Free trade is one of the principal mantras of capitalism as an historical system. Free trade is preached as the optimal arrangement for expanding production, lowering costs of production and therefore prices for consumption, and increasing income equality over the long run. This all may be true. We shall never know since we have never ever known a world of free trade.
What is being debated is whether it is a plus or minus to remain in the Eurozone. And obviously this is a matter of short-term tactics. The Eurozone as presently constructed is a pressure to further neoliberal policies. But withdrawing from it involves serious short-term negative impact on the lives of Greeks.
It is very clear that flags and other symbols are never neutral terrain. They matter, and people know that they matter. But why do they matter? It is because symbols create attitudes as much as, or quite possibly more than, attitudes create (or are reflected in) the symbols.
Turkey held parliamentary elections on June 7, 2015. Against the expectations of virtually everyone, the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP in its Turkish initials) lost its absolute majority. This was seen as a major defeat both for the party and Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In countries with contested elections, there are usually two mainstream parties considered as being somewhere in or near the center of the views of the voters in that country.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the United Provinces (more or less today’s Netherlands) was the hegemonic power of the capitalist world-system, which was then geographically smaller. Within this world-system, it was the wealthiest country with the most efficient industrial enterprises.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019