Fighting for Water book launch: Recording and Responses to questions.

In my new book Fighting for Water: Resisting Privatization in Europe (Zed Books), I am investigating the underlying dynamics of the successful struggles against water privatization around the Italian referendum in 2011, the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Water and Sanitation are a Human Right’ in 2012/2013, the ongoing struggles against water privatization in Greece as well as the struggles against water charges in Ireland between 2014 and 2016. The online book launch hosted by the Fives Leaves Bookshop in Nottingham, UK on 7 July generated several interesting questions. In this blog post, there is first a link to the recording of the book launch, before I will address these questions.

The day the EU lost its moral authority

The pictures could have been hardly more dramatic on 2 March 2020. Syrian refugees in a fragile boat in open sea are desperate for help and yet they are greeted with canon fire by a hostile Greek coastguard. The day fire was opened on vulnerable people on the EU’s border is the day, the European project lost its moral authority. How did it happen that a project established to overcome war between European countries had lost its moral compass to such an extent?

Crisis in the Eurozone: the illusion of development?

Post-Keynesians have delivered an important advance in providing explanations of the Eurozone Crisis, not the least in demonstrating how the formation of the European integration project lacked the means to manage effectively the macroeconomic imbalances between ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ spaces across the region. In our recent article ‘EU aggregate demand as a way out of crisis?’, published in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Jamie Jordan, Adam David Morton and I provide a critical engagement with such descriptions. We argue that it is necessary to focus on the uneven and combined development of Europe’s ‘peripheral’ spaces and here in particular their integration into an expanded free trade regime since the 1980s in order to get a better understanding of the roots of the current crisis.

Photo by Chris Goldberg

Wellsprings of resistance – struggles over water in Europe

The question of who controls water and for what purpose makes water inherently political. Whether it’s water sources, water production such as desalination plants and waste treatment, or water services, private industry and financial markets are approaching water as the “it” commodity of the coming decade. Water grabbing is a form of accumulation by dispossession. Risk is shifted from private investors to the public whilst profits are siphoned off in the opposite direction. In this guest post, Madelaine Moore draws on her recent Rosa Luxemburg publication Wellsprings of Resistance.

What's wrong with post-Keynesian accounts of the Eurozone crisis?

Photo by UggBoy - Ugg Girl

There is general agreement that the Eurozone crisis has had a devastating impact on countries in Europe’s periphery, especially in the south. This is expressed in record levels of unemployment, social inequality and widespread social deprivation. However, there is little agreement amongst academic accounts on the causes of the crisis, nor on how this can be resolved. In this guest post, Jamie Jordan reports on the recently published article in the Journal of Common Market Studies, co-authored by him, Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton. The article ‘EU aggregate demand as a way out of crisis?’ critically engages post-Keynesian accounts on both the economic causes of the crisis and the political possibilities for realising a European-wide recovery.

A Crisis of Crisis Management Continues in Greece: “Sudden Death for the Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko? We Say No!”

Over a period of eight years and three programmes of financial assistance Greece has never been far from the news. Recent reporting has become more positive in outlook, dominated by discussion about whether the Syriza-led coalition government will be able to make a clean exit from its third ‘Economic Adjustment Programme’. A clean exit would mean the Greek government being able to finance spending commitments and its enormous public debt through bond markets, without any further loans from European partners or even a pre-cautionary line of credit from the IMF. Greece’s ability to go it alone after 20^th August (although with regular ‘post-programme surveillance’ as the likes of Ireland and Portugal have experienced) relies on perceptions from its creditors and financial markets about the government’s ongoing commitment to the types of austerity and so-called ‘structural reforms’ that have dominated all three programmes. In this guest post, Jamie Jordan assesses the implications of Greece going it alone with a particular focus on the future of the Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko.

           

Resisting water privatisation in Greece and Portugal

In response to the Eurozone crisis, austerity and restructuring has been imposed on the European Union’s (EU) peripheral member states in order to receive financial bailout loans. And yet, workers have not simply accepted these restructuring pressures. They have organised and fought back against austerity and enforced privatisation. In the article ‘Commodification and “the commons”: The politics of privatising public water in Greece and Portugal during the Eurozone Crisis’, published in the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR) and freely available at Nottingham eprints, Jamie Jordan and I comparatively assess the struggles against enforced water privatisation in Greece and Portugal set against the background of the structuring conditions surrounding the Eurozone crisis.

Greek Solidarity Co-ops: disruption of austerity beyond the electoral terrain.

Thursday, 11 May 2017, George Kokkinidis, Leicester University, gave a seminar in the Nottingham Sumac Centre on the objectives and principles of Greek Solidarity Co-ops in the ongoing crisis. While Greece was bullied into accepting the restructuring demands by the European Union (EU) in the summer of 2015, George made clear that resistance and the search for alternatives on the ground is alive and well today. In this blog post, I will draw on George’s presentation in an assessment of the state of the Left and ongoing possibilities of resistance.

Mobilising through Solidarity: the social clinic in Drama and the refugee crisis.

While the Syriza government had to submit to the dictate of the European Union in July 2015, the concrete resistance against austerity has continued unabated on the ground in Greece. In this blog post I will discuss the experiences of the social clinic Solidarity Community Clinic – Pharmacy of Drama (KIFA) in Drama and its recent efforts at helping refugees living in a camp close to town. I will draw on experiences and discussions with activists from a recent visit to this city in Northern Greece.

Working for an Alternative Economic Policy in Europe: the EuroMemo Group meeting in Roskilde.

