*** JEAN-LOUIS LAVILLE, GEOFFREY PLEYERS, ELISABETTA BUCOLO, JOSE LUIS CORAGGIO (Eds.): Mouvements sociaux et économie solidaire. Editions Desclée de Brouwer (Groupe Elidia, 10 rue Mercœur, F-75011 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 44465400 – Internet: http://www.editionsddb.fr ). "Solidarité et société" series. 2017, 490 pp, €21.90. ISBN 978-2-220-0921-3.
This book emerges from the observation that players in the social economy – and these days the solidarity economy – and the players of social movements do not know each other; and the researchers interested in one or other of these domains follow suit. The scientists brought together in these pages, essentially sociologists and economists, do not resign themselves to this, feeling that it is time to observe without blinkers the practices of each on the ground in order to become aware of the new world that is being sketched out and to be able to trace out paths leading in terms of what concerns them to an overarching sociology.
In the introduction, sociologists Elisabetta Bucolo, Jean-Louis Laville and Geoffrey Pleyers start by describing the developments that the two domains have experienced and the "reductionisms" that have characterised research about them. Thus although the social economy was initially made up of cooperatives and mutual welfare societies (mutuelles), it has become imbued with solidarity through the action of fringes of civil society that wanted to "democratise the economy based on citizens’ commitments.’ Most of the researchers, however, continued to only want to work on social enterprises, in other words structures "that do not challenge the dominant system for palliating inequalities," when even a good number of new practices bear witness to a "desire to democratise the economy using citizens’ commitments.". Likewise, researchers involved in social movement studies have not given themselves the resources to fully measure the ruptures caused over time by the student, feminist and ecologist movements, and later the another-world-is-possible movement, or, in the current decade, the movements that connect in their thinking and action the socio-economic and cultural domains while ‘closely associating dignity with democracy and social justice." Thus the trend is to only see challengers to the system in them, although these activists generally ‘spend far less time protesting than setting up alternatives’ to capitalist society, with the "Zones to Defend" bearing witness to the fundamental importance they grant to "the coherence between values and practices."
Faced with this fact, the thirty-two authors take the gamble of ‘exiting eurocentrism" to draw links between these two domains so that the developments that are under way can prove to be mutually enriching. They thus open themselves up to realities from the South, to "social struggles that take place there" and "invite one to appreciate the change in values in SSE and also in social movements." By South is meant geographical South of course, strongly represented in the contributions, but also the South which "also exists in the North, in the form of excluded populations, reduced to silence and marginalised, like people without official documents, the unemployed, ethnic and religious minorities, the victims of sexism, homophobia and racism." Basically, resume the writers of the introduction, in this book it is a question of "thinking of the world ‘from below’ with those oppressed b the dominant world order, with their practical and also cognitive fight-backs."
This combative book, of both a scientific and a political combat, has six parts. The first, entitled ‘In search of another economy," opens with three texts that highlight how expression of the alternative meshes with critique of the dominant economy and the delegitimising of capitalism in the light of Latin American realities, viz the fight against "extractivism" of companies that pillage the resources of countries in the South, the lessons to be learned from the Zapatista experience and the landless peasant movement, the growth of an agri-ecologist movement and what the economy of solidarity owes the Catholic Church’s social doctrine. In the second part, texts making a connection between libertarian socialism, feminism and the economy of solidarity, with sociologists Frère and Gardin defending Proudhon by showing that his fight was not limited to changing the economy, but also aimed to ‘reappropriate for society the economic power seized by capitalism and the political power confiscated by national centralism" – which is certainly very much a question of our times. There follow texts reporting on the social and solidarity economy arising from the demands carried by social movements, with Elisabetta Bucolo discussing the fights against the mafia in Sicily and economist Alain Lipietz the contributions made by the ecologist movement to the solidarity economy in France. In the next section, four authors stress the need for the social solidarity economy to reappropriate a critical stance and a political aim, with the following section focusing on the problems encountered in enabling players and researchers from the two ‘camps’ to meet each other. The recompositions that the solidarity economy brings about for old movements like the trade unions and parties is addressed in the sixth section, with conclusions being drawn by Argentinean economist José Luis Coraggio and French sociologist Jean-Louis Laville.
