomsbury. Peebles, Gustav. 2010. “The Anthropology of Credit and Debt.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 225–240. Piketty, Thomas, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Heiner Flassbeck, Dani Rodrik, and Simon Wren-Lewis. 2015. “Austerity Has Failed: An Open Letter from Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel.” Nation, 7 July. https://www.thenation.com/article/austerity-has-failed-an-openletter-from-thomas-piketty-to-angela-merkel/. Saunders, Frances S. 2015. “My Big Fat Greek Crisis.” BBC Radio 4, The Report, 24 September. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b06c0cjh.

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Schäuble, Wolfgang. 2011. “Why Austerity Is Only Cure for the Eurozone.” Financial Times, 5 September. https://www.ft.com/ content/97b826e2-d7ab-11e0-a06b-00144feabdc0#axzz1X76pAYPy. Seith, Anne. 2013. “‘A Toxic System’: Why Austerity Still Isn’t Working in Greece.” Spiegel Online, 9 July. http://www.spiegel. de/international/europe/greek-austerity-reforms-failing-despitebillions-in-bailout-funds-a-910078.html. Shore, Cris. 2000. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge. Shore, Cris. 2012. “The Euro Crisis and European Citizenship: The Euro 2001–2012—Celebration or Commemoration?” Anthropology Today 28 (2): 5–9. Smith, Helena. 2012. “IMF Official Admits Austerity Is Harming Greece.” Guardian, 1 February. https://www.theguardian.com/ business/2012/feb/01/imf-austerity-harming-greeve. Standing, Guy. 2011. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury. Stuckler, David, and Sanjay Basu. 2013. The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills—Recessions, Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death. New York: Basic Books. Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios. 2014. “The Ambivalence of Antiausterity Indignation in Greece: Resistance, Hegemony and Complicity.” History and Anthropology 25 (4): 488–506. Tsipras, Alexis. 2015. “To the President of the European Parliament Athens.” 19 August. https://europeangreens.eu/sites/europeangreens.eu/files/news/files/Letter%20to%20the%20President %20of%20the%20EP.pdf. Turner, Victor. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Wire. 2015. “Thomas Piketty: ‘Germany Has Never Repaid Its Debts. It Has No Right to Lecture Greece.’” 8 July. Trans. Gavin Schalliol. Published in arrangement with Die Zeit. https:// thewire.in/economy/thomas-piketty-germany-has-never-repaidits-debts-it-has-no-right-to-lecture-greece. World Bank. 2015. “Data: Net Migration.” http://data.worldbank. org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM.

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When Ernest Mandel assessed austerity politics and public reaction to them during the early 1980s, the heyday of neo-liberalism, the small island state of Mauritius featured prominently. To Mandel (1983: 159), austerity meant to “systematically take money out of the pockets of the poor to put it in the portfolios of the rich.” However, in capitalist democracies, universal suffrage allows the public to serve the bill: “We have had one election, a world record: in Mauritius where, under a conservative government and with a complete conservative control of the mass media, you had a general election last year in which 100% of the MPs were Left, not a single rightwing MP was elected … the people voted against austerity.” But to Mandel, this was not the end of the story—incoming “social democratic governments” would “absolutely … repeat the austerity policies of the right” (ibid.). Since then, this process has been repeated over and over again—the 2015 Greek elections and the fairly swift embrace of austerity by the SYRIZA-led coalition being a case in point (Rakopoulos 2015)—and researching austerity is now an important venture for anthropology. The following adds to this venture a short anthropological analysis

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of austerity’s role in the political and economic conditions that contributed to the 1982 election results in Mauritius. In particular, I will consider two recent anthropological approaches to austerity: first, the portrayal of austerity measures as events that disrupt the flow of historical epochs (Knight and Stewart 2016: 5); second, calls for analytical attention to how present-day politics of austerity emerge within a changing historical articulation of sovereign debt as an “explicitly collective obligation” (Bear 2015: 8). My analysis of the continuities and differences between the policies of the late-colonial British government and those of the post-independence Mauritian government since around 1960 adds to these approaches a focus on the capacity of austerity to prevent change and austerity’s importance for maintaining essential features of capitalism’s anti-markets, that is, the direct and indirect transfer of public revenue to the bourgeoisie and the nationalization of losses.1 To conclude, I propose a set of questions that could help sustain anthropology’s analytical distance to ideologies attached to the regulation of capitalist accumulation in a given social space-time.

Austerity beyond the Event In their introduction to a recent special issue of History and Anthropology on ethnographies of austerity, Daniel Knight and Charles Stewart (2016: 2) assert that austerity creates a “counterfactual futurity.” Now, academic circles that do not engage in high postmodernist jargon may object that any human society’s future has no facts, for it is the future. Yet what Knight and Stewart seek to highlight is that austerity is unique. According to them, even in the direst circumstances austerity is different from “endemic underdevelopment and poverty” (ibid.). This is supposedly so

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because underdevelopment and poverty could be considered structures that generate path dependence and, hence, predictable futures. Austerity, instead, is a ‘rupture‘ in any structured, path-dependent society. Thus, the crises that austerity generates alter established trajectories everywhere—in individual lives as much as the collective expectations of social units up to the level of the nationstate. What is more, austerity is a ‘critical event’, and, as such, it disintegrates a given structure’s past-present-future continuum, replacing the certainty that had characterized the current epoch with uncertainty (ibid.: 3–5). If we put this to the test, though, there are few historical instances when austerity politics and crises had such disruptive power (see the introduction to this volume). In macro-histories of modes of regulating capitalist exploitation—such as David Harvey’s (2005) analysis of neo-liberalism—debt crises and austerity in major US cities, such as Detroit and New York in 1975, and in the United Kingdom in the same year are two of the many factors in the shift toward flexible accumulation. In fact, these policies appear more as manifestations of a process that was already well underway, fueled by a declining rate of profit in US and UK manufacturing operations since the 1960s, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of stable currency exchange rates, the oil price shocks, the expenses for the Vietnam War, and so forth—all ‘events’ of the early 1970s. Delving into the details and intricacies of global history and its multifarious manifestations in social space-time, I now turn attention to Mauritius. As Mandel predicted, the landslide victory in 1982 that handed all 60 electable seats in Parliament to the Mouvement Militant Mauricien (MMM) did not end the austerity politics that the previous governing coalition of the Mauritius Labour Party (MLP) and the Parti Mauricien Social Démocrate (PMSD) had introduced.2 This was because the state was committed to

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a special drawing rights (SDR) agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and to a structural adjustment program (SAP) with the World Bank (WB), signed in 1979 when the Mauritian government foreign exchange reserves allowed for less than two weeks of imports of essential staple foods and natural resources. Paul Bérenger, minister of finance and leader of the MMM in 1982, explained to me in a conversation in November 2012 that his party had had little idea of the degree of commitment attached to the SDR and the SAP. After the new cabinet’s first meeting with IMF and WB delegations in Toronto in 1982, efforts to obtain alternative bailout funds from Libya and Algeria bore no fruit. Within a few months, a larger group of MPs left the MMM and set up a new party, the Mouvement Socialiste Mauricien (MSM), which toppled the government in 1983 in coalition with eight MPs from the MLP and PMSD who had retained seats in Parliament. The new government had fewer scruples about maintaining the ban on subsidizing imports of staple foods and resources such as oil, although this put considerable strain on most Mauritian households. The program ran until 1987, when it was foreseeable that the Mauritian government would soon have foreign exchange reserves to cover essential imports for 15 weeks (World Bank Group 1987: 7). Strikingly, though, few Mauritians I spoke to during research in 2003, 2004, and 2012 considered the austerity period from 1979 as the end of—or even as a disruption to—an epoch in the sense outlined above by Knight and Stewart. Likewise, Mauritian and outside historians, economists, and journalists regard this not as a moment of ‘rupture’ in the nation’s history, but as an ‘event’ that had profound impact on the rise and fall of a socialist alternative to mainstream capitalist politics in Mauritius. Such a historical trajectory would begin with the party’s

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foundation in 1968 and its increasing popularity in the 1970s, when many MLP supporters, including high-ranking public officials and politicians, felt their party had betrayed the fight for independence when it entered into a coalition with the PMSD, the party of the colonial bourgeoisie that had fiercely opposed independence.3 The trajectory would continue further with the rapid shift of many workers from MLP-affiliated trade unions to new unions under the umbrella of the MMM’s General Workers’ Federation. It also involved the fight against the state of emergency, which the MLP/PMSD government upheld from 1971 to 1976 and which banned public demonstrations and strike action while pushing through an export-oriented development policy that included considerable subsidies for local and foreign capital. These fights had also targeted a political system established by the colonial state that was based on rather fictional ethnic categories and sought to deny any relevance to class structures that had been introduced by the colonial state in the 1950s. That political trajectory had culminated in general strikes in 1975 and 1979, and the MMM nearly won the first post-independence elections in 1976. To some extent, this campaign continued throughout the 1980s and resurfaced in 1992, for example, when a coalition of MSM and MMM, elected with an overwhelming majority of parliamentary seats in 1991, ended the status of Commonwealth realm that had been ratified in the independence agreement of 1968 and created the Republic of Mauritius, with an elected president of Mauritius replacing the British governor-general.4 In other words, we may want to see the IMF/WB politics of austerity beginning in 1979 and the elections of 1982 as two of many events in a historical struggle over Mauritian independence and whether, in the process, the nation would abandon colonial legacies of inequality and ethnicized capitalist exploitation. If anything, the particular

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version of IMF/WB austerity in this instance consolidated those legacies and, hence, was an event that maintained the kind of path-dependent structure that Knight and Stewart imagine would be disrupted by austerity. Instead, for the time being, early 1980s austerity politics in Mauritius defeated a collective effort to usher in a new, truly postcolonial epoch.

Austerity and the History of Sovereign Debt As we have seen, the 1982 elections in Mauritius did not end austerity or the legacies of the colonial era that the new nation had inherited in 1968. In fact, most Mauritians never tire of emphasizing that many of the nation’s powerful economic consortia have their roots in the colonial era and in the sugar cane industry, which dominated the island’s economy since the extension of British imperial tariff preferences in 1825. Such preferences, which before had been the privilege of the British Caribbean colonies, gave Mauritian cane planters and millers a favorable position in the global sugar commodity chain. For many years they enjoyed reduced import duties to the world’s largest market for cane sugar. The access to such capitalist antimarkets, which generate hierarchies among sellers of the same product, would shape the political economy of colonial Mauritius up to 1968 (Neveling 2013). However, depending on sugar had its downsides, and a large share of the sovereign debt owed in 1979 had been amassed through policies that sought to break this dependency. At independence, Mauritius was widely regarded as a lost cause: the odds of diversifying an economy solely reliant on cane sugar as the only export commodity were seen as too great. Rapid population increase, large-scale unemployment especially among the younger generations,

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and an overreliance on imports of basic goods had been ‘discovered’ by the British colonial administration in the 1950s. Since 1963, the colonial government had been selling long-term bonds to investors on the London market and borrowing from the World Bank and private international banks to develop Mauritian infrastructure, public housing, and ‘pioneering industries’ that would lower the island’s dependency on importing vital commodities and also create jobs (Neveling 2017). These debts contributed a lion’s share at the time of Mauritius’s default in 1979, not least because post-colonial governments continued and expanded the colonial development strategy of debt-backed subsidies to capital, based on the explicit advice of WB advisers. In 1970, a travail pour tous (TPT) or ‘work for all’ program promised the creation of 130,000 jobs by 1980—a remarkable number for a nation whose total population numbered 800,000. The majority of these jobs were to be delivered by an Export Processing Zone (EPZ) Act, passed in Parliament in 1970, which aimed at attracting export-oriented manufacturing industries with tax and customs holidays for investors and with state-funded cultivation of industrial land and new industrial estates. Several World Bank loans backed these state expenses, while private companies’ revenues from high sugar prices since the world food crisis in 1973 were diverted into the EPZ. Local capital had learned to appreciate tax and customs holidays as much as guarantees against nationalization for EPZ investment. Yet at the same time, rising prices for imported foodstuffs and fossil fuels increased the cost of living. The government responded with salary increases for state employees, not least so they would not join the MMM. This house of cards hinged on tax revenues from high sugar prices and rapid growth in EPZ manufacturing. The gradual collapse set in when a major cyclone in 1975

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demanded additional investment in housing and when sugar prices began to fall in the same year. Things took a sharp turn for the worse once the 1979 oil crisis began (Neveling 2012: 225–314). Defined as a rolling back of state expenditure, austerity is a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century in Mauritius. But before the 1950s, there was no social welfare system for ordinary Mauritians that could have been cut. The colonial state put money into the economy mainly by way of trade preferences, as in 1825, and local tax revenues went into infrastructure for irrigation, transport, and research—all for the benefit of the sugar industry. Of course, even though Mauritius had no welfare state, austerity measures in response to crises in the metropole had repercussions in the colony. Protectionist measures on the British market aggravated the repercussions of the 1920s crisis in Mauritius, and the colonial state bailed out indebted estates as late as 1937, although deliberately excluding small businesses of former indentured laborers (Neveling 2012: 153–190). From this historical perspective, Mark Blyth’s (2013) analysis seems useful, for it treats austerity as a policy concept that encounters different states in different historical eras and under different global circumstances. Blyth notes, for example, that Adam Smith’s case for cutting back state expenditure against a “state personified by … vicious, capricious, untrustworthy monarchs” (ibid.: 99) is different from austerity in various Western capitalist nations during the 1920s. Anthropologist Laura Bear (2015: 6), however, criticizes Blyth, claiming that his work would establish the “usual interpretation of austerity policy as a recent phenomenon” and that anthropology instead should “show that current fiscal policies that focus on cutting public spending are a consequence of a longer history of alterations in sovereign debt.” The latter

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is an important point, for in the case of Mauritius it mattered a great deal whether the British colonial state or the post-colonial Mauritian state acted as a guarantor for sovereign debt. Yet, contrary to Bear’s assumptions, the Mauritian example shows that the accumulation of sovereign debt may well have a rather short history, as here the principal intention was to encourage development through local and international capital—an outcome that emerged in the 1950s. What is more, the expenditures that generated Mauritian sovereign debt call into question whether anthropologists are well-advised to follow Bear (2015) in viewing sovereign debt as an explicit collective obligation. The fact that such efforts target an improvement of capital’s positioning in global (anti-)markets raises questions about axioms of Bear’s analytical proposals. Should we assume that, in the case of Mauritius, neo-liberalism has indeed established “specific alterations in the relations and mechanisms of state debt” (ibid.: 7)? Should we concur that state debt “creates a contradiction between the redistributive and extractive aspects of state institutions [and] … leads to austerity policy, which is decentralized, creative, short-term and chaotic” (ibid.)?

Proposals for Austerity’s Future Analysis Anthropology’s understanding of austerity is closely related to the history of a given place. But whereas Knight and Stewart consider the potential for austerity to disrupt structures (i.e., ordinary life in a given epoch), Bear regards austerity as a by-product of the historical alterations to sovereign debt. The material from Mauritius reveals that both approaches generate new contradictions rather than unmasking existing ones. Why, for example,

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would a nation-state seek to meet a ‘collective obligation’ (sovereign debt, in Bear’s sense) by way of ‘decentralized’ and ‘chaotic’ policies (austerity)? What do we gain from regarding times without austerity as epochal structures and times of austerity as disruptive events? These prominent contemporary approaches to austerity in anthropology seem to distinguish between structure as the equivalent to cultural order and austerity as the equivalent to cultural disorder. Once we couple this with Knight and Stewart’s disclaimer that austerity is different from ‘endemic underdevelopment and poverty’, we might have to reintroduce long-abandoned notions, such as Oscar Lewis’s ‘culture of poverty’, into anthropology’s analytical portfolio. What is more, should we accept austerity as a disruptive event, we foreclose the possibility to analyze it as an event that maintains order. Such was the case when the socialist project that the majority of Mauritians voted into government in 1982 was crushed within less than a year by the reality of the ‘collective obligation’ that the previous government had undertaken.

Patrick Neveling is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Bergen. He researches capitalism from historical, anthropological, and critical political economy perspectives. His PhD thesis on Mauritius is forthcoming as Manifestations of Globalization: Capital, State, and Labor in Mauritius, 1825–2005 (in German). He has published widely on the historical political economy of capitalism and is currently finishing a volume titled “Relocating Capitalism: Export Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones since 1947.”

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Notes 1. For more details on this subject, see Neveling (2014). 2. In fact, the previous coalition retained eight seats in the 1982 elections on an ethnicity-based ‘best loser’ system. 3. In his autobiography, Jayen Cuttaree (2011), a former MLP member, a long-time member of Parliament, and a minister in various governments for the MMM since 1982, provides an excellent overview of defections from the MLP to the MMM throughout the 1970s and until 1982. 4. For the Mauritius Republic Act of 1992, whereby Mauritius became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations, see http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/45/enacted.

References Bear, Laura. 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cuttaree, Jayen. 2011. Behind the Purple Curtain: A Political Autobiography. Mauritius: Editions Le Printemps. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Knight, Daniel M., and Charles Stewart. 2016. “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe.” History and Anthropology 27 (1): 1–18. Mandel, Ernest. 1983. “Social Democracy and Social Movements.” Thesis Eleven 7 (1): 159–162. Neveling, Patrick. 2012. “Manifestationen der Globalisierung: Kapital, Staat und Arbeit in Mauritius, 1825–2005” [Manifestations of globalization: Capital, state, and labor in Mauritius, 1825– 2005). PhD thesis, Martin Luther University of Halle/Saale. Neveling, Patrick. 2013. “A Periodisation of Globalisation According to the Mauritian Integration into the International Sugar Commodity Chain (1825–2005).” In Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions, ed. Jonathan Curry-Machado, 121–142. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Neveling, Patrick. 2014. “Three Shades of Embeddedness, State Capitalism as the Informal Economy, Emic Notions of the AntiMarket, and Counterfeit Garments in the Mauritian Export Processing Zone.” Research in Economic Anthropology 34: 65–94. Neveling, Patrick. 2017. “The Political Economy Machinery: Toward a Critical Anthropology of Development as a Contested Capitalist Practice.” Dialectical Anthropology 41 (2): 163–183. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2015. “Of Direct and Default Democracy: The Debt Referendum in Greece.” FocaalBlog, 6 July. http:// www.focaalblog.com/2015/07/06/theodoros-rakopoulos-ofdirect-and-default-democracy-the-debt-referendum-in-greece. World Bank Group. 1987. Report and Recommendation of the President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to the Executive Directors on a Proposed Loan in an Amount Equal to US$25.0 Million to Mauritius for an Industrial Sector Adjustment Program. Washington, DC: World Bank.

