Third World Traveller by VN Gelis

Author:VN Gelis [Gelis, VN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-05-15T22:00:00+00:00

Greece Under the IMF: Continuous Eyewitness Accounts The Crisis of Greek Capitalism

Last October, the leader of PASOK (Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement) George Papandreou, and recently elected prime minister announced that Greece’s public finances were much worse than he expected.

Six months later he announced that in order to balance the budget it was necessary to embrace an austerity programme drawn up in collaboration with the IMF and the EU. Yet as recently as March this year the IMF chief, Strauss Kahn declared Greece didn’t require a bailout. Yet now we have lived through the biggest EU “bailout” in history; how did it come to this?

Thirty years membership of the European Union has brought Greece to the verge of economic collapse. A predominantly agricultural producer it never industrialised to the extent of the northern countries of the EU as during the 19th century Greece itself was a colony of the Ottoman Empire and after ‘liberation’ after 1918 was under the joint supervision of France, Britain and Russia.

After the second world war the EU was sold to the Greek people as a way of the country being developed. Instead the exact opposite has occurred, irrespective of the fact that certain infrastructure projects have occurred during this period – including airports, roads and telecommunications.

Having medium-sized heavy industries predominantly in shipping repairs, bus manufacturing and solar panels it has lost almost all its manufacturing in a de-industrialisation frenzy that would make Thatcher proud. Globalisation has brought it to its knees as almost all the shipping crews of one of the world’s largest shipping fleets replaced their crews in the 1970s with lower paid labour from third world countries like the Philippines.

Agriculture and the EU were sold to the Greek people as the path along which Greek producers would increase their exports; but instead via the domination of the supply chain by multinational supermarkets, non-EU imports have increased exponentially to the detriment of Greek produce.

The crippling forest fires and the destruction of olive trees, as well as the heat waves of the last few years, have meant agriculture is on the verge of meltdown. For the last 20 years the sector is staffed by workers who live in huts with the animals and are paid third-world subsistence wages. Agriculture now constitutes a very small percentage of GDP around 8%, unlike the 1970s when it was around 28%.

The mass building boom in holiday flats led to huge oversupply; thousands of properties remain unsold and building activity has dropped by 45% since the credit crunch. Historically the building workers in the 1960s and 1970s were the wage setters for the whole of the labour movement but their union organisation was broken in the early 1990s and the workforce was replaced on the whole by cheap immigrant labour, initially from neighbouring countries. Average wages are about €50 a day for more than eight-hours work. Insurance cover is non-existent and health and safety measures rarely count. The 2004 Olympics “boom” led to many building workers’ deaths and hundreds of millions spent

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