NewLeftProject (newleftproject) New Left Project | Home. The Class War in Europe. Steve McGiffen has had a long involvement with left politics in Europe. He is a former official of the United European Left Group in the European Parliament and has been associated in various capacities with the Socialist Party of the Netherlands since 1999. He is also the editor Spectrezine.
He spoke to Ed Lewis about the class politics driving both the euro and the ever-deepening austerity in Europe, Neo-Nazism in Greece, and how to frame a left response to the EU. What do you think is most salient about the ongoing turmoil in Europe that has been passed over or distorted in mainstream discussion? It’s hard to isolate specific points from what is in fact nothing more than a collection of lies, distortions and misunderstandings. Firstly, as Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, has pointed out, this isn’t a crisis of debt at all, it’s a crisis of policy failure. Look at Greece. Two final points. So there are two ways of answering this question. We Are All Precarious - On the Concept of the ‘Precariat’ and its Misuses. Introduction: Standing for the precariat In its current formulation, the concept of ‘the precariat’ is unconvincing, impressionistic and certainly tinged with millennial Weltschmerz.
It is Guy Standing of Bath University who has done the most to popularise the concept and, at the same time, give it some added theoretical depth. He argues that the ‘precariat’ is a class-in-becoming which, as it is consolidated, will represent a “new dangerous class”, a “monster”: “Action is needed before that monster comes to life.” He warns that if ‘the precariat’ is not understood – or rather, does not understand itself, become a “class-for-itself” in language borrowed from Hegelian Marxism – it is taking us toward a “politics of the inferno”. This inferno would be a reconfigured fascism, with precarious workers playing a role perhaps analogous (not too analogous, Standing insists) to that of the old, much maligned, lumpenproletariat. Something old Something new A breviary on social classes.
N+1. N+1 (nplusonemag) American Independent (tai_news) Boston Globe Ideas (globeideas) Nathanjurgenson (nathanjurgenson) The New Inquiry (newinquiry) The New Inquiry. The New Inquiry. Imp Kerr, The Romper, 2008 By TARA BURNS Are you a working girl or a Nick Kristof rescue waiting to happen? Take this quiz from our consent issue and find out! Being a sex worker means that people constantly try to explain to me that I’m a victim who doesn’t know what I’m doing to myself—either that or I must be one of those very empowered, very expensive whores who gets paid thousands of dollars to lounge around in my underwear, enjoying life. The reality of my almost two decades of sex work has swung back and forth, but mostly it’s been squarely, complexly, somewhere in the middle. I’ve been paid hundreds of dollars to receive full body massages. I’ve happily cuddled up to a sweet man and a bottle of champagne in the VIP room until his credit card broke several thousand dollars later.
It’s exciting to think that women in the sex industry are forced into sexual bondage by evil men, but the boring reality is that most often we have to go to work to pay the bills, just like everyone else. Sarah Leonard (srl2126) Alexismadrigal (alexismadrigal) Dissent Magazine (dissentmagazine)