Debt, Vultures, and Austerity in Argentina

( Victoria Goddard

On a warm, late-summer afternoon in March 2016, a large crowd gathered outside the Palace of the Argentine National Congress in the city of Buenos Aires. Inside, deputies were preparing to debate the agreement with the country’s creditors reached by the government weeks after it took office in December 2015. Argentina’s outgoing president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had refused the terms demanded by hedge funds that, with the support of a New York judge, had blocked the payment of restructured debt agreed on with a majority of creditors. Now, under a new government, congressmen and -women were being asked to approve the legal changes that would enable payment of the holdouts and unlock the ‘technical default’ that was limiting Argentina’s access to financial markets. Inside the Congress, government spokespersons and supporters proposed that the country faced a harsh choice: either the hedge funds were paid so Argentina could rejoin the global financial community, or the country submitted to a regime of austerity and ajuste.1 An equally stark choice—between ‘the Motherland’ and ‘the Vultures’—was proposed by those protesting outside the building. As evening fell, the crowds grew larger, spreading along the

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adjacent streets and over the large plaza opposite the Congress. Banners, songs, and chants repudiated negotiations with the vulture funds and the prospect of a future blighted by debt. Many supported Kirchner and her party, the Front for Victory, whose narrow electoral defeat was proving to be costly. For their part, human rights groups, trade unions, social movements, and parties of the Left set up their banners and prepared for a long vigil. A large lorry served as a stage from which DJs played popular tunes that beckoned young and old to dance and sing. This they did enthusiastically, stopping to listen attentively to the congressmen and -women who took time out from the debate to address the crowd. Standing alongside trade union leaders who joined them onstage, they gave their reasons for defying the holdouts and Thomas Griesa, the New York judge whose intervention had consolidated their cause. They would vote against the government’s motion in defense of sovereignty and of the workers and the poor, who would bear the brunt of the costs of the agreement.2 In the early hours of 16 March, the government’s proposal was approved, with 186 votes in favor and 86 votes against. Two weeks later, the proposal went before the Senate. Only a handful of protesters gathered opposite Congress. Women sat in circles, holding banners and flags that identified them as supporters of neighborhood groups or social movements. A larger circle was formed, and those of us who were in the square were invited to share our views and proposals. One speaker lamented the poor turnout but promised to persevere in the struggle against debt and the measures that, contrary to the government’s rhetoric, were already making ajuste a tangible reality. That evening the mood was very different from the mixture of anger and humor that sustained the protesters on 15 March. Now a quiet sense of despondency and

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resignation fell on the gatherings around the square. The outcome of the vote was predictable, and it would not be to their liking. The Senate overwhelmingly supported the government’s motion, with 54 votes in favor and 16 votes against. The outcome was made possible by the support of several members of the Front for Victory and its allies, who until very recently had supported a more combative stance in the name of national interest. Everyday conversations echoed the markedly different views exposed in Congress. Many expressed despair, recalling the hardships caused in the past by spiraling debt and economic crisis. Those who had lived through the military dictatorship of 1976–1983 often emphasized the violent roots of national debt, which grew exponentially from the 1970s, to end in default and economic chaos at the beginning of the twenty-first century.3 Others were less concerned with history and highlighted the moral obligations entailed in any debt or exchange. National shame could be attributed as much to conceding to all holdout demands, to the detriment of the country’s sovereignty, as to failing to meet its obligations to its creditors. Some disapproved of the hedge funds, fearing the consequences of a renewed cycle of indebtedness, but they could see no alternative. Many dared to hope that all would be well in the end. Yet the highs and lows provoked by asset bubbles and their inevitable implosion were vividly recalled by the older generations. Historically, prosperity had proved to be elusive.

Debt and the Pursuit of Happiness The dawn of the twenty-first century saw Argentina shift from being a country with low debt and high levels of employment to a country that was facing economic meltdown, a financial crash, and unprecedented levels of

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poverty and unemployment.4 As an enthusiastic supporter of neo-liberal policies in the 1990s, Argentina was singled out as a star pupil by the IMF.5 Recessionary conditions turned into a full-blown economic crisis, which in turn became a political crisis as workers, the unemployed, and the middle classes united in their rejection of the political elite. The government collapsed, and new elections were called. Néstor Kirchner, a relative outsider from a Patagonian province, stepped into the presidential role with only 22 percent of the vote. Benefiting from the widespread rejection of what had been in place prior to the crisis, he outlined a program that prioritized the reduction of poverty and of unemployment. Like Brazil and other South American neighbors, Kirchner aimed to minimize IMF influence, which demanded a resolution to Argentina’s default and debt. Kirchner negotiated restructured payments that allowed the government to proceed with policies aimed at fostering economic recovery. By January 2016, the entire IMF debt was canceled, but further restructurings with private creditors were resisted by a small group of holdouts. Only eight months before the congressional vote on the hedge fund settlement, Kicillof (2015: 138), the outgoing minister for the economy, commented: If it is still not understood that our policies were responsible for bringing unemployment down from 25 percent [in 2001] to 7 percent, if people don’t see the practical outcomes of the struggle against the vulture funds on a daily basis, then they will say: “Sure! Go on and pay them!” But that changes if we understand how [these improvements] are connected with standing up in the United Nations, in the Organization of American States, in the G-20 to defend our sovereignty, which is nothing more nor less than to defend the people’s livelihoods.

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The quarrel with the hedge funds is sometimes cast as gladiatorial—even heroic—while others focus less on the protagonism of the Argentine government, noting instead the tensions and risks inherent in contemporary capitalism between the principles of sovereignty and the interests of financial capital that this conflict exemplifies.6 The capacity of an elite of investors to derive enormous profits by capitalizing on distressed firms and countries could threaten the edifice of the global economy itself.7 Kicillof’s optimistic assessment of the public’s mood was disappointed when in December 2015 voters favored the promise of a new start offered by the coalition Cambiemos (Let’s Change) over the track record of his own government. Furthermore, the resolution of the stalemate with the hedge funds was the key to the new government’s promise of prosperity and a ‘happiness revolution’.

Two Models? The Brazilian political scientist Emir Sader (2016) suggests that Argentina’s new government may become the key reference for neo-liberalism in Latin America, perhaps signaling the demise of the region’s exploration of progressive, redistributive models. There is evidence to support the view that such models have had some success, particularly in relation to employment and social policies (ECLAC-ILO 2015). In Argentina, the post-crisis policies implemented by the Kirchner or ‘K’ governments8 aiming to redress inequality were supported by the income generated by the strong performance of commodities in the global market (Ottone 2012). Indicators such as the Gini coefficient appear to vindicate the ‘K’ strategy,9 as does research carried out by independent institutions such as the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the International

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Labor Organization, and the Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina of the Pontificia Catholic University. The reliance on an extractive economy and on export income became problematic as the global recession affected global demand and prices, impacting on revenue and rates of growth. Despite research showing that the government’s safety net did protect vulnerable families and individuals (ODSA 2016), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s mandate ended in 2015 with a poverty rate of 29 percent, highlighting the limits of the model. Such limitations can be attributed to mismanagement, distortions in the implementation of policies, and, more importantly, the inability to devise innovative strategies to deal with unfavorable conditions (Vázquez 2016). A more significant factor relates to structural continuities that are symptomatic of the inability of Latin America’s so-called progressive governments to disentangle their projects from the logic and current incarnation of global capitalism (Zibechi 2011).10 On 8 May 2018, President Macri addressed the country to announce that the government was approaching the IMF to negotiate a credit line to support its economic plans. The announcement was made in the context of a plummeting peso and interest rates that have been hiked up to 40 percent in an attempt to stabilize the peso against the dollar. The announcement was met with widespread repudiation. On 28 May, demonstrators embarked on a week-long Federal March across the country demanding “Bread and Work.” On Friday, 1 June, coming from the north and the south, the marchers converged on the Plaza de Mayo facing the Government House. At the mass rally, a broad coalition including social movements, human rights groups, pique­ teros (unemployed men and women), and trade unionists rejected the politics of ajuste. Further turmoil is expected, with a general strike proposed for early June. In the meantime, all sides of the IMF negotiations highlight the urgency

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of finalizing a stand-by agreement that makes the release of funds conditional on the implementation of IMF conditions. Government representatives have offered assurances that this is not a repeat of the events experienced in the 2002 crisis. Nevertheless, opinion polls suggest that an agreement with the IMF is deeply unpopular. The return to the IMF, predicted by many on that evening in March 2016, might be seen as another point within a cycle of boom and debt. It will undoubtedly be represented as a symptom of the failure of one model or the other, ajuste pitted against ‘populism’. Yet the historical resonance encapsulated in the very notion of ajuste (Forster 2013) would seem to suggest the need to confront those persistent inequalities and stubborn imbalances that have been at the heart of the country’s awkward relationship with capitalist modernity.

Final Remarks The extractivism promoted by the convergence of national economic models and global capitalist interests is linked to finance rather than production. It has failed to generate development, although it does produce great wealth. The massive increase in the production of soya in the region is a case in point. The soya boom provided much needed income for the ‘K’ governments, but it intensified the concentration of the rural economy in the hands of transnational firms like Monsanto and Cargill. Smaller producers were displaced, generating unemployment and forcing pauperized populations to migrate, while human health and the environment suffered long-term damage (Juanche 2011).11 At the same time, the ‘normalization’ proposed by the new government of Mauricio Macri echoes the policies of the 1990s, which generated high levels of poverty and unemployment.12 History suggests that neo-liberalism will

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neither forge an equitable society nor sustain the ‘horizon of hope’ attributed to its rival (O’Donnell 2012).13 Argentina and Latin America are at a cross-roads and must decide whether to reinstate neo-liberalism or to pursue the ongoing struggle between contrasting and competing social, economic, and political projects (Kalb 2013; Sader 2016), leading, perhaps, to emancipatory politics, pluralism, and a project of radical democracy (Svampa 2011).

Victoria Goddard is a Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked in the fields of economic and political anthropology, with an emphasis on gender and class. Her current research focuses on the political and the production of alternative publics in Argentina. Recent publications, with co-editor Susana Narotzky, include Industry and Work in Contemporary Capitalism: Global Models, Local Lives? (2015) and Work and Liveli­ hoods: History, Ethnography and Models in Times of Crisis (2017), winner of the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize in 2017.

Notes 1. Here, the term ajuste, or adjustment, has a range of meanings that lends it more nuanced understandings than might be elicited by terms such as ‘restructuring’ or ‘structural adjustment’. The philosopher Ricardo Forster (2013) comments on the ways in which certain terms can stretch and alter meaning, giving depth to words through their association with experience. In Argentina, ajuste elicits a déjà vu that provokes deep reactions by association with “a politics that devours rights, social and employment achievements, and even dignity in the name of higher-order

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necessities and future-oriented goals, while at the same time leaving in its wake the damages and the damaged” (ibid.: 207). All translations are my own if not otherwise indicated. 2. Holdouts were paid a sum of US$4.6 billion at the end of April 2016. In order to make the payments, Argentina “sealed the largest ever bond issue from an emerging market economy … with a $16.5bn sale of government debt” (Platt and Moore 2016). 3. These views are supported by figures provided by the World Bank (quoted in Basualdo 2010: 443). Basualdo argues that following a very high rate of growth between the 1970s and 1981, the debt decreased noticeably in the 1980s (coinciding with the return to democratic government) until the early 1990s (ibid.). These changes coincide with internal policies and with global shifts, notably the ‘lost decade’ of Latin American economies that, starting with the Mexican 1982 debt crisis, saw a period of reduced lending and strict adjustment policies imposed by international organizations such as the IMF. In the 1990s, there was greater access to credit, which was managed by international organizations rather than banks. In Argentina, this coincided with the implementation of policies based on the principles of the Washington Consensus (ibid.). 4. The 1980s are known as Latin America’s ‘lost decade’ (Ottone 2012). Starting in the 1970s, Latin American governments, like developing countries elsewhere, borrowed heavily. By the end of 1975, developing countries owed US$78,000 million, with Latin America having a disproportionate share of that debt. Argentina had embarked on national development policies and enjoyed strong export revenues that had limited its participation in credit markets. This changed radically after the militarycivilian coup of 1976. Embracing global financial markets and borrowing to sustain and consolidate the military’s position resulted in high levels of debt growth: by 1981 the debt was eight times higher than in 1976. 5. According to figures provided by Lozano (cited in Sznol 2007), at the time of the crisis, 39 percent of Argentine national income was in the hands of only 10 percent of the population. Unemployment grew across the country, in the first instance because companies restructured and later when growing numbers of them closed down. Unemployment figures rose to a high of 22.5 percent in 2001, and a new political actor took center stage as the piqueteros devised new forms of protest.

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6. Paul Singer of Elliott Management Corporation (ECM), whose subsidiary in the Caymans, NML Capital, owned Argentine debt, impounded up to US$260 million of Argentine assets in the United States and Europe. He attempted other confiscations, such as the presidential plane, and in 2012 he instructed the Ghanaian government to impound an Argentine frigate, the ARA Libertad, which was on an official visit to the country. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea declared the confiscation illegal, as did other international organizations. 7. Those concerned about the implications of the standoff between Argentina and the hedge funds include the IMF, which expressed concern about “possible broader systemic implications” if Argentina’s negotiation failed (Talley 2014). The economist Kenneth Rogoff (2014) refers to Argentina’s 2014 default as signaling a “shift in the international sovereign-debt regime. The shift favors hard-line creditors in bond issuances governed by US law. With emerging-market growth slowing, and external debt rising, new legal interpretations that make debt future write-downs and reschedulings more difficult do not augur well for global financial stability” (see also Eichengreen 2014; Jones 2014). In what it describes as a ‘historic’ measure, UNCTAD (2015) responded to the recent debt crises in Greece, Argentina, and elsewhere by setting out nine principles and guidelines for the proper conduct of global debt relations that are aimed at limiting vulture funds’ ability to undermine sovereignty and the resolution of the crisis. According to UNCTAD, sovereign states have the right to design their macro-economic policies unimpeded and, when needed, to restructure their sovereign debt. The document also includes the principles of ‘equitable treatment’ and of ‘majority restructuring’, which, had they been in place, would have prevented a minority of firms such as Singer’s from blocking the restructuring agreed to by other creditors. 8. The ‘K’ model refers to the policies pursued under the presidency of Néstor Kirchner from 2003 to 2007 and that of his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was elected in 2007 and again in 2011, occupying the presidency from 2007 to 2015. ‘Kirchnerismo’ has been described as proposing a nationalpopular project based on growth with social inclusion; it is also described as a neo-developmentalist strategy, specifically based on an export-oriented economy with incipient import substitution in support of small and medium industrial units (Varesi

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2016). It is worth noting that the content and form of the ‘K’ governments shifted significantly from the presidency of Néstor Kirchner through the first and second presidencies of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (ibid.). 9. According to World Bank estimates, the Gini index rose from 40.8 in 1980 to peak in 2002 with 53.8. In 2013 it reached a low of 41, rising to 42.4 in 2016 (GINI Index World Bank estimate, World Bank Group). 10. While a World Bank report claimed that the Argentine middle class doubled in size over a decade (see Banco Mundial 2012) and the ‘K’ policies reduced levels of poverty, there are significant continuities across the Kirchner governments and both earlier and subsequent governments. For example, Svampa (2013) describes the Kirchner project in terms of Gramsci’s concept of ‘passive revolution’ as simultaneously promoting transformation and restoration. She also points out that under the ‘K’ policies, the unemployed were no longer the outcast Other they had been in the 1990s. The rural poor and indigenous communities are among those that have taken their place as the dispossessed within the priorities of an economic model based on extractivism and appropriation of land and natural resources (ibid.). This orientation has also meant that powerful groups have remained in powerful positions. Despite conflicts with the large agroexporters, the successive ‘K’ governments were heavily reliant on the income derived from that sector, particularly from the sale of soya. Similarly, despite a rhetoric of national interest and a program of renationalization of key sectors, the ‘K’ governments’ alliances with large multinational corporations such as Monsanto and Chevron, enabling their exploitation of key resources, reflected broader continuities with regard to the significant position of foreign interests or extranjerización, resulting in a transfer of profits. For 2011, an estimated 70 percent of total gains of US$7.331 million left the country (Varesi 2016: 83). 11. Zibechi (2011) argues that an important effect of this complicity with extractivism across Latin America has been a lack of debate about possible models for the future. Instead, debates have been locked within fixed parameters, in the case of Argentina focusing on how much to tax soya, while avoiding an important discussion of the soya model itself. 12. Macri’s first cabinet and key staff were recruited from the business sector, including transnational firms such as Shell, JP

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Morgan, and Monsanto. Devaluation, the removal of capital and currency controls, and the cancellation or reduction of export tariffs, on the one hand, and the reduction or withdrawal of subsidies to utilities, on the other, were rapidly introduced along with large-scale job losses in the public sector as well as the private sector. In the first three months of Macri’s government, poverty levels increased by 5.5 points, with the percentage of the population living in poverty rising from 29 percent to 34.5 percent. While in February 2016 an estimated 1.4 million people joined the ranks of the poor, major economic entities such as the banking and the mining sectors experienced increased profits of 78 percent (ODSA 2016). 13. O’Donnell (2012: 103) accepts that the hope awakened by the new directions explored in many Latin American countries have been “all too frequently submerged within the banality of petty passions and multiple forms of corruption.” An example of this is the spectacle of disdain exhibited during the impeachment of Brazil’s ex-president, Dilma Roussef. The rowdy proceedings crossed a tangible threshold when two deputies—father and son—dedicated their vote in favor of impeachment to the leader of the 1964 military coup and the head of the detention center where Roussef, then a young militant, was tortured. The gesture signals the historic entanglements between military repression and the imposition of economic change, identified by the militant and journalist Rodolfo Walsh in his “Open Letter to the Argentine Junta.” He warned of the long-term suffering that would be inflicted on the population by the economic model pursued by the military following the 1976 coup, which crushed resistance to reforms by “freezing wages with rifle butts while prices rise at bayonet point” (quoted in McCaughan 2002: 288). Three years earlier, the coup led by Augusto Pinochet against Chile’s democratically elected government then pioneered the new model devised by the ‘Chicago boys’, “having eliminated possible sources of resistance or negotiation” (Lomnitz and Melnick 1991: 1). In 2017, the newly elected neo-liberal government led by the Cambiemos coalition broke with the previous government’s refusal to cooperate with the United States in its drive to reconstitute its military presence on the continent and signed protocols and agreements that enabled the creation of two new US bases in strategic points of the country. See Borón (2011: 75) and Juanche (2011) for a discussion of the militarization and remilitarization of Latin America.

