#anti-austerity

[kropotkindersurprise]

September 22, 2025 - Indigenous protesters from Cotacachi and Otavalo in Ecuador came out against the IMF-demanded austerity plans of the neoliberal Noboa government, and attacked a police station in Otavalo, reportedly setting fire to police cars and appropriating police motorcycles. [video]

[elladastinkardiamou]

GREECE: THE END OF AUSTERITY? (2015 documentary)

Syriza had 22 days to make history. This is how they did it. We followed Syriza's activists, candidates and leadership from the waterfront, to remote mountain villages, to the nail biting final days. Please share this video.

This is an independent documentary, directed by Theopi Skarlatos (@TheopiSkarlatos)

[cathkaesque]

Fragments of the Left in the 21st Century

In order to topple the establish order, we socialists need to become a political force of our own, with our own political priorities and vision of a world beyond capital and the state.

I recently came across I.Kosigan's breakdown of the British left. The piece is an excellent review of different leftist tendencies in Britain at the moment. This has inspired me to to try and generalise some of the categorisations in this piece to processes in other countries, in order to assess the direction and limitations of socialist politics in the 21st Century.

Firstly a bit about myself as a disclaimer - I have been involved with socialist politics since around 2013, and was a member of the Socialist Party of England & Wales until the beginning of 2019 (when I broke rather messily from this group). I was also briefly involved in the Labour Party in 2016-2017. I see myself as a class struggle oriented Marxist with a traditionalism I have inherited from the SP. I am now politically independent, but continue to organise with former SP comrades where we are trying to make sense of the limitations of our previous political engagements and the possibility of a more effective socialist response. Over the years I have specialised in researching the Pink Tide governments in Latin America and followed Greek politics particularly closely while that country was at the forefront of the anti-austerity movement.

Generally I reckon there's three distinct tendencies within the left at the moment - the 20th Century Leninists, the autonomists/anarchists, and the reformists. These are groups whose politics are ultimately an inheritance from previous generations. Their memberships often overlap with each other, but generally the result is the reformist forces end up hegemonic and incorporating elements of both the Leninists and the Autonomists into their political programmes. This is generally because the reformists have had the clearest idea of both their political programme (state mediated wealth redistribution) and their method for achieving it (winning an election).

However, I think the reformists, due to their dependence on restoring economic growth and redistributing the proceeds from it, are ultimately unable to implement their political programme in the context of a capitalism in crisis which does not have the wiggle room or the inclination to allow a project of wealth redistribution which doesn't aim to fundamentally change how wealth is produced. If we are to be successful, socialists need to grapple with the question of what a socialised economy looks like in the 21st century and how we intend to get there.

I wrote a longer piece about the existing left wing ideologies, “radical left” parties and governments, and the trajectory that the anti-austerity uprisings that kicked off from around 2011 or so have taken. I have been meaning to write up my socialism in longer form for a while so I look forward to seeing what people have to say.

[headcanonsandmore]

Me: Don’t get political, don’t get political-

Also me: Austerity was a political choice rather than an economic necessity, the oil companies knew about what climate change would do but deliberately tried to bury the research to keep their profit margins, and the British mainstream media (including the BBC) has an innate bias against the left. Pull up a chair, people; this talk’s only getting started-

[revolutionaryeye]

In Ireland HAP is a con

[ailedhoo]

Tax avoidance may be legal but it’s bankrupting our social order | Owen Jones

Tax avoiders rely on legal loopholes, at the expense of a state they refuse to contribute to, says the Guardian columnist Owen Jones

In the coming days, you will hear this response from the defenders of our rotten status quo. “What the Paradise Papers has exposed is legal, so what is the problem?” They have an agenda, of course. They want to demonise the very concept of taxation because they want to roll back the state and construct a free-market “utopia” which, in practical terms, would be dystopian for the vast majority.

Owen Jones highlights what the Paradise Papers reveal in how elites are refusing to help the populace and how the loopholes are hurting society. As Jones goes on to note on Britain:

The state is punitive when it comes to, say, benefitfraudsters or thousands of young people criminalised for arbitrarily banned drugs, but uses kid gloves when it comes to our shameless uber-wealthy elite. The colossally destructive behaviour of the rich is permitted; the infractions of the poor are deemed intolerable.

As Owen Jones illuminates current society has been set as following:

One rule for those at the top, another for everyone else. 

In this age of austerity, in which public services are being axed, the Pararise Papers highlights a greater ill in the practice of austerity as tax avoidance is set as such. As Owen Jones end his article:

A democratic revolution is surely coming in the western world, and this shameless, decadent elite only have themselves to blame.

[sataniccapitalist]

From Anne Frank to Heather Heyer... The torchlit procession and violent rally of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan members in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month, and President Donald Trump’s repeated defense of the racist gathering, mark a turning point in modern America. Trump doubled down last week when he blamed both sides again, denouncing some anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters as “bad dudes,” a day after meeting with the Senate’s lone black Republican, Sen. Tim Scott, whom the White House called “Tom” Scott.

[owenbedford]

Anti-Austerity March, July '17