European Left

A New 1933-39 Moment. No reactions in the West as the Empire Strikes Back. Do they already Control Everything? Original post title: Media, political establishment treat dropping of...

More than four years on, we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from the Republican primaries, but the freakshow anticipated the Trump campaign to come. In Italy the ousting of Berlusconi in a backroom coup in November 2011 and the installation of the ‘unpolitical’ economist Mario Monti as prime minister set the stage for the emergence of Beppe Grillo and Five Star in the local elections of May 2012. In France as the fiscal compact began to bite, François Hollande’s presidency was dead almost before it had started.

To be sure, the union was designed to establish a transnational capitalist bloc capable of competing on the world market. The euro’s adoption moved further in that direction. However, nation-states — in economic competition with one another — created this bloc to begin with. It is therefore insufficient to focus only on capital’s transnationalization; we must

Galbraith’s articles and interviews collected in this book (ending in October 2015) traces his growing exasperation at the “troika” – the European Central Bank (ECB), IMF and EU bureaucracy – which refused to loosen their demand that Greece impoverish its economy to a degree worse than the Great Depression. The fight against Greece was, in a nutshell, a rejection of parliamentary democracy after the incoming Syriza coalition of left-wing parties won election in January 2015 on a platform of resisting austerity and privatization.

The astonishingly draconian steps the party machine has taken to reduce the chance of Corbyn winning are another warning sign. Disenfranchising 130,000 members and purging people left, right and centre — including the general secretary of an affiliated union — is not the behaviour of an establishment that cares about playing fair.

Yanis Varoufakis speaks to DiEM25 Aegina, 22nd July 2016   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyNfj52AVKw Question: What does DiEM 25 mean? YV:  I’ll tell you. For a start we were...

In their thousands they came. Carrying home-made placards, they came. Women pushing prams, their kids in tow, the young, middle-aged and old, black, white, disabled, the old left and the newly awoken; in the pouring rain they came. They filled St George’s Plateau and still they came, until they filled the road and the central reservation and the pavements beyond. 10,000 strong they closed Lime St, stopped traffic, and still they came.

By Michael Löwy The election of Pope Francis obviously created a new climate for the relations between the Church and the European Left. At the...

“It’s barbarism. I see it coming masqueraded under lawless alliances and predetermined enslavements. It may not be about Hitler's furnaces, but about the methodical...

For the first time in a generation Britain will vote on its membership of the European Union, probably in the autumn of 2016. How...