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Copyright of Relaciones Internacionales (1699-3950) is the property of Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, International Relations Studies Group (GERI) Law Faculty and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article looks to identify and contextualise the shift of journalism towards emotion in terms of broader socio-political shifts. It focuses on 'hate journalism', a term we use to describe a new kind of journalism that emerged in Greece during the debt crisis years and is ideologically close to neo-fascist, and ethnonationalist political positions. We understand hate as an action oriented socio-cultural practice and examine the conditions of production and deployment of hate through focusing on Makeleio, the most successful example of this kind of journalism. Within this context, hate is produced and circulated as a 'hook' to attract and entice users, by mirroring their emotions; it further constitutes a means of producing and diffusing ideology by helping readers manage uncertainty through putting forward authoritarian solutions. In doing so, hate journalism is involved in social reproduction processes by which (Greek) society produces and sustains itself as ethnically pure, culturally Christian, and gendered as masculine and virile. Readers are invited to recognise themselves and their practices and vernacular, to be consoled and offered solace and comfort within an unmoored world. They, in turn, offer support to this journalism through consuming it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study has been analyzed and penned down considering various financial events that occurred in the history of finance and the magnitude of impact they had in one or more countries or at a global level. The need to capture the same is to provide caution before any decision we make in the financial markets and infer from the past for bad events not to let them occur again and for good events to use the ideology for earning better returns or achieving the devised objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nancy Fraser is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent critical theorists of our time and is highly regarded for her work on feminism and capitalism. In this interview, she sets out the new conceptions of capitalism, crisis, and critique that she has been developing since her 2014 article "Behind Marx's Hidden Abode." She begins by presenting an original conception of capitalism as an "institutionalized social order," which includes not only its economic features, but also its social, ecological, and political background conditions of possibility. After defining the normative foundations of capitalism and the corresponding boundary struggles to which it gives rise, she then explores the multiple crises it is currently experiencing. Inspired by Marx's tripartite critique, she concludes by proposing a new multi-stranded critique of capitalism, which combines a functionalist critique of capitalism's tendencies to crisis with a normative critique of domination and a political critique of unfreedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread attention to capital investments in land and property around the globe, the active re‐regulating role of the neoliberal state in processes of "accumulation by dispossession" remains underexplored. Through an in‐depth look at the dispossession of highly fragmented and loosely regulated private land for windfarm investments on Crete's eastern corner, Sitia, this paper re‐affirms the political nature of the forcible appropriation of land for large‐scale investments; dissects the specific mechanisms in which the state dispossesses land on behalf of investors and promotes the forcible appropriation of land from below; and problematises the dialectic relationship of both rupture and continuity between crisis and inherited, path‐dependent relations embedded in land. The transformation of Sitia's loosely regulated, informal relations on land is made possible through the mobilisation of the state's bureaucratic and normalising powers, which redefine the concept of forest and dispossess through classifying land as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trabalho & Educação is the property of Work & Education of the Graduate Program, Faculty of Education, Federal University of Minas Gerais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Adam Academy Journal of Social Sciences / Adam Akademi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Adam Academy Journal of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Antipode is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article introduces a general framework for the critique of the university in crisis that originates in the Marxist tradition. After indicating the limitations of current proposals regarding the source and shape of this crisis, the article emphasizes the dialectical matrix that lies behind the nexus of crisis and critique, which is responsible for closing and deactivating the contradictions emerging within it. To break this theoretical deadlock, we use the 'in-against-beyond' figure formulated on the grounds of Open Marxism. Referring this figure back to the project of Marx and Engels from The German Ideology allows us to explicate a program and research method for critical university studies, which relies on the integrity of three moments of critique: an inquiry into the experience of being within the university subsumed under capital; going against its rule and interrupting the processes of accumulation; and rendering visible what lies beyond the current form of the higher education in crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of education crises typically start out from the notion that these are derivative of economic crises. Hard times for capitalist economies - with recession and consequent shortfalls in tax takes as unemployment rises - leads to cutbacks in budgets for state services, including education. The victims of these cuts are schools, colleges, universities, and students (as provision is trimmed) and staffs (redundancies, recruitment freezes and restructurings). This is The Classical Theory of Education Crisis. A critique of this perspective on education crisis is outlined in this article. Alternatively, it is