The United States has long been unusual for the absence of socialist, or even social democratic, politics. There is debate as to why this is but, whatever the reasons, the US never developed a mass class-based social democratic party capable of seriously reforming capitalism. Then the 2016 Democratic primary happened, putting self-proclaimed socialist senator Bernie Sanders on the national stage. While his policies were those of middle-of-the-road social democracy (and he explicitly rejected any attempt to change property relations), millions of Americans showed themselves open to policies well to the left of acceptable discourse and that being a socialist did not make you unelectable. Even though Sanders ultimately lost the primary, in the wake of his candidacy we are seeing an embryonic socialist movement emerge in the United States. Given the “special relationship” between the two countries, it is worthwhile for the British left to know what their American counterparts are doing and Continue reading
Posted in US & Canada
Charlottesville, fascism and economic anxiety
What’s the liberal hot take on last weekend’s white supremacist march in Charlottesville, North Virginia? According to Twitter, and never missing an opportunity to be smug, it definitely, definitely was not about “economic anxiety”. Here are some typical examples. They think they’re being clever funny ironic, of burnishing woke creds while caricaturing and mocking those annoying people who insist there is a relationship between what goes on in someone’s life and their outlook on the world. This liberal heroism merely advertises their inability to think, and broadcasts their unwillingness to do so.
And what is more, they are entirely wrong. They are even wrong on their assumptions about what economic anxiety is. Here I want to look at economic anxiety in a narrow and an expanded sense, that is how economics ‘stands alone’ (which as a proposition is only possible in an analytical exercise like this, in the real world it cannot be separated from wider social processes and inequalities) and how it combines, in this case, with race/ethnicity and, crucially, gender as a way into explaining how white supremacists become the hate mongering shits they are. Continue reading
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Donald Trump and North Korea
It’s 9th August 2017, 72 years to the day since a nuclear weapon was last used in anger. How might the leadership of the nation who launched that attack commemorate the event. I suppose the United States could have taken a leaf out of Barack Obama’s book and at least utter a few pious words. Then again, you can’t expect anything of the sort from Donald Trump who responded to another outburst of North Korean tough talk – this time an empty boast of their intention to launch a pre-emptive attack on the US airbase on Guam – with the threat of nuclear war. An impeccable sense of timing, that man.
I’m forever hopeful we won’t see war on the Korean peninsular, because anyone with half an understanding of the situation knows a conflict would exact a huge cost, even though the outcome would be a foregone conclusion. The South would pay a horrendous blood price, and the huge cost of rebuilding an entire country and dealing with millions traumatised by dictatorship, war and occupation would be on them. The Federal Republic had a hard time absorbing the former East Germany, and that was one of the world’s richest countries doing so under more benign economic circumstances. A Republic of Korea doing the same with the north after a war, and after its economic and cultural centres around Seoul have been reduced to rubble by artillery is a nightmare that doesn’t bear thinking about. Korean politicians know this, Korea-watchers know this and, crucially, Kim Jong-un knows this too. Continue reading
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On climate change, the NDP’s Niki Ashton beats Corbyn
While Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party have brought many improvements to party policy, much remains to be done. In particular, Corbyn has been weak on energy and climate policy. Although Labour’s election manifesto was widely interpreted to include energy nationalisation, in fact it promised no such thing. It pledged to bring the electricity grid into public ownership at some ill-defined later date, but that was the only nationalisation proposed. Instead it pledges to create “publicly owned, locally accountable energy companies and cooperatives”, which a supplementary industrial strategy paper clarifies to mean energy suppliers (the companies from which we purchase gas and electricity, rather than the companies which produce it). Despite stating “Labour understands that many people don’t have time to shop around”, strangely the party’s solution is to introduce a 7th choice to the market.
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A Canadian Corbyn?
Niki Ashton, NDP leadership hopeful
With the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and Bernie Sanders in the US, the Canadian Left (to the extent it exists) has been wondering what the chances are of the same happening for them. Like the United Kingdom, Canada has a party—the New Democratic Party, or NDP—linked to the unions, so could a left-wing candidate emerge there?
The history of the NDP is not encouraging. When it was founded as the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1932 it adopted the radical Regina Manifesto which memorably ends with the commitment that “No C.C.F. Government will rest content until it has eradicated capitalism and put into operation the full programme of socialized planning which will lead to the establishment in Canada of the Cooperative Commonwealth.” However, after forming government in the province of Saskatchewan in 1944, they pursued a classically reformist program, similar to that of Attlee. In 1956, moderates in the NDP replaced the Regina Manifesto with the social democratic and pro-capitalist Winnipeg Declaration. Desiring to increase links with trade unions and further moderate the party, in 1962 the CCF partnered with the Canadian Labour Congress to create the New Democratic Party. Their ambition was to replace the centrist Liberal Party as one of the two parties of government, much as happened in the UK during the 1920s. Continue reading