Feed
donate Summary for Blätter 07/2009
David Harvey
The financial coup d'etat
Their crisis, our challenge
Does the economic crisis signal the end of neoliberalism? David Harvey, world-famous human geographer and Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), interprets the government programs to rescue the banks as a coup dΎtat. His thesis: The capitalist class and its successful neoliberal project may even get stronger during the crisis Рas long as the left and social movements do not gain more control over the surplus product and practice new kinds of urban democracy.
James K. Galbraith
Lessons from the New Deal
What we can learn from Roosevelt
The current crisis is often compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Therefore, the history of the New Deal is getting more and more attention. James K. Galbraith, Professor for Economics at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, objects to the interest-driven critique of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. His conclusion: FDR's government managed to achieve positive results, in particular in areas where it did not simple fulfil the agenda of big business.
Wole Soyinka
An African dream
Searching for the African renaissance
The anti-colonial fighters, artists and scholars had a dream: They wanted to achieve universal humanity and reclaim their own history. Noble laureate in literature Wole Soyinka, who on July 13 will celebrate his 75th birthday, discusses in this first-published essay the achievements and failures of the liberation movement in the context of the post-colonial project.
Markus Euskirchen, Henrik Lebuhn and Gene Ray
How Illegals are being made
The new border regime of the European Union
The image of the "Fortress Europe" characterises the European policy concerning refugees and migration as repressive and exclusionary. But is this image adequate? Social scientists Markus Euskirchen, Henrik Lebuhn and Gene Ray argue instead that the whole EU has been turned into a "border zone". Today, millions of people live illegally in the EU, where they form a completely disfranchised and highly flexible labour force. It is thus not sufficient to just look on the southern frontier to explain European policies – and to expand political resistance.
Heike Moldenhauer
The threat of green gene technology
The struggle about MON 810
Time and time again, polls demonstrate that European citizens do not want products made by gene technology. At the same time, great efforts are made to massively expand the cultivation of genetically modified plants. Heike Moldenhauer, expert for gene technology at the German environmental NGO "BUND", shows why the prohibition of the genetically modified corn MON 810 is a substantial progress in the struggle against so-called green gene technology – and why a grand coalition of politics, economy and science sabotages the prohibition.
Klaus Lederer
Left and libertarian?
Why the left quarrels over individual freedom
Why do many leftists see their political agenda and individual rights as contradictory? Klaus Lederer, chairman of the party "Die Linke" (Left Party) in Berlin, sees the problems of this construction as primarily situated in the traditional left itself. "Freedom" was and is far too often subordinated to "equality", or it is even interpreted as "bourgeois". In going back to Marx, Lederer pleads for overcoming this false antagonism.
Johanna Klatt und Franz Walter
The implosion of politics?
Germany in the year of crisis and elections
Following Thatcher's phrase "there is no alternative", politics has lost any substance over the course of the last 30 years. The experts on party politics Franz Walter and Johanna Klatt ask which ideas could bring meaning back to government policies as well as to oppositional projects. Their thesis: The necessary impulse for a renewal of politics cannot come from bureaucratic elites, but only from disappointed counter-elites.
Published 2009-06-30
Original in German
Contributed by Blätter
© Blätter
© Eurozine
Focal points click for more 
Social media 
