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Leo Panitch

The European Crisis and the Radical Left’s Strategic Dilemmas

Thursday, January 21, 2016, 5:00pm

The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Wilder House
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The first anniversary of Syriza’s election, as the first and only radical left party to gain state power since the beginning of the global capitalist crisis, provides an appropriate occasion to reflect on how and why the euphoria was so quickly tempered, and what this suggests about the structural constraints and strategic dilemmas facing the radical left, not only in Spain and Portugal as well as Greece but across the continent, amidst Europe’s multiplying crises and rise of the far right.

Leo Panitch (PhD London School of Economics, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) is the Senior Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University. He is co-author with Sam Gindin of The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso 2012). Other books include In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives and American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance. He is longtime co-editor of The Socialist Register, for which he is currently editing an upcoming edition on the politics of the Right.

This event is co-sponsored by the Social Theory Workshop.