argued that education crises can be crises for capital, where capitalist development in education institutions becomes threatened or terminated. Through the analysis of commodity forms, the conditions for education crises generating crises for capital are demonstrated. In this perspective, it is capital that is the victim. It is argued that when conscious attempts to go beyond existing forms of capitalist education are forged along anti-capitalist lines in alternative, oppositional educational organisations, then this poses the most threatening scenario for capital and its human representatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The coming to office of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought to the fore the need to understand the rise of the far right and to come to terms with the conflicted legacies of more than a decade of rule under the Workers' Party. This forum brings together six leading intellectuals from different traditions on the left and introduces their reflections on the contradictions and complexities of the Workers' Party, the 2008 crisis, the June 2013 protests, the weakness of the Brazilian left, corruption, and on how to characterise Bolsonaro's regime. Their interventions offer crucial insights that are relevant today not just to Brazil, or even Latin America, but to the politics of the left worldwide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dawn of capitalism was marked by what Marx referred to as primitive accumulation. Nevertheless, similar processes of dispossession of the means of subsistence and production continue until today. Capitalism cannot be sustained if additional means of production and growing availability of labor-power are not integrated into its accumulation processes. If on one hand, we have recently seen an expansion of the processes of dispossession, on the other, there is growing evidence that the capitalist system is immersed in a structural crisis. Thus, it is plausible to imagine that the potential shift of emphasis from the generation to the redistribution of surpluses is a sign of the very limits of the system. This is because capitalism cannot be sustained by redistribution processes alone. These may be effective for individual capitalists, but the system requires expansion. This article discusses the hypothesis that the processes of dispossession of the means of subsistence and production that we see in late capitalism are signs of exhaustion of the system. These signs are revealed by both the limits of spaces and possibilities for expansion—as the system reaches full capitalization and full proletarianization—and by the resistance of the dispossessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the current special issue, Extra-capitalist impulses in the midst of the crisis. Those seeking alternatives to capitalism, and egalitarian social change more generally, face a chronic undecidability. In this context, the special issue considers episodes of what we term, extra-capitalism. By this, we mean those instances, examples, strategies, tactics, experiments, programmes, moments, ruptures and revolutions that have sought to find a way either to challenge or to move outside of capitalism. The article highlights three key dimensions of difference that tend to face those seeking alternatives to capitalism: on the question of scale; regarding the attitude towards institutions of authority, and especially the state; and over the mode of internal organization. Each of the articles of the special issue connect with these questions, and the way in which we might learn from episodes of extra-capitalism, both historically and in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, the financial crisis exploded onto the global scene, causing a world-wide recession and damage to public finances. Governments quickly switched from fiscal stimulus to retrenchment. Despite economic stagnation, falling living standards and rising not falling government debt, rulers have stuck to their austerity guns since then. Arguably, the mainstream media have played a central role in communicating austerity to publics. This article analyses the framing of austerity by the UK media over time, from the financial meltdown of 2008 until late 2015. It charts the emergence of a fledgeling austerity narrative from before the term was in common use, the establishment of a dominant austerity frame in 2009, the building of the frame before and after the 2010 elections and the fluctuations within the frame after 2010. It finds that, although there are considerable differences among the five outlets studied and changes over time, the central message overall has been that some degree of austerity is painful but necessary, and the general population is constructed as obliged to pay for the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines some political and economic facts that led to an intensification of austerity measures by the Brazilian government, including ones against the Unified Health System (SUS) and its progressive dismantling. In a country where fundamental human rights were never fully respected, nowadays social and labor rights are under severe attacks. The deepening of the capital crisis and the rise of interest-bearing capital dominance have been causing unemployment, social insecurity growth, and resulting public fund appropriation by the private capital. The Brazilian governments in the 1990s and 2000s have implemented deeper cuts in social policy expenditure, freezing security benefits, privatizing services, and prioritizing the payment of public debt interests. The right wing's project involves the demoralization of not only theWorkers' Party but also the left as a whole, so that the adoption of austerity measures could be achieved without popular resistance. It is the duty of the Brazilian left wing to denounce such a project and to provoke firm initiatives to rebuild its bonds with the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological challenges of developing a shared academic–student discourse of recovery with undergraduate students in their final year at a British business school.Design/methodology/approach The authors reflect on the meaning of recovery and how it was negotiated and constructed by the relation established between students and academics, by analysing the visual- and