Πηγή: Social Europe Journal
by BY
One of the major intellectual stumbling blocks in having a clear and honest debate about the Greek situation and by extension the situation throughout the entire European Union is an unrelenting and pure naïveté, if not stupidity, in the way that the situation is discussed: wide swathes of the European media talk about Greeks and Greece as though what we are dealing with was simply one monolithic entity.
This kind of thinking seems to be the residue of the most naive form of ethno-national thinking and a desperate fear of returning to a class based analysis. Within any national population there will be a multitude of groups with different behaviours, and most importantly different interests. In Greece at the moment it makes sense to address this in terms of a straightforward class analysis. The free movement of capital in the EU has made this all the more the case. It is simply not coherent or honest to talk about the situation in Greece as though the rich, middle class and poor all behave in the same way, or have behaved in the same way or have the same interests. And yet this seems to be how the discourse in the European media is most often structured.