Seminar on the Greek Crisis in Salford

University of Salford Centre for Democracy and Human Rights
SEMINAR SERIES IN RADICAL POLITICAL & SOCIAL THOUGHT

The Greek Crisis in Context:
De Te Fabula Narratur!

In his preface to the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx declares to his German readers that, although England is used as the main illustrative case, de te fabula narratur (the tale is told of you)! To think of England as some anomalous case would be to severely misread the global scale of the forces in play; England was, for Marx, a precursor of what the future held for Germans and many others.

This seminar takes the same position vis-à-vis the Greek crisis. To treat it as a product of forces unique to Greece itself, or even to the entirety of Southern Europe (the PIGS as those peoples are labelled by many), is to misread the significance of the crisis toward capitalism and liberal democracy more generally. Through a series of roundtable discussions, three key sets of questions will be examined: what the crisis reveals about the fragility and character of the European project as it is presently constituted; the class character and stakes of current developments and struggles in Greece and beyond; and, most centrally, the possibility that the Greek case is simply an early example of a much deeper and wider crisis of the capitalist state.

Participants will include:
Peter Bratsis (University of Salford)
Costas Douzinas (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Carlos Frade (University of Salford)
Bob Jessop (University of Lancaster)
Stathis Kouvelakis (Kings College, University of London)
Dimitris Papadimitriou (University of Manchester)
Spyros Sakellaropoulos (Panteion University)
Konstantinos Tsoukalas (University of Athens)

Tuesday May 4th, from 2-7pm
Clifford Whitworth Library, Conference Room
ALL ARE WELCOME
For further information please contact:
Dr Peter Bratsis (Tel. 0161 295 6555 or p.bratsis@salford.ac.uk)