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References Banco Mundial. 2012. “Argentina duplicó su clase media en la última década, dice informe del Banco Mundial.” 13 November. http:// www.bancomundial.org/es/news/press-release/2012/11/13/ argentina-middle-class-grows-50-percent. Basualdo, Eduardo. 2010. Estudios de historia económica argentina: Desde mediados del siglo XX a la actualidad. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Borón, Atilio. 2011. “Las víctimas son culpables: Notas sobre la criminalización de los pobres y la protesta social en América Latina.” In Palau 2011, 69–76. ECLAC-ILO (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean–International Labor Organization). 2015. “The Employment Situation in Latin America and the Caribbean: Universal Social Protection in Labor Markets with High Levels of Informality.” ECLAC-ILO Bulletin, No. 12, May. Eichengreen, Barry. 2014. “Restructuring Debt Restructuring.” Guard­ ian, 9 September. Forster, Ricardo. 2013. La anomalía kirchnerista: La política, el con­ flicto y la invención democrática. Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta. Jones, Tim. 2014. “When Vulture Funds Circle, Who Will Make Debt Repayments Fairer?” Guardian, 8 September. Juanche, Ana. 2011. “La remilitarización de América Latina: Una estrategia funcional al desarrollo hegemónico.” In Palau 2011, 59–66. Kalb, Don. 2013. “Financialization and the Capitalist Moment: Marx versus Weber in the Anthropology of Global Systems.” American Ethnologist 40 (2): 258–266. Kicillof, Axel. 2015. Diálogos sin corbata: Para pensar la economía, la política (y algunas cosas más) en el siglo XXI. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Lomnitz, Larissa, and Ana Melnick. 1991. Chile’s Middle Class: A Struggle for Survival in the Face of Neoliberalism. Trans. Jeanne Grant. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. McCaughan, Michael. 2002. True Crimes: Rodolfo Walsh, the Life and Time of a Radical Intellectual. London: Latin America Bureau. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 2012. “Acerca de crisis y democracia.” In Crisis y movimientos sociales en nuestra América: Cuerpos, terri­ torios e imaginarios en disputa, ed. Mar Daza, Raphael Hoetmer,

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and Virginia Vargas, 103–113. Lima: Programa Democracia y Transformación Global. ODSA (Observatorio de la Deuda Social Argentina). 2016. Baró­ metro de la Deuda Social Argentina. Serie del Bicentenario (2010–2016). Año VI, Universidad Católica Argentina. http:// hcdcorrientes.gov.ar. Ottone, Ernesto. 2012. “A Non-Global Crisis? Challenging the Crisis in Latin America.” In Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, ed. Manuel Castells, João Caraça, and Gustavo Cardoso, 278–302. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Palau, Marielle, ed. 2011. La dimensión represiva y militar y el mode­lo de desarrollo. Asunción: BASE, DIAKONIA, SERPAJ-PY. Platt, Eric, and Elaine Moore. 2016. “How Did Argentina Pull Off a $16.5bn Bond Sale?” Financial Times, 20 April. Rogoff, Kenneth. 2014. “A Tear for Argentina.” Project Syndicate, 1 August. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/kenneth -rogoff-warns-that-a-broken-sovereign-debt-system-augurs-poorly -for-global-financial-stability?barrier=accesspaylog. Sader, Emir. 2016. “En Brasil se disputa el futuro de la región.” Página 12, 13 June. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/ elmundo/ 4-301610-2016-06-13.html. Svampa, Maristella. 2013. “La década kirchnerista: Populismo, clase media y revolución pasiva.” LASAForum 44 (4): 14–17. Sznol, Florinda E. 2007. “Geografía de la Resistencia: Protesta social, formas de apropriación y transformación del espacio urbano en la Argentina (1996–2006).” Revista THEOMAI/THEOMAI Journal 15: 21–34. Talley, Ian. 2014. “IMF Issues Warning on Argentina Debt Defeat.” Wall Street Journal, 17 June. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). 2015. World Investment Report 2015. http://unctad.org/en/ PublicationsLibrary/wir2015_en.pdf. Varesi, Gastón Ángel. 2016. “Acumulación y hegemonía en Argentina durante el kirchnerismo.” Revista Problemas del Desarrollo 187 (47): 63–87. Vázquez, Federico. 2016. “La crisis del posneoliberalismo.” Le Monde Diplomatique 202, 20 March. Zibechi, Raúl. 2011. “La impostergable lucha contra el extractivismo.” In Palau 2011, 87–93.

Austerity Wars The Crisis of Financialization and the Struggle for Democracy

( Jaime Palomera

Austerity politics constitute by no means an innovation. The neo-classical codes from which they draw inspiration have regulated the institutional architecture of the European Union for decades, creating an ideal framework for the rise of financial capitalism. Although often presented as a depoliticized set of ‘technical’ norms, they have contributed decisively to shaping the process of continental integration and redefining class relations across regions. In short, austerity has provided the normative scaffolding for the European division of labor under finance capital. However, financialization has recently entered a prolonged crisis, with no avenues for growth looming in the horizon. In the current context, the deepening of austerity politics can only translate into an undisguised process of dispossession (similar to structural adjustment programs implemented in the Global South; see Rakopoulos, this volume) and a challenge to the social contract that sustained the political and economic regime of the EU in previous decades. This is nowhere clearer than in the peripheral countries of Southern Europe, where millions of people have risen up over recent years to push history in a

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different direction. In this chapter, I turn to Spain in order to cast light on the class relations behind austerity politics and the broad democratic movement striving to transform them—from that extraordinary outburst called the 15-M Movement to the birth of the political party Podemos.

A Financial Regime of Accumulation (1977–2007) Austerity has become a buzzword as of late, but the kind of economic policies that characterize it began to take shape during the last great crisis 40 years ago. By the mid1970s, the system of international mechanisms that had supported capital accumulation in the preceding decades began to fall apart. The emergence of new actors in the world system increased competition and led to a problem of industrial overcapacity that has persisted up to the current era, as carefully demonstrated by Brenner (2006). However, the fundamental factor behind the acceleration of the crisis was the challenge posed by the labor movement, which was robustly organized around the factory system. Wages boomed comparatively faster than productivity, substantially reducing profit rates,1 and capital owners reacted by increasing prices—a vicious zero-sum game that sent inflation levels through the roof. In sum, intense class conflict posed serious obstacles, not only to the continuity of Spain’s dictatorial regime, but also to capitalism itself (see Balfour 1994; López Hernández and Rodríguez López 2010). The resolution to that crisis can be easily characterized as a first exercise in austerity politics, granted by a class compromise between the institutional forces of the Francoist regime and the Left that crystallized in 1977. In the name of ‘competitiveness’, the government adopted a set of monetarist measures that tackled inflation and as a

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result pushed wages downward.2 Salaries went from playing a central role in the overall economy (and a powerful source of social promotion) to becoming mere production costs. Supported by the now familiar rhetoric of ‘sacrifice’, the burden of the crisis was placed on the shoulders of the most vulnerable sectors. The horizon of full employment disappeared in favor of corporate surpluses, and the workers movement embarked on a slow process of decomposition. This new brand of policymaking came hand in hand with the gradual transformation and repositioning of the Spanish economy in the new international order. Integration into the European Union was predicated on the shift from a Fordist regime of accumulation (articulated around manufacturing and economies of scale) to a financialized model (centered on the capture of global financial rents and harnessed by real estate development). Tellingly, from the early 1980s, the European Economic Community (EEC) put an end to industrial subsidies. Instead, it lavishly funded huge infrastructural programs, which played a central role in feeding the financial and real estate bubbles of 1986–1992 and 1997–2007.3 Financialization was also fundamental in offsetting the regional imbalances between the exporting Northern European countries and the importing Mediterranean regions. Trade surpluses amassed in the core were reinvested in the periphery in the form of debt bonds and mortgage-backed securities.4 Most importantly, the advance of austerity politics was predicated on a transfer of social entitlements (attained between the 1970s and 1980s) from the public to the private sphere. From the signature of the Maastricht Treaty up to the financial crisis (1993–2007), Spanish governments behaved as the best pupil of austerity proponents,5 keeping public debt in check. However, they could do so only by shifting collective obligations to the private

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domain of the corporation and the household. The dogma of public debt reduction, with its limiting effects on social expenditures, came together with a vast liberalization of the financial sector. Guaranteeing one’s own welfare through the mortgage market became the new thing for the average citizen. The capacity of households to access resources was less ensured by their real income, which was in decline, than by the financial revaluation of their properties and the ensuing capacity to access credit— wealth effects that were guaranteed as long as the bubble continued.6 This was the magic that sustained aspirations of social mobility for a vast majority of the population. It was the ideological glue that held the middle-class dream together and supported the growth of oligarchies in the construction and banking sectors.

Zero-Sum Games (2008–2016) When the bubble burst in 2007, the financial dynamics that had hitherto sustained wealth effects triggered the opposite trend. The value of properties in the hands of families plummeted. Homes became liabilities rather than assets, and debts were now hardly repayable. The economic meltdown had an even worse impact on the balance sheets of banks, but the financial oligarchies embedded in the ‘troika’7 managed to turn the systemic crisis into an opportunity for creating new areas of profit—in short, for their own reproduction. First, following the idea that banks were ‘too big to fail’, states poured public funds into the financial system and took up a colossal amount of toxic assets.8 Second, in the name of budget deficit reduction, peripheral countries were forced to dismantle and privatize their welfare systems while financing their sovereign debt through derivative markets. In the process,

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a European problem of private debt was socialized, contained within the borders of the peripheral countries, and turned into a lucrative niche for financial institutions.9 The combination of austerity and financial expropriation10 constitutes an inherent response to structural limitations in the traditional mechanisms of accumulation: industrial overcapacity, stagnant productivity, and falling rates of profit. Against this backdrop, the temporary ‘solution’ to the crisis can only take the form of a zero-sum game, whereby the gains of a class imply absolute losses for vast social groups. In Southern Europe, with the bulk of the population knee-deep in debt, the possibility of fueling new booms and extending household loans on a wide scale to compensate for low wages (and sustain living standards) cannot even be fathomed. Financial capitalism will survive only as long as it can resort to outright extractions of social wealth through mechanisms that have long been practiced in the Global South—that is, measures carried out by plutocratic governments that have little to do with the laws of the ‘free market’.11 In other words, the current crisis is not simply the end to just another cycle of growth, but a poignant revelation that promises of social reproduction cannot be kept anymore for wide segments of the population. Spain is as devastated as the many unfinished buildings and towns dotting its landscape: the unemployment rate is structurally located at 20 percent;12 around 40 percent of the population scrape by with wages that oscillate between 400 and 900 euros; almost one in three people live at risk of poverty; and hundreds of thousands have been evicted from their homes since 2007.13 In spite of their resilience, dreams of progress and modernity linked to the European project are slowly collapsing, like a house of cards. Currently, very few (a meager 26 percent in 2016) believe in the much-touted ‘economic recovery’.14

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A Democratic Revolution without a Revolutionary Subject We are living through turbulent times. In recent years, millions of people across Southern Europe have risen up against the tyranny of austerity around a unanimous call for ‘democracy’. The current cycle of struggles is indelibly marked by the eruption of the 15-M Movement in Spain, also known as the Indignados Movement and Take the Square. Beginning on 15 May 2011, a week before the local and regional elections scheduled for 22 May, this movement shook up the views of different generations of Spaniards in ways that are still difficult to measure today. “They do not represent us,” shouted the massive assemblies. “Join the #Spanishrevolution,” read tweets that helped boost the demonstrations. “It’s not a crisis: it’s the system,” chanted the millions who over a matter of weeks took over hundreds of public squares across the country. Without a doubt, the 15-M was much more than a merely defensive reaction against austerity measures. It amounted to no less than a massive indictment of the political-economic order and a call for a democratic radicalization of the state. Of course, the struggle for democracy in Europe is not at all new. Its history goes back a long way and is sutured by several episodes of radicalization (Rodríguez 2013). It emerged as the central fight of the Left between the Revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871, always as a synonym for the eradication of exploitation. Later on, it was retrieved by the cycle of protests of 1968, as a critique of twentieth-century socialism and its bureaucratic structures, and it has now resurfaced again. In ways that re-enact previous struggles, the 15-M by and large framed the democratic struggle as a radical distribution of power, which should necessarily lead to a distribution of wealth.

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While some of its militants came from existing leftist groups, one of the strategic successes of the 15-M was the rejection of party affiliations and traditional symbols of the Left as a way to reach out to a broad social majority (“This is neither left nor right—it’s the ones below against the ones above”). The support that its transformative program amassed (72 percent of the population) would have been unimaginable not long ago.15 Moreover, by strengthening networks among bottom-up initiatives, in 2011–2013 the movement was capable of catalyzing a wave of protests not seen since the 1970s—actions of civil disobedience to reclaim social rights (homes, health, schools, culture, public services) and attempt to promote spaces of autonomy. However, the state is currently not receptive to any internal reforms, as the indignados have exposed. Every new round of austerity measures confirmed that negotiation was not even a possibility, rendering the institutional system—from bipartisanship to the monarchy, from financial oligarchies to the main unions—more illegitimate. As suggested above, austerity measures go against any possible growth strategies due to structural limitations and the reproductive needs of finance capital. The rigidity encountered by the Take the Square movement reveals that, unlike previous eras, the current conjuncture does not even allow for ideological discussions about revolution and reform. Rather, it boils down to either revolution or absolute involution, which the rise of far-right politicians is already announcing. Like an army of scaremongers, the fascists of the world are engineering new forms of discrimination and fostering ‘wars’ among the poor. It has come to a point where the choice is between that or a radically progressive transformation. In fact, if the crisis of representation and the surge of corruption (resulting from power struggles among the elites) have not resulted in the rise of a Spanish Le Pen or

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Trump, it is to a great extent because the 15-M not only rejected the established elites but also aspired to a new, egalitarian social order. While it spurned the traditional revolutionary method—namely, military insurrection— it employed different forms of symbolic violence, like “Occupy Congress” in September 2012. By the end of the following year, the expression ‘regime crisis’ had become as familiar among activists as that of ‘constituent process’. In spite of the many perspectives, there was a growing sense that some kind of mass party movement would be required in order to replace Congress with a constituent assembly—one that could draft a popular constitution disarticulating, at least temporarily, the instituted powers of the financial oligarchies.16 Paradoxically, the greatest shortcoming of the so-called democratic revolution up to the present day is the lack of a revolutionary subject. This has to do with its peculiar class composition. In spite of its scope,17 the current cycle has been symbolically represented and materially led by the emerging figure of the university precariat (34.6 percent of the population).18 After all, the 15-M was also an expression of the crisis of the middle class as an ideological project. Its mechanisms of reproduction have collapsed to the point that—for over 20 years—the regime has not even been able to integrate the most educated segments into its own structures (cultural industries, academia, urban planning, etc.). Current organizers have had trouble generating the kind of alliances with subaltern groups that would amount to anything like a class formation process in the classic sense (Thompson 1963). Meanwhile, any remaining traces of the working-class subjectivity that crystallized in the 1970s have practically vanished. The weak presence of proletarian and manual laborers in the movement—that huge 43.4 percent of the Spanish population with lower secondary education attainment,

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according to INE (2015)—denotes a severe limitation in terms of democratic potential and of the political agenda that the movement can put forth. In fact, this ‘middle-classism’ is at the basis of an ongoing temptation—notorious in Podemos and other recent parties—to read the demands of the 15-M from a conservative angle, allegedly in the name of convincing the ‘moderate voter’. The keyword is ‘regeneration’: a renovation of the political elites, a timid return to Keynesian solutions, and a war on corruption. Still, if the emergence of Podemos in 2014 carried great promise, it is especially because it had the potential to reverse the class bias. Although the party was spawned by a group of highly trained—yet precarious—university activists, it showed the capacity to raise hopes precisely where the indignados had been almost non-existent: the old red belts and their hard-hit neighborhoods. Podemos burst onto the public arena with audacious appearances in prime time television shows and a down-to-earth rhetoric that managed to seduce the university graduate and the domestic worker alike. Its ambitious program, inspired by the demands of the indignados, called for a political and economic democracy, including debt restructuring, basic income, and the socialization of key economic sectors. After Podemos’s formidable success in the European elections of May 2014, thousands of Spaniards who had never been politically involved—unemployed people, working poor, and ethnic minorities—flocked to its círculos (circles), the popular assemblies that mushroomed across the country. Working-class Spain had not seen anything like it in a long time. However, the steps that the organization has taken since then have so far wasted its great possibilities. First, the prime movers of the project turned the primary election system into a plebiscite about their own team rather than a truly open process that could ensure the formation

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of plural candidacies. As a result, the movement quickly shifted into what the 15-M had wanted to fend off: a vertical party with a small apparatus concentrating most of the power, focused on defusing internal disagreement and on distributing positions of privilege. This dynamic was replicated in every region and municipality. The new ‘citizen councils’ were formed on the basis of loyalty ties to the apparatus rather than bottom-up processes of deliberation. Second, and most importantly, Podemos has so far disregarded its own circles—precisely those spaces that involve the chance of producing democracy (and building a political culture) where it is more desperately needed. During the campaign, the party’s grassroots amounted to little more than ‘shock troops’. At most, they were perceived as entities expressing demands, never as decisionmaking bodies. Any actions and debates in neighborhoods and towns were disconnected from the organization or stifled by it. Instead, the leadership chose to concentrate all of its energies on building an ‘electoral machine’. And what was its unifying thread? A populist premise— namely, that the formation of a common political subjectivity and hegemony, which Errejón calls ‘building a people’ (see Errejón and Mouffe 2015), would be achieved through a powerful narrative, charismatic leadership, and a fast seizure of state power. In fact, even among those closest to power, political debates were absent, replaced instead by boardroom intrigues and quarrels among ‘families’ over the distribution of power. The outcome of this strategy is well known. In spite of Podemos’s significant irruption in the Spanish Parliament after the general elections of December 2015, its results are clearly below its original expectations19 and those of the 15-M. Meanwhile, the initial enthusiasm shared by the party’s grassroots has somewhat faded. Unable to participate in the decision-making process and devoid of

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political orientation, they have either dissolved or survived thanks to their most persistent members. But all hope is not lost. Podemos is a very young organization, and its current crisis opens up new possibilities, even if only small. On the one hand, different factions within the party are currently struggling—against many obstacles—to redefine Podemos’s global strategy, pushing it to abandon the populist hypothesis and to retrieve the organizational culture of the 15-M. On the other hand, different grassroots organizations have lately been emerging and growing outside the realm of the party system, giving shape to new forms of counterpower that will be crucial in prolonging the current political cycle. With the gradual disintegration of the middle-class horizon and the advance of precarity, new forms of unionism are emerging that involve all sorts of struggles—those of chambermaids, street vendors, musicians, and tenants, to name but a few. The capacity of civil society to self-organize and to exert critical pressure on the parties that have entered the institutional system will surely play a crucial role in extending the claims for real democracy in the years to come.

