real utopias

Green Left Weekly Protestors occupy office of 'minister for coal' Green Left Weekly Protesters occupied environment minister Greg Hunt's office in Melbourne on October 30, in protest at his re-approval of Australia's largest new mega coalmine — the...

Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian-born economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticizing neoclassical economics as ...

It is now sometimes hard to remember -- and for the generation that is now in college and wasn't necessarily reading the opinion pages at the time, it may seem nothing short of perverse -- but there was a period following the onset of the crisis...

In Spain, the government’s economic austerity policies have contributed to an unemployment rate of 23 percent, mass home foreclosures and evictions and a deep distrust of an entrenched political class. It has also inspired the rise of a new generation of leftist politicians who are shaking up Spain’s political landscape.

Under austerity/immiseration capitalism, Europe is witnessing its deepest economic and social crisis since the Second World War. In 2012, more people lost their jobs than in any other year in the last two decades. The situation is particularly severe in southern and eastern European countries. For example, in Greece and Spain, one person in four is officially unemployed, with over half of young people without work (Schwarz, 2013). As Peter Schwarz (2013) puts it:

Austerity has been the main battle cry on the part of the forces of capital. New cuts in public spending, new cuts in pensions, new cuts in social expenditure, mass lay-offs of public sector workers, all in the name of dealing with increased budget deficits and increased debt-burden. This was intensified after the eruption of the global capitalist crisis in 2007-08. All over the world, political and economic elites along with media pundits have been singling out public spending as the main obstacle to economic recovery. Deficit reductions have become the point of condensation of political conflicts and party rivalries. The call for budget cuts and deficit reductions has been accompanied by new calls for abolishing whatever has been left of labour rights. In all advanced capitalist societies, we can hear the same battle cry against the supposed ‘rigidities’ of the labour market and the ‘privileges’ enjoyed by public sector employees and certain segments of the workforce. Liberalizing markets and removing obstacles to entrepreneurial activity have been at the centre of political debates and policy discussions. The attempt to save the banking system has led to massive transfusion of public funding from socially useful directions toward banks, leading in a massive redistribution of income toward capital.[1]