"Conclusion: What should Marxists do? Europe’s elites are behaving today like a hapless cast of clueless leaders who understand neither the nature of the crisis that they are presiding over nor its implications for their own fate – let alone for the future of European civilisation. Atavistically, they are choosing to plunder the diminishing stocks of the weak and the dispossessed in order to plug the gaping black holes of their bankrupted bankers, refusing to come to terms with the impossibility of the task. [...]
With Europe’s elites deep in denial, disarray, and with their heads buried ostrich-like in the sand, the Left must admit that we are just not ready to plug the chasm that a collapsing European capitalism will open up with a functioning socialist system, one that is capable of generating shared prosperity for the masses. Our task should then be twofold: To put forward an analysis of the current state of play that non-Marxist, well meaning Europeans who have been lured by the sirens of neoliberalism, find insightful. And to follow this sound analysis up with proposals for stabilising Europe – for ending the downward spiral that, in the end, reinforces only the bigots and incubates the serpent’s egg. Ironically, those of us who loathe the Eurozone have a moral obligation to save it! This is what we have been trying to do in with our Modest Proposal. When addressing diverse audiences ranging from radical activists to hedge fund managers, the idea is to forge strategic alliances even with right-wingers with whom we share a simple interest: an interest to end the negative feedback loop between austerity and crisis, between bankrupt states and bankrupt backs; a negative feedback effect that undermines both capitalism and any progressive program for replacing it. This is how I defend my attempts to enlist to the cause of the Modest Proposal the likes of Bloomberg and New York Times journalists, of Tory members of Parliament, of financiers who are concerned with Europe’s parlous state. The reader will allow me to conclude with two final confessions. While I am happy to defend as genuinely radical the pursuit of a modest agenda for stabilising a system that I despise, I shall not pretend to be enthusiastic about it. This may be what we must do, under the current circumstances, but I am sad that I shall probably not be around to see a more radical agenda being sensibly adopted. [...]" --- I dedicate the above lines - which I dare to copy from a paper dated May 2013 - to all Pen-lers who still have sympathy not for the devil, but for a hardcore Grexit, a slow Grexit, for a Lexit, or for a Varoufakisean Grexit. This link is not deceptive: http://genius.com/The-rolling-stones-sympathy-for-the-devil-lyrics/ But it does not release the mystery of the above lines. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
