Kees van der Pijl: The United States and Europe—Bolstering the Infrastructure of Atlantic Unity in a Time of Crisis, Overcoming Rivalry

In these notes[1] I will address the issue of how the United States and the European Union are responding to what is now increasingly recognised as an existential crisis of Western hegemony and liberal capitalism. As George Soros wrote on 23 October 2014 in The Guardian newspaper, the West must keep up its pressure in Ukraine, because if not, the system that has been built up over decades and which includes NATO and the EU, may begin to unravel and as it does, eastern Europe may again come under the influence of a resurgent Russia. More

 

Judith Dellheim: “Peripherisation”?

Rosa Luxemburg clearly demonstrates how political economy can readily be turned into a tool to strengthen people’s struggles for emancipation and how solidarity can reveal opportunities for action. Luxemburg saw herself as a global, socialist citizen in the sense that she expressed solidarity with people who were exploited and oppressed by those in power, regardless of their nationality or citizenship. Her goal was to understand and explain how exploitation takes place, how it is constantly renewed, and the consequences exploitation has at the individual, family and community level. Weiterlesen

Kees van der Pijl: The Financial Crisis and the War for Global Governance

This paper argues that in the transition from corporate liberalism to neoliberalism, the projection of global governance by the West replaces the previous recognition of bloc formation of non-Western states. The military build-up and counterrevolutionary interventions  under Reagan, and the revolt of the capital markets against Keynesianism coupled with unregulated finance, were the relays in this projection. In the same period the Israeli Far Right and their supporters in the United States re-baptised national liberation as terrorism. This made it possible to continue with record defence outlays and arms exports to Middle East and Asian clients. In the early nineties the US military-industrial complex  More

Kees van der Pijl: 1984 All Over Again. The Snowden NSA Revelations in Perspective

In the discussion concerning the Snowden NSA revelations many have referred to Orwell’s 1984. This paper highlights that Orwell identified two components–total surveillance and permanent war. The paper then looks at the actual year 1984 and argues that in that year was significant after all because both elements of today’s War on Terror (surveillance and war) were being prepared. One was the Washington conference on the War on Terror, the third in a series initiated from Israel; the other, the preparation of a Continuity of Government (COG) programme by the Reagan administration, more

Catherine Samary: The Social Stakes of the Great Transformation in the East

The “great capitalist transformation” in the East was characterized by general
forced “privatisations” in a very opaque and unprecedented context. It had to
radically transform the role of money and markets in the whole economy to
permit capital accumulation while getting rid of the existing forms of social
protection and income within the big factories—the core of the bureaucratic
system of production and distribution. More

Organisers: Again on the German Dominance

For the first EU experts’s discussion in 2011 Frieder Otto Wolf had elaborated a text on the „Gemeinschaftsmethode“ (Community method) and on the „Unionsmethode“ (Union method). His English text helps to understand the problems and the context as the societal consequences of the ESM treaty and of the Fiscal compact. It helps also to understand what the document „A Fundamental Law“ of the Spinelli group and the Bertelsmann foundation means and should. Please find Frieder Otto Wolfs paper here.

Again on “Core” and “Periphery”

The current post should show that the terms “core” and “periphery” have to be regarded in relation to an “imperial division of labour”. The term has been specifically introduced and elaborated by the Hungarian historian Ivan Berend. We have taken it from his book “History Derailed. Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century” (2003), which we make use of, including quotes from it. More

Aris Chatzistenaou: How the IMF Destroyed Greece: The Reality of the Greek “Success story”: On Its Way to Become a Third World Country

In Greece we are living a financial and social genocide and it’s a huge lie from Greek Prime Minister to characterize people who are committing suicide because they don’t have enough for food and the don’t have enough to support their families to characterise this as a success story. We couldn’t imagine that something like that could happen. More

Peter Gowan: Crisis in the Heartland. Consequences of the New Wall Street System

The long credit crunch that began in the Atlantic world in August 2007 is strange in its extraordinary scope and intensity. Mainstream discourse, referring to a ‘sub-prime’ crisis, implies that the credit crunch has been caused, rather than triggered, by a bubble in the real economy. This is at best naïve: after all, the bursting of an equally large bubble in the Spanish housing market led to no such blow-out in the domestic banking system More