Monday, April 27, 2020
We Need a Collective Response to the Collective Dilemma of Coronavirus
BY DAVID HARVEY
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/david-harvey-coronavirus-pandemic-capital-economy
I write this in the midst of the coronavirus crisis in New York City. It is a difficult time to know exactly how to respond to what is happening. Normally in a situation of this kind, we anti-capitalists would be out on the streets, demonstrating and agitating.
Instead, I am in a frustrating position of personal isolation, at a moment when the time calls for collective forms of action. But as Karl Marx famously put it, we cannot make history under circumstances of our own choosing. So we have to figure out how best to make use of the opportunities we do have.
My own circumstances are relatively privileged. I can continue to work, but from home. I have not lost my job, and I still get paid. All I have to do is to hide away from the virus.
My age and gender put me in the vulnerable category, so no contact is advised. This gives me plenty of time to reflect and write, in between Zoom sessions. But rather than dwelling upon the particularities of the situation here in New York, I thought I might offer some reflections on possible alternatives and ask: How does an anti-capitalist think about circumstances of this kind?
Elements of the New Society
Ibegin with a commentary that Marx makes on what happened in the failed revolutionary movement of the Paris Commune of 1871. Marx writes:
The working class did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce by decree of the people. They know in order to work out their own emancipation and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly trending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes transforming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.
Let me make some comments on this passage. First, of course, Marx was somewhat antagonistic to the thinking of the socialist utopians, of which there were many in the 1840s, ’50s and ’60s in France. This was the tradition of Joseph Fourier, Henri de Saint-Simon, Étienne Cabet, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and so on.
Marx felt that the utopian socialists were dreamers, and that they were not practical workers who were going to actually transform the conditions of labor in the here and now. In order to transform conditions here and now, you needed a good grasp on exactly what the nature of capitalist society is about.
But Marx is very clear that the revolutionary project must concentrate on the self-emancipation of the workers. The “self” part of this formulation is important. Any major project to change the world will also require a transformation of the self. So workers would have to change themselves, too. This was very much on Marx’s mind at the time of the Paris Commune.
However, he also notes that capital itself is actually creating the possibilities for transformation, and that through long struggles, it would be possible to “set free” the lineaments of a new society in which the workers could be released from alienated labor. The revolutionary task was to set free the elements of this new society, already existing within the womb of an old collapsing bourgeois social order.
Setting Potential Free
Now, let’s agree that we’re living in a situation of an old, collapsing bourgeois society. Clearly, it’s pregnant with all kinds of ugly things — like racism and xenophobia — that I don’t particularly want to see set free. But Marx is not saying “set free all and everything inside of that old and awful collapsing social order.” What he’s saying is that we need to select those aspects of the collapsing bourgeois society that will contribute to the emancipation of the workers and the working classes.
This poses the question: What are those possibilities, and where are they coming from? Marx does not explain that in his pamphlet on the Commune, but much of his earlier theoretical work had been dedicated to revealing exactly what the constructive possibilities for the working classes might be. One of the places where he does this at great length is in the very large, complex, and unfinished text called the Grundrisse, which Marx wrote in the crisis years of 1857–58.
Some passages in that work shed light on exactly what it is that Marx might have had in mind in his defense of the Paris Commune. The idea of “setting free” relates to an understanding of what was then going on inside a bourgeois, capitalist society. This is what Marx was perpetually struggling to understand.
In the Grundrisse, Marx dwells at length upon the question of technological change and the inherent technological dynamism of capitalism. What he shows is that capitalist society, by definition, is going to be heavily invested in innovation, and heavily invested in the construction of new technological and organizational possibilities. And that is because, as an individual capitalist, if I’m in competition with other capitalists, I will get an excess profit if my technology is superior to that of my rivals. Thus, every individual capitalist has an incentive to search for a more productive technology than those used by other firms with which that capitalist is competing.
For this reason, technological dynamism is embedded within the heart of a capitalist society. Marx recognized this from the Communist Manifesto (written in 1848) onward. This is one of the prime forces that explains the permanently revolutionary character of capitalism.
It will never rest content with its existing technology. It will constantly seek to improve it, because it will always reward the person, the firm, or the society that has the more advanced technology. The state, nation, or power bloc that possesses the most sophisticated and dynamic technology is the one that is going to lead the pack. So technological dynamism is built into the global structures of capitalism. And that’s been the case since the very beginning.
Technological Innovation
Marx’s perspective on this is both illuminating and interesting. When we imagine the process of technological innovation, we typically think of somebody making something or other and seeking out a technological improvement in whatever it is that they’re making. That is, the technological dynamism is specific to a particular factory, a particular production system, a particular situation.
But it turns out that many technologies actually spill over from one sphere of production to another. They become generic. For instance, computer technology is available to anybody who wants to use it for whatever purpose. Automating technologies are available to all kinds of people and industries.
Marx notices that by the time you get to the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s in Britain, the invention of new technologies had already become an independent and freestanding business. That is, it’s no longer somebody who’s making textiles or something like that who is interested in the new technology that will increase the productivity of the labor they employ. Instead, entrepreneurs come up with a new technology that can be used all over the place.
The prime initial example of this in Marx’s time was the steam engine. It had all of these different applications, from drainage of water out of the coal mines to making steam engines and building railroads, while also being applied to the power looms in the textile factories. So if you wanted to go into the business of innovation, then engineering and the machine tool industry were good places to start.
Whole economies — such as that which arose around the city of Birmingham, which specialized in machine toolmaking — became oriented to the production of not only new technologies, but also new products. Even in Marx’s time, technological innovation had become a freestanding business in its own right.
Running to Stand Still
In the Grundrisse, Marx explores in detail the question of what happens when technology becomes a business, when innovation creates new markets, rather than functioning as a response to a specific, preexisting market demand for a new technology. New technologies then become a cutting edge of the dynamism of a capitalist society.
The consequences are wide-ranging. One obvious result is that technologies are never static: they’re never settled, and they quickly become obsolete. Catching up with the latest technology can be stressful and costly. Accelerating obsolescence can be disastrous for existing firms.
Nevertheless, whole sectors of society — electronics, pharmaceuticals, bioengineering and the like — are given over to creating innovations for the sake of innovation. Whoever can create the technological innovation that is going to capture the imagination, like the cell phone or the tablet, or have the most varied applications, like the computer chip, is likely to win out. So this idea that technology itself becomes a business becomes absolutely central in Marx’s account of what a capitalist society is about.