text-based materials they produced and the discussions provoked by these materials using symmetric ethnology and content analysis.Findings The main finding is that students tended to reflect on the real, particularly the social, by creating copies and replicas; the authors, as academics, engaged with this practice with ambivalence. The article concludes that this as an attempt to manage what is felt to be unmanageable, echoing what some authors consider to be a contemporary practice of social justification (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1991) and others consider to be a well-established cultural practice (Taussig, 1993).Research limitations/implications The paper contributes to a better understanding of how relatedness and reflexive inquiry become essential for when teaching and that is linked with academics being able to be openly related with students and their situation; to a better understanding of recovery and how it can be co-constructed by academics and students through a share narrative; to a methodology for the analysis of text and images, and its appropriateness for the study of ways in which imagination of the future may be co-constructed; and to an understanding of mimetic objects, replicas and copies.Practical implications The paper suggests that this approach could have practical implications when applying co-inquiry approaches of learning, the understanding of institutional and academic meaning of replication and relatedness in academic context of economic crisis.Originality/value The authors conclude that academic relatedness and students–tutors engagement is constructed differently when re-considering replication as a way of learning. Preference for copying and pasting found texts and images, rather than creating, served as a way of managing the unknown and of constructing recovery through a process of “mimeting” (Campbell, 2005). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the two great late modern crises—economic and environmental—has prompted calls for a return to Marx. This article describes a Marxian account of the 2008 economic crisis relating it to the phenomena of job polarization, de-industrialization, the decline of the middle class, and political populism in Europe and elsewhere. These are argued to spring from political mobilization due to certain kinds of capability deprivations as understood in Amartya Sen’s capability approach. The article demonstrates the continued relevance of Marx for philosophy of the social sciences as well as for a better understanding of the future challenge of maintaining societal stability in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a critical assessment of David Harvey's perspectives on Marxism this paper examines current developments in dialectical materialism that offer alternative possibilities for class-based movements struggling to overcome neoliberal policies around the world. My objective is to show that, despite his self-declared Marxism, Harvey's version of Marxism remains tethered to the prevailing bourgeois logic of fetish-forms and fails to provide us with a sufficient description for the organization of a new form of class struggle appropriate for the 21st century. Methodologically situated within the wider context of Western Marxism, this paper juxtaposes two versions of how Marxist dialectics can be evaluated: the work of Louis Althusser, which in my view Harvey follows, and the Open Marxist path that I regard as closer to what Marx had in mind in his interpretation of social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how mainstream news journalism reported a recent industrial crisis in Sweden (2011) and compares it with the journalistic construction of a similar crisis in the late 1970s. Analysis shows that the one-dimensional news coverage today fails to contextualize the crisis, preferring instead to report the surface drama and exalt the competitiveness of the economic elite. In this oversimplified understanding and construction of a crisis, journalism neglects certain aspects and focuses on matters relating solely to the market. The political and labor perspective highlighted in the crisis coverage of the 1970s is missing in more recent reports. The different voices discussing the causes, characteristics, consequences and solutions of crisis in the industry four decades ago have been replaced by several economic or market experts representing broadly the same perspective; a narrow business understanding of what is at stake, how a crisis can be solved as well as by whom. The class aspect, along with the democratic implications when the interests of the working class and the view of industry as an arena for labor are largely neglected by mainstream news journalism, are highlighted in the study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines radical documentaries in Greece, in the context of neoliberal crisis and post-democracy. In a context where the mainstream media have made themselves irrelevant, facing historical lows in trust and credibility, we found that radical documentaries have emerged outside the commodification of information and form part of the growing social or solidarity economy in Greece. Our analysis shows that these documentaries operate through a different political economy relying on crowdfunding, free distribution and a collaborative organisation. Specifically, these documentaries are firmly oriented towards society rather than the political sphere. Further, they seek to recuperate the media through engaging professional media workers, journalists, film directors, academics and actors; they operate through reclaiming media know-how; through radicalising the financing, production and distribution by refusing to participate in commodification processes; and through recreating commonalities by thematising the common, the public, and responsibility towards others. Their specific political role is that of helping to restore the social body and to contribute to processes of commoning, whereby solidarity and social trust is recovered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the mass mobilisations and occupations of urban squares since 2011 that came as responses to the global financial crisis, the spatial practices of social movements have undergone crucial transformations. This paper addresses these through the