Epilogue Spain is only a province in the European Union, a highly integrated region governed by financial oligarchies. The struggle against austerity cannot prosper unless it is articulated on that scale. Pan-European experiments calling for a ‘democratic rebellion’, such as the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) or Plan B for Europe, point in the right direction, yet they face the same problem as Podemos. Without the backing of grassroots organizations that are powerful enough to strive for a true redistribution of wealth, they will be unable to confront the instituted

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powers and will end up participating in processes of elite replacement. This assumption is not arbitrary but based on fact: no democratic gains in the history of Europe have been obtained without forms of class struggle that made them inevitable. The extension of political and social rights has always derived from organized working-class movements, articulated through alliances that involved different segments of society, from the radical bourgeoisie to the proletariat. The great obstacle is that while austerity politics have accelerated the crisis of the middle class as an ideological project, planting the seeds for a new era of conflict, the revolutionary subject capable of pushing it forward has yet to emerge. Certainly, most of our imagination is still captured by the memory of the post-war factory and the aura of the relatively homogeneous workingclass subject who emerged with it. However, we might be able to find more answers to our current predicament in the changing reality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period that Thompson (1978) characterizes as one of ‘class struggle without class’. The English historian describes a long process through which an infinite variety of kinds of work and subjective experiences came together through social organizations and movements. His political subject was formed out of a variety of alliances among different social positions rather than from a more or less common experience. The challenge today is perhaps greater than back then, given the national borders that divide the peoples of the continent. Yet it is a challenge that we cannot escape.

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Acknowledgments The research for and the writing of this chapter were fully funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant “Grassroots Economics: Meaning, Project and Practice in the Pursuit of Livelihood” (GRECO), Project ID 323743, funded under FP7-IDEAS-ERC.

Jaime Palomera is an anthropologist at the University of Barcelona (ERC Grassroots Economics Project) and one of the founders of La Hidra, a think tank in the same city. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and at the Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques in Paris. Since 2006 he has conducted ethnographic research in the urban peripheries of London, Barcelona, and Tarragona, analyzing a variety of contemporary topics that include the real estate-financial complex and the housing question, the transformations of class and culture, the advance of urban inequality, migration and ethno-national stratification, and political mobilization.

Notes 1. Between 1969 and 1979, the profit rate shrank from 30 percent to 12 percent of the social product (Nieto Ferrández 2007). 2. In October 1977, the main political forces, including the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, signed a treaty through which they defined the new political-economic framework, following the guidelines of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Etxezarreta 1991). Arguably, the most important element in this document was the decision to control inflation by adopting (1) a monetarist policy (monetarist restrictions)

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and (2) an income policy (wage restraint). It was agreed that, from then on, wage levels would be subordinated to expected inflation, thereby reversing the previous wage indexing system, whereby salaries were set in relation to past inflation levels. 3. For more details on these financial developments, see Etxezarreta (1991), Naredo (1996), and, in particular, the key work of López Hernández and Rodríguez López 2010). 4. This was a precarious but crucial mechanism after the establishment of the euro, which made it impossible for peripheral countries to rely on currency devaluation—a traditional way of making their exports more competitive vis-à-vis the core countries (Aglietta and Brand 2014; Lapavitsas 2012). 5. The rate of public debt as a proportion of GDP in Spain was consistently below 60 percent (as stipulated by the Maastricht Treaty) until 2008 and only began to increase with the financial crisis. This took place fundamentally as a result of the bailout program, which turned private debt into government debt in what constituted a classic socialization of corporate losses—from 40.17 percent in 2008 up to 98.64 percent in 2014, representing a level of growth of 146 percent. In 2015, the rate of public debt with respect to GDP rose again, by 5 percent. 6. Prior to the financial crisis, 87.1 percent of the housing stock was privately owned, and its price increased by more than 180 percent between 1998 and 2008 (EMF 2008; INE 2011). The figures are staggering. Compare, for instance, with another extremely financialized market such as the US, where real estate prices increased by 104 percent, according to Freddie Mac’s Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index (CMHPI). See http:// www.freddiemac.com/research/indices/house-price-index.html. 7. The term ‘troika’ (‘group of three’ in Russian) is used to describe the European Commission, the IMF, and the European Central Bank (ECB)—the three supra-national institutions in charge of dictating austerity measures in exchange for bailouts (or the promise of bailouts), especially for peripheral European states such as Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Greece. 8. Sareb, the ‘bad bank’ that the Spanish government created in agreement with the troika, acquired bad loans estimated at around 80 billion euros. 9. The normative impossibility of the ECB to act as a lender of last resort—as the Federal Reserve did in the US, guaranteeing the bonds issued by different states—has generated several panic

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waves in the financial markets in 2011–2014, making government debts an easy target for speculative attacks. The crisis was so deep in the summer of 2014 that the European Commission was forced to partly betray its austerity principles by lowering interest rates in the face of potential deflation and massively purchasing toxic asset–backed securities (Aglietta and Brand 2014). 10. To get a very superficial sense of what can be rightly called a ‘financial government’, one need only look at the size of global financial assets (typically between four and six times bigger than the world’s GDP), or compare the power of corporate groups versus nation-states in Europe. For instance, the total value of Santander Bank’s assets is above Spain’s GDP. 11. Public debt, among others, was in fact defined by Marx ([1867] 1990) as one of the characteristic forms of primitive accumulation through which European powers extracted wealth from their colonies. 12. In 2013, up to 6 million people (27 percent) registered as unemployed. The present reduction in the unemployment rate does not mean that more people are employed. Rather, fewer registered people are actively looking for a job. See Encuesta de población activa (EPA), Instituto Nacional de Estadística, at http://www.ine.es. 13. No accurate data exist on the actual number of evictions, but different groups—such as the grassroots organization Plataforma de Afectados por las Hipotecas (PAH, Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) and Amnesty International—estimate that the figure could be around 600,000 in 2007–2015. 14. See the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) survey of January 2016, http://www.cis.es/cis/export/sites/default/Archivos/Marginales/3120_3139/3124/Es3124mar.pdf. 15. According to a Metroscopia survey, in May 2014 (three years after the inception of 15-M), 72 percent of the population supported the 15-M’s main claims. See http://metroscopia.org/ el-apoyo-ciudadano-al-15m-tres-anos-despues/. 16. The idea of a constituent process was indirectly informed by the Latin American experiences (in Ecuador and Bolivia) in the wake of structural adjustment programs, although there was ample critique of the presidentialist turn they had ended up taking and discussions about the paradoxical need for a strong, coercive state in order to defend social conquests from the attacks of oligarchic powers.

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17. According to a survey (Ipsos Public Affairs), between 6 and 8.5 million people claim to have participated in the public squares. See El País, 3 August 2011, https://politica.elpais.com/politica /2011/08/03/actualidad/1312388649_737959.html. 18. Meanwhile, the participation of segments with low education (40 percent of Spaniards do not finish secondary education) was relatively absent. 19. Polls between November 2014 and February 2015 showed that Podemos was in a favorable position to win the elections, being predicted to outpoll the two main parties—the Socialist Party and the Popular Party.

References Aglietta, Michel, and Thomas Brand. 2014. Un New Deal para Europa: Crecimiento, euro, competitividad. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Balfour, Sebastián. 1994. La dictadura, los trabajadores y la ciudad: El movimiento obrero en el área metropolitana de Barcelona (1939–1988). Valencia: Alfons el Magnànim. Brenner, Robert. 2006. The Economics of Global Turbulence. London: Verso Books. EMF (European Mortgage Federation). 2008. Hypostat 2008: A Review of Europe’s Mortgage and Housing Markets. https:// hypo.org/. Errejón, Íñigo, and Chantal Mouffe. 2015. Construir pueblo: Hegemonía y radicalización de la democracia. Barcelona: Icaria. Etxezarreta, Miren. 1991. La reestructuración del capitalismo en España, 1970–1990. Madrid: Fuhem/Icaria. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística). 2011. Censos de población y viviendas. http://www.ine.es/censos2011_datos/cen11_datos _inicio.htm. INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística). 2015. “Mujeres y hombres en España: Educación.” http://www.ine.es/. Lapavitsas, Costas. 2012. Crisis en la eurozona. Madrid: Capitán Swing. López Hernández, Isidro, and Emmanuel Rodríguez López. 2010. Fin de ciclo: Financiarización, territorio y sociedad de propietarios en

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la onda larga del capitalismo hispano (1959–2010). Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Marx, Karl. (1867) 1990. Capital. Vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Classics. Naredo, José M. 1996. La burbuja inmobiliario-financiera en la coyuntura económica reciente (1985–1995). Madrid: Siglo XXI. Nieto Ferrández, Maximiliá. 2007. “Rentabilidad y distribución en el capitalismo español (1954–2003).” http://pendientedemigracion. ucm.es/info/ec/jec10/ponencias/908nieto.pdf. Rodríguez, Emmanuel. 2013. Hipótesis Democracia: Quince tesis para la revolución anunciada. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Thompson, E. P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin Books. Thompson, E. P. 1978. “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3 (2): 133–165.

On Austerity and Structural Adjustment Continuity and Difference across Space and Time

( Theodore Powers

Alongside the contemporary wave of austerity that has enveloped Europe, an academic discourse has developed that frames the impact of fiscal disciplining as a primarily European concern. Such accounts elide the continuities between austerity and the structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that continue to manifest—albeit in different form—across the Global South. Noting that the dissemination of policy principles associated with SAPs and austerity overlap might seem rote. After all, these are simply transnational assemblages whose movement has been enabled by elite class considerations. However, the resurgence of austerity offers an opportunity to reflect on how power, knowledge production, and policy process combine to produce social outcomes. In particular, the current moment offers a useful entry point for reconsidering how anthropological research can contribute toward a broader social debate on austerity’s social effects. Within the anthropological literature, analyses of the socio-economic effects of SAPs have largely focused on the role of this transnational policy assemblage as part of ‘development’, neo-liberalism, and the rising levels of

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social inequality associated with the contemporary phase of global integration. A point of emphasis in these accounts is the negative health effects associated with SAPs, usually analyzed via ethnographic accounts of individual and community experiences (Pfeiffer and Chapman 2010: 154–156). The knowledge produced by anthropologists in the 1990s buttressed the criticism of SAPs leveled at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). However, IMF economists have recently stated that the organization underestimated the negative effects that austerity would have on Greek society (Blanchard and Leigh 2013). That such claims can be sustained despite extensive evidence underlines the need to revisit anthropological contributions to the study of austerity and SAPs. The resurgence of austerity not only is a question of the dominance of global capital, but also relates to how evidence is understood and leveraged by powerful actors, organizations, and institutions. Currently, much of what is being learned about the social effects of austerity is a direct result of the knowledge produced by European states that were designed according to social democratic principles. Based upon continued public health surveillance in Greece, for example, we know that austerity has led to rising infant mortality rates, the re-emergence of malaria, and the rapid expansion of HIV/AIDS. Might such findings be tethered to the impact of SAPs in the Global South? What are the parallels between the two, and what are the limitations to direct comparison across social, cultural, and historical lines?

The Contemporary Case: Austerity in Europe Precipitated by parasitic lending practices and the misclassification of loan risk by financial sector actors, the 2008 financial crisis produced widespread economic dislocation

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across the world. As financial institutions withdrew assets from emerging markets to cover their losses, the impact of the crisis was shifted from the center to the periphery of the global financial system. Arguably, the crisis has been felt most acutely in Greece, where high levels of public borrowing predicated on misleading accounting practices emerged during the aftermath of the crisis (see Rakopoulos, this volume). With capital markets hesitant to lend, Greece turned to the ‘troika’ (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) to access financing (see Kalb, this volume). Austerity was the troika’s solution to the crisis. The austerity measures that have been demanded in exchange for access to financing have had devastating effects on the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain), as those societies are distastefully characterized by financial sector actors. The impact of austerity has been felt acutely in the domain of public health. Health budgets have been cut alongside significant increases for user fees in Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, and Greece (Kentikelenis 2015). Declining state support and higher costs for accessing health services have served as barriers to care, with negative effects on public health. Again, Greece provides the most clear-cut example of the health effects of austerity. Following the crisis, public sector hospitals saw their budgets cut by 40 percent (Kentikelenis et al. 2011). For the youngest members of Greek society, the effects of the crisis and austerity were as clear as life and death. Between 2008 and 2010, infant mortality rose by 43 percent (Kentikelenis et al. 2014). One of the most concerning effects of public health cuts has been the rapid expansion of infectious disease. In Greece, cuts to HIV/AIDS prevention initiatives such as needle exchange and condom distribution programs were quickly followed by a 16-fold increase in HIV infections among injection drug users between 2010 and

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2011 (Hatzakis et al. 2015). After austerity policies were implemented in 2010, HIV infection rates across Greece had nearly doubled by the end of 2012 (Nikopoulos et al. 2015). Due to cuts in vector control, malaria has returned to Greece for the first time in 40 years, now accompanied by the arrival of West Nile virus. Coming on the heels of austerity’s implementation, West Nile has spread through Greece, bringing with it severe neurological effects (Hadjichristodoulou et al. 2015). The imposition of austerity across Europe in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has produced clear public health effects. In Greece, cuts to public health carried out in the name of austerity have enabled the expansion of HIV/AIDS, the re-emergence of malaria, and dramatic increases in infant mortality. Clearly, austerity has facilitated the rapid spread of infectious disease and a significant upturn in mortality. A question that the Greek case raises is whether we have seen comparable dynamics before. Over the past four decades, similar social and health-related effects have been observed relative to SAPs and their proge­ny across the Global South.

The (Ongoing) Historical Case: SAPs across the Global South After achieving political independence in the 1950s and 1960s, post-colonial countries undertook large-scale projects to transform their societies. Across the world, newly independent states used loans in an attempt to develop autonomous economies through import substitution industrialization and other developmental strategies. However, the 1970s saw a combination of high oil costs and declining prices for a wide range of commodities that limited the transformative potential of these policies. As the commodity

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cycle went into a downward phase, debt repayment capacity declined alongside governmental revenue, leading to the Third World debt crisis. In response, the World Bank and the IMF intervened to restructure state spending and ensure debt repayment via SAPs. Starting in the early 1980s, SAPs cut spending on health, education, food subsidies, and social services to secure debt repayment. Here, the focus will be on how SAPs transformed the trajectory of health and society across the African continent, where the impact was wide-ranging and destructive. In Rwanda, income levels for 75 percent of rural residents dropping by an average of 35 percent per year following a currency devaluation imposed by the IMF (Schoepf et al. 2000). As a result, one-third of the children in rural Rwanda showed stunted growth, indicating chronic malnutrition (ibid.). Similar health trends were observed in Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of the Congo. There, acute malnutrition and stunted growth among young children were accompanied by the doubling of low birth weights among newborns (ibid.). Inadequate access to food and health services compromised immune systems, enabling the spread of a new and deadly epidemic— HIV/AIDS. Increased poverty, migration, sex work, and decreases in public sector treatment capabilities were the bitter fruit borne by SAPs (Sanders and Sambo 1991). The link between poverty and HIV/AIDS is clear: lack of access to resources leads to a rise in the survival strategies that spread the virus, while malnutrition compromises the immune systems that serve as the first line of defense against the pathogen. As SAPs took hold across the African continent, the epidemic expanded from Central to West Africa before moving into Southern Africa. South Africa now has the world’s largest HIV/AIDS epidemic, with the compromised immune systems of 7 million people enabling other deadly

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pathogens to prosper. People living with HIV/AIDS are 20 to 30 times as likely to contract tuberculosis (TB) (WHO 2015). Amid the unrelenting expansion of HIV/AIDS and TB, malaria continues to plague African societies. Due to cuts in public health spending instituted alongside SAPs, many countries have lost the capability to mitigate the deadly effects of malaria. For example, in the highlands of Madagascar the resurgence of malaria amid an SAP led to 30,000–40,000 preventable deaths between 1986 and 1990 (Boisier et al. 2002). The effects of an SAP in Zimbabwe offer an interesting addendum to the examples given above. An SAP was implemented in Zimbabwe following a decade-long effort to increase access to primary care following independence in 1980. One entailment of public sector health expansion was that researchers were capacitated to study the effects of Zimbabwe’s SAP. In-country researchers undertook a longitudinal study that compared the social, economic, and health effects of the SAP in rural and urban areas (Bijlmakers et al. 1996). The outcome included a rise in child mortality, declining per capita expenditure on health, and large increases in health sector user fees. Additionally, there was a significant upsurge in child malnutrition, with the impact felt most acutely in rural areas (Bijlmakers et al. 1999). The effects of SAPs in Africa have been deadly, facilitating the growth of HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria epidemics. However, there has been limited accounting of the public health effects produced by SAPs. Post-colonial African states have generally lacked strong public health sectors that could achieve this goal. Zimbabwe is a notable exception. Studies there on the ramifications of SAPs constitute nearly half of the published research that has developed empirical data independently of the World Bank (Breman and Shelton 2001). Critically, the

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most frequently cited data source on the effects of SAPs is the World Bank itself (ibid.). As a result, there is comparatively little independent data on how SAPs affected African societies relative to what we know of the health effects of austerity in Europe.