This is what differentiates capitalism from all other modes of production. The capacity to innovate has been omnipresent in human history. There were technological changes in ancient China, even under feudalism. But what is unique within a capitalist mode of production is the simple fact that technology becomes a business, with a generic product that is sold to producers and consumers alike.
This is very specific to capitalism. This becomes one of the key drivers of how capitalist society evolves. This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not.
Appendage of the Machine
Marx goes on to point out a very significant corollary of this development. In order for technology to become a business, you need to mobilize new forms of knowledge in certain ways. This entails the application of science and technology as distinctive understandings of the world.
The creation of new technologies on the ground becomes integrated with the rise of science and technology as intellectual and academic disciplines. Marx notices how the application of science and technology, and the creation of new forms of knowledge, become essential for this revolutionary technological innovation.
This defines another aspect of the nature of a capitalist mode of production. Technological dynamism is connected to a dynamism in the production of new scientific and technical knowledge and new, often revolutionary mental conceptions of the world. The fields of science and technology mesh with the production and mobilization of new knowledge and understandings. Eventually, wholly new institutions, like MIT and Cal Tech, had to be founded to facilitate this development.
Marx then goes on to ask: What does this do to the production processes within capitalism, and how does it affect the way in which labor (and the worker) is incorporated into these production processes? In the pre-capitalist era, say the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the laborer generally had control of the means of production — the necessary tools — and became skilled in the utilization of these tools. The skilled laborer became a monopolist of a certain kind of knowledge and certain kind of understanding that, Marx notes, was always considered an art.
However, by the time you get to the factory system, and even more so by the time you get to the contemporary world, that is no longer the case. The traditional skills of laborers are rendered redundant, because technology and science take over. Technology and science and new forms of knowledge are incorporated into the machine, and the art disappears.
And so Marx, in an astonishing set of passages in the Grundrisse — pages 650 to 710 of the Penguin edition, if you are interested — talks about the way that new technologies and knowledge become embedded in the machine: they’re no longer in the laborer’s brain, and the laborer is pushed to one side to become an appendage of the machine, a mere machine-minder. All of the intelligence and all of the knowledge, which used to belong to the laborers, and which conferred upon them a certain monopoly power vis-à-vis capital, disappear.
The capitalist who once needed the skills of the laborer is now freed from that constraint, and the skill is embodied in the machine. The knowledge produced through science and technology flows into the machine, and the machine becomes “the soul” of capitalist dynamism. That is the situation Marx is describing.
Emancipation of Labor
The dynamism of a capitalist society becomes crucially dependent upon perpetual innovations, driven by the mobilization of science and technology. Marx saw this clearly in his own time. He was writing about all of this in 1858! But right now, of course, we’re in a situation where this issue has become critical and crucial.
The question of artificial intelligence (AI) is the contemporary version of what Marx was talking about. We now need to know to what degree artificial intelligence is being developed through science and technology, and to what degree it is being applied (or likely to be applied) in production. The obvious effect would be to displace the laborer, and in fact disarm and devalue the laborer even further, in terms of the laborer’s capacity for the application of imagination, skill, and expertise within the production process.
This leads Marx to make the following commentary in the Grundrisse. Let me cite it to you, because I think it’s really, really fascinating:
The transformation of the production process from the simple labor process into a scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human needs, appears as a quality of fixed capital in contrast to living labor . . . thus all powers of labor are transposed into powers of capital.
The knowledge and scientific expertise now lies within the machine under the command of the capitalist. The productive power of labor is relocated into the fixed capital, something that is external to labor. The laborer is pushed to one side. So fixed capital becomes the bearer of our collective knowledge and intelligence when it comes to production and consumption.
Further on, Marx homes in on what it is that the collapsing bourgeois order is pregnant with that might redound to the benefit of labor. And it’s this: capital — “quite unintentionally — reduces human labor, expenditure of energy to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labor and is the condition of its emancipation.” In Marx’s view, the rise of something like automation or artificial intelligence creates conditions and possibilities for the emancipation of labor.
Free Development
In the passage I cited from Marx’s pamphlet on the Paris Commune, the issue of the self-emancipation of labor and of the laborer is central. That condition is something that needs to be embraced. But what is it about this condition that makes it so potentially liberatory?
The answer is simple. All of this science and technology is increasing the social productivity of labor. One laborer, looking after all of those machines, can produce a vast number of commodities in a very short order of time. Here again is Marx in the Grundrisse:
To the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose “powerful effectiveness” is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production . . . real wealth manifests itself, rather — and large industry reveals this — in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product.
But then — and here Marx quotes one of the Ricardian socialists writing at that time — he adds the following: “Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time . . . but rather disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.”
It is this that leads capitalism to produce the possibility for “the free development of individualities,” including that of the workers. And, by the way, I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again: Marx is always, always emphasizing that it’s the free development of the individual which is the endpoint of what collective action is going to push for. This common idea that Marx is all about collective action and the suppression of individualism is wrong.
It’s the other way around. Marx is in favor of mobilizing collective action in order to gain individual liberty. We’ll come back to that idea in a moment. But it’s the potential for the free development of individualities that is the crucial objective here.
Necessary and Unnecessary Labor
All of this is predicated upon “the general reduction of the necessary labor,” that is, the amount of labor that is needed to reproduce the daily life of society. The rising productivity of labor will mean that the basic needs of society can be taken care of very easily. This will then allow abundant disposable time for the potential artistic and scientific development of individuals to be set free.
At first, this will be time for a privileged few, but ultimately, it will create free disposable time for everyone. That is to say, setting free individuals to do what they want is critical, because you can take care of the basic necessities by use of sophisticated technology.
The problem, says Marx, is that capital itself is a “moving contradiction.” It “presses to reduce labor time to a minimum while it posits labor time on the other side as a sole measure and source of wealth.” Hence it diminishes labor time in the necessary form — that is, what is really necessary — to increase it in the superfluous form.
Now, the superfluous form is what Marx calls surplus value. The question is, who is going to capture the surplus? The problem that Marx identifies is not that the surplus is unavailable, but that it is not available to labor. While the tendency “on the one side is to create disposable time,” on the other it is “to convert it into surplus labour” for the benefit of the capitalist class.
It is not actually being applied to the emancipation of the laborer when it could be. It’s being applied to the feathering of the nests of the bourgeoisie, and therefore to the accumulation of wealth through traditional means within the bourgeoisie.