case of Athens and contends that the territorialisation of movements in urban space occurred through thecentralisationof counter-austerity struggle in the occupied Syntagma Square and, following this, through thedispersalof spatial practices that emerged out of the squares across the city. In the first instance, solidarity, mutual aid and collective self-organisation practices articulated in the occupied square introduced new collective action repertoires; while, in the aftermath of Syntagma, these were transposed in local groups, solidarity initiatives and networks that produced new territorialised forms of struggle and solidarity in Athenian neighbourhoods. Through these, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on contestation ‘from below’ emerging in urban contexts of austerity as constitutive of contemporary contentious politics. The arguments raised here on the transformations of movements occurringduringanddue toausterity span the period between 2011 and 2014 and empirically draw on participatory ethnographic research conducted in Athens, Greece between October 2012 and May 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capitalism has become progressively more unstable since the welfare state became attenuated and the Cold War ended. Finance capitalism was restored, and monopolistic competition has been rejuvenated. Economic control is more concentrated than ever. The reserve army of labour has been partially restored, and investment controlled. In turn that led to vast accumulations of money in banks, private equity and other forms of money holding, while the economy ultimately fell into its crisis. Austerity has failed to hold the fort, leading to a combination of concessions to the far right while maintaining austerity. There have been no concessions to deal with the overall stagnation, real mass unemployment and low productivity. The logic of the situation leads to increased disintegration combined with repression and a slow-growing mass movement of the working class. There are no more intermediate stages to socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay aims at providing the basis for an approach to public debt consistent with Marx’s theory of capitalist economy. The starting point for this theory is the value theory, and it upholds that public debt is a specific type of fictitious capital and that the latter is the outcome of a dialectical development in the substantiation of different types of capital. It is argued that fictitious capital validates the current valuation in capitalism, allocating a crucial role to the so-called public debt. Along these lines, the essay links public debt to Marx’s theory of the capitalist State, outlines its historical and logical role in the reproduction of capital, details its own features as a type of fictitious capital, clarifies the way the modern tax system bolsters division amongst social classes, and debunks the rise in public indebtedness as the root of the current crisis of world capitalism, as well as conventional therapies based upon orthodox fiscal adjustments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If decisions are made in democracies in open procedures, the rhetoric of There is no alternative (TINA) raises certain questions. Tracing back the idea of necessity to symptomatic discourses, this article analyzes TINA as a political strategy in contexts such as Thatcherism, Third Way politics, and European crisis management, and sheds light on the specific characteristics of politics in the name of TINA. The analysis identifies distinct models of ‘one way’ discourses, reflecting political cultures and institutional settings and providing discursive trajectories. We examine the motivation for invoking necessity to justify unpalatable and normatively intricate policy decisions, and understand TINA politics in its double effect: as facilitating certain policies yet obstructing democratic and deliberative procedures. This allows us to address the question of whether the politics of our time shows a disposition to TINA as a means of responding to the rise and fall of political steering optimism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the world system emerged in the mid-19th century, the stages of capitalist development have all been initiated by economic crises. But unlike the crises of 1873, 1929 or 1973, that of 2007 did not signal the end of the neoliberal stage, but rather its continuation in more extreme forms. This break in the previous pattern requires us to periodize neoliberalism itself and understand how the cumulative effect of the policies implemented during the ‘vanguard’ and ‘social’ periods prepared the way for the current ‘crisis’ period, by restricting the options available to political and state managerial representatives of capital. By reorganizing political economy in such a way that states respond to short-term demands by key sectors of capital rather than the needs of the system as a whole, neoliberalism has inadvertently undermined the accumulation process, producing permanent ‘states of exception’ as the only means of containing the resulting social crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Çalışma ve Toplum is the property of Calisma ve Toplum and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study presents a scrutiny of 'liberal' discursive constructions of the 'Enlightenment' in the Greek public sphere. The study is based on the analysis of articles published in two news/lifestyle websites, 'AthensVoice' and 'Protagon', during the (ongoing), so-called, 'Greek crisis'. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive constructions. The analysis shows that Greece's economic/social/political problems are constructed as symptoms that underline Greece's fundamental deficit, which is the country's alleged 'lack of 'Enlightenment', as perceived by 'liberal' voices in Greece and elsewhere. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: an 'un-Enlightened' 'Greek character', 'guilty' for 'self-inflicting' Greece's crisis. This 'reform of character' envisioned by liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructuring processes that include austerity reforms, privatizations, and loss of labor and civic rights, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially meet the socio-political requirements of late capitalist growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigaciones Turisticas is the property of Investigaciones Turisticas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

