Greek banks set up “bad banks”

London/Athens - Greece's biggest lenders, National Bank of Greece and Piraeus plan to put their troubled loans into separate "bad banks" in order to restore consumers' confidence in the rest of their business, the banks' executives told ...

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Greeces far-right party leader to be put in jail

Greece's extreme-right Chryssi Avgi (Golden Dawn) party leader Nikos Michaloliakos, who was arrested last Saturday, was Thursday due to be transferred to the country's main prison complex Korydallos by sunset. Michaloliakos is being transferred to prison even as the investigation into the circumstances of the Sep 18 murder of an anti-fascist activist by a party member and other criminal acts ...

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Greece cracks down on neo-Nazi political party after murder of rapper

Golden Dawn rejects the neo-Nazi label, but their political rallies with leaders flanked by young men in black combat pants and tight black T-shirts standing at attention and other young men similarly dressed yelling slogans like “Blood!

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Greek anti-fascism protests put the left's impotence on display

What unifies demonstrations from Greece to France is the lack of a clear strategy. We need to rediscover the language of communism

I begin with a feeling, an affect, which is perhaps personal, perhaps unjustified, but which I nevertheless feel, given the information at my disposal: a feeling of general political impotence. What is currently happening in Greece is something like a concentrate of this feeling.

Of course, the courage and tactical inventiveness of progressive and anti-fascist demonstrators is cause for enthusiasm. Such things, moreover, are thoroughly necessary. But novel? No, not at all. They are the invariant features of every real mass movement: egalitarianism, mass democracy, the invention of slogans, bravery, the speed of reactions … We saw all of these same things, undertaken with the same energy – joyful and always a little anxious – in May '68, in France. We have seen them more recently in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Indeed, these things must have already been at work in the times of Spartacus or Thomas Münzer.

Let us set out, provisionally, from another point of departure.

Greece is a country with a very long history, one of universal significance. It is a country, whose resistance to successive oppressions and occupations has a particular historical density. It's a country where the communist movement, including the form of armed struggle, has been very powerful. A country where, even today, the youth set an example by sustaining massive and tenacious revolts. A country where, without a doubt, the classic reactionary forces are very well organised, but where there is also the courageous and ample resource of the great popular movements. A country where there are certainly formidable fascist organisations, but also a leftist party with an apparently solid electoral and militant base.

Now, everything in this country happens as if nothing could stop the utter domination of capitalism, unleashed by its own crisis. As if, under the direction of ad hoc committees and servile governments, the country had no alternative but to follow the savagely anti-popular decrees of the European bureaucracy. Indeed, with regard to the questions posed and their European "solutions", the resistance movement looks more like a delaying tactic than the bearer of a genuine political alternative.

Such is the great lesson of the times, inviting us not only to support the courage of the Greek people with all our strength, but also to join them in meditating on what must be thought and done so that this courage should not be, in a despairing way, a useless courage.

For what is striking – in Greece above all, but elsewhere as well, particularly in France – is the manifest impotence of the progressive forces to compel even the slightest meaningful retreat of the economic and state powers that are seeking to submit the people unreservedly to the new (though also long-standing and fundamental) law of thoroughgoing liberalism.

Not only are the progressive forces making no headway, and failing to score even a limited success, but also the forces of fascism have been growing and, against the illusory backdrop of a xenophobic and racist nationalism, now claim to lead the opposition to the European administrations' decrees.

My feeling is that the root cause of this impotence is not, at bottom, the people's inertia, a lack of courage, or a majority support for "necessary evils". Many testimonies have shown us that the resources for a vigorous and massive popular resistance exist. Nevertheless, no new thinking of politics has emerged on a mass scale from these attempts, no new vocabulary has emerged from the rhetoric of protest and the union bosses have finally managed to convince everyone that we must wait … for elections.

I think that what we are experiencing today is instead that the majority of the political categories activists are trying to use to think and transform our current situations are, as they now stand, largely inoperative.

After the sweeping movements of the 1960s and 1970s, we have inherited a very long counter-revolutionary period, economically, politically and ideologically. This counter-revolution has effectively destroyed the confidence and power that were once able to commit popular consciousness to the most elementary words of emancipatory politics – words, to cite a few at random, like "class struggle", "general strike", "revolution", "mass democracy"', and many others. The key word of "communism", which dominated the political stage since the beginning of the 19th century, is itself henceforth confined to a sort of historical infamy. That the equation "communism equals totalitarianism" should come to appear as natural and be unanimously accepted is an indication of how badly revolutionaries failed during the disastrous 1980s. Of course, we also cannot avoid an incisive and severe criticism of what the socialist states and communist parties in power, especially in the Soviet Union, had become. But this criticism should be our own. It should nourish our own theories and practices, helping them to progress, and not lead to some kind of morose renunciation, throwing out the political baby with the historical bathwater. This has led to an astonishing state of affairs: regarding a historical episode of capital importance for us, we have adopted, practically without restriction, the point of view of the enemy. And those who haven't done so have simply persevered in the old lugubrious rhetoric, as if nothing had happened.

Of all the victories of our enemy, this symbolic victory is among the most important.

