First edition: October 2022. The year 2022 – a hundred years after the Smyrna catastrophe – is certainly a significant year. This book, with the help of the dialectical logical method, attempts a broader reflection on the hows and whys of social existence and the contradictions of the wider modern Greek space.

The current data dramatically highlight the relevance of these questions, as once again imperialist ties lead the country down a path that will only burden the Greek people with suffering. The difficult genesis of Greek capitalism and its peculiarities are at the center of this work.

The war and the defeat in Asia Minor created the conditions for the transformation and qualitative change of a society with pre-capitalist characteristics into capitalistic Greece of the interwar period. Everything happened in their own unique way; the expropriation of producers, through the relentless violence of war, manifests in the faces of the homeless and destitute refugees arriving in Greece, the creation of the working class and a large reserve army of labor, the community capital, and later the foreign Western capital transform modern Greek society during the interwar period.

The continuation of all this is today’s suffering – economic crisis, political absurdity, cultural insignificance. If all this is to change, it is first and foremost necessary that we learn. And to learn, it is not enough just to draw back the veil of “national triumphs” in front of us. This is essential; however, before anything else, the dialectical logical method of research and study of this critical twenty-year period is necessary, otherwise we will get lost in the labyrinth of historicism.

To raise once again – and in the correct way – the questions in a discussion in which many significant issues remain open, this is the aim of this study.