We are living in a chaotic situation. Due to the structural crisis of the capitalist world economy, standard solutions for managing a shrinking economy do not work anymore, despite that politicians and experts keep assuring that the recovery is just around the corner. Fluctuations in everything are large and rapid and this applies as well to social protest. This is what we are seeing as the geography of protest constantly shifts.

A special and unique form of capitalism has evolved in Eastern Europe after the post-socialist transformation. This form is characterised by the unusual weak SMEs sector, an agricultural sector with few efficient capitalist large farms and many weak small farms often producing for self-subsistence and very weak labour in general. In these new systems, in addition to multinational companies, technocrats have a large weight in the evolving domestic capitalist elite, coming from the second rank of the former nomenclature and often with inherited bourgeois cultural capital.

Topics of the articles of this issue vary considerably but almost all of them are common in dealing with the fundamental contradictions of the capital system and capitalism, which are undermining the framework of human life. From Holocaust to the global crisis, the reader can find thorough analyses on the chances of escaping by social production as well as on cultural resistance. The debate on the world-systems analysis of Wallerstein is also continued. A series of photos, as a new feature of Eszmélet, present the artwork of Éva Keleti. We recommend reading on Auschwitz, the ghetto, defaulting states and the world system, economic collapse, Beatles, global crisis, postcoloniality and on escaping the grip of the state and capital.

The art of the painter from the Netherlands, despite its anarchist and irrational features, is a true picture of the age of transition, the death agony of feudalism and the birth of capitalism. Immense changes characterised that time: the feudal order was falling apart and the bourgeoisie of the towns attacked the old order and demanded rights. His art is of a world torn by conflicting powers, from which reason was ousted, where animal spirits ruled, the world of force and terror, when reality became a nightmare. That is, a world quite similar to ours.