Burdened with debt
Through the constant terrorism of the media for almost a year now concerning “our” debt, the modern moralists, the preachers of the word of capital and money are trying violently to convince us, the “debtors”, that in order to pay back “our” debt to “our” creditors we are obliged to take up our cross of torture and sacrifices, to place our faith in the orthodoxy of the Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies and the Stability Pact and filled with awe to anticipate in the fullness of time the post-deficit life.
For months now, fiscal terrorism attempts to become more effective targeting, through the collective responsibility of the debts, our own subjectivity. The storm of the imminent threats against “our” national economy aims at the internalization of the crisis as fear and guilt: “our” debts (Schulden) should become our collective guilt (Schuld). Thus, the original sin recurs even more violently to make us, paraphrazing Nietzsche, pledge our already low wages, our already labour- intensified life, our very expectations for a world where capitalist domination will be history. They want us to pledge our own claims for a life liberated of debts and guilt now and in the future; to get indebted with the burden of a depressingly insecure present so that we eliminate even from our imagination any possibility of abolishing this old, burdened with guilt and debts, world.
The terror of deficits aims at creating an emergency now in Greece transforming it into a laboratory of a new shock-policy implementation. Certainly, this does not only reflect the aggravation of the global crisis and the particularity of its manifestation in Greece (as we will see below). It also reflects the catalytic effect of the December 2008 rebellion which made the crisis even more acute causing the delegitimization of the previous government and the subsequent delay in taking the necessary pro-capital measures. In this sense, fiscal terrorism along with police repression could be considered as part of the ongoing counter-insurgency campaign that takes up – even in a preventive way– global dimensions.
During the last months, Greece has been located at the heart of the continuing global capitalist crisis. The outbreak of the “debt crisis” and the implementation of a “shock-therapy” by the PASOK government in cooperation with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have drawn internationally the attention of both capitalists and proletarians, since many people believe that the outcome of class struggles in Greece will greatly influence the outcome of the crisis on a global level. From this perspective, we believe that it is necessary to put the developments in Greece into a broader framework of analysis of the capitalist crisis; moreover, we should draw conclusions from the experience of the ongoing class struggles against the austerity measures in Greece since it has now become clear that similar “adjustment” programmes have already begun to be implemented in other European countries as well.