On 8/1/14 the Greek government organized festivities for taking over the presidency of the EU. The protest organized by radical left organizations in Athens has been banned by the police on purely political grounds. The organizations of the left that organize the protest have decided to defy the ban and go on with the demonstrations. Several trade unions and political parties of the left denounced the ban.

Pavlos Antonopoulos, a trade unionist from the board of the union of civil servants (ADEDY) and member of the left wing organization ANTARSYA, was arrested and handcuffed for defying the demonstration ban. At Omonia Square in the center of Athens, several hundreds of protesters defied the ban of demonstrations against the festivities for the Greek EU Presidency. They were attacked with tear gas by the riot police. Pavlos Antonopoulos trial will be tomorrow.

In my analysis, capitalist and socialist are adjectives referring to class processes. The class processes are different from – other than – the processes that comprise ownership of property and also different from the processes of market exchanges, including the exchange between wages and labor power. Class processes are defined precisely as the producing, receiving, and distributing of surplus labor. It is these processes together that comprise a class structure. Thus, my approach differs from the traditional debates over capitalism and socialism by focusing attention upon a different variable that others choose to make the distinction between the systems. In my approach, capitalism and socialism or communism refer to the issue of class structure, the particular form of the processes of producing, receiving, and distributing surplus labor. Class processes so defined are interactive and interdependent with, but also irreducibly different from such nonclass processes as ownership (private, collective, or state), distribution (markets, command allocation, custom), and power (distribution of authority among individuals, levels of government, and so on).

2.If it is not wage labor, markets, and private property that determine capitalist class processes, what exactly is capitalism?

Crucial to my argument about systems is that there is no necessary or mechanical linkage between any of these factors and the presence of a particular form of the class process. It is not wage labor, markets, private property, parliamentary democracy, natural resource availability, or any other one or a subset of factors that are the key or essential determinants of, say, capitalist class processes. It is, rather, the ensemble of conditions, the totality of all the factors that interact and thereby generate the particular form of the class processes. So capitalism is that particular class process, i.e. organization of the surplus, in which those who produce the surplus are different people from those who appropriate and then socially distribute that surplus with the goal of reproducing that capitalist class process. In this way, capitalism is like feudalism and slavery. What differentiates capitalism from feudalism and slavery is the relationship between the surplus producers and appropriators. In capitalism, there is a contractual relationship (unlike ownership, as in slavery, or the personal relation of serfdom, as in feudalism) between surplus producer and appropriator via the wage system. But to push the argument to a logical extreme, if capitalist class processes can coexist in a society without wage labor, without markets and without private property, can this society still be called capitalist? The answer that flows from the definition I am advancing is, yes, if we can demonstrate that all the other social factors (other than wage labor, markets, and private property) impacting on its particular organization of the production, receipt, and distribution of surplus labor have overdetermined a capitalist form.

3. This is to say, then, that who predominates in state, economy and society, which has been the position of various socialists and communists, from Lenin to Lange and Sweezy, is not what differentiates capitalism from socialism?

Yes, exactly. What differentiates a systems is, as Marx showed, “how the surplus is pumped out of the producers.” If the surplus producers themselves collectively (i) determine the size of the surplus they produce, (ii) appropriate it, and (iii) distribute it socially, then you have socialism or communism as clearly differentiated from capitalism in which the surplus producers are precisely excluded from making that determination or that appropriation or that distribution.

4.From the perspective of Marxian class analysis you employ, what was the nature of Soviet economy and society?

I think it’s beyond contention that the system in the USSR did not generally arrange for the workers themselves to appropriate and distribute their surpluses. As such, the Soviet system did not end capitalism. They did change its form. Instead of private capitalism (appropriators chosen by shareholders and holding no state positions), they instituted state capitalism (state officials functioned as surplus appropriators). Lenin acknowledged that, hoping that state capitalism might serve as a step on the road to socialism. Except for a short time on collective farms in the 1930s and 1940s, a socialist or communist class structure was not widespread in the history of the USSR.

There is a major theme in Marx’s work that uses a careful specification of what it calls necessary and surplus labor to differentiate among economic systems. Briefly, this theme holds that in all human societies, some members work to transform nature into the objects of human needs and desire. These members do necessary work – the quantity of work required to secure whatever standard of living they demand – yet, they also do more work than that. This additional quantity of work is what Marx calls their surplus labor. In Marx’s definition of surplus labor, exploitation (defined precisely as any situation in which the producers of the surplus are different people from its appropriators) does not occur only in a capitalist system. It can occur in other systems that Marx only briefly and tentatively distinguished from capitalism, especially slavery and feudalism. And it did occur in the Soviet Union for the reasons already outlined with regard to the appropriation and distribution of surplus labor. The full details of this argument are available in S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (New York: Routledge, 2002).

5.Socialism and direct participatory democracy seem to be intertwined in your analyses of future social orders. Some critics might point out that this view carries the implication that humans are totally capable of pushing aside their selfish nature, which is to say that the future of socialism depends indeed on a “new man.” How would you respond to this charge?

The shortest answer to this question is that the “nature” of human beings is a socially overdetermined, evolving quality. Capitalism shapes various forms of behavior which are conditioned and determined by the contradictory demands placed upon them by economic and social components of the system. The evolution of human nature to now is what   produces growing demands for social change beyond capitalism. The change to socialism will in turn further develop human beings and their “nature.”

6. Many on the Left suggest that the crisis facing advanced capitalism today is life- threatening to the system.  Yet, profits for major corporations, banks and other financial institutions are at an all time high while the standard of living for the average workers is shrinking and the scourge of long-term unemployment constantly grows. What kind of a capitalist crisis is this?

Capitalism has always sought to turn its internal contradictions and periodic crises to its own advantage, to turn, as Mao said, bad things into good things. The current crisis since 2007 has provided capitalists with opportunities they have seized.  In the US, for example, financial and other mega-corporations rushed to mobilize massive government assistance to save them from collapse.  Clear to all, that rush mocked the previous era’s glib contrast of the private sector as efficient and the public sector as useless or worse.  No political gridlock prevented the government from swiftly and nearly unanimously providing those mega-corporations with trillions in loans, guarantees, investments, and other forms of stimulus spending.

In the meantime, the system has stopped delivering “goods to the people.”  Millions of people throughout Europe and the United States are condemned to the repeated ravages of lost jobs, job benefits, and job security plus foreclosed homes and bleak job prospects for their children.  The personal, family, and economic costs of the failure to deal with capitalist crises are staggering. Over 20 million of Americans today are without a job, millions more limited to part-time jobs.  Similar situations exist in Europe, and much worse in parts of southern Europe. As example of the kind of capitalist crisis we are facing, according to the US Federal Reserve System, roughly 20 percent of the economy’s tools, equipment, factory, office, and store space, and raw materials stand idle. This capitalist system deprives us all of the output and wealth that could be produced if the people denied jobs were combined with the idled means of production.