Limits to Comparative Analysis: Uneven Development, Knowledge, and Power The social effects of austerity and SAPs show important continuities relative to health effects, but also significant divergences, particularly in the domain of knowledge production. As Stuckler and Basu (2013) argue, ‘austerity kills’. By directing states to enact significant funding cuts to public health programs, austerity enables the spread of infectious disease with resultant increases in mortality. The limited information that we have on the health effects of SAPs shows similar patterns in African societies. However, the same cannot be said relative to the evidence available on the health effects of austerity and of SAPs. The sharp contrast between the evidence bases of the two highlights the historical effects of colonization, colonial medicine, and uneven development. European states have maintained the capability to analyze disease and mortality trends despite severe cuts to public health budgets. That European health systems have withstood the structural violence of austerity highlights the resilience of public sector health workers. The continued operation of European public health sectors also underscores a legacy of social democracy, that is, a history of public investment in health. The same cannot be said of health systems in the African context. The nascent public health sectors that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization were unable to maintain primary

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care—let alone national disease surveillance—following the implementation of SAPs. The relative weakness of African public health systems was the direct result of European colonization. Where health infrastructure had been developed, it focused on providing care for European expatriates in urban colonial centers. Our knowledge of SAPs, therefore, is circumscribed by the legacy of colonialism across the Global South. However, attention must also be paid to the forms of knowledge produced in assembling a critical genealogy of SAPs and austerity. While anthropologists have made a significant contribution to the literature on SAPs, a disciplinary emphasis on small-scale studies and qualitative data has limited its impact. Indeed, international institutions have been hesitant to acknowledge anthropological accounts of SAPs. A longitudinal study of the health effects of an SAP in Zimbabwe (Bijlmakers et al. 1999) offers one example of how this obstacle might be overcome. The authors combined quantitative and qualitative research methodologies in their analysis of the health effects of Zimbabwe’s SAP. This approach, combined with the central involvement of in-country researchers, enabled the development of an evidence base that measured the adverse health effects of Zimbabwe’s SAP. Anthropologists elsewhere have followed the example set in Zimbabwe, linking small-scale qualitative research initiatives to broader public health research projects. For example, Pfeiffer (2003) contributed an ethnographic component to an earlier quantitative analysis of household-level food insecurity in Mozambique (Pfeiffer et al. 2001). However, the study was not included in a review of the effects of SAPs commissioned by the WHO. A possible explanation for the omission may lie with the shifting discursive terrain of SAPs. Mozambique transitioned to an Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) program

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in 1996 before shifting to the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) approach in 2001, shadowing global trends among indebted societies. Critics have noted that titular changes to SAPs are simply that, despite some modifications associated with the ESAF and PRSP programs. Thus, analyses of the social effects associated with different policy platforms could be characterized as irrelevant or divergent. What might be required, then, to link the social effects of policies that are based on similar principles and produce comparable social outcomes?

Conclusion: Building Analyses of Transnational Policy Assemblages Austerity and SAPs have circulated transnationally  as policy assemblages, manifesting within the historical particularity of different societies. Core principles such as privatization, social service cuts, and cost recovery serve as a common ground from which to build a conceptual history of these assemblages. But in doing so, we must engage with the broader political and economic dynamics that lead to their implementation and inform the context into which they are unleashed. While embracing historical particularity, it is important to conceptualize austerity and SAPs as policy assemblages that share important characteristics, particularly as regards their core principles. Substantiating continuities between austerity and SAPs also serves to contest—rather than reify—their discursive separation (see Hart, this volume). Thus, rather than simply collapsing the analysis into national histories, taking into account the legacies of imperialism, colonial medicine, and uneven development may provide a basis for reconstituting a conceptual history of these policy assemblages.

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Indeed, the European emphasis on contemporary analyses and the continued omission of qualitative perspectives in international institutions necessitate a reconceptualization of how anthropological accounts can substantively contribute to public debates on austerity. Some have traced how neo-liberal policy principles have traveled across national boundaries, linking social effects across space (Kingfisher 2013). Others have analyzed how transnational policy norms manifest within historically particular social dynamics, highlighting how different actors, organizations, and institutions influence policy process at different levels (Powers 2013). Attention to how transnational policy assemblages move and to the particular context within which they congeal may allow for a more nuanced understanding of how policies—including austerity and SAPs— are made actionable and transform life outcomes across space and time.

Theodore Powers is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa and a Research Associate with the Human Economy Program at the University of Pretoria. His research focuses on the dynamics of health, society, and inequality through extended fieldwork in contemporary South Africa. Analyzing the politics of HIV/AIDS treatment access, austerity, and public health policy, his work engages with debates on social movements, the state, transnationalism, multi-sited research, and temporality to better understand social change in post-apartheid South Africa.

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References Bijlmakers, Leon A., Mary T. Bassett, and David M. Sanders. 1996. Health and Structural Adjustment in Rural and Urban Zimbabwe. Research Report No. 101. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Bijlmakers, Leon A., Mary T. Bassett, and David M. Sanders. 1999. Socioeconomic Stress, Health and Child Nutritional Status in Zimbabwe at a Time of Economic Structural Adjustment: A Three-Year Longitudinal Study. Research Report No. 105. Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute. Blanchard, Olivier J., and Daniel Leigh. 2013. “Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers.” IMF Working Paper No. 13/1. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. Boisier, P., R. Jambou, L. Raharimalala, and J. Roux. 2002. “Between Parasite Density and Fever Risk in a Community Exposed to a Low Level of Malaria Transmission in Madagascar Highlands.” American Journal of Tropical Medical Hygiene 67 (2): 137–140. Breman, Anna, and Carolyn Shelton. 2001. “Structural Adjustment and Health: A Literature Review of the Debate, Its Role Players and Presented Empirical Evidence.” Commission on Macroeconomic Reform Working Paper Series. CMH Working Paper No. 6. Geneva: World Health Organization. Hadjichristodoulou, Christos, Spyros Pournaras, Maria Mavrouli, et al. 2015. “West Nile Virus Seroprevalence in the Greek Population in 2013: A Nationwide Cross-Sectional Survey.” PLoS ONE 10 (11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0143803. Hatzakis, Angelos, Vana Sypsa, Dimitrios Paraskevis, et al. 2015. “Design and Baseline Findings of a Large-Scale Rapid Response to an HIV Outbreak in People Who Inject Drugs in Athens, Greece: The ARISTOTLE Programme.” Addiction 110 (9): 1453–1467. Kentikelenis, Alexander. 2015. “Bailouts, Austerity and the Erosion of Health Coverage in Southern Europe and Ireland.” European Journal of Public Health 25 (3): 365–366. Kentikelenis, Alexander, Marina Karanikolos, Irene Papanicolas, et al. 2011. “Health Effects of Financial Crisis: Omens of a Greek Tragedy.” Lancet 378 (9801): 1457–1458. Kentikelenis, Alexander, Marina Karanikolos, Aaron Reeves, et al. 2014. Greece’s Health Crisis: from Austerity to Denialism. Lancet 383 (9918): 748–753.

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Kingfisher, Catherine. 2013. A Policy Travelogue: Tracing Welfare Reform in Aotearoa/New Zealand and Canada. New York: Berghahn Books. Nikolopoulos, Georgios K., Vana Sypsa, Stefanos Bonovas, et al. 2015. “Big Events in Greece and HIV Infection among People Who Inject Drugs.” Substance Use & Misuse 50 (7): 825–838. Pfeiffer, James. 2003. “Cash Income, Intrahousehold Cooperative Conflict, and Child Health in Central Mozambique.” Medical Anthropology 22 (2): 87–130. Pfeiffer, James, and Rachel Chapman. 2010. “Anthropological Perspectives on Structural Adjustment and Health.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 149–165. Pfeiffer, James, Stephen Gloyd, and Lucy Ramirez Li. 2001. “Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Child Growth in Mozambique: An Ethnographic Case-Control Study.” Social Science & Medicine 53 (1): 83–97. Powers, Theodore. 2013. “Institutions and Social Change: A Case Study of the South African National AIDS Council.” Anthropology Southern Africa 36 (3–4): 116–123. Sanders, David, and Abdulrahman Sambo. 1991. “AIDS in Africa: The Implications of Economic Recession and Structural Adjustment.” Health Policy and Planning 6 (2): 157–165. Schoepf, Brooke G., Claude Schoepf, and Joyce V. Millen. 2000. “Theoretical Therapies, Remote Remedies: SAPs and the Political Ecology of Poverty and Health in Africa.” In Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor, ed. Jim Yong Kim, Joyce V. Millen, Alec Irwin, and John Greshman, 91–125. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Stuckler, David, and Sanjay Basu. 2013. The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. New York: Basic Books. WHO (World Health Organization). 2015. “Tuberculosis: Fact Sheet No. 104.” http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs104/en/ (accessed 13 March 2016).

Austerity in Portugal The ‘Middle-Classification’ of the Public Space, Migration, and the Silences of History

( José Mapril and Ruy Llera Blanes

In Portugal, one could say that austerity is a ‘many splintered thing’. It suddenly appeared in the lives of many as an inevitability, a fatality, but one was never too sure where it came from or what it actually meant. Our goal in this chapter is to discuss how public debates about the politics of austerity in Portugal have revealed, on the one hand, problematic ideas about migrations, class distinctions, and spatial inequalities (see Powers, this volume) and, on the other hand, issues of advocacy and representation—that is, the problem of who has the possibility of enunciation concerning ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ and the subsequent silences that such enunciations produce. Within this framework, we will underline how the problem of ‘class’ has re-emerged as a politically contentious and equally problematic trope. To begin with, our example is a landmark of what Theodoros Rakopoulos, in his introduction to this volume, refers to as the ‘Eurocentric’ attribute that the term ‘austerity’ currently entails. Portugal’s integration into the European Union in the mid-1980s was enveloped by a growing number of expectations regarding its place in

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‘modernity’ and in global narratives of development. In several segments of Portuguese society, Portugal, historically perceived as a semi-peripheral country (Santos 1999), would then finally be a fully ‘European’, ‘modern’, ‘cosmopolitan’, and ‘developed’ nation. This was, at least, the narrative with which several generations identified and others grew up in, embracing a teleology of ‘moving forward’ that could only be achieved with and within the European Union. As with the equally problematic adhesion to NATO a few years earlier, the process of EU accession in the early 1980s was invariably presented in the melodramatic formula of ‘either Europe or chaos’. This upwardly transformative stance would be revealed not only in its economic performance but also in other ‘development indicators’, such as degrees of literacy and consumption patterns, among many others. One revealing example of this changing position of Portugal in relation to global development indicators was its positionality concerning migration flows. Historically, Portuguese society has been strongly marked by its relation with emigration, a relation that has been depicted in cinema and literature, for example, Ferreira de Castro’s novel Emigrantes, first published in 1928. From the nineteenth century to the early 1980s, emigration to South America, North America, and Central Europe was seen by many as a structural condition of Portuguese society, of its defining condition (see, e.g., Leal 2002; Pires 2010). For several segments of Portuguese society—that is, urbanized intermediate strata and the bourgeoisie— emigration was frequently perceived as symbolic, or at least consequential, of the country’s underdevelopment. Following the integration of Portugal into the European Union and the subsequent change of Portugal’s position in relation to migration flows, many were led to argue that Portugal was finally ‘modern’ and ‘developed’.1

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This discursive formation produced a silence concerning the ongoing outward migration, while turning most of the attention in the public space toward the fact that Portugal was now an immigration country, multicultural and cosmopolitan (see, e.g., Almeida 2006; Baganha and Fonseca 2004; Fikes 2009). In sum, by ‘becoming European’, Portugal was becoming part of a global ‘first class’ (Ferguson 1999). This process was congruent with the increase in the official demographics of the classes medias, the middle classes or intermediate strata, who saw in the services, credit, and consumption economy the main drivers for their upward social mobility. To a certain extent, immigration of diverse backgrounds—some with colonial links to Portugal and others with diverse histories—was seen by the middle classes, academics, and political representatives as revealing the modernity of Portugal. For a while, and especially for certain segments of Portuguese society, the ‘expectations of modernity’ (Ferguson 1999) seemed to be en route, and several indicators—the construction boom, the massification of universities, the inauguration of highways, the emergence of a private media sector— revealed as much. However, after the global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent application of austerity policies, the discourse changed significantly. In 2010, Portugal suddenly became ‘unstable’, ‘vulnerable’, and ‘dependent’ on external processes. The once (or allegedly) robust banking sector became precarious, and national sovereignty became subject to the impending menace of international financial speculators. Austerity and readjustment programs implemented in Portugal in the aftermath of this global crisis were ostensibly produced as an ‘inevitability’ and a disciplining strategy2 in similar teleological terms, interestingly enough, as the initial narrative of accession. This aspect of a recurring teleology highlights what Keith

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Hart, Don Kalb, and Patrick Neveling (this volume) refer to, that is, a more overarching, epochal sense of ‘historical articulation’. But it does so with a strange conclusion: the teleology of progress and modernity appears replicated in the teleology of austerity.

The End of the Middle Class As several authors have shown, neo-liberalism is not a single global project, but an assemblage of techniques and institutions (Gledhill 2004; Hilgers 2012; Ong 2006; Wacquant 2012) whose goal is the production of capitalist hegemony. In Portugal, the political argument was that to reduce public debt it was necessary to decrease public spending, especially in welfare, health care, and other social services. This would amplify labor flexibility and, simultaneously, create a new culture of (cheap) labor, based on ideas of increasing productivity and competitiveness vis-à-vis emerging economies such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The consequence was an increase in unemployment and precariousness in the general labor market that especially affected younger members of the classes medias, some of whom have the highest levels of educational capital in Portuguese history. For these segments of Portuguese society, access to modernity and development was no longer possible if they stayed in Portugal but had to be sought lá fora (outside) through emigration. Despite the fact that, as mentioned above, Portugal was never only a country of immigration, the trope of emigração (emigration) reacquired an increasing visibility in Portuguese public space. These ‘new emigrants’ are now moving, once again, to ‘old’ destinations of Portuguese migration, including the former colonies of Brazil, Mozambique, and

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Angola, as well as Central or Northern European countries such as France, Germany, and the UK. At the same time, the discourses about these renewed flows continuously reproduced an idea of a migration composed mainly of highly qualified workers who are now migrating, contrary to what had happened in the 1960s for white-collar jobs. Paradoxically, these ideas of a ‘brain drain’ seem to produce (class) distinction in relation to a not so distant past. This has been accompanied by a discursive formation that accuses the austerity programs of affecting most acutely the middle classes and thus throwing them into a state of abjection and eventual disappearance. As in other countries experiencing the politics of neo-liberalism and austerity, in Portugal austerity became ‘austerity’ only when it hit the middle classes. The local media invariably described this process in their headlines as the ‘destruction of the middle classes’ in Portugal: The End of the Portuguese Middle Class (Público, 5 July 2011) The Destruction of the Middle Class Is a “Serious Threat to Democracy” (Jornal de Notícias, 3 November 2012) The Troika Program “Destroyed the Middle Class” (Expresso, 19 March 2014)

From this perspective, despite the undoubtedly terrible circumstances in which it has emerged, the discursive formation of the ‘middle-classification’ of austerity, imbued with a recognizably moralizing tone, seems to tell only part of the story. First, it is essential to ask who is included in this middle-classification, especially keeping in mind the multiple voices—produced by diverse strata of Portuguese society—claiming to be middle class. Second, as suggested above, this issue overshadows a longer

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history of top-down imposed austerity in Portugal, which has consistently affected other segments of Portuguese society. For instance, the deindustrialization of northern Portugal and the dramatic attack on the agricultural and fishing sectors of the Portuguese economy during the late 1980s and the 1990s, precisely on behalf of the same movement of integration into the EU space—that is, into a PAC or Common Agricultural Policy—meant that austerity and the precariat were already present among several segments of the working classes, notably those working in the agrarian, fishing, and industrial sectors. This implied a dramatic transformation of the rural landscape of Portugal by way of its ‘desertification’, a topic that remained largely undebated in the Portuguese political and academic arenas. Likewise, factories delocalizing from Portugal and worker protests (occupations, strikes, pickets, etc.) had already been household images during the previous two decades. However, several segments of Portuguese society did not classify such processes as crises. On the contrary, according to the official narrative, they were due to the ‘inevitable march of time’. The economy of the future was not based on industrialized or rural production but instead on a (flexible) service economy. In the meantime, former farmers, fishers, and factory workers, for whom the idea of a future in their own homeland had become exhausted, continued emigrating throughout the 1990s. They constituted what could be called an ‘invisible migration’, overshadowed by the media ‘excitement’ with the new immigration flows and their input in Portugal’s urban reconfigurations.3 Thirdly, this same discourse that exclusively associates austerity with the middle classes perpetuates a silence in and around other sectors of Portuguese society that have been in the ‘eye of the hurricane’ with regard to the immediate effects of austerity—namely, those individuals

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with a migrant background. As the classical economistic perspective would tell you, migration flows are the obvious markers of national economy performance: follow the migrant and you will locate the burgeoning economic land of opportunities. But what has happened to those who arrived during the last three decades of the twentieth century, many of whom became Portuguese nationals? What has been the impact of austerity politics on their lives and expectations? If we follow the obvious numbers, such as unemployment statistics, these phenomena appear invisible. It is true that many of the citizens waiting in line at the Centros de Desemprego (unemployment offices) in Portugal are indeed migrants. But those lines account for only a small percentage of migrants who found themselves in the position of looking for jobs in the formal sector in a country where employment in itself was an object of ‘destruction’. In what follows of this text, we intend to move beyond this trope and use our personal and anthropological gaze to expose what the migrant experience can tell us about austerity beyond the current logic of ‘austerity as an event’, which seems to prevail in the international media.

