George Souvlis
I hold a PhD in history from the European University Institute in Florence. Prior to my Ph.D. studies, I received my BA in Sociology at the University of Crete and I completed an MRes in Modern European History at the EUI. I am the author of Voices on the Left (Red Marks) and co-editor of Back to the ‘30’s? Crisis, Repetition and Transition in the 20th and 21th centuries (Pagrave). Currently, I am teaching fellow in history and sociology at the Democritus University of Thrace. My research topics lie in the intersection of intellectual history and historical sociology. I write also for Jacobin, Salvage and Left East.
Phone: 6947175680
Address: Marathonodromou 38b, Marousi, Athens, postal code: 151 24.
Phone: 6947175680
Address: Marathonodromou 38b, Marousi, Athens, postal code: 151 24.
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Η συζήτηση αυτή εγκαινιάζει το νέο vidcast του Jacobin Greece στο φιλόξενο στούντιο του The Press Project με τίτλο, Συζητήσεις με το Jacobin. Πρώτος μας καλεσμένος ο καθηγητής πολιτικής επιστήμης στο Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο, Σεραφείμ Σεφεριάδης. Αντικείμενο της συζήτησης είναι όψεις του νέου του βιβλίου, Για την πολιτική που διαμορφώνει, Εργατικό κίνημα και κράτος (Εκδόσεις Τόπος). Ειδικότερα, ανοίγουμε θεματικές που καταπιάνονται με όψεις της σύγχρονης ελληνικής ιστορίας και πολιτικής όπως: η ιστορία της Σοσιαλδημοκρατίας, η ιστορία του ελληνικού κομμουνιστικού κινήματος στον ελληνικό μεσοπόλεμο, ο Βενιζελικός αστικός εκσυγχρονισμός, το μεταπολεμικό διεκδικητικό κίνημα, ο εκσυγχρονισμός κατά την διάρκεια της μεταπολίτευσης και τα αιτήματα που αποτελούν προϋποθέσεις για την αναζωογόνηση του σύγχρονου εργατικού κινήματος.
Παρακολουθήστε ολόκληρη την συζήτηση εδώ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqvZqnGBlUc&t=268s
Στη συζήτηση που έλαβε χώρα πριν από μερικές εβδομάδες, συζητήθηκαν ζητήματα που αφορούν τα κυρίαρχα ΜΜΕ στην Ελλάδα, τη διαμόρφωση των συσχετισμών και τις δυνατότητες των κοινωνικών κινημάτων να απαντήσουν σε αυτό το εχθρικό τοπίο που διαμορφώνεται στην Ελλάδα.
Επίσης αναλύθηκαν οι προσπάθειες της κυβέρνησης ΣΥΡΙΖΑ να αναδιαμορφώσει το ραδιοτηλεοπτικό τοπίο και στη συνέχεια οι επιλογές της Νέας Δημοκρατίας που ξεκίνησαν από τον έλεγχο του ΑΜΕ-ΜΠΕ και επεκτάθηκαν και σε άλλες πλευρές.
Μεταξύ άλλων συζητήθηκε το βασικό θέμα της επιβίωσης των εναλλακτικών εγχειρημάτων και των ανθρώπων τους μέσα από οικονομικά μοντέλα λειτουργίας που δε θα δημιουργούν σχέσεις εξάρτησης από τα μεγάλα οικονομικά και πολιτικά συμφέροντα. Από αυτή τη σκοπιά αναλύθηκε το πετυχημένο μοντέλο του The Press Project και διεξήχθη συζήτηση σχετικά με τη διεθνή εμπειρία παρόμοιων προσπαθειών και τη δυνατότητα να εφαρμοστούν οι πετυχημένες τακτικές στην Ελλάδα.
Φυσικά, από τη συγκεκριμένη συζήτηση δε θα μπορούσε να λείπει μία προσέγγιση για τα Social Media και τις (α)δυνατότητες να συμβάλλουν στην προσπάθεια των κοινωνικών κινημάτων να παρακάμψει το τείχος σιωπής που επιβάλλεται από τα μεγάλα συμφέροντα.
Παρακολουθήστε ολόκληρη την συζήτηση εδώ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtt5kQ4jaPI
Abstract: While rebutting Karl Kautsky’s exaltation of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Cunctator’s “strategy of attrition”, Rosa Luxemburg quotes the historian Theodor Mommsen in order to correct the record and inveigh against the preaching of this “legend … at high school students in our schools to drill them in conservative spirits” (Theory and Practice: Postscript, 1910). “Rome was not saved by the ‘Procrastinator’,” Mommsen writes in his Roman History (1856, 3rd edition), “but by the firm union of the federation – and equally, perhaps, by the national hatred with which the occidental welcomed Phoenician Man.” This lecture will explore the dark underside of this and other racializing moments in the disciplinary imagination of ancient history, by situating the emergence of “classics” as a field of study in dialogue not only within the Orientalist constructs of 19th-century nation-state politics but within the broader arc of European race-making and settler-colonialism. I will argue for an approach to the study of Greco-Roman classics that locates it as one uniquely (and violently) overrepresented form of classicism, and that inquires whether such an overrepresented form is capable of accommodating the communities and knowledge-practices that it has historically so effectively Othered.
Abstract: Understanding the relationship between gender and eugenism requires a critical exploration of the factors that have shaped our negotiation with and resistance to power along with historical and contemporary readings of those factors. Moreover, it requires a new understanding of the foundations of the Western patriarchal, racist-colonial tradition of binary categoric thinking in which academic disciplines and epistemic truth are rooted. Following Michel Foucault’s premise, in his work the History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, that aphrodisia remains the ethical substance for ancient Greek and Roman sexual ethics and the ontological parameters of the ‘thinking’ subject, I suggest that gender perpetuates this sexual, racist and patriarchal code of ethics and truth and the one-dimensional deterministic perception about the subject. While throughout the 16th century this regime of ethics-truth was more philosophical from the 19th century on, I argue, it takes the form of an absolute scientific truth - as a response to the social upheavals and the rising of Marxist and anarchist ideas. Thus, a discriminative in terms of sex, race, age, and able-bodiness regime-of- truth emerged, as a part of the liberal biomedical discourse, essentially for the survival of capitalism. This biomedical discourse gained momentum after the Paris Commune and provided a place for s/he as the subject that can speak the truth. At the same time, this biomedical discourse employed all the supposedly psychic and somatic interventions in order to ‘help’ nature -through the castration of the intersex- produce an evolved, scientifically stable, social sex, that is, gender. Within this logic, gender became the boundary not only between the rational, healthy, superior race of the civilized liberal-christian West, against the savage, anarchist, androgynous and degenerate non-Western races, but also the boundary between a supposed patriarchal and matriarchal culture, with the latter relying on blood and soil ties and a passive acceptance of all natural phenomena. It also signifies the inclusion of all people as equal, as all children of Mother Earth. In the patriarchal culture, by contrast, we run across the concept of the ‘beloved son’ symbol of the hierarchical order of society. Within this concept, eugenism, I argue, though commonly used, it has been under-theorized concept in the historical -materialist queer literature. In short, eugenism and its relation to gender is more complicated, and its historicity is more difficult than it is presented. After the October Revolution, a series of eugenic programmes will take place, aiming at the study of western gender and the obligatory classification of it strictly into male and female, as an absolute, universal scientific truth. At the same time any societal crisis such as poverty, defeat, subjugation, illness, or sudden death, was interpreted as the result of a psychologically vulnerable, effeminate, castrated, “bastardized”, transgender or intersex life. The dualistic, hierarchical form of masculinity-feminity and the sovereignty of patriarchy emerged as the weapon against degeneracy, transgenderism and communism, allowing fascism to grow up to its ultimate devasting moment for humanity, the holocaust. Following World War II, eugenism as a scientific regime of truth, became through gender not only the intersectional boundary between sex/nature and gender /nurture, but also the barrier against black, trans, intersex, homosexual youth, communists and working class who emerged as parts of an anarch, matriarchal and thus, castrated sub-human nature who had fallen to the category of sub-beings. In conclusion, I argue that gender in our days has become part of an absolute post-eugenic, liberal, scientific truth that leads to the production of a liberal, patriarchal, racist, ageist and ableist treatment of intersex and transgender life that goes hand in hand with the authoritarian (post) liberal states, under the threat of a World’s Republic.
