Tuesday, May 22nd saw the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Between 250,000 and 350,000 youth and workers came out onto the streets of Montreal and openly defied the emergency law that requires police approval of protest routes eight hours in advance. A widely publicized “official route” was broken; the crowd turned away, following an unannounced path. The crowd was enormous, and easily ...

Recent elections in France and Greece have generated a good deal of comment, suggesting that the years of center-right governance in Europe may be coming to an end. The defeat of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France by the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, and the collapse in Greece of political parties that allowed unrestrained capitalism and chaos to take hold, are major developments. But whether they ...

“Austerity has failed because Greek society has been destroyed, the production base has been dissolved. Our country has been in a deep recession for five consecutive years. This has never happened in Europe in peacetime.” –Alexis Tsipras, leader of Greece’s Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) Europe is a trainwreck. The signs of a credit crunch are popping up in countries on the periphery, a slow-motion ...

Can the co-op movement be one source of alternatives to marketisation? Hilary Wainwright explores. In the free-for-all over the spoils of the public sector, Tory ministers are playing fast and loose with the concepts of co-operatives and mutuals. They talk blithely about ‘the John Lewis model’. One might smile at the fact that Tories have to raid progressive history, such is the crisis of legitimacy of big ...

In the millions of words written about Europe’s debt crisis, Germany is typically cast as the responsible adult and Greece as the profligate child. Prudent Germany, the narrative goes, is loath to bail out freeloading Greece, which borrowed more than it could afford and now must suffer the consequences. Would it surprise you to know that Europe’s taxpayers have provided as much financial support to Germany ...

Elections in Western parliamentary systems are always about the center. The standard situation is one in which there are two dominant parties – one somewhat right of center and one somewhat left of center. There are differences between the policies these parties pursue when in office, but there are also enormous similarities. The election never reflects a profound political split. Rather, it is about recent ...

The Occupy movement built a global sense of community and put unprecedented inequality on the agenda. In an exclusive extract, the eminent US thinker asks where it goes now. This is the transcript of a discussion that took place earlier this year between Noam Chomsky and Occupy supporters Mikal Kamil and Ian Escuela for InterOccupy, an organisation that provides links between supporters of the Occupy moveme ...

The French and Greek elections have already shifted Europe's politics. But it needs real change to hold the right at bay. Revolt against austerity is sweeping Europe. The election of François Hollande has not only opened up the chance of a change of direction in France, but even in the citadels of fiscal orthodoxy in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin. In Greece, Sunday's electoral earthquake has all but destro ...

In order to affirm its loyalty to Europe, the Irish political elite has decided that it is best not to pay too much attention to European reality. "Austerity" may be, as Joseph Stiglitz argued recently, "Europe's man-made disaster", yet the coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour has gambled on positioning Ireland as the poster child for Frankfurt and Berlin's extended experiment in disaster denial. Th ...

The main message of the elections of May 6 is the denouncement of the austerity measures and their main supporters. The parties of the previous governmental coalition PASOK (socialists) and Nea Dimokratia (conservatives) that support the memoranda and the harsh austerity policies suffered huge losses. In particular, they lost about 3.000.000 votes and received together 32% of the total votes. This is a dram ...