Roos: Socialism or Barbarism

[polly7]

By Jérôme Roos
Source: teleSUR English
January 29, 2015

Today, however, with leftist parties poised to take power in Greece and Spain, the notion of a two-speed Europe has rapidly attained a very different meaning. Suddenly, we will have a progressive periphery pushing for debt cancellation, social reforms, popular empowerment, migrant rights and an end to the fiscal masochism of austerity — squaring off against a reactionary core governed by an extreme center that keeps insisting on further budget cuts and that desperately tries to appease the rising anti-immigrant sentiments of the far-right.

This is a remarkable reversal that turns the ideological narrative of Europe’s neoliberal cosmopolitan project upside down. Powerful EU figures like Wolfgang Schäuble and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the Commission, have long delighted in the self-congratulatory view that the countries of the North are somehow more prudent and more advanced than their weak and profligate cousins in the South. The only way the latter can advance, it was argued, would be for Greece and Spain to become more like Germany and the Netherlands.

Of course we have been here before. A century ago, the German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg made a poignant statement that turned out to be tragically prophetic: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads,” she wrote in her Junius Pamphlet of 1915: “either transition to Socialism or regression into Barbarism.” As the left rises in the South and the far-right takes the North by storm, the neoliberal cosmopolitans of the extreme center have made it clear where they stand at this juncture: if given the chance, they will take us all back into the Dark Ages.

Today, only a radical cosmopolitan project emerging from the grassroots and the periphery can cast a different light on the notion of human progress and carry the Old Continent forward into a promising new direction. As another German revolutionary once wrote, it is time to “turn Hegel back from his head on his feet, so we can start walking again.” From Athens to Madrid, and then to Berlin.

https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/socialism-or-barbarism-2/

[libdem4life]

1. Thanks for the link...great reads on Europe's Left and their activities. They are actually doing

what many of us here would like to do or be a part of...that is, creating even just a Progressive/Left conversation that is respected and viable.

Greece and Spain may be to Merkel/German-financially dominated Europe, what Sanders and Warren are to Hillary Clinton as the potential next President. The beginnings of change...voting revolution...people-centric...social democracy...providing an example, creating a path and a pressure that begins to coalesce into a real movement and change in the larger European Body.

Greece and Spain will likely never lead the EU, but they are starting to change that conversation and those who do are "fearful". Same with Sanders and Warren...neither will be President, but their focused and passionate values, views and conversations will attract people who have never even heard of Progressive politics the Left has been stifled for so long.

[TBF]

2. KKE (the strong communist party in Greece)

may not win elections but they have a massive impact with their clarity. They are a revolutionary Marxist party and call out neoliberalism for what it is. We don't have such a party in this country and it shows.