3 - The Greek ‘economic miracle’ and the hidden proletariat

Summary

It did, however, seem that most historical writing about cities and city-dwellers was deficient, not only because it lacked the breadth and analytical rigor which Lampard called for but because it dealt with only a small segment of the population - the visible, articulate elements of the community rather than the masses of ordinary people. The existing literature was based largely upon traditional literary sources which were socially skewed … When they did treat ordinary people they spoke with the accent of a particular class, and too often indicated more about the perceptions of that class than about life at the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Stephen Thernstrom (1971: 673)

The Second World War (1940-5) and the Greek civil war (1946-9) left the country in ruins. The structure of underdevelopment was aggravated by destruction and was carried through to the first postwar decades. Then, however, it was soon overcome. In the 1960s the safety valve of emigration reopened, the centre of gravity of the economy moved towards industry, living conditions improved and the role of marginality and urban poverty declined. Athens began to diverge from Third World urbanization models from a socio-economic point of view, and a solid working class grew in its society. This urban proletariat, however, has been virtually ignored by researchers, hidden within an alleged parasitic urban population. Even the Left went along with stereotypes about ‘underdevelopment’, ‘parasitism’, ‘overurbanization’ and the ‘petty-medium society’. In this chapter available evidence will be combined with an analysis of census data in order to discuss the nature of the urban working class, and social classes more generally, within the political economy of Greek development until the 1960s.