Blockupy activists and police face off in front of the ECB building in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. PAimages/Andreas Arnold. All rights reserved.
In Europe, democracy – understood as the access of people without economic power to crucial decisions regarding the course oftheir societies – is successfully limited today. The institutional design and the prevailing political mentality shape the ground for the elites to openly exclude popular needs from decision making.
A few decades after the fall of ‘actually existing socialism,’ we are experiencing the fall of ‘actually existing liberalism,’ so to speak. From a historical perspective, the two falls are simultaneous and mark the beginning of a hard clash between the elites and the people. The neoliberal project signifies an open, ambitious and brutal strategy to radically change the basic coordinates of human societies and modes of subjectivity.