The capitalist crisis has also provided, in dialectical fashion, opportunities for anti-capitalists, but they have only begun to seize them.Many of today’s radicals largely avoid the language, concepts, and imagery associated with earlier forms of anti-capitalism: traditional socialism, the USSR, China, and the marginalized, often sectarian, groups who remain identified with those forms. Various sorts of anarchism and unorthodox Marxisms (old and new) have surfaced and found followings on the left.  These diverse movements have formulated critiques of the crisis focused on its roots in capitalism, but they have not yet coalesced into or with political, enduring, and self-consciously anti-capitalist organizations.

7.What examples from around the world would you say point to the future of socialism?

In countless countries, including Greece, there is a fast-growing anti-capitalist consciousness and anti-capitalist components of social protest. This consciousness raising is extremely important, notwithstanding the frustration that it has not yet been matched, in most countries, by more developed organization. In the US,  for so long the bastion of uncritical celebration of capitalism, the level of anti-capitalist criticism is greater than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Around the world, movements to replace capitalist organizations of the surplus with collective (socialist, communist) organizations of the surplus are growing. So far these are largely dispersed and small (with crucial exceptions such as Mondragon in Spain), but their growth and the growing focus on worker coops are yet another expression of growing anti-capitalist consciousness. As for Mondragon,it isthe world’s largest and perhaps most successful example of Workers’ Self-Directed Enterprises, competing effectively with conventional capitalist enterprises. Begun in 1956 with six workers organized into a cooperative enterprise by a Spanish priest, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) now employs over 100,000 workers, is the largest corporation in the Basque part of Spain and the tenth largest corporation in all of Spain. It has extensive research and development labs generating new ways to produce new products and maintains its own university to train its workers and interested others in all the ways of running and building democratically cooperative enterprises. MCC is thus a remarkable testimony to the contemporary viability and strength of non-capitalist production systems. It is one of the proliferating models of an alternative to capitalist economics and politics.

Source: http://www.rdwolff.com/content/richard-wolff-capitalism-and-socialism-interview-c-j-polychroniou

Noam Chomsky: The term neoliberal is a bit misleading. The doctrines are neither new, nor liberal. As you say, big business and the rich rely extensively on what economist Dean Baker calls “the conservative nanny state” that they nourish. That is dramatically true of financial institutions. A recent IMF study attributes the profits of the big banks almost entirely to the implicit government insurance policy (“too big to fail”), not just the widely publicized bailouts, but access to cheap credit, favorable ratings because of the state guarantee and much else. The same is true of the productive economy. The IT revolution, now its driving force, relied very heavily on state-based R&D, procurement and other devices. That pattern goes back to early English industrialization.

However, neither “neoliberalism,” nor its earlier versions as “liberalism,” have been myths, certainly not for their victims. Economic historian Paul Bairoch is only one of many who have shown that “the Third World’s compulsory economic liberalism in the 19th century is a major element in explaining the delay in its industrialization,” in fact, its “de-industrialization,” a story that continues to the present under various guises.

In brief, the doctrines are, to a substantial extent, a “myth” for the rich and powerful, who craft many ways to protect themselves from market forces, but not for the poor and weak, who are subjected to their ravages.

What explains the supremacy of market-centric rule and predatory finance in an era that has experienced the most destructive crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression?

The basic explanation is the usual one: It is all working quite well for the rich and powerful. In the US, for example, tens of millions are unemployed, unknown millions have dropped out of the workforce in despair, and incomes as well as conditions of life have largely stagnated or declined. But the big banks, which were responsible for the latest crisis, are bigger and richer than ever, corporate profits are breaking records, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice is accumulating among those who count, labor is severely weakened by union busting and “growing worker insecurity,” to borrow the term Alan Greenspan used in explaining the grand success of the economy he managed, when he was still “St. Alan,” perhaps the greatest economist since Adam Smith, before the collapse of the structure he had administered, along with its intellectual foundations. So what is there to complain about?

The growth of financial capital is related to the decline in the rate of profit in industry and the new opportunities to distribute production more widely to places where labor is more readily exploited and constraints on capital are weakest – while profits are distributed to places with lowest [tax] rates (“globalization”). The process has been abetted by technological developments that facilitate the growth of an “out-of-control financial sector,” which “is eating out the modern market economy [that is, the productive economy] from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid,” to borrow the evocative phrase of Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, probably the most respected financial correspondent in the English-speaking world.

That aside, as noted, the “market-centric rule” imposes harsh discipline on the many, but the few who count protect themselves from it effectively.

What do you make of the argument about the dominance of a transnational elite and the end of the nation-state, especially since its proponents claim that this New World Order is already upon us? 

There’s something to it, but it shouldn’t be exaggerated. Multinationals continue to rely on the home state for protection, economic and military, and substantially for innovation as well. The international institutions remain largely under the control of the most powerful states, and in general the state-centric global order remains reasonably stable.

Europe is moving ever closer to the end of the “social contract.” Is this a surprising development for you?

In an interview, Mario Draghi informed The Wall Street Journal that “the Continent’s traditional social contract” – perhaps its major contribution to contemporary civilization – “is obsolete” and must be dismantled. And he is one of the international bureaucrats who is doing most to protect its remnants. Business has always disliked the social contract. Recall the euphoria in the business press when the fall of “Communism” offered a new work force – educated, trained, healthy and even blond and blue-eyed – that could be used to undercut the “luxurious lifestyle” of western workers. It is not the result of inexorable forces, economic or other, but a policy design based on the interests of the designers, who are rather more likely to be bankers and CEOs than the janitors who clean their offices.

One of the biggest problems facing many parts of the advanced capitalist world today is the debt burden, public and private. In the peripheral nations of the eurozone, in particular, debt is having catastrophic social effects as the “people always pay,” as you have pointedly argued in the past. For the benefit of today’s activists, would you explain in what sense debt is “a social and ideological construct?” 

There are many reasons. One was captured well by a phrase of the US executive director of the IMF, Karen Lissakers, who described the institution as “the credit community’s enforcer.” In a capitalist economy, if you lend me money and I can’t pay you back, it’s your problem: You cannot demand that my neighbors pay the debt. But since the rich and powerful protect themselves from market discipline, matters work differently when a big bank lends money to risky borrowers, hence at high interest and profit, and at some point they cannot pay. Then the “the credit community’s enforcer” rides to the rescue, ensuring that the debt is paid, with liability transferred to the general public by structural adjustment programs, austerity and the like. When the rich don’t like to pay such debts, they can declare them to be “odious,” hence invalid: imposed on the weak by unfair means. A huge amount of debt is “odious” in this sense, but few can appeal to powerful institutions to rescue them from the rigors of capitalism.

There are plenty of other devices. J.P. Morgan Chase has just been fined $13 billion (half of it tax-deductible) for what should be regarded as criminal behavior in fraudulent mortgage schemes, from which the usual victims suffer under hopeless burdens of debt.

