Wednesday, August 29, 2012

On Europe’s Failure

Click here to access article by Costas Panayotakis from NYT eXaminer

The author provides an excellent illustration of the method used by Empire's media to obscure issues related to capitalism's failures: re-frame the problems in terms of other conflicts regardless of whether the latter are causes or merely some indirect consequences of class based conflicts. Often such indirect consequences are promoted or induced by capitalist agents to distract attention away from real underlying class conflicts.
...the European crisis has revealed the contradictions of this neoliberal model, European capitalist elites have responded with austerity and an attempt to use the crisis as an opportunity to entrench the neoliberal model even further.  Far from representing a repudiation by the masses of the benign cosmopolitanism of the capitalist elites, the demonization of Greece and the European South imposes nationalist and culturalist frames on the crisis that are much more consistent with the interest of these elites than a frame that also includes consideration of class divisions.