Although the European governments talk about a “humanitarian crisis” and pretend they take relief measures, they hide the causes of the refugee crisis and the real face of their policies, multiplying the death toll on the Greek islands.

Despite the early media reports presenting Germany and other west European countries as open to refugees (Germany was even talking about thousands of employment posts they would cover…), the reality is totally different. The number of refugees that Europe eventually agreed to resettle is too small compared to the millions of refugees that the countries neighbouring the conflict zones have admitted. This tiny quota is the hypocritical answer of the European governments to the huge pressure placed on them by social and political groups but also industrial circles that see in the refugee crisis an opportunity for even cheaper labour in Europe.

The countries of the EU on the refugee route to Europe are doing their best to keep them out. The extreme-right Hungarian government set up fences on the borders of Hungary with Serbia and Croatia, while the “left-wing” Greek government claims that the fence on Greece’s land borders with Turkey cannot be removed. On the sea borders of the EU, Frontex intensifies its efforts to block the refugee entrance instead of helping with rescue efforts. Together with the Greek Coast Guard, they turn a blind eye to the gangs attacking refugee boats. This is Fortress Europe.

But the EU’s responsibility extends even further. The EU along with the US and Russia are to blame for the disastrous wars driving people off their homelands. Their direct or indirect interventions have fuelled the civil wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Talibans in Afganistan and the Islamic State in Middle East did not rise on their own but thanks to the financial, political and military support by the international imperialist forces. The invasion of the US and their allies in Iraq brought about more wars and horrors for Iraqi people. Kurds are suffering an ongoing oppression and faced with fierce attacks by the Islamic State and Erdogan’s authoritarian regime. The economic, political and military interventions of the US, the EU and Russia have totally disrespected the need of people in these areas to live peacefully and are to blame for the enormous migration wave that the EU is trying to keep out of its fortress.

In the past years, European societies are under an enormous pressure due to the financial crisis, by and large paid by the lower classes. The governments in the “Europe of the people” saved the banks and international companies by providing them huge amounts of state funding. A few years ago, Greece’s public debt was transferred from the banks to the European people. Harsh austerity measures have been imposed on the people of indebted countries, while the welfare state throughout Europe is under attack. It is not only salaries that have been severely cut, but also labour rights. At the same time, flexible working has almost become the norm.

Given that neoliberal governments cannot care less about the quality of life of lower classes, a part of them fears that the arrival of the refugees will lead to its deterioration. Like every other government in the EU, the Dutch government makes sure to live up to this fear: it sets up huge cheap camps next to small neglected villages, without concern for the living conditions of the refugees or the local population. At the same time, it gives no guarantees that the refugees will not be used as cheap workforce.

The part of European population that has been paying the price of the neoliberal policies is now being told that the refugees pose a threat to its standard of living. In this way, its discontent and uncertainty are directed against the refugees, themselves victims of the EU’s foreign policy. Protesting against the arrival of the refugees or the creation of refugee camps and not against the neoliberal policies that cause unemployment and poverty for the people and profits for the capital, is very convenient for the governments and economic elites in the EU. It fits in well with their goals and plans if people fall for the racist and fascist propaganda of Golden Dawn in Greece, Wilders in the Netherlands or Lepen in France.

Humanitarian solidarity and material support to the refugees are necessary but not enough. The real solution to the migration crisis will come from overturning the policies of the European Union and the governments applying them. The borders should open immediately so that no more people are drowned at the sea borders of the EU in Greece and Italy. The criminal fences blocking their way to Europe should be removed. Refugees should get equal rights to housing, education, healthcare and work in Europe.

The foreign policy of the EU should change right away. The military, economic and political interventions in the countries of the Middle East should stop. Democracy, peace and development should be actively supported. The EU should stop backing authoritarian regimes. The right of Kurdish and Palestinian people to their own state should be admitted. Money should be given to the refugees and the poor. We should not allow the refugees to be used as cheap workforce in the service of capital.

Parties and organizations of the Left and trade unions in the whole Europe should take specific initiatives in this direction. They should point to the real culprits of the refugee crisis and play a leading role in organizing the struggle of European citizens to protect their quality of life as well as the right of every human being to live with peace and dignity at some place in the world.

Refugees welcome!

Racists, fascists and neoliberals, you are personae non gratae.

ReINFORM

(Source of the photos::http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/war-in-peace)

A considerable number of anti-fascists joined the demonstration, over 400 in particular. Such anti-fascist actions are necessary to block fascism and actively support migrants. But for the anti-fascist movement to accomplish its goals, it should overcome its limitations. To this end, some self-criticism may be useful. The dark clouds of racism and fascism gather over Europe. We must not allow this to happen again.

Of course anti-fascism is not just about opposing some lunatics who believe in blood purity and race. Anti-fascism is mainly a struggle against the political parties implementing neoliberal policies to the interests of the bourgeoisie. These policies equal to a sheer attack on working people’s rights, income, pensions and access to public healthcare and education. These parties might not have a fascist rhetoric, but they pave the way for the rise of fascist movements and ideologies by creating social instability, obscene inequality and massive poverty. In sum, by plunging people and countries into debts and despair.

From this perspective, only if anti-fascists show how fascism is linked to the capitalist system will they be effective. It is only by perceiving anti-fascism as a form of class confrontation that simplistic chauvinist arguments, such as those attributing unemployment to migrants, can be resisted and fought. In the example of the Syrian refugee crisis, anti-fascists should point out that Syrians are migrating because the interests of the European and American bourgeoisie are best served in conditions of a continuing war.

To defeat fascism in all its expressions we should be united and open to society. The success of any anti-fascist action is premised on the unity of the trade unions and the left-wing and anarchist organizations. At the same time, the anti-fascist movement should be inviting every individual or social group that wants to oppose racism and fascism to join in. However, such unity and broadness would be fake and fragile if not based on political criticism. Thus, although people who have voted for PvdA or other neoliberal political parties are welcome in anti-fascist actions, we should be clear about the responsibility that these parties have for the rise of racism and fascism and the launch of imperialist wars. Crying crocodile tears for the refugees, while voting measures against migration or harsh austerity policies should be openly criticised and condemned.