The inspector-general of the US government bailout program, Neil Barofsky, pointed out that it was officially a legislative bargain: the banks that were the culprits were to be bailed out, and their victims, people losing their homes, were to be given some limited protection and support. As he explains, only the first part of the bargain was seriously honored, and the plan became a “giveaway to Wall Street executives” – to the surprise of no one who understands “really existing capitalism.”

The list goes on.

In the course of the crisis, Greeks have been portrayed around the globe as lazy and corrupt tax evaders who merely like to demonstrate. This view has become mainstream. What are the mechanisms used to persuade public opinion? Can they be tackled?

The portrayals are presented by those with the wealth and power to frame the prevailing discourse. The distortion and deceit can be confronted only by undermining their power and creating organs of popular power, as in all other cases of oppression and domination.

What is your view about what is happening in Greece, particularly with regard to the constant demands by the “troika” and Germany’s unyielding desire to advance the cause of austerity?

It appears that the ultimate aim of the German demands from Athens, under the management of the debt crisis, is the capture of whatever is of value in Greece. Some people in Germany appear to be intent on imposing conditions of virtual economic slavery on the Greeks.

It is rather likely that the next government in Greece will be a government of the Coalition of the Radical Left. What should be its approach toward the European Union and Greece’s creditors? Also, should a left government be reassuring toward the most productive sectors of the capitalist class, or should it adopt the core components of a traditional workerist-populist ideology?  

These are hard practical questions. It would be easy for me to sketch what I would like to happen, but given existing realities, any course followed has risks and costs. Even if I were in a position to assess them properly – I am not – it would be irresponsible to urge policy without serious analysis and evidence.

Capitalism’s appetite for destruction was never in doubt, but in your recent writings you pay increasing attention to environmental destruction. Do you really think human civilization is at stake?

I think decent human survival is at stake. The earliest victims are, as usual, the weakest and most vulnerable. That much has been evident even in the global summit on climate change that just concluded in Warsaw, with little outcome. And there is every reason to expect that to continue. A future historian – if there is one – will observe the current spectacle with amazement. In the lead in trying to avert likely catastrophe are the so-called “primitive societies”: First Nations in Canada, indigenous people in South America and so on throughout the world. We see the struggle for environmental salvage and protection taking place today in Greece, where the residents of Skouries in Chalkidiki are putting up a heroic resistance both against the predatory aims of Eldorado Gold and the police forces that have been mobilized by the Greek state in support of the multinational company.

Those enthusiastically leading the race to fall off the cliff are the richest and most powerful societies, with incomparable advantages, like the US and Canada. Just the opposite of what rationality would predict – apart from the lunatic rationality of “really existing capitalist democracy.”

The US remains a world empire and, by your account, operates under the “Mafia principle,” meaning that the godfather does not tolerate “successful defiance.” Is the American empire in decline, and, if so, does it pose yet a greater threat to global peace and security? 

US global hegemony reached a historically unparalleled peak in 1945, and has been declining steadily since, though it still remains very great and though power is becoming more diversified, there is no single competitor in sight. The traditional Mafia principle is constantly invoked, but ability to implement it is more constrained. The threat to peace and security is very real. To take just one example, President Obama’s drone campaign is by far the most vast and destructive terrorist operation now under way. The US and its Israeli client violate international law with complete impunity, for example, by threats to attack Iran (“all options are open”) in violation of core principles of the UN Charter. The most recent US Nuclear Posture Review (2010), is more aggressive in tone than its predecessors, a warning not to be ignored. Concentration of power rather generally poses dangers, in this domain as well.

Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you have said all along that the one-state/two-state debate is irrelevant.

The one-state/two-state debate is irrelevant because one state is not an option. It is worse than irrelevant: It is a distraction from the reality.

The actual options are either (1) two states or (2) a continuation of what Israel is now doing with US support: keeping Gaza under a crushing siege, separated from the West Bank; and systematically taking over what it finds of value in the West Bank while integrating it more closely to Israel, taking over areas with not many Palestinians; and those who are there are being quietly expelled. The contours are quite clear from the development and expulsion programs.

Given option (2), there’s no reason why Israel or the US should agree to the one-state proposal, which also has no international support anywhere else. Unless the reality of the evolving situation is recognized, talk about one state (civil rights/anti-apartheid struggle, “demographic problem”, etc.) is just a diversion, implicitly lending support to option (2). That’s the essential logic of the situation, like it or not.

You have said that elite intellectuals are the ones that mainly tick you off. Is this because you fuse politics with morality? 

Elite intellectuals, by definition, have a good deal of privilege. Privilege provides options and confers responsibility. Those more privileged are in a better position to obtain information and to act in ways that will affect policy decisions. Assessment of their role follows at once.

It’s true that I think that people should live up to their elementary moral responsibilities, a position that should need no defense. And the responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity. If commissars in Soviet Russia agreed to subordinate themselves to state power, they could at least plead fear in extenuation. Their counterparts in more free and open societies can plead only cowardice.

Michel Gondry’s animated documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? has just been released in selected theaters in New York City and other major cities in the US after having received rave reviews. Did you see the movie? Were you pleased with it? 

I saw it. Gondry is really a great artist. The movie is delicately and cleverly done and manages to capture some important ideas (often not understood even in the field) in a very simple and clear way, also with personal touches that seemed to me very sensitive and thoughtful.

Source: http://www.zcommunications.org/chomsky-it-is-all-working-quite-well-for-the-rich-powerful-by-noam-chomsky.html

Frank Barat: When did you make the decision to make the Wall tour (that ended in Paris in September 2013) so political ? And why did you dedicate the final concert to Jean-Charles De Menezes ?

Roger Waters: The first show was October 14^th 2010. We started working on content of show with Sean Evans in 2009. I had already decided to make it much broader politically than it had been in 1979/80. It could not be just about this whinny little guy who didn’t like his teachers. It had to be more universal. That’s why ‘fallen loved ones’ came into it (the shows are showing pictures of people that died during wars) trying to universalise the sense of grief and loss that we all feel towards family members killed in conflict. Whatever the wars or the circumstances, they (in the non western world), feel has much lost as we do. Wars become an important symbol because of that separation between ‘us and them,’ which is fundamental to all conflicts. Regarding Jean-Charles, we used to do Brick II with three solos at the end and I decided that three solos was too much, it was boring me. So sitting in a hotel room, one night, I was thinking about what I could do instead of that. Somebody had recently sent me a photograph of Jean-Charles De Menezes to go on the wall. So he was in my mind and I thought that I should sing his story. I wrote that song, taught it to the band, and that’s what we did.

FB: A lot of artist would say that mixing arts and politics is wrong. That their goal is only to entertain. What would you say to those people?

