DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] BOOK REVIEW - CRUCIBLE OF RESISTANCE by Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos

My CV suggests, accurately, that I am not an Eastern Europe specialist, rather a specialist in South Asia and 'Sub Sahara Africa'. I'm not overly fond of the phrase 'Sub-Saharan Africa', since it's a full 3/4s of the continent, but it's how most people split Africa. Fun. Always more fun with discrete variables and the arbitrary ways in which we assign the boundaries.

Regardless of actual speciality, when Brexit happened, my employer at the time pressed me to become a Brexit expert, largely because I was the only trained economist in the organisation and people kept asking about Brexit, so I quickly had to catch up on decades of European integration theory and the wider European economy as well as Britain's relationship with the continent. This was no mean feat, as supranational organisations such as the EU are still relatively new (compared to nation-states which we've had, for better and worse) for centuries, and so economists, especially of the neo-liberal/neo-classical bend, of which I was one back then, were still struggling to figure out how to study an organisation like the EU. Similarly, when the Greek economic crisis happened, European economists of all backgrounds, and yes, here we're counting Britain as European, were quickly pressed into explaining why Greece was Greeking, despite its status as a Euro using EU member. What did the economic failures in Greece say about Greece itself? What did it say about the wider EU project? What did it say about the wider neo-liberal project?

The quickly emerging dominant narrative was largely based on cultural stereotypes of the Greeks. Lazy, corrupt, welfare loving moochers, who engaged in corrupt clientelism, unlike the noble and hard working Germans, who had to come to their salvation, through good German grit, penny-pinching, and fiscal wisdom. Merkel the wise, you see, had brought neo-liberalism and market logic to Germany, which had made Germany rich, and Greece's failure to bring similar neo-liberal free market wisdom and austerity had brought Greece to financial ruin, so thank God the Germans intervened and brought austerity with them, albeit with severe resistance and protests from the ungrateful people of Greece, who were too busy enjoying their flavourful food and wine to properly manage an economy. (That's the real reason for British, American, and German fiscal responsibility, our food is terrible, and so we focus our astute minds on business, business, business).

It might surprise you to find that I don't agree with this dominant narrative on the causes of the Greek financial crisis, nor do the authors of Crucible of Resistance. Greece, they posit, had already begun implementing neo-liberal reforms long before the EU bail-out, as such reforms are the basis for EU membership in the first place. It was the neo-liberal reforms, they argue, that had led to the financial crisis, and not the Keynesian system that the reforms had replaced. Further, they argue, that far from a case of 'Greek exceptionalism' as the dominant narrative around Greece's economic crisis spelt out, the causes of Greece's financial failure share commonalities found across not only the wider EU project, but throughout the neo-liberal project, even in 'strong holds' like Britain, Germany, and the US.

If I may put on my 'Africanist' hat here, the corruption argument from the dominant narrative rings particularly familiar, as so frequently I am told that the reason Nigeria (one of the more precise countries I specialise in) is poor is because it is corrupt. As a British person, I find this particularly ironic, as:

1. So is Britain, if anything British politics is more corrupt, just through the sheer amount of money involved in our corruption.

2. Most of the corruption in Nigeria can be traced back to Britain and/or British corporations. (Looking at you, Shell).

There's a couple of issues with the corruption argument, first of course, is that it is largely unmeasurable, most illegal things are since the very nature of illegality means you don't readily report your activity to your government, and most of us who engage in the social sciences rely on government collected data, whether that be from censuses, taxes, or other points of collection. (Surveys are surprisingly expensive to run, and no one is willing to give us the money to run them any more, speaking from experience as a man who ran three concurrently recently, and without research assistants because, again, no money, and oh my days could I rant and rave about why I hate running surveys). The second issue is, speaking in mathematical terms, I tend to view corruption as something of a constant rather than a variable, and constants cannot, by their nature, be the explanatory variable. Nigeria isn't poor because of corruption, it's poor because of British corruption and wider systematic problems. (We don't pay fair price for the labour or value of the oil, for example, what money we do send down there mostly ends up in oil extraction and shipping and not in other infrastructural projects, etc, etc, since all the money is centred around oil the only people with the capital necessary to stand for election in 'free and fair' elections are the people with deep connections to the oil industry, ensuring nothing ever changes, I could go on and on).