Here’s the central contradiction. “Truly,” Marx says, “the wealth of a nation. How would we understand that? Well,” he says, “you can understand it in terms of the mass of money and all the rest of it that somebody commands.” But for Marx, as we have seen, “a truly wealthy nation is one in which the working day is six rather than twelve hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labor time but rather disposable time outside that needed in direct production for every individual in the whole society.”
That is: the wealth of a society is going to be measured by how much disposable free time we all have, to do whatever the hell we like without any constraints, because our basic needs are met. And Marx’s argument is this: you need to have a collective movement to make sure that kind of society can be constructed. But what gets in the way is, of course, the fact of the dominant class relation, and the exercise of capitalist class power.
Under Lockdown
Now, there’s an interesting echo of all this in our current situation of lockdown and economic collapse as a consequence of the coronavirus. Many of us are in a situation where, individually, we have a lot of disposable time. Most of us are stuck at home.
We can’t go to work; we can’t do things that we normally do. What are we going to do with our time? If we have kids, of course, then we have quite a bit to do. But we’ve arrived at this situation in which we have significant disposable time.
The second thing is that, of course, we are now experiencing mass unemployment. The latest data suggested that, in the United States, something like 26 million people have lost their jobs. Now, normally one would say this is a catastrophe, and, of course, it is a catastrophe, because when you lose your job, you lose the capacity to reproduce your own labor power by going to the supermarket, because you have no money.
Many people have lost their health insurance, and many others are having difficulty accessing unemployment benefits. Housing rights are in jeopardy as rents or mortgage payments fall due. Much of the US population — perhaps as many as 50 percent of all households — have no more than $400 of surplus money in the bank to deal with small emergencies, let alone a full-blown crisis of the sort we are now in.
A New Working Class
These people are likely to be hitting the streets very soon, with starvation staring them and their kids in the face. But let’s look more deeply at the situation.
The workforce that is expected to take care of the mounting numbers of the sick, or to provide the minimal services that allow for the reproduction of daily life, is, as a rule, highly gendered, racialized, and ethnicized. This is the “new working class” that is at the forefront of contemporary capitalism. Its members have to bear two burdens: at one and the same time, they are the workers most at risk of contracting the virus through their jobs, and of being laid off with no financial resources because of the economic retrenchment enforced by the virus.
The contemporary working class in the United States — comprised predominantly of African Americans, Latinos, and waged women — faces an ugly choice: between suffering contamination in the course of caring for people and keeping key forms of provision (such as grocery stores) open, or unemployment with no benefits (like adequate health care).
This workforce has long been socialized to behave as good neoliberal subjects, which means blaming themselves or God if anything goes wrong, but never daring to suggest that capitalism might be the problem. But even good neoliberal subjects can see that there is something wrong with the response to this pandemic, and with the disproportionate burden they must bear of sustaining the reproduction of the social order.
Make It New
Collective forms of action are required to get us out of this serious crisis in dealing with COVID-19. We need collective action to control its spread — lockdowns and distancing behaviors, all of those kinds of things. This collective action is necessary to eventually free us up as individuals to live the way we like, because we cannot do what we like right now.
This turns out to be a good metaphor for understanding what capital is about. It means creating a society in which most of us are not free to do what we want, because we are actually taken up with producing wealth for the capitalist class.
What Marx might say is, well, maybe those 26 million unemployed people, if they could actually find some way of getting enough money to support themselves, buy the commodities they need to survive, and rent the house in which they need to live, then why wouldn’t they pursue mass emancipation from alienating work?
In other words, do we want to come out of this crisis by simply saying that there’s 26 million people who need to get back to work, in some of those pretty awful jobs they may have been doing before? Is that how we want to come out of it? Or do we want to ask: Is there some way to organize the production of basic goods and services so that everybody has something to eat, everybody has a decent place to live, and we can put a moratorium on evictions, and everybody can live rent free? Isn’t this moment one where we could actually think seriously about the creation of an alternative society?
If we are tough and sophisticated enough to cope with this virus, then why not take on capital at the same time? Instead of saying we all want to go back to work and get those jobs back and restore everything to the way it was before this crisis started, maybe we should say: Why don’t we come out of this crisis by creating an entirely different kind of social order?
Why don’t we take those elements with which the current collapsing bourgeois society is pregnant — its astonishing science and technology and productive capacity — and liberate them, making use of artificial intelligence and technological change and organizational forms so that we can actually create something radically different than anything that existed before?
Glimpse of an Alternative
After all, in the midst of this emergency, we are already experimenting with alternative systems of all sorts, from the free supply of basic foods to poor neighborhoods and groups, to free medical treatments, alternative access structures through the internet, and so on. In fact, the lineaments of a new socialist society are already being laid bare — which is probably why the right wing and the capitalist class are so anxious to get us back to the status quo ante.
This is a moment of opportunity to think through what an alternative might look like. This is a moment in which the possibility of an alternative actually exists. Instead of just reacting in a knee-jerk manner and saying, “Oh, we’ve got to get those 26 million jobs back immediately,” maybe we should look to expand some of the things that are already going on, such as the organization of collective provision.
This is already happening in the field of health care, but it is also beginning to happen through the socialization of food supply and even cooked meals. In New York City right now, several restaurant systems have remained open, and thanks to donations, they’re actually providing free meals to the mass of the population that has lost its jobs and can’t get around.
Instead of saying, “Well, okay, this is just what we do in an emergency,” why don’t we say, this is the moment when we can start to tell those restaurants, your mission is to feed the population, so that everybody has a decent meal at least once or twice a day.
Socialist Imagination
And we already have elements of that society here: a lot of schools provide school meals, for example. So let’s keep that going, or at least learn the lesson of what might be possible if we cared. Isn’t this a moment where we can use this socialist imagination to construct an alternative society?
This is not utopian. This is saying, all right, look at all those restaurants on the Upper West Side that have closed and are now sitting there, kind of dormant. Let’s get the people back in — they can start producing the food and feed the population on the streets and in the houses, and they can give it to the old people. We need that kind of collective action for all of us to become individually free.
If the 26 million people now unemployed have to go back to work, then maybe it should be for six rather than twelve hours a day, so we can celebrate the rise of a different understanding of what it means to live in the wealthiest country in the world. Maybe this is what might make America truly great (leaving the “again” to rot in the dustbin of history).
This is the point that Marx is making again and again and again: that the root of real individualism and freedom and emancipation, as opposed to the fake one that is constantly preached in bourgeois ideology, is a situation where all of our needs are taken care of through collective action, so that we only have to work six hours a day, and we can use the rest of the time exactly as we please.