RW: Well it’s funny you should say that because I just finished yesterday the text of a new piece which will be a new album of mine. It’s about a grandfather in Northern Ireland going on a quest with his grandchild to find the answer to the question: “Why are they killing the children?”, because the child is really worried about it. Right at the very end of it, I decided to add something more. In the song, the child tells his grandpa: “Is that it?” and the grandpa replies “No, we cannot leave on that note, give me another note”. A new song starts and the grandpa makes a speech. He says: “We live on a tiny dot in a middle of a lot of fucking nothing. Now, if you’re not interested in any of this, if you’re one of those “Roger I love Pink Floyd but I hate your fucking politics”, if you believe artists should be mute, emasculated, nodding dogs dangling aimlessly over the dashboard of life, you might be well advised to fuck off to the bar now, because, time keeps slipping away.” That’s my answer to your question.

FB: When will album be out?

RW: I’ve got no idea. I’m working away furiously on lots of old projects. I’m going to give a first listen to this to Sean Evans. He’s coming to my house tomorrow to listen to it. I’ve made a demo which is one hour and six minutes long. It’s pretty heavy I confess, but there is also some humor in it, I hope, but it’s extremely radical and it poses very important questions. Look, if I’m the only one doing it, I am entirely content. I mean, I’m not, I wish there were more people writing about politics and our real situation. Even from what could be considered extreme points of view. It’s very important that Goya did what he did, same for Picasso and Guernica and all those anti-war novels that came out during and after the Vietnam war.

FB: You’re talking about yourself being one of the only one, in your position, taking radical political positions. When it comes to Palestine, you are very open about your support for a cultural boycott of Israel. People opposing this tactic say that culture should not be boycotted. What would you answer to that?

RW: I would say that I understand their opinion. Everybody should have one. But I can’t agree with them, I think that they are entirely wrong. The situation in Israel/ Palestine, with the occupation, the ethnic cleansing and the systematic racist apartheid Israeli regime is un acceptable. So for an artist to go and play in a country that occupies other people’s land and oppresses them the way Israel does, is plain wrong. They should say no. I would not have played for the Vichy government in occupied France in the Second World War, I would not have played in Berlin either during this time. Many people did, back in the day. There were many people that pretended that the oppression of the Jews was not going on. From 1933 until 1946. So this is not a new scenario. Except that this time it’s the Palestinian People being murdered. It’s the duty of every thinking human being to ask: “What can I do?”. Anybody who looks at the situation will see that if you choose not to take up arms to fight your oppressor, the non violent route, and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S) movement, which started in Palestine with 100% support from Palestinian civil society in 2004-2005, a movement that has now been joined by many people around the world, the global civil society, is a legitimate form of resistance to this brutal and oppressive regime. I have nearly finished Max Blumenthal’s book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in greater Israel”. It’s a chilling read. It’s extremely well written in my view. He is a very good journalist and takes great pains to make sure that what he writes is correct. He also gives a voice to the other side. The voice, for instance, of the right wing rabbinate, which is so bizarre and hard to hear that you can hardly believe that it’s real. They believe some very weird stuff you know, they believe that everybody that is not a Jew is only on earth to serve them and they believe that the Indigenous people of the region that they kicked off the land in 1948 and have continued to kick off the land ever since are sub-human. The parallels with what went on in the 30’s in Germany are so crushingly obvious that it doesn’t surprise me that the movement that both you and I are involved in is growing every day. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine was trying to shed light on this when we met, I only took part in two sessions, you took part in many more. It is an extremely obvious and fundamental problem of human rights which every thinking human being should apply himself to.

FB: The scary thing is that the extreme Rabbinate you were talking about with the extreme right wing views about the Palestinians and the non-Jews are having a more and more prominent place in terms of the Israeli society, regime and power structure and that is very scary.

I wanted to follow up on the Cultural Boycott and about the fact that you are one of the only ones who take such a stand. You could, as many others do, I guess enjoy the benefits of your success and lead a quiet, at least politically, non-controversial life. Why do you do it but more importantly why do you think not more people are doing it? Why a lot of artists who often take position against wars, why don’t they touch Palestine?

RW: Well, where I live, in the USA, I think, A: they are frightened and B: I think the propaganda machine that starts in Israeli schools and that continues through all the Netanyahu’s bluster is poured all over the United States, not just Fox but also CNN and in fact in all the mainstream media. It’s like a huge bucket of crap that they are pouring into the mouth of a gullible public in my view, when they say “we are afraid of Iran, it is going to get nuclear weapons…”. It’s a diversionary tactic. The lie that they have told for the last 20 years is “Oh, we want to make peace”, you know and they talk about Clinton and Arafat and Barak being in Camp David and that they came very close to agreeing, and the story that they sold was “Oh Arafat fucked it all up”. Well, no, he did not. This is not the story. The fact of the matter is no Israeli government has been serious about creating a Palestinian state since 1948. They’ve always had the Ben Gurion agenda of kicking all the Arabs out of the country and becoming greater Israel. They tell a lie as part of their propaganda machinery whilst doing the other thing but they have been doing it so obviously in the last 10 years . For instance, even after when Obama went to Cairo and made that speech about Arabs and the Israelis, everybody was like “Oh, this is a step in a new direction at least”. But as soon as he visited Israel, they said. “Oh by the way, we are building another 1200 settlements”. Exactly the same when Kerry went last year saying, “Oh I am going to try to get the sides together and talk peace”. Netanhayu said “Fuck you. We are going to build another 1500 settlements and we a going to build them in E1, this is our plan.” This is so transparent that you’d have to have an IQ above room temperature not to understand what is going on. It is just dopey.

You know I read some piece the other day where it said “apparently only the Secretary State of the United States, believes that these current peace talks are real, no one else in the world does”.

It is a very complicated situation which is why you and I and all the other people in the world who care about their brothers and sisters and not just about the people of our own faith, our own colour, our own race or our own whatever, have to stand in solidarity shoulder to shoulder. This has been a very hard sell particularly where I live in the United States of America. The Jewish lobby is extraordinary powerful here and particularly in the industry that I work in, the music industry and in rock’n roll as they say. I promise you, naming no names, I’ve spoken to people who are terrified that if they stand shoulder to shoulder with me they are going to get fucked. They have said to me “aren’t you worried for your life?” and I go “No, I’m not”. A few years ago, I was touring and 9/11 happened in the middle of the tour and 2 or 3 people in my band who happened to be United States citizens wouldn’t come on the next leg of the tour. I said “ why not? Don’t you like the music anymore?” and they replied “no, we love the music but we are Americans and it’s too dangerous for us to travel abroad, they are trying to kill us” and I thought “Wow!”.

FB: Yes, the brainwashing works!

RW: Obviously it does, that is why I am happy to be doing this interview with you because it is super important that we make as much noise as possible. I’m so glad that this right wing newspaper in Israel, Yedioth Ahronoth, printed my interview with Alon Hadar. At least they printed it. Although they changed the context and made it sound different that what is actually was but at least they printed something. You know, I would expect to be completely suppressed and ignored.