Anti-fascism is not a matter of an one-day battle. All of us, either Dutch or migrants, who want to live peacefully with one another, should work on a long-term, multifaceted plan for this common cause. Creating anti-fascist committees in every city, which will explain to society how fascist phenomena and migration are linked to political decisions and strategies imposed by the neoliberal governments, the EU and the NATO, is such a long-term anti-fascist action. The Dutch left-wing and anarchist organizations and groups should come up with such actions and back up the creation of a broad popular front against racism and fascism.

United against whom?

After the anti-fascist protest at Janskerkhof, a big part of the anti-fascists tried to reach the rally of Pegida. Their anti-rally was prohibited by the police and considered as illegal. When the anti-fascists gathered, the police tried to turn them away even resorting to physical violence and arrests. These actions prove that there cannot be any “state anti-fascism”, as some people claim. When the state and police protect Pegida, they share responsibility for Pegida’s views and deeds.

With the political decision to allow Pegida’s rally, Dutch bourgeois parties and the state give the message that fascist rhetoric and ideology are welcome. And when dealing with people who believe that migrants should either drown in the Mediterranean or die in their countries by the bombs of Europe, the US and ISIS, it is not about ensuring the right to the freedom of speech. Despite the claims about preventing episodes of violence among the protesters, the prohibition of the anti-Pegida rally resulted in the protection of Pegida from the Dutch mainstream media spotlight and public exposure. Dutch mainstream media are now focusing on the Pegida phenomenon in Germany and not on its persistent attempt to set foot in the Netherlands. In view of Pegida’s comeback to Utrecht on the 8th of November, such prohibitions by the police and the media coverage of the issue should be among the subjects addressed by the anti-fascist movement.

The enemy is not only Pegida, but also the neoliberal political parties that create the conditions for fascism to rise and the police, prohibiting and repressing anti-fascist rallies. To defend the migrants, we should struggle against all those who want the Dutch society hypnotized with lies and terrorized by the police or fascist brutality. We should struggle against capitalism and the 21^st century comeback of fascism that it gives rise to.

ReINFORM

In this event, we want to go further than just challenging the media propaganda. The roots but also the aims of austerity and reform policies will be discussed. Who are the winners of these policies? What will the economy and the political system look like after their full implementation? What was the role of the participation of Greece to the EU and the euro for the development of the crisis as the crisis in the Eurozone started from Greece?

Three critical scholars will provide their contribution to the discussion:

Kees van der Pijl, emeritus professor at the University of Sussex, will give the broader context of the issue from an international perspective and will present the Dutch context as well.
Yiorgos Vassalos, political scientist in Brussels, will evaluate the 30-year long participation of Greece to the EU.
Dimitris Pavlopoulos, assistant professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, will talk about the winners and losers of the austerity policies in Greece

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/275719382636460

The world is experiencing extreme weather.  In the US, California’s drought is the worst in 100-years while the East Coast faced a massive snowstorm with freezing temperatures. On the other side of the world, Australia continues to deal with intense summer heat and droughts, causing major bush fires. There has been severe winter flooding in the UK and Europe; extreme cold and snow in the Eastern US and Japan and so on.

Now this may just be random, outliers in the normal distribution of weather conditions, or it could be that the globe is reaching a peak in a cycle of weather, or it could be the ever-growing impact of climate change as the world heats up.  In fact, it could be all three, as the first two possible causes can be considered as immediate or cyclical and the last (climate change) as structural or ‘ultimate’.  The facts speak.  Since 1997, the world has experienced the 13 warmest years ever recorded out of 15, according to the UN.  June 2012 marked the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average.  In 2013, extreme weather events included several all-time temperature records.  Snow cover in Europe and North America was above average, while the Arctic ice was 4,5% below the 1981–2010 average.

Northern Hemisphere weather extremes have been linked to the Arctic sea ice melting.  In January alone, 11233 weather-related deaths were reported in India.  Bangladesh faced the lowest temperature since country’s independence.  In Europe, last summer’s weather was bizarre.  Finland and most of Northern Countries got the highest temperatures in Europe during May and June, while Western- and Middle Europe faced much cooler weather and even their wettest May and June ever.  Overall, prolonged heat waves in the Northern Hemisphere set new record high temperatures.

There’s little doubt that climate change is contributing to the extreme weather disasters we’ve been experiencing.

Numerous studies, such as the US  NOAA’s 2011 State of the Climate report, shows the clear links between extreme weather and human-induced climate change.  In the UK, the media is bouncing about the extreme levels of rain and wind hitting the island and causing significant and prolonged flooding.  The UK Met Office, the body that forecasts the weather, announced that climate change was likely to be a factor in the extreme weather that has hit much of the UK in recent months: “all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change” and “there is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”  The UK Met office said there had been the “most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years”.

Climate models are forecasting increased episodes of flooding for the UK under climate change conditions.  According to the UK Met Office, four of the wettest five years have occurred since 2000, a statistic made all the more remarkable given the drought between 2010 and 2012. Peer-reviewed scientific research, performed by academics in collaboration with RMS scientists, found that climate change increased the likelihood of the floods that impacted England and Wales in the year 2000 in which 10,000 homes and businesses were flooded due to heavy autumn precipitation.  And Britain’s Rowntree Foundation study, found that this was a direct result of the physical principle that a warmer atmosphere holds higher amounts of water vapour and UK regional climate models predict increased winter rainfall (especially in the north and west) and more intense, highly localised summer rainfall (especially in the south and east). These predictions also accord with recent changes in rainfall over the period 1961–2006 which have seen many parts of the UK affected by severe and highly damaging floods.  The study concluded “Whilst no single flood can unequivocally be attributed to climate change, there is evidence that the probability of floods (in this instance, the regional floods affecting England and Wales in 2000) is increasing as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”

But while the  British press gushes about the sorry state of a few thousands people in the richer and leafier parts of England like Somerset or Surrey, the most damage from extreme rainfall, flooding and wind is likely to be in the poorer urban areas.  As the Met Office put it: “there is now little doubt that a warmer and wetter UK will experience more floods with greater impacts in urban areas.”  In particular, there is the increased risk of pluvial flooding.  River banks overflowing is called fluvial flooding; pluvial flooding is when  combined systems (storm water and foul water sewers) are overwhelmed, the foul water sewers surcharge onto the streets. The resulting flood is a mixture of surface water and untreated sewage which produces a more severe health hazard.