Abstract: Domestic workers have been erased from two important movements of the 20th and 21st century: the workers' movement and the feminist movement. On the one hand, studies on class have historically neglected care and domestic workers in their analysis. Notoriously, both Karl Marx and E. P. Thompson did not include female 'servants' in their description of the English working class, in spite of the fact that this was the most prevalent job for working women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. On the other hand, servants and domestic workers have been erased from the history of the feminist movement in spite of their important presence and contributions. This paper will address these two forms of erasure, and try to understand what it would mean to bring the domestic workers movement fully into the family picture of the workers' movement and the feminist movement.
Abstract: In this talk, I will reflect the role of materiality and of material memory in the constitution of temporal and other experiential regimes of modernity, while at the same time discussing the role of disciplinary practices, and more specifically archaeology, in producing and sustaining such regimes. Given the colonial-cum-national and racial background of modern western/eurocentric epistemes, what is to be done with apparatuses such as archaeology? Moreover, is there an emancipatory potential in material traces, in remnants? I will argue that a reconfigured and reconstituted archaeology as a sensibility, as a set of relationships, and a strategy of mediation between different worlds can activate the liberating, haunting potential of matter, provided that it undergoes a series of paradigmatic shifts to do with chrono-politics, with sensorial politics, and the politics of story-telling and narration. I will illustrate these theses with a series of short case studies, from the 19th c. Athenian Acropolis to the toppling of confederate monuments in the USA, and the archaeology of contemporary migration in the Mediterranean.
Abstract: The common wisdom on the relation between the “founding fathers” of historical materialism and the nation is that they have little to say on the subject. “Little” doesn’t mean here quantitatively little, since it is acknowledged that many of their writings include lengthy discussions of those “national questions” that were of primary importance at their time – Poland, Italy, Ireland, German unity, the ‘Eastern question’, colonial expansion to name just the most prominent ones. The claim is rather that in all those texts there is little, if anything, that is properly original and specific, i.e. integrated to their broader theoretical framework. A more emphatic version of this claim is that even if we admit that Marx and Engels have something specific to say on the national phenomenon, their contribution just misses the point, by reducing the question to a by-product of the development of productive forces combined with references to a Hegel-inspired philosophy of history, according to which only some peoples are entitled to a distinct national-state existence. In both cases, the nation appears as the blindspot of Marx and Engels’s theory, a source of constant and serious trouble for all those who tried to build on their intellectual and political legacy. Ultimately, we are told, the reasons of this deficiency is Marx’s and Engels’s internationalism. Based on the assumption of transnational interests that are common to the exploited classes, internationalism lies unquestionably at the heart of their politics and their vision of history. However, according to this perspective, internationalism and attention to the specifics of national question are viewed as incompatible; hence the failure of Marxism as a political project since modern history has shown that nations are a much stronger form of collective existence than class-based movements. Without denying the problematic and unstable aspects of Marx’s and Engels’s elaboration on the national question, we want to challenge these views by developing the following six points:
●Marx and Engels do have a theory of the nation as a modern phenomenon, inherent to the worldwide expansion of a new mode of production, capitalism, and the emergence of “bourgeois society” (a concept to be analytically distinguished from capitalism although belonging to the same historical formation).
●At the core of this theory lies the concept of the nation as the necessary framework through which the fundamental classes of modern society (first the bourgeoisie, then the proletariat) build their (revolutionary) capacity to lead a broader bloc of social forces to a higher level of historical existence (in Gramscian terms, their hegemony). The nation thus appears as the expression of the unity of politics and economics, of an enlarged vision of class struggle, within a revolutionary process oriented towards human emancipation.
●This vision is indeed, in its initial formulation (around the 1848 revolutionary moment), heavily loaded by Euro- and western-centric biases, typical of the time and largely derived from the position of its authors at the centre of the world’s major industrial and colonial empire. ●The evolution of Marx’s (and, to a more limited extent, Engels’s) views on colonialism and the multiple paths of development of European and Western societies lead them to overcome to a significant degree (but not fully) those biases.
●The internationalism of the exploited and oppressed groups wasn’t understood by Marx and Engels as a negation of national realities but rather as a constitutive dimension of new, class-based, historical bloc which has to affirm its strategic capacity to lead society (and seize political power) at a national level.
●This vision of internationalism wasn’t an abstract vision but an outlook concretely and systematically worked out in Marx’s and Engels’s interventions in the worker’s movement, first and foremost in the debates and practices of the International Workingmen’s Association (known as “the 1st International”).
Abstract: The pace of technological development has significantly accelerated in the past 20 years or so. Aided by unprecedented computing power, ideas that belonged to science fiction are now possible. Techniques such as machine learning and deep learning have massively increased in precision and refinement. However, these technological developments take place in a period of intense capitalist crisis. This has led to the formulation of three significant critiques: The first strand focuses on the identification of new or intensified forms of worker control and other forms of subjugation, highlighting intensified surveillance and expansion into the lifeworld, exploitation, resource appropriation, increasing alienation and data extraction as a colonial practice. The second line of critique seeks to identify longer term, epochal shifts, looking at how technologies are co-articulated with, and change capitalist practices, such as platform capitalism, data-intensive capitalism, surveillance capitalism and so on. The third line of critique locates technological innovation as part and parcel of ongoing capitalist restructuring in a context characterised by falling rates of profit and in general the unstoppable drive for growth and profit. All three critiques view technology as caught up in capitalist practices of exploitation and extraction. But is this an inevitability of technological development? Must technological advances produced under a capitalist mode of production always and necessarily reflect its ethos and principles? Recognizing the important contribution
of these critiques, I want to address the following questions: can an alternative radical approach to technology be developed? Can technologies aid and even advance a politics of liberation? To address these questions, I sketch out intersections between technology and the project of emancipation across three domains: technologies, labour and economic organisation; technologies and the lifeworld, everyday life and identity; and technologies and the political sphere.