As disasters increasingly affect a greater proportion of the population with growing strength and frequency it is becoming even more important to comprehend how recovery from these events is mediated and managed by society. Emerging from several decades of concerted work on the social determinants of disaster, vulnerability and risk, research is now being established that underlies the importance of the politics and power in shaping the processes and outcomes of disaster recovery. In particular, there is a need to situate the central role of neoliberal capitalism in shaping the values and practices of reconstruction and recovery, particularly through engagements with crisis politics. At the same time, disasters may open up space for contestation and resistance that allows for alternative and transformative forms of recovery politics. In this paper I draw on geographies of crisis and hope to frame a theoretical perspective that encapsulates both the capitalist dynamics of disaster recovery and the radical potential of post capitalist politics for facilitating transformative action at the community scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the materialist theory of development and fall of Marxism based on the theory of value as originally considered and presented by Karl Marx in Grundrisse and in Crítica da Economia Política, claiming that the production of value depends on labor force. As it takes place today, capital displaces labor force in every industry, service and activity, country, territory and region all over the world; workers are dismissed and are transferred to speculative activities of the fictional capital. This lesser disposition of labor force eventually harms the mean profit rate and, as time goes by, it provokes a crisis. The present capitalist crisis is resultant from the insufficiency and, to certain extent, to the incapacity of mechanisms from the system to generate enough value production in the labor process, to provide value to the invested capital (in settings of production, raw matter, and in labor force or variable capital); to create more value and to regain increased profit rate. These restraints of the financial capital (fictional capital) cause a deviation to the speculative plan and contribute for the formation of tragic speculative bubbles in sectors such as those of housing, energy and food. No matter how much productivity is increased, developing a technological revolution and “sparing labor force”, the reduction of time, socially required for the production of goods and labor force, becomes harder and more marginal. This is the way the capitalist system enters a civilian, structural and organic crisis, as it is now. To go beyond the capital means to construct structures and superstructures of a new non-capitalist society based on a new way to produce, to work and to keep harmonious and friendly human social relations. It is difficult to have a successful revolution if not with the education of its agents, that is, the organized front people, parties and syndicates that will raise the social, political and cultural awareness. For that purpose, a brief analysis of the system crisis core is required.

A hundred years ago, a historical sequence of imperialism, war, and revolution climaxed in the epoch-defining event of the 1917 October Socialist Revolution in Tsarist Russia. On the eve of the centenary of this unprecedented breakthrough in world history, humanity sees imperialism and wars re-affirm themselves dramatically, from the early 21st century up to today. The crucial question remains on the ‘third term’ of the historical sequence: will the ongoing tragedies of imperialism and war meet the redeeming moment of a revolutionary catharsis? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capitalism in Argentina underwent some important transformations between the neoliberal era (1975-2001) and the new, neodevelopmentalist one (2002-2015). These changes constituted a new mode of peripheral participation of Argentina's economy that has novelties as well as strong continuities, where State form and modes of intervention change. We'll show how this project of development reproduces, in a new context, and within new structural and subjective/political conditions, the historical process of combined and uneven development in Argentina. We propose to analyze such transformation, and assess their limitations for creating a sustainable option for capitalist reproduction in Argentina. Our analysis will provide an alternative view of recent capitalist developments in Argentina that combine the process of class formation, class struggle and political conflict, with the structural tendencies of changing global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores how Europe’s Union is tested though crises but also faces explicit contestation in troubled times. Crises are ‘open moments’ that impact on rulers and ruled, testing existing paradigms, policies, politics, institutional roles and rules. The papers in this special issue test the resilience of the Union in crisis conditions, the post-functionalist interpretation of contemporary integration, the legacy of the crisis for politics and institutions in Europe and the impact of the crisis on key bilateral relations. Four thematic issues are addressed: the resilience of the EU, multilevel politics, patterns of continuity and change and the relationship between the whole (EU) and the member states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the logic underpinning austerity governance in the United Kingdom. Taking the UK’s relative fiscal and monetary policy autonomy as a starting point, the paper unpacks and analyses how the United Kingdom has charted a successful course between the imperatives of social stability and market credibility. At the heart of this ‘success’ is a fundamentally anticipatory governing logic. Fiscal consolidation was justified and enacted as a pre-emptive and preventative intervention in order to anticipate an indebted and thus disciplined future. Contrary to conventional wisdom, then, UK austerity is not necessarily geared only towards swingeing spending cuts, because