Greek elections

[co-op]

I'm wondering if there's any mileage to be got out of looking at this via the idea of 'legitmation crisis' concept. Briefly, via habermas + gramsci, modern democratic states are ran around the principles of authority rather than (open imposition) of power, authority is the acceptance of power as legitimate. In the classical sense the idea applied to states, but here i think we have something interesting taking place - namely, the state retaining it's authority but wider bodies losing theirs and being forced back into power.

Within the states based theory that Habermas came up with society (note, not the state) had a number of adaptive, learning mechanisms that could be used to return legitimacy to the state if the state responded adequately (He actually says that the states reaction to this is one way that social progress is made, that it can elevate social organisation to higher level though collective debate and action) - but there simply is no such european society to drive these processes, there is only power. The EU (and the IMF) have no access to the authority-producing stablisation mechanisms that states may develop - and those states that failed to develop them ended up in real crisis, that actually often passed into insurrectionary or revolutionary periods. (Often over many years, see the long Spanish 20s and 30s).

i think a lot of this - if relevant - will be lost in the pared down economic debate. The splitting of the political and economic.

For what it's worth, on an anecdotal level I find this completely right; I have had many conversations in the past weeks with people who are clearly uneasy about being "anti-european", ie anti-EU, (or were even previously very pro-EU) but who are equally shocked and dismayed by what the EU is up to with Greece. For me, it's been a real platform to put forward anti-EU ideas without getting sucked into the tedious side-bollocks about UKIP/racism/NAFTA/whatever etc.

For me this whole episode is destroying any last vestige of the idea that there is a social democratic core to the EU project any more, and doing so very effectively.

It's interesting that the IMF have split so early from the troika's position that TINA. They may be more aware of their inability to manufacture credible political/social authority and of their need to maintain at least a semblance of economic/technocratic authority (ie "it [the troika's plan] isn't working").

 

[Athos]

That's not a point, nor is it a reasoned argument.

It is, however, an insult, which remarkably, given your intrinsically supercilious nature, you are not very good at articulating in an even remotely entertaining fashion.

It's a bit like being a dunce while trying to act the fool.

It's not an insult; nor is it an argument. It's a statement of fact. It is clear to me that you have no idea what you're talking about, given the grossly disproportionate importance you seem to attach to Varoufakis' negotiating style as opposed to the far more significant underlying interests.

Please don't start the 'I'm cleverer than you' routine. Not only do you always come off worse, but, also (and more importantly), this is a great thread, and nobody wants you to shit all over it.

 

[Diamond]

Beaten to it by KT.

By the way Diamond, contra what you say, this *is* a zero-sum game. The better the Greeks do, the worse the creditors do, it's almost definitionally zero-sum. Why get into Game Theory language and arguments when you don't know much about them?

The only non zero solution to this impasse was for the IMF to do what it was originally set up to do and provide liquidity to an economy that is crashing in order to allow it to start growing again. Then it could possibly pay off its debts, everyone's a winner. But this method is predicated on having a currency that can devalue so leaving the euro is aa sine qua non of this route.

Are economies zero-sum games?

 

[Diamond]

It's not an insult; nor is it an argument. It's a statement of fact. It is clear to me that you have no idea what you're talking about, given the grossly disproportionate importance you seem to attach to Varoufakis' negotiating style as opposed to the far more significant underlying interests.

Please don't start the 'I'm cleverer than you' routine. Not only do you always come off worse, but, also (and more importantly), this is a great thread, and nobody wants you to shit all over it.

Remarkably sharp and neat demonstration of you wrapping up an accusation within the very same attempt to get over the goal line.

 

[DotCommunist]

WOW!

is this your first encounter with downwarddog on a wind up then

 

[Athos]

For what it's worth, on an anecdotal level I find this completely right; I have had many conversations in the past weeks with people who are clearly uneasy about being "anti-european", ie anti-EU, (or were even previously very pro-EU) but who are equally shocked and dismayed by what the EU is up to with Greece. For me, it's been a real platform to put forward anti-EU ideas without getting sucked into the tedious side-bollocks about UKIP/racism/NAFTA/whatever etc.

For me this whole episode is destroying any last vestige of the idea that there is a social democratic core to the EU project any more, and doing so very effectively.

It's interesting that the IMF have split so early from the troika's position that TINA. They may be more aware of their inability to manufacture credible political/social authority and of their need to maintain at least a semblance of economic/technocratic authority (ie "it [the troika's plan] isn't working").