Abstract: How can Gramsci help us to understand the war in Ukraine? The talk will discuss the concepts of passive and Jacobin revolutions, hegemony crisis, Caesarism in relation to the post-Soviet condition. Post-Soviet Caesarist regimes and maidan revolutions presented only deficient solutions to the post-Soviet crisis of hegemony that either conserved or reproduced and intensified the very crisis. The roots of the crisis lie in the incapacity of post-Soviet political capitalists to provide any stable alternative to the degraded Communist hegemony. The dynamics of the hegemony crisis on the global, regional, and domestic levels is crucial to understanding the threats, opportunities, and resources for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, this shift to military coercion after failing in political, intellectual, and moral leadership may trigger the end of the crisis either destructing any sovereign center of capital accumulation in the post-Soviet region or pushing Russia to the fundamental economic, political, and ideological transformation that may create the conditions for a new cycle of “Jacobin” social revolutions in the XXI century.
Abstract: Since December 2021, Reporters United has been investigating the wiretapping scandal, uncovering both the surveillance on part of the Greek national secret services (ΕΥP) and the spyware infections performed via the illegal spyware Predator. On January 4, 2022, we explained how the government changed the law governing the secret services practices by introducing an unconstitutional amendment to cover up its wiretapping. On April 15, we revealed that the amendment to the law intended to silence the surveillance of journalist Thanasis Koukakis. On June 3 and August 4, we documented (along with the newspaper “Efimerida ton Syntakton – EfSyn”) the business connections between Grigoris Dimitriadis, the nephew and general secretary of Prime Minister and businessman Felix Biggiou, a shareholder and former deputy administrator of Intellexa, the company that markets the spyware Predator in Greece. After these revelations, Mr. Dimitriadis resigned from the position of the Prime Minister’s general secretary (as did Panagiotis Kontoleon, who was holding at the time the position of General Director of Greek secret services) and filed a lawsuit against the journalists of Reporters United, the journalists “Efimerida ton Syntakton-Efsyn” and Thanasis Koukakis, claiming over half a million euros. Despite the lawsuit, which was denounced by domestic and international organizations as a SLAPP lawsuit aiming at silencing us, the investigation continued, revealing connections of government officials with businessman Yiannis Lavranos, involved in the wiretapping scandal, as well as the government's war against ADAE, the independent Authority defined by the Constitution as responsible for the protection of privacy of communications in Greece and which plays an important institutional role in clearing up the wiretapping scandal.
Abstract: Projection and discussion of the documentary “Oleanders”: Paola, Betty and Eva are three trans women in their 60s who have known each other for more than forty years. All three of them started making their living early in their youth as sex workers in Athens, Greece. In “The Oleanders” Betty Vakalidou, Eva Koumarianou and Paola Revenioti revisit all the different places in the city where they used to work, socialize, get harassed or arrested by the cops, fight for their rights, have fun and find love. The unapologetic, humorous, and empowering discussion of Eva, Betty and Paola is a history of Athens as well as a history of sexualities of the Mediterranean region and beyond.
Abstract: Thomas Piketty and colleagues (Piketty 2020; Gethin, Martinez-Toledano and Piketty 2021), amongst others, point to what appears a paradox; that in many Western societies, a significant rise in the level of social inequalities over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an equivalent rise in political demand for redistribution, via class-based politics. Jonathon Mijs (2021) also points to this same paradox. Using International Social Survey Data, he shows that citizens in general in more unequal societies are less concerned about social inequalities than those in more egalitarian societies. This is not to suggest there have been few frictions or little turbulence across these polities. Far from it! From the election of authoritarian populists like Trump in the USA, to Brexit in the UK, and the rise of far-right politics, there is considerable evidence of dramatic upheavals in these political and social systems. Is the rise of xenophobic ‘populism’, Piketty (2020) asks, the outcome of these inequalities, or are they the result of longer-run structural changes? In authoritarian populist polities like the UK and USA, Piketty and colleagues show that less well-educated low-income voters who have historically voted left have moved to the political right, whilst once conservative, better-educated higher-income voters have moved to the political left. They go on to identify two kinds of political elites: a high education low-income ‘Brahmin Left’ and a high-income low education ‘Merchant Right’. Central to their argument is that levels of education appear to be a key demographic variable in these shifts. Is the rise in levels of higher education across different societies, Piketty asks, a consequence of the transition to a knowledge society, resulted in the transformation of values, political alliances, and voting behaviour? Could it be that this represents a realignment, and cleavage, along education lines (Gethin, Martinez-Toledano and Piketty 2021: 6; see also Bovens and Wille 2017). And if so, what are the implications of this? Would the promotion of greater access to higher education be a means of stimulating a shift to a left political agenda? In Capital and Ideology (2020), Piketty embraces this as a solution to the problem of inequality and the basis for a more radical liberatory politics of the kind that Rosa Luxemburg envisaged (Mills 2020). In this paper I problematise these seductive knowledge societies/cleavage accounts in several ways.
First, they promote an overly teleological, cosmopolitan, view of the knowledge society as an inevitable shift from industrialisation to a new mode of production (Kitschelt and Rehm 2021). I contrast this with the ongoing work by corporate elites, multilateral agencies, and political power to advance a knowledge economy premised on services, human capital formation, innovation, digital technologies, and intellectual property (Robertson 2009).
Second, that the work logic tied to the rise of people-to people occupations (Oesch 2006) are assumed to be part of the state and presumed to engender a left politics. I argue that many of these occupations are part of a privatised social policy sector; it therefore does not follow that the work logic of person-to-person labouring sits outside neoliberal governing. Rather, many services sectors, such as education, care and health work, are themselves governed by the ‘engines of anxiety’ and ‘cruel optimism’ of neoliberalism (Epseland and Sauder 2016; Davies 2018; Mijs 2022; Ibled 2022).
Third, higher education is black boxed and placed beyond ideology. However, Mijs (2021) shows that being well educated does not necessarily result in the embrace of structural accounts of social inequalities. Instead, in highly unequal societies, its citizens (both well-educated and less well-educated) are more likely to explain success in meritocratic terms, as ‘individual effort’. This accords with findings from our own research (see Martini and Robertson 2022; Robertson and Martini 2023) where we trace out discursive transformations over two decades of higher education policies in the UK aimed at developing globally competitive knowledge economies, on the one hand, and the inclusion of higher education into the services economy, on the other. We show that Young’s (1958) conception of ‘meritocracy’ (ability and effort) has now been replaced with ‘neoliberal meritocracy’ (effort) as a legitimating ideology. In doing so it erases visibility of the structural inequalities that account for the highly unequal outcomes in UK higher education.
Fourth, treating higher education as a ‘variable’ (the holder of a higher education qualifications, or not), along with income, makes invisible the dynamics that Luxemburg (1951) pointed to in The Accumulation of Capital: capitalism is dependent on expanding into new spheres of social life whose dynamics include commodification (education as consumption), differentiation (stratification/value/worth), imperialism (international markets/brain drain), precarity (zero hours contracts/indebtedness), and militarism (securitisation/policing of free speech/knowledge espionage). Using UK higher education as a case, I show its progressive incorporation into processes of capital accumulation. In doing so, higher education as a sector, together with its workers and students, experience ongoing crises as it is caught in the tensions and contradictions of capitalist expansionary development.
