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While the media are reporting the news of the deadlocked EU Summit negotiations over the so-called ‘Recovery Fund’, an eerie silence prevails regarding the Elephant in the Room: The huge wave of austerity the Eurozone is sleepwalking towards. Let’s look at the facts.

What did you think when the Euro-group elected its new leader last week? At least this was not the outcome Frau Merkel had wished?

In less than a year, MeRA25’s our parliamentary group has proven “your voice in parliament”

Europe never was the battlefield on which the frugal North clashed with the profligate South. Instead, every European country has been the battlefield where a vicious class war is fought by a transnational oligarchy-without-frontiers training its armour against the weaker residents of every country, every region, every community. Covid-19, and the European Union’s response to it, only magnifies the human costs of this unremitting class war.

Before capitalism, debt appeared at the very end of the economic cycle; a mere reflection of the power to accumulate already produced surpluses. Under feudalism, production came first with the peasants working the land to plant and harvest crops. Distribution followed the harvest, as the sheriff collected the lord’s share. Part of this share was later monetised when the lord’s men sold it at some market. Debt only emerged at the very last stage of the cycle when the lord would lend his money to debtors, the King often amongst them.

ATHENS – To exorcise my worst fears about the coming decade, I chose to write a bleak chronicle of it. If, by December 2030, developments have invalidated it, I hope such dreary prognoses will have played a part by spurring us to appropriate action.

Before our pandemic-induced lockdowns, politics seemed to be a game. Political parties behaved like sports teams having good or bad days, scoring points that propelled them up a league table that, at season’s end, determined who would form a government and then do next to nothing.

Free market capitalism died over a 100 years ago and gave way to monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism is now not even able to reproduce itself, let alone sustain the planet, common decency etc. But what comes next?

With Lives, Livelihoods and the Union on the brink, the COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest test of the European project in the history of the Union — and we are failing.

Solidarity was meant to be a foundational principle of the EU. But solidarity is missing at the moment it is most needed.

COVID-19 has revealed a fundamental truth: Europe is only as healthy as its sickest resident, only as prosperous as its most bankrupted.

Enormous global corporations and financial institutions are now, some say, more powerful than governments. Rules that once constrained and regulated capitalism have gone. And when their power causes massive destruction, the captains of Big Capital find ways to profit from the destruction. So, is modern capitalism, itself, a threat to capitalism? Or will corporations always be able to monetise misery?

Paul Barclay speaks to Yanis Varoufakis and Antony Loewenstein

Recorded on March 4, 2020 at Adelaide Writers Week

Speakers