Pluvial flood risk accounts for approximately one-third of flood risk from all sources in the UK.  Approximately 2 million people in UK urban areas (settlements with a population over 10,000) are exposed to an annual pluvial flood risk of 0.5 per cent or greater (‘1 in 200-year’ event).  An additional 1.2 million people in urban areas could be put at risk by 2050 from a combination of climate change (300,000) and population growth (900,000).  Settlements across the UK with higher rainfall also tend to have greater levels of social deprivation.

As one blogger put it: “The Environment Agency has taken its fair share of blame for the flooding misery in Somerset , but there is an industry which has escaped criticism. And unlike the quango, it’s not short of a billion or two. Step forward the privatised water industry which has a key role in dealing with our storm and sewage water. In the last six years water companies have made £11 billion in profits from our water bills, surely enough to have stopped its customers from having raw sewage flooding into their homes and down their streets every time there is a heavy downpour.  Dispatches has been investigating the role of the water companies in the country’s recent flood problems and while Somerset have been dealing with record rainfalls and storm surges many homes across the country have been dealing with another consequence of the deluge: sewage flooding into their homes and down their streets.  When it rains heavily, our underground infrastructure can become overwhelmed and raw sewage can get discharged onto our streets , rivers and to a growing number of unfortunate people into their homes. According to the Consumer Council for Water, complaints from homeowners about sewer flooding are up by 50% compared to last year.”  

The private sector and the private water management monopolies that are supposed to provide decent water and sewage facilities are not not up to the task.  Profit for shareholders comes before service to the public.  As a result, basic infrastructure investment in sewage and water, roads, rail etc is inadequate – and yet the world, including the richer capitalist countries, is facing increased risk of ‘natural disasters’ as the global climate changes and, with it, the weather conditions.

Every year there is a major disaster in the emerging economies, with thousands dying and hundreds of thousands losing their homes and livelihoods.  But the media only remembers the events that hit the rich economies. The most infamous was the Katrina hurricane, the bursting of the levees and the flooding of the homes of the poor in New Orleans.  Not only did the federal and local governments fail to act quickly and efficiently, we now know that warnings of such a calamity had been voiced years before.  But instead of spending more to upgrade the levees, federal and state governments actually cut back on such infrastructure funding. After all, such spending was of no value to rich living up on their hilltop homes.

It’s the same story in the current flooding crisis in the UK.  In November 2012, the government announced plans to spend £120 million (US$183 million) on flood defences, split between new areas targeted for protection and speeding up protection already being built.  But this came after a period of budget cutting, with government climate advisers in the summer of 2012 noting a 12% decrease in flood defence spending from the previous year. Construction began on 93 new flood defences in February 2013 with a government pledge of an additional £2.3 billion (US$3.5 billion) until 2015.

Despite this activity, some of the largest projects, like the £80 million (US$122 million) coastal defence at Rossall, Lancashire, are to protect from storm surge rather than the pluvial flooding  that dominated 2012’s losses. According to the RMS UK Inland Flood Model, an annual flood loss of £1.2 billion (US$1.8 billion) can be expected approximately once every decade. The RMS model also estimates that only 50% of the average annual loss (AAL) comes from major river flooding, with the other half from small river and stream flooding, flash flooding, pluvial flooding, and localized heavy precipitation.

Even the classical economist of capitalism and the so-called guru of free markets, Adam Smith recognised the need for public spending in infrastructure because the private sector could not do it.  In his Wealth of Nations.  Smith explained: “The first and last duty of the sovereign is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual.” And Smith meant by this “good roads, navigable canals, harbours and education”.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has continually complained that America’s infrastructure is rotting away.  It found that one in five American bridges were “structurally deficient”.  While the number of miles travelled by cars and trucks had doubled in the past 25 years, highway lane miles had risen only 45%.  Demand for electricity had increased by 25%, but the construction of new transmission facilities had fallen by 30%.  This deterioration had lost 870,000 jobs that could have been secured with new projects, while the costs of moving goods had risen significantly. The ASCE reckoned that there was $100bn of potential work available. Instead the US Congress plans to cut such spending by 35% over the next six years.

More extreme weather is on its way and the risk of calamity involving millions is rising sharply.  To avoid this, we can rely only on uninterested private monopolies and governments engaged in cutting back on so-called ‘discretionary’ public spending.  It’s another consequence of the dominance of the capitalist mode of production.  There is a UN summit in New York on climate change and the weather in September.  We may have to rebuild Noah’s Ark before then.

Michael Roberts

Source: http://leftunity.org/time-for-noahs-ark-again/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=time-for-noahs-ark-again&utm_reader=feedly

Source Link allegralaboratory

ALLEGRA: Dimitris, you are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. In the past you have studied highways and infrastructures and currently you are carrying out a research project entitled « The City at the Time of Crisis », funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Can you briefly introduce yourself to those who are not familiar with your work and describe your projects?

DIMITRIS: For my PhD I studied anthropologically political transition via infrastructures and vice versa. More precisely I studied the main cross-border motorway between Albania and Greece and via that peculiar -at the time- ethnographic site I studied in a new way -via the road and its flows- the postsocialist conditions in the Balkans. By extension this study of infrastructure provided an insight into the materiality of the wider European neoliberalisation project.

