Preface
- This year’s volume opens with an assessment of the European Union from the point of view of left strategy by Gregor Gysi, who was elected president of the Party of the European Left at its Congress in December. An idea of the few options left to a country led by a radical left party, which still suffers under the EU’s financial regime, is given by Greece’s Minister of Finance, Euclid Tsakalotos.
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The European Union and the Left
Europe – Quo vadis? The Left and European Integration
- After the Brexit vote, there is a sense of cluelessness, or at least irritation, in Germany, that is, in the newspapers, in political journals, in the parties represented in the Bundestag, and...
Twofold Disenchantment
- Donald Trump’s election as the 45th President of the United States alarmed policy makers as well as the media and intellectuals all over Europe. Not only because the umbrellas have always been opened...
Euclid Tsakalotos – interviewed by Haris Golemis
- Haris Golemis: At the time of this interview (12 December 2016), the Greek government is close to completing its second review of the third painful Memorandum of Understanding, which it was forced to...
Economic Governance of the European Union: Activate the Emergency Brakes?
- Walter Benjamin polemicised against the naïve idea of revolutions as the locomotives of world history. In his thesis on the concept of history1 Benjamin suggested that if this locomotive, constructed...
Social Evolutions
The Future of Work: Neither Utopias nor Dystopias but New Fields of Accumulation and Struggle
- It is fanciful to presume that there are many Marxists who believe in an afterlife, so it is perhaps perverse to imagine Karl Marx sitting somewhere on a heavenly cloud, looking down at the world and...
Time of Alternatives: The Left 100 Years After the October Revolution
- The undermining of commodity production began one hundred years ago with a qualitative leap in the manipulation of market and consumption by corporations. No anti-cartel legislation can touch the...
Ways Out of Secular Stagnation?
- In its Fall 2016 prognosis for the capitalist economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has notably scaled back its growth prediction for the USA. Sluggish investments – possibly also due to...
The Left: Past and Present
The Left and the Labour Movement in Europe – What History? From the 19th to the 21st Century
- At the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the left in Europe is in such a state that it seems to have come to the end of a long history. Split up between different components, it...
The Left, the People, Populism
- The right-left divide seems to be breaking down in current political representation. In fact this goes back some thirty years when the right turn of European socialism began to blur the boundaries...
The Left Alternative – The Search for a Subject of History
- Globalisation is increasingly influencing us. On the one side, it opens up new forms of a networked internet civilisation; on the other side, it entails irresolvable contradictions. The events of the...
What is Left in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Survey Data on Left Self-Location
- What is the political left in Europe? Does left-wing orientation and its links with other socio-political questions exist as more or less one configuration found throughout all European countries, or...
Europe’s Old and New Left and Its Constituencies (1)
- The aim of this general reflection on the transformations undergone by Europe’s social and political left is to suggest strategies and tools for promoting a more just economic and social system. For...
Back to the Roots?
- How left movements and parties see themselves in society and how they behave towards people outside of them has been continually changing in the last 150 years. As a result, they have been able to...
What Produces Democracy? Revolutionary Crises, Popular Politics, and Democratic Gains in Twentieth-Century Europe
- Contemporary assumptions about democracy are still darkly shadowed by the whole process of post-Communist transition since 1989. In that Eastern European context, the prospects for democracy were...
Ecosocialism – from William Morris to Hugo Blanco
- What is ecosocialism? Ecosocialism is a political current based on an essential insight: that the preservation of the ecological equilibrium of the planet and therefore of an environment favourable...
The Consequences of Climate Change for Left Strategy – A Roundtable
- In periods of crisis socio-ecological questions are repeatedly pushed to the margins. Apart from the Greens, left parties have difficulty in creating systematic connections between economic, social,...
Gender, Feminism, Antifeminism, and Imperialism
- Notes from a Gender History Perspective on the Current Debates Around Male Immigrant Attitudes Towards Women
Connecting people through cinema. Notes on a political film festival
- Editorial note: This article is not part of the printed version of the yearbook. It is available only online.
Voters – Right-Wing Appeals and the Left
Right-Wing Populism: An Answer to the Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (1)
- In broad areas of Europe as well as in North America, right-wing populist movements and parties have a substantial following and have chalked up impressive electoral successes. In Germany too, which...
Voter Abstention as Class Electoral Behaviour – and the Weakness of Left Approaches
- In almost all states of the European Union voter participation in local, regional, national, and European elections is declining – at least in the countries without compulsory voting.1 For some years...
Non-Voting and Support for Left Parties in Poland
- Introduction For the first time since 1918, the Polish left has no representation in parliament. The country is now governed by a conservative nationalist party, which has managed to gain the support...
State of the Left – Country Reports
The Corbyn Moment: A Dialectic of Defeats
- I. Defeat is an under-rated experience in political life. During the US Civil War, Charles Eliot Norton wrote on the ‘advantages of defeat’, noting that an early setback at Bull Run was not only...
Who Are In the Streets? Reflections on Nuit Debout in Paris
- After the 31 March demonstration against the new proposed labour legislation (the ‘loi travail’), demonstrators decided not to go home; they re- assembled at Place de la République to keep vigil and...
New Municipalism in Barcelona: A First Attempt at a Balance Sheet
- To undertake a full appraisal of a government one needs more time than just a third of a mandate, but given the speed of political events in Spain since 2008, it is worth having a first look at the...
Towards the League of the Balkan Left
- The Balkan Peninsula has played a special role in Europe’s political imagination. For the greater part of contemporary history this region figured as a kind of barbaric wasteland. Barbaric in the...
Activity Report
transform! europe 2016 at a Glance
- For over fifteen years, transform! has been working as a horizontal network with alternative thinking and political dialogue at its core – always in relation to social and labour movements, as well as...
Book Order
Ordering information
- Yearbook as eBook available soon. THE LEFT, THE PEOPLE, POPULISM: PAST AND PRESENT. transform! 2017Edited by Walter Baier, Eric Canepa and Eva Himmelstoss Merlin Press...
Authors
