DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
is this the expected capital strike then
Greek elections
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brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
The Guardian has re-hashed a speech Yanis gave in 2013 explaining his 'erratic Marxism'...
Makes for quite an interesting read.
It's starting to enter endgame territory here.
Either the Greeks submit to the terms or else they default on their debts, redenominate their currency from Euros into a new Drachma (Grexit) and presumably put in place severe currency controls to stop the current bank run becoming a catastrophe.
Cue massive recession and emigration from Greece.
It will also put extreme pressure on the EU principle of freedom of movement and the fundamental idea that the EU is permanent - i.e. no one can ever leave.
In this the same sort of endgame as you predicted two and half years ago?
not-bono-ever
meh
Someone has to finance our freedoms innit
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
The conservative left will hate it because of his central argument - that Marxists should be working to save the European capitalist model rather than 'organise' for its replacement. His reasoning - which I share - is that the collapse of European capitalism would not automatically mean its replacement with a more progressive alternative. In fact, given the impotence of the left it is likely that what would replace neo-liberalism would be far more reactionary in formation and outlook.
Also very impressed with his analysis on how the left abandoned the playing field on the concept of 'freedom' allowing capital a free hand to define the entire concept of freedom as indivisible from their economic model (and therefore equating left ideas as the opposite of freedom and statist).
His demonstration of the severe and probably fatal seperation of poltics and economy, and how professed socialists have sometimes captured the former and not the latter and the consequences, is spot on and a ironically has lesson for those currently hyperventilating about the election of Syriza.
Also like - and strongly agree - with the section arguing that for any progressive force wanting to properly win the argument and gain real agency their arguments need to be located within the mainstream's axiom's rather than attempting (and always failing) to promote theories that are outside of this.
Finally, the analysis of Thatcher and the impact on the left and the working class is also well thought out and argued.
Required reading.
gosub
~#
I have sympathy with your posting, as I agree there are major cracks and all the EU has done in recent years is paper over them. But I suspect that is what they will do again; getting a new currency physically in place would take months, bridging loan til then.
just about to post that, with the same comment!
The bit about how when he sailed past all the economy flight passengers while on a paid up trip in business class. I wonder how many Labour politicians think like that these days?
btw, is there a way to save the great article?, too many images for C+P
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brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Yeah, I'd go with a great deal of that; I found the parts on freedom and the limits of political democracy quite refreshing. That said, the central premise that "European capitalism" (whateverthefuckthatis) has to be saved for fear of what might replace is surely the crux of the issue. Seen in a sort of 'world-system' scale, an anti-systemic party working to preserve the system, does not suggest a great confidence in his professed Marxism.
Fits with his first criticism of Marx though.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Well, it would, wouldn't it?
gosub
~#
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/europe/article4358352.ece
Two days before the January general election, as conservatives looked doomed to a defeat, Kostas Vaxevanis, a journalist who caused uproar for exposing thousands of tax cheats, got a late-night tip-off.
The country’s financial crimes police, the SDOE, had begun shredding scores of documents linked to cases of corruption. What remained was stuffed in bin bags and discarded outside the bureau’s headquarters in Athens, in public view.
“I sent my team to pick up the bags,” said Vaxevanis, the editor ofHot Doc, an investigative magazine. “Many of the documents had been destroyed by a shredder but others were just torn in pieces,” he added.
“Those I laid out in the office,” he said, “piecing together what seemed to be the biggest jigsaw puzzle of my life. The picture that quickly came to life was one of corruption and cover-up.”
Vaxevanis said the authorities had discarded case files linked to at least four big businesses, including a prominent hotel chain, under investigation for fraud. The documents included original transcripts from tax audits and testimony from whistleblowers, without whom the prosecution of suspects cannot be pursued.
Greek law forbids SDOE to destroy case files and public records. If required, the national archives can issue an order — but no such decree existed for the files destroyed and strewn on the streets of the capital.
“Confidential documents remain in their bureaus unless they of historic importance,” the General State Archives said in a statement. “There has been no such related request by SDOE.”
Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, said he was investigating the case and is believed to have appointed a prosecutor.
Vaxevanis said: “SDOE was used as a tool by the previous government to pursue its own agenda. It was used either as a pistol, sending tax inspectors to conduct audits against politicians and businesses it wanted to silence or sideline. Or, it used it to cover up illicit financial dealings of its own.”
In its 13-page exposé, H ot Doc exposes attempts by the SDOE before the elections in January to stop a year-long audit of Stavros Papastavrou, a government aide implicated in one of the biggest tax evasion scandals in history.
Mr Papastavrou is an Athens-based barrister who until last month served as the chief financial adviser to Antonis Samaras, then the prime minister. He features prominently on the “Lagarde list” of 2000 suspected tax cheats with accounts at a Geneva branch of HSBC.
He had been under investigation by SDOE since 2013, but in December an official ordered an auditor to “close the file”, according to Hot Doc. “The young employee refused the request, submitting his objections in a memo to his superiors, a move that eventually blocked the closure of the case,” Vaxevanis said.
Neither Mr Papastavrou nor Mr Samaras’s New Democracy party responded to requests for comment.
The revelations follow calls from Syriza, the new government, to crack down on offshore havens and the concealment by wealthy individuals of millions of euros. An official has said that the government expects to bring in €3 billion from its “war on tax evasion” in the first year alone.
Named after Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, the list of 2,059 Greeks including oligarchs, shipowners, artists and politicians was given to Athens by the French authorities in 2010 to help to stem the rampant tax evasion that costs the country more than $20 billion a year.
