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Reconfigurations of Everyday Life in Chalkida, a Postindustrial Greek City

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Reconfigurations of Everyday Life in Chalkida, a Postindustrial Greek City Authoritative Models and Grassroots Responses to Crisis: Reconfigurations of Everyday Life in Chalkida, a Postindustrial Greek City Stamatis Amarianakis Aquesta tesi doctoral està subjecta a la llicència Reconeixement 4.0. Espanya de Creative Commons. Esta tesis doctoral está sujeta a la licencia Reconocimiento 4.0. España de Creative Commons. This doctoral thesis is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Spain License. Ámbit D’ Antropología del Programa de Doctorat : Societat i Cultura: Història, Antropologia, Art i Patrimoni Doctorand : Stamatis Amarianakis Directοr de la Tesi : Susana Narotzky Authoritative Models and Grassroots Responses to Crisis: Reconfigurations of Everyday Life in Chalkida, a Postindustrial Greek City 1 Abstract This thesis focuses on grassroots practices, meanings and understandings in the context of the Greek economic crisis and austerity restructurings that were unilaterally imposed by hegemonic institutions and Greek governments between 2010 and 2016. I employ a bottom up approach to identify the social, economic, political and cultural shifts and ruptures that the imposition of austerity measures and neoliberal policies provoked in Chalkida, a mid-sized (post) industrial city. I juxtapose mainstream definitions and explanations of crisis with national and place-bound grassroots experiences, practices and understandings in order to establish an inter-scalar interconnection between global processes and local agency. This thesis is based on 18 months of systematic fieldwork that took place between April 2015 and December 2016. Material was collected through participant observation in workplace settings, public spaces and households. Additionally, the research was informed by semi-structured personal and group interviews, as well as many informal conversations in cafes, taverns and open air markets. Building on existing literature on crisis, neoliberalism, scale and power, household transformations, social solidarity and informality, I assess the impact of crisis and austerity on the socio-economic relationships and established livelihood patterns that were severely challenged by it. My research demonstrates that people in a provincial city like Chalkida counterbalanced the austerity crisis’s effects on formal income resources and the restructuring of the state and its welfare provisioning. They did so by reinventing traditional structures and practices that had been predominant in the past when resources had also been scarce. I therefore suggest that crisis was understood as a retrograde movement that questioned linear processes and conceptualizations of modernity and progress. Drawing upon historical continuities and ruptures at the local, national and international scales, this dissertation offers a rich ethnographic account of everyday life under the condition of “being in” and “living with” crisis. 2 Table of Contents Introduction ...6 Chapter 1 The Cement of Chalkida’s Society: Sketches of Modern Development in Industrializing Regions Intoduction ...32 1.1 A Brief History of Cement and Its Role in Undeveloped Regions ...35 1.2 The Political Economy of Chalkida Before the Cement Factory (1833 – 1926) ...40 1.3 The Political Economy of Chalkida in the Era of Cement – Major Urban & Industrial Developments (1926 – 1980) ...43 1.4 The Era of Financialization (1980s – 2010s) ...49 1.5 Chalkida’s Cement Factory ...55 Conclusion ...61 Chapter 2 The Quest for Modernity: A Brief History of the Greek Project of Development Introduction ...65 2.1 Modernity and Development as Longue Durée Process (1827-1949) ...68 2.2 Greece in the Post War Period (1950-1974) ...86 2.3 The Metapolitefsi 1974-2010 ...94 2.4 Modernity in the Years on non-Development (2010-2015) ...101 Conclusion ...106 3 Chapter 3 Austerity, Εmployment and Income: Working Lives in Crisis Introduction ...108 3.1 The Disappearance of Industrial Labor ...114 3.2 Precariously Waged Employees in the Public and Private Service Sector ...123 3.3 Civil Servants ...131 3.4 Self-employment ...135 3.5 Pensioners ...144 Conclusion ...153 Chapter 4 Household Economics, Livelihood Patterns and Austerity from Below: Social Reproduction in Times of Crisis Introduction ...156 4.1 A Household that Provides Income Resources and Receives Care ...160 4.2 Care Giver Households ...163 4.3 Households with Adult Children ...171 4.4 Independent Households with Dependent Children ...178 4.5 The Formation of a New Household ...186 Conclusion ...191 4 Chapter 5 Renegotiating the Social Contract and the Grassroots: Austerity, Informality and Social Solidarity Introduction ...194 5.1 Social Solidarity and the Gift Economy ...200 5.2 Conditions of