I conclude by arguing that higher education itself needs to be cleaved from the jaws of what Fraser (2022) calls ‘cannibal capitalism’. Drawing insights from Wright’s (2010) real utopias, Luxemburg’s work on social transformation through mass strikes, spontaneous and organised action, and learning through social organising, and Freire’s (1970) conscientisation, I argue for a radical reworking of higher education as a key institution engaged in knowledge production that enables it to be constitutive of social democracy, social transformation, and social justice.
Abstract: This presentation attempts to make sense of the economic crisis and political protest in Sri Lanka. In popular media and by the protestors themselves, the on-going Sri Lankan crisis of 2022 was mostly if not exclusively understood in terms of the corruption, ineptitude and other nefarious qualities of the country’s deposed president and his extended family. Without denying their patent deficiencies, here we begin rather with an historical perspective on Sri Lanka’s seemingly ungovernable external debt problem, which manifested itself most immediately in unprecedented power cuts, fuel shortages and inflation, bringing people from all classes into the streets in apparently spontaneous protest. Next, we examine the nature of the protest movement itself, including its multi-class character, social media orchestration, foreign relations and political demands condensed in the ultimately successful but also extremely limited slogan and hashtag #gotagohome (injunction for President Rajapaksa to resign). Finally, we compare the form and the content of what Sri Lankans call the aragalaya (the struggle) to classical revolutions such as the French and the Bolshevik, as well as Arab Spring and Occupy movements, to assess the prospects of the present conjuncture in Sri Lanka from an emancipatory perspective.
Abstract: Little over a hundred years ago the word ‘fascism’ was meaningless. Only a few ‘dense’ years later it had graduated into a formidable trope, first in Italy and very soon across an ever-expanding range of countries. Superlatives have accompanied historical accounts of fascism ever since its appearance in crisis-ridden post-WW1 Italy. Surely something as extreme, repressive, murderous, and devastating in the most real sense of the word as ‘fascism’ cannot be spoken about in any terms other than the language of the unique and the extreme. Yet, if we shift for a moment the focus from the praxis and the outcomes to the reasons behind fascism’s formidable international traction in the interwar years and its endurance over time, we encounter a different picture. Like a potent alchemy, fascism was forged from the existing base metals of nationalism and deep-rooted fears of the ‘other’, from sedimented prejudices and contemporary anxieties about crises, real or perceived. It also promised the illusion of history-making agency to those who felt disempowered and subjugated by the historical mainstream. Fascism’s ideological and political formula may have been unique, extreme, and brutal but its drivers were (and continue to be) disturbingly commonplace, indeed banal. This explains why, in the midst of a profound crisis of liberalism and of a collective paranoia against the spectre of a socialist revolution, interwar fascism gained traction so quickly among people and elites across countries, regions, cultures, and political spaces. If fascism may indeed be ‘banal’ in this sense, as I will argue, then the fight against it needs to be refocused on the mainstream fundamentals that drive its ongoing appeal. In the past fascism gained traction and was diffused internationally not because of some mysterious collective lapse into unreason and extremism but through incremental, banal affirmative choices for many. Its power of attraction derived from a deep reservoir of crises, fears, and long-standing prejudices, building on run-of-the-mill motifs about national community and sovereignty, expressing a longing for defending a seemingly threatened identity and for wresting agency that appeared in retreat. All these fundamentals remain as painfully relevant and resonant today as in the past. Therefore fascism’s potential for resurfacing, one way or another, and for gathering fresh (if different) momentum today or in the future remains largely undiminished.
Abstract: Far-right populist authoritarianism builds on the rhetoric of historical revisionism. Revisionist history can be illustrated in the U.S. Republicans’ backlash against using Critical Race Theory in school curricula, promoting at the same time ‘Patriotic Education,’ a whitewashed nativist version that bears little relevance to the present, while selectively erasing the past. This seminar explores the features and politics of historical narratives, collective remembering and their role in supporting and strengthening the authoritarian far-right Trumpist rhetoric. The control over the collective historical narrative is central in far-right politics, and Trumpism has successfully integrated a dangerous historical revisionism into its muddy ideological mix. The distortion of history has traditionally been at the core of all ideological struggles. Features of far-right authoritarian narratives will be presented in an attempt to frame history as a critical pedagogical project and pedagogy as a historical project. Different themes will be weaved under the light of history and the process of historicization, situating social phenomena and events in their historical dimension.
Μπορείτε να εγγραφείτε εδώ: https://politicsofliberation.gr/reporters-united/
Η συζήτηση αυτή εγκαινιάζει το νέο vidcast του Jacobin Greece στο φιλόξενο στούντιο του The Press Project με τίτλο, Συζητήσεις με το Jacobin. Πρώτος μας καλεσμένος ο καθηγητής πολιτικής επιστήμης στο Πάντειο Πανεπιστήμιο, Σεραφείμ Σεφεριάδης. Αντικείμενο της συζήτησης είναι όψεις του νέου του βιβλίου, Για την πολιτική που διαμορφώνει, Εργατικό κίνημα και κράτος (Εκδόσεις Τόπος). Ειδικότερα, ανοίγουμε θεματικές που καταπιάνονται με όψεις της σύγχρονης ελληνικής ιστορίας και πολιτικής όπως: η ιστορία της Σοσιαλδημοκρατίας, η ιστορία του ελληνικού κομμουνιστικού κινήματος στον ελληνικό μεσοπόλεμο, ο Βενιζελικός αστικός εκσυγχρονισμός, το μεταπολεμικό διεκδικητικό κίνημα, ο εκσυγχρονισμός κατά την διάρκεια της μεταπολίτευσης και τα αιτήματα που αποτελούν προϋποθέσεις για την αναζωογόνηση του σύγχρονου εργατικού κινήματος.
Παρακολουθήστε ολόκληρη την συζήτηση εδώ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqvZqnGBlUc&t=268s
Στη συζήτηση που έλαβε χώρα πριν από μερικές εβδομάδες, συζητήθηκαν ζητήματα που αφορούν τα κυρίαρχα ΜΜΕ στην Ελλάδα, τη διαμόρφωση των συσχετισμών και τις δυνατότητες των κοινωνικών κινημάτων να απαντήσουν σε αυτό το εχθρικό τοπίο που διαμορφώνεται στην Ελλάδα.
Επίσης αναλύθηκαν οι προσπάθειες της κυβέρνησης ΣΥΡΙΖΑ να αναδιαμορφώσει το ραδιοτηλεοπτικό τοπίο και στη συνέχεια οι επιλογές της Νέας Δημοκρατίας που ξεκίνησαν από τον έλεγχο του ΑΜΕ-ΜΠΕ και επεκτάθηκαν και σε άλλες πλευρές.