In conclusion, isn’t this an interesting moment to really think about the dynamism and the possibilities for construction of an alternative, socialist society? But in order to get onto such an emancipatory path, we first have to emancipate ourselves to see that a new imaginary is possible alongside a new reality.
The US Political System Is to Blame for This Pandemic
BY BRANKO MARCETIC
Donald Trump richly deserves to be condemned for his response to COVID-19. But the catastrophic failures of public policy didn’t start with Trump: this bipartisan disaster has been decades in the making.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bipartisanship-pandemic-coronavirus-donald-trump-democrats-republicans
When historians ask why the United States became the world’s epicenter for the coronavirus, the temptation will be to blame it all on Donald Trump. After all, why wouldn’t they?
Trump disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team in 2018. He scrapped an early warning program for pandemics just three months before the current outbreak. Most of his appointees who had been briefed on possible scenarios by outgoing Obama officials fell victim to his administration’s record-breaking turnover rate. And despite having been repeatedly warned about the virus, not least in his January intelligence briefings, Trump played down its severity for months, fatally misinforming his supporters, and even held rallies.
Since Trump finally decided to take the pandemic seriously, his response has been halting, chaotic, and even vindictive, seemingly withholding aid to Democratic state governments, while stepping it up for Republican ones. When the history of the pandemic is written, Trump will justifiably get the lion’s share of blame for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths that the United States is predicted to see.
A Bipartisan Catastrophe
And yet this isn’t the whole story. The breathtaking failure of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced empire in human history to deal with this pandemic is the result of a perfect storm of decades of bipartisan decision-making.
Perhaps the clearest factor is the continued lack of any form of universal health care in the United States. Opposition to this essential reform has been the official position of the leadership of both major parties since at least 2016. With anywhere between 25 and 54 percent of Americans delaying their search for health care for fear of what it would cost, the reluctance of countless people to get tested or treated certainly assisted the spread of the virus.
Those that did seek testing or treatment suffered the consequences, hit with thousands of dollars in medical bills — nearly $35,000 for one woman. This problem has only gotten worse since millions began losing their employer-provided insurance due to the dizzying number of job losses that accompanied weeks of lockdown.
But universal coverage is only part of the sorry picture. The US for-profit health care “system” has brought about a spate of closures of hospitals that had ceased being profitable, including at least thirty that went bankrupt in 2019. Things have been particularly severe in rural areas, with 120 rural hospitals closing over the last decade, reaching a high with nineteen closures last year.
Not only do such closures push patients to seek treatment outside of their insurance network, meaning more sky-high medical bills. For some people, particularly in isolated rural areas, it leaves them with nowhere to go in the middle of a pandemic.
Public Squalor
These closures aren’t just the product of a system built around profit. Rural hospital closures have been happening at a steady tick since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan’s savage cuts to Medicaid and other public health programs led to hundreds of hospital closures, both urban and rural, by the end of the decade.
This pattern continued through the 1990s, fueled in part by the Medicare cuts in Bill Clinton’s Balanced Budget Act, and has kept going to this day because US lawmakers have continued to hack away at entitlement programs.
Washington’s war on government spending hamstrung the response in other ways. Tea Party Republicans rejected the Obama administration’s 2010 request to refill the federal stockpile of medical equipment that had been used up by swine flu. The automatic, across-the-board “sequestration” cuts that were cooked up in the administration’s budget negotiations further cut funding for disaster preparedness.
Although the Affordable Care Act put $15 billion into the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a 2012 deficit reduction package cut this by more than a third, the first of a number of cuts to come for the fund.
Obama was by no means innocent in this. It was his White House that had dreamt up sequestration in the first place, as a crude way to force tough budget-cutting decisions, and Obama personally approved it. And in 2013, he took nearly half of the $1 billion allocated to the fund that year and diverted it to the federal health insurance exchange, the confusing boondoggle meant to give consumers the joyous experience of spending hours making the wrong choice out of a dozen different insurance options.
Overall, Obama presided over a significant reduction in public health spending: while it had gone up as a share of overall health spending from 1.36 to 3.18 percent between 1960 and 2002, by 2014, it had dropped to 2.65 percent.
It’s Called Outsourcing, Larry
Decades of neoliberal trade policy have left the United States incapable of a wartime response to this equipment shortage. Its manufacturing base has been hollowed out and shifted overseas. The Trump administration now finds itself scrambling to import medical equipment instead, at a time when sixty-eight countries are restricting exports of medicine and personal protective equipment (PPE), including China.
Of total US imports of antibiotics, PPE, and medical devices, China is responsible for 35, 30, and 8.6 percent, respectively, including 42 percent of face shields, 45 percent of protective garments, and 70 percent of mouth-nose-protection equipment.
“Why can’t the greatest economy in the history of the world produce swabs, face masks and ventilators in adequate supply?” Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economist, asked on Twitter. As furious Twitter users pointed out to him, he only needed to consult his own words at a 2011 business conference: “We should not oppose offshoring or outsourcing.”
Corporate concentration played a role, too. The government had inked a deal in 2009 with the small California-based manufacturer Newport Medical Instruments to make thousands of affordable ventilators, for around $7,000 less than their typical cost. The plan was foiled when the fittingly named Covidien, a much larger manufacturer, bought Newport and five other medical device companies, as part of a trend sweeping the industry at the time.
After first demanding more public money for the project and a higher sale price, Covidien canceled the contract altogether two years later, without having produced a single ventilator. According to the New York Times, rival executives suspected the whole affair had been a move to stop Newport from undercutting Covidien’s own ventilator sales.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Meanwhile, the festering income and wealth inequality that the US political class has either permitted or actively worked to widen has worsened the spread and impact of the virus, particularly among people of color. African Americans have accounted for a staggering 70 and 81 percent of coronavirus deaths in Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively, and their contribution to the death toll far outpaces their share of the population in states in every region of the country.
Circumstances born of historical and existing injustices have conspired to produce these grisly numbers. Virtually every aspect of being black in America has made African Americans uniquely exposed to this pandemic: they tend to live in densely populated cities, have higher rates of chronic health problems, disproportionately rely on public transport, and often work in jobs that are especially at-risk for spreading the virus.