the direction of travel towards an imagined debt- and deficit-free future is just as important as reaching the destination itself under the logic of anticipatory fiscal consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Greek economic crisis is primarily structural and the result of an international economic impasse that developed in 2007, with devastating implications for the struggling peripheral economies of Europe. This article suggests that falling profitability led to the stagnation of profits, which in turn discouraged new investment, decreased production and increased unemployment. The resulting recessionary economic environment, in conjunction with the mounting public debt and the austerity policies imposed on the Greek economy by the so-called 'troika' of creditors in 2010, has decimated the Greek economy even further, causing one of the worst economic crises since the Second World War. The article also provides some broad guidelines for an alternative economic policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper examines the preconditions of the strike at the Greek steel company Hellenic Halyvourgia (HH) which started on 1 November 2011 and ended on 28 July 2012. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of current labour disputes in the context of economic crisis focusing on previous developments of mobilisation theory and social movement literature. The overall aim is to highlight the linkages between trade unions and society when a broader sense of injustice comes to the fore. Design/methodology/approach – Qualitative methods were employed in order to contextualise the strike events and examine the preconditions of the occurrence and the volume of the strike. Semistructured interviews, field notes, interviews taken by the media, documentaries, chronicles and articles, constructed the main body of empirical material. Findings – The HH case indicates that certain collective identities and leadership qualities account for high mobilisation potential with spillover effects which are in turn conditioned upon the situation of the strikers’ allies. Although there was an agency to transform the sense of injustice into collective action, the framing processes employed by the union did not have the kind of impact that would render state and management’s responses ineffective, as the strike message did not eventually penetrate other industries or even the rest factories of the HH. Originality/value – The present paper goes beyond the general description of the social turmoil during the Greek crisis by showing the critical bonds that were established through framing and identity-building processes among the strikers and the anti-austerity protesters in Greece and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing global crisis not only poses challenges for critical empirical analyses, it also forces us to reconsider central analytical concepts. This paper takes the multiple crisis as a starting point to reconsider notions of (state) power, hegemony, and subjectivation in contemporary crisis management. We discuss recent analyses by feminist and neo-Gramscian scholars, highlight their valuable contributions to a richer understanding of current crisis politics, and argue for their mutual complementarity. Neo-Gramscian perspectives, which productively highlight the current conjuncture's increasing (lack of) hegemonic qualities, need to be confronted with feminist insights regarding the current transformations of gender orders. In combining these approaches, we develop the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’. To illustrate this we refer to the example of Greece: increasingly coercive and authoritarian modes of governance parallel the re-privatization of reproductive work and increasing reliance on gendered division of labor, traditional concepts of privacy, and gendered knowledge of care and the practices associated with it for the reproduction of social cohesion. With the notion of ‘crisis management by subjectivation’ we hence refer to the fact that austerity policies draw on a gendered (re-)allocation and subjective incorporation of social responsibilities as hidden resources of stability and hegemony. The crisis, through its management, is displaced into the gendered subjects themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on a Lacanian perspective to better understand how crisis can paradoxically produce fantasies of ideological renewal. Using the 2008 economic meltdown as an example, it argues that these events are articulated as a part of a crisis narrative that links past ideals with future stability and progress. At the level of subjectivity, these fantasies reflect the psychological trauma individuals feel in the face of encountering the incoherent and fragmentary ‘Real’ of their identity during periods of greater social and economic upheaval. In the context of the current crisis, political leaders attempted to reinforce capitalist ideologies through promoting a fantasy of recovery that connected future prosperity with values of financialization and a global ‘free market’, as is borne out in their public statements following this event. Critically, this points to the importance of ‘traversing’ these fantasies in order to break free from desires for renewal in favour of those emphasizing transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called epistemological turn of the Descartes- Locke- Kant tradition ( Rorty) is a hallmark of modern philosophy. The broad family of normativism constitutes one major response to the Cartesian heritage building upon some version of the idea that human knowledge, action and sociality build fundamentally upon some form of social agreement and standards. Representationalism and the Cartesian picture more generally have been challenged by normativists but this paper argues that, even where these challenges by normativism have been taken to heart, our intellectual culture remains fundamentally epistemic in certain problematic senses. Two problems are highlighted: first, normativism remains functionally Cartesian, for human action and sociality appear as processes driven by the shared understandings by competent contributors (regardless of how these are constructed naturalistically), and second, normativism is unable to account for forms of human action and sociality other