Μεταξύ άλλων συζητήθηκε το βασικό θέμα της επιβίωσης των εναλλακτικών εγχειρημάτων και των ανθρώπων τους μέσα από οικονομικά μοντέλα λειτουργίας που δε θα δημιουργούν σχέσεις εξάρτησης από τα μεγάλα οικονομικά και πολιτικά συμφέροντα. Από αυτή τη σκοπιά αναλύθηκε το πετυχημένο μοντέλο του The Press Project και διεξήχθη συζήτηση σχετικά με τη διεθνή εμπειρία παρόμοιων προσπαθειών και τη δυνατότητα να εφαρμοστούν οι πετυχημένες τακτικές στην Ελλάδα.
Φυσικά, από τη συγκεκριμένη συζήτηση δε θα μπορούσε να λείπει μία προσέγγιση για τα Social Media και τις (α)δυνατότητες να συμβάλλουν στην προσπάθεια των κοινωνικών κινημάτων να παρακάμψει το τείχος σιωπής που επιβάλλεται από τα μεγάλα συμφέροντα.
Παρακολουθήστε ολόκληρη την συζήτηση εδώ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtt5kQ4jaPI
Abstract: While rebutting Karl Kautsky’s exaltation of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Cunctator’s “strategy of attrition”, Rosa Luxemburg quotes the historian Theodor Mommsen in order to correct the record and inveigh against the preaching of this “legend … at high school students in our schools to drill them in conservative spirits” (Theory and Practice: Postscript, 1910). “Rome was not saved by the ‘Procrastinator’,” Mommsen writes in his Roman History (1856, 3rd edition), “but by the firm union of the federation – and equally, perhaps, by the national hatred with which the occidental welcomed Phoenician Man.” This lecture will explore the dark underside of this and other racializing moments in the disciplinary imagination of ancient history, by situating the emergence of “classics” as a field of study in dialogue not only within the Orientalist constructs of 19th-century nation-state politics but within the broader arc of European race-making and settler-colonialism. I will argue for an approach to the study of Greco-Roman classics that locates it as one uniquely (and violently) overrepresented form of classicism, and that inquires whether such an overrepresented form is capable of accommodating the communities and knowledge-practices that it has historically so effectively Othered.
Abstract: Understanding the relationship between gender and eugenism requires a critical exploration of the factors that have shaped our negotiation with and resistance to power along with historical and contemporary readings of those factors. Moreover, it requires a new understanding of the foundations of the Western patriarchal, racist-colonial tradition of binary categoric thinking in which academic disciplines and epistemic truth are rooted. Following Michel Foucault’s premise, in his work the History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, that aphrodisia remains the ethical substance for ancient Greek and Roman sexual ethics and the ontological parameters of the ‘thinking’ subject, I suggest that gender perpetuates this sexual, racist and patriarchal code of ethics and truth and the one-dimensional deterministic perception about the subject. While throughout the 16th century this regime of ethics-truth was more philosophical from the 19th century on, I argue, it takes the form of an absolute scientific truth - as a response to the social upheavals and the rising of Marxist and anarchist ideas. Thus, a discriminative in terms of sex, race, age, and able-bodiness regime-of- truth emerged, as a part of the liberal biomedical discourse, essentially for the survival of capitalism. This biomedical discourse gained momentum after the Paris Commune and provided a place for s/he as the subject that can speak the truth. At the same time, this biomedical discourse employed all the supposedly psychic and somatic interventions in order to ‘help’ nature -through the castration of the intersex- produce an evolved, scientifically stable, social sex, that is, gender. Within this logic, gender became the boundary not only between the rational, healthy, superior race of the civilized liberal-christian West, against the savage, anarchist, androgynous and degenerate non-Western races, but also the boundary between a supposed patriarchal and matriarchal culture, with the latter relying on blood and soil ties and a passive acceptance of all natural phenomena. It also signifies the inclusion of all people as equal, as all children of Mother Earth. In the patriarchal culture, by contrast, we run across the concept of the ‘beloved son’ symbol of the hierarchical order of society. Within this concept, eugenism, I argue, though commonly used, it has been under-theorized concept in the historical -materialist queer literature. In short, eugenism and its relation to gender is more complicated, and its historicity is more difficult than it is presented. After the October Revolution, a series of eugenic programmes will take place, aiming at the study of western gender and the obligatory classification of it strictly into male and female, as an absolute, universal scientific truth. At the same time any societal crisis such as poverty, defeat, subjugation, illness, or sudden death, was interpreted as the result of a psychologically vulnerable, effeminate, castrated, “bastardized”, transgender or intersex life. The dualistic, hierarchical form of masculinity-feminity and the sovereignty of patriarchy emerged as the weapon against degeneracy, transgenderism and communism, allowing fascism to grow up to its ultimate devasting moment for humanity, the holocaust. Following World War II, eugenism as a scientific regime of truth, became through gender not only the intersectional boundary between sex/nature and gender /nurture, but also the barrier against black, trans, intersex, homosexual youth, communists and working class who emerged as parts of an anarch, matriarchal and thus, castrated sub-human nature who had fallen to the category of sub-beings. In conclusion, I argue that gender in our days has become part of an absolute post-eugenic, liberal, scientific truth that leads to the production of a liberal, patriarchal, racist, ageist and ableist treatment of intersex and transgender life that goes hand in hand with the authoritarian (post) liberal states, under the threat of a World’s Republic.
Abstract: Domestic workers have been erased from two important movements of the 20th and 21st century: the workers' movement and the feminist movement. On the one hand, studies on class have historically neglected care and domestic workers in their analysis. Notoriously, both Karl Marx and E. P. Thompson did not include female 'servants' in their description of the English working class, in spite of the fact that this was the most prevalent job for working women in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. On the other hand, servants and domestic workers have been erased from the history of the feminist movement in spite of their important presence and contributions. This paper will address these two forms of erasure, and try to understand what it would mean to bring the domestic workers movement fully into the family picture of the workers' movement and the feminist movement.
Abstract: In this talk, I will reflect the role of materiality and of material memory in the constitution of temporal and other experiential regimes of modernity, while at the same time discussing the role of disciplinary practices, and more specifically archaeology, in producing and sustaining such regimes. Given the colonial-cum-national and racial background of modern western/eurocentric epistemes, what is to be done with apparatuses such as archaeology? Moreover, is there an emancipatory potential in material traces, in remnants? I will argue that a reconfigured and reconstituted archaeology as a sensibility, as a set of relationships, and a strategy of mediation between different worlds can activate the liberating, haunting potential of matter, provided that it undergoes a series of paradigmatic shifts to do with chrono-politics, with sensorial politics, and the politics of story-telling and narration. I will illustrate these theses with a series of short case studies, from the 19th c. Athenian Acropolis to the toppling of confederate monuments in the USA, and the archaeology of contemporary migration in the Mediterranean.
