It is rare to find a book that offers such a variety of insights into the widespread changes that have shaped labour market reforms in Europe since the 1970s. It is even rarer to read an analysis that provides a thorough understanding of the economic policies that were implemented in the last few decades, based on a Political Economy reading of such policies and their implementation. This book accomplished these tasks and more. Its well informed theoretical underpinning draws from a deep understanding of Marxian theory of value clearly developed in Chapter 1. The reader is exposed to a theory that understands the way in which socially constructed economic relationships allow for capital accumulation through exploitation of labour in the production and reproduction of capital (p. 18). This unifying viewpoint works to pull together the various chapters and provides an original and intelligible analysis of various ‘eras’ of economic policies in Greece and Turkey through the 20th century and up to the recent past.
The analysis of the labour market that follows the introductory chapter is solidly grounded on this understanding of the labour-capital struggle: productivity gains and wage reductions are only partially successful in achieving profit maximization because labour needs to be able to reproduce itself. The recognition of labour as a component of production cost, but also as a component of demand, is a central tenet of Keynesianism, and it is further explored in Chapter 3. It is particularly in Chapters 3 and 4 (‘The rise and fall of Keynesianism: an outline of the labour-capital relations’ and ‘The rise and consolidation of Monetarism: transformation of the labour regime’, respectively) that the ‘parallel, but strikingly different processes of capitalist development, the unique class structure and the history of class struggle’ meet labour market reforms ‘in quite divergent manners’ in Greece and Turkey (p. 3). Thus, the starting point of the book is that it is possible to analyse ‘capitalist relations of production throughout the execution of different economic policies in the 20th century’ (p. 206).
The tension between production and reproduction and between labour as a cost and labour as a building block of demand is cleverly developed through the analysis of the role of the state and the particular interventions that Greece and Turkey witnessed in their recent past. Chapter 2 very distinctively delivers a sense of the complex process through which production and capital accumulation, from one hand, and reproduction of labour and of capital–labour relations, from the other, emerge as phenomena with specific features in Greece and Turkey. In Greece, for example, in the 1950s and 1960s, wages were kept low as they were primarily considered ‘an element of the cost of production’ (p. 47), but ‘measures such as promoting public housing and universal farmers’ insurance and the expansions of employment through public investments’ (p. 47) contributed substantially in masking ‘the suppressive attitude of the state towards the working class organizations’ (p. 47). Duman argues convincingly about the role of the state, ‘the guarantor of the bourgeois relations of exploitation’, the pace setter of always ‘historically specific form(s) of social relations of production’, but also an important actor to understand the evolution of the political stage, as for example, in the case of Greece during the military dictatorship of 1967–1974 (p. 63) or in the ‘Keynesian period’ of 1981–1985 (p. 68).
It is precisely Chapters 3 and 4 that make it evident how looking at economic policy as the complex outcome of capitalist relations of production works as an analytical strategy in this book. After a Keynesian era, which promised ‘full employment, right to unionization, […] and comprehensive social security rights’ (p. 1), follows a monetarist regime, where ‘unemployment was no longer seen as a problem of political regulation’ (p. 36). This is a turning point with respect to Keynesian thought and Keynesian policy design, the acknowledgement of which acquires a mighty power because it allows a reader to recognize that labour and the labour markets have been conceived in relation to the needs of capital and the capitalist class in Greece and Turkey in the 1990s and 2000s. Thus, class, class structure and the role of the state are crucial analytical tools to gain insights in the ‘paradigmatic shift in the economic policy’ (p. 33) Greece and Turkey experienced in the monetarist era (the 1990s). This argument acquires strength from the comparative perspective adopted because ‘during the transformation of economic policy since the mid-20th century, the working class in Greece and Turkey have passed through different historical pathways, and have experienced dissimilar processes of organization’ (p. 3).
