Category Archives: intellectual property

Commons,Critique of Political Economy,intellectual property,Law

The enclosures of Brussels

by Akis Gavriilidis

Brussels, as everybody knows, is the seat of the EU institutions, as well as of several other international agencies –private, public, or any combination of the two- who all day long praise the virtues of «liberalisation and market-oriented reforms» and propose/ impose them on all countries as the only one-size-fits-all solution. So much so that the name of the city itself has come to constitute a synonym for neoliberal governance.

But apart from being a symbol, Brussels is a real city where real people live, whose lives and needs are administered and served (or not) every day, in certain ways rather than others. (Ιncluding the people –dozens of thousands of them- who work for the said institutions and agencies). These ways can rarely be considered as a paradigmatic delivery of the promise for a “smooth functioning market system which provides Συνέχεια →

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Crisis,Debt,intellectual property,Nationalism

Should “Greece” charge the rest of Europe for its “past contributions”?

by Akis Gavriilidis

Recently, the anthropologist David Graeber suggested through Tweeter that “Greece should charge the rest of Europe for it past contributions”. He even made concrete quantified proposals as to how much should be charged: “100 billion euros for Aeschylus” and “200 bil for Socrates”.

A similar suggestion was made some time ago by the veteran French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

These statements were no doubt made in good intention: they were meant as a display of solidarity for the bullying the Greek society has been submitted to the past 5 years due to the debt crisis. It is also true that their authors were addressing mainly the European public opinion, especially its sections which have proven vulnerable to cultural racism against the allegedly lazy, good-for-nothing Greeks. However, when somebody is speaking about a certain country, they should give some consideration to how this speaking will sound in the country itself. And in Greece these statements sound quite nasty, believe me. As a person who is trying to fight in Greece against the austerity regime and the Συνέχεια →

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