Further austerity imposed, democracy attacked – the third bailout of Greece in July 2015 has demonstrated the brutal face of neo-liberalism in Europe. Refugees in need at the doors of Europe and the governments of the European Union (EU) member states are squabbling over the allocation of small numbers of refugees across the EU, numbers which the comparatively wealthy EU should easily be able to accommodate. These events provided the dramatic background to this year’s EuroMemo Group’s conference Addressing Europe’s Multiple Crises: An agenda for economic transformation, solidarity and democracy, held at Roskilde University/Denmark, 24 to 26 September. In this blog post, I will make some personal observations.

Greece, the Eurozone crisis and the end of European solidarity?

Image by Wikimedia Commons

After five years of imposed austerity, the Greek economy is on its knees. GDP has declined by 25 per cent, unemployment is at 26 per cent with youth unemployment above 50 per cent. And yet, all the EU has got on offer for Greece is yet more austerity in exchange for a third bailout agreement (BBC, 13 July 2015). Pension reform will be part of the deal agreed at the marathon meeting of eurozone leaders on July 12, as is further privatisation and labour market liberalisation. EU agents will be given oversight of Greek government spending, including a new independent fund that will monetise €50bn in state assets to repay debts.

There is no sign of European solidarity in this deal. It is a punishment handed down to Greece for daring to say no to austerity. The EU was established on the principles of cooperation and mutual support – and many are now wondering what has happened to those aspirations. But solidarity fell by the wayside some time ago in Europe. This is just the most recent example of how European integration today is about profit maximisation for capital – not about cooperation between European people.

Austerity and Resistance – Greece in the Eurozone crisis.

Concerns over Greece’s ability to pay back its debt continue unabated, with another crisis meeting of Eurozone finance ministers having taken place in Brussels on Monday, 11 May. While the media focuses on Greece’s ability to meet the conditions by the European Union, in this post Jamie Jordan and I have another look at some of the key underlying dynamics of the crisis.

Greece at the ballot box – How should the European left show solidarity?

On Sunday, 25 January the Greek people are voting for a new parliament. According to opinion polls, this time the left party Syriza may win the elections (BBC, 22 January 2015). In view of the heavy pressure put on Greece by financial markets, the European Commission as well as European Central Bank, people of the European left are calling for solidarity. Support is needed especially should Syriza form the next government and demand from the European Union (EU) a re-negotiation of the terms of its bailout package. In this blog post, I will reflect on what form these solidarity actions may take.

The struggle against water privatisation: Victory for Greek union and social movements.

Proposals to privatise the water company in Thessaloniki/Greece were overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum on 18 May 2014 with 98 per cent of votes against. In this guest post, his third contribution focusing on the privatisation of water, EPSU's Jan Willem Goudriaan gives an update of the struggle of Greek workers against the austerity policies imposed upon them.

Resisting austerity in Greece: The Thessaloniki water referendum.

In this guest post, written on request, Jan Willem Goudriaan, Deputy General Secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), updates the experience with the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) on the Human Right to Water. Based on a discussion of the struggles over water privatisation in Thessaloniki/Greece, he assesses how the ECI has been linked with local struggles and demands for an alternative Europe (for the earlier post see European Citizens’ Initiative on Water and the alternative to Austerity Europe).

Crucible of Resistance: Class struggle over ways out of the crisis.

Many commentators make Greece and other peripheral EU members responsible for the sovereign debt crisis. People in these countries would have lived above their means and it was only right that they should tighten their belts now, the argument goes. Having postponed the necessary restructuring for too long, austerity would be the only solution to enforce liberalization and deregulation from the outside. In their impressive book Crucible of Resistance: Greece, the Eurozone and the World EconomicCrisis (Pluto Press, 2013), Christos Laskos and Euclid Tsakalotos challenge these understandings and reveal the class dynamics underlying the crisis. In this blog post, I will provide a critical review of this book including also a discussion of potential ways out of the crisis. I will argue, in contrast to Laskos and Tsakalotos, that successful resistance may well start at the Greek, national level rather than the European level.  

Resistance to neo-liberal restructuring in Germany: the case of Stuttgart 21!

Chancellor Angela Merkel seems to be unopposed in Germany at the moment. Her incorrect story about the Eurozone crisis along the lines of "Germany did it best" rather than "Germany wins at the expense of others" puts her above criticism within the German domestic context. In this guest post, Werner Sauerborn reflects on the situation of left-wing policies and trade unions in Germany with a specific focus on the conflict around Stuttgart 21, the planned new railway station for this city in the South-West of the country. 

The Privatisation and Internationalisation of Public Services in a Time of Austerity

Why is austerity the dominant response to the global financial crisis and how can it be resisted? How is privatisation affecting sectors such as health services and education? These and related questions were discussed at the workshop A Political Economy of the Privatisation and Internationalisation of Public Services in a Time of Austerity, held in the Business School of the University of Hertfordshire on 1 and 2 March 2013. In this post, I will draw on some of the themes discussed at this workshop.

The Greek Left and the Rise of the Neo-Fascist Golden Dawn

The imposition of austerity on Greece by the troika of EU, European Central Bank and IMF has resulted in enormous social hardship and societal conflict. The rise of the fascist party Golden Dawn in Greece is one of the most worrying phenomena in this respect. In this guest post, the Greek social scientist Panagiotis Sotiris looks at the underlying causes of the party's increasing popularity and discusses the challenges for the Greek left in resisting and combating fascism.

European Citizens’ Initiative on Water and the alternative to Austerity Europe

In this guest post, written on request, Jan Willem Goudriaan, Deputy General Secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), explains how the European Citizens Initiative (ECI) on the Human Right to Water is part of a broader struggle for change and alternatives to the current policies of the European Commission and most governments.