The problem with this perception of academic research as objective, dispassionate and free from emotion runs deeper. Neutrality, especially in social sciences does not exist.
Syriza’s extraordinary problem – which would not be faced by any other political party in government – was to alter internal institutional frameworks under conditions of external institutional assault.
In 2010 the image of ‘ending up like Greece’ was that of a Dickensian debtors’ prison. In 2015 it is that of hell.
Investment is low, the trade deficit is growing, and what growth we have is largely driven by ultra-cheap money and asset inflation. This is unbalanced and unsustainable.
This Greek rule-bending ambition, from a position of weakness, violates the basic principles of financial realism.
For now, thanks to surreptitious symbiosis, it is possible to do sustained activism to bring about social change, without becoming part of a ‘civil society industry’. From the Squares and Beyond partnership.
All the countries of those sitting around this table were born in genocide. In the case of Brazil, we were the world champion of slavery. So we are based on that! Sweet but violent. From the Squares and Beyond partnership.
On the eve of the 2015 Greek bailout referendum, Robin McAlpine of Scotland’s Common Weal and researcher Christina Psarra from Greece, sat down to discuss radicalized generations, alternative spaces, and the need for solidarity. From the Squares and Beyond partnership.
This lack of lived experience with the violence of our state entails an almost inevitable blindness to the deepening divide between those our states protect and those whose life it represses, expels, and humiliates.
The 2015 General Election was a disaster for people and political parties that can loosely be called ‘progressive’. Rather than relying upon the one-way communication of ‘messages’ and ‘narratives’, they now need to learn how to engage in open-ended ‘Democratic Dialogues’.