You know that Shuki Weiss( preeminent Israeli promotor) was offering me a hundred thousand people at hundred dollars a ticket a few months ago to come and play in Tel Aviv! “Hang on, that’s 10 million dollars”, how could they offer it to me?! And I thought Shuki are you fucking deaf or just dumb?! I am part of the BDS movement, I’m not going anywhere in Israel, for any money, all I would be doing would be legitimizing the policies of the government.

I have a confession to make to you. I did actually write to Cindy Lauper a couple of weeks ago. I did not make the letter public but I wrote her a letter because I know her a bit, she worked with me on the Wall in Berlin which is why I found it super difficult to understand that she is doing a gig in Tel Aviv on January the 4th. apparently, quite extraordinary, reprehensible in my view, but I don’t know her personal story and people have to make up their own mind about these things. One can’t get to personal about it.

FB: For sure but you can help them, I guess by what you are doing, by writing to them. You can open their eyes because that’s what they need I think.

RW: Yes but if their eyes were going to be opened they would need to either visit the Holy land, visit the West Bank or Gaza or even visit Israel or any single checkpoint anywhere and see what it’s like. All they would need to do is visiting or, read, read a book! Check out the history. Read Max Blumenthal’s book. Then say “Oh I know what I am going to do, I am going to play a gig in Tel Aviv”. That would be a good plan! (sarcastic tone).

Frank Barat is one of the producers of “The Wall has ears; conversation for Palestine”.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/an-interview-with-pink-floyds-roger-waters/?utm_source=feedly

Source Link allegralaboratory

ALLEGRA: Dimitris, you are a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sussex. In the past you have studied highways and infrastructures and currently you are carrying out a research project entitled « The City at the Time of Crisis », funded by an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant. Can you briefly introduce yourself to those who are not familiar with your work and describe your projects?

DIMITRIS: For my PhD I studied anthropologically political transition via infrastructures and vice versa. More precisely I studied the main cross-border motorway between Albania and Greece and via that peculiar -at the time- ethnographic site I studied in a new way -via the road and its flows- the postsocialist conditions in the Balkans. By extension this study of infrastructure provided an insight into the materiality of the wider European neoliberalisation project.

We have to understand that the project of European neoliberalisation of the 1990s and 2000s passed precisely via a mass development of built environment in the continent. Moreover an additional element of that process was the re-determination of European boundaries and a related inter-European movement of populations which crossed these re-determined borders. Indeed, the replacement of State-run economies by market-based capitalism in half of the continent and the parallel expansion of Western European capitalist interests in Eastern Europe had a crucial role in this neoliberalisation project. So given this context the cross-border road between postsocialist and non-socialist peripheral European states looked like an ideal ethnographic locus for analysing such process anthropologically.

Today we are seeing one more stage of that neoliberalisation process with a capitalist crisis centered on the periphery of Western Europe.

In 2012, together with a team of colleagues, we started the ‘City at the time of Crisis’ project funded by ESRC. In this project we study the new forms of governance implemented in that periphery of Western (as political determination rather than geographic) Europe. A basic idea is that one of the most important parts of this new form of governance is the transformations of the notions of public. So ethnographically we study political transitions and social change in the form of socio-spatial changes in the public urban and infrastructural materialities of Athens.

ALLEGRA: You seem to suggest that Athens is the ideal ‘laboratory’ from which to observe the global financial crisis. In their recent book, Theories from the South, the Comaroffs argue that it is rather the global South that is best placed to help us understand contemporary world transformations. The obvious fact that you are Greek put aside, can you tell us why you chose Athens as your primary site of inquiry?

DIMITRIS: The Commaroffs are right, but they are also wrong. The reality is that we first saw extreme capitalism being applied in the global South. Gradually, more advanced and elaborated versions of capitalism were applied there. However, a very similar version of extreme neoliberalism -like the one that emerged in the 1970s in the South- was then applied in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. Now it is the turn of the Western European periphery to experience a similar regime.

The anthropologists who happen to have ethnographic knowledge of both the postsocialist and non-socialist European periphery would be able to confirm the similarity between e.g. the loan and “aid” agreements between EU and postsocialist states and the current agreements between e.g. the Greek or Spanish governments and EU institutions.

So in the current historical stage it is not only organisations like the IMF:  there are other institutions involved in the shaping of the world political economy. For instance the EU leadership and especially the European Central Bank along with several other European banks play a crucial historical role in the expansion of an extreme neoliberalist form of governance that is applied in the crisis-ridden euro-zone countries. More and more populations are subjected to that regime and what we used to call Global South governance extends well beyond the South. So the category itself is a bit problematic.

As I mentioned in the previous question Greece is centrally located in a process of global proportions that is unravelling at this very moment. Greece’s centrality in this project starts from the re-definition of Greek borders which changed radically after 1990, given that it was surrounded by socialist European countries. Phenomena like migratory flows, big construction projects and capitalist expansion of Greek capitalist entreprises in Eastern Europe just complete this picture.

Under such circumstances the anthropology of Europe and European politics keep asking the same questions since the 1990s: How did the continent change after the collapse of socialism? What will come next? These questions are very similar to the ones we ask about e.g. China or India and especially North African countries.

The end of the cold war has led to radical transformations globally and we are still seeing them in front of our eyes. If European communism had really been the point of reference for the Left everywhere we would not have the squares movements occuring around the Mediterranean. So it is not a process that is detached from what is happening in the so-called Global South. Overall I think that unless anthropology starts including more substantially Europe and the West in its own perception of the world we will end up running behind change.

ALLEGRA: A few weeks ago, ALLEGRA launched a discussion on the future of universities, and tried to define the nature of the ‘space’ that current movements against cuts are seeking to preserve. Some of our conclusions were relatively optimistic, in the sense that we also tried to highlight the regenerative potential of the public to achieve positive change. In the past when ASA asked you to write a text on the crisis of higher education you jumped to similar conclusions. However, seeing your more recent work you seem to suggest that the current global crisis has deeply transformed notions of ‘public space’, ‘public good’, ‘public interest’ and so on…to the extent that the public as we used to know (or fantasize?) it seems to be slowly disappearing. To a certain extent, one is left with an impression of Athens as a city under a permanent state of exception, to use an Agambian expression. What has changed?

DIMITRIS: Since you used the term of a political philosopher I will respond with a political answer. In that ASA article I concluded that higher education in Britain does not deserve to be defended for what it is or what it was, but for what it may potentially become. I guess this applies in the case of Athens and Greece as well.

In the last two decades, as  European neoliberalisation reached a more intensified form,  we saw some of the resistance movements in the Western world romanticise or imagine a capitalism with better public social provisions. Much of the Occupy movement in the US had such demands, while many of the European movements suggest a return to a recent past of better social provisions. While I see the value of these benefits for the better quality of life of many, as a political proposition I think that implies a crucial mistake. If the middle classes of the Western World had a better life during the recent past, the majority of the world, the poor in the West or globally had very bad time.

