By Tad Tietze I was recently on Grant Gallagher and Joseph Sciortino’s excellent podcast The Rabble Report. It’s a real deep dive, in which we look at the rise and fall of left populism by using the recent book, The Populist Moment: The Left After the Great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger (Verso, […]
08 Apr
I know this is not a popular opinion in progressive circles but the attacks on Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán as “anti-democratic” are overblown rubbish. It has gotten to the point where op-ed writers in The Guardian claim that “Hungary today is on the verge of full-blown autocracy” and “the war on democracy in Hungary is a war […]
26 Jun
It seems pretty clear now that even the leaders of the Leave campaign in the UK’s referendum on the European Union didn’t believe that Brexit could win. UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage not once but twice conceded a narrow defeat on election night before the results for Sunderland indicated a much bigger Leave vote than predicted […]
05 Oct
Following on from Part 1 and Part 2 of my analysis — which were first published in abridged form as a single article at Jacobin Magazine — I bring the Greek tragedy up to date with why the Syriza breakaway Popular Unity failed its first electoral test, as well as delving deeper into the dead-end of trying […]
22 Sep
This is the second of three parts of my analysis of the Greek radical Left debacle. Part 1 focused on the lead-up to the referendum in July. Part 3 will focus on the most recent developments, including the election result, and respond to some criticisms of my argument that have emerged within the Marxist Left. While my prediction that Tsipras […]
21 Sep
Comments Off on Greece’s radical Left experiment: An obituary (Part 1)
The results of the Greek election, with Syriza again able to rule with the help of the hard-right nationalists of ANEL (the Independent Greeks), represents a further blow to the radical Left political project in Europe. Syriza now has an electoral mandate to implement the austerity deal it agreed with the Eurogroup, and which saw […]
04 Jul
A selection of KEVIN OVENDEN’s live posts from the massive No protest in Athens, 3 July 2015 Rally for the No side this evening — various different forces calling it — in Syntagma Square, central Athens. The rally will be big and militant. But please do not over-read the size of it and so on. […]
02 Jul
SPECIAL DISPATCH FROM ATHENS BY KEVIN OVENDEN Kevin is the author of a forthcoming Pluto Press book on Greece and Syriza, Escaping the Labyrinth The streets of Athens are calm tonight. The political atmosphere, intense. I joined a patient queue in the Galatsi area to withdraw a few euros from the ATM. We smiled and […]
13 Apr
Two hostile intersecting axes are forming against the Syriza-led government in Athens. Together they comprise an increasingly cohered effort to destabilise and defeat the government, to usurp the democratically expressed hope of the Greek people to break from the iron cage of austerity. The first axis, from without, has been evident since before the 20 […]
20 Mar
PHIL BUTLAND, Berlin (with the input of KEVIN OVENDEN, Athens) reflects on the Blockupy protest in Frankfurt this week and whether we are at a “Prague moment” opening up a new sequence of anti-capitalist and international mobilisations Just four days ago, I* was reporting with hope about a few hundred people demonstrating in Berlin for Greece […]
03 Nov
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