Seven years after Athens was set ablaze by raging protests over the murder of a teenage anarchist by the police and six years into a regime of savage austerity a coalition of non-dogmatic left-wing parties (SYRIZA) won the elections in Greece, establishing what may turn out to be the first of several democratically elected left-wing governments in the periphery of Europe in the 21st Century. You are invited to a discussion of the challenges that face the SYRIZA project and hopes that its program promises to materialize. Kostis Papadantonakis will provide some background to the Euro-capitalist encroachment that has fattened Greece's oligarchs and ravaged the lives of its working people. He will also present the framework for the rise of neo-Nazi racism that has been stoked by the previously ruling coalition of right-wing and centrist parties. Finally, he will summarize the just-published SYRIZA program for countering austerity and leading to democratic-socialist transformation.
Kostis is a retired economics professor who has researched and written on the political economy of Greek dependence and Europe's southern periphery, more generally. He is a founding member of Research Associates Foundation and has been an activist in Baltimore over the last 45 years.
