‘We Are All Socialists’: Greek Crisis and Precarization

Abstract

The chapter addresses the way precarious people on the edge of poverty are governed against the ethnographic background of the contemporary Greek economic crisis using the notion of governmentality. The author argues that these people are treated as second-class citizens since they are denied a range of rights, such as the equal access to forms of protection and the equal possibility to live with dignity. He describes the background of the way the global financial crisis and the neoliberal policies implemented by international organisations like the IMF and EU negatively affected the Greek economy and the daily lives of unsuspecting citizens. Finally, he shows how people conceive social policy programs as well as their reaction to their conditions of existence, supporting the view that understanding the precarious ‘Other’ presupposes understanding the way it is constructed and managed.