The issue is that the current crisis is quite crucial for the evolution of capitalism in Europe and probably globally, and as we know in anthropology crises signify a transition while they also provide a window for anti-structural events to take place. This is our case at the moment and unless societies come up with a radical alternative (way forward from just better social policy) the future of European people will look very bad.

I think that the potentialities of the crisis are visible to economic elites and state authorities who are trying to make sure that no anti-structural events will occur. This is the reason why they employ some of the most violent apparatuses, like e.g. extreme police violence or armed neo-Nazi groups.

For example when the large anti-austerity and anti-governmental movement in Greece appeared in the summer of 2011 the police brutality was profound. Soon the neo-Nazis were funded with huge amounts of money and were activated on the streets of Athens but also electorally.

Neoliberal governance since its birth was ready to employ fascists such as Pinochet or go to fascistic extremes such as declaring national wars out of the blue like e.g. Margaret Thatcher did in the case of the UK or her social democratic offsprings did with Iraq and Afghanistan.

Researching the use of extreme violent apparatuses in Greece these days might make you pessimistic. In order for the austerity experiment to work, in order for the bankers’ interests to be protected, the current form of governance in Greece is ready to spill a lot of blood. A similar escalation in state’s violence has been seen in Britain in the last couple of years when the student movement emerged: police brutality against the protesters has been profound in recent British history. We even saw the police being invited on campus to arrest protesting students:  I personally saw it twice in my university, Sussex, and I have worked there only for only five years!

ALLEGRA: Your work brings an important contribution to the scholarship on statehood, by documenting changing everyday experiences in public spaces. With the mass privatization of public infrastructures, it seems like the only means left for the state to manifest itself is through violence, symbolic or real. What do you think is remaining of the state in Greece today?

DIMITRIS: Well, violence is a crucial part of statecraft anyway. Even the most democratic socialist or mild state mechanisms have used and/or use apparatuses of death and pain. For example, one of the most quoted of such examples: the Swedish state was force sterilising women until the 1970s. For another example, we have to remember that every state apparatus discriminates against people: citizens and non-citizens alike.

As the history of Europe shows in the best case scenario such division just implies less rights for the non-citizens and in the worst case scenario it implies exterminating non-citizens massively.

Even the most democratic states are still states and have the monopoly of legal violence, so potentially the state authorities or their agents can crash, kill, torture, and imprison any of us at any moment they will decide. They do not have necessarily to do it, but the fact that apparatuses are ready to do so is violent enough. And indeed these days they have a nice army of journalists, academics and so on who will provide good excuses about public order and social peace that need to be restored.

When the revolt of 2008 happened in Greece you had people like Greek Yale professors up to famous journalists supporting the government and indirectly excusing the police assassination of a teenager, and this is precisely what triggered the revolt.

Within this barbaric mechanism modern states provided various things to their citizens and selected citizens from other states to become part of the national body. That happened for many reasons, which I do not have the time to analyse at the moment. However, such provisions maintained some kind of social peace and consent between the State (or what we imagine to be the state) and a critical mass of state residents.

So in our case, EU citizens and migrants with visas probably had a better life at some point, but a substantial part of the population was faced with a state that did not even give them the right to exist, that arrested them, deported them and killed them. The same dynamics stands for the new poor, for example: many young people in Europe mainly experience the state as an apparatus that deregulates labour and that makes sure that the majority will work like slaves for small salaries, will have no job or social security etc. If they protest, the state will beat them up or in some cases may even kill them just for being around a protest, as Metropolitan Police did with Ian Tomlinson a few year ago. It is just that today we see this state of exception expanding towards social groups who have not had direct experience of state as violence before.

And certainly we are in a very difficult position, because the state and the capitalist market have ended up being the main controllers of social provisions, so now that state policies enforce poverty and austerity and fewer and fewer can afford private provisions, we see suffering of important proportions of the European population. This has been a usual phenomenon outside Europe though and among the non-citizens within Europe!

What one should stress is that the last few decades when the state has been as social provider have been nothing more than a happy break in the history of capitalism, based on the fear of social unrest.

Today that states have achieved so advanced repression and silencing mechanisms, is probably what allows them not to find it necessary anymore to provide social provisions. Anyhow, Western European middle classes as consumers of the products of global capitalism lose their significance given that we have new consuming classes emerging in other places of the planet. So their future is that of most Eastern Europeans: lots of work for peanuts, extreme inequalities etc. When it was happening there very few Western Europeans complained or protested against the barbaric form of postsocialist capitalism.

Indeed while European states decrease social provisions to the citizens in a drastic manner and provide only violence for non-citizens, simultaneously great proportions of state’s wealth is chanelled to global financial institutions and other corporations through various paths.

To end this answer with a final note though. I think that when the elites start busting their cards one after the other, namely when the police violence is not anymore enough to control social disappointment and rage and they have to use the para-state neo-Nazis apparatuses, we are in a situation where they are running out of legal responses, running out of cards, while running towards a potential dead end.

ALLEGRA: Michael Herzfeld, in his now famous books The Social Production of Indifference, argues that Greeks have always maintained some kind of indifference or at least, some kind of distance towards the state. In which ways does your work confirm or contradict this argument? How has the current crisis transformed citizens relationship towards the state? Is this pattern illustrative of broader transformations taking place in European/Western democracies?

DIMITRIS: Herzfeld’s question was phrased in the right way, one could summarise it like this perhaps: If Greeks are generally polite and welcoming people how comes when they become civil servants they are so unhelpful? My take on that phenomenon can be summarised like this: generally people are polite and nice until State and other power apparatuses intervene. For example when the civil servant’s role provides them with e.g. three options to the way s/he will treat a citizen and all three are nasty options, going for the least nasty one is actually a good option. At the same time remember that the official state does its best to create obedient people who will follow the rules.

It is like the banality of the evil argument of Hannah Arendt who suggested that some of the people who carried out the Holocaust were just civil servants who saw the mass extermination of people as just doing their job, like they would do any other job. They were good civil servants.

Back in 2011 when the people in Greece rose against the government, more than 500 people were hospitalised only in Athens due to police brutality.

Last summer when I was in Gezi park in Istanbul, I saw how Turkish policemen attacked the camp beating up people while, in the meantime, they were chatting and having cigarette breaks. Similarly in London, when Occupy London started in front of St Paul, the riot cops brutally attacked peaceful demonstrators without any reason, when 10 minutes before they were queuing next to each other in front of the same toilet in a nearby cafe. While I do not consider police or Nazi officials as simple civil servants, the reality is that the modern state apparatus filters and fractures its violence so much that the actual state’s employees/attackers often feel that they are merely serving the state and the government that feeds them. Indeed the state makes sure that they can do whatever they want, that they are fully potected and that they will never have to face the consequences. Most Nazi officials never paid for their crimes and quite a few of them were happily integrated in capitalist post-war state apparatuses. This does not imply that police officers who beat up demonstrators or shoot migrants are innocent. Only certain kinds of people can remain silent under such circumstances or blindly obey orders. So this is not an excuse: it is just an analysis of the production of indifference.

