crisis

Alternatives in a World of Crisis

16 April 2018

Global Working Group Beyond Development

Seeking alternatives beyond developmentOur world is facing a multidimensional crisis arising from the very civilizational foundations that capitalist modernity is built on: economic growth, instrumental and destructive societal relations with Nature, a blind belief in science and technology and a rational, profit-maximizing, and individualistic understanding of humanity. These bases have not only produced a specific set of problems, including an unprecedented level of ecological destruction. They also shape the possible solutions that are envisioned and often...
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Economic Guidelines for a Better Union

8 January 2018

John Weeks & Jeremy Smith

This report on EU and national guidelines for fiscal balances, commissioned by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Brussels Office, is written at a time when the EU and member state national governments appear determined to make the present highly constrictive fiscal rules, which have heavily contributed to an overall poor economic performance, even tighter. Despite the fact that the global financial crisis was a crisis brought on by excessive private debt, the EU and its most powerful member states insisted that the answer was to bear down ever more strongly on...
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Resisting Evictions Across Europe – now in French!

21 March 2017

European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the city

As this report makes depressingly clear, the forcible eviction of people from their homes – whether rented, owned or occupied – is on the rise in Europe. In some respects, Europe has arrived late to the global eviction party that each year sees millions of people displaced from housing across the world. Over the course of the twentieth century, the various national housing crises afflicting Europe's industrial working classes were gradually tamed through state intervention as part of the broader Keynesian deal that put Western capitalism...
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Progressive industrial policy for the EU?

28 February 2017

Collection of essays from different authors and countries

Outmanoeuvring neoliberalismWhy the European Union needs a genuinely progressive industrial policy The warmest decade on record in Europe fell between the years of 2002 and 2011. Statistics show that heatwaves and floods are on the rise. Southern Europe in particular is suffering from low river levels, and the agricultural sector is plagued by heat and water shortages. Crop yields are expected to fall in southern Europe, a region that has suffered from a massive wave of de-industrialisation since the global financial crisis hit in 2007. Those are just a...
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Cornelia Hildebrandt, Richard Detje and Martin Schirdewan

Analysing European Social Democracy: The Stance of the Left

13 December 2016

Angelina Giannopoulou, Jukka Pietiläinen

Crises and left solutions

Report of the Helsinki WorkshopThe workshop was dedicated to the state of affairs in European Social Democracy and the interrelation with the current crisis and the dismantling of European integration. In the framework of the event, we analyzed the decline of Social Democracy through the prism of post-democratic politics, as well as from the political economy perspective. 20 people from ten different countries participated in the event which was co-organised by transform! europe, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Brussels and the Left Forum...
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Image: Cam Evans, [Void of time] / Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0

Shorter working times

25 October 2016

digberlin

Crises and left solutions

A European debate on re-distribution and good work for allOn 20-21 October 2016 we organised a meeting on shorter working times at the European Parliament. Representatives of political parties, parliamentary groups, trade unions, the scientific community and social movements from seven European countries exchanged their positions, expectations and experiences. The meeting took place in a difficult time, where employers and governments rather bank on longer working hours and maximum flexibility. While reducing working hours is still a marginal topic, it gains importance in...
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Anti-ACTA-Protestaktion in Sosnowiec (Polen), Foto: olo81 [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Local solidarity

9 June 2016

Florian Horn

Crises and left solutions

“Rebel cities” in Spain and the Plaza in Athens – left-wing activists are currently joining forces most effectively at the local levelWhat remains of Europe? For large sections of the population the answer is very little. Instead they are facing deepening of the neoliberal crisis and austerity policy, entrenchment of the European border regime and the rise of the far right. In view of such woes, it might be reasonable to think that nothing is going well in Europe. What scope is there in Europe to counteract that development? In other words, what is happening on the left in...
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Rising up Together

26 April 2016

Nina Léger

Solidarity and emancipation

On 31 March during the protest against the El Khomri law (France’s new labour law), a few protesters handed out flyers which read Nuit debout (“rising up at night”), echoing La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: “Tyrants appear great only because we are on our knees”. That same evening, people were invited to gather on place de la République where François Ruffin’s film Merci Patron! was to be screened and discussed. The evening’s motto: “Tonight, nobody goes home”. It had rained heavily during the whole protest. Everyone was drenched and everything was soaking wet....
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