Last week in Athens I attended a teachers’ demonstration. The protest took place in the evening, the day before schools returned for the year. Cuts to education in Greece are savage, and teachers have been on strike for most of the semester already. I spoke to an art teacher, who advised that the entire art [...]
20 Mar
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By KEVIN OVENDEN My previous post was written early on Monday morning, London time. Since then events have proceeded rapidly and dramatically. They will continue to do so. This update is meant to highlight the political significance of some of those developments in a fast moving crisis. 1) Despite desperate protestations it is now clear, [...]
19 Mar
GUEST POST by KEVIN OVENDEN Two months ago, perennial optimists were telling us that the worst of the Eurozone crisis was probably over. Then came the Italian election. Now the great Cypriot bank heist. By Sunday morning it was dawning on tens of millions of people what had happened, as the news spread from [...]
10 Mar
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by KEVIN OVENDEN Below are the points, updated and a little amplified, I made in a contribution to the highly successful Unite Against Fascism conference in London on 2 March. The speech (and I’ve incorporated my summing up) was in a workshop with Petros Constantinou from Greece, Marwan Mohammed from France and Glyn Ford [...]
27 Feb
In the end the results of Italy’s general election were even more unsettling than the most pessimistic pro-Euro commentators had anticipated. As this post was being completed, the lower house counts were as follows: Pier Luigi Bersani’s centre-left coalition 29.5% Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition 29.1% Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement 25.5% Mario Monti’s Civic Choice [...]
30 Dec
Just before 2012 closes out, I’m reposting my last Overland blog of the year, which originally appeared here. In some ways it is a summing up of themes we have developed at Left Flank since we started in mid-2010; chiefly in our attempts to present not just a general ideological or theoretical approach to the [...]
11 Jun
As background to the recent posts on the situation in Greece, we’re reprinting the translation of an article written by PANOS GARGANAS, editor of the Workers Solidarity newspaper, from his organisation SEK’s Socialism From Below magazine, May-June 2012 issue. This piece was written just after the 6 May elections. Translation is by Costas Todoulos. The original [...]
13 May
Read mainstream accounts of the massive electoral realignment in Greece and you notice a strange use of terminology. The pro-austerity parties — especially conservative New Democracy and centre-Left PASOK — are called “pro-bailout” and “moderate”, while the parties that oppose austerity are called “extremist” and “hard-line”. And there’s a tendency to portray the rise of new [...]
19 Nov
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‘Don’t forget who runs your economy now.’ For the 1 percent who rule society, democracy seems more than ever a hindrance to ensuring that the most calamitous economic crisis since the 1930s is paid for by the 99 percent below them. The most obvious expression of this is the installation of unelected technocrats as prime [...]
10 Nov
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If the last week’s bizarre political contortions in Greece — first a referendum, then not, then a government of national unity, now more uncertainty — were not enough, the spread of contagion to Italy threatens even greater turmoil. As we arrived in London we were greeted by the Financial Times informing us that Silvio Berlusconi had (finally) [...]
19 Sep
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