Invisible Austerities In the early 2000s, when both authors of this text were in their postgraduate studies at the Institute of Social Sciences in Lisbon, the predominant theme in Portuguese anthropology and sociology was the above-mentioned narrative of Portugal’s transformation from an emigration to an immigration country. This led to an increasing interest, on behalf of the academy, in the changing, pluralizing urban landscape in Portugal, namely, of its capital Lisbon. Several sociological studies ascertained

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this transformation from both quantitative and qualitative points of view. Along with other anthropologists, both of us worked throughout our PhD and postdoctoral studies with migrant communities in Portugal, principally African and Asian. Throughout the years, perhaps the most striking experience we had was observing how, little by little, our interlocutors began to leave Portugal. We thus had two options: either to reframe our own research to follow the renewed transnational networks of our interlocutors or to change our ethnographic subject. But obviously this academic concern appears somewhat petty when compared to the complicated life choices our interlocutors were forced to make over the past years. Take the example of Bangladeshi migrants (Mapril 2011). After living for more than 20 years in Portugal— where many migrants opened businesses, reunited their families, and invested in their children’s education while maintaining a close relation with their relatives in the desh (Bengali for ‘home’, in this case Bangladesh) through economic and social remittances—several of the most prominent Portuguese-Bangladeshis decided to remigrate to other European countries. To a certain extent, they felt that they were ‘beginning again’ in the aftermath of the application of austerity measures and structural readjustment programs in Portugal. Since 2011, more than 300 Portuguese-Bangladeshi families have remigrated to the UK, Switzerland, or France, now as EU citizens, while preserving close ties with Portugal. These new projects have implied changes in the channeling of tangible and intangible goods to Bangladesh, leading to increasing tensions and conflicts within joint families (jouthko poribar or porivar). Similar remigration processes have been widespread among other sectors of Portuguese society. For instance, Portuguese Ismailis have remigrated to Mozambique and

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Angola while maintaining close connections with relatives and friends in Portugal (Trovão and Batoréu 2013). Similar onward migration projects can be found among Portuguese Guineans, who have remigrated to East London over the past several years.4 Perhaps the case of brother N., an Angolan whom Ruy Blanes met in a church in the Lisbon suburbs, illustrates this point more fully. N. was a full-time member of the Tokoist Church in Lisbon, which Ruy was studying at the time (see Blanes 2014), and a reputed guitarist in the church choir. In Lisbon, he worked in the construction sector, giving his specialization as an electrician. In 2012, Ruy stopped seeing N. during the Sunday services, eventually finding out that he had returned to Angola with almost no prior warning. In early 2013, Ruy was conducting fieldwork in Luanda when he bumped into N. in the very populated Congolenses market. N. explained that he had returned to Luanda very suddenly because he had found opportunities in the then burgeoning oil and diamond economy of Angola that he lacked in the former El Dorado Europe. He even invited Ruy to stay with him, explaining that there could be a number of business opportunities for both of them. Ruy, in any case, decided that he still wanted to be an anthropologist.

Conclusion In all of these cases, there is a close connection between the application of austerity politics and the emergence of new migratory projects, and this allows us to decenter the aforementioned discursive formation about those emigrants to Portugal who remigrate and the new middle classes. Indeed, these cases complicate the hegemonic tropes about the politics of austerity in Portugal and its

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relation to the emergence of new migratory experiences and projects. From this perspective, the public debates about these issues have revealed two pervasive tropes. On the one hand, there exists a complex discursive formation that reveals class distinctions and ideas about ‘middle-classness’. On the other hand, these same debates raise the problem of who, in the ‘economy of words’, is in the position to comment on ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and its effects in Portuguese society. What we have tried to unearth is how class has re-emerged as a politically contentious and equally problematic trope.5 Finally, there is a more troubling realization. Throughout much of the media, political, and academic discourses that have emerged concerning the financial crisis, there is a certain nationalistic idea of ‘standard Portugueseness’ that is politically inclusive yet also exclusive: white and, yes, middle class.

José Mapril received his PhD in Anthropology from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, with an ethnography of transnationalism and Islam among the Bangladeshis in Lisbon and Dhaka. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a Senior Researcher at CRIA-NOVA, where he coordinates the Circulation and Production of Places research group, with João Leal. His current research interests include onward migration, political economy, and subjectivities and temporalities among Bangladeshis in neo-liberal Europe.

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Ruy Llera Blanes is is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg. He has conducted research in Angola since 2007, where he has explored issues of religion, politics, and temporalities. He is currently the leader of a collaborative research project, Currents of Faith, Places of History. His publications include the monograph A Prophetic Trajectory (2014), and he is a co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research and an associate editor of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.

Notes 1. Emigration never really stopped, but by the 1990s Portugal had become a migration destination within Schengen Europe and had a positive net migration. 2. As Theodoros Rakopoulos and Don Kalb argue in this volume, a discourse of obedience and self-blame was drawn on when constructing the austerity and readjustment programs. 3. For more on this topic, see, for example, the 2004 documentary film Lisboners by Sérgio Tréfaut. 4. Ambra Formenti, personal communication, September 2016, Lisbon. 5. See Palomera’s contribution to this volume for a comparison with neighboring Spain.

References Almeida, Miguel Vale de. 2006. “Comentário.” In Portugal não é um País Pequeno: Contar o Império na Pós-Colonialidade, ed. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, 359–367. Lisbon: Edições Cotovia.
 Baganha, Maria I., and Maria L. Fonseca, eds. 2004. New Waves: Migration from Eastern to Southern Europe. Lisbon: Luso-American Foundation.

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Blanes, Ruy L. 2014. A Prophetic Trajectory: Ideologies of Place, Time and Belonging in an Angolan Religious Movement. New York: Berghahn Books. Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fikes, Kesha. 2009. Managing African Portugal: The Citizen-Migrant Distinction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gledhill, John. 2004. “Neoliberalism.” In A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics, ed. David Nuget and Joan Vincent, 332–348. London: Blackwell. Hilgers, Mathieu. 2012. “The Historicity of the Neoliberal State.” Social Anthropology 20 (1): 80–94. Leal, João. 2002. “Identities and Imagined Homelands: Reinventing the Azores in Southern Brazil.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 11 (2): 233–254. Mapril, José. 2011. “The Patron and the Madman: Migration, Success and the (In)visibility of Failure among Bangladeshis in Portugal.” Social Anthropology 19 (3): 288–296. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pires, Rui Pena, ed. 2010. Portugal: Atlas das Migrações Internacionais. Lisbon: Tinta-da-China. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 1999. Pela Mão de Alice: O social e o político na pós-modernidade. Porto: Afrontamento. Trovão, Susana Salvaterra, and Filomena Batoréu. 2013. “What’s New about Muslim Ismaili Transnationalism? Comparing Business Practices in British East Africa, Colonial Mozambique and Contemporary Angola.” African and Asian Studies 12 (3): 215–244. Wacquant, Loïc. 2012. “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism.” Social Anthropology 20 (1): 66–79.

(De)stabilizing the European Austerity Debate Lessons from Post-crisis South Korea

( Elisabeth Schober

On 6 January 2011, a female labor activist by the name of Kim Jin-sook climbed on top of a crane located inside South Korea’s oldest shipyard, with the intention to occupy it until her worker friends, who had recently been laid off, would get their jobs back. Kim, currently a Direction Committee member of the Pusan branch of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), had been employed as a welder at the shipyard in the early 1980s while the facility was still under state control, but she was fired (and permanently blacklisted) for her union activities a few years later. In the late 1980s, the shipyard was then bought by Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction, an offshoot of the powerful Hanjin chaebol (industrial conglomerate), which used the technologically rather outdated site (first built in 1937) to gain experience in the shipbuilding sector. When the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit South Korea a decade later, the company began to downsize its workforce at the shipyard, and thousands of jobs were lost over the years to come. By late 2010, when yet another round of layoff notifications reached hundreds of workers, the traditionally militant workforce at the shipyard (cf. Nam 2009) was

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internally fragmented, pushing Kim toward the extreme measure of occupying a crane. The ‘aerial sit-in strike’ (Robinson 2011) at the shipbuilding facility in Pusan that Kim undertook would last 309 consecutive days before the company agreed to take back the workers. Kim’s actions would inadvertently also bring about a nationwide social movement in South Korea that focused on the question of steadily rising precarity in the world of work. During the height of protests, tens of thousands of people got on so-called hope buses and drove across the country to catch a glimpse of the woman on top of the crane (Baca 2011). Huimang (hope), which became the slogan, was a term that had been extracted by the activists from the much bleaker term huimangtwaejig (voluntary redundancy), a phrase that since the financial crisis of 1997 hit South Korea had become an all-too-common household word. In the eyes of those who joined this struggle, huimang was something that needed to be given to Kim Jin-sook in her attempt to hold out on top of the crane as the months went by. In 2003, a close comrade of hers, union president Kim Joo-ik, had committed suicide on the same crane at the end of a 129-day-long strike, and the fear that Kim would resort to that drastic measure if all else failed was palpable throughout those days in 2011. Huimang, however, was a sentiment that many felt the larger working population of the country could also use a good dose of, as suicide had increasingly become a way to end personal financial miseries during the previous decade.

Taking the Austerity Bullet As dramatic as they were, Kim Jin-sook’s story and the prolonged nationwide agitation that her actions brought about received little to no attention in the European press

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when these events were unfolding. Europe, after all, was rather preoccupied in 2011 with the question of how to handle the debt crisis that was holding the continent in its grip. The shorthand of ‘austerity’ as a policy response to fiscal crisis was quickly gaining in popularity at that time. Austerity, in the way it is commonly understood nowadays, is frequently made out to be a quintessentially Western tale, with the Eurozone crisis in particular coming to mind when the word is uttered. But as Mark Blyth (2013) has shown in Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, the understandings packed into this ubiquitous term in fact have a much longer historical trajectory: over the course of the twentieth century, they came into play in geographical areas that were significantly larger than we now often envision. Defined by Blyth (2013: 2) as “a form of voluntary deflation in which the economy adjusts through the reduction of wages, prices, and public spending to restore competitiveness, which is (supposedly) best achieved by cutting the state’s budget, debts, and deficit,” austerity is arguably strikingly similar to (and nearly indistinguishable from) another economic policy that goes by the name of ‘structural adjustment’. With fiscal consolidations of the austerity kind having been an integral part of their loan programs, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are the two institutions that promoted structural adjustment programs (SAPs) wherever they went in the 1980s and 1990s. South Koreans, too, have much experience with such loan schemes and the kind of economic policies that were built into them, given that the country was bailed out by the IMF through a program worth approximately US$60 billion in December 1997. And quite similarly to Southern Europeans, who were recently subject to moralizing claims about their putative laziness, the affected Asian countries and their populations were during the wake of the 1997 crisis also told that essentially the crisis was of their own

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making, and that the harsh measures brought upon them were simply the outcome of the ‘moral hazard’ that their corrupt institutions had fallen prey to. A few years prior to the crisis, Asian ‘tiger economies’ such as South Korea were still being hailed as models of how rapid economic development should be done, yet the very same countries now found themselves recast as prime examples of crony capitalism. Economist Chang Ha-Joon (2000) has traced the significant flaws in these rather popular putting-theblame-on-Asia narratives of those days. He argues instead that “the Asian crisis was mainly caused by the ‘manias, panics, and crashes’ mechanism … inherent in unregulated financial markets” (ibid.: 776; cf. Kalb, this volume). Curiously enough, while the European debt crisis unfolded in a similar fashion 13 years later (and barely any news of Kim Jin-sook’s spectacular labor struggle against layoffs first induced by austerity-à-la-Korea reached our shores), South Korea would still come to play a (marginal) role in the way some commentators made sense of the economic troubles affecting Europe. For instance, US economist Stephen Roach (2012) argued in an op-ed for Al Jazeera that “austerity can work,” and went on to focus on the response of a number of Asian countries to the 1997 financial crisis. In particular, he argued that “there were no lasting negative effects from the short-term dose of austerity, and, to the extent that austerity was essential to post-crisis healing, the long-term benefits have proven to be both enduring and astounding” (ibid.). One lesson that Europe could draw from the experience of countries like South Korea, Roach claimed, was that “there is no gain without pain.” BBC reporter Lucy Williamson (2012) went for a similar angle in her piece titled “What Eurozone Countries Can Learn from South Korea.” In an interview with Lee Chan-woo, the Finance Ministry’s deputy director of economic policy during the 1997 crisis, she was told that the secret of South

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Korea’s successful recovery from economic crisis can be found in “burden-sharing … every economic player should take their fair burden of the economic restructuring … Managers and workers agreed to accept salary cuts and layoffs. The consensus among the people is a key ingredient, so we asked our people to take the bullet. And they did” (ibid.). With regard to ‘taking the bullet’, ‘no gain without pain’, and ‘burden-sharing’, while I shall take issue with the general argumentative line displayed in these and similar analyses, which are arguably all part of a larger ‘economy of words’ (Holmes 2013, cf. Hart, this volume), the Western commentators gazing at East Asia for answers to the Eurozone crisis were inadvertently spot on in their curious choice of words, as the immediate months and years after the 1997 crisis certainly did bring lots of agony to South Korea’s workers. However, unlike the positive conclusions these commentators draw about how the measures behind these sufferings worked out for Korea in the long run, from my own interviews and encounters with South Korean workers and union representatives over the last few years, I can only deduce a different message altogether. Much like the lingering effects of the seemingly never-ending euro debt crisis that Europeans have recently found themselves engulfed in, the SAPs that were introduced as a response to the 1997 crisis in South Korea are the kind of pernicious gift that keeps on giving, leaving the South Korean workforce to struggle with the consequences up to the present day.

Worker Suicides In the aftermath of widespread ‘fiscal consolidation’ across Europe, “Austerity kills!” has become one of the key slogans for the social movements that have arisen all over the continent in reaction to it. Indeed, much truth seems to be

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hidden in this rallying cry. Stuckler and Basu (2013) suggest this in The Body Economic, in which they investigate the link between public spending cuts in the health care sector and a significant hike in mortality rates in the austerityaffected countries of Europe. In the small but growing literature on austerity within social anthropology (e.g., Bear 2015; Knight and Stewart 2016; Rakopoulos 2014), much has been published in recent years on a related subject that also points to a deadly outcome of this particular bundle of economic policies: the exploding number of people who have opted to commit suicide in Southern Europe because they could no longer find a way out of the crisis and fiscal restructuration that now impacted their lives (e.g., Davis 2015; Knight 2013; Pipyrou 2014). Incidentally, South Korea consistently makes it into the list of the top three countries with the largest number of people taking their own lives. While these dreadful statistics are unarguably also the outcome of social, cultural, and historical factors, with suicide nowadays representing an extreme yet somewhat socially acceptable response to personal tragedies, South Korea did face a significant hike in suicide rates after the 1997 crisis—an increase that has widely been attributed to the devastation caused by the SAPs pushed through by the IMF. It is important to note here that the phrase ‘Asian financial crisis’ would for the most part be met with blank stares if uttered by a visitor in Seoul, as this particular crisis is known locally as ‘the IMF crisis’. The very term that Koreans use for the crisis puts the blame for the devastation of those years squarely onto those who supposedly brought the antidote. Indeed, it was not the crisis per se, but the fiscal tightening—the ‘burden-sharing’ in Willamson’s BBC story—that was not as evenly spread across society as Finance Ministry representatives would like to have it. This subsequently led to many bankruptcies of small business owners and to

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widespread layoffs that came to affect ever-larger numbers of once securely employed workers. Such widespread loss of livelihood, which continued for many post-crisis years, at times led to the most tragic of all outcomes. The available suicide figures tell a clear story: while 13.0 per 100,000 people in South Korea committed suicide in 1997, this number had grown to 33.3 per 100,000 by 2011 (Min et al. 2015: 75). These statistics should certainly be read alongside another set of data, that is, the one that reflects the rise of precarious work, called pijeong-gyujig (nonregular work), in the South Korean context. As sociologist Shin Kwang-Yeong (2013: 356) notes: “Immediate outcomes of the extensive neoliberal reforms [after the crisis] were massive layoffs, because of the bankruptcy of corporations or massive restructuring, and the sharp increase of nonregular workers such as temporary workers, subcontract workers, and dispatched workers. Companies began to replace regular workers with nonregular workers and hire mostly nonregular workers for new positions.” Consequently, the proportion of workers employed under precarious conditions in the total working population increased from 27.4 percent in 2002 to 37.0 percent in 2004. In the meantime, the number of precarious workers in the country has since stabilized at around 34 percent of the working population (ibid.). However, some age segments and occupational sectors are more affected than others. In shipbuilding, for instance, well over 50 percent of all workers find themselves laboring under precarious conditions these days (Schober 2018).

“Let’s Live Well” To fully appreciate the extent of desolation and demoralization that the IMF crisis caused among large sections of

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the working population of South Korea, one needs to cast a quick glance back at the country’s tumultuous twentiethcentury history. Often presented as the poster child of rapid development (for a critique of this narrative, see Chang 2008), South Korea went from being an economic basket case in the 1950s to building up its performance during the 1960s–1980s in the midst of a succession of military regimes that kept workers obedient through brutal force. With the country’s first successes being made in the garment sector and light industries, where young female workers in particular were made to sacrifice their health and well-being for economic growth, it was the spoils gained from South Korea’s alliance with the United States (Schober 2016) and its strategic investments in heavy industries such as shipbuilding that eventually allowed it to reach its present-day status (see Chang 2008, 2010). A particular modernization narrative played a key role in keeping workers in line during those times, which is perhaps best encapsulated by a slogan coined by none other than long-time South Korean military dictator Park Chung-Hee: “Chal sara bose” (Let’s live well). It is an idiom that sums up the most crucial belief that lies at the heart of capitalism as Park imagined it: that with hard work, the goods will be delivered to you one fine day. It was with this notion of development in mind, and the sacrifices and continuous deferrals it would require, that President Park whipped his country into shape in the 1960s and 1970s. The irony was, of course, that the better off people became, the more demands they made toward the dictator and his successors, as philosopher Paik NakChung (2005) has pointed out: “Park’s slogan ‘Let’s Live well’ (chal sarabose)—signifying in effect, ‘Let’s live for once like the well-fed and well-clothed’—represented in essence the philosophy of a beggar, and people once out of beggary usually wish to live not by bread alone.”

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Consequently, the spectacular economic ascent of the late 1980s and early 1990s brought much social mobilization that led to the beginning of democratization. In addition, the uncanny persistence of the South Korean labor movement (in which workers like Kim Jin-sook played a crucial role) made all the difference in the attempt to bring down the military dictatorship (Gray 2008). With labor activists facing harassment, imprisonment, torture, and, on occasion, murder for the sake of democracy, higher labor standards and a rise in wage levels eventually became a much-cherished reality for the country’s working population the military strongmen had been replaced (Cumings 1997; Koo 2001). The thorough dismantlement of these hard-fought-for gains less than a decade later when the IMF crisis fully hit was consequently experienced all the more negatively by workers who now saw their few privileges rapidly disappearing into thin air again.