Back in the day of the old communisms, we used to heap mockery on what we called langue de bois, or hackneyed, cliched language – empty words and pompous adjectives.

Of course, of course. But the existence of a common language is also that of a shared idea. The efficacy of mathematics in the sciences – and it cannot be denied that mathematics is a magnificent langue de bois – has everything to do with the fact that it formalises the scientific idea. The ability to quickly formalise the analysis of a situation and the tactical consequences of that analysis. This is no less required in politics. It is a sign of strategic vitality.

Today, one of the great powers of the official democratic ideology is precisely that it has, at its disposal, a langue de bois that is spoken in every medium and by every one of our governments without exception. Who could believe that terms like "democracy", "freedoms", "human rights", "balanced budget", "reforms", and so on, are anything other than elements of an omnipresent langue de bois? We are the ones, we militants without a strategy of emancipation, who are (and who have been for some time now) the real aphasics! And it is not the sympathetic and unavoidable language of movementist democracy that will save us. "Down with this or that", "all together we will win", "get out" "resistance!", "it is right to rebel" … This is capable of momentarily summoning forth collective affects, and, tactically, this is all very useful – but it leaves the question of a legible strategy entirely unresolved. This is too poor a language for a situated discussion of the future of emancipatory actions.

The key to political success certainly lies in the force of rebellion, its scope and courage. But also in its discipline, and in the declarations that it is capable of – declarations having to do with a positive strategic future, and that reveal a new possibility that remained invisible amid the enemy's propaganda. This is why the existence of sweeping popular movements does not by itself furnish a political vision. What cements a movement on the basis of individual affects is always of a negative character: the sort of thing that proceeds from abstract negations, like "down with capitalism", or "stop the layoffs", or "no to austerity", or "down with the European troika'", which have strictly no other effect than provisionally soldering the movement with the negative frailty of its affects; as for more specific negations, since their target is precise and they bring together different strata of the population, like "down with Mubarak", during the Arab spring, they can indeed achieve a result, but they can never construct the politics of that result, as we see today in Egypt and in Tunisia, where reactionary religious parties reap the rewards of the movement, to which they have no true relation.

For every politics becomes the regimentation of what it affirms and proposes, and not of what it negates or rejects. A politics is an active and organised conviction, a thought in action that indicates unseen possibilities. Watchwords like "resistance!" are certainly suitable for bringing individuals together, but they also risk making such an assembly nothing more than a joyful and enthusiastic mixture of historical existence and political frailty, only to become, once the enemy (who is far better politically, discursively and governmentally equipped) wins the day, a bitter redoubling and sterile repetition of failure.

It's not in the contagion of a negative affect of resistance that we might find what it takes to compel a serious retreat of the reactionary forces that, today, seek to disintegrate every form of thought and action that refuses to follow them. It is in the shared discipline of a common idea and the increasingly widespread usage of a homogeneous language.

The reconstruction of such a language is a crucial imperative. It is to this end that I have sought to reintroduce, redefine and reorganise everything that hinges on the word "communism". The word "communism" denotes three fundamental things. First, it denotes the analytic observation according to which, in today's dominant societies, freedom, whose democratic fetishisation we're all familiar with, is, in fact, entirely dominated by property. "Freedom" is nothing but the freedom to acquire every possible commodity without any pre-established limit, and the power to do "what one wants" is strictly measured by the extent of this acquisition. Someone who has lost any possibility of acquiring something does not, as a matter of fact, have any kind of freedom, as is plain to see, for instance, with the "vagabonds" that the English liberals of rising capitalism executed by hanging, without any qualms. This is the reason why Marx, in the Manifesto, declares that all the injunctions of communism can, in a sense, be reduced to just one: the abolition of private property.

Next, "communism" signifies the historical hypothesis according to which it is not necessary that freedom be ruled by property, and human societies be directed by a strict oligarchy of powerful businessmen and their servants in politics, the police, the military and the media. A society is possible in which what Marx calls "free association" predominates, where productive labour is collectivised, where the disappearance of the great non-egalitarian contradictions (between intellectual and manual labour, between town and country, between men and women, between management and labour, etc) is under way, and where decisions that concern everyone are really everyone's business. We should treat this egalitarian possibility as a principle of thought and action, and not let go of it.

Finally, "communism" designates the need for an international political organisation. It endeavours to set people's inventive thinking in motion, to construct, in a fashion unalloyed with the existing state, a power internal to any given situation. The goal is for this power to be capable of bending the real in the direction prescribed by the tying together of principles with the active subjectivity of all who have the will to transform the situation in question.

The word "communism" thus names the complete process by which freedom is freed from its non-egalitarian submission to property. That this word has been the one that our enemies have most doggedly opposed has to do with the fact that they cannot endure this process, which would indeed destroy their freedom, the norm of which is fixed by property. If that is what our enemies detest above all, then it is with its rediscovery that we must begin.

Have these verbal exercises taken us far afield from Greece and the concrete urgency of the situation? Perhaps. However, a politics [une politique] is always the encounter between the discipline of ideas and the surprise of circumstances. My wish is for Greece to be, for us all, the universal site of such an encounter.

