The Digger

ITALY broke ranks with the EU on Thursday night, declaring that it “does not recognise the self-proclaimed president Juan Guaido” in Venezuela. The declaration came after the European Parliament voted to recognise Mr Guaido, an MP of the Popular Will party who declared himself president of Venezuela on January 23 despite not having participated in any election. Italy’s Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Manlio di Stefano of the Five Star movement, said Rome was “totally against” a group of countries “determining the internal policies” of a sovereign state: “This is called the principle of non-intervention and is enshrined by the United Nations.” After the United States recognised Mr Guaido as president instead of Venezuela’s elected leader Nicolas Maduro, a range of Latin American and EU countries followed suit, although the UN security council declined to endorse his claim on Thursday. Venezuela’s legitimate government continues to be recognised by a majority of coun...

Excerpts: This text deals with strategy, but strategy cannot be seen separate from people and their histories and actions. SYRIZA has always been an uneasy conglomerate of groups of many political persuasions, but ever since it came to power in January 2015, until its capitulation seven months later, two main fractions fought a fierce fight. On one side, there was the heterogeneous left, which wanted to make good on the electoral promise (the Thessaloniki program): there was going to be no austerity any longer, Greece would negotiate a debt write off and if the Troika pushed the country to the brink, the group advocated leaving the euro zone. The leadership, on the other side, also wanted to end austerity. But under no condition was it willing to exit the euro zone. As Lapavitsas explains, the Syriza leadership convinced itself that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of financial and political unrest. The mastermind of this strategy was Yanis...

Excerpts: What exactly  is  the EU and what is the effect of the EU on our national politics and economics? These questions — the most important ones facing the British Left in 2018 — have received little serious treatment across the political spectrum since the referendum. Costas Lapavitsas’ book,  The Left Case Against the EU  (Polity, 2018; ISBN: 9781509531066; 179pp.), addresses this gap by offering a direct class analysis of the European Union. It points to a clear and unequivocal conclusion: anyone on the Left has to be foursquare against the EU. [...] Almost the entirety of the British “Left”, by which I mean many Labour-supporting Remainers, is deeply Europhile. Their support for the EU, often so equivocal and hesitant before the Referendum, has deepened and hardened. They make a series of unforgivable analytical errors in their analysis of the EU and of Brexit. They frequently equate the EU with Europe. The slogan “for Europe, against the EU” is often...

What, if anything, is wrong with this picture? Excerpt: "I’m English, which means I have European blood and believe that my country ‘belongs’ in Europe. And I’m interested in our history. It is a matter of record that for millennia Europeans have continually fought each other, culminating in two devastating world wars. There’s a lot wrong about the European Union; most EU citizens, including myself, want to see some reforms. But this, for me, is the most precious thing about the EU - that since its foundation we have had peace. And of course, the EU is the largest trading bloc in the world. It makes no sense for a small country (admittedly far too self-important) to leave it. The very thought frightens me. And this increases my fear: that we will be at the mercy of the rise of populism, right-wing politics and corporate bullying. I’m left-wing; I want politics that put people first. But the Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, the man who put together a Party ma...

Yellow Vests, Italian Budget  Battles & Silent Labor Unions   "While organized labor restrains itself, both right- and left-wing populists take the helm on EU on economic issues, many claiming they are not anti-European as such, but merely determined to stop the austerity policies that have done so much harm to the population." Excerpts: " Since mid-September, the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, has been battling with Italy over its budget.  The populist government in Rome—led by the  Five-Star Movement , orM5S, and the  League —have decided to stimulate the economy by giving money to the poor, lowering taxes and increasing public investment. With an assist from financial markets that are penalizing Italian government bonds, the Commission has been threatening an “excessive deficit procedure” if Italy doesn’t reduce spending and resume measures to balance its budget. In theory this austerity policy will make the country more sta...

Excerpt: " On one level the Andalucian elections do look like Germany, where the neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfG) took 94 seats in the Bundestag, and Italy, where the rightwing, xenophobic Northern League is sharing power with the center-right Five Star Movement. There are certainly parallels to both countries, but there are also major differences that are uniquely Spanish. What is similar is the anger at the conventional center-right and center-left parties that have enforced a decade of misery on their populations. Center-left parties like the Democratic Party in Italy and the Social Democratic Party in Germany  bought into  the failed strategy of neo-liberalism that called for austerity, regressive taxes, privatization of public resources and painful cutbacks in social services as a strategy for getting out of debt. Not only was it hard for most people to see a difference between the center-left and the center-right, many times the parties governed jointly,...