Blog post

May Day International - a new initiative to debate the financial crisis

Tamar Shlaim 3 May 2011

Some of our favourite radical blogs have collaborated to create May Day International - a new forum for debating the financial crisis and alternatives to austerity measures. The site will be a space for discussion and host content from sites from four countries (at present) - Ireland, Greece, the USA and the UK. 

The contributing websites are Crisisjam, Greek Left Review, New Left Project, ZNet and Irish Left Review

The initiative was launched on the Guardian's Comment is Free site with an article by Costas Douzinas, Gavan Titley and David Wearing: 

Neoliberalism - audaciously, given the historic humiliation suffered by its market fundamentalist dogma in the autumn of 2008 - is on the comeback trail, with a renewed and reinvigorated assault on the fundamental democratic principle of economic governance in pursuit of the common good. The public itself - with its "generous" pensions, social safety nets and other unaffordable luxuries - is now portrayed as a burden on the economy.

A choice must be made, we are now effectively told, between sharing our common wealth to support one another in living dignified lives as human beings, or maintaining a sound fiscal policy. It is one or the other, and that being the case, good sense dictates that the latter must win out.

Meanwhile, the economic and policy elites who caused the crisis appear to be suffering no material penalty. "Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor" hardly begins to describe the absurdity, the irony, and the sheer, rank injustice of the situation in which we now find ourselves. 

Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.

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