We have to understand that the project of European neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s passed precisely via a mass development of built environment in the continent. Moreover an additional element of that process was the re-determination of European boundaries and a related inter-European movement of populations which crossed these re-determined borders. Indeed, the replacement of State-run economies by market-based capitalism in half of the continent and the parallel expansion of Western European capitalist interests in Eastern Europe had a crucial role in this neoliberalisation project. So given this context the cross-border road between postsocialist and non-socialist peripheral European states looked like an ideal ethnographic locus for analysing such process anthropologically.

Today we are seeing one more stage of that neoliberalisation process with a capitalist crisis centered on the periphery of Western Europe.

In 2012, together with a team of colleagues, we started the ‘City at the time of Crisis’ project funded by ESRC. In this project we study the new forms of governance implemented in that periphery of Western (as political determination rather than geographic) Europe. A basic idea is that one of the most important parts of this new form of governance is the transformations of the notions of public. So ethnographically we study political transitions and social change in the form of socio-spatial changes in the public urban and infrastructural materialities of Athens.

ALLEGRA: You seem to suggest that Athens is the ideal ‘laboratory’ from which to observe the global financial crisis. In their recent book, Theories from the South, the Comaroffs argue that it is rather the global South that is best placed to help us understand contemporary world transformations. The obvious fact that you are Greek put aside, can you tell us why you chose Athens as your primary site of inquiry?

DIMITRIS: The Commaroffs are right, but they are also wrong. The reality is that we first saw extreme capitalism being applied in the global South. Gradually, more advanced and elaborated versions of capitalism were applied there. However, a very similar version of extreme neoliberalism -like the one that emerged in the 1970s in the South- was then applied in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Now it is the turn of the Western European periphery to experience a similar regime.

The anthropologists who happen to have ethnographic knowledge of both the postsocialist and non-socialist European periphery would be able to confirm the similarity between e.g. the loan and “aid” agreements between EU and postsocialist states and the current agreements between e.g. the Greek or Spanish governments and EU institutions.

So in the current historical stage it is not only organisations like the IMF:  there are other institutions involved in the shaping of the world political economy. For instance the EU leadership and especially the European Central Bank along with several other European banks play a crucial historical role in the expansion of an extreme neoliberalist form of governance that is applied in the crisis-ridden euro-zone countries. More and more populations are subjected to that regime and what we used to call Global South governance extends well beyond the South. So the category itself is a bit problematic.

As I mentioned in the previous question Greece is centrally located in a process of global proportions that is unravelling at this very moment. Greece’s centrality in this project starts from the re-definition of Greek borders which changed radically after 1990, given that it was surrounded by socialist European countries. Phenomena like migratory flows, big construction projects and capitalist expansion of Greek capitalist entreprises in Eastern Europe just complete this picture.

Under such circumstances the anthropology of Europe and European politics keep asking the same questions since the 1990s: How did the continent change after the collapse of socialism? What will come next? These questions are very similar to the ones we ask about e.g. China or India and especially North African countries.

The end of the cold war has led to radical transformations globally and we are still seeing them in front of our eyes. If European communism had really been the point of reference for the Left everywhere we would not have the squares movements occuring around the Mediterranean. So it is not a process that is detached from what is happening in the so-called Global South. Overall I think that unless anthropology starts including more substantially Europe and the West in its own perception of the world we will end up running behind change.

ALLEGRA: A few weeks ago, ALLEGRA launched a discussion on the future of universities, and tried to define the nature of the ‘space’ that current movements against cuts are seeking to preserve. Some of our conclusions were relatively optimistic, in the sense that we also tried to highlight the regenerative potential of the public to achieve positive change. In the past when ASA asked you to write a text on the crisis of higher education you jumped to similar conclusions. However, seeing your more recent work you seem to suggest that the current global crisis has deeply transformed notions of ‘public space’, ‘public good’, ‘public interest’ and so on…to the extent that the public as we used to know (or fantasize?) it seems to be slowly disappearing. To a certain extent, one is left with an impression of Athens as a city under a permanent state of exception, to use an Agambian expression. What has changed?

DIMITRIS: Since you used the term of a political philosopher I will respond with a political answer. In that ASA article I concluded that higher education in Britain does not deserve to be defended for what it is or what it was, but for what it may potentially become. I guess this applies in the case of Athens and Greece as well.

In the last two decades, as  European neoliberalisation reached a more intensified form,  we saw some of the resistance movements in the Western world romanticise or imagine a capitalism with better public social provisions. Much of the Occupy movement in the US had such demands, while many of the European movements suggest a return to a recent past of better social provisions. While I see the value of these benefits for the better quality of life of many, as a political proposition I think that implies a crucial mistake. If the middle classes of the Western World had a better life during the recent past, the majority of the world, the poor in the West or globally had very bad time.

The issue is that the current crisis is quite crucial for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and probably globally, and as we know in anthropology crises signify a transition while they also provide a window for anti-structural events to take place. This is our case at the moment and unless societies come up with a radical alternative (way forward from just better social policy) the future of European people will look very bad.

I think that the potentialities of the crisis are visible to economic elites and state authorities who are trying to make sure that no anti-structural events will occur. This is the reason why they employ some of the most violent apparatuses, like e.g. extreme police violence or armed neo-Nazi groups.

For example when the large anti-austerity and anti-governmental movement in Greece appeared in the summer of 2011 the police brutality was profound. Soon the neo-Nazis were funded with huge amounts of money and were activated on the streets of Athens but also electorally.