Solidarity During the Greek Crisis ...203 5.3 Divide and Conquer: The Calculated Imposition of Austerity Measures ...206 5.4 The Financialization of Everyday Life and New Forms of Grassroots Economic Solidarity ...211 5.5 Informality and Social Solidarity: Resistance, Subsistence and Metaphors of Survival ...219 Conclusion ...228 Chapter 6 Everyday Life in Crisis – Grassroots Experiences and Analyses of Crisis and Austerity in Chalkida Introduction ...230 6.1 Grassroots Experiences and Understandings of Crisis in Chalkida ...233 6.2 Crisis, Critique and History ...243 6.3 The Events Before and After the Greek Referendum ...250 6.4 Crisis, Austerity and Neocolonialism ...254 Conclusion ...259 Conclusion ...263 Bibliography ...272 5 Introduction This thesis’ aim is to offer an ethnographic, political and historical account of everyday struggles and life experiences during the Greek economic crisis in the city of Chalkida. As the capital of an industrial region in Central Greece, Chalkida has been severely affected by the ongoing socioeconomic transformations produced by the current crisis. It has been almost a decade since the outbreak of the sovereign debt crisis which has brought with it harsh austerity measures that have changed the country’s economic, social and political landscape. Greece today finds itself in an unprecedented situation due to neoliberal restructuring that has resulted in wage cuts, high taxation, reductions in social welfare spending, privatization of the public sector and mass layoffs. These policies have pushed increasing numbers of people into poverty. Most of those affected by the so-called sovereign debt crisis are those who belong(ed) to the working middle classes (Giannitsis & Zographakis, 2018), that is to say, the majority of Greek society who experienced a radical decline in their standard of living. The current economic crisis has on the one hand unveiled the middle classes’ false consciousness and on the other, revealed the great chasm of inequality and injustice inherent to the articulation of power under globalized capitalism today. People who had constructed their livelihoods according to the prospect of continual capitalist progress and economic growth, which opened up a world of possibilities, saw their future expectations and existing living arrangements collapse. As a result, the crisis has produced not only economic and structural shifts in everyday economic activities and decisions but has also challenged ideological and moral values. In this thesis, I follow a bottom up approach in order to critically evaluate the effects of the reforms that the IMF and the Eurogroup have imposed on the Greek economy, and more particularly on ordinary people. I do so through an exploration of grassroots anti-crisis responses that have emerged through people’s day-to-day communication and interactions. My particular interest is in the ways in which people value and manage their limited resources and the grassroots networks they mobilize in order to sustain social reproduction practices. The recent crisis has broken the livelihood arrangements of the majority of Greeks and has greatly affected their income resources, shattering the promise of modernity as well as any possibility of future upward mobility. Therefore, people who built their life projects during 6 the past thirty years believing that they belonged to one of the richest and most “developed” parts of the world (the European Union), experienced an identity shock which altered their relationship with national and international power structures. The abrupt transformations brought about in the context of the austerity crisis altered their moral and ideological values and their attitudes towards the state, the political system, the EU and the banks. This led them to reconsider and reflect on their pre-crisis consumption-based lifestyles and to reevaluate their life needs. In order to locate the process of social transformation in its broader context, it is therefore necessary to describe ordinary people’s pre and post-crisis practices and expectations as regards happiness, success and wellbeing. In order to do so, I engage in a detailed exploration of the life and work histories of local people. Thus, I consider that “crisis” is a concept with varied meanings that motivate people’s actions in diverse ways, and that these grassroots definitions must therefore be placed at the center of attention. It is my contention that within the crisis context we can witness the transformation and reconfiguration of other social spheres in which economic actions are embedded. Hence my research questions and analysis are guided by a combined political economy and moral economy framework through which I assess social stratification. Aligned with the collective objectives of the Grassroots Economics Project (GRECO), my aims are to assess the impacts
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