Tonight we honour the Greek electorate and their courageous government for having given us a very rare example of economic democracy. Yes, let the people themselves decide how much austerity they can bear: does this idea seem just too much for most of the financial markets to accept? With today’s vote in Greece, have we at last crossed the Rubicon to allow the demos, our fellow citizens, to design an economy and financial system that serves their needs, rather than leaving it up to the interests of capital?
This has been an historic day which shows that the Greek people are not going to be terrorised into making a decision against their best interests because the leaders of Germany, France and Italy threaten them to do so. I am not at all sure that the Irish electorate might have shown the same courage to stand up to naked economic threat.
Where do we go from here, is being asked throughout cyberspace tonight. The simple answer is that we at last begin to move beyond the dictatorship of markets to allow deliberative politics to determine outcomes that serve the interests of citizens who have borne far too much suffering to placate the interest of markets.
In his recent encyclical letter on global warming, Pope Francis spoke of the globalisation of the technocratic paradigm. It was a rare acknowledgement of the forces that have shaped all our societies, not for the good of citizens and our societies, but for the good of...