


































Dreams of wealth: finance and dystopia on the European periphery

Review by Tringa Bytyqi

FABIO MATTIOLI. 2020. Dark Finance: Illiquidity and Authoritarianism at the Margins of 

Europe. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503611658

Keywords: financialization; European periphery; authoritarianism; illiquidity; economy of 
predation.

Dark Finance explores processes of financial expansion in North Macedonia, materialized by 

Skopje 2014, the ten-year urban growth plan centered on the capital city and Nikola Gruevski’s 

authoritarian government (the country’s prime minister from 2006 to 2016 – exiled since 2018). 

The book isn’t on hedge funds, credit schemes, or stock exchanges; it’s about the generative 

force of financialization, seen as a social process involving relationships, imaginations and 

aspirations alongside desperate struggles to make ends meet.

In North Macedonia, even if the investment in construction was considered unwise because of

the 2008 global financial crisis, European financial institutions were seduced by  Skopje 2014.

Specifically, investors were attracted by the expectation that their peers would be investing too.

By implementing austerity politics (53, 69), North Macedonia became worthy of European loans

aimed at strengthening the country’s infrastructure (71). To North Macedonian oligarchs, Skopje

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2014 brought symbolic legitimacy and a means to launder money. To Skopjans, it offered a place

on the world map along with a new historic narrative ethnically purged of Ottoman, Muslim, and

Albanian influences (21-22). Gradually, it came to embody the invincible, omnipotent Gruevski

government (41), the rampant inequalities and the obscure process of financial expansion (21).

Drawing on rich ethnographic, historical, and economic data, including an extended period of

participant  observation with Construx (pseudonym),  a  middle-sized Macedonian construction

firm in financial trouble, Mattioli examines different layers of the financial expansion and its

effects. The author argues persuasively that to grasp the essence of the country’s regime, we must

analyze its ability to access and manage financialization (Chapter 1 and 2) alongside structures

that shape people’s actions and imaginations (Chapter 3-5).

Mattioli  places  Skopje’s  spectacular  urban  enlargement  partly  within  the  continuity  of

Yugoslavia’s economic fictions (Chapter 1). Once a pride of the country, construction businesses

came to symbolize its downfall.  Unable to compete with their  Eastern European rivals (27),

North Macedonian construction businesses bankrupted, which in turn created an opportunity for

Gruevski to seize power.  Between 2006 and 2015, several  global companies  also seized the

opportunity (60) offered by the newly elected prime minister: cheap labor (52; 60) and tax breaks

(60). As a result, a rentier landscape (Chapter 2) emerged, where businessmen and administrators

from North Macedonia and the EU tried to use their geopolitical positions to capture wealth and

symbolic capital (54). Following the economic crisis in southern European countries (53-62),

male entrepreneurs, namely Italians, came to North Macedonia (53-56) with hopes of earning a

living  and  a  chance  to  affirm  their  masculinity  (57).  These  small  entrepreneurs  rapidly

understood that only European contractors with higher social and economic connections in the

EU could gain from the financial expansion (53, 65-66) – more than North Macedonia’s own

businesses (72). Hence, Gruevski encouraged the latter to transform their unequal partnerships

and subordination into profit (67-71). 



Only companies with connections  to  the  regime (88)  had access to  loans from international

financial  organizations.  Constant  cash-flow  problems  (80)  resulted  in  an  illiquidity  crisis

(Chapter 3) and thus forced North Macedonia’s businesses to rely upon in-kind payments known

as  kompenzacija (78),  a  form  of  barter.  Since  1945,  in-kind  exchanges  were  a  part  of

international  trade  in  socialist  countries  (82-83)  and  played  an  important  role  in  domestic

economies (83-86). Being paid in kompenzacija resulted in things that a person had to resell to

earn  cash  (80).  Unable  to  access  capital,  in  the  2000s  construction  companies  used

kompenzacija:  they  fired  or  hired  workers  illegally;  they  promised  them  future  pay;  they

provided them just enough money to survive (89-92). These practices evolved into forced and

increasingly  exploitative  credit  relationships  (80,  96-97),  whose  devastating  effects  on  male

construction workers are chronicled in Chapter 4. In Construx, Mattioli tells us, male directors

were “barricading themselves in their offices” or using administrative excuses so that they didn’t

have  to  talk  about  money  with  their  employees.  As  the  financial  crises  deepened,  workers

became suspicious of one another and slowly eroded any chance of solidarity between them

while simultaneously preventing them from organizing against their employer (142-145).

Gender paradoxes in workplaces of the construction businesses (Chapter 5) illustrate another

aspect  of  the  generative  forces  of  financialization.  The devaluation of  the  male  construction

workers – symbolized by their harsh economic situation while surrounded by wealth (Chapter 3

and 4)  –  worked to  wear  away their  social  identities  (138).  For  most  construction  workers,

financial expansion engendered a crisis of masculinity. Furthermore, their role of breadwinners

was challenged by female colleagues who gained access to prominent jobs, namely in the offices

of  similar  construction  companies.  At  the  same  time,  women  often  worked  to  ensure  that

construction workers received some material recompense for their work and generally supported

the idea of the construction business as a male-dominated space.  

Central  to  the  author’s  arguments  is  that  financial  expansion is  undeniably  empowered and

limited by its cultural specificity (Chapters 1-3). Nonetheless, the sole aim of financial capital is

to produce more capital, most of the time by destroying industrial capital (Guilhot 2006). With

Dark Finance, Mattioli manages successfully to articulate the global, the local and the intimate

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in peripheral European contexts. It is easy to agree with the author that studying the world of

finance in  western  countries  does  not  help us  understand how financial  expansion works in

peripheral places. However, several of its effects analyzed in  Dark Finance, namely the slow

social death and the devaluation of the social worth of construction workers, is also observed in

other western countries (Pinçon and Pinçon-Charlot 2014; Guilhot 2006), bringing attention to

larger patterns observable in such processes. Overall, Dark Finance is a riveting study aided by

comprehensive  ethnographic  observations.  This  book would  be  useful  to  those  interested  in

economic  anthropology,  European  anthropology,  the  study  of  labor  and  processes  of

finacialization.  

Works Cited

Pinçon Michel,  and Monique Pinçon-Charlot, 2014.  La violence des riches: chronique d’une

immense casse sociale, Paris: La Découverte.

Bruder, Jessica, 2017.  Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,  New York:

W.W. Norton & Company.

Guilhot Nicolas, 2006. Finaciers, philanthropes: sociologie de Wall Street, Paris: Raisons d’agir. 

Tringa Bytyqi is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Montréal, in Canada. Her

research  focuses  on  the  social  change  in  Kosovo and the  role  of  foreign  private  secondary

schools in social reproduction.

© 2022 Tringa Bytyqi


