American expatriate and Victor Serge translator Richard Greeman has an excellent article (“Europe at a Dark Crossroads“) on France in the Hollande administration in the current issue of New Politics. This piece is particularly strong on anti-Roma and anti-Arab racism in France, as well as on the stark absence of evidence of international solidarity—in either theory or practice—of the European left (including the much-vaunted Syriza in Greece) and organized labor movement:

“Predictably, despite shows of international solidarity displayed in slogans on banners and signs visible in recent spontaneous anti-austerity demonstrations, there has been no significant attempt at building a united front among the official trade unions and left parties of France, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. As a result, the workers and general populations of these once-proud nations stand disarmed and disunited in the face of a united adversary: the creditors’ “Europe” of the Troika. Meanwhile, the near-total lack of international solidarity in a European Union that has abolished national borders and currencies is shocking to a U.S. observer. One hopes that in the next phase of this struggle, which will likely intensify as the inflated capital markets careen toward another, more devastating Crash of 2008, the peoples of Europe will be able to form their own horizontal solidarity networks, perhaps with the help of the Internet and social media as during the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements of 2011.”

Greeman’s latest translation is Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, making available the entirety of the text in English for the first time.