The book surveys in great details the legal reforms that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s in both Greece and Turkey, which informed the labour markets of these two economies in rather different ways (Chapters 5 and 6). Again, a comparative perspective allows the reader to recognize how ‘the reforms that aimed to reduce the organizational capacity of trade unions and to prevent collective bargaining remained much more limited in Greece than in Turkey’ (p. 107). Duman relies on the unifying argument that class and class struggle change in the face of the law of a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. He notes how the ‘transformation and development of the working class and the capitalist class in Greece occurred in parallel with the rising level of industrialization’ (p. 23). However, we have at times the sense that a deeper and finer understanding of class and its evolution would serve the purpose of this book well, particularly because the ‘monetarist’ economic policies that radically transformed the Greek and Turkish labour markets through de-unionization, suppression of collective bargaining, deregulation and flexibilization, social security reforms and privatization (discussed in Chapters 5, 6 and 7, respectively) had been conceived within the frame of a neo-liberal understanding of individuals’ active role in the regulation and deregulation of markets. It would have been useful to pose and question how the class structure of Greek or Turkish societies changed in the period between the 1960 and the current era and particularly during the period of monetarism when ‘the state took the necessary steps to transform the labour regime to increase the profitability of production’ (p. 35). These questions could have invited the readers to see economic policies, and the consequent economic changes, as events that triggered dramatic ‘anthropological shifts’, similar to the one that Italian intellectual Pierpaolo Pasolini saw happening under his eyes as Italy was evolving from a predominantly agricultural economy to an industrial society in the 1960s, a few years before Greece and Turkey were undergoing similar changes in the structural composition of output (e.g. p. 95). The long-run view adopted by the author requires a centre, and this rich historical material maintains cohesion through an ‘Open Marxist approach’ (p. 5) where a focal attention to the role of traditional classes, specifically working class and capitalist classes, are central for an understanding of conflict and coalitions. However, this anchoring role given to ‘class’ comes at times with a sense that some difficult questions have been avoided: what is a class? And how does it change?
Readers may ask, Why a focus on Greece and Turkey? The answer does not come in a straightforward way. I would have loved Özgün Sarimehmet Duman to spell out the centrality of Greece and Turkey and other liminal economies in the world to understand the way global capital is evolving. After all, it is in the flow of global capitalism that we need to place the current debate that re-emerged in January 2015 on ports’ privatization, which the newly elected Greek leader Tsipras blocked the first day after gaining power with his anti-austerity political platform. One is left with queries about the particular ‘stage of (capitalist) development’ that calls for a deeper understanding of these national economies and their economic policies, often characterized by a distinct national and at times nationalistic focus in policy. How these policies were reconciling, if at all, national priorities (e.g. full employment) with other extra-national priorities – for example, those of the European Monetary System in the 1990s or the International Monetary Fund–World Bank–European Central Bank in 2015 – remains a rather overlooked question.
Some answers to these questions come in Chapter 8, which focuses on the transformation of the labour markets in Greece and Turkey during and following the Global Financial Markets of 2008–2009 and the deep economic crisis that followed. One might wonder whether placing a central chapter like this one after seven others is the result of favouring a chronological criterion over a more theoretically audacious reading of the Political Economy of labour market reforms in these two countries. In any case, the chronological structure of this book works well to bring together a thorough review of recent economic policies with an explicit treatment of very recent events such as those following the Global Financial Crisis. In Greece and Turkey as in other parts of the world, financialization is a complex phenomenon, but it has a clear political economy rationality as it has ‘circumvented the tendency for the rate of profit to fall’ (p. 179). Whether indeed the theory that a falling rate of profit was the primary cause of the Global Financial Crises or rather ‘the economic crisis occurred as a result of the excessive growth of the financial market over the real economy and of fictitious profits over real profits’ remains to be ascertained. The analysis could have been integrated with a deeper and disaggregated analysis of what the financialization of these economies meant for ordinary people and households. Granted that financial markets’ deregulation, starting from the Monetarist era of the late 1980s and 1990s, was legitimated as a strategy to alleviate falling wages and/or difficult access to real estate markets for first home buyers, but other questions concerning the differential participation of groups in these ‘new’ economies remain: how did these changes impact upon groups of workers differentiated by age or gender? And, even more importantly, how did the financialization of the Greek and Turkish economies contributed to change the delicate balance of power between labour and capital as it emerged from the monetarist period of the 1990s and 2000s? Despite these questions, Chapter 8 achieves its purpose of giving the sense of the profound transformation that the events of 2008–2009 and the economic crisis that followed brought in the entire Mediterranean area.
In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in understanding the way labour market changes are conceived and implemented as political strategies even before being conceived as economic policies. What we gain from this reading is a deep understanding that economics is embedded in societal and cultural changes and that sometimes, changing the structure of markets means that societal and economic purposes change as well.