Abstract: The common wisdom on the relation between the “founding fathers” of historical materialism and the nation is that they have little to say on the subject. “Little” doesn’t mean here quantitatively little, since it is acknowledged that many of their writings include lengthy discussions of those “national questions” that were of primary importance at their time – Poland, Italy, Ireland, German unity, the ‘Eastern question’, colonial expansion to name just the most prominent ones. The claim is rather that in all those texts there is little, if anything, that is properly original and specific, i.e. integrated to their broader theoretical framework. A more emphatic version of this claim is that even if we admit that Marx and Engels have something specific to say on the national phenomenon, their contribution just misses the point, by reducing the question to a by-product of the development of productive forces combined with references to a Hegel-inspired philosophy of history, according to which only some peoples are entitled to a distinct national-state existence. In both cases, the nation appears as the blindspot of Marx and Engels’s theory, a source of constant and serious trouble for all those who tried to build on their intellectual and political legacy. Ultimately, we are told, the reasons of this deficiency is Marx’s and Engels’s internationalism. Based on the assumption of transnational interests that are common to the exploited classes, internationalism lies unquestionably at the heart of their politics and their vision of history. However, according to this perspective, internationalism and attention to the specifics of national question are viewed as incompatible; hence the failure of Marxism as a political project since modern history has shown that nations are a much stronger form of collective existence than class-based movements. Without denying the problematic and unstable aspects of Marx’s and Engels’s elaboration on the national question, we want to challenge these views by developing the following six points:
●Marx and Engels do have a theory of the nation as a modern phenomenon, inherent to the worldwide expansion of a new mode of production, capitalism, and the emergence of “bourgeois society” (a concept to be analytically distinguished from capitalism although belonging to the same historical formation).
●At the core of this theory lies the concept of the nation as the necessary framework through which the fundamental classes of modern society (first the bourgeoisie, then the proletariat) build their (revolutionary) capacity to lead a broader bloc of social forces to a higher level of historical existence (in Gramscian terms, their hegemony). The nation thus appears as the expression of the unity of politics and economics, of an enlarged vision of class struggle, within a revolutionary process oriented towards human emancipation.
●This vision is indeed, in its initial formulation (around the 1848 revolutionary moment), heavily loaded by Euro- and western-centric biases, typical of the time and largely derived from the position of its authors at the centre of the world’s major industrial and colonial empire. ●The evolution of Marx’s (and, to a more limited extent, Engels’s) views on colonialism and the multiple paths of development of European and Western societies lead them to overcome to a significant degree (but not fully) those biases.
●The internationalism of the exploited and oppressed groups wasn’t understood by Marx and Engels as a negation of national realities but rather as a constitutive dimension of new, class-based, historical bloc which has to affirm its strategic capacity to lead society (and seize political power) at a national level.
●This vision of internationalism wasn’t an abstract vision but an outlook concretely and systematically worked out in Marx’s and Engels’s interventions in the worker’s movement, first and foremost in the debates and practices of the International Workingmen’s Association (known as “the 1st International”).
Abstract: The pace of technological development has significantly accelerated in the past 20 years or so. Aided by unprecedented computing power, ideas that belonged to science fiction are now possible. Techniques such as machine learning and deep learning have massively increased in precision and refinement. However, these technological developments take place in a period of intense capitalist crisis. This has led to the formulation of three significant critiques: The first strand focuses on the identification of new or intensified forms of worker control and other forms of subjugation, highlighting intensified surveillance and expansion into the lifeworld, exploitation, resource appropriation, increasing alienation and data extraction as a colonial practice. The second line of critique seeks to identify longer term, epochal shifts, looking at how technologies are co-articulated with, and change capitalist practices, such as platform capitalism, data-intensive capitalism, surveillance capitalism and so on. The third line of critique locates technological innovation as part and parcel of ongoing capitalist restructuring in a context characterised by falling rates of profit and in general the unstoppable drive for growth and profit. All three critiques view technology as caught up in capitalist practices of exploitation and extraction. But is this an inevitability of technological development? Must technological advances produced under a capitalist mode of production always and necessarily reflect its ethos and principles? Recognizing the important contribution
of these critiques, I want to address the following questions: can an alternative radical approach to technology be developed? Can technologies aid and even advance a politics of liberation? To address these questions, I sketch out intersections between technology and the project of emancipation across three domains: technologies, labour and economic organisation; technologies and the lifeworld, everyday life and identity; and technologies and the political sphere.
Abstract: How can Gramsci help us to understand the war in Ukraine? The talk will discuss the concepts of passive and Jacobin revolutions, hegemony crisis, Caesarism in relation to the post-Soviet condition. Post-Soviet Caesarist regimes and maidan revolutions presented only deficient solutions to the post-Soviet crisis of hegemony that either conserved or reproduced and intensified the very crisis. The roots of the crisis lie in the incapacity of post-Soviet political capitalists to provide any stable alternative to the degraded Communist hegemony. The dynamics of the hegemony crisis on the global, regional, and domestic levels is crucial to understanding the threats, opportunities, and resources for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. However, this shift to military coercion after failing in political, intellectual, and moral leadership may trigger the end of the crisis either destructing any sovereign center of capital accumulation in the post-Soviet region or pushing Russia to the fundamental economic, political, and ideological transformation that may create the conditions for a new cycle of “Jacobin” social revolutions in the XXI century.
Abstract: Since December 2021, Reporters United has been investigating the wiretapping scandal, uncovering both the surveillance on part of the Greek national secret services (ΕΥP) and the spyware infections performed via the illegal spyware Predator. On January 4, 2022, we explained how the government changed the law governing the secret services practices by introducing an unconstitutional amendment to cover up its wiretapping. On April 15, we revealed that the amendment to the law intended to silence the surveillance of journalist Thanasis Koukakis. On June 3 and August 4, we documented (along with the newspaper “Efimerida ton Syntakton – EfSyn”) the business connections between Grigoris Dimitriadis, the nephew and general secretary of Prime Minister and businessman Felix Biggiou, a shareholder and former deputy administrator of Intellexa, the company that markets the spyware Predator in Greece. After these revelations, Mr. Dimitriadis resigned from the position of the Prime Minister’s general secretary (as did Panagiotis Kontoleon, who was holding at the time the position of General Director of Greek secret services) and filed a lawsuit against the journalists of Reporters United, the journalists “Efimerida ton Syntakton-Efsyn” and Thanasis Koukakis, claiming over half a million euros. Despite the lawsuit, which was denounced by domestic and international organizations as a SLAPP lawsuit aiming at silencing us, the investigation continued, revealing connections of government officials with businessman Yiannis Lavranos, involved in the wiretapping scandal, as well as the government's war against ADAE, the independent Authority defined by the Constitution as responsible for the protection of privacy of communications in Greece and which plays an important institutional role in clearing up the wiretapping scandal.
Abstract: Projection and discussion of the documentary “Oleanders”: Paola, Betty and Eva are three trans women in their 60s who have known each other for more than forty years. All three of them started making their living early in their youth as sex workers in Athens, Greece. In “The Oleanders” Betty Vakalidou, Eva Koumarianou and Paola Revenioti revisit all the different places in the city where they used to work, socialize, get harassed or arrested by the cops, fight for their rights, have fun and find love. The unapologetic, humorous, and empowering discussion of Eva, Betty and Paola is a history of Athens as well as a history of sexualities of the Mediterranean region and beyond.
