by
Leonidas Phoebus Koskos*
If there is anything that has marked our society during this period, it is this sense of impasse, inertia, and inaction. The utter lack of individual and collective initiative.
The country’s economic and social gridlock is only discussed in bar-room debates, and one keeps hearing the need parroted for a “new national model” of economic reconstruction, a new and different “model of production”, the implementation of which could lead us out of the state of bankruptcy in which we seem to be mired.
Latent in this for a “new model of production” is an awareness of the role of the state in the society and economy of Greece, a role which I believe has been largely responsible for the lack of action during the six-year period I referred to earlier.
The Greek state is domineering and highly centralized.
From the very infancy of the Greek state, the revolutionary governments at its helm during the civil strife of 1824-1827 had already claimed the role of the sole administrator of the first foreign loans, which they used to pay—and control—its armed supporters.
The Greek state was established as a protectorate within the European system of security in place at the time. It did not naturally emerge from a society of free citizens, nor did it organically reflect the will of a social class that owned the means of production. On the contrary, in this country of farmers and serfs it was the state that owned all the means of production and the vast majority of land in the country.
This ownership has been imprinted in the collective memory of Greeks as the time-honored relation between the state, which owns the means of production, and the “model of production”, a relation that has continued to our time and day.
The institutional organization of the Greek state borrowed heavily from European models and did not fit with either the pre-revolutionary organization of Greek society or the ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity of its people. Even the awareness of the continuity of Greek culture and the forging of a sense of national identity only possible in the mid-19th century.
The pre-revolutionary organization of Greek society and its marked degree of fragmentation created centrifugal forces, which led Kapodistrias and the Bavarian Regency to create a central(ized) state as a counterweight to weaken these forces.
The Greek state and society have been in competition ever since. Six state bankruptcies and the international financial oversight that followed reinforced the state’s concentration of power and undermined individual initiative.
The effectiveness of the state was always tempered by its need to meet its obligations to its lenders. The latter’s oversight of income and expenses entailed control over investments and development programs as well. The result was centralized economic planning.
The activity of American officers who came to manage and monitor American aid to Greece led to the same results as the international financial controls. While these administrators, whether as members of the American diplomatic mission or not, helped salvage the Greek economy and society at the end of the 1940s and helped preserve popular rule along the lines of Western democracy, they contributed to strengthening the central state, centralized economic planning and executive authority at the expense of the judiciary and legislature.
The American overseers were New Dealers. Apart from the obligation they had to ensure the prudent disposition of American aid for the benefit of the Greek people, they believed that state rather than individual economic initiative should have priority. Faced with the unaccountability of the private sector, they believed that a stronger state would be more effective, even though they could see that the Greek state fell far short of Western standards.
The Greek “model of production” continued to develop in the same way it had at the outset of the Greek state. Each time the state went bankrupt or disaster ravaged the economy, the country’s infrastructure and the fabric of society, the remnants of state and society were used to rebuild and reproduce the same model.
Throughout its history—and not, as many believe, only since the restoration of democracy after the fall of the junta—the Greek state has been the sole administrator of foreign money, be it foreign loans, European funds distributed by the state, or, in the case of the Marshall Plan, development aid.
In addition, the Greek state has always been the country’s largest employer, its biggest consumer, and at times its most powerful businessman. After each of its succession of defaults, the Greek state transformed its operations and modified its goals according to the needs of international financial oversight current at the time so that it could effectively collect the money it needed to repay its loans.
The perennial reproduction of the same model of production is made possible by the perennial return of the ruling class that was originally formed and organized on a mode of production—Marx would have called it the Asiatic mode of production—in which state owns most of the means of production and individuals only few. In Greece, the relations of power between the ruling class and the state were never severed; the country never experienced a revolution of the kind that occurred in France in 1789, which jettisoned the institutions of the ancient régime.
The relation of the ruling class to the means of production (in terms of ownership) was thus mediated through the former’s relation to the state, which the ruling class took possession of and through which it exercised its power. This class comprised politicians, military leaders of the Greek Revolution and their descendants (and at times other military figures), trade unionists, certain state officials and establishment intellectuals, including university professors. There was a degree of horizontal mobility among these groups.
The way in which the Greek state is organized and functions rests on the foundation of the state’s existence. The essence of every state is the claim to and acquisition and maintenance of a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In the case of Greece, state intervention in the economy and society is also an expression of the concept of monopoly. And power. When the state intervenes in the economy or the society, it does so by creating entities with monopolistic features. One such feature is the occupation of a dominant or sole position in the market that precludes even the slightest degree of competition.
At the same time, the consumers of the products or services provided by the state monopoly are not free participants in these transactions but governed subjects who are obliged to conduct the transaction without previous negotiation and under terms that they are unable to help shape.
The elimination of competition and consumer rights alike is made possible through specific directives that either prohibit individuals from taking initiative or fail to provide legal protection when they are wronged. The occasion or pretext for creating a state monopoly, which has always been falsely characterized as a public “enterprise”, is the inability of private initiative to develop the business in question. It is the state itself that arbitrarily and single-handedly determines this inability, failing at the same time to mention the gaps and prohibitions in the existing framework that prevents an individual from undertaking the same initiative that the state is assuming.