The reality is that civil servants (with the exception of riot police!) are on the forefront of salary and personnel cuts in Greece these days. The same mechanism that was programming them to misbehave, by e.g. giving them few resources, poor training, unjust promotion or employment system, poor and misleading explanation of tasks and roles etc. is the same mechanism that now blames them for doing what they were told to do. In other words everyone, even the cops are just consumable for the political and financial elites. So people do come to a realisation with great potentialities, as far as insecurity and state violence reaches one of the most secure social class such as permanent civil servants, there is a discontinuity in the continuums that have made the system sustainable so far.

In this interview, D. Kousouris points out that a general ideological denouncement of fascism is not enough to address the needs of the long-term unemployed and those ones who cannot make ends meet. What he regards as most important is the setting up of solidarity networks in order to counteract the extreme right.

An interview to Georgos Laoutaris for the weekly newspaper PRIN

15 years ago, when the Golden Dawn tried to kill you it was marginal organization, while now it is part of the political establishment. Wouldn’t you expect that its presence in the parliament would push this party to more lawful actions?

By no means. Legitimating political ideas in the broad public never resulted in mitigating its initial features. In Greece after the elections in 2012 there has been a widespread view that people would realize the violent face of the Golden Dawn and would stay away from it. This view was at least naive. As the capitalist crisis continues to affect a huge part of Greek society leading it to pauperization and impoverishment, the conditions on which fascism can grow continue to exist.

Do you believe that the murder of Pavlos Fyssas had a political motive?

It was a political assassination that had been announced by the Golden Dawn in the working-class districts of Piraeus. It was just a matter of time for this to happen. The immediate reaction of the government proves that they knew about it and they were prepared to act accordingly.

Do you believe that the imprisonment of members of Golden Dawn will be a step towards the solution of the problem?

Obviously this would change the rules of the game. However it is an illusion to believe that this would solve the problem. Even if the Golden Dawn was outlawed or if they applied the anti-terrorist law or if they just used the penal code to send some of its members to prison, the problem would be still there. The murder of Pavlos Fyssas, a working-class offspring that was engaged in the cause of social emancipation reveals the size of the damage that has been inflicted the last years. In this transitional period,where the historical defeat of the labour movement (as known till now) seems to be completed, it was inevitable that the dismantled social structure and public space of the poor neighbourhoods where unemployment and poverty dominate the lives of young and old would become the scenery where bouncers, snitches and all kinds of gangs take over. The infringement of parliamentarianism its very representatives, the abrupt narrowing of democratic legitimacy by the abolition of basic social rights, the longstanding deep roots of the extreme right in the state apparatus in combination with the reactionary and racist shift of the government and the media as well as the collapse of the two major parties of the political establishment enabled Golden Dawn to be the one that provides political coverage and ideological identity to these gangs organizing them around the rich and turning them against the remaining cells of organization and struggle of the working people. The political elites are certainly aware of the transitory nature of these political identieties that are formed in the current conditions. It is obvious that after the assassination of Pavlos Fyssas the government is trying to regain control and initiative and send a message to all directions: to the right, to the left, inside and outside the country.

Is the increased influence of the Golden Dawn a coincidental phenomenon or is it here to stay?

This will depend on each one of us and all of us together. The Golden Dawn is one of the many faces of fascism, the most repulsive we have seen after the dictatorship. In any case, in the coming period, there is going to be an attempt of approaching its electorate. The aim is gaining control over the legal or illegal paramilitary branch of the dominant power coalition. Therefore, Golden Down may disappear but not fascism itself as long as the circle of illegitimacy grows within which the domestic and international elites are trying to establish their dominance at the expense of the working people

During the last period books, articles and documentaries have shed light on the Nazi references of Golden Dawn. How do you interpret the fact that this evidence is not convincing?

Building an ideology based on the political struggle is an aspect of bourgeois politics which is rather convenient for the journalists of the so called “constitutional range” but has also created many illusions within the Left.  How can someone thatonly uses a general ideological denouncement, address the needs of the unemployed, the ones who are hungry and eat at the common meals of the church, the ones who sleep in the cold and the dark, and the young people who do not have any hopes for their future? The denouncement of Nazism is essential. However, as demonstrated in the last years, it is an illusion to be considered adequate. It is also known that applying the same methods over and over again and expect different results is an indicationof insanity or stupidity. Reading through history, fascism was born as a mass counterrevolutionary movement bred by the defeat of the labour movement in the inter-war period and was reborn as the “dark side” of neoliberalism after the retreat of the labour movement that followed the crisis of the 1970s.Two decades after the triumph of neo-liberal parliamentarism, the crisis has dramatically narrowed the possibilities for preserving and managing the status quo with purely parliamentary means in Europe, the U.S., China or Egypt. Fascism as a power optionbounces back in its European cradle: Greece, Hungary, Norway, France and elsewhere. The goal of fascism is again the defeat and finally the elimination of the labour movement. Therefore the crucial factor for the character of the fight and the outcome of the struggle – now as then – is the status and the level of organization of the working class. The historical bet of our time is who will prevail: the long-lasting darkness of the authoritarian domination of global capital or the rebirth and strengthening of the labour movement that will stand against fascism but also against the forces of capitalism which breed and sustain it.

How do you think the Left should react?

The different forces of the Left chose very often a defensive attitude by trying to preserve the limited political space that is available to them or the traditional good-old avoidance of action by referring to some abstract plan of labour emancipation that stands far away from the actual movement of the social subjects of the same plan. But if we really want to discuss how to eliminate fascism, it is high time we organize solidarity and resistance of the vast majority of the working people and the unemployed.

Who fits in the antifascist front?

If we agree that fascism is an extreme and authoritarian version of capitalism as well as an alliance between the capitalists and the middle class aiming at the preservation of the dominant ownership relationships, then we can first clarify the class characteristics of the anti-fascist front. Many fit to this antifascist front as the majority of the working people fit to the front.  Based on that, the organization of the antifascist struggle is the responsibility of all those who think and act against capitalist barbarism. It is the responsibility of grass-root local initiatives and assemblies, the numerous online or printed alternative media, several initiatives of popular self-organization and collaborative economy, students’ unions in high schools and higher education institutions, trade unions and political clubs that are either politically independent or related to SYRIZA, the Communist Party, or ANTARSYA or anarcho-syndicalism. On the other hand, fascism is both the nazi storm troopers and the emergency regime where the governments rules beyond and popular control and the repression forces act uncontrolled against the people’s movement and abolish at will any constitutional freedom Therefore, the anti-fascist front excludes by definition that consent, support or manage this reality.

