Alain Badiou on the Greek Crisis

Alain Badiou is a French Philosopher and activist. For more on Badiou see this article. The full article titled "Save the Greeks from their Saviors". The article is translated from French into English. There seem to be a few glitches but it is still quite readable on the whole.

Badiou starts by noting the high unemployment in Greece and other features caused by the austerity measures. There are 25,000 homeless in Athens alone. A full thirty per cent of Greeks now live below the poverty line. Under these conditions the saviors of Greece claim that the Greeks are not trying hard enough.

The solution is to increase the dose of austerity. The right to work is abolished through eliminating jobs. The plan makes the poor even poorer and eliminates much of the middle class.

Badiou sees Greece as a model but its not about saving Greece. It is about allowing time to save creditors. NOTE: The creditors however get only a fraction of their investment back! The model is of bleeding public services so that public social services, schools, etc. fall into ruin. Only the rich will be able to access health care and workers will face worse working conditions and ever more precarious job security.

In order for the neo-liberal offensive to carry out this model democracy must be jettisoned. Technocratic government is installed without regard for popular sovereignty. When the former Prime Minister Papandreou dared to suggest there should be a referendum on austerity measures he was forced to resign. He is now replaced by an unelected technocrat. But even that is not enough as Badiou points out.

Badiou sees the Greek situation as one where politicians give a blank check to financial experts and bankers. They give up any power to decide on their own.

The deal negotiated with the Troika will involve an EU account that will be paid directly to Greece but only for servicing debt. Greek revenue will be mandated as having as the first priority payment of the debt. In fact Greek accounts will in effect be managed to make debt payment by law the main priority. As Badiou notes the privatization requirements will be a great boon for buyers.

Badiou notes that with the help of the rescuers the debt has gone into free fall now reaching 170 per cent of GDP. In 2009 it was 120 per cent. This further weakening has created a situation where Greece cannot resist its creditors and feels forced to yield to what he calls the blackmail of austerity.

Badiou portrays the situation in Greece as a war being conducted by finance, politics and law. This is a war in which the financial class takes from the enemy the social benefits and democratic rights of society. A new social model is being developed in which the needs of finance capital triumph over all else

The model will be replicated throughout Europe with austerity measures being seen as painful but necessary and ultimately healthy as restoring countries to being competitive.

In the face of what is happening people must speak up in defense of basic democratic rights and social solidarity. The neo-liberal climate of fear must be countered. While Badiou does not suggest positive solutions to the Greek crisis he notes that the first order of business should be to show solidarity with the Greek people in resisting what is being imposed upon them.

Alain Badiou on the Financial Crisis

These are just a few excerpts from the much longer article. Some parts are amusing and even illustrated with photographs such as Sarkozy kissing Merkel! The whole article is at cinestatic.
His point about the practice of calling the financial system as not part of the real economy is telling. The same clowns tell us that finance is the life blood of capitalism. Badiou points out that it is absolutely necessary to bail out the financial system and money is found for that but on the other hand if we need to bail out social security or increase pensions there is no money for that!
Badiou is a French philosopher. See wikipedia.


18 October 2008
badiou on the financial crisis
[Hot off the keyboard, a quick translation of Badiou's piece from yesterday's Le Monde. Translation by myself and ICR.UPDATE: Badiou actually originally wrote this as a longer piece (which is here). We have added in the extra sections/noted changes in bold. As you can see, the original is quite a bit longer and includes a discussion of housing. Badiou on mortgages! Who'd have thought it?]Of Which Real is this Crisis the Spectacle? Alain Badiou, Le Monde, 17/10/08. As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the "cinema". Nothing is missing, the spectacle of mounting disaster, the feeling of being suspended from enormous puppet-strings, the exoticism of the identical – the Bourse of Jakarta placed under the same spectacular rubric as New York, the diagonal from Moscow to Sao Paulo, everywhere the same fire ravaging the same banks – not to mention terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything will collapse...But hope abides. In the foreground, wild-eyed and focussed, like in a disaster movie, we see the small gang of the powerful – Sarkozy, Paulson, Merkel, Brown, Trichet and others – trying to extinguish the monetary flames, stuffing tens of billions into the central Hole. We will have time later to wonder (the saga will surely continue) where these billions come from, given that for some years, at the least demand from the poor, the same characters responded by turning their pockets inside out, saying they hadn't a cent. For the time being, it doesn't matter. "Save the banks!" This noble, humanist and democratic cry surges forth from the mouths of every journalist and politician. Save them at any price! It's worth pointing this out, since the price is not insignificant. I have to confess: given the numbers that are being bandied about, whose meaning, like almost everyone else, I am incapable of representing to myself (what exactly is one thousand four hundred billion euros?), I too am confident. I put my full trust in our firemen. All together, I am sure, I can feel it, they will succeed. The banks will be even greater than before, while some of the smaller or medium-sized ones, having only been able to survive through the benevolence of states, will be sold to the bigger ones for a pittance. The collapse of capitalism? You must be kidding. Who wants it, after all? Who even knows what it would mean? Let's save the banks, I tell you, and the rest will follow. For the film's immediate protagonists – the rich, their servants, their parasites, those who envy them and those who acclaim them – a happy ending, perhaps a slightly melancholy one, is inevitable, bearing in mind the current state of the world, and the kinds of politics that take place within it............

In these past few weeks we have heard a lot about the "real economy" (the production and circulation of goods) and the – how should we call it? unreal? – economy which is the source of all evils, in that its agents had become "irresponsible", "irrational" and "predatory" – fuelling, first rapaciously, then in a panic, the now formless mass of stocks, securities and currencies. This distinction is obviously absurd, and is generally immediately contradicted, when, by way of an opposite metaphor, financial circulation and speculation are presented as the 'circulatory system' of capitalism. Are heart and blood perhaps subtracted from the living reality of a body? Is a financial stroke indifferent to the health of the economy as a whole? As we know, financial capitalism has always – which is to say for the past five centuries – been a major, central component of capitalism in general. As for the owners and managers of this system, by definition they are only "responsible" for profits, their "rationality" is to be measured by their earnings, and it is not just that they are predators, but that they have to be......

The ordinary citizen must ‘understand’ that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole? We must sombrely accept that no one imagines any longer that it’s possible to nationalise a factory hounded by competition, a factory employing thousands of workers, but that it is obvious to do so for a bank made penniless by speculation?.........