Where can social-democracy go? In Greece, the parties of the center, once utterly dominant on the country’s political scene, can barely scrape together a majority combined even with the help of a mass of bonus seats for the plurality party. Their opposition is now formidable in the form of SYRIZA, a left social-democrat outfit with a programme of radical reform that would stretch liberal political economy to the breaking point, but staying well short of an explicit commitment to revolution. In France, the victory of the Parti Socialiste is complete with its clear majority in the Assemblée Nationale following François Hollande’s election to the Elysée. In the UK, the Conservative-LibDem coalition appears ever weaker and less able to enforce its majority, while the Labour Party has been leading it in the polls by large numbers for months on end. In Germany, the ruling rightist coalition has suffered painful defeats in the länder against the SPD. In short, it seems finally things are looking up for European social-democracy. Continue reading “Death Agony of Social-Democracy”
Category: Social-Democracy
Unions and the West: The Scott Walker Affair
Following a headlong confrontation over the Governor of Wisconsin, the reactionary Scott Walker, and his direct assaults on the public sector unions and their legislative achievements, much of the US left is now abuzz with the resounding failure of the campaign to recall him. In what had been seen as one of the last great revivals of the labor movement in the United States, workers officially and unofficially organized against Walker, even going so far as to occupy the Capitol building and to make the functioning of the Wisconsin legislature impossible. There were massive campaigns for opposition against the anti-union onslaught, and it was seen by many in organized labor as a decisive battle on whether the fight for union rights could be won in America. Laws undermining the public sector unions had already passed without much difficulty in Indiana and Missouri, but were defeated in Ohio. In this way, Wisconsin became something of a battleground, befitting a state which has a reputation for supplying leading politicians of both the left wing and the right wing, relative to American standards. But the Democratic Party took the leadership of the campaign together with the unions, and supplied a weak centrist called Tom Barrett against Walker – a candidate who, as mayor of Milwaukee, failed to even endorse unequivocally the union position, and who had lost the election against Walker in the first place. In the end, Barrett added about 150.000 extra votes, but Walker added 200.000 extra votes, and therefore won by a larger margin than before. For all the union efforts, the Democratic Party nationally put in no real support for the campaign, and President Obama could not be bothered to do more than post a Tweet about it. This despite his pledge, during his own campaigning, that in case of an attack on union organizing he’d “put on a pair of comfortable shoes and join them on the picket line”. Continue reading “Unions and the West: The Scott Walker Affair”
A Question of Votes?
Among many progressive-minded people in the United Kingdom, the seemingly perpetual and unstoppable rightward trend of the Labour Party is a constant source of frustration and anger. Many have remarked on the massive gap in general political orientation between the Parliamentary Labour Party and the party activists, and in turn between the party activists and the Labour voter population one would normally expect. Yet the Blairite stalwarts always defend the course, slowly set in under Callaghan and Kinnock and totally dominant since the election of Blair himself, as essential to electoral victory for Labour. Without the votes, the argument runs, Labour cannot win a majority in Parliament, and without a majority in Parliament it cannot make policies, and to win the votes, it needs to ‘capture the centre’. Leaving aside the questionable sense of principle and the point of political parties this particular refrain exhibits, it is important to make the argument that it is also strategically wrong. Continue reading “A Question of Votes?”