Journal

Contents

• Essays

• • Capitalism's Crisis of the Century

  • By Joachim Bischoff

  • There is still no end in sight to the global financial crisis that has been raging for over a year. The potential for crisis will continue to preoccupy financial markets and investors until well into 2009 and hover over the stock markets like the sword of Damocles. The capitalist world system is being shaken by the most severe turbulence in the financial system since the world economic crisis of 1929.  

• • Social-Democracy is Over: We Need to Build the “Left That Comes After”

  • By Jean-Luc Mélenchon

  • The call for social-democratic conversion was the privileged formula of a large part of French Socialist leaders as well as left journalists in response to the 2007 electoral defeat. However, none of...
• • Post Bush Amercia: A Site of Family Disintegration and Revolutionary Personal Change

  • By Harriet Fraad

  • Post-Bush America is a land of personal suffering, family disintegration, and desperation for women and children. The US family has experienced a class revolution in family and personal life. 

• Focus: European Social Models

• • The Impact of Finance on the European Social Models

  • By Jörg Huffschmid

  • 1. Introduction...
• • What Can be Learned from the Nordic Model?

  • By Asbjørn Wahl

  • The Nordic Model, or the welfare state, which developed in a very specific historic context. It can therefore not be assessed independently from its social and historical origin and the power relations which made it possible.  

• • The Rise of Anti-Poverty Policies in Finland

  • By Susan Kuivalainen , Mikko Niemelä

  • Welfare states everywhere are changing. Over the past decades, many states in the western world have entered a phase of rethinking, retrenchment and reconstruction. A number of studies have examined...
• • The Dualities of the Swedish Welfare Model

  • By Daniel Ankerloo

  • Framing the Problem: Viability vs. Effect

    In the prevailing political and scientific discussion on welfare states in general and the Swedish welfare model in particular, the focus is on the question of the viability of the different welfare models (in light of demographic changes, globalisation, multiculturalism, citizenship etc.). By contrast, I believe that the basic question is not whether the Swedish model is viable – but whether it works.

• • The Scandinavian Model and the Labour Market

  • By Jan Lelann

  • The Scandinavian countries play a key role in the European social harmonisation process. Within the social representation at the European level, there is a sort of informal division of labour, with Denmark serving as the point of reference in terms of employment and Sweden as the model for consideration of different retirement systems. Why are European institutions so infatuated with the development of the Scandinavian model?

• • The Welfare State, The European Union And The Future

  • By Erik Meijer

  • People are not equal, but all people need to be accorded equal value. And it is just this equal value that is permanently in danger, not only for traditional reasons like natural disasters, wars and slavery, but also as a result of a colonial history, geographic differences and, last but not least, today’s free market.

• • Fighting Plant Closures

  • By Richard Detje , Wolfgang Menz , Sarah Nies , Dieter Sauer

  • The crisis on the international financial markets has had a powerful impact on the real economy. The explosive nature of the situation is produced by two crises coming together and to a certain extent reinforcing each other: asset losses, indebtedness and the credit crunch on one side, and faltering accumulation processes in the economic downturn on the other.  

• • Reality and Outsourcing in India

  • By Krishna Murthy Padmanabhan

  • In India outsourcing has two aspects. Generally, we are talking about India, which is developing, and in which an economic boom supported by information technologies is in process. This is the...
• • Building Class Consciousness

  • By Christine Mendelsohn

  • The struggle of the workers at the Renault Dacia plant in Rumania has clarified how competition between wage-earners in the Eastern and Western parts of the European Union works. Their resistance to...
• • The EU and Hungary: Colonisation, De-industrialisation, De-structuring

  • By Judit Morva

  • With the accession of Eastern European countries, EU leaders, without warning and formal declaration, changed the project of European integration. Instead of putting in place a programme of...
• • Having your Cake and Eating It

  • By Lutz Brangsch

  • The EU’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) seems to exist in a world of its own, outside of the real social welfare debate. Proven ineffectiveness in its core area – combating poverty – is combined with an apparently naïve faith in the power of consensus and the need to set a good example. 

• • General Intellect: The Left and the new Workforce

  • Capitalism transforms itself in order to control crises and instability and in order to secure the functioning of market mechanisms, and these transformations involve all functions of society, institutions, property, work and the different forms of wealth.  

• • The Attack on the Welfare State in the Name of the Welfare State

  • By José Casimiro

  • Discussion of the welfare state and the European social model has intensified in the last years. This is of vital importance, not only for European workers and citizens, but also in terms of the role...

• Chronicles

• • The Case of Austria: A European Test Case?

  • By Walter Baier

  • What’s wrong with the Austrians? In the elections which took place at the end of September, the two parties who ended up on the right margin of the political spectrum, the “Freedom Party” FPÖ and the...

• European Social Forum

• • Alterglobalism and Marxism: Dialectic of Interrelations in the Epoch of the Proto-Empire

  • By Christophe Ventura , Elisabeth Gauthier , Alexander Buzgalin , Jorge Martín

  • The European Social Forum in Malmö included a series of seminars organised by transform! or by its partner organisations. The following four papers were given at one of these seminars: “Marxism and Altermondialism“.

• • The Assembly of the Charter of Principles of Another Europe

  • By Chantal Delmas , Francesco Russo

  • After many seminars and workshops organised by the Charter’s network in cooperation with other networks and organisations, an assembly was held in order to share the results of the discussions and to make progress in the analysis of European questions and in the development of platforms for combating EU principles and policies.

• • Democracy acquires new meaning at the European Social Forum

  • By Patrick Coulon

  • Significantly, the theme of democracy has emerged from the European Social Forum in Malmö renewed and broadened. If the analysis of the concept of reciprocal communication based on the experience of...
• • Science and Democracy Invite Each Other to the World Social Forum

  • By Janine Guespin-Michel

  • Although it did not all start in 2000 with the council of European ministers in Lisbon, this event shed dramatic light on, and sharply accelerated, the deep changes that have gradually transformed...

• Networking

• • The First European Attac Summer University (ESU)

  • By Sabine Leidig

  • With its ESU, Attac Europe wanted to achieve a milestone in the capacity for joint action – an offer to activists for participation. ...
• • Reclaim Life - Fight Precariousness!

  • A Campaign of the Summer University of the European Left

• • Seminar on Participatory Democracy and Participatory Budgets in Local Governments

  • By Walter Baier , Javier Navascués

  • On November 22 and 23, 2008 transform!, the group of the Communist Party in Bohemia and Moravia in the Prague City Hall the Czech Association SPED, which is a member of transform!, jointly organised a...
• • Towards an Institut Européen du Salariat

  • Goal of the Institute

    For lack of a better translation, we will refer to “wage-earning” in the rest of this presentation. The “Institut Européen du Salariat” (IES) promotes research on “salariat,” a French term that comes from the word for “salary” or “wage.” “Salariat” designates both the status of wage earner and wage earners as a group.