Boaventura de Sousa Santos outlines the two experiments being practiced in the laboratory of Europe today: a stress test on democracy, and an exercise in the final destruction of the European Left. July 22, 2015. Republished from ZNet.
In Western turbo-capitalism, people move faster and faster, but still feel stuck in the same place. Hartmut Rosa, professor of Sociology at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, explains such a paradox in his studies on “social acceleration”. Among his other books are Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality and High Speed Society, Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity and, most recently by Verso, Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, co-authored with Klaus Dörre and Stephan Lessenich. The following interview was originally published by the LA Review of Books. June 28th, 2015.
If we are to get out of the vicious circle of a free-market Europe condemned to austerity, we must start by renouncing the euro as a single currency, with a new European Bretton Woods—or so argues Wolfgang Streeck in an interview with Giuliano Battiston for L’Espresso, 7 July 2015. Translated from the Italian by David Broder.