If the source of the crisis is government policy, do you think a left government would be the solution?

Using fear as domination method, the political establishment attempts to stabilize the political system by forcing the left and the right extreme to restrain themselves within the parties of the so-called ‘constitutional range’. The polarization and tension strategy that is followed by the elite aims at convincing the public opinion that a left government would be an improvement compared to the repressive Samaras-government to the extent that it will try to confront the fascist elements in the state, the police and the army and to renegotiate the country’s position in the EU and the Eurozone. This assumption is flawed since the dominance of the pro-austerity forces of the old political system makes it extremely doubtful for the Left to achieve a majority in the Parliament. Even if the Left manages to form such a majority, it would be almost impossible to control a state apparatus that is deeply penetrated by the ‘praetorians’ of the ‘old’ regime. Finally, as repeatedly proven throughout modern Greek history, whenever the Left failed to take advantage of the cracking of elite’s power and abandoned the prospect of toppling capitalism and proceeding with a plan for social emancipation in favor of achieving democratic legitimacy (such as in 1944¹, 1965² and 1974³), it was driven to political and literal extermination, entrapment within the political system and marginalization.

Impossible Biographies from Ross Domoney on Vimeo.

For them, the crisis has by now come of age. Yet despite and against shallow journalistic interpretations, there is nothing humanitarian about it. This is because for them the crisis was from the upstart orchestrated politically, socially and militarily. In this way, the discourse about racism in crisis-ridden Greece merely obfuscates and comes in handy. For it obscures exactly how structural this devaluation had been for the development of the Greek state in itself, as well as for the self-perception of Greek society. Yet the crisis knows how to twist meanings too. Today, migrants are accused of the very decline of the Greek edifice. And within this twisted world, their devaluation takes on a more offensive and, at the same time, a more legitimate form. Impossible Biographies, as part of the research project The City at a Time of Crisis, bears witness to this offensive. Today, just like yesterday, the devalued lives of migrants shall remind us how it is to live and die within an enforced anonymity and invisibility. How it is to live a life whose biography is impossible.

The City at a Time of Crisis is mapping racist attacks in Athens. To view or contribute information please visit: map.crisis-scape.net

Produced by Ross Domoney and Christos Filippidis

Filmed and edited by Ross Domoney

Research by Christos Filippidis

Additional footage by Yannis Tsakiridis

Special thanks to Clemont

Paloma Yáñez

Klara Jaya Brekke

Dimitris Dalakoglou

Antonis Vradis

In times of severe austerity things look bleak for Greek people, but they’re far worse for those who have recently arrived. Without housing, legal papers or support, migrants in Greece are faced with increasing and often violent racism at the hands of the growing Nazi party Golden Dawn and the police in Athens. Many are trapped by EU laws and legislation of other EU countries meaning they’d be returned to Greece if they managed to get to another member state, they are desperate to leave the country.

Shot and edited with sensitivity and compassion, it doesn’t pull its punches and makes for harrowing viewing in parts. It is the product of crowd funding, dedication, self-sacrifice and a burning sense of justice.

This film gives incredible insights to the reality faced by people who simply want to lead peaceful, normal lives.

This great documentary is a work from Reel News video activists.

Funded by small donations from friends and organisations, the film makers are once more turning to their supporters and allies to distribute the film online and through screenings to grassroots groups across the country.

No one has been paid to work on this film.

Please consider to donate to make possible producing this kind of films in the future !

http://intothefire.org/donations/

Here is the Facebook event : https://www.facebook.com/events/366214530155484/

Cavia Filmhuis: http://www.filmhuiscavia.nl/

Filmhuis Cavia – Van Hallstraat 52-I (trap op) – 1051 HH Amsterdam – 020-68 11 419

Free entrance

Critical Thinking and Freedom of Speech is not one of the goals of SEFA

With the occasion of having Mr. Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, participating in the “Room for Discussion” event, the Student Association for Economics and Business (SEFA) of University of Amsterdam avoided any opportunity to expose tomorrow’s economists to critical and diverse thinking. Mr Draghi gave a rather boring and foreseen speech about his views on the role of the monetary policies of the ECB in preventing the economic down spiral of the euro zone crisis. The intelligent, inspiring, and true to the academic spirit, questions chosen for Mr. Draghi by SEFA where non other than “your signature on the euro bill is simple compared to your predecessors, are you also so direct in your life?”, “who was your favorite student?”, and finally “what is your advice for the students that want to also become the president of ECB one day?”.

When we confronted the organizers and ask them why there were no questions about the crisis, or the effectiveness of the policies of the ECB, or finally the consequences of such policies, we were told that students already knew the answers to these questions and thus there was no point posing them. In addition, according to the views of SEFA and the organizers of the “Room for Discussion” event, when you interview important people, such as Mr. Draghi, you should make small talk and not direct questions!

Not even one of the questions we sent beforehand via twitter – which was the designated way to ask questions – was chosen. We had prepared for this case by printing a brochure criticizing the infamous quota of Mr.Draghi, that “the euro must be saved whatever it takes”. However, we were not allowed to distribute our brochure to the students since it was deemed by the security of the University of Amsterdam as non-academic material! We were bullied out by the security, who claimed that the building is private and “owned” by the head of the security. Eventually, we were only allowed to distribute our brochure far away from the entrance of the University.

The policies of ECB have triggered countless criticism not only for causing hundreds of thousands to be unemployed and poor, but also for their effectiveness in the economical growth. Mr. M.Draghi, once a vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs, now the President of ECB, is still a member of private financial trusts and banking lobbies, such as the G30. (For the history, a complaint to the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) filed in June 2012, the complaint was directed against the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, for his membership of an organization of high profile bankers from both the private and public sector – the Group of Thirty G30).

We believe that SEFA, and the University of Amsterdam, has a responsibility in the stultification of the students by exposing them only to one-sided views, and by discouraging lively discussions in interesting topics of the economical and political life. SEFA is also responsible for the degradation of the academic spirit of the students, transforming them to mere admirers of the so called powerful and successful men.

Yesterday, it was clear that there was No “Room for discussion”.

The organizers choose to hide the fact that Mr. Draghi of the ECB is responsible for the humanitarian crisis of the European south. We call SEFA and the University of Amsterdam to organize real discussions that give food for thought, that speak the truth rather than covering up reality, and to stimulate the critical thinking of tomorrow’s economists, so as to be able to recognize and serve society’s interests and not just their carriers with “whatever it takes”.

This is the flyer that was distributed to the attendants of the event:

reinform.nl

This is the reply we got from Room for Discussion:

Dear Sir/Madam,

Bob Verhagen

| Roetersstraat 11 | 1018 WB | Amsterdam roomfordiscussion@sefa.nl | www.roomfordiscussion.com
+31 (0) 20 525 40 24