And decades of draconian anti-drug-and-crime laws also mean they’re overrepresented in prisons. With their cramped, unsanitary conditions and a population containing many older and less healthy inmates, jails are like a primordial soup for sickness. We’ve already seen this in Rikers Island prison, whose estimated infection rate of 9.29 percent is nearly six times the rate in New York City, and which is fast becoming the epicenter of the whole crisis.
Horrifying in its own right, this situation is also a ticking time bomb for wider public health: not only might it put further strain on the wheezing US health infrastructure, but the virus can be spread to the outside community through staff, visitors, and prison transfers and releases. With millions belonging to what is still the world’s largest prison population, the US carceral system could well become one more calamity to add to the growing swirl of debris that surrounds this virus.
Centers of Infection
While the pandemic has had some positive effects on the criminal justice system, leading to early releases, fewer arrests, and delayed trials, this approach has not been applied across the board by any stretch of the imagination. In many parts of the United States, even as the pandemic crescendos, you can still be arrested for a petty crime and placed for more than twenty-four hours in a holding cell with a dozen other people, as happened to one woman in New York arrested, grotesquely, for allegedly not following social distancing rules.
There’s little doubt these practices helped the virus spread in the first place. In some cases, officials are choosing to actually worsen the crisis by moving in the opposite direction on criminal justice. This includes Democratic media darling and New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who rolled back the bail reform that was enacted in his state last year.
All of these concerns apply equally to the inhumane, overcrowded immigrant detention centers, another product of Washington’s storied history of bipartisanship. Already, four migrant children have tested positive for COVID-19, and conditions are so dangerous, detainees are actually pleading and hunger-striking to be deported. If immigrant detention centers become the new hotbeds of coronavirus infection, you can thank the aggressive campaign of mass arrests and overcrowded immigration hearings that continued well into March 2020.
Quarantine for Those Who Can Afford It
As the virus spreads, it is the massive and growing US underclass of the poor and the just-barely-getting-by that are bearing the brunt of its effects. Every factor that has made African Americans particularly vulnerable applies to the poor more generally, including lack of access to health care — unsurprising, given the racialized nature of poverty in the United States.
Already data from New York and Michigan suggests that, as in the rest of the world, it’s the poorest neighborhoods that are being the hardest hit. This is a moral atrocity that will also make the task of containing the pandemic harder.
US economic inequality, primitive guarantees for workers’ rights, and a vanishing welfare safety net mean that staying quarantined or locked down was never an option for millions of Americans. Sixty percent of Americans don’t have the savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, and nearly 40 percent can’t even cover a $400 one. By mid-March, thirty-three million didn’t have paid sick leave, a right overwhelmingly reserved for the country’s top earners.
Unable to claim unemployment benefits if they quit, and with welfare decimated in the wake of Democratic “welfare reform,” low-wage workers are locked into defying stay-at-home orders and venturing out to work, often using public transport. Phone location data analyzed by the New York Times reveals those who are most likely to stay at home are those with the means to do so.
A Failed State
The better-off might be spared for now, but that should be little comfort to them. It is these low-wage workers who do the vital work they rely on to stay quarantined, from picking fruit and packing meat, to transporting products, manning grocery stores, and delivering items to their doors. This means that an outbreak can only stay confined to the poor for a finite period of time, as it will disrupt vital supply chains that are needed to keep people safe at home.
Strategies to prevent this from happening, such as sick leave and workplace measures to protect workers from infection, could and should have been in place from the beginning. Instead, decades of attacks on union rights have meant that American workers were forced to come to work sick for fear of retaliation. They’ve had to fight tooth and nail for what should be common sense.
As we’ve seen in countries like India, it’s the people on the margins who are most likely to relocate in the midst of a lockdown, potentially spreading the virus to communities well beyond the places where infections were originally concentrated. America’s antiquated state bureaucracy makes that outcome more likely. Millions of people who don’t have direct deposit information logged with the IRS will have to wait months to receive their paltry, onetime $1,200 check.
State unemployment agencies are buckling under the weight of unprecedented numbers of applicants, their websites crashing while people make hundreds, even thousands, of calls to get through. This is a far cry from countries like Germany, where getting state help is a matter of filling out a short form and waiting a few days for money to appear in your account.
If you had consciously tried to engineer a massive public health disaster, you couldn’t hope to match the ways in which the whole American system has been calibrated to transform this crisis into a catastrophe. Decades of racist, anti-worker, and plutocratic government policy has created the ideal conditions for a pandemic to turn the United States into a failed state.
In order to resolve this crisis, and future ones like it, extra resources and fiery rhetoric about “waging war” on the virus won’t be sufficient. It will require us to completely overhaul the unequal structure of American society.
The Labour Left Didn’t Start With Jeremy Corbyn’s Leadership, And It Won’t End There Either
BY TOM BLACKBURN
British socialists may be reeling from December’s election defeat, but the injustices that fueled their movement are still as glaring as ever. Sooner or later, the forces inspired by Jeremy Corbyn will regroup and resume the struggle, under the leadership of a new generation.
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/04/labour-left-jeremy-corbyn-leo-panitch-colin-leys-searching-socialism
With Jeremy Corbyn having now departed from the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party, the postmortems have begun in earnest. For bien-pensant liberal and conservative pundits — a ubiquitous presence in the British media — Corbynism could only ever have ended in a historic election defeat. Such accounts usually erase the memory of the 2017 general election, when, under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour came close to unseating the Conservatives on an ambitious left-of-center manifesto.
But with Labour having now lost four consecutive general elections in a decade, under party leaders from its right, center, and left wings respectively, it’s clear that more fundamental factors underlie the party’s current crisis.
Searching for Socialism, a fresh study of Labour’s New Left by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, thankfully provides the kind of historical context so commonly absent from mainstream discussion. A follow-up to their earlier volume, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, the book condenses and reprises the thesis of its predecessor, while taking stock of the turbulent Corbyn era and Labour’s heavy loss in December’s general election.
Panitch and Leys explore the contentious relationship of Labour’s New Left to social democracy, working to defend its gains while aiming to go beyond them. They trace the story of this current from its initial origins in the second half of the 1960s through its efforts to transform Labour beyond recognition in the 1970s and ’80s, and the myriad controversies flowing from those struggles.
They then conclude by assessing Corbynism — which marked the first time that the Labour New Left had won the party leadership — and the furious, scorched-earth counteroffensive with which it was met by Labour’s entrenched old guard.
From Consensus to Conflict
Labour’s New Left first started to take shape under the leadership of Harold Wilson. Having led Labour into government in 1964, Wilson initially inspired considerable enthusiasm among British socialists. He had a seemingly radical past: a former confrere of Aneurin Bevan, Wilson had resigned from Clement Attlee’s government along with his mentor in 1951, in protest at the introduction of charges for some NHS services.