Neoliberal governance since its birth was ready to employ fascists such as Pinochet or go to fascistic extremes such as declaring national wars out of the blue like e.g. Margaret Thatcher did in the case of the UK or her social democratic offsprings did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Researching the use of extreme violent apparatuses in Greece these days might make you pessimistic. In order for the austerity experiment to work, in order for the bankers’ interests to be protected, the current form of governance in Greece is ready to spill a lot of blood. A similar escalation in state’s violence has been seen in Britain in the last couple of years when the student movement emerged: police brutality against the protesters has been profound in recent British history. We even saw the police being invited on campus to arrest protesting students:  I personally saw it twice in my university, Sussex, and I have worked there only for only five years!

ALLEGRA: Your work brings an important contribution to the scholarship on statehood, by documenting changing everyday experiences in public spaces. With the mass privatization of public infrastructures, it seems like the only means left for the state to manifest itself is through violence, symbolic or real. What do you think is remaining of the state in Greece today?

DIMITRIS: Well, violence is a crucial part of statecraft anyway. Even the most democratic socialist or mild state mechanisms have used and/or use apparatuses of death and pain. For example, one of the most quoted of such examples: the Swedish state was force sterilising women until the 1970s. For another example, we have to remember that every state apparatus discriminates against people: citizens and non-citizens alike.

As the history of Europe shows in the best case scenario such division just implies less rights for the non-citizens and in the worst case scenario it implies exterminating non-citizens massively.

Even the most democratic states are still states and have the monopoly of legal violence, so potentially the state authorities or their agents can crash, kill, torture, and imprison any of us at any moment they will decide. They do not have necessarily to do it, but the fact that apparatuses are ready to do so is violent enough. And indeed these days they have a nice army of journalists, academics and so on who will provide good excuses about public order and social peace that need to be restored.

When the revolt of 2008 happened in Greece you had people like Greek Yale professors up to famous journalists supporting the government and indirectly excusing the police assassination of a teenager, and this is precisely what triggered the revolt.

Within this barbaric mechanism modern states provided various things to their citizens and selected citizens from other states to become part of the national body. That happened for many reasons, which I do not have the time to analyse at the moment. However, such provisions maintained some kind of social peace and consent between the State (or what we imagine to be the state) and a critical mass of state residents.

So in our case, EU citizens and migrants with visas probably had a better life at some point, but a substantial part of the population was faced with a state that did not even give them the right to exist, that arrested them, deported them and killed them. The same dynamics stands for the new poor, for example: many young people in Europe mainly experience the state as an apparatus that deregulates labour and that makes sure that the majority will work like slaves for small salaries, will have no job or social security etc. If they protest, the state will beat them up or in some cases may even kill them just for being around a protest, as Metropolitan Police did with Ian Tomlinson a few year ago. It is just that today we see this state of exception expanding towards social groups who have not had direct experience of state as violence before.

And certainly we are in a very difficult position, because the state and the capitalist market have ended up being the main controllers of social provisions, so now that state policies enforce poverty and austerity and fewer and fewer can afford private provisions, we see suffering of important proportions of the European population. This has been a usual phenomenon outside Europe though and among the non-citizens within Europe!

What one should stress is that the last few decades when the state has been as social provider have been nothing more than a happy break in the history of capitalism, based on the fear of social unrest.

Today that states have achieved so advanced repression and silencing mechanisms, is probably what allows them not to find it necessary anymore to provide social provisions. Anyhow, Western European middle classes as consumers of the products of global capitalism lose their significance given that we have new consuming classes emerging in other places of the planet. So their future is that of most Eastern Europeans: lots of work for peanuts, extreme inequalities etc. When it was happening there very few Western Europeans complained or protested against the barbaric form of postsocialist capitalism.

Indeed while European states decrease social provisions to the citizens in a drastic manner and provide only violence for non-citizens, simultaneously great proportions of state’s wealth is chanelled to global financial institutions and other corporations through various paths.

To end this answer with a final note though. I think that when the elites start busting their cards one after the other, namely when the police violence is not anymore enough to control social disappointment and rage and they have to use the para-state neo-Nazis apparatuses, we are in a situation where they are running out of legal responses, running out of cards, while running towards a potential dead end.

ALLEGRA: Michael Herzfeld, in his now famous books The Social Production of Indifference, argues that Greeks have always maintained some kind of indifference or at least, some kind of distance towards the state. In which ways does your work confirm or contradict this argument? How has the current crisis transformed citizens relationship towards the state? Is this pattern illustrative of broader transformations taking place in European/Western democracies?

DIMITRIS: Herzfeld’s question was phrased in the right way, one could summarise it like this perhaps: If Greeks are generally polite and welcoming people how comes when they become civil servants they are so unhelpful? My take on that phenomenon can be summarised like this: generally people are polite and nice until State and other power apparatuses intervene. For example when the civil servant’s role provides them with e.g. three options to the way s/he will treat a citizen and all three are nasty options, going for the least nasty one is actually a good option. At the same time remember that the official state does its best to create obedient people who will follow the rules.

It is like the banality of the evil argument of Hannah Arendt who suggested that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust were just civil servants who saw the mass extermination of people as just doing their job, like they would do any other job. They were good civil servants.

Back in 2011 when the people in Greece rose against the government, more than 500 people were hospitalised only in Athens due to police brutality.

Last summer when I was in Gezi park in Istanbul, I saw how Turkish policemen attacked the camp beating up people while, in the meantime, they were chatting and having cigarette breaks. Similarly in London, when Occupy London started in front of St Paul, the riot cops brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators without any reason, when 10 minutes before they were queuing next to each other in front of the same toilet in a nearby cafe. While I do not consider police or Nazi officials as simple civil servants, the reality is that the modern state apparatus filters and fractures its violence so much that the actual state’s employees/attackers often feel that they are merely serving the state and the government that feeds them. Indeed the state makes sure that they can do whatever they want, that they are fully potected and that they will never have to face the consequences. Most Nazi officials never paid for their crimes and quite a few of them were happily integrated in capitalist post-war state apparatuses. This does not imply that police officers who beat up demonstrators or shoot migrants are innocent. Only certain kinds of people can remain silent under such circumstances or blindly obey orders. So this is not an excuse: it is just an analysis of the production of indifference.

