Geography Archives: Europe

Abstract Following the 2000-01 crisis, Turkey implemented an orthodox strategy of raising interest rates and maintaining an overvalued exchange rate.  But, contrary to the traditional stabilization packages that aim to increase interest rates to constrain domestic demand, the new orthodoxy aimed at maintaining high interest rates to attract speculative foreign capital.  The end result was […]

Abstract The collapse of the European socialist block at the end of the 1980s caused a deep crisis in the Cuban economy.  One of the distinctive features of the process of adjustment and reform of the Cuban economy carried out by the government was that even during the worst period of the crisis, the Revolution’s […]

  El telón de azúcar (The Sugar Curtain) was the winner of the Premio Coral for the best documentary at the 29th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in 2007. — Ed. In The Sugar Curtain, the Paradise of the Cuban Revolution Is Put in Crisis The daughter of a Chilean documentary […]

  Obama did what was expected, dispensing good luck charms for all.  What he left behind is a state of delirium, a la the Hunchback of Notre Dame: “He gave me water.” Even though some of Obama’s gestures during the visit — such as Obama reminding the young people he was chatting with of the […]

Very few writers maintain total indifference toward the ethics of their work.  Those who have thought that in the practice of literature it is possible to separate ethics from aesthetics, however, are not so few.  Jorge Luis Borges, not without mastery, practiced a kind of politics of aesthetic neutrality, perhaps convinced of its possibility.  Thus, […]

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The world has been slow to realise that we are living this year in the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.”  Today, as then, we are in the shadow of catastrophe.  Today, as then, our thinking is slow.  We need to come to grips […]

Paper presented at the Congrès Marx International V, Paris-Sorbonne et Nanterre, October 2007 1.  Introduction About a decade ago the radical left, both in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, had been gripped by an understanding of contemporary capitalism as based on a three-pronged tendency: ‘globalization’ as an already accomplished state, the ‘end of labor’ due […]

Sonya Huber.   Opa Nobody.   Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.  xvi + 358 pp.  Illustrations.  ISBN 978-0-8032-1080-6; $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8032-1080-6. In recent years, scholars have grappled with the specific manner in which recent generations of Germans and Austrians have confronted their own familial complicity in Nazism.  The narratives revealed by these studies […]

If we take a look at the recent self-described progressive US presidents (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton), we will notice that their progressiveness invariably fades away, not even intentionally.  That is because the beast compels them to align themselves with its own reality.  Carter, who campaigned against the wage stagnation of the Nixon-Ford years, collapsed […]

Boris Kagarlitsky: “Moldovan Turmoil Grew Out of Unresolved Social Problems” Moldova Blames Romania for Riots Opposition Promises Larger Protests Violence Escalates in Moldovan Capital Mikhail Chernov: “Defeat of Moldovan Democracy” Kirill Koktysh: “Those Taking Part in Moldovan Protests Are Mainly Migrant Workers Who Had to Return Home amid the Financial Crisis” Aleksandr Fomenko: “Protest in […]

In the Financial Times of March 31st, Martin Wolf set down a straightforward criterion to evaluate the outcomes of the G20 meeting in London.  Will they decide, he asked, to put forward a plan to shift world demand from the countries with a balance of payments deficit to those with a surplus?  The underlying reasoning […]

  2008 — Annus Horribilis for the world economy — produced successive food, energy, and financial crises, initially devastating particularly the global poor, but quickly extending to the commanding heights of the US and core economies and ushering in the sharpest downturn since the 1930s depression. As all nations strive to respond to the financial […]

The clashes between police and anti-NATO demonstrators in Strasbourg on Thursday, 2 April resulted in 300 people arrested and 105 detained, according to the figures released by the police on Friday.  DDP, a Germany news agency, reported that its photographer was injured by a rubber bullet during the clashes. The Résistance des Deux Rives collective […]

  Activists interviewed by an alternative journalism collective Pueblos Sin Fronteras reported that the police provocation made the protests violent, penning demonstrators in separate corrals and preventing them from moving for hours, without access to water, food, or restrooms.  This may explain the collapse of a citizen who died this Wednesday while the demonstrators were […]

  – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – See also TeleSur‘s coverage of the protest. Hamish Macdonald’s report was broadcast by Al Jazeera on 1 April 2009.

  A group of seven highly indebted rich countries (HIRC) of the world have organized a meeting of twenty nations in London in order to discuss the future of the world’s finances.  They have invited some creditors among developing countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, some Arab countries, China, and India, leaving aside all the […]

FTA (Dir. Francine Parker, 1972). Preamble: “This film was made in association with the servicewomen and men stationed on the United States bases of the Pacific Rim, together with their friends whose lands they presently occupy.” Accepting his Oscar for Best Actor, Sean Penn jokingly referred to the Academy as lovers of “commies and homos.”  […]

“Caracas: one of the most dangerous cities of the planet. . .” goes the blurb for the movie Express Kidnapping — the only Venezuelan film viewed internationally so far, and the top grossing movie here. Crime, according to the Latinobarometro 2008 report, is the biggest problem in Venezuela for 57% of its respondents.  So it […]

  The Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has issued the following statement: Investigate the Israeli Missile Contract The Rs. 10,000 crore missile production deal with an Israeli company, the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), has now been exposed as a deal involving massive kickbacks besides being an unnecessary contract.  The Left parties […]

MRZine Editor’s Introduction The crisis in which we find ourselves is not a crisis of the capitalist class, much less a crisis of the capitalist mode of production.  Nor is it even a crisis of neoliberalism.   It’s a crisis of the working class, plain and simple.  What’s in store for us, especially in the […]