Give Us All Your Gold The “Let’s live well” narrative outlined above arguably allowed people to soldier on during the difficult decades of the dictatorship. Interestingly, and perhaps almost by default, a similar rhetoric was then utilized to mobilize the population in the early days of the 1997 crisis, when thousands upon thousands of South Koreans followed their government’s call to donate their private gold for the sake of the nation’s economic recovery. This particular public display of the historically proven willingness of South Korea’s people to make sacrifices for the greater good of the collectives they find themselves embedded in was also singled out by Western commentators who wanted to ‘draw lessons’ from the IMF crisis that could be applied to the one now affecting large parts of Europe.

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Why could not the Greeks be more like South Koreans, seemed to be the message conveyed in a Deutsche Welle article entitled “Koreans’ Gold Donations—a Model for Greeks?” (Becker 2015). Here, we should perhaps take a moment to appreciate the paradox of South Koreans now being recast as model recipients of SAPs in the wake of the Eurozone crisis, with images of obedient Korean citizens being dragged in to discipline (Southern) European working classes (see also Rakopoulos’s introduction to this volume). As noted earlier, while the Asian financial crisis was still going strong a little more than a decade earlier, the classical stereotype of East Asian docility had served to underpin a rather different narrative: that of crony capitalism gone wild, which was essentially blamed for the crisis. If one were to read these recent commentaries and suggestions in an even more unflinching manner, I believe they could quickly guide us toward an understanding of the European austerity measures as representing only one small puzzle piece in a larger systemic picture that is slowly emerging. After all, once we advise unwilling Europeans to tighten their belts and be more like those seemingly well-behaved East Asians, we may quickly end up having to admit to the recent complete inversion of twentieth-century development narratives that such recommendations entail. Indeed, focusing on the slow transformation of ‘the West’, which is gradually turning into ‘the Rest’ (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), and on proclamations concerning the end of the Global North as the center of twenty-first-century capitalism (e.g., Arrighi 2007) is a rather popular exercise among leftist scholars these days. In some of these writings that involve Western writers gazing eastward, culturalist arguments that make use of the rather familiar trope of ‘Asian despotism’ can be spotted as well. After a recent visit to South Korea, Slavoj

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Žižek came back thoroughly disheartenened about the role that Europe is still left to play for global capitalism: “It’s my belief that modern capitalism is developing in a direction in which it functions better without a fully developed democracy. The rise of the so-called capitalism with Asian values in the past 10 years at the very least raises doubts and questions: What if authoritarian capitalism on the Chinese model is an indication that liberal democracy as we understand it is no longer a condition for, and driving force of, economic development and instead stands in its way?” (quoted in Leick 2015). If we take such thoughts to their logical conclusion, we may come to ask ourselves, given that the tripling of the Chinese workforce over the last few decades has put so much pressure on the worth of labor worldwide that the precarization of working populations across the globe is now the outcome, why should not we all in fact embrace the inevitable, tighten our belts, or ‘take the bullet’ of austerity to make ourselves competitive again while we still can? Such pessimism displayed by Žižek and others, I believe, is both ill-advised and premature, given that it falls into the same trap that the pro-austerity pundits cited earlier have not managed to avoid either. East Asia is here yet again imagined as a terrain inhabited by meek and obedient workers who have proved themselves to be so much fitter to survive the most vicious forms of capitalism—a story that leaves aside dynamic working-class histories like the ones Kim Jin-sook and her comrades are embedded in and that arguably can tell us much about the entanglement of resistance and hope in times of economic crisis and uncertainty. It is important for us to take note of how culture is used and abused in such debates around austerity, because utilizing such culturalist arguments typically comes with a number of rather grave political implications attached. Just as the myth of lazy Southern Europeans has served

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a crucial function in the way blame was shifted amid the Eurozone crisis from an overheated financial sector to the continent’s laboring populations, the culturalist line of reasoning involving East Asian worker docility and its role in global capitalism today is equally as much of a treacherous road to take, as it blinds us to much more complex trajectories of how South Korea and its neighbors have actually become the new powerhouses of the global economy. Finally, perhaps it is time for us to overcome our unwillingness or inability to think through the new reality we are faced with today—that the intellectual project of ‘provincializing Europe’ has in the meantime been overtaken by historical events that have indeed made the European continent rather parochial in political and economic terms (cf. Rakopoulos, this volume). Would an understanding of neo-liberal austerity measures as an integral part of concerted efforts toward a return to a more vicious, ‘disembedded’ form of capitalism, rather than a truly novel thing that only arose out of Europe’s particular history and circumstances, change our understanding of austerity and the reactions it has triggered? Once we begin to think of European austerity as just one instance representative of a wider global trend, many lessons could be drawn from listening to the tales of labor activists like Kim Jin-sook, who got up on a crane to resist such developments, rather than to those Korean voices that were conveniently highlighted in the international press to teach us all a lesson about how austerity (and by extension, capitalism) is to be done, the East Asian way.

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Acknowledgments As part of the ERC Advanced Grant project “Overheating: The Three Crises of Globalisation” (FP7-IDEAS-ERC, Project ID 295843), I have investigated the offshoring project of Hanjin Heavy Industries, which, in addition to its shipyard in Yeongdo, South Korea, has recently built a giant shipyard in the Philippines to bring down its labor costs. In order to look more closely into the responses of workers in both South Korea and the Philippines, I have collaborated with a number of trade unions in both countries. I wish to extend my sincere gratitude to the labor activists who have given me their time. I am also grateful to Theodoros Rakopoulos, Keir Martin, George Baca, and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable input on this chapter.

Elisabeth Schober is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. In her previous work, she has investigated responses to US bases in South Korea. Recently, she has focused on the challenges emerging from the relocation of manufacturing from South Korea to the Philippines. She is the author of Base Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea (2016) and has coedited a special issue of Ethnos entitled “Economies of Growth or Ecologies of Survival?” (2016, with Thomas Hylland Eriksen).

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References Arrighi, Giovanni. 2007. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso. Baca, George. 2011. “Resentment of Neoliberals in South Korea: Kim Jin-Sook and the Bus of Hope Movement.” Journal of Eurasian Studies 8 (4): 125–140. Bear, Laura. 2015. Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt Along a South Asian River. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Becker, Andreas. 2015. “Koreans’ Gold Donations—a Model for Greeks?” Deutsche Welle, 2 April. http://www.dw.com/en/ koreans-gold-donations-a-model-for-greeks/a-18357224. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chang Ha-Joon. 2000. “The Hazard of Moral Hazard: Untangling the Asian Crisis.” World Development 28 (4): 775–788. Chang Ha-Joon. 2008. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. London: Bloomsbury. Chang Ha-Joon. 2010. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism. London: Penguin Books. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa. London: Routledge. Cumings, Bruce. 1997. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton. Davis, Elizabeth. 2015. “‘We’ve Toiled without End’: Publicity, Crisis, and the Suicide ‘Epidemic’ in Greece.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 57 (4): 1007–1036. Gray, Kevin. 2008. Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation. London: Routledge. Holmes, Douglas. 2013. Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Knight, Daniel M. 2013. “Famine, Suicide and Photovoltaics: Narratives from the Greek Crisis.” GreeSE Paper No. 67. Hellenic Observatory Papers on Greece and Southeast Europe. Knight, Daniel M., and Charles Stewart. 2016. “Ethnographies of Austerity: Temporality, Crisis and Affect in Southern Europe.” History and Anthropology 27 (1): 1–18. Koo Hagen. 2001. Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Leick, Romain. 2015. “SPIEGEL Interview with Slavoj Zizek: ‘The Greatest Threat to Europe is Its Inertia.’” Spiegel Online International, 31 March. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/ slavoj-zizek-greatest-threat-to-europe-is-it-s-inertia-a-1023506.html. Min Kyoung-Bok, Park Shin-Goo, Hwang Song Hee, and Min JinYoung. 2015. “Precarious Employment and the Risk of Suicidal Ideation and Suicide Attempts.” Preventive Medicine 71: 72–76. Nam Hwasook. 2009. Building Ships, Building a Nation: Korea’s Democratic Unionism under Park Chung Hee. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Paik Nak-Chung. 2005. “How to Assess the Park Chung Hee Era and Korean Development.” Asia-Pacific Journal 3 (12). https:// apjjf.org/-Nak-chung-Paik/1725/article.html. Pipyrou, Stavroula. 2014. “Narrating Death: Affective Reworking of Suicide in Rural Greece.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 22 (2): 189–199. Rakopoulos, Theodoros. 2014. “Resonance of Solidarity: Meanings of a Local Concept in Anti-austerity Greece.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32 (2): 313–337. Roach, Stephen S. 2012. “Lessons from Asia: Austerity Can Work.” Al Jazeera, 9 March. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/ 2012/03/20123781637209922.html. Robinson, Tammy Ko. 2011. “South Korea’s 300 Day Aerial Sit-In Strike Highlights Plight of Precarious Workers in Korea and the Philippines.” Asia-Pacific Journal 9 (45). http://www.japanfocus .org/-tammy_ko-Robinson/3644. Schober, Elisabeth. 2016. Base Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea. London: Pluto Press. Schober, Elisabeth. 2018. “Working (Wo)man’s Suicide: Transnational Relocations of Capital—Repercussions for Labour in South Korea and the Philippines.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24 (S1): 134–147. Shin Kwang-Yeong. 2013. “Economic Crisis, Neoliberal Reforms, and the Rise of Precarious Work in South Korea.” American Behavioral Scientist 57 (3): 335–353. Stuckler, David, and Sanjay Basu. 2013. The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. New York: Basic Books. Williamson, Lucy. 2012. “What Eurozone Countries Can Learn from South Korea.” BBC News, 9 July. http://www.bbc.com/news/ business-18719079.

Austerity and ‘the Discipline of Historical Context’

( Don Kalb

Douglas Holmes (2013) has written about the post-1970s Western economy as an ‘economy of words’. This may sound like magic but it is not, at least not in the pejorative sense of the term. Those magic words are primarily spoken by central bankers. And the words do not come out of thin air but are robustly based in neo-classical economics, in particular ‘the economics of rational expectations’ as formulated by Robert Lucas in 1972. Holmes’s argument is that if contemporary economies are largely driven by the ‘expectations of the public’, in particular the public expectations about inflation, the management of those expectations by central bankers has become the key handle on the dashboard of economic management. The words of the central bankers are, then, performative. Holmes further specifies that what has always been known as a ‘fiat currency’ (a currency that is not backed up by gold or silver, say, the dollar after 1971) is, more precisely, a ‘public currency’. The exchange value of a public currency is managed by words that are spoken by central bankers—words that manage performatively the inflation expectations of the public. On closer scrutiny, ‘the public’ in Holmes’s seminal work consists primarily of the small global network of the

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CEOs of the big banks, the larger investment funds, hedge funds, other central bankers, and ministries of finance. They receive and digest the magic words about the money supply and the interest rates and pass them on downward, spiced with their own comments, to lesser but still substantial economic networks. Next, all these powerful actors incorporate them, reflexively, into their expectations and therefore their actions. The consequences of their actions are then again registered, through a feedback loop, by the central banks, who in their next communiqué manage those consequences by adjusting their spoken words and, thereby, inflation expectations. But my point is that, to put it simply, the unemployed and the poor, whose inflation expectations hardly matter in normal times, are not truly part of Holmes’s public. And the same is true for offshore workers, even though their insertion into, and exploitation by, globalizing Western value chains after the 1970s was a powerful factor behind precisely the decline of inflation in the West and the disciplining of labor in the rich world beyond the words and actions of central bankers. What Holmes calls a public currency, which remains undeveloped in his work, is a currency not just of exchange but also, and more importantly, for capitalist accumulation (see Harvey 2007). The way that currency works is supposed to guarantee the reproduction and accumulation of existing distributions of nominal wealth, including also fictitious wealth—that is, credit and other claims on future streams of revenue. This is, therefore, a ‘limited public currency’. The capitalist aspect is a feature of the historical context that Holmes neglects, which is consonant with his overestimation of the actual inclusiveness of his ‘public’. No wonder, then, that his innovative anthropology of central banking could not well incorporate the financial crisis and its consequences, even though this major collapse of financialized capitalism was breaking right in the

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middle of his research period. It was then also beyond his scope to anticipate the subsequent emergence of a historically unprecedented capitalist configuration: central bank ‘quantitative easing’, injections of fiat money to the phenomenal extent of 25 percent of Western GDP (plus Japan), and zero interest rates combined, in particular in Europe, with austerity in state finances—an intensely contradictory formation. Economies, then, are not only or mainly driven by words. There are overriding social and political logics at work, logics that express themselves at best only in obscure and mysterious ways, indeed, often in inverse ways, through the market data of the economists and the words spoken by the banker-conductors. A similar neglect of capitalist dynamics can be traced in the work of David Graeber. His monumental book Debt (2011) makes much of Mesopotamia and the ‘axial age’ but is decidedly unspecific about the difference capitalism has made to the last 500 years of world history (Kalb 2014a). It has even less to say about the last 50 years. Earlier, Graeber (2006) suggested that capitalism is a contemporary update on classical slavery. There is little difference, then, between the logics of the Roman Empire and those of (contemporary) capitalism. Meanwhile, Keith Hart, similarly taking a long-term perspective, wonders about the contemporary turn to ‘rent-seeking’ and whether it means that capitalism is reverting to a kind of feudalism (see Kaur 2014). The HAU publication enterprise that has recently gripped British anthropology celebrates ‘ethnographic theory’ in its search for small worlds of Maussian reciprocity that deny the hegemony and therefore the inevitability of surplus value—once more an escape from really existing capitalism. E. P Thompson (1972) once criticized anthropology for being weak on ‘the discipline of historical context’. While Holmes, Graeber, Hart, and HAU have many insightful

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things to say and are clearly groping toward a rich sense of the historical context, their unwillingness to deal with the Marxian tradition and its analysis of capitalist relations and dynamics gives their work an evasive tenor. In what follows, my thinking will be unashamedly based on Marxian categories and analyses of capital and class, more than on currently recelebrated anthropological key terms such as ‘market societies’, ‘hierarchy’, ‘exchange’, ‘reciprocity’, and ‘morality’. Austerity is nothing but a blatant form of class politics at a crucial critical junction—indeed, a crisis—in the transformations of global capitalism. While I applaud the conversation that is emerging in anthropology between Marx, Mauss, and Polanyi (to mention the most visible beacons), I do this from a self-conscious location in the Marxian tradition broadly conceived. If, to take Douglas Holmes’s felicitous term, there are ‘economies of words’, then there will also be ‘economies of lies’ (with a blink to Jonathan Friedman). I have earlier argued that while most anthropologists are interested in known ‘knowledges’ (local or epistemic), anthropological political economy of the Marxian sort tends to prioritize the discovery, and then the analysis, of ‘lies’ and ‘silences’. Indeed, this drive stems from notions such as ideology and fetishism, and of course from Gramsci’s hegemony (Kalb 2013b). When it comes to austerity, there is no shortage of such lies and silences. Austerity luxuriates in (self-)deception.

A Pack of Lies In contrast to Southern Europe, in Northwestern Europe publics have freely chosen to impose austerity upon themselves, not because it makes any overall sense, but because politicians and people imagine it to be ‘necessary’

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and ‘virtuous’.1 Necessary for what? Because the costs of the national debt are surging? Because the public debt is swallowing up all the liquid pools of capital and is squeezing investments in production, as in the late 1970s? None of that is the case. On the contrary, credit is cheaper than ever in the last 300 years. The public debt costs little to nothing. States have been attracting capital virtually for free for 30 years or even for 100 years. Even with just a half-percent growth, they will have no problem whatsoever in paying these debts back. Capital holders are even loudly panicking because they find themselves in a club with too many members, each with too much capital, chasing too few assets. There is now too much of what historically used to be a scarce commodity—‘savings’ or liquid capital/financial capital. Hence, the price is structurally low, indeed, must be structurally low. Worse, ‘investors’ do not even seem to know what to do with all their liquidity, to the point that most are happy to buy German or American bonds or park their reserves at the European Central Bank (ECB) even at a loss (as if the big men in the world are already expecting full-out deflation to come soon, as in the 1930s). Industrial investment, meanwhile, is at an all-time low, and even the likes of Apple have no idea what to do with the hundreds of billions of dollars that they are holding in cash in bank accounts in London (the euro-dollar market). That is the factual situation: singularly unprecedented, but simply true. Those who get alarmed about public debts are trying to wage the last war all over again, a ritual holding operation in unwanted new times. Will this situation of surplus liquidity change, as economists and politicians are regularly announcing? No, in all probability not, at least not fundamentally, unless excess liquidity is absorbed in major public projects, such as, in 2008–2014, saving the banks because they are ‘too big

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to fail’, or in the preparation for imperial wars to come. Other ways out are easily imaginable—a richer commons, a more fascinating and intelligent urbanism—but public discussion of them is blocked by innumerable, willed, and continuously renewed taboos. And so, in Europe, the eyes remain fixed on a written rule, agreed upon in 1992, that a public debt of more than 60 percent of GDP is out of bounds, morally and economically. Several European nations, such as Germany and Poland, have even written similar rules into their constitutions, so that they may forever live in 1992. Why will surplus liquidity not disappear in the foreseeable future? Because we are only in the early stages of a period of substantial financialization of capital in the global system as a whole. Western and Japanese pools will continue to grow for another 20 years at least, and they will not diminish afterward. Sovereign funds of most commodity and industrial mass exporters will continue to grow, and private funds from the Global South are also rapidly expanding. The year 2015 was the first time that Chinese capital exports began exceeding Chinese imports of capital. These Chinese capital exports are increasing so fast that Chinese development monies at this point in time already dwarf all the available official multilateral development assistance. While this is not the place to go into detail, it is very likely, even though unprecedented, that capital has simply become structurally abundant rather than scarce. This is a striking reversal from 30 years ago, when, after 1989, global labor became structurally abundant while global capital remained scarce. The sequence—with expanding global labor exploitation coming first, and global capital surpluses following—is no surprise. The structural abundance of capital drives down the interest rates to zero, enraging the small savers and pensioners who imagine they have a right to a rent, and destabilizing