The reality is that civil servants (with the exception of riot police!) are on the forefront of salary and personnel cuts in Greece these days. The same mechanism that was programming them to misbehave, by e.g. giving them few resources, poor training, unjust promotion or employment system, poor and misleading explanation of tasks and roles etc. is the same mechanism that now blames them for doing what they were told to do. In other words everyone, even the cops are just consumable for the political and financial elites. So people do come to a realisation with great potentialities, as far as insecurity and state violence reaches one of the most secure social class such as permanent civil servants, there is a discontinuity in the continuums that have made the system sustainable so far.

BRUSSELS - One of the worrying issues that emerged from last week’s European Council in Brussels is the ‘cut red tape’ initiative promoted by UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

The proposal, which was welcomed by other EU leaders, is cause for alarm and threatens the protection of European citizens and the environment.

The initiative is based on a report prepared by a UK Business Task Force specifically appointed by Cameron to advise him on identifying burdensome EU regulations.

Red tape, by definition, refers to regulations and policies that are unnecessary and do not serve society’s interests. The recommendations of the Business Task Force to withdraw, change, or weaken EU regulations have very little to do with addressing red tape.

The measures targeted include important pieces of regulation such as food labelling, safeguards against chemical poisoning, rules on greenhouse gas emissions from engine fuels, the rights of communities to be informed about industry activities affecting their environment, and rights to be able to take a company to court when it violates the rules.

What is under attack are essential measures to protect people and the environment in areas such as health and safety, data protection, climate change and labour and consumer rights.

We should be alarmed that European leaders do not recognise the social and environmental benefits of the safeguards business is trying to undermine, nor that these are an essential component of a positive economic environment.

Few businesses stand to benefit long-term from a world of depleted resources, environmental damage, and an unhealthy workforce.

A consultant report commissioned by the European Commission High-Level Group on reducing administrative burdens already found that more than 80 percent of EU red tape originates from a couple of policy areas – taxation and company law.

Only 1 percent of the burden relates to environmental rules such as the ones that ‘Cut EU Red Tape’ would like to get rid of.

This is revealing of the real agenda behind this initiative. When regulation serves the direct profits of big business, it is welcomed. When not, it is labelled red tape.

A real reform agenda would initiate an urgent transition away from the drive for short-term profits that has led us into the current crisis situation and towards a new economy based on sustainability principles.

Klaus Probst, president and CEO of Leoni AG, Europe’s largest supplier of cables and cable systems to the automotive industry, is a perfect blend of world citizen and self-centred industrialist. With his Hollywood looks and light Bavarian accent, he looks and sounds the part, too. The German model may be cracking at the seams, but he remains confident: “Our system really is a model for others. When we look at France and see how the unions react to job cuts, we realise the advantage we have in Germany, where we all manage to agree on a reasonable solution. The social partnership in our country seems very stable to me; I don’t see any threats on the horizon.”

Last year Leoni had sales of €3.8bn and earnings before tax of €236m. It is a leading member of the Bavarian Association of Metal Processing and Electrical Companies (VBM), which represents 600 companies with more than 700,000 employees. Probst says: “The VBM is quite a powerful organisation. It lobbies politicians on our behalf — Horst Seehofer, president of the state of Bavaria, and [Chancellor] Angela Merkel. We lobby on energy policy in particular, because the price of electricity is going up all the time, and that is a threat to some of our members.”

The lobbying aims to circumvent Germany’s Energiewende (energy transition) policy, which is supposed to promote alternative energy but has been diluted by amendments introduced under pressure from lobbyists. One passed in 2011 exempts more than 2,000 companies from an ecotax levied on major consumers of fossil fuels. It is estimated that these accommodations will cost the German treasury €4bn in 2013.

There are also cash donations. Between 2002 and 2011, VBM gave €4.16m to political parties, including €3.7m to Seehofer’s Christian Social Union (1). Only BMW and Deutsche Bank were more generous.

Living in a bubble

Given these figures, Germany’s low wages and lack of job security are outrageous. Between 2000 and 2010, Germany saw the biggest increase (after Bulgaria and Romania) in the gap between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% (2). This does not trouble Probst: “Even if several studies confirm what you are saying, I see nothing like that around me. Social security means that everyone in Germany can live decently. I have two children who are at university, and I am not worried about the society they are living in falling apart.”

Leoni was founded in the 19th century and has been listed on the stock exchange since 1923. During the Nazi era it benefited from the forced labour of deportees. The postwar German miracle and rapid expansion of the automotive sector brought more growth. The euphoria of the period, combined with a ban on “political strikes” and anti-communist policies that intensified with the erection of the Berlin Wall, led to a social consensus unique in Europe, and the Federal Republic of Germany was able to delegate the task of negotiating collective labour agreements to employers’ organisations.

The state refrained from interference and allowed employers to agree working conditions and pay with the unions; the employers undertook to involve employee representatives in the management of their companies. This system, known as “co-determination” (Mitbestimmung) gave unions half of the seats on a company’s governing body — the works council (Betriebsrat) in small and medium enterprises or the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat) in those with more than 500 employees. The system really only gives equal representation in the metal processing sector: in all others, company directors have a majority of one that allows them to resolve deadlocks.

Though it is the envy of southern European employers, this system is collapsing. “On paper, everything is still fine, but in reality, the social partnership only survives in traditional industries,” says Jürgen Bothner, secretary-general of the union Ver.di for the state of Hesse. It is not relevant to the services sector, the growth of which is eroding the German model. In 2012 only 58% of German workers enjoyed collective labour agreements: 60% in the west of the country and 48% in the east, compared with 75% and 63% in 1997. And in sectors where the social partnership still applies, the delicate balance between the partners is being lost. “The links between the trade union federations and the employee representatives who sit on company boards are under strain, where they are not already broken,” says Bothner. “It is not unusual for representatives elected to defend the interests of the workers to collude with the employers.”