I guess those whose interests are served by a system which facilitates continent-wide capitalism have been very successful (at least in this country) in portraying anyone who resists the shift in power further and further away from the people from whom it is said to derive (and increasingly towards unelected technocrats) as right-wing bigots (e.g. UKIP).

 

[Athos]

is this your first encounter with downwarddog on a wind up then

No, but I was still taken aback!

 

[co-op]

Are economies zero-sum games?

What do *you* think?

 

[Athos]

Edited.

 

[MochaSoul]

Will you guys please, please, please listen to

Just don't respond to him. Any of us. It works, if you hold the line.

and stop responding?
Athos, we know. Please?

 

[belboid]

Euclids appointment is a sign Syriza will compromise - http://www.ids.ac.uk/opinion/new-finance-minister-signals-tsipras-willingness-to-reach-compromise

 

[MochaSoul]

Edited.

LOL. I know what you did there.

 

[co-op]

I guess those whose interests are served by a system which facilitates continent-wide capitalism have been very successful (at least in this country) in portraying anyone who resists the shift in power further and further away from the people from whom it is said to derive (and increasingly towards unelected technocrats) as right-wing bigots (e.g. UKIP).

Yes I meet many supporters of a 'soft' pro EU position who are clinging to an idea that there is a social democratic basis to the EU - and they might be historically right about that - and so they are going to vote for the EU even though it is now obviously a juggernaut of neo-liberalism. The extra layer of irony is that Cameron is going to trot off to Brussels, "re-negotiate" the EU into an even more neo-liberal body and the soft-pro-EU-ers will still vote for it, and Cameron will tell everyone that he had to make the EU more right wing because that's what the common herd are demanding.

How anyone left of centre can vote for this bollocks is quite beyond me.

 

[Athos]

Will you guys please, please, please listen to



and stop responding?
Athos, we know. Please?

I'll try!

 

[pocketscience]

news reporting that Euclid has turned up to the summit in Brussels today without the "new concrete proposals" the Eurogroup demanded...
Markets have tanked on news...

Plus, at his first meeting he's managed to make a schoolboy error and leaked a game of naughts and crosses he had with Yanis in the hotel room last night:

Loving the lack of ironing on Euclids atire

 

[Belushi]

For what it's worth, on an anecdotal level I find this completely right; I have had many conversations in the past weeks with people who are clearly uneasy about being "anti-european", ie anti-EU, (or were even previously very pro-EU) but who are equally shocked and dismayed by what the EU is up to with Greece.

I was surprised the other day at a very pro-EU friend (who even worked in Brussels at one time) saying on facebook that he no longer knows how he'll vote in the referendum.

 

[Belushi]

news reporting that Euclid has turned up to the summit in Brussels today without the "new concrete proposals" the Eurogroup demanded...
Markets have tanked on news...

Plus, at his first meeting he's managed to make a schoolboy error and leaked a game of naughts and crosses he had with Yanis in the hotel room last night:

Loving the lack of ironing on Euclids atire

WTF is that jacket he's wearing? Even I'd make more effort if I'd just been appointed Finance Minister

 

[MochaSoul]

I read this yesterday and thought "It's about time!"

Today's referendum reflects how Syriza has started to re-introduce the notion of participatory democracy to Europe. The question of who is on the executive committee becomes less important when the public actively makes the decisions which affect it. Bakunin would have heartily approved. Marx would have been as baffled as the eurozone finance ministers who've spluttered with outrage since Alexis Tsipras announced the referendum.

This week has finally seen this lesson start to be internalised by the left. It has done more to further the eurosceptic cause than anything Ukip has ever done. The debate has shifted from the right-wing critique of Europe – immigration, market interference – to the left-wing one, which is of German fiscal extremism applied to powerless local communities.

Right-wing euroscepticism needs no encouragement. The shrill little Englander hysteria of the right has done a lot to prevent left-wingers recognising the dangers of the European project. They see the Farages of the world and instinctively adopt the other position. Quite apart from economics, this was a failure of vision. The left listened to Marx much more than it ever did to Bakunin. It was unable to recognise how the structure of power would affect the way that power is used.

ETA the quote

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/201...il&utm_term=0_cb6d3a8c9c-6a990e4d39-180968257

 

[Diamond]

What do *you* think?

No I do not think that economies are zero-sum games.

My belief, strange as it may seem to you, is that over time economies can and usually do grow to the material benefit of all of their members.

A few mundane game changers from the last century - refrigeration, vacuum cleaners, and telephones.

