I agree with this perspective of Alex Foti, i.e. that progressive popular movements should be pro-European, but against the EU elites, factors to consider is that many people, despite their frustrations and the rise of right-wing anti-european populism, are still attached to the structures, fearing adventurism, which is why a party like Syriza is so circumspect in its policies, Michel *Resent-From:* [email protected] *From:* Alex Foti <[email protected]> *Date:* 20 november 2014 12:42:02 CET *Resent-To:* Nettime <[email protected]> *To:* [email protected] *Subject:* *<nettime> 'fuck europe!' then what?* is the european question the analog of the habsburg question or the ottoman question in the 19th century? i don't think so, but there's certainly room for the belief that the 'sick man of europe' is europe itselft, or rather the EU. One could counter that the stagnation that Merkel and the eurocracy are casting upon Europe is actually limited to the eurozone. EU countries that are issuing their own currency have escaped the Greek fate. And the UK is timidly recovering (wages are still way depressed everywhere, though) while Italy and Spain accumulate record after record in youth unemployment. So the euro is the problem, and especially the deflationary bias intrinsic to the Maastricht Treat, that monetarist cadeau poisonn?? wrapped up by market theologists in good times when the neoliberal economy seemed to deliver the goods (growth and low inflation). The much-praised Draghi is actually not doing enough against the sound money balanced budget dogma of Ordoliberismus. He hasn't gone fully QE and unlike the Fed he doesn't have to care about escalating unemployment in Southern Europe, save for the periodic staid sermons about 'structural reform' of public finances and labor markets. In macroeconomic terms, monetary policy is not expansionary enough (and the extra liquidity to shore up reckless banks doesn't translate in extra loans) while fiscal policy stays viciously restrictive to the point that it's hurting Germany itself, a country that can now finance itself at negative real interest rates (imagine: you pay back to the bank less than what you owe, perhaps for that student loan you were forced to take for your studies). But of course the point is that in political terms the European citizenry has sent a huge 'fuck europe!' to Council and Commission at the last European Parliametary elections, where less than 50% cares to vote and right-wing, xenophobic, nationalist or populist parties clearly and sadly won the election (just think of FN and Marine Le Pen in France). The eurocracy responded the usual way, by castling against any pressure from either right or (red and/or green) left and covering the EU credibility gash with a used band-aid like Juncker (in the pocket of banks and corporations since day one, Luxembourg being synonymous with corporate tax evazione) in a Commission still committed to austerity and backed the three major EU parties: Merkel's european popular party, Hollande's european socialist party, and Verhofstadt's european liberal party, i.e. the political forces that are the self-proclaimed founders of Europe in 1957. I have long argued that a Great Recession would come and its political consequences would be similar to the Great Depression, namely a shift to the right in Europe, which is happening everywhere except Spain (podemos) and Greece (syriza). Even in Italy, where Renzi won the elections for the PD, the League is rearing its ugly head with a no euro campaign and future alliance with the elected faction of Italian neofascism (the aim being that of equaling the FN's meteoric rise at the polls). The only antidote to the racist drift in the peninsula has been the #socialstrike organized by centri sociali, anti-precarity activists and radical unions (sindacati di base) in 45 Italian cities (especially Rome, Milan, Naples, Genoa, Padua, Turin, Pisa, Rimini) last November 14. It brought the country to a grinding halt, its success totally unexpected. Let's hope the practice extends to Brussels, Frankfurt, and the rest of Europe, cos we desperately need to go beyond the nation-state to defeat precarity and solve mass youth unemployment. Europe is not a good sell. Not in Western Europe, not in Eastern Europe, and most particularly on the left, where accusations of eurocentrism and denunciations of the arbitrary political notion of "Europe" (where does it end? when did it start?) abound. The position, best argued by Streeck, that only by returning to the nation-state what's left of the left can hope to shelter citizens from the inequalities of global financial capitalism, seems to me nostalgic of the fordist age of (patriarchal and paternalist) social democracy. In fact, the very notion of the left seems to be a trap which the political movements born out of the revolutions of 2011 often try to avoid (although podemos sits with the red left in strasbourg, it has smashed the competition of izquierda unida at home and is posed to threaten the pp-psoe power duopoly in the next political elections). What we need more of in europe and elsewhere is progressive populism from below, which is nevertheless structured in organizations that are able to wield significant counterpower against increasingly repressive governments. In Italy and France, sinistra and gauche are increasingly associated in the popular imagination with ideological conservatism and political inaction, while social fear and misery spread unchecked in the banlieues of Europe. Populism is in fact the bane of the eurocratic consensus above described. Because it would bridge the democratic deficit in the only possible way: by getting rid of failed ??lites. On the other hand, liberals agitate the threat of the extreme right to present themselves as the defenders of last resort of political Europe. Of course, the very antisocial policies they pursue (bailing out banks and restoring capital gains at the expense of everybody else) make the growth of the radical right ever more likely. I think there is no alternative to opposing this Europe other than in the name of Europe itself, the Europe of individual and social rights. Knowing full well that the remnants of the left in Europe will provide little assistance in the task of building a left-oriented (but not left-proclaimed) populist front, we cannot refrain from the task of fighting nationalism at home and overthrowing the EU government in Brussels in the name of the people. Only then, in this act of self-assertion against the European oligarchy, will a truly European people constitute itself as the sovereign subject from which all power descends. Next December 19 in Brussels (where a particularly rowdy anti-austerity general strike ended up in major clashes with the police on November 6 #manif6nov; a flashmob launched my young labor activists of mixed descent had weeks earlier raided the European Parliament to protest against LePen's press conf) could be the first stage of such a process of euroradical self-awareness. Last year they stormed the European Commission and Business Europe against the TTIP. The D1920 is an assorted transnational coalition of activists, unionists, farmers, public employees, students and young precarious workers. We must bring toghether various social interests around the common priorities of jobs and welfare, and the establishment of real democracy in europe against appropriation by oligarchic interests. We need social advocacies and structured political movements for this. In their absence, rabid nationalism will only grow, until France and Germany part ways and the whole European architecture collapses. In that scenario (which some on the left welcome as it would entail the end of the euro and the return of national economic sovereignty) war could return to Europe. It's already at its doorsteps in Ukraine and Kurdistan, not to mention Syria and Libya. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/