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large pension and insurance institutions. Liquidity surpluses also drive the financial engineering that propelled the financial crisis, a financial engineering that is almost impossible to regulate and serves to multiply the stocks of (fictitious) capital even further. Structural capital abundance is closely interwoven in complex ways with what Larry Summers, at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings in Jackson Hole in October 2014, called “structural stagnation,” a situation of structurally blocked economic growth. It is also the flip side of the lack of demand in the global system, as working-class and middleclass purchasing power has been structurally repressed with the political ascent of capital over labor and the universalized (although uneven) imposition of neo-liberal Staatsraison—with the important exception of China. The same is true for the rising inequality of income and wealth that has now finally entered public awareness thanks to Piketty (2014) and others (more than 25 years after it was first noted).2 Some of this is certainly being discussed in circles of experts, but not in the political arena, not before the demos, and certainly not in its historical and anthropological fullness as a historical transformation of capitalism, the contours of which are complex and momentous. It is at best obscurely wrapped in the evermore often recurring term in the economics debates, ‘uncertainty’, which in a way functions as the realist flip side of the celebrated anthropological concept with a similarly shaky epistemological function, ‘hope’. If austerity is not ‘necessary’, what about it being ‘virtuous’? That is of course an issue of politics and taste. It is a claim with a very long history epitomized by Protestantism (Goede 2005), European conservatism (see Hart, this volume), and Buddhism, as well as being nurtured in some of the historical ideals of a more sober Left. Consider also the socialist utopias in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China,

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which proclaimed the necessity of public austerity before the threshold to the new worlds of plenty and freedom could be reached. It is a claim that always seems to gain public credibility in a situation of danger and uncertainty and, indeed, is often wielded to feed such feelings of anxiety. Many of the lies that we are hearing are lies precisely about such threats: threats from the outside (immigration, aggression) and from an uncertain ‘future’, and threats of decline ‘among ourselves’, a lack of discipline, addiction to excess, corruption of character. That is why the resounding German call for ‘stability’ is such a powerful polysemic symbol for political paralysis in the present context, even when obviously deployed in a self-defeating manner, up to the point even of destroying the very coherence of the EU that earlier German leaderships so conscientiously sought to build. See also UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s obsessive repetition of the “strong and stable” lie in 2016–2017. The conclusion is never drawn that ‘discipline and stability’ are the wrong ‘medicine’, but always that these medicines are not swallowed fully, that too many sugar bowls are allowed, that ‘partners’ are not trustworthy. It is a powerful ritual silencing device against fresh analysis and intelligent politics. More fundamentally, austerity, instead of being necessary or virtuous, is a class design that protects classes of creditors over classes of debtors. It makes public savings available for paying off public debts, and it serves ongoing dispossessions and disenfranchisements meant to push people onto markets, maneuvers that are routinely obscured by technical terms such as ‘structural adjustment’ or by political clichés such as ‘modernization’ and ‘reform’. This is embedded within nations and among nations, at the moment most crassly and momentously so within the Eurozone. What cannot easily be said is that the EU as we thought we knew it (‘ever closer union’,

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‘European values’) is over, perhaps forever, an ever less closer union with ever less European values. By creating the legal fiction that all members were equal—and if not entirely equal yet, then in any case on their way to becoming so (‘convergence’)—great unevenness and deep international inequalities in the making of the Eurozone were substantially denied. They were intellectually buried under the ‘subsidies’ that originated in an earlier EU, as well as under the liberal mantra that ‘all good institutional things go together’, as classically summarized by Albert Hirschman (2013), inevitably producing a golden equilibrium at some point. European space, of course, has never been level. It has always consisted of shifting historical imperial cores and peripheral vassals, and capital has always flown from the former to the latter; rents and profits from the latter to the former, sometimes lifting territories up, sometimes generating and deepening backwardness. The pattern of open imperial overlordship that is now emerging on the continent is almost entirely similar to the geopolitical and geo-economic relationships of inequality and unevenness in the late nineteenth century and the 1930s. It is no surprise that the ‘weakest’ countries were cut off from credit at the moment that the financial crisis produced a drying up of liquidity in the system. As if ‘weakness’ was something new. Corruption, laziness, and other vices on a supposedly historical scale had almost nothing to do with that. What was new was that some of the ‘weak’ were now tied into the Eurosystem. But after having (mis)judged the financial crisis on Wall Street as merely an American affair (“greediness and corruption on Wall Street”), ‘innocent’ European politicians and publics had lost the chance to understand how their own countries and banks were implicated in it and how it would subsequently hit them. The ugly blame game that

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followed was therefore no surprise either. Initial intentions, however, were all very good, except that they were formulated and executed in ways that made things much worse, as is common when actors are willingly unprepared. Angela Merkel’s fundamental errors are well documented (e.g., Legrain 2014; Soros 2014). I want to single out just two of them, one of which was later drowned in silence while the other amounts to a straightforward lie, a lie with momentous domestic (German, European) consequences. The first happened immediately in the fall of 2008 during the frightening days of the financial crisis: in order to forestall the feared run on the banks, the European Council decided that all bank deposits in Europe would be guaranteed. No one had spoken yet about how to do that, but enlightened optimists in and around that meeting were assuming that a European banking union was now on offer (the same actors would later assume that Eurobonds might come on the table). Leaving the council meeting late at night, a tired Merkel was asked by a German journalist whether it would be the EU/Eurozone that would be responsible for executing this guarantee or rather each country individually. Merkel first did not know the answer—they had not spoken about it yet—then, pressed on, uttered uncertainly that obviously it would be the responsibility of individual countries. Here was the unknowing and impromptu verdict over the future of the Southern (plus Irish) banking systems, spoken by an unprepared chancellor who understood lots about morality, very little about economics, and perhaps even less about international unevenness and inequality. The second instance was a straightforward lie that misled the public in irreversible ways. The German and EU readiness to offer “aid to Greece,” as the Eurozone loans were coined by Merkel, was no aid at all—something that the smarter theorists of ‘the gift’ among us will recognize

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at once. This was the same old lie as the one that had blurred the discussions about the Global South, the IMF, and conditionality for so long. Multilateral loans are no aid; they are mere loans. They extract a rent from a vassal, taking away any appearances of sovereignty and ‘democracy’, and are a means to take control over a national budget so that foreign creditors can be paid back. Rather than being aid, the loans given to Greece by the Eurozone group (which does not legally exist—another major silence) until 2014 were used to pay back Greece’s private creditors (mainly, German, Dutch, French, and Italian banks). The then Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis (2015), stated that 96 percent of the loans left the country immediately after they had arrived (from a fund in Luxemburg) as interest payments to Northern banks. Later, they were used to pay off the Northern banks with a ‘haircut’. ‘Taking a haircut’ does not mean that these creditors actually made a loss on the principal of the loan, that some of their money was not being returned. In colloquial jargon, they got all their pennies back—and, in fact, much more than that. What they did not receive in full (the haircut) were the multi-year interest payments that they had demanded from the Greek state when it signed up to the contracts. The ‘troika’ (the European Commission, the ECB, and the IMF) reduced the totality of future interest payments to private Northern banks by some 40 percent. In other words, German taxpayer money was used to make good on 60 percent of the profits that German banks had been expecting to make in the future on Greek loans, but not the full 100 percent. Such ‘losses’, then, are mere accounting losses in the banks’ anticipated future revenues. Under liberal capitalism, these expected rents are assumed to be already the contractual ‘property’ of the creditor/rent-taker. In other words, finance capital has an enforceable right to its expected profits, unless very

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powerful sovereign actors such as the troika make a slight cut. But this does not apply to Argentina or Greece: they have to forcefully default and are then cut out of the system as a pariah. Multilateral loans were thus substituted for private loans, putting Greece literally in the public poorhouse run by the troika. These multilateral loans initially carried exorbitant interest rates. They were meant to morally punish a deviant country while they were all but crushing it financially at the same time. That is what Merkel’s European ‘aid’ was about. Gift theorists please take note. And at the risk of overstating it, all this—the public poorhouse, the punishments, the moral accusations, the lies—is of course about class. The concept of aid, like the gift, naturally produces a discourse of solidarity, partnership, even intimacy. But it was a lie. In reality it was an overt imperial act between nominal friends and partners that even the IMF found perverse. Indeed, the IMF has now officially conceded that even its own calculations concerning Greece had been too optimistic and that Greece needs a debt write-down. Debt had surged from about 120 percent of GDP at the moment of the crisis to 180 percent, while GDP had declined by 25 percent, and incomes and internal demand had dwindled by 30 percent. And still, the initial lie of ‘aid given to Greece’ in good trust would allow North European conservatives to rage on about the infidel Greeks who were stealing the hard-earned savings of productive German workers. Under this pack of lies, the Eurozone-EU had become all but a debt collection agency for Northern rentier capitalists, rentier nations, and rentier citizens imagining themselves unisono as victims of an international racket. As a consequence of these lies, the legally non-existing Eurozone group cannot now publicly concede that it has, in the end, felt forced to reduce the actual interest payments on Greek loans to such an extent that Greece is effectively

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paying less on the euro than Italy or Portugal (Klein 2016; Wolf 2016). Wolfgang Schaüble, the then German finance minister, refused to relax his focus on the 180 percent headline indebtedness, just like Europe cannot forget about the once agreed 60 percent headline of the maximally allowed national debt. Why? Probably in order to justify the continuing assault on Greek sovereignty that the troika is still undertaking to justify its authoritarian management of the poorhouse (expectedly until summer 2018). Payback periods can be extended, interest holidays can be allowed, and extra-low interest rates can be talked about—but not the nominal rate of indebtedness. Why not? Because this would bring Greece back among the ‘normal’ countries that legitimately claim sovereignty over their internal affairs. The ECB contributes powerfully to that imperial fix by not accepting Greek state and bank bonds as collateral for ongoing loans from Frankfurt. This lockout keeps the Greek banking system deliberately in the danger zone of a bank run. Both are expert devices that are meant to blackmail the leftists of SYRIZA into refraining from even beginning to publicly imagine any popular sovereignty for the Greeks. Within the Northern countries themselves, other things cannot be said or must be wrapped in lies when it comes to austerity. The UK’s Cameron government was the least embarrassed, and it openly combined austerity with a substantial tax reduction for the high incomes. The Dutch government, however, could not openly say that Dutch budget cuts (a cut of 25 billion euros in 2014, every bit as large proportionally as the British or German cuts) were largely imposed on its youth and its benefit receivers. Indeed, the latter had to be sacrificed in order to protect older generations of real estate owning but often deeply indebted middle classes. The 25 billion euros of mortgage interest tax reduction was kept out of the equation by all political parties. It cannot be said that the basic collateral

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for the whole inflated financialized Dutch banking system was kept safe, or that the spending cuts helped to create budgetary space for new state debts in case the government would again have to save the banks (which have outstanding obligations six times the Dutch GDP, proportionally decidedly more than the British banking system). The same inflated real estate values must be paid later by the now disenfranchised youth, who are therefore punished doubly—except those from the higher middle classes who will, in all likelihood, be well educated nonetheless and are looking forward to a good inheritance. Blatant class politics, all this, on behalf of austere morality, ‘individual choice’, and ‘growth’. In September 2014, the Dutch king announced that the period of the welfare state was over. The Netherlands is now a ‘participation society’, another genial word that encapsulates and obscures both workfare for the unemployed and assimilation for immigrants and minorities. I leave it to others to analyze domestic German or French lies and silences.

Coda All this suggests that with the emergent anthropology of austerity we are entering the more general and exciting terrain of the anthropology of rent-taking. Keith Hart is not alone among anthropologists in calling attention to the ongoing reconfigurations of capitalism toward rent extraction (see Kaur 2014; see also Friedman 2015; Kalb 2013b, 2015; Smith 2014: 177). Earlier, I have argued for a reconsideration of the role of internationalized finance capital in the transition toward capitalism (Kalb 2013a), in other words, for haute finance and rent-taking to be acknowledged as actual drivers in the making of modern capitalism. From that perspective, Hart’s problematic is

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less about capitalism morphing back into a classic form of feudalism than about capitalism coming fully into its own (see also Harvey 2013). Paradoxically, one could argue that it is in fact the financialized rentier nature of contemporary industrial and other ownership structures that has produced the surge toward stockholder value versus stakeholder value and the concomitant drive toward short-term competitiveness, intensified labor exploitation, and the globalization of value chains. The general rise in national indebtedness, similarly, has driven nations and states willy-nilly into neo-liberalization and austerity—even, and in fact especially, the most competitive ones. The debate among critical liberal economists is now also turning ever more toward a discussion of ‘monopoly’ and monopoly rents as an explanation both for structural stagnation and for increasing inequality (see, e.g., Stiglitz 2016). The import of the Piketty wave is not altogether different. Finance, rents, monopolies, and inheritances are key properties of the ‘new’ old capitalism, as are the social relations of indebtedness and extraction. Austerity has become a tool and an expression of all that. The politics of rent-taking is supported by the lies (narratives, myths, ideologies) under which it is legitimized; the historical blocs that underlie particular hegemonic forms at particular times and places, including ‘globally’; the experiential structures, popular contestations, and rebellions; and the local and global histories. This is a very up-to-date agenda for anthropology, an agenda that merges with the contemporary interest in the ongoing forms of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession. Historically and culturally dynamic relationships of class—their discovery and situated analytical description within the ongoing global transformations of capitalism— drive this agenda, whether or not we name them as such (Kalb 2015). This is not to say that ideas of reciprocity and

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everyday communism, and of (dis)embeddedness, stark utopias, and double movements, have no place in this discussion—on the contrary, in fact. But at the end of the day, when it comes to recognizing the diacritica of Thompson’s ‘discipline of historical context’, there is nothing in Mauss or Polanyi that can reasonably convince us to leave aside a whole array of basic Marxian insights into the contemporary class struggles of, and around, capital accumulation. From below—but in this age particularly also from above—we must consider the global cultural, political, and economic transformations that are being driven by these power struggles, as suggested in the works of Arrighi, Harvey, Brenner, and other (and earlier) Marxians.3 Empirically, this might well mean that we are looking at dynamic localisms: right-wing populisms with left-wing elements as in Eastern Europe (Kalb 2011, 2014b), and classically left-wing mobilizations as in the Southern Eurozone (Narotzky 2015). Contestation might as well be about generations or gender, about racism or ethnicism. Polanyi’s countermovements are, as always, underdetermined in their actual composition and substance. Situated expressions of the deeper contradictions are necessarily locally contingent, but at the same time they are always also universally structured. Meanwhile, Douglas Holmes’s trilogy (1989, 2000, 2013), Smith’s (2014) book, and Friedman and Friedman’s (2008a, 2008b) volumes challenge us to venture into a more ambitious multi-scalar ethnographic research agenda that brings the state, classes, the experts, and the capitalist powerholders overtly and frontally into full view.

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Don Kalb is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen and until recently Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Central European University, Budapest. He is also a Senior Researcher at Utrecht University. His recent books include Anthropologies of Class (2015, co-edited with James Carrier) and Worldwide Mobilizations (2018, co-edited with Massimiliano Mollona). With Chris Hann, he co-leads the Financialisation research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, and he directs the Frontiers of Value project at the University of Bergen.

Notes 1. For a historical analysis of finance from the early eighteenth century up to the present day, see Goede (2005). 2. This inequality was earlier pointed out in the deindustrialization debate of the mid-1980s (see Bluestone and Harrison 1984). For the ‘dual city’ debate, see Castells (1991) and Mollenkopf and Castells (1991). A conference I co-organized at Utrecht University in 1996 made the same argument. See Kalb et al. (2000), in particular the articles by Wilterdink (2000) and Schmitt (2000). Wilterdink’s (2016) mid-1980s book with extensive Dutch data has been revised and republished. 3. See Kunkel (2014) for an elegant overview of prominent contemporary Anglo-Marxist advocates.

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Kalb, Don. 2011. “Introduction: Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe.” In Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe, ed. Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai, 1–36. New York: Berghahn Books. Kalb, Don. 2013a. “Financialization and the Capitalist Moment: Marx versus Weber in the Anthropology of Global Systems.” American Ethnologist 40 (2): 258–266. Kalb, Don. 2013b. “Marxist Anthropology.” In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, ed. R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, 523–531. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kalb, Don. 2014a. “Mavericks: Harvey, Graeber, and the Reunification of Anarchism and Marxism in World Anthropology.” Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 69: 113–134. Kalb, Don. 2014b. “‘Worthless Poles’ and Other Dispossessions: Toward an Anthropology of Labor in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe.” In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor, ed. Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella, 250–287. New York: Berghahn Books. Kalb, Don. 2015. “Introduction: Class and the New Anthropological Holism.” In Carrier and Kalb 2015, 1–27. Kalb, Don, Marco van der Land, Richard Staring, et al., eds. 2000. The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield. Kaur, Ravinder. 2014. “Round Table Discussion with John Comaroff and Keith Hart.” Workshop titled “Southern Futures: Thinking through Emerging Markets,” 25 September. Centre of Global South-Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen. Klein, Matthew. 2016. “What If Greece Got Massive Debt Relief but No One Admitted It?” Financial Times, 6 June. http:// ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/06/06/2164813/what-if-greece-got -massive-debt-relief-but-no-one-admitted-it-part-1-5/?siteedition =intl#recommended-h-89201465494074900. Kunkel, Benjamin. 2014. Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis. London: Verso. Legrain, Philippe. 2014. European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess—and How to Put Them Right. Clinton, CT: CB Creative Press.

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Mollenkopf, John H., and Manuel Castells, eds. 1991. Dual City: Restructuring New York. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Narotzky, Susana. 2015. “The Organic Intellectual and the Production of Class in Spain.” In Carrier and Kalb, 53–72. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmitt, John. 2000. “Inequality and Globalization: Some Evidence from the United States.” In Kalb et al. 2000, 157–168. Smith, Gavin. 2014. Intellectuals and (Counter)-Politics: Essays in Historical Realism. New York: Berghahn Books. Soros, George. 2014. The Tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival. New York: Public Affairs. Stiglitz, Joseph E. 2016. “Monopoly’s New Era.” Project Syndicate, 13 May. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/highmonopoly-profits-persist-in-markets-by-joseph-e--stiglitz-2016-05. Thompson, E. P. 1972. “Anthropology and the Discipline of Historical Context.” Midland History 1 (3): 41–55. Varoufakis, Yanis. 2015. The Global Minotaur: America, Europe, and the Future of the Global Economy. London: Zed Books. Wilterdink, Nico. 2000. “The Internationalization of Capital and Trends in Income Inequality in Western Societies.” In Kalb et al. 2000, 187–201. Wilterdink, Nico. 2016. Vermogensongelijkheid in Nederland: Ontwikkelingen sinds 1850. Amsterdam: Van Gennep. Wolf, Martin. 2016. “Painful Choices Still Hang over Greece.” Financial Times, 7 June. https://www.ft.com/content/9452f446-2c01 -11e6-a18d-a96ab29e3c95.