Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting Neoliberal Europe.

Despite increasing inequality and social deprivation in Europe since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007-8, right-wing parties, such as the French Front National and the German Alternative for Deutschland, have benefited the most in recent elections. Does the electoral failure of the Left indicate that there is no progressive resistance against austerity and neo-liberal restructuring in Europe? Not so say the authors of Beyond Defeat and Austerity: Disrupting (the Critical Political Economy of) Neoliberal Europe. In this blog post Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton provide a critical review of the book and some pointers as to wider debates that it may inform.

Modes of Production and Forms of Exploitation: Understanding Capitalism.

In his remarkable collection of essays Theory As History (Brill Academic Publishers, 2010), Jairus Banaji makes two significant claims about how to conceptualise capitalism and our historical understanding of it. First, capitalism as a mode of production cannot be reduced to the specific form of exploitation around wage labour; and second, understood more broadly, capitalism also needs to include the period of ‘commercial capitalism’, pioneered by Islam in the Mediterranean area as early as the eighth century AD. In this blogpost, I will critically engage with these claims.

Corbyn and the winds of change – politics of the new centre ground

While US President Trump has lent his ears to climate change deniers, huge storms of unknown ferocity have caused widespread havoc in the Caribbean and parts of the USA. In this guest post, Alan Simpson calls for a new economic model that reconnects people to planet and weather to climate. What is required, he argues, is a fundamental rethink of markets, ecosystems, inclusion, security, interdependency and accountability.

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.

Norwegian elections 2017: Another right-wing victory - and a serious Labour defeat.

For many decades post-1945 Norway was governed by the social democratic Labour Party. It was credited with the establishment of the so-called Nordic model, characterised by an expansive welfare state, comparatively high living standards and low inequality within society. And yet, not only did an alliance led by the Labour Party lose general elections in 2013, now four years later it failed to defeat a right-wing government. The Norwegian Labour Party has to prepare itself for a prolonged period in opposition. In this guest post Asbjørn Wahl analyses the underlying dynamics of the recent elections and assesses the opportunities and problems for social democracy in Norway and beyond. 

Feed the world: Can trade liberalisation help to achieve global food security?

Photo by Jason Taellious

Free trade’s expansion into the realm of food and agriculture has given residents of the Global North access to a greater range of food at lower costs than ever before. As with most commodities since free trade was implemented globally during the 1980s and 1990s, food has been globalised. However since the 2008 global financial crisis critiques of this prevailing economic system have become more prominent. The wisdom of free trade economics is being questioned at an unprecedented level, with many seeing it as increasingly evident that the people of the Global South are being exploited for the benefit of those in rich nations. With the financial crisis came a food price crisis, which led to the number of people not receiving adequate nutrition reaching a level not seen in decades, with one in seven people going hungry worldwide.

Paradoxically, more food is being produced than ever, and the burden of hunger is tragically placed in developing countries. In this guest post, Angus Macleod analyses whether this crisis, and general malnourishment in the developing world, can be considered a result of the trade liberalisation policies which dominate global economics, and if so, how viable food sovereignty, the main alternative to this system, can be.

After the elections: Where next for the Labour Party?

Against all odds and predictions, the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell secured a much better result in the general elections on 8 June 2017 than expected. Considering the resulting hung parliament and the Conservative minority government of Theresa May having to rely on the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) as well as Conservative party internal tensions over Brexit negotiations, many observers point to the likelihood of renewed elections in the near future. What does this mean for the Labour Party? In this blog post, I will reflect on the potential labour strategy for the next months and year.