Catastroika: the disastrous wholesale of the Greek state

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Catastroika: the disastrous wholesale of the Greek state Posted: 10 Jun 2012 05:40 AM PDT In this sequel to last year’s Debtocracy, two Greek journalists explore the catastrophic history of neoliberal privatization — and its lessons for Greece. If there was one political documentary that rattled the global anti-austerity movement in 2011, it was Debtocracy. Featuring some of the biggest names of the international Left — from Samir Amin to David Harvey and from Alain Badiou to Manolis Glezos — this crowd-funded documentary by Greek journalists Katerina Kitidi and Aris Hatzistefanou rapidly went around world. Published online for free, it received well over a million views and was screened from the occupied Puerta del Sol to local activist gatherings in Kuala Lumpur. Now, a year later, Kitidi and Hatzifestanou are back at it with an excellent new documentary: Catastroika. As the Greek debt crisis deepened over the past year, the so-called Troika of foreign lenders — made up of the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund — imposed strict conditions as part of Greece’s second “bailout” agreement, including the mass fire-sale privatization of billions of euros worth in “public assets” (in reality crucial public services, including the railway and water systems). Catastroika, as the name suggests, explores the catastrophe these privatizations are about to unleash within Greece. To sketch the historical and global context in which this disastrous policy response came about, Kitidi and Hatzifestanou traveled around the world, from Moscow to San Francisco and from Paris to London, to explore the past failures of the neoliberal shock therapy of mass privatizations. Once again, the documentary features some sacred cows of the global Left, this time including Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, and Slavoj Žižek, arguably the most influential radical philosopher of our time, as well as leading academics and analysts, like Dani Rodrik, Alex Callinicos, Costas Douzinas and Dean Baker. Overall, film-wise, Catastroika is not as striking as Debtocracy. At times, the film feels more like a travel documentary than a piece of investigative journalism. After the introductory part of the film, the narrative stalls a bit and seems to lead nowhere but to the already inevitable conclusion that further privatizations will unleash catastrophe. At no point do the filmmakers make any suggestion on how the privatization-drive of the EU and IMF could be effectively resisted. Weaving this question through the story-line earlier on would have allowed the quick and slightly cheesy 2-minute conclusion on the need for popular resistance to have been a bit more contextualized. Furthermore, the film’s reliance on ‘experts’ and its failure to incorporate those directly affected by the privatizations gives the documentary a bit of a cold, clinical and overly analytical feel (something I am also guilty of here at ROAR!). Rather than drawing the viewer into the story, outraging her with the injustice of the EU-IMF policy response to the crisis, the overload of historical detail at times times risks lulling even the genuinely interested viewer into distraction. Overall, however, the message the filmmakers are trying to convey is obviously of crucial importance — and the neat visuals with which it is presented make the sequel to Debtocracy more than worth the watch. In fact, Catastroika remains a must-see for all those who still care about the future of Europe and our world. As Subcomandante Marcos, spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, wrote in the immediate aftermath of Mexico’s crippling debt crisis of the 1990s, “in the cabaret of globalization, the state appears as a stripper — it strips off all its characteristics until only the bare essential remains: repressive force.” Catastroika is the story of a modern-day stripper.