English
The EU’s multiple failures are due to its immunity to democracy – The New Statesman
From denial, to grudging acceptance, to substantial intervention, to debacle: that was the European Union’s trajectory once the storm that nearly consumed Wall Street in 2008 had crossed the Atlantic, starting the euro crisis. Twelve years later, the EU’s reaction to Covid-19’s arrival is following an ominously comparable trajectory. Eurosceptics take aim at the EU’s […]
Speaking of antisemitism… – A personal view as related to my DiEM25 comrades (video + text)
On 4th February 2021, DiEM25’s coordinating collective held a discussion on how progressives can, at once, fight antisemitism and remain highly critical of Israel’s policies. You can watch a video of my speech and read an extended version of these thoughts below. Last week, while discussing competing identities, I argued that it is unacceptable to […]
Trumpism after Trump – NEWSWEEK magazine, interviewed by Basit Mahmood
He’s been described as the George Clooney of the government, a rockstar politician who took on the EU and an “erratic Marxist.” Few politicians can hope – or fear – to achieve the levels of notoriety Yanis Varoufakis did in just six months while serving as finance minister of Greece. A world-renowned economist, Varoufakis now […]
From an imagined hi-tech rebellion to the GameStop incident: Lessons for collective action in the 21st Century – Der Freitag
When in 2008 I heard that Lehman Brothers collapsed, and thousands of its staff were laid off, I allowed myself a fantasy. I imagined that one of the laid off financial engineers, whom for some reason I named Esmeralda, would turn into a dissident. That, incensed with the way she had been discarded by the […]
Was the GameStop episode a version of ANOTHER NOW’s Crowdshorters-in-action ? On Channel 4 (video)
Further to this post, in which I compare my ANOTHER NOW‘s fictional Crowdshorters with the crowd that used Reddit to collude so as to defeat the hedge funds shorting GameStop, you can now watch my brief debate with Frances Coppola on Channel 4. Was that episode of broader interest? Is this a new phenomenon of […]
Did we see yesterday something like ANOTHER NOW’s Crowdshorters in action ? You be the judge!
In my ANOTHER NOW I imagined a new type of resistance movement that uses the tools of finance to bring down capitalism and create a democratic market socialist economy in its stead. I called them CROWDSHORTERS. Yesterday, I received many messages suggesting that the CROWDSHORTERS are emerging for real, with the Reddit group that supported […]