Abstract: Thomas Piketty and colleagues (Piketty 2020; Gethin, Martinez-Toledano and Piketty 2021), amongst others, point to what appears a paradox; that in many Western societies, a significant rise in the level of social inequalities over the past two decades has not been accompanied by an equivalent rise in political demand for redistribution, via class-based politics. Jonathon Mijs (2021) also points to this same paradox. Using International Social Survey Data, he shows that citizens in general in more unequal societies are less concerned about social inequalities than those in more egalitarian societies. This is not to suggest there have been few frictions or little turbulence across these polities. Far from it! From the election of authoritarian populists like Trump in the USA, to Brexit in the UK, and the rise of far-right politics, there is considerable evidence of dramatic upheavals in these political and social systems. Is the rise of xenophobic ‘populism’, Piketty (2020) asks, the outcome of these inequalities, or are they the result of longer-run structural changes? In authoritarian populist polities like the UK and USA, Piketty and colleagues show that less well-educated low-income voters who have historically voted left have moved to the political right, whilst once conservative, better-educated higher-income voters have moved to the political left. They go on to identify two kinds of political elites: a high education low-income ‘Brahmin Left’ and a high-income low education ‘Merchant Right’. Central to their argument is that levels of education appear to be a key demographic variable in these shifts. Is the rise in levels of higher education across different societies, Piketty asks, a consequence of the transition to a knowledge society, resulted in the transformation of values, political alliances, and voting behaviour? Could it be that this represents a realignment, and cleavage, along education lines (Gethin, Martinez-Toledano and Piketty 2021: 6; see also Bovens and Wille 2017). And if so, what are the implications of this? Would the promotion of greater access to higher education be a means of stimulating a shift to a left political agenda? In Capital and Ideology (2020), Piketty embraces this as a solution to the problem of inequality and the basis for a more radical liberatory politics of the kind that Rosa Luxemburg envisaged (Mills 2020). In this paper I problematise these seductive knowledge societies/cleavage accounts in several ways.
First, they promote an overly teleological, cosmopolitan, view of the knowledge society as an inevitable shift from industrialisation to a new mode of production (Kitschelt and Rehm 2021). I contrast this with the ongoing work by corporate elites, multilateral agencies, and political power to advance a knowledge economy premised on services, human capital formation, innovation, digital technologies, and intellectual property (Robertson 2009).
Second, that the work logic tied to the rise of people-to people occupations (Oesch 2006) are assumed to be part of the state and presumed to engender a left politics. I argue that many of these occupations are part of a privatised social policy sector; it therefore does not follow that the work logic of person-to-person labouring sits outside neoliberal governing. Rather, many services sectors, such as education, care and health work, are themselves governed by the ‘engines of anxiety’ and ‘cruel optimism’ of neoliberalism (Epseland and Sauder 2016; Davies 2018; Mijs 2022; Ibled 2022).
Third, higher education is black boxed and placed beyond ideology. However, Mijs (2021) shows that being well educated does not necessarily result in the embrace of structural accounts of social inequalities. Instead, in highly unequal societies, its citizens (both well-educated and less well-educated) are more likely to explain success in meritocratic terms, as ‘individual effort’. This accords with findings from our own research (see Martini and Robertson 2022; Robertson and Martini 2023) where we trace out discursive transformations over two decades of higher education policies in the UK aimed at developing globally competitive knowledge economies, on the one hand, and the inclusion of higher education into the services economy, on the other. We show that Young’s (1958) conception of ‘meritocracy’ (ability and effort) has now been replaced with ‘neoliberal meritocracy’ (effort) as a legitimating ideology. In doing so it erases visibility of the structural inequalities that account for the highly unequal outcomes in UK higher education.
Fourth, treating higher education as a ‘variable’ (the holder of a higher education qualifications, or not), along with income, makes invisible the dynamics that Luxemburg (1951) pointed to in The Accumulation of Capital: capitalism is dependent on expanding into new spheres of social life whose dynamics include commodification (education as consumption), differentiation (stratification/value/worth), imperialism (international markets/brain drain), precarity (zero hours contracts/indebtedness), and militarism (securitisation/policing of free speech/knowledge espionage). Using UK higher education as a case, I show its progressive incorporation into processes of capital accumulation. In doing so, higher education as a sector, together with its workers and students, experience ongoing crises as it is caught in the tensions and contradictions of capitalist expansionary development.
I conclude by arguing that higher education itself needs to be cleaved from the jaws of what Fraser (2022) calls ‘cannibal capitalism’. Drawing insights from Wright’s (2010) real utopias, Luxemburg’s work on social transformation through mass strikes, spontaneous and organised action, and learning through social organising, and Freire’s (1970) conscientisation, I argue for a radical reworking of higher education as a key institution engaged in knowledge production that enables it to be constitutive of social democracy, social transformation, and social justice.
Abstract: This presentation attempts to make sense of the economic crisis and political protest in Sri Lanka. In popular media and by the protestors themselves, the on-going Sri Lankan crisis of 2022 was mostly if not exclusively understood in terms of the corruption, ineptitude and other nefarious qualities of the country’s deposed president and his extended family. Without denying their patent deficiencies, here we begin rather with an historical perspective on Sri Lanka’s seemingly ungovernable external debt problem, which manifested itself most immediately in unprecedented power cuts, fuel shortages and inflation, bringing people from all classes into the streets in apparently spontaneous protest. Next, we examine the nature of the protest movement itself, including its multi-class character, social media orchestration, foreign relations and political demands condensed in the ultimately successful but also extremely limited slogan and hashtag #gotagohome (injunction for President Rajapaksa to resign). Finally, we compare the form and the content of what Sri Lankans call the aragalaya (the struggle) to classical revolutions such as the French and the Bolshevik, as well as Arab Spring and Occupy movements, to assess the prospects of the present conjuncture in Sri Lanka from an emancipatory perspective.
Abstract: Little over a hundred years ago the word ‘fascism’ was meaningless. Only a few ‘dense’ years later it had graduated into a formidable trope, first in Italy and very soon across an ever-expanding range of countries. Superlatives have accompanied historical accounts of fascism ever since its appearance in crisis-ridden post-WW1 Italy. Surely something as extreme, repressive, murderous, and devastating in the most real sense of the word as ‘fascism’ cannot be spoken about in any terms other than the language of the unique and the extreme. Yet, if we shift for a moment the focus from the praxis and the outcomes to the reasons behind fascism’s formidable international traction in the interwar years and its endurance over time, we encounter a different picture. Like a potent alchemy, fascism was forged from the existing base metals of nationalism and deep-rooted fears of the ‘other’, from sedimented prejudices and contemporary anxieties about crises, real or perceived. It also promised the illusion of history-making agency to those who felt disempowered and subjugated by the historical mainstream. Fascism’s ideological and political formula may have been unique, extreme, and brutal but its drivers were (and continue to be) disturbingly commonplace, indeed banal. This explains why, in the midst of a profound crisis of liberalism and of a collective paranoia against the spectre of a socialist revolution, interwar fascism gained traction so quickly among people and elites across countries, regions, cultures, and political spaces. If fascism may indeed be ‘banal’ in this sense, as I will argue, then the fight against it needs to be refocused on the mainstream fundamentals that drive its ongoing appeal. In the past fascism gained traction and was diffused internationally not because of some mysterious collective lapse into unreason and extremism but through incremental, banal affirmative choices for many. Its power of attraction derived from a deep reservoir of crises, fears, and long-standing prejudices, building on run-of-the-mill motifs about national community and sovereignty, expressing a longing for defending a seemingly threatened identity and for wresting agency that appeared in retreat. All these fundamentals remain as painfully relevant and resonant today as in the past. Therefore fascism’s potential for resurfacing, one way or another, and for gathering fresh (if different) momentum today or in the future remains largely undiminished.