Wilson also had a notable “talent for double-talk,” as Panitch and Leys note, and came to office promising to unleash the “white heat” of a “technological revolution,” shaking up Britain’s decrepit class structure and marching boldly into a new era of change. But Wilson had the misfortune to govern just as the long postwar capitalist boom was showing signs of faltering. A generation of trade unionists had grown up “in an acquisitive, affluent society,” and many realized that the reality of their own lives didn’t measure up to the images with which they were bombarded by television and advertising.
Simultaneously, a new intellectual ferment was taking hold in the universities, as movements oriented toward anti-imperialist, feminist, and anti-racist causes similarly tested the boundaries of the social-democratic consensus. Forging unity between the two strands of this New Left would prove onerous, but they shared a disdain for the traditional parties of social democracy.
In spite of this tension, there was a drift of New Left activists into the Labour Party after Wilson’s government fell in 1970. The limitations of fragmented and often localized activity had become apparent to these activists through experience, and they turned to Labour in the hope of scaling up their campaigns.
Their goal was to turn Labour into a pole of attraction around which social movements could coalesce, and to make it a vehicle for raising socialist consciousness as well as an electoral machine. The consequences for the party over the following decade — both at the national level and in local government — would be profound.
“That Option No Longer Exists”
Tony Benn provided the burgeoning Labour New Left with the leadership it had hitherto lacked. By the mid-1970s, it had proven itself as a force to be reckoned with, both in the party and in the trade unions. Previously a modernizing and broadly centrist Labour technocrat who seemed to be in tune with the Wilson zeitgeist, Benn had been radicalized by the frustration of his experience in government, and he saw more clearly than most the threat posed by the emerging New Right. To preserve the gains made by social democracy in the postwar period, Benn argued, it was essential to go beyond them.
Panitch and Leys are quick to debunk common stereotypes that claim the Bennites failed to come to terms with the inexorable rise of globalization. In fact, it was precisely because they recognized the threat a more mobile regime of capital movement would pose to the postwar social compact that they felt it necessary to respond by subordinating capital movements to popular needs. Labour’s 1974 manifesto, which famously contained Benn’s ringing call for “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families,” bore the unmistakable stamp of the New Left.
Though Labour returned to government in 1974, the Bennite left had imposed a left-wing program on a party leadership that essentially didn’t believe in it. Benn himself sought to use his new position as industry secretary to pursue experimental new models of worker ownership and economic democracy. In doing so, he faced opposition from an uncomprehending Labour leadership, the mainstream press, and his own civil servants, all at once. After the 1975 referendum on membership of Europe’s common market, in which Benn had campaigned unsuccessfully for Britain’s withdrawal, Harold Wilson took the opportunity to demote the troublesome minister.
After Wilson stood down as prime minister in 1976, his successor, James Callaghan, took to the rostrum at the Labour Party conference to signal a final abandonment of Keynesianism, in a speech that would be warmly received by none other than Milton Friedman. “We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending,” Callaghan informed delegates and media onlookers. “I tell you in all candor that that option no longer exists.”
The Struggle for Party Democracy
The focus of the Bennites thus turned to democratizing the Labour Party’s constitution so that, in future, party leaders could not disregard rank-and-file opinion so casually. The reforms they sought included mandatory reselection of sitting Labour MPs (in effect, forcing them to seek a renewed endorsement from their local party before each general election), and granting ordinary party and union members the right to vote in Labour leadership elections.
Democratizing the Labour Party was, in the eyes of the Bennites, a necessary precursor to the future democratization of the British state. Favorable political changes in the trade unions greatly assisted their campaign: many unions were moving leftward at this time, depriving party leaders of the iron control they had previously exerted over Labour conferences.
Tony Benn’s concern with party democracy was neither an opportunistic way of boosting his own leadership prospects nor a fetish. For him, democracy was a prerequisite for building “mass popular support for and involvement in radical social change.” Benn saw himself primarily as a tribune and a teacher, raising the sights of the exploited and oppressed. A future socialist Labour government was to serve, in Benn’s words, “as the liberator unlocking the cells in which people live.”
He recognized that neither the Labour Party nor the trade unions had offered any serious program of political education, satisfying themselves instead with a reformed capitalism. As the 1970s wore on and the crisis deepened, the diminishing value of this approach, and the impossibility of continuing in the same vein, became ever clearer.
Backlash
However, this campaign for party democracy met with aggressive pushback from Labour’s main power holders. As a result, the Bennite New Left was forced to devote huge amounts of energy to overcoming the internal resistance it encountered inside the party. As Panitch and Leys observe, it became preoccupied with that intraparty struggle and was left with little energy for doing anything else outside it.
By comparison, the Thatcherite takeover of the Conservative Party only faced half-hearted opposition. While the Bennites were bogged down in internecine warfare, the Thatcherites were able to quickly get on with addressing their doctrine to the wider public.
Some Labour MPs compounded this problem by peddling lurid tales of hard-left sectarianism and intolerance to a media that was only too eager to consume them. Attempts by constituency parties to replace right-wing Labour MPs saw the targets swiftly elevated to martyr status in newspaper and broadcast coverage.
Although the Bennites succeeded in extending the franchise for Labour leadership elections and securing mandatory reselection of sitting MPs, it proved to be a step too far for some and split the party. Twenty-eight Labour MPs decamped to the breakaway Social Democratic Party after it was formed in 1981.
This fissure in the anti-Tory vote proved to be devastating, and the Thatcher government — having come through a fraught early period, including a sharp recession — was well placed to take advantage.
Defeat and Retrenchment
Before the new system for leadership elections could be introduced, however, Labour’s parliamentary party installed Michael Foot as leader under the old arrangements. Foot was another acolyte of Bevan, about whom he had written a poignant two-volume biography. But Foot was no longer the radical hero of the Labour left, having served as one of the key mainstays of the unpopular Wilson–Callaghan governments of 1974–79.
While Foot did pursue some left-wing policies as Labour leader, including unilateral nuclear disarmament, he sought above all to play the role of unifier, ensuring that his leadership would be defined by its bumbling incoherence, trying to placate all sides and satisfying none. In any case, the first beneficiary of the electoral-college system for electing Labour leaders was Neil Kinnock, who greatly accelerated the counterrevolution against the Bennite New Left.