Pierre Bouvier
*** STEVE KEEN: Pouvons-nous éviter une autre crise financière? Editions Les liens qui libèrent (2 impasse de Conti, F-75006 Paris. Internet: http://www.editionslesliensquiliberent.fr ). 2017, 191 pp, €16. ISBN 979-10-209-0557-4.
Steve Keen is happy to be a bird of ill omen. After having anticipated the crisis of ten years ago, he is a repeat offender in this book, in which he asserts that we risk a massive new collapse of the stock exchange. It will be of global scale again, but could well start in Europe: in the preface, Gaël Giraud, chief economist at the French Development Agency, starts effectively from the fact that the collapse of Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena bore witness to the fact that not enough progress has been made by the European Union since 2008 in the process of preventing catastrophes and bank rescues. He points out that the Italian banking sector is "devastated" with "more than 330 billion euros of unrecoverable debts" on their balance sheets. This is why the European inter-bank resolution fund was not used for the two Venetian banks, and Italian taxpayers were forced to cough up some 24 billion euros. The European moral he draws from this débâcle is edifying: "if a State recapitalises its banks with public money, it will not be penalised; but if on the other hand, it expands its spending to reduce unemployment, it certainly will be penalised. Such ‘broad-mindedness’ bears witness to the fact that the European authorities were aware for more than twenty years of the systemic risk run by the European banking sector." This has particular resonance now that Italy is sinking into a major crisis...
It is in this context that Prof. Giraud (Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées) judges the prospects set out by Steve Keen. Figurehead of the New Economic Thinking movement, he starts from another fact, as joyful as the first, namely that the fundamentals of a new crisis are now in place in the United States. Everything is therefore in place for a crisis to break out which the deterioration of public finances all around the world compared with 2007 risks making even more painful. It is against this backdrop that the Australian economist, a professor at Kingston, deals in particular in these pages with the central role played, in his view, by bad private debt, underlying financial crises. Believing that this bad debt comes from a curse that is impossible to predict is absurd, says the preface-writer: "Such a magic vision of the world was that of he Athenians forced every nine years to sacrifice seen boys ad seven girls to the Minotaur to pay for the murder of Minos’ son, Androgeo, by Aegeus – in other words, to pay off a debt for which they were not responsible." It is Keen’s argument that it is the West that created the monster since, as Prof. Giraud resumes it, "each degree of extra freedom granted to the financial markets multiplies occasions for accumulating bad private debt, which will turn out to be insolvable sooner or later and could generate a new collapse." It is therefore a powerful and equally scientifically solid warning sign that is issued by Steve Keen, denouncing the impasses of the neoclassical economy and proposing areas of research for drawing up an alternative economic analysis. (MT)
*** RHEA GALANAKI: L'ultime humiliation. Editions Cambourakis (62 rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, F-75012 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 80059417 – Email: editions@cambourakis.com – Internet: http://www.cambourakis.com ). 2017, 379 pp, €12. ISBN 978-2-36624-297-3.