Abstract: Far-right populist authoritarianism builds on the rhetoric of historical revisionism. Revisionist history can be illustrated in the U.S. Republicans’ backlash against using Critical Race Theory in school curricula, promoting at the same time ‘Patriotic Education,’ a whitewashed nativist version that bears little relevance to the present, while selectively erasing the past. This seminar explores the features and politics of historical narratives, collective remembering and their role in supporting and strengthening the authoritarian far-right Trumpist rhetoric. The control over the collective historical narrative is central in far-right politics, and Trumpism has successfully integrated a dangerous historical revisionism into its muddy ideological mix. The distortion of history has traditionally been at the core of all ideological struggles. Features of far-right authoritarian narratives will be presented in an attempt to frame history as a critical pedagogical project and pedagogy as a historical project. Different themes will be weaved under the light of history and the process of historicization, situating social phenomena and events in their historical dimension.
Μπορείτε να εγγραφείτε εδώ: https://politicsofliberation.gr/reporters-united/
The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s? In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and facing a dramatic rise of right wing, authoritarian politics across the globe, the events of the 1930s have acquired a renewed relevance. Contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars address the relationship between these historical moments in various geographical contexts, from Asia-Pacific to Europe to the Americas, while probing an array of thematic questions―the meaning of populism and fascism, the contradictions of constitutional liberalism and “militant democracy,” long cycles and crisis tendencies in capitalism, the gendering and racialization of right wing movements, and the cultural and class politics of emancipatory struggles. Uncovering continuity as well as change and repetition in the midst of transition, Back to the 30s? enriches our ability to use the past to evaluate the challenges, dangers, and promises of the present.
Eυχαριστίες......................................................................................... 9
Πρόλογος της ελληνικής έκδοσης ...................................................... 11
Εισαγωγή ............................................................................................ 21
1 | Εξουσία και πολιτική ........................................................... 27
2 | Κράτη, αυτοκρατορίες και έθνη-κράτη................................ 54
3 | Καθεστώτα και επαναστάσεις ............................................. 80
4 | Φωνή διαμαρτυρίας και ψήφος στη δημοκρατία ................. 105
5 | Επαναφέροντας το κράτος στην ανάλυση ........................... 136
6 | Κοινωνικά κινήματα και κοινωνική αλλαγή ........................ 167
7 | Υπερεθνικότητα και το μέλλον της πολιτικής τάξης ........... 194
Βιβλιογραφία....................................................................................... 211
Ευρετήριο............................................................................................ 225
Covers a wide swath of geographies, topics, and disciplines to provide a multifaceted and scholarly understanding of our relationship to the ‘30s
Raises fundamental theoretical questions about the temporality of global capitalism, the meaning of historical materialism, and the limits of liberalism
The essays in this volume address the question: what does it mean to understand the contemporary moment in light of the 1930s? In the aftermath of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and facing a dramatic rise of right wing, authoritarian politics across the globe, the events of the 1930s have acquired a renewed relevance. Contributions from a diverse, interdisciplinary group of scholars address the relationship between these historical moments in various geographical contexts, from Asia-Pacific to Europe to the Americas, while probing an array of thematic questions—the meaning of populism and fascism, the contradictions of constitutional liberalism and “militant democracy,” long cycles and crisis tendencies in capitalism, the gendering and racialization of right wing movements, and the cultural and class politics of emancipatory struggles. Uncovering continuity as well as change and repetition in the midst of transition, Back to the 30s? enriches our ability to use the past to evaluate the challenges, dangers, and promises of the present.
https://www.ianos.gr/voices-on-the-left-0468777
You can order the book being inside Greece through Politeia bookshop:
https://www.politeianet.gr/books/9786188397064-souvlis-george-red-marks-voices-on-the-left-296662?fbclid=IwAR0UDAIDPPZVlC_lrqp9Hlaw2CTOL7goMxkn5OZLOM20wflOz_H-HkQTXyQ
El Partido Laborista de Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos, la Francia Insumisa creada por Jean-Luc Mélenchon y el Bloco de Esquerda portugués aspiran a transformar sus países y ofrecer una alternativa política emancipadora en una Europa dominada por un neoliberalismo renovado y el crecimiento de la extrema derecha. Por su parte, Syriza consiguió llegar al gobierno en Grecia y desafió las políticas de austeridad impuestas por la troika formada por la Comisión Europea, el Banco Central Europeo y el Fondo Monetario Internacional. Sin embargo, el gobierno de Alexis Tsipras acabó aceptando el memorandum de la troika, una derrota que se analizará críticamente en este libro.
¿Cómo han surgido estos partidos? ¿Qué tienen en común y qué los diferencia? ¿Cómo han transformado los sistemas políticos de sus países y por qué son tan importantes para el futuro de Europa? Estas son algunas de las preguntas a las que pretende responder este libro. Más allá de Podemos, estas fuerzas políticas son sorprendentemente poco conocidas en España y América Latina, a pesar de los progresos que han conseguido en los últimos años. El objetivo es acercar al público latinoamericano y español la experiencia de estos nuevos partidos anti-austeridad europeos, que son los experimentos político-electorales más novedosos y prometedores del continente.
Περιεχόμενα
Εισαγωγικό σημείωμα της ελληνικής έκδοσης.................................. 9
1 | Η αίσθηση ενός ξεκινήματος.................................................. 25
2 | Οι καταβολές του καπιταλισμού ............................................ 47
3 | Επαναστάσεις και κοινωνικά κινήματα.................................. 69
4 | Αυτοκρατορίες ....................................................................... 105
5 | Κράτη ..................................................................................... 128
6 | Ανισότητα ............................................................................... 149
7 | Φύλο και οικογένεια............................................................... 175
8 | Κουλτούρα.............................................................................. 190
9 | Προβλέποντας το μέλλον ....................................................... 210
Βιβλιογραφία ..................................................................................... 229
Οργανωτική επιτροπή: Dimitra Alifieraki, Νatalia-Rozalia Avlona, Alexandros Chrysis Angela Dimitrakaki, Eirini Gaitanou, Penny Galani, Costas Gousis, Giorgos Kalampokas, Dimitris Kaltsonis, Angelos Kontogiannis-Mandros, Nikos Kourachanis, Giannis Kouzis, Olga Lafazani, Dimitris Lenis,
Kimon Markatos, Ismini Mathioudaki, Alexandros Minotakis, Despina Papadopoulou, Dimitris Papafotiou, Despina Paraskeva-Veloudogianni, Alkisti Prepi, Spyros Sakellaropoulos, Katerina Sergidou, Sotiris Siamandouras, Panagiotis Sotiris, George Souvlis, Kostas Skordoulis, Giorgos Velegrakis
Key Words: Kemalism, AKP, HDP, Kurdish Question, Interwar, Nation-Building, Necropolitics, Authoritarianism, State of Emergency