Elected leader after Labour’s colossal defeat in the 1983 general election, Kinnock was confronted by a divided, demoralized Left that was unsure of how to approach him. As a protégé of Foot, Kinnock had his own left-wing credentials. Previously supportive trade unions, now suffering badly under the Thatcherite assault, had abandoned the Bennites. The all-consuming priority in Labour was ending Thatcherism, without any clear idea of what to replace it with.
The Labour New Left split in two: some regrouped around Marxism Today, house journal of the Eurocommunist wing of Britain’s Communist Party, while others formed the Socialist Campaign Group, a parliamentary faction of Bennite die-hards. As Marxism Today gravitated toward a new “radicalism of the centre” and (in some cases, inadvertently) laid the foundations for New Labour, the Campaign Group retreated to a more workerist position, devoid of much of its old creativity, and hunkered down for hard times ahead.
From New Labour to New Left
With the Bennite left all but vanquished, the advent of New Labour saw the party reconcile itself (seemingly for good) with neoliberal capitalism. Tony Blair’s giddy embrace of light-touch financial regulation, privatization, and imperialist wars of aggression made him a hated figure on what remained of the Labour left.
That left faction was, however, ill-equipped to resist as Blair did away with timeworn Labour shibboleths, most notably Sidney Webb’s 1918 Clause IV, with its commitment to state ownership. In any case, few seriously believed by the mid-1990s that Labour was committed to reversing the privatizations of the Thatcher years, let alone doing anything more radical.
Blair led Labour to three election wins, but the music finally stopped for New Labour when the global financial system went into meltdown in 2008, and Gordon Brown led the party to a bad defeat two years later. The financial crisis and the austerity that followed under David Cameron largely erased the modest gains of thirteen years of social reform under Blair and Brown, as Panitch and Leys point out. A reluctant rebellion against Labour’s long rightward drift finally began to crystallize, first in the trade unions and then in the party itself.
Ed Miliband became Labour leader in 2010, promising to move on from New Labour, but he was elected on the back of the votes of trade unionists, not those of party members. His brother, die-hard Blairite David Miliband, won 44 percent of the Labour membership vote, compared to just under 30 percent for Ed. The constituency Labour parties, for so long strongholds of the Left, had been hollowed out.
Lacking organized support, either within the Parliamentary Labour Party or in the constituencies, Miliband was browbeaten into adopting an uninspiring “austerity-lite” platform as the Tory–Liberal Democrat coalition government tore chunks out of Britain’s welfare state. The result was another Labour defeat in 2015, including a near-total collapse in Scotland — a canary in the mine for the party’s near future.
Corbynism
Miliband immediately resigned, and the Labour leadership election that summer started in bleak fashion, as candidates from the party’s right and center competed to disown Miliband’s allegedly excessive radicalism. With the Labour right flagellating itself about New Labour’s public-spending record, it fell to the depleted forces of the Bennite left to defend the more progressive aspects of the Blairite settlement.
Grassroots members pushed for an alternative. The end result was the impromptu candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn, a follower and close friend of Tony Benn, who squeezed onto the ballot at the very last minute, yet was elected on the first round with nearly 60 percent of the vote under a new “one member, one vote” system.
Corbyn was widely respected as a dogged campaigner who had used his parliamentary platform to promote a range of often marginal causes, and who had been active in the anti-cuts movement after 2010. He brought hundreds of thousands of new recruits with him, many of whom had been formed by that movement.
However, once Corbyn assumed his position as Labour leader in September 2015, he found himself isolated. The Campaign Group had withered to barely a dozen MPs, forcing the new leader to assemble a shadow cabinet with a center of political gravity well to his right.
That shadow cabinet fell apart when most of its members resigned en masse in coordinated fashion after the European referendum of 2016, forcing another leadership election. Corbyn was reelected as Labour leader by an increased margin, but his opponents never accepted his legitimacy, and the Tory leader Theresa May called the 2017 general election in a bid to capitalize on Labour’s palpable discomfort.
Scores of Corbyn’s MPs openly despised him, barely concealing their willingness to throw the election if it forced him out. In similar fashion, senior Labour Party bureaucrats engaged in an unprecedented wrecking campaign, the details of which are only now coming to light. The malicious mindset at work will be familiar to supporters of Bernie Sanders.
Even so, Labour deprived the Tories of their parliamentary majority, with the campaigning group Momentum — formed to support Corbyn’s leadership in 2015 — playing an instrumental role.
Quagmire
However, the 2017 election had contradictory consequences. As Panitch and Leys detail, a rousing grassroots campaign reenergized Labour, but the party’s focus then shifted back toward Westminster — precisely where Corbyn was at his weakest — as Brexit came to the crunch. The “mass repudiation” of neoliberalism that Corbyn had spearheaded in 2017 soon dissipated, as his party returned to the grind of parliamentary maneuvering.
The prospects of meaningful party reform likewise died at this point: with a socialist-led Labour government seemingly an imminent possibility, Corbyn prioritized holding the parliamentary party together over democratizing Labour. His concessions, however, earned him no goodwill from the Labour right.
Meanwhile, the issue of Brexit tore Corbyn’s fragile base apart. The Labour left could neither make a convincing case for a left-wing Brexit — it was evident, as Corbyn acknowledged, that the nationalist right was in the ideological saddle — nor could it offer a plausible strategy for democratizing European institutions from within. Corbyn’s supporters in the party were badly split on the matter, and they argued rancorously among themselves.
Belatedly, Corbyn ended up calling for a second referendum on Brexit, a stance that not only failed to fire up most of his supporters, but also alienated many voters in those Labour-held “rust belt” constituencies that had voted Leave in 2016.
Much of the Labour right, sensing an opportunity, had latched on to the anti-Brexit cause with a view to maximizing Corbyn’s embarrassment and splintering his support base. They succeeded in that aim, at least, but some of them paid for it with their jobs in December’s election: fifty-two of the sixty seats Labour lost had voted Leave three and a half years earlier. In the process, they helped hand a mandate for a hard Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, before the COVID-19 pandemic intervened.
Corbyn’s attempt to renew and reimagine social democracy for a new era was successfully undone by his inner-party opponents, who made such a fuss of claiming the social-democratic label for themselves, without making any effort to explain what they took it to mean.
Prisoners of the Broad Church
Leo Panitch has remarked elsewhere that the responsibility for maintaining Labour Party unity bears down heaviest on its left wing: it is “more easily guilted, always.” Keir Starmer’s appeal for unity has resonated with a tired party membership guilt-stricken by December’s defeat, winning over many erstwhile Corbynites.