than those occurring in the relatively small worlds of normatively regulated conceptual spaces of mutual access and listening. These points are illustrated by an applied discussion of the blind spots of normativist accounts of the emerging environmental and the on-going economic crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of global financial-led growth reflects evidence of exhaustion of the current model of accumulation, which has been in place since the late 1970s, characterized by lower growth rates and decreasing labour shares. A system which so far has only been possible by means of excessive consumerism through increasing indebtedness, accelerated depletion of resources, growing income inequalities and social exclusion and unrest. Yet this is no longer sustainable. Since the end of the last century, we can find and connect root signs of a multidimensional systemic crisis, which manifests itself today beyond the economic downturn in terms of human, ecological and socio-political crises. The contradictions that arise from the process of capital accumulation are the point of departure to look at this multidimensional crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that traditional associations between money and the devil remain with us – best seen in narratives about the (im)morality of money following the crisis of 2008. However, such eruptions of moral concern about money and finance mask the more fundamental problems of a money economy that these associations sought to articulate in the first place. The fundamentally ‘demonic’ nature of money is not necessarily either about ‘evil’, but expresses the ontological insecurities both of money itself and of the social changes it brings about. The paper looks at the long historical association between money and three overlapping ‘psychologems’ – Trickster, Devil and Fool. It argues that these ‘mythic’ characters performed an important function in allowing the complexity of money to be articulated and embodied. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Constellation of threats to international security makes more complex the further fact that the conflicts of great and regional powers itself contain the possibility of using weapons of mass destruction. In this geopolitical turmoil raises the question about the fate of small countries. Southeast Europe is for many years epicenter of events in terms of energy policy and energy security, and it is evident that these trends will continue. Russian cancellation of the South Stream, as well as the US intention to build a South corridor gas pipeline in the area of Southeast Europe, represents a new strategic challenge to the security of the Republic of Serbia, as well as the whole southeastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary rise of popular support for fascism is investigated in this article through an examination of Golden Dawn's remarkable appeal to a section of Greek youth. This leads to the problematization of mainstream explanatory and interpretive discourses that attribute Golden Dawn's electoral and political attractiveness almost exclusively to anger and a will to punish the political system which is regarded as being responsible for the country's collapse and the harsh consequences of austerity and recession. Drawing upon the findings of ethnographic research on Golden Dawn and its young voters' and supporters' ideology and political activism conducted as part of the MYPLACE project, we argue that Golden Dawn's young voters and supporters are much more than angry youth. Their choice to support a fascist political agenda and practice cannot be reduced solely to an emotional reaction to the crisis but rests on wider ideological and political affinities and links that have been building over the previous two or three decades. In this sense, the contemporary rise of fascism in Greece appears as not merely a straightforward and simple outcome of the crisis but the complex result of previous socio-political transformations, sharpened, magnified and accelerated by the current systemic crash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon ethnographical research carried out in Greek cities, this article discusses the use of political graffiti as a creative, playful response to the economic depression, social upheavals and precariousness surrounding the writers and as an act of civil disobedience and political protest in the context of the Greek economic crisis. The graffiti creation releases a flood of cultural responses to the crisis and gives an insight into the lived experience endured by the Greek people faced with the gloomy conditions of a society in crisis. The analysis traces the ways in which activists and unaligned writers turn their attention to the creative and expressive potential of graffiti and articulate cultural heterotopias on the visual landscape of Greek cities. Spatial politics allow distinctive political voices to transform the material dimensions of urban life in meaningful visual expression. The act of doing graffiti in the dystopia of crisis shows the desire of grassroots artists and cultural activists to use their creative capacities to overcome the unfavourable material conditions of their existence and to build alternative counter-hegemonic spaces of representation in the urban landscapes, challenging austerity policies and the existing social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing economic crisis has variously influenced the relative strength and bearing of the major systems of political beliefs and it is not yet fully clear in what shape they will come out of the turmoil. However, at first glance, relevant ideological debates have so far continued to unfold along familiar trajectories. Thus, the neoliberal diagnosis of the economic debacle and the corresponding response to it appear to mirror the claims that were repeatedly made by enthusiasts of free market capitalism in the past. Likewise, the discursive reactions to the crisis by rivals of neoliberalism do not seem entirely new. This article sheds a tentative light on the crystallizing ideological interpretations of the crisis and the extent to which the emerging schemes of coping with it are determined by conventional parameters of the established systems of political beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]