Docile Elites, Lumpen People, Spoiled Country
Docile Elites, Lumpen People, Spoiled Country

Some Preliminary Reflections on the Cultural and Moral Analysis of Capitalist Asymmetry in post-war Greece

Summary/Abstract: This paper builds on ethnographic research conducted among Greek technocrats specialized in the policies of European Integration. It will initially focus on the main discursive themes that these social agents enacted amidst the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece. This will address their elite self-image and their explicit endorsement of Eurocentric taxonomies, as well as more generally the centrality of culture and morality in their reading of the capitalist economy and its crises. Secondly, the paper will draw a parallel between elite constructions of Greek society and the overall delineation of political debates in post-war Greece. Indeed, the idea of ambiguity of the Greek dominant classes themselves – as seen in their putative subservience to the ‘West’ - seems to function as the other end of a continuum of moral politics. In this sense, the prevalence of culture and morality in political debates – in a highly nationalized version - seems to bear a more general political and epistemological logic which favors a continuous insistence on questions of flawed conduct, in contrast to structural understandings of capitalism and its inevitable antinomies.

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