The notion of eliminating competition and the conduct of economic activity via monopolies have an impact on the “demarcation” of the boundaries of the private sector. Both in the 1930s and in the years after 1950, the Greek state created a safety net of taxes and duties for Greek industry, through which it determined the growth and decline of the sector. Other state directives fostered the creation of monopolies and oligopolies in the private sector, choking off competition in the internal market. The Fix Brewery is one of the most characteristic examples of this practice.
For long periods of time in its history, the Greek state determined what would be produced in the country, how and by whom it would be made and to whom net revenues would be distributed. It set private-sector wages but also labor conditions, education policy and qualifications standards, and consequently employability. It determined the amount of currency in circulation, the crowning achievement of which being the imposition of capital controls—as we know from the Finance Minister’s triumphal cry to his wife: “Honey, I shut down the banks today!” Apart from the amount of currency in circulation, the state, as the sole manager of foreign capital and master of the banking system, determined and continues to determine to whom money in the form of business capital or subsidies will made available.
In exercising these roles the Greek state has developed a powerful impulse towards self-enlargement and centralized planning. At the same time, it has acquired a tendency to consolidate its power through legislation and procedures that enable it to pursue the roles it has amassed without resistance but with great cost to society.
We thus see an insatiable desire for legislation and directives to prevent those who do not belong to or serve the nucleus of the state apparatus from gaining access to funds and decision-making. A powerful monopoly of will, initiative and action is thus created on behalf of the state and beyond the public sector, a monopoly that gradually covers every sector of life in society and asphyxiates anything we could call private or individual initiative, private or individual action.
At the same time a culture integrally tied to the operation of the state is fostered. An indifference to results and the deification of procedures. A tendency to keep things the way they are. A resistance to change and innovation. The repudiation of excellence, assessment and social oversight. Solipsism, arrogance and hostility towards the citizen.
The Greek legislator or state official can conceive of no educational, cultural or labor organization apart from public utilities and other state enterprises. Synonymous with central planning, these enterprises entail the exclusive disposition of a good that is called public and thus considered sacrosanct, a characterization that releases them from social oversight, shuts them off from debate, reform or modernization, and prevents the individual from gaining access to decisions and management.
The trade unionists in these monopolistic utilities and state enterprises are members of the ruling class, self-appointed trustees of a so-called public good. They acquire privileged access to this good and exclude others as they see fit. Understood in this context, these state enterprises include not only the public power company or national telecommunications organization but the public universities, professional associations and public schools as well.
I spoke in the beginning about the ongoing competition between the Greek state and Greek society. The fact that the Greek state functions without reference to society, together with the fragmentation that has historically marked the latter, makes Greek society the weaker of the two partners. It allows the state to maintain its dominance and autonomy vis-à-vis Greek society and its citizens. We have here a serious democratic deficit. The primary relations of citizen and state are reduced to political clientelism, in which the citizen is simply a “useful idiot”, whose freedom of choice, initiative and action are held captive.
This deficit hinders the emergence of enterprising citizens, to borrow a phrase from my dear friend, Thanasis Papandropoulos. This process of obstruction is reinforced by the centrally planned educational system and in many instances by the ideological preconceptions of a good part of the mass media. In particular regard to education, the ongoing war against the private school and the continued undermining of the model experimental public schools impede the free exchange of ideas and innovation, as it does the formation of a culture of civil society.
When we speak of a change in the “model of production” we mean a shift in development goals, a fundamental change in the way that society and politics are organized. We mean the decentralization of the state, and here I am referring not to administrative decentralization but to genuine political decentralization) the devolution of power and initiatives to a society of free, engaged citizens. We mean an open and outward-looking civil society, anchored in Europe and the West and released from the protective custody of the state. A society in an open, globally oriented country with an open market. A society of “enterprising citizens”.
The “enterprising citizen” is not to be confused with the entrepreneur. It is rather a citizen endowed with critical reasoning and emboldened to decide among various choices, daring to innovate despite the risk of failure and accepting the consequences of his actions. The enterprising citizen is every engaged, responsible citizen. And it is precisely these responsible citizens that article 16 of the Constitution expects the school to cultivate.
The school, then, can be at the heart of the great change for growth that the country needs. The school is imprinted in Greek collective memory as the “seedbed” of national self-awareness, a nucleus of society as important as the family. But it has also been seen as a tool of the ruling class used to create a society of subservient subjects. The time has come to make it the nucleus of a national reawakening, the rebirth of our country as a part of Europe and the world. In a society that will bring to fruition the vision to decentralize the autocratic structures that tyrannize it, the school can be a substantial counterweight to the monopolistic, hyper-centralized, autocratic state.
By school I do not mean today’s inward-looking, centrally planned and state-controlled school. I am instead referring to autonomous, self-administered school units, both public (as the model experimental schools were intended to be) and private. Through these units, a meaningful dialog can emerge on educational reform, and with it, a model of social liberation.
Such a dialog would stand as a creative alternative to the useless, prefabricated, so-called public dialog that once again has been launched in the aim of never being concluded. I would urge that starting from today every engaged citizen who is concerned about education and development become part of an alliance for a free school and a free society.
*President of the Hellenic American University
By: N. Peter Kramer