• This is an edited extract of an article in Radical Philosophy

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Spain's new research budget fails to deliver

As Spanish researchers staged a mock funeral in Madrid, the government released its 2014 budget. But there was little good news for Spanish science

Last Friday it was the European Commission-backed Researchers' Night, and in Spain it was a pitch-black night. This event, intended to bring together science and society, was celebrated by Spanish researchers with a mock funeral in Madrid, near to the Congress. In the 2014 national budget released that day, the Spanish government had completely ignored the demands of Spain's scientific community, condemning the Spanish R&D system to a not-so-slow death.

During the last two weeks, representatives from the Spanish scientific community have met with all political parties in the Spanish Congress, including the leader of the opposition, with a proposition: a parliamentary agreement to guarantee the viability of the Spanish R&D system.

This request, signed by the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies, the Conference of University Chancellors, a wide range of Conferences of University Deans, most of the directors of the Spanish National Research Council centres, several grassroots scientific organisations and the two major trade unions, among others, contains four basic requests: (1) That public spending on R&D is restored to 2009 levels by 2016, to converge with the EU-27 average of 0.6% of GDP; this would require an annual increase of 636 million Euros for three years. (2) The elimination of the current restrictions on hiring in the public research system, which is resulting in the permanent loss of 90% of the tenured posts left vacant due to retirements. (3) The release of enough resources in 2013-2016 for the national research grants programme, and a guarantee that future calls for proposals will follow clear and sensible timelines. And (4), the creation of the national research agency as an autonomous and politically independent institution with a multi-annual budget.

While the goal of the last two points is to guarantee that we do not see a repeat of the chaos that the system has suffered in 2012 and 2013, the first two requests are focused on the longer-term revival of the system.

The 2014 budget for civil R&D spending (€2,250m) sees a modest increase of €128m over what was first announced in 2013. This is not only much smaller than the €636m increase requested by the community but - given that in late 2013 the government was forced to supply an extra €104m to avoid the collapse of the R&D system - does not represent any significant increase. Indeed, the largest fraction of the 2014 increase (€59.2m of the €128.3m extra) is accounted for by an increase in Spain's contribution to Cern (€35.6m of which actually cover overdue payments).

Only 1.7 of that €128.3 extra will go to increase the budget of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which, with an estimated deficit (according to its president) of some €75m, will spend another year on the verge of bankruptcy.

The restriction on hiring researchers has been maintained for the third consecutive year. This freeze, together with the budget cuts and year-long delays in the grants and human resources programmes, are forcing talent to leave the system. Without much needed generational renewal in research institutes and universities, the Spanish system will continue to be less competitive in winning funding from EU research programmes and companies will continue to struggle to find researchers with whom to take advantage of European financial resources (like the Risk Sharing Finance Facility) that promote research and innovation activities in the private sector.

Only €10.3m out of the extra €128.3m for 2014 is allocated to the crucial budget line (the Fondo Nacional para Investigación Científica y Técnica) covering all grant funding and human resources programmes in the Spanish public research system. It was precisely this budget line which needed an emergency bail-out in 2013 to avoid triggering the collapse of the entire system. This budget will see a deficit in 2014 of €69m with respect to 2013. And needless to say, the new state budget allocates no resources whatsoever to the creation of the national research agency.

R&D should be one of the basic foundations of the Spanish economic recovery, supporting a much needed transition to a less volatile economic model based on production and generation of knowledge. It is well known that investment in R&D is correlated with GDP growth, and it may be no accident that the European countries that have had to be rescued or intervened (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are those that have invested less in R&D.

By not reforming and revitalising R&D spending, the government is contradicting its own claims that the Spanish economy has started down the path of recovery. The 2014 budget document boasts that one of the priorities of recent budgets has been research, development and innovation policies, allowing public investment in R&D to approach the EU average. It is very difficult to argue with a government that lives in a parallel universe: public spending in R&D has suffered a 33.1% decrease under the present administration (2012-2013 period) and Spain has fallen below EU standards in terms of R&D investment (both overall and public) and in terms of number of researchers per citizen.

In the numerous meetings held in Congress in the last two weeks, we found that all political parties in the opposition (progressive and conservative, nationalist and non-nationalist) support the scientific community's four requests, and agreed to support an act to articulate this commitment, with clear goals. This is a milestone because a three-year commitment would include the first year of the next government, whoever is in power. So Spain may yet move towards a more stable and transparent research system - but time is of the essence and to really secure the future of Spanish science, the governing party also urgently needs to come on board.

Amaya Moro-Martín is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Spanish National Research Council and spokesperson of the grassroots movement Investigación Digna. She is about to return to the US to work at Nasa

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Head of Golden Dawn jailed pending trial in Greece

The party has vehemently denied any role in the killing. It is the first time since democracy was restored in Greece in 1974 after a military dictatorship that sitting members of parliament have been arrested and jailed. The government, which has vowed to ...

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Greece and Cyprus: Welcome any time

The blistering heat subsides from September until May, which means autumn and spring are great times for your sporty clients to visit, and according to tour operator Islands of Greece, enquiries for cycling and fitness-focused breaks have increased.

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