Probst praises the “sense of responsibility” of his social partners. They have been very accommodating: in 2000, and again between 2008 and 2010, workers’ representatives in the metal processing and electronics sector, to which the Leoni group belongs, accepted management demands for wage freezes without question. As a result, Probst says, Leoni “survived the crisis and is doing very well today, which is in everyone’s interest.” His own pay rose by 8.8% between 2008 and 2009 and he is currently the 55th best-paid manager in Germany, with a salary of €1.87m plus other rewards (3).

Offshoring over the last 20 years has also weakened the social partnership. Here too, Leoni has been a pioneer. Only 4,000 of its 60,000 employees work in Germany. “When the iron curtain fell in 1989,” says Probst, “we immediately decided to transfer part of our production operations to Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.”

It offshored more in the late 1990s to Ukraine and Romania, and in the 2000s to Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. Have the Arab revolutions affected this competition strategy? “Not at all,” says Probst. “The maths is easy: in Germany, the cost of labour in the electronics sector is €25 an hour, including social security contributions; in Poland it’s €6 an hour and in Tunisia it’s only €2.” The 12,000 workers at Leoni’s Sousse site in Tunisia, mostly women earning €300 a month, do not enjoy the advantages of the German model. Probst sees hiring these workers as a “modern form of development aid”. “Germany is doing very well. We have never been so close to full employment,” he claims, although that is a surprising statement in a country where four million (12% of the economically active population) earn less than €7 an hour (4), and where an employment agency has published a brochure advising the unemployed to save money by drinking tap water rather than bottled water (5). Germany’s bosses are living in a bubble, increasingly isolated from the real world.

For the past six years, Markus Pohlmann, a professor of sociology at Heidelberg University, has been leading an ambitious study on the global economic elite. In Germany, his team has interviewed 82 top managers from two generations, those who were in charge during the 1980s and 90s, and those who are today, to “determine how far the principles of neoliberalism have permeated the thinking of the decision-makers, and they way they do business.”

According to Pohlmann, German bosses “devote body and soul to their company, far more than they did 20 years ago. They work an average of between 14 and 16 hours a day during the week, and 10 to 12 hours at weekends. They see society only through the filter of the company … For the older generation, there was a kind of social pact by which the search for a consensus tempered the overriding obligation to pursue profit. That concept has vanished. Today it is the principle of human capital that prevails, according to which every individual is responsible for his or her own fate. Those who do the least well — ‘lower-performing’ employees — are eliminated without scruple.”

‘Labour has a price, like pork’

You can hear this in what they say. Over the last few years, the top bosses have tended to be far more direct than their predecessors. In 2005 Walter Norbert, then chief economist for Deutsche Bank, said: “In Germany, we tend to think the head of a company has a duty to pay workers enough to keep their entire family. But that’s not possible in economic terms” (6). Also in 2005, Michael Rogowski, then president of the powerful Federation of German Industry (BDI), explained the workings of the labour market: “Labour has a price, just like pork. In the business cycle, prices are high when pork is hard to come by. When there is a lot of pork about, prices fall” (7). Rogowski has since worked as a consultant to US investment group Carlyle and presented a programme on a private German TV channel.

The greatest change, according to Pohlmann, has been in “ethical values”. The protestant restraint traditionally associated with German capitalism has been abandoned in the pursuit of material gain. “The top management of companies listed on the DAX [Frankfurt stock exchange index] earned four times and a half as much in 2010 as they did in 1995, with an average income of €2.9 million … In 2011 their income rose again substantially, to an average of €3.14 million per board member,” writes sociologist Michael Hartmann (8).

Tax fraud has increased, although this is not a recent phenomenon among major taxpayers: Albert Eickhoff, owner of a luxury fashion retailer targeted in a 2012 tax evasion probe along with several hundred other German millionaires, said that in the 1970s it was already considered “acceptable to hide money abroad” (9). What has changed, according to Pohlmann, is the way company bosses now openly admit their tolerance of the practice: in 2009, after Klaus Zumwinkel, the former CEO of Deutsche Post, was convicted of tax evasion, nearly everyone Pohlmann’s team talked to agreed that the €2-3m Zumwinkel had hidden in an account in Liechtenstein was nothing to make a fuss about.

Siegmar Kleinert, a member of the supervisory council of DZ Bank, Germany’s third largest financial institution with a capital stock of €11bn, is very angry about Germany being tainted by Berlusconi-style corruption. Since Gerhard Schröder began selling his contacts to Russian energy group Gazprom, Kleinert says: “The dykes have been breached and nobody is worried about conflicts of interest any more.” He mentions Wolfgang Clement, economy and labour minister under Schröder, who became an adviser to international staffing giant Adecco and banking firm Citigroup, and Peer Steinbrück, Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader and candidate for chancellor at the September general election, who gave 74 talks, for fees of €15,000-25,000 a time, to Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, BNP Paribas and JP Morgan, between 2009 and 2012.

Profiting from the losses of others

The ease with which secretaries of state (administrative heads of ministries) move from public office to the private sector shows the dividing line between politics and business is becoming blurred. According to Hartmann, only five of 20 secretaries of state at the finance ministry between 1949 and 1999 joined the private sector after leaving government, but seven of the eight who have held office since 2000 have gone on to a career in business or finance.

The revolving door allows movement in both directions. In 2003 the Frankfurt stock exchange recruited Axel Nawrath, a senior civil servant in Germany’s finance ministry and a member of the SPD, as public relations director. Two years later, he moved back to the civil service as secretary of state to finance minister Hans Eichel. Today he is a director of KfW, one of Germany’s biggest banks.

