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

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

Joachim Becker: Enlarging the EU Sphere of Influence Eastwards – Or: The Dialectics of Integration and Disintegration

In the face of the austerity-induced depression of the domestic markets in the EU, the EU and its main powers bank on the expansion of economic relations beyond the EU and free trade agreements. The coalition agreement of social democrats and Christian democrats in Germany, the dominant EU power, is characteristic of this thinking. It is extremely brief and unimaginative in its paragraphs on the EU, but dedicates detailed and highlighted paragraphs on the Germany’s economic relationship with so-called emerging economies and on EU free trade agreements More

Judith Dellheim, Frieder Otto Wolf: On Industrial Policy

In addition to the posts from April 23th, April 30th, June 2nd, June 22th we publish two texts for the discussion on production and consumption structures and on conclusions for a socio-ecological transformation. Both texts were written for the EuroMemo Group meetings in 2013 and 2014.

Workshop Organizers: A Few More Remarks

We now propose the following workshop parts:

  • I. Global Context, Experience and Theoretical Basics
  • II. Financialisation and Transnationalisation; Social and Production Structures
  • III. Case Studies in Regard to Countries
  • IV. More specifically on Alternatives

Weiterlesen

Daniela Gabor: The Romanian Financial System: From Central Bank-Led to Dependent Financialisation

This study argues that financialisation is not a phenomenon exclusively associated with complex innovation in highly developed financial markets. Financialisation also affects countries with „shallow“ financial markets but with a significant presence of transnational financial actors that become a powerpul economic and political force able to navigate and shape uneven regulatory and institutional terrains in order to sustain new modes of profit generation. The study distinguishes two stages in the financialisation of the Romanian economy. The first, central bank dominated. Weiterlesen

Etienne Balibar: The Rise and Fall of the European Union: Temporalities and Teleologies

Historians and philosophers have been discussing the extent to which specific ideologies regarding the understanding of time and space are involved in the writing of history, as a consequence of the “central” place that Europe had attributed itself in Modern history. The idea of “Europe” itself, whether perceived from inside or outside, is by definition ideological or it is a teleological “discourse”, which performs epistemological and political functions at the same time. Whether we consider ourselves More