Novels do not usually have a place in European Library, but there are times when a novel with a social texture speaks better about the facts of an experienced crisis than essays or scientific studies by eminent experts. This is the case of this novel, which plunges us into the Athens of distress and protest in the year 2012. The author follows the fortunes of two elderly ladies without much money, living in a retirement home, recounting their relations with their immediate entourage, particularly Takis, a young sympathiser of Golden Dawn, and Orestes, an anarchist, but not for long. Nymphe and Tiresia, along with all the other characters, are portrayed with immense humanity by the pen of Rhéa Galanaki, who even manages to make the omnipresent financial distress elegant. This is shown in a superb extract in which she sumptuously revisits the myth of the abduction of Europe by Zeus and suggests she was transformed ‘into a female Minotaur": "Eternally imprisoned in the labyrinth," she nourishes herself "on he flesh of young men and young girls, as if youth had always to be punished for its beauty." The author adds that she never "shows pity for the innocent creatures" which are delivered up to her as food. How could one express with greater elegance the extent to which Europe has been judged cruel by many Greeks? (MT)
*** TAKIS MICHAS: La Grèce et l'euro: la vision libérale. Editions Metamessonikties ekdoseis (18 rue Alexandrou Soutsou, Gr-10671 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3617992 - Fax: 8015797 - Email: skbllz@hol.gr). 2017, 126 pp, €8.48. ISBN 978-960-7800-74-9.
In this book, Takis Michas, highly respected editorialist and a recognised specialist in economic issues, is at pains to demonstrate how the liberals who backed Greece’s participation in the eurozone committed an error that invalidates their own philosophy and now traps their political influence. He hits home because he is the only Greek liberal analyst who, since 2000, has never stopped predicting that Greece’s membership of the EMU would lead in that member state to unemployment, company closures and the rise in nationalist and Bolshevik movements. Inspired by the ideas of great liberal and conservative analysts such as Hayek and Friedman, he denounces the policies of bourgeois political forces in Greece "which have contributed to this crime against humanity by pushing hundreds of thousands of young people into unemployment." The transformation of liberalism into "europeism" played a decisive role in these developments and arose, in his view, from the vague ad mistaken perception that the demands of the Brussels nomenclature overcome any other option or right. The author proposes that Greece, led by new political forces should follow the example of Ecuador, - the country where he lives – and put an immediate end to debt payments, seeking to amortise them by between 70% and 80%. What pains Takis Michas above all is that "by their attitude, the liberals have lost any possibility of influencing political developments" and getting Greek capitalism back on track, which leads him to the following bitter conclusion: "As the movement against the Brussels nomenclature expands a little more each day, the liberals have lost their voice and run to hide in the skirts of profoundly anti-liberal political forces like New Democracy (a centre-right political party) and even Pasok or Potami (a centre-left political party).’ (Aka)
*** PASCHOS MANDRAVELIS: Crise et perception. 65 textes pour une décennie troublée. Editions Papadopoulos (9 Kapodistriou, GR-14452 Metamorphosi. Tel: (30-210) 2846074-5 - Fax: 2817127 – Email: info@epbooks.gr - Internet: http://www.epbooks.gr ). 2017, 270 pp, €14.99. ISBN 978-960-569-755-6.
In this book, economist Paschos Mandravelis settles account with everyone in Greece who peddles ideological nonsense. ‘In Greece, the political party that won {Syriza} is the one that promised that the State would be organised to deal with each problem. But when the liberalisation of the market brings growth everywhere, in Greece, the liberalisation of working time appears as a trap swallowing up worker ‘rights.’ The two big parties {New Democracy and Pasok} have dominated Greek society through the ‘best media in the world,’ which is perhaps why there are a lot of media, but they are not economically viable.’ No. Highly reputed editorialist for daily newspaper ‘I Kathimerini,’ the author explains that Greek citizens are drunk with stupid, indigestible theories stating that, for example, all that’s needed to get the economy going again is to ‘get money to rain down on the market’ or that the liberalisation of the economy that works everywhere in the world would only bring about unhappiness in Greece. Why? Because of the weather? Or geography? It is for all these reasons, he explains, that Greece has not been able to get out of the crisis in ten years. Which is why on the big boulevards of Athens, people’s hands are sometimes in the shape of a fist raised in one of the countless demonstrations, or often simply stretched out by beggars. Hence this conclusion in the form of a question: ‘Who said that ideological obsessions do not come at a cost?’ (AKa)