For the Workshop Discussion – Theses of the Speakers

The mainstream debate on core and periphery should not distract us from the really important questions on the causes and the causers of the crises and on how ruling policy deals with them. In this context we shall have to take note of the fact that the term “peripherisation” cannot adequately express the real challenges we face. More

Sergio Tzotzes: The Case of Greece: Labour Market Reforms as Neoliberal Discipline in the European Periphery

This paper examines the dismantling of labour market institutions in Greece along neoliberal imperatives that was explicitly imposed by the loan conditionality of the IMF/EU/ECB adjustment programme. The mainstream public and academic discourse presents Greece as an exceptional isolated incident or a Greek disease where harsh adjustment was required to save the country from bankruptcy. Failing, to elucidate the structural aspects and the contradictions underlying the capitalist crisis, mainstream accounts also obscure the true nature, the aims and the implications of the labour market restructuring ongoing in Greece. More

Sergio Tzotzes: Resistance, Change and Alternatives: Tracing a Modern Left Strategy

It is worth highlighting that knowledge transforms our views, ethics, values and opinions about the state of affairs. The running water of the roman aqueducts was once seen as unprecedented progress, while nowadays drinking water which passes through lead pipes hardly seems a good idea at least to those knowledgeable enough and capable of acting upon their knowledge. Yet, this progress does not signify that More

Özge Yaka: Limits of the Core-­‐Periphery Model in the Analysis of the Contemporary Political Environment

The core periphery model, which belongs to the language of the pre 1980 era, has recently returned to the academic and political language in the context of the Euro‐zone-crisis. The model, which was originally developed against the modernisation school and Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantages, was aiming to reveal the structural processes and mechanisms which consistently disfavour primary producer countries of the periphery against the industrial western core. More

Claude Serfati: 2014 – A Turning Point in the Economic and Geopolitical Situation

1) The hypothesis laid out in this paper is that a new turn in the international economic and geopolitical situation took place in the last months. On the economic side, not only it appears that the finance capital’s social and economic power has not been seriously dented by the new regulatory framework under way in different countries, but that it goes on thriving on the global bleak macroeconomic situation. Through the last years, mainstream economists’ main concern was EU deflation, a code name for depression. More