Starmer has implied that he will keep party policy well to the left of where it was before Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. If he is serious in this aim, he will have to face down opposition from the Labour right in a way that both Miliband and Corbyn were unable to do, which seems most unlikely.
To understand the bitterness of Labour’s internal rivalries under Corbyn, we need to appreciate the fundamental nature of the divisions within the party. Labour has always been a fractious and borderline incoherent coalition of divergent perspectives. Simply holding the party together as a serious electoral force and a prospective party of government, then, necessitates certain ideological elisions.
The result has been, as Raymond Williams once noted, “an evident poverty in theory” in Labour, as “any attempt to go beyond quite general definitions leads at once to strains on this complicated alliance.” Corbyn’s unlikely rise to the party leadership instantly brought these latent tensions to the boil.
In the Labour Party, mutually antagonistic political projects — primarily those of reformist socialism and centrist liberalism — are squeezed together, cheek by jowl, in the same unwieldy political vehicle. The intense antipathy between its warring camps suggests that this is not because of any shared commitment to pluralism.
In truth, Labour’s much-mythologized “broad church” remains welded together primarily by the need to adapt to a first-past-the-post electoral system that punishes splits severely — as underlined by the fact that Change UK, a centrist breakaway from Labour formed in February 2019, had dissolved completely by the end of the year.
Resisting Rollback
And what of Momentum? With a membership that peaked somewhere north of forty thousand, the organization quickly established itself as a highly effective campaigning machine, mobilizing many thousands of Labour activists in the general elections of 2017 and 2019.
It had plenty of practice: the 2016 challenge to Corbyn’s leadership, which saw sizable pro-Corbyn rallies take place in towns and cities across Britain, turned out to be a useful dress rehearsal for the general-election campaign of the following year. Its social-media presence, at least at its very best, has been witty, sharp, and provocative.
But Momentum has had far less success in reorienting Labour toward social movements, or with socialist political education, notwithstanding its original intentions. It has been overwhelmed by its responsibilities, forced to serve simultaneously as get-out-the-vote operation, propaganda outfit, factional organizing vehicle, and Praetorian Guard for an embattled party leader.
Its progress in reforming the party has thus been very limited, and Labour’s structures remain essentially unchanged since 2015. It would be fairly easy for Starmer to roll back the modest reforms made under Corbyn; an undeniably poor return for four and a half years of acrid civil war.
Corbynism After Corbyn?
As Jeremy Corbyn departs the political limelight to see out the remainder of his career on the Westminster backbenches, he does so to a chorus of derisive hooting from his many adversaries. He has done well just to survive the extraordinary campaign of vilification directed at him.
Corbyn’s supporters were similarly demonized. In fact, so splenetic was the screaming vitriol circulating in the press and right-wing social media circles that two elderly Labour canvassers came away from the campaign trail last December with broken bones. The British media, normally so scrupulous about upholding standards of civility in politics, took minimal interest in such attacks.
Undoubtedly, Corbyn had his failings as Labour leader, some of them major. Yet he also generated heartfelt enthusiasm, renewed interest in socialism after decades on the margins, and inspired a movement several-hundred-thousand strong: achievements that none of his detractors are ever likely to match.
Crestfallen and badly disoriented though that movement is now, the grievances that fueled it — rampant inequalities of wealth and power, deep-seated social alienation, the injustices of a decade of cuts, and the impending threat of climate breakdown — remain. The history supplied by Panitch and Leys provides us with a valuable and timely reminder that, for all the defeats it has suffered over the years, Labour’s New Left current has been stubbornly resilient.
A World Still to Win
It’s worth noting the apparent change in what Panitch and Leys have to say about the prospects for socialist advance through the Labour Party. The authors had previously concluded in The End of Parliamentary Socialism that the failure of Bennism and the rise of New Labour settled the question of whether Labour could be a vehicle for socialist politics: the answer was “no.” In Searching for Socialism, by contrast, they acknowledge that the revived Labour left is unlikely “to see any other way forward than continuing the struggle inside the Labour Party.”
The failure of Europe’s new left parties to make the hoped-for breakthrough hangs heavy here: the eclipse of Syriza after showing such early promise was particularly shattering. Other left parties, such as Podemos, have, as Panitch and Leys note, at best “served as minor partners in coalitions with mainstream social-democratic parties” — and even that is likely to be more than any British equivalent could hope for, so long as the first-past-the-post system remains in place.
But the authors do see 2019 as a kind of watershed, and an indication that the generation of Labour leftists that came to maturity in the 1970s can no longer take that project any further. Instead, those drawn into Labour by the Corbynite insurgency must find their own way forward, “discovering and developing new political forms” in the process.
It might take a while, but Corbynism’s scattered forces will regroup, rebuild, and resume their struggle. There remains a world to win, though we may be short of time in which to do it.
Goodbye Democrats: Why We Have to Leave the Party & Go BEYOND The Electorate
All of the establishment--sadly including progressive leaders--have fallen in line in promoting Joe Biden as the nominee to go against Trump.
The sad reality is that Biden is the worst candidate and people are at a loss as to who to vote for or what to do.
Jacobin recently released an article calling for people and progressives to not vote third party because it's futile.
While they're right that voting third party won't get us a win right now, the reasons people vote third party still matter.
We need to show the democrats they can't keep abusing people and giving nothing and expecting votes.
If we continue to participate in their sham democracy they'll continue to keep us hostage in this cycle.
Let's face it even running progressives under the Democratic party doesn't work either.
If they are lucky enough to win they end up capitulating to the establishment because they need to keep their positions inside the party.
We've seen this with some of the members of the squad.
The reality is we need to build third parties but that alone won't save us because we don't have fair and free elections.
Right now, we are living in an oligarchy where elections are controlled by the rich and powerful and presidents are selected not elected.
These last two presidential elections cycles prove that frankly, it's been like this for a long time.
Until we have fair and free elections nothing we want will happen.
So how do we get that if we don't buy into the two party system?
We don't give them our vote, but instead go outside the electorate and demand our basic needs in a form of a strike.
Period.
That's what it means to go outside the electorate.
We build a mass movement of all people of all political parties and affiliations and demand a rent freeze, demand a medicare for all system, demand debt forgiveness, and if they don't give us that we will not work or participate.
This is how things change, through movements, rarely ever through only the long-winded electorate process.
This is also how we get our power back.
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