ITALY: Mobilizing for the common: some lessons from Italy

by Jerome Roos on April 14, 2014

Saturday’s protest in Rome [12 April] was the latest in a series of actions around a common project. What can organizers elsewhere learn from Italy’s movements?

Tens of thousands of protesters marched on Rome this Saturday to denounce the austerity measures and economic reforms of Matteo Renzi’s new government and to restate their call for income, housing and dignity for all. Dozens were injured as clashes broke out towards the end of the march and police violently charged forward into the crowds, indiscriminately beating protesters and trampling over those who got caught in the way. What the police could not trample, however, was the resolve of the movements to step up their resistance in the wake of last October’s sollevazione generale (“general uprising”), which brought a hundred thousand people into the streets of Rome.

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: Interview with Lo*, an anarchist from Bosnia

*Lo is an anarchist from Sarajevo

– It’s been 2 months since the start of the protest movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina, what is happening with this movement now? Do people still organise citizens’ Assemblies [Plenums] and does the government hear your requirements?

UK: Anarchists! Get Organised!

We are facing an unprecedented period of attacks against the working class. The Conservative-Liberal coalition have unleashed the full force of austerity upon us in order to help tighten the grip capitalism holds on society. Public sector cuts, the bedroom tax, benefit cuts and so on are merely different faces of the ugly beast known as neoliberalism. Unless we directly challenge these attacks on our standard of living we can only expect further cuts – all at the expense of the working class.

It is important that there is an specifically anarchist response to austerity for anarchism is a social and political movement with its roots in the struggles of the working class – those who are most effected by the cuts. We cannot allow the struggle against austerity to be left to authoritarian or state socialists or the liberal left (or worse the far-right and fascists); their response to the economic crisis is much of the same. Anarchism holds the only really answer for the emancipation of the working class from the exploitation of capitalism.

GREECE: Statistics of austerity

Posted by Thrasybulus
Dec 24 2012

As more loans have been released to the Greek state a combination of recent surveys and reports show the true effects of years of austerity. There has been across the board reductions in conditions and living standards for large parts of the Greek population.

Growth Is the Problem: By Chris Hedges

The ceaseless expansion of economic exploitation, the engine of global capitalism, has come to an end. The futile and myopic effort to resurrect this expansion—a fallacy embraced by most economists—means that we respond to illusion rather than reality. We invest our efforts into

bringing back what is gone forever. This strange twilight moment, in which our experts and systems managers squander resources in attempting to re-create an expanding economic system that is moribund, will inevitably lead to systems collapse. The steady depletion of natural resources, especially fossil fuels, along with the accelerated pace of climate change, will combine with crippling levels of personal and national debt to thrust us into a global depression that will dwarf any in the history of capitalism. And very few of us are prepared.

From Greece, coming to a place near you…?

rooieravotr   Sep 16 2012 02:25

Sometimes one reads a piece of news that should set the alarm bells of working class militants, anarchists, communists ringing loud and clear – should, but somehow doesn’t. That strange mismatch between alarming news and an almost total lack of outrage struck me after I read reports that creditor insitutions involved in the Greek bailout/ imposed austerity programme want to impose a hugely longer working hours as a precondition for another bailout.

The Vocabulary of Greek Neo-Nazis

 

Anti-Greek: He who hates the Nation. Participate in strikes, demonstrations, attacks the Βenefactors of the Νation, such as banks and offshore companies, wants to participate in assemblies, does not hate his enemies, the Turks, does not have Greek flag tattoos, does not hold a knife. You can recognize him by the correct spelling.

La zona euro, al borde de una explosión ‘catastrófica e irrecuperable’

Publicado: 30 jul 2012

Alemania ejerce la máxima presión sobre los países más débiles, lo que es destructivo 

Kleptocracy: debt as a method of legalized robbery

 

Debt is the mechanism that makes legalized robbery possible. This is why stopping the payment of our debt is an imperative in the defense of a decent life.

By Raimundo Viejo, originally published on Diagonal, nº 179, p. 33. Translation by Richard McAleavey (here).

Western bankers intensify global recession by financial terrorism

Western bankers are using weapons of mass financial destruction as the world is entering into global recession and depression, a financial analyst tells Press TV.