Empty Net- Dying in Tempi: State Failure and Social Restructuring in Greece 2.0

"Man does not die because he is mortal (no less than he lies because he is dishonest or loves because he is amorous). He dies because he does not eat enough, because he is reduced to a beastly state, because he is killed."

Francois Châtelet

It is especially difficult to recognize that your life does not count or even that it falls under a metric system that values ​​it less than the profits of a business. The Tempe accident, in addition to being a horrific event where so many people lost their lives, was a painful recognition of such disparagement, predictably igniting widespread social outrage alongside collective mourning. We already know from Spinoza that politics is (also) shaped by such emotions. However, to understand why now and not at some other event, that is, why it was the specific event that triggered the above recognition and the emotions that permeate it, we need to go beyond the field of immediacy to analyze its active mediations.

National identity/consciousness is clearly the precursor of these mediations, and it does not really matter if it is imaginary as an identity, since it does not become less real. For better or worse, the nation has been for more than a century the generalized way of constituting the modern state, i.e. a political structure of sovereignty/right, in a community (to such an extent that the denial of a people's will to become a nation may well be considered a historical injustice) . Which community in turn mediates the capitalist market not through the formal-legal arrangements of the state, but through a normative network of claims, obligations and dependencies. Undoubtedly, this is a dynamic form of mediation, which can define the state and the market as impersonal mechanisms only to the extent that it is subordinated, therefore determined, from them. In any case, the Greek state, like any modern nation-state, maintains its social cohesion through the reproduction of a collective identity, awe charged with narratives, beliefs and axioms.

It is the mediation of this we that determines the impact of the accident in Tempi, as well as correspondingly that no event involving immigrants is going to produce a generalized revolt of Greek society, regardless of how tragic and unjust the event is or how disturbing/unacceptable it may be this finding from an abstract (bourgeois) moral point of view or from a class and internationalist perspective.

The more specific features of Greek identity also determine the form that mourning and rage take, as they crystallize in the current reactions. Because once again we see active the contradiction between an identity imbued with a lost greatness that can and must return and a consciousness of a decaying reality (of "Greece-Psarokostaina"). This consciousness is reinforced by the sense of an inferior status in relation to the "developed world" and the failure to reach it through EU membership and the modernization project that accompanied it as a condition.

Again, we can (and well will) say a lot about the problematic nature of elevating Western European societies to standard models, as long as we understand that the sense of inferiority towards them has an objective basis: in this case, the railway networks of the Northern/Western European societies are sufficiently developed so that, based on the potential they realize, they make the Greek railway network backward and closer to the networks that exist in the former so-called "Third World". That is why it makes no theoretical or political sense to find that such events also occur in advanced countries. Because the obvious fact that even in the most technologically advanced network can happen for various reasons an accident,

It is the relevant experience of failure together with the contradiction between what Greece "should-be-be" and "what-is" that the concept of the "failed state" comes to theoretically express. Failure should not be taken in terms of an objective magnitude that can be dismissed by offering data that invalidates it, e.g. that the state that does not put modern security systems in place for its rail network is the same state that spends billions on weapons systems and harbors ambitions to participate in (and get as much of the pie as possible from) the late geopolitical rivalries in the region . The concept of the "third world state" - as long as it is not put in racist terms (as it is of course basically done in the reports about "Uganda", etc.) but as an analytical indicator - is informative: a key characteristic of many "Third World" states is precisely the existence of an elite that recklessly spends public money for its own enrichment and for the military power of the state. So what the term "failed state" conceptualizes is the failure of the Greek state to respond to its concept, that is, the European state-of-law. In reality of course, no existing EU state. it does not fully fall within the definition of the rule of law, which reveals the limits of the concept as such. In any case, however, there are clear differences between states to the extent that their active reality contradicts their concept, with Greece being a state where the contradiction is quite strong and is becoming more and more intense. This paves the way for the popular reaction to the detainees,

The request also highlights the problem in the concept of a failed state. That is, that it is based on a normative judgment that, on the one hand, makes the considered successful states as evaluation measures and the failed states as deviant forms of an a priori ideal. What is lost of course is the historical production of (each) state, with the contradictions and tensions that define it. Even more, it obscures the fact that the failure of a state to live up to its meaning is how it is reproduced as active reality. In the case of the Greek state, specifically, the pro-European demand for modernization fails to realize that (a) systemic corruption and incomplete democratization are conditions for the expansion and development of foreign (in this case European) capital, something that points towards the imperialist dimension of the EU, without this meaning that the EU is simply an imperialist structure; (b) in order to achieve the modernization of Greek society there had to be a high-intensity depreciation of fixed/variable capital and labor, i.e. a devaluation and destruction of the living conditions of millions of people. The sacrificial character of the whole process is not only evident in the form of austerity – which gives the vulgarity of Cima and Protosalte its material basis and rationality – it is also class-determined; who were always sacrificed if not the subordinates? For this reason, conversely, the deprecation/destruction process in Greece could be carried out – for the most part.

So behind the failed Greek state is a very real process, which can be defined as the neoliberalization of Greek society, a concept that gives concrete form and content to the most abstract concepts of modernization and/or social restructuring. Certainly, far from being a ready-made patent, neoliberalization as a general process takes various specific forms, which reflect the historical conditions of each state. It can have a progressive social sign (e.g. in terms of identity rights) or a more conservative character as in Orbanism; there can also be a contradictory mix of the two, as is done today in Greece by the New Democracy, which can govern only by trying to strike a balance between middle-class liberalism and far-right populism. In any case, however, it maintains some determinations that define its character as neoliberalization, one of which is that the value of life and access to social reproduction structures is made in market terms. Here is the essence of the public/private confrontation, not as a comparison of the same, but a differentiation between ways of demarcating and structuring social functions: good or service, each with distinct evaluation criteria (although obviously there may be several common recommended ones, like the modernization of infrastructure based on current technical capabilities), with its own context of confrontation and its own perspectives. In any case, however, it maintains some determinations that define its character as neoliberalization, one of which is that the value of life and access to social reproduction structures is made in market terms. Here is the essence of the public/private confrontation, not as a comparison of the same, but a differentiation between ways of demarcating and structuring social functions: good or service, each with distinct evaluation criteria (although obviously there may be several common recommended ones, like the modernization of infrastructure based on current technical capabilities), with its own context of confrontation and its own perspectives. In any case, however, it maintains some determinations that define its character as neoliberalization, one of which is that the value of life and access to social reproduction structures is made in market terms. Here is the essence of the public/private confrontation, not as a comparison of the same, but a differentiation between ways of demarcating and structuring social functions: good or service, each with distinct evaluation criteria (although obviously there may be several common recommended ones, like the modernization of infrastructure based on current technical capabilities), with its own context of confrontation and its own perspectives.

The critique of privatization, therefore, and the critique of the depreciation of the public are aspects of the critique of a single process. The more this critique becomes conscious of itself as a desire and a practical demand, it can lead to the transcendence of collective mourning in national terms and the transformation of social outrage into a defined project of social justice. The tendency is already present within the reactions, especially in the mobilizations, e.g. in the slogans "we live by chance" and "our lives count", in which both their subject of reference and the sense of injustice and the desire for justice that permeates them have not national symbol; moreover, they are open enough to accommodate non-Greek victims.