Successive governments were accused of keeping the list secret until Vaxevanis published it in 2012, embarrassing Greece’s business and political elite. Its publication led to his arrest in one of the most bizarre footnotes to the country’s financial crisis.
Two days before the January general election, as conservatives looked doomed to a defeat, Kostas Vaxevanis, a journalist who caused uproar for exposing thousands of tax cheats, got a late-night tip-off.
The country’s financial crimes police, the SDOE, had begun shredding scores of documents linked to cases of corruption. What remained was stuffed in bin bags and discarded outside the bureau’s headquarters in Athens, in public view.
“I sent my team to pick up the bags,” said Vaxevanis, the editor ofHot Doc, an investigative magazine. “Many of the documents had been destroyed by a shredder but others were just torn in pieces,” he added.
“Those I laid out in the office,” he said, “piecing together what seemed to be the biggest jigsaw puzzle of my life. The picture that quickly came to life was one of corruption and cover-up.”
Vaxevanis said the authorities had discarded case files linked to at least four big businesses, including a prominent hotel chain, under investigation for fraud. The documents included original transcripts from tax audits and testimony from whistleblowers, without whom the prosecution of suspects cannot be pursued.
Greek law forbids SDOE to destroy case files and public records. If required, the national archives can issue an order — but no such decree existed for the files destroyed and strewn on the streets of the capital.
“Confidential documents remain in their bureaus unless they of historic importance,” the General State Archives said in a statement. “There has been no such related request by SDOE.”
Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, said he was investigating the case and is believed to have appointed a prosecutor.
Vaxevanis said: “SDOE was used as a tool by the previous government to pursue its own agenda. It was used either as a pistol, sending tax inspectors to conduct audits against politicians and businesses it wanted to silence or sideline. Or, it used it to cover up illicit financial dealings of its own.”
In its 13-page exposé, H ot Doc exposes attempts by the SDOE before the elections in January to stop a year-long audit of Stavros Papastavrou, a government aide implicated in one of the biggest tax evasion scandals in history.
Mr Papastavrou is an Athens-based barrister who until last month served as the chief financial adviser to Antonis Samaras, then the prime minister. He features prominently on the “Lagarde list” of 2000 suspected tax cheats with accounts at a Geneva branch of HSBC.
He had been under investigation by SDOE since 2013, but in December an official ordered an auditor to “close the file”, according to Hot Doc. “The young employee refused the request, submitting his objections in a memo to his superiors, a move that eventually blocked the closure of the case,” Vaxevanis said.
Neither Mr Papastavrou nor Mr Samaras’s New Democracy party responded to requests for comment.
The revelations follow calls from Syriza, the new government, to crack down on offshore havens and the concealment by wealthy individuals of millions of euros. An official has said that the government expects to bring in €3 billion from its “war on tax evasion” in the first year alone.
Named after Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, the list of 2,059 Greeks including oligarchs, shipowners, artists and politicians was given to Athens by the French authorities in 2010 to help to stem the rampant tax evasion that costs the country more than $20 billion a year.
Successive governments were accused of keeping the list secret until Vaxevanis published it in 2012, embarrassing Greece’s business and political elite. Its publication led to his arrest in one of the most bizarre footnotes to the country’s financial crisis.
War is hell and I understand his call for pragmatism.
He reminds me of that quote from Walter Benjamin, "Behind every Fascism there is a failed revolution."
Isis is the failure of the secular left in the Arab Spring.
The liberal bourgeoise state will side with the fascists rather than lose their titles and privileges as they did in Spain, Italy and Germany.
It's almost like he predicts Syriza's coalition with the Independent Greeks.
"A spectre is haunting Europe" and it doesn't look or feel like Communism.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
But, faced with systemic collapse, is pragmatism born of fear the best we can hope for from an anti-systemic party? The system cannot work...so...we must preserve the system at all costs?
I loathe selective quotation.
Many people have used it on this board to parcel my arguments into smaller elements that they can attack more easily and more vigorously while disingenously ignoring the wider points made. It's a strange way to advance ideas - a process of elision and synecdoche that makes your counter-party all the more rigidly exposed in a lamentably mendacious fashion.
However, this quotation above is worth highlighting in isolation because it is replete with so much failure.
Failure to attempt to understand local circumstances, failure to understand that the left-right dichotomy is not the only way to view the world, and the failure to understand, ultimately, that the horrors of the far abroad are not linked to one's own "struggle" in any meaningful way whatsoever and that there is an independent logic to them, as there is an independent logic to any nation state, geographical region or general grouping.
Deep down it is an egotistical error.
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I think he's making an argument for reformism in the article.
We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Smash capitalism first.
Smells like a sell- out to me...
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Well...maybe, but it's certainly odd to see someone speaking like this in 2013, entering into a position of power within representative democracy, dedicated to preserving capitalism at all costs.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Broken links
Good article that. Does Immanuel Wallerstein say how he'd like to replace the current broken system?
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
I have heard Wallerstein speak at the LSE, but I've not read enough of his academic output to say for sure how normative his work has been. Though it is true to say that the question of what might replace capitalism is one of the research areas that world-system theorists have concerned themselves with.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Did I say that?
No. Phildwyer did.
Wow. Am genuinely surprised this morning's 6 month loan extension request has been rejected. V.v. high stakes stuff now.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31532755
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-31532755
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Tomorrow will therefore show if the Eurogroup has any meaning beyond Merk's will.