The broader point the book makes is also interesting. There is nothing wrong with the broader idea of European integration. A European Union is indeed preferable to millions of teenagers dying over Alsace-Lorne or more centuries of small nation-states fighting each other over diminishing resources. The notion of a Frenchman killing a German because they have three different colours in their respective tri-colours and have mildly different racisms about the rest of the world is absurd, and I do not think history will look back on the 19th and 20th centuries kindly. Except maybe for the aesthetics, I do like Victorian and Art-Deco aesthetics, but not the racism, colonialism, genocide, etc etc that all reached dramatic heights during the period. However, the particular way that this European Union has been built, largely on neo-liberal logic, has created far more economic inequalities and strife than it has created wider unity, we can tell because if the EU was delivering on economic development for all, there wouldn't be so much fascism emerging on the continent, with or without the copious amounts of money flowing in from the American far-right, money only brings seeds, and seeds only grow where the soil is fertile.

The EU's failures in Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (PIIGS, as it is known) shows that Greece is not an exceptionality, but rather has commonality with other countries, namely the ones that had began the EU project 'behind' France, the Netherlands, and Germany, suggesting that the EU project has done little to catch these economies up, and instead has centralised capital in the places where it was already. Like Marx said would happen. Capitalism is a centrifuge in which capital attracts capital, and so the EU, with the enforced free market and no room for domestic protections, was always going to extract capital from the periphery for the centre. After the First World War, Germany and Austria had lost their capacity to outright extract capital from Eastern Europe and the 'colonial' world, but the EU has given them a new platform upon which to do it. VW was built on the back of slave labour and exploitation of Eastern Europe, and can seemingly only sustain itself through it, whilst VW is the only German corporation outright established by the Nazis, it's far from the only one with extensive Nazi ties, to this very day. These empires of theft and exploitation need to be preserved.

If this sounds familiar, of course, you might be thinking of the review from Quinn Slobodian's Globalists, which argues that the main point of the neo-liberal project has always been the protection of imperial linkages for the protection of capital. In the relative microcosm of the EU project, this has been largely to enable continued German exploitation of cheap Eastern European resources, the initial source of much of German and Austrian wealth. In the contexts of the wider world, the ways in which the EU treats trade in Africa and Asia speaks miles to continued desire for imperialist capital extraction. Greece is poor for the same reason Nigeria is, it's profitable that way, and also holds comfortably with our [racist/outdated] views of the 'natures and cultures' of the people in those lands. If they want a better life, they'd better migrate to us, but only on our terms, and even then, there's no guarantee we won't exploit their [intentionally cheap] labour here, that fruit isn't going to pick itself, and the NHS isn't going to run itself.

In the lead up to Brexit, one of the main 'gotchas' the Remain camp frequently went to was, 'Oh man won't the Brexiters be so upset that the custodians and fruit pickers will all be deported'. What a terrible, tone-deaf argument in favour of the EU, that was always destined to fail. It's a thoroughly neo-liberal market take that the main benefit of immigration isn't the ideal of human freedom, isn't the ability to experience foreign cultures and food, or even just the acknowledgement of a migrant's basic human dignity. No, it was the cheap, thankless labour, that no 'self-respecting [white] British person would do' at a time when people of all backgrounds were desperate for work. This thinking is why the centre-Left and centre-Right have lost all footing, and despite their constant looking down their noses from The Economist, The Financial Times, or The Guardian will never get their footing back. Their time, their precious Overton window has shut, it was starting to shut in 2007/08, and finally latched close in 2016. The capitalist class had taken everything it could before even the British and American middle classes began noticing that they'd lost so much.

Indeed, one of the arguments that Laskos and Tsakalotos make is that many in the capitalist class noticed as far back as 2007/08 that the proverbial game was up, and have begun more aggressive and open means of capital extraction before the masses revolt entirely. Students of history should know that every time capital feels threatened, it tends to go fascist, since those nasty Socialists want to redistribute the wealth they worked so hard to steal. It is no mistake that so much of the capitalist class of the US has rallied behind Trump, nor the move of the UK capitalist class to the right. Laskos and Tsakalotos also take the time to show the movement of the Greek capitalist class to the right.

To disguise this obvious move to authoritarianism and fascism, the elites begin a systematic condemnation of all 'populism', but focus far more on leftist populism than right. Again, because the Left threatens only capital. Slobodian as well as Laskos and Tsakalotos point out in their respective books that populism is also a name for democracy, and this knee-jerk reaction against democracy emerges every time that class consciousness does. Neo-liberalism tolerates democracy as a means to an ends, but doesn't rely on it. 'The freer the markets, the freer the people' is a nice slogan, but holds no weight in reality.

After you finish reading Slobodian, I guess, I recommend reading Crucible of Resistance, for a case study of a single country's adoption of neo-liberalism, and don't be surprised when you're able to realise that your country has a lot more in common with Greece than you likely originally thought.

Then get a gyro. They're delicious. Also get that sauce they make but I can never remember the name of.