It was great fun speaking alongside ACOSS policy officer Emily Hamilton and radical economist Steve Keen at the Northside Forum in the heart of Joe Hockey’s electorate last Saturday. Close to 100 people packed into the function room at the Union Hotel to hear us speak and participate in a Q&A. Thanks to the organisers for inviting us — the […]
17 Mar
LUKE STOBART with the first instalment of a special three-part analysis of the radicalisation that has swept Spain since the 15-M protests of 2011. *** Anti-politics and the 15-M movement On 15 May 2011 the new collectives Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth Without Future) and ¡Democracia Real Ya! (Real Democracy Now!), demonstrated in Madrid using […]
07 Nov
Comments Off on Internationalism, racism & the geo-political labyrinth
About two hundred people took to the streets of St Petersburg, Russia, at the weekend for the annual ‘March Against Hatred’, which aims to ‘unite those who fight against intolerance, xenophobia, fascism and discrimination on grounds of race, nationality, religion and beliefs, sexual orientation etc.’ The following day, tens of thousands in about 100 cities […]
08 Oct
By KEVIN OVENDEN This piece is a follow-up to “Greece, the state & anti-fascism”, which was subsequently also posted at Socialist Unity in the UK and Socialist Worker in the US. The anti-fascist conference in Athens last weekend hosted by the Greek anti-fascist/anti-racist coalition KEERFA was a major step forward. About 600 people, from a broad spectrum […]
04 Oct
By KEVIN OVENDEN The struggle against the most pernicious and entrenched neo-Nazi force in Europe is at a critical moment. At stake in the dramatic arrests of Nikolaos Michaloliakos and other leaders of the Golden Dawn in Greece is not only the immediate future of a Nazi party that has 18 MPs, with 7 percent […]
19 Sep
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
Comments Off on Cyprus says ‘No!’ — a watershed vote against EU austerity
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
Comments Off on Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat
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 […]
09 May
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