#69 - November 2015
This collection of articles gives an overview of the current state and outlook of the radical left parties and social movements across much of Europe, at a time when the global financial crisis and the resulting sovereign debt crisis...
After 1989, as a result of structural and political upheavals, and major economic transformations, a process of capitalist restoration had severe social repercussions on a global scale. In Europe, anti-capitalist forces found their...
The sociopolitical context of post-2008 Europe is ripe for the revival of the radical left as a viable force against the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and the politics of austerity. Political space on the left has been opened up...
If Europe is for us first of all the name of an unresolved political problem, Greece is one of its centers, not because of the mythical origins of our civilization, symbolized by the Acropolis of Athens, but because of the current...
The crisis of 2008 and the 15 May Movement
In May 2004, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, PSOE) regained power after two years of massive protests against the Iraq...
Recent history
France, together with Italy, is the only West European country in which a Communist party occupied the main political space on the left for several decades. Since the end of the 1970s, however, the...
The small but densely crowded European states of Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg have a long common history, in which they were sometimes united and later separated again. Linguistically, they are divided: 23 million of their...
Introduction and overview
In order to understand the present perspectives of the radical left in Germany today, five main considerations are needed:
a.) a non-sectarian idea of the radical left
b.) a...
Italian Left, European Left
“Syriza, Podemos, venceremos”: it was January 22, 2015, when, at the concluding rally of the electoral campaign, Alexis Tsipras, the leader of SYRIZA who would...
The currently reigning economic model in Portugal is based on accumulation via expropriation. There is no investment. Instead, profit is increased by reducing wages. Wealth is not being created but rather is being destroyed – by closing...
Nordics, historical and present
The Nordic cases2 are interesting for the political left globally, because of the “welfare state” tradition characterized by a relatively equal income distribution, high...
Striking differences appear between the old and the new (post-socialist) EU upon examining the 2014 European Parliament election. If the election had taken place only in the “old EU”, the winner would have been social democracy with 27...
Introduction: What is the Post-Yugoslav ‘new left’?
Seven new states have been formed where Yugoslavia once stood. It is a post-Yugoslav, post-partition, post-conflict, and post...
During the 1990s, Europe saw the emergence of electorally significant radical left parties, drawing from the communist and other left and progressive traditions to form qualitatively new political formations. These parties challenged...
The Irish radical left is an uneasy and somewhat contradictory assemblage of Marxist-republican, Trotskyist, and anarchist thought. This is not purely by choice, of course, but rather a reflection of the history of the island itself....
2008:
January 1: Cyprus and Malta join the Eurozone, bringing the total number of members to fifteen.
February 3: Dimitris Christofias of the Progressive Party of Working People (AKEL)...
Essays
Reflections on Bowling for Columbine (2002) in the wake of the Charleston massacre
When news of the latest white racist gun horror came up from Charleston, South Carolina this past summer, I happened to...
Twenty Years Later
When Ken Saro-Wiwa and his nine Ogoni compatriots were hanged in November 1995, it both polarized and unified the fragile as well as volatile geographical entity known as Nigeria. However, this time,...
Review Essay
Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 585 pp., $29.95.
True crime traffics in the imagined...
Book Reviews
James Green, The Devil Is Here in These Hills: West Virginia Coal Miners and Their Battle for Freedom (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press), 448 pp., $28
Many years ago, while he was a Visiting...
Todd Wolfson, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2014), 248 pp., $30 paper/$90 cloth
Social media, youth activism, global capitalist crisis and the...
Randy Martin, Knowledge LTD, Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 264 pp. paper, $29.95.
In this book Randy Martin brings a most original approach to the...
Shalini Puri, The Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 358 pp., $75
Because of the trauma of the Grenada Revolution, beginning with...
Steve Martinot, The Need to Abolish the Prison System: An Ethical Indictment (Smashwords, 2014), 96 pp., ebook $2.00. Paper copies available @ $4 from the author at PO Box 11842, Berkeley, CA 94712.
In...
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Babak Amini studies sociology at York University (Toronto). His research interests include the history of socialist thought, history of the labor movement, and workers’ self-management....