These links are advantageous to the financial sector. Heribert Zitzelsberger, once head of finance at Bayer, where he was responsible for tax optimisation strategies, was headhunted in 1999 by Schröder’s Red-Green government to be secretary of state at the finance ministry. “We have sent our best tax expert to Bonn. I hope he has been sufficiently infiltrated by Bayer and will make the necessary reforms,” Bayer’s chairman Manfred Schneider told a meeting of shareholders (10).

Zitzelsberger’s reform reduced corporation tax from 34% to 25% and exempted profits made by listed companies on the disposal of shares. After these “competitiveness support measures”, which cost the state €23bn, were announced, the DAX index jumped 4.5%. Bayer got a tax refund of €250m in 2001, which it passed on to its shareholders. When Zitzelsberger died in 2003, German bosses paid tribute to the man who had made them “the greatest gift of all time” (11).

Berthold von Freyberg is grateful to Schröder too. He was born into an influential aristocratic family (his brother Ernst is head of the Vatican Bank), and is a co-founder of the venture capital fund Target Partners, which invests its clients’ money in high-tech startups. He complains about the unfair treatment of his sector: “If you invest 100 million [euros], you get an annual commission of 2.2% or 2.2 million — for five years. But for the last 12 months, German investment funds have had to pay tax at 19% on this. Germany is the only country in Europe to have put such a measure in place; even France is more liberal. It damages the whole sector by discouraging investors. We absorb this tax, which means we lose 19% of our profits. We have to tighten our belts.”

Von Freyberg believes Schröder would not have done anything so insensitive: “Schröder created the conditions for wealth that we enjoy today. We owe him far more than we do Merkel. I don’t criticise her for defending the euro, but she hasn’t done even a quarter of what her predecessor achieved in terms of structural reforms of the labour market.”

Yet, according to a study by management consultancy Kienbaum, 78% of German entrepreneurs support Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). German bosses are grateful to the left, but vote rightwing: German single-mindedness is weakening.

The same survey also indicates that 66% of the heads of companies still have full confidence in the euro, which they believe is beneficial to Germany. Hans-Olaf Henkel, former head of the BDI, who is campaigning against the euro alongside the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, has a hard time convincing his colleagues: only 1% of German entrepreneurs would like a return to the deutschmark. “The euro has been a great success for German companies. In spite of the uncertainty, they have confidence in the single currency and in the Merkel government’s rescue policy,” says a senior executive at Kienbaum (12).

Probst confirms this: “Obviously, the depreciation of the euro against the dollar, following the poor economic performance of our European neighbours, has stimulated our exports and enhanced our competitiveness on the global market. If Germany returned to the deutschmark, it would trigger an appreciation of our currency that would be disastrous for German industry. We must recognise that the financial pressure on the EU at the moment is keeping the euro at an artificially low level, which is advantageous to us.”

Profiting from the losses of others seems to be the new German model. Lothar Reininger and his brother run Reininger AG, a Mittelstand company (medium-sized business, traditionally associated with values of integrity, hard work and perseverance). They import medical equipment and supplies: wheelchairs from China, beds from Poland, personal hygiene products from Thailand, and employ 190 people, but Lothar Reininger doesn’t like to be called an entrepreneur. He used to work for Triumph-Adler, but lost his job in 1994 after a protest strike over the restructuring of the group by a US investment fund. Since 2006 he has represented leftwing party Die Linke on the Frankfurt city council.

He is familiar with the Mittelstand contradictions: “In our sector, there are many precarious workers — ‘independents’ — who earn five to six euros an hour doing deliveries or cleaning work that our competitors contract out to them. At Reininger, our own employees do that work, and earn a minimum of 10 euros an hour. No matter what employers’ organisations say, it is still possible, even in the face of fierce competition, to pay people a decent wage and treat them fairly. But for how long? The only way to end social dumping would be to set a federal minimum wage of 9 or 10 euros. By refusing to do that, the Merkel government is threatening the survival of the few employers who want to do an honest job.” In 2012 Reininger AG made a profit of €414,000, which it redistributed to its employee shareholders — “the equivalent of two week’s pay per employee: not enough to go to the Bahamas.” The company may not be able to repeat that performance in 2013.

by Olivier Cyran

Olivier Cyran is a journalist.

(1) Official figures published by the Bundestag.

(2) Source: Eurostat. Quoted by Michael Dauderstädt inEuropas unterschätzte Ungleichheit (Europe’s Underestimated Inequality), Friedrich-Ebert Foundation, Berlin, 2010.

(3) Annual ranking of executive pay published byManager Magazin Online.

(4) Source: Institut Arbeit und Qualifikation (Institute for Work, Skills and Training), University of Duisburg-Essen. Quoted by Michael Hartmann in Soziale Ungleichheit, Kein Thema für Eliten? (Social Inequality: no Theme for the Elite?), Campus, Frankfurt, 2013.

(5) “Gehen Sie nie hungrig einkaufen” (Never go shopping when you’re hungry), Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich, 19 July 2013.

(6) Interview with the daily Volksstimme, Magdeburg, 11 February 2005.

(7) Quoted by Norbert Blüm, former conservative labour minister, in Ehrliche Arbeit, ein Angriff auf den Finanzkapitalismus und seine Raffgier (Honest work: an attack on financial capitalism and its rapacity), Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh, 2011.

(8) Michael Hartmann, Soziale Ungleichheit, op cit.

(9) Interview with Bild Zeitung, Berlin, 13 November 2012.

(10) Quoted by Hans Weiss and Ernst Schmiederer inAsoziale Marktwirtschaft (Unsocial Market Economy), Kepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne, 2005.

(11) “Das grösste Geschenk aller Zeiten” (The Greatest Gift of All Time), Die Zeit, Hamburg, 8 September 2005.

(12) “Deutsche Unternehmen vertrauen dem Euro” (German Entrepreneurs Trust the Euro), Kienbaum, Berlin, 26 July 2013.

Source: http://mondediplo.com/2013/10/06germany