 

[Diamond]

If we're talking about big picture stuff though, the issue is surely that you have a bunch of national democratic mandates within a supranational body pulling in different directions, no?

 

[killer b]

I'll try!

There's a board feature that can help you with that.

 

[CNT36]

Yesterday SpookyFrank posted a link to a translation of an interesting interview with Piketty in Der Zeit. The version at that original link seems to have been removed for copyright infringement. However the whole thing has been reposted here :

The Greek representative signs the 1953 Agreement.






(...)

(...)

Just don't read the comments.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

If we're talking about big picture stuff though, the issue is surely that you have a bunch of national democratic mandates within a supranational body pulling in different directions, no?

Is that the big picture you see? Only trouble is it's inaccurate; what are the national democratic mandates relating to Greece...apart from the Greeks own referendum? And it's really not that big; what is being articulated in the referendum vote and the talk of the EU finance ministers and the ECB?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[Athos]

There's a board feature that can help you with that.

Yeah, but, sometimes it's important to correct him e.g. poor legal advice to board members. Which is why I don't use 'ignore'. But that inevitably raises the temptation to challenge other obvious bullshit. For instance, it's not easy to give the nonsense in post#2629 a free pass!

 

[Patteran]

I'm wondering if there's any mileage to be got out of looking at this via the idea of 'legitmation crisis' concept. Briefly, via habermas + gramsci, modern democratic states are ran around the principles of authority rather than (open imposition) of power, authority is the acceptance of power as legitimate. In the classical sense the idea applied to states, but here i think we have something interesting taking place - namely, the state retaining it's authority but wider bodies losing theirs and being forced back into power.

Within the states based theory that Habermas came up with society (note, not the state) had a number of adaptive, learning mechanisms that could be used to return legitimacy to the state if the state responded adequately (He actually says that the states reaction to this is one way that social progress is made, that it can elevate social organisation to higher level though collective debate and action) - but there simply is no such european society to drive these processes, there is only power. The EU (and the IMF) have no access to the authority-producing stablisation mechanisms that states may develop - and those states that failed to develop them ended up in real crisis, that actually often passed into insurrectionary or revolutionary periods. (Often over many years, see the long Spanish 20s and 30s).

i think a lot of this - if relevant - will be lost in the pared down economic debate. The splitting of the political and economic.

I haven't read Habermas, I read some Berger this year. Are there parallels - authority comes from perceived objectivity, acquired through habitualisation, & these European financial institutions, separated from traditional political bodies, don't have the historicity of a link to society & consequently lack crucial parts of that process? Haven't been sufficiently institutionalised?

 

[Diamond]

Is that the big picture you see? Only trouble is it's inaccurate; what are the national democratic mandates relating to Greece...apart from the Greeks own referendum? And it's really not that big; what is being articulated in the referendum vote and the talk of the EU finance ministers and the ECB?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.

They all share the same currency with Greece so what the Greeks try and do economically directly relates to them.

Those are the democratic mandates that within the eurozone tend to or may pull in different directions.

 

[Diamond]

Yeah, but, sometimes it's important to correct him e.g. poor legal advice to board members. Which is why I don't use 'ignore'. But that inevitably raises the temptation to challenge other obvious bullshit. For instance, it's not easy to give the nonsense in post#2629 a free pass!

But you haven't actually done that, have you?

Earlier on you accused me of grandstanding, saying something like "I'm cleverer than you".

But are you not doing exactly that above in your typically pompous style?

As far as I can see, you have an aversion to substance, which would appear to be characteristic.

 

[Pickman's model]

But you haven't actually done that, have you?

Earlier on you accused me of grandstanding, saying something like "I'm cleverer than you".

But are you not doing exactly that above in your typically pompous style?

As far as I can see, you have an aversion to substance, which would appear to be characteristic.

oh do shut up you tedious little man

 

[Pickman's model]

oh: & Diamond, Athos is cleverer than you

 

[Athos]

I haven't read Habermas, I read some Berger this year. Are there parallels - authority comes from perceived objectivity, acquired through habitualisation, & these European financial institutions, separated from traditional political bodies, don't have the historicity of a link to society & consequently lack crucial parts of that process? Haven't been sufficiently institutionalised?

Is it just habitualisation, though? Isn't legitimacy derived, at least in part, from sense of commonality? And, since there isn't a society of people who feel, first and foremost that they are European, then any 'state' which purports to pertain to that group is correspondingly weak in authority, notwithstanding that it may have power over a wider group.