The Pitfalls and Possibilities of Socialist Transformation: The Case of Greece

With its 2015 electoral victory in Greece, Syriza became the first left political party to lead a European government since the founding of the European Union. As such, its eventual capitulation to the demands of the Troika was a bitter development, and not only for the people of Greece. Because the need for change remains as great as ever, and efforts at electoral-based transformations continue, especially in Europe, this paper seeks to assess the Greek experience, and in particular Syriza’s political options and choices, in order to help activists more effectively respond to the challenges faced when confronting capitalist power. Section 1 examines how Greece’s membership in the euro area promoted an increasingly fragile and unsustainable economic expansion over the period 2001 to 2007. Section 2 discusses the role of the Troika in Greece’s 2008 to 2014 downward spiral into depression. Section 3 discusses the ways in which popular Greek resistance to their country’s crisis helped to shape and nourish Syriza as a new type of left political organization, “a mass connective party.” Section 4 critically analyzes the Syriza-led government’s political choices, highlighting alternative policies not chosen that might have helped the government break the Troika’s strangle hold over the Greek economy and further radicalize the Greek population. Section 5 concludes with a presentation of five lessons from the Greek experience of relevance for future struggles

What the New Deal Can Teach Us About Winning a Green New Deal

Growing awareness of our ever-worsening climate crisis has boosted the popularity of movements calling for a Green New Deal. At present, the Green New Deal is a big tent idea, grounded to some extent by its identification with the original New Deal and emphasis on the need for strong state action to initiate system change on a massive scale. Given contemporary conditions, it is not surprising that people are looking back to the New Deal period for inspiration. However, inspiration is not the same as seeking and drawing useful organizing and strategic lessons from a study of the dynamics of that period. While there are great differences between the crises and political movements and possibilities of the 1930s and now, there are also important lessons that can be learned from the efforts of activists to build mass movements for social transformation during the Great Depression. My aim in this paper is to illuminate the challenges faced and choices made by these activists and draw out some of the relevant lessons for contemporary activists seeking to advance a Green New Deal

Don’t Believe the Hype, Big Finance Continues to Threaten Our Survival

This article is reprinted with permission from Reports From The Economic Front and the author. Our special thanks to the author, Dr. Martin Hart-Landsberg

Medium range structural order in amorphous tantala spatially resolved with changes to atomic structure by thermal annealing

Amorphous tantala (a-Ta2O5) is an important technological material that has wide ranging applications in electronics, optics and the biomedical industry. It is used as the high refractive index layers in the multi-layer dielectric mirror coatings in the latest generation of gravitational wave interferometers, as well as other precision interferometers. One of the current limitations in sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors is Brownian thermal noise that arises from the tantala mirror coatings. Measurements have shown differences in mechanical loss of the mirror coatings, which is directly related to Brownian thermal noise, in response to thermal annealing. We utilise scanning electron diffraction to perform Fluctuation Electron Microscopy (FEM) on Ion Beam Sputtered (IBS) amorphous tantala coatings, definitively showing an increase in the medium range order (MRO), as determined from the variance between the diffraction patterns in the scan, due to thermal annealing at increasing temperatures. Moreover, we employ Virtual Dark-Field Imaging (VDFi) to spatially resolve the FEM signal, enabling investigation of the persistence of the fragments responsible for the medium range order, as well as the extent of the ordering over nm length scales, and show ordered patches larger than 5 nm in the highest temperature annealed sample. These structural changes directly correlate with the observed changes in mechanical loss.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Continuous Blooming of Convex Polyhedra

We construct the first two continuous bloomings of all convex polyhedra. First, the source unfolding can be continuously bloomed. Second, any unfolding of a convex polyhedron can be refined (further cut, by a linear number of cuts) to have a continuous blooming.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure