<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">I agree with this perspective of Alex Foti, i.e. that progressive popular movements should be pro-European, but against the EU elites,</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">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,</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Michel<br><div dir="auto"><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>Resent-From:</b> <a href="mailto:nettime@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime@kein.org</a><br><b>From:</b> Alex Foti <<a href="mailto:alex.foti@gmail.com" target="_blank">alex.foti@gmail.com</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 20 november 2014 12:42:02 CET<br><b>Resent-To:</b> Nettime <<a href="mailto:nettime-l@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime-l@kein.org</a>><br><b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:nettime-l@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime-l@kein.org</a><br><b>Subject:</b> <b><nettime> 'fuck europe!' then what?</b><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>is the european question the analog of the habsburg question or the ottoman</span><br><span>question in the 19th century? i don't think so, but there's certainly room</span><br><span>for the belief that the 'sick man of europe' is europe itselft, or rather</span><br><span>the EU.</span><br><span></span><br><span>One could counter that the stagnation that Merkel and the eurocracy are</span><br><span>casting upon Europe is actually limited to the eurozone. EU countries that</span><br><span>are issuing their own currency have escaped the Greek fate. And the UK is</span><br><span>timidly recovering (wages are still way depressed everywhere, though) while</span><br><span>Italy and Spain accumulate record after record in youth unemployment.</span><br><span></span><br><span>So the euro is the problem, and especially the deflationary bias intrinsic</span><br><span>to the Maastricht Treat, that monetarist cadeau poisonn?? wrapped up by</span><br><span>market theologists in good times when the neoliberal economy seemed to</span><br><span>deliver the goods (growth and low inflation). The much-praised Draghi is</span><br><span>actually not doing enough against the sound money balanced budget dogma of</span><br><span>Ordoliberismus. He hasn't gone fully QE and unlike the Fed he doesn't have</span><br><span>to care about escalating unemployment in Southern Europe, save for the</span><br><span>periodic staid sermons about 'structural reform' of public finances and</span><br><span>labor markets. In macroeconomic terms, monetary policy is not expansionary</span><br><span>enough (and the extra liquidity to shore up reckless banks doesn't</span><br><span>translate in extra loans) while fiscal policy stays viciously restrictive</span><br><span>to the point that it's hurting Germany itself, a country that can now</span><br><span>finance itself at negative real interest rates (imagine: you pay back to</span><br><span>the bank less than what you owe, perhaps for that student loan you were</span><br><span>forced to take for your studies).</span><br><span></span><br><span>But of course the point is that in political terms the European citizenry</span><br><span>has sent a huge 'fuck europe!' to Council and Commission at the last</span><br><span>European Parliametary elections, where less than 50% cares to vote and</span><br><span>right-wing, xenophobic, nationalist or populist parties clearly and sadly</span><br><span>won the election (just think of FN and Marine Le Pen in France). The</span><br><span>eurocracy responded the usual way, by castling against any pressure from</span><br><span>either right or (red and/or green) left and covering the EU credibility</span><br><span>gash with a used band-aid like Juncker (in the pocket of banks and</span><br><span>corporations since day one, Luxembourg being synonymous with corporate tax</span><br><span>evazione) in a Commission still committed to austerity and backed the three</span><br><span>major EU parties: Merkel's european popular party, Hollande's european</span><br><span>socialist party, and Verhofstadt's european liberal party, i.e. the</span><br><span>political forces that are the self-proclaimed founders of Europe in <a href="tel:1957" value="+661957" target="_blank">1957</a>.</span><br><span></span><br><span>I have long argued that a Great Recession would come and its political</span><br><span>consequences would be similar to the Great Depression, namely a shift to</span><br><span>the right in Europe, which is happening everywhere except Spain (podemos)</span><br><span>and Greece (syriza). Even in Italy, where Renzi won the elections for the</span><br><span>PD, the League is rearing its ugly head with a no euro campaign and future</span><br><span>alliance with the elected faction of Italian neofascism (the aim being that</span><br><span>of equaling the FN's meteoric rise at the polls). The only antidote to the</span><br><span>racist drift in the peninsula has been the #socialstrike organized by</span><br><span>centri sociali, anti-precarity activists and radical unions (sindacati di</span><br><span>base) in 45 Italian cities (especially Rome, Milan, Naples, Genoa, Padua,</span><br><span>Turin, Pisa, Rimini) last November 14. It brought the country to a grinding</span><br><span>halt, its success totally unexpected. Let's hope the practice extends to</span><br><span>Brussels, Frankfurt, and the rest of Europe, cos we desperately need to go</span><br><span>beyond the nation-state to defeat precarity and solve mass youth</span><br><span>unemployment.