“Hope is coming. Europe is changing. Greece is going forward.” Two months into Syriza taking office after the historic victory of the Left at the polls on 25 January, dare we hope for a breach in the iron cage of austerity? Is hope even alive? My answer is an unequivocal “yes”. That’s not down to […]
28 Mar
KEVIN OVENDEN writes from Athens on continuing moves to re-legitimise the neo-Nazis of Golden Dawn on the eve of their trial as a criminal organisation, and responds to voices that have tacitly defended some of the perturbing concessions to chauvinism coming from within the new Greek government. Following his essay is some background on the legal […]
23 Mar
Comments Off on Athens: Crisis, racism & new figures of resistance
KEVIN OVENDEN wrote this report from Athens just after Saturday’s anti-racist day of action there. I’ve not seen the centre of Athens so black since August of 2012 and the massive protest against the onset of the Xenios Zeus anti-immigrant police sweeps. Not the black of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. Its party colour gives rise […]
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 […]
12 Mar
Comments Off on Tariq Ali & Luke Stobart: Podemos, crisis & movements
Within a year of its creation, Podemos became the main opposition party in Spain. Analyses of its rapid rise have centred on its unorthodox and ambitious political approach and the different forms of participatory democracy practised (however imperfectly). Less has been said about the relation between the Podemos phenomenon and the Spanish context of major […]
12 Mar
Comments Off on Anti-Germanism: the anti-austerity politics of fools
KEVIN OVENDEN returns to Athens for the first in a new series of posts at Left Flank. It is worth reading in full yesterday’s speech by Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras on the incendiary issue of German war reparations to Greece. The issue was not resolved upon the unification of the German state in 1990 […]
04 Mar
The intervention of SYRIZA MP and Speaker of the House Zoi Konstantopoulou during the first (and so far sole) session of the Greek Parliament sent a chill through the country’s anti-fascist movement. The Speaker proposed the postponement of the parliamentary sitting because the District Attorney had not given permission to the MPs of Golden Dawn […]
27 Feb
Comments Off on Peter Pinkney: A Marxist running for the UK Greens
Some joined up thinking in Redcar Peter Pinkney, President of the RMT, Rail, Maritime and Transport, Trade Union, spoke to Kevin Ovenden about his decision to stand for the Green Party at the general election in May in the once Labour heartland seat of Redcar on Teesside. The electoral advances by Syriza in Greece and […]
26 Feb
In this special guest post for Left Flank, PANAGIOTIS SOTIRIS forensically dissects the SYRIZA government’s agreement with the Eurogroup — not to lead people to despair but to focus the question on the political and economic limits of the Eurozone that SYRIZA has accepted, and to argue the basis for a policy of rupture with […]
25 Feb
My postings here will resume but be episodic for a few weeks as I am commissioned to write a book in short order on the Greek crisis, Syriza and socialist strategy. The plan for that writing includes weekly gobbets on Greece and the politics of the austerity crisis in Europe. Here are what I hope […]
31 Mar
Comments Off on Greece two months on: where is the hope?