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Europe is not a good sell. Not in Western Europe, not in Eastern Europe,</span><br><span>and most particularly on the left, where accusations of eurocentrism and</span><br><span>denunciations of the arbitrary political notion of "Europe" (where does it</span><br><span>end? when did it start?) abound. The position, best argued by Streeck, that</span><br><span>only by returning to the nation-state what's left of the left can hope to</span><br><span>shelter citizens from the inequalities of global financial capitalism,</span><br><span>seems to me nostalgic of the fordist age of (patriarchal and paternalist)</span><br><span>social democracy. In fact, the very notion of the left seems to be a trap</span><br><span>which the political movements born out of the revolutions of 2011 often try</span><br><span>to avoid (although podemos sits with the red left in strasbourg, it has</span><br><span>smashed the competition of izquierda unida at home and is posed to threaten</span><br><span>the pp-psoe power duopoly in the next political elections). What we need</span><br><span>more of in europe and elsewhere is progressive populism from below, which</span><br><span>is nevertheless structured in organizations that are able to wield</span><br><span>significant counterpower against increasingly repressive governments. In</span><br><span>Italy and France, sinistra and gauche are increasingly associated in the</span><br><span>popular imagination with ideological conservatism and political inaction,</span><br><span>while social fear and misery spread unchecked in the banlieues of Europe.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Populism is in fact the bane of the eurocratic consensus above described.</span><br><span>Because it would bridge the democratic deficit in the only possible way: by</span><br><span>getting rid of failed ??lites. On the other hand, liberals agitate the</span><br><span>threat of the extreme right to present themselves as the defenders of last</span><br><span>resort of political Europe. Of course, the very antisocial policies they</span><br><span>pursue (bailing out banks and restoring capital gains at the expense of</span><br><span>everybody else) make the growth of the radical right ever more likely. I</span><br><span>think there is no alternative to opposing this Europe other than in the</span><br><span>name of Europe itself, the Europe of individual and social rights. Knowing</span><br><span>full well that the remnants of the left in Europe will provide little</span><br><span>assistance in the task of building a left-oriented (but not</span><br><span>left-proclaimed) populist front, we cannot refrain from the task of</span><br><span>fighting nationalism at home and overthrowing the EU government in Brussels</span><br><span>in the name of the people. Only then, in this act of self-assertion against</span><br><span>the European oligarchy, will a truly European people constitute itself as</span><br><span>the sovereign subject from which all power descends. Next December 19 in</span><br><span>Brussels (where a particularly rowdy anti-austerity general strike ended up</span><br><span>in major clashes with the police on November 6 #manif6nov; a flashmob</span><br><span>launched my young labor activists of mixed descent had weeks earlier raided</span><br><span>the European Parliament to protest against LePen's press conf) could be the</span><br><span>first stage of such a process of euroradical self-awareness. Last year they</span><br><span>stormed the European Commission and Business Europe against the TTIP. The</span><br><span>D1920 is an assorted transnational coalition of activists, unionists,</span><br><span>farmers, public employees, students and young precarious workers. We must</span><br><span>bring toghether various social interests around the common priorities of</span><br><span>jobs and welfare, and the establishment of real democracy in europe against</span><br><span>appropriation by oligarchic interests. We need social advocacies and</span><br><span>structured political movements for this. In their absence, rabid</span><br><span>nationalism will only grow, until France and Germany part ways and the</span><br><span>whole European architecture collapses. In that scenario (which some on the</span><br><span>left welcome as it would entail the end of the euro and the return of</span><br><span>national economic sovereignty) war could return to Europe. It's already at</span><br><span>its doorsteps in Ukraine and Kurdistan, not to mention Syria and Libya.</span><br><span></span><br><span></span><br><span># distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission</span><br><span># <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,</span><br><span># collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets</span><br><span># more info: <a href="http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l" target="_blank">http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l</a></span><br><span># archive: <a href="http://www.nettime.org" target="_blank">http://www.nettime.org</a> contact: <a href="mailto:nettime@kein.org" target="_blank">nettime@kein.org</a></span><br></div></blockquote></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<br></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan" target="_blank">http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div></div>
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