Attacking railroad workers as "privileged," the French government seeks to break labor strength as Margaret Thatcher did in Britain when attacking miners. In response French unions and labor are responding with a rare degree of unity.
Conor Lamb ran as an anti-establishment, labor-backed candidate who defended the welfare state. To keep winning, Democrats will need to embrace a bold, redistributive program. If anything, the problem is that the progressive efforts are too weak, not too strong.
The debate between Cornel West and Ta-Nehesi Coates revealed a larger need for clarity in media and political movements about what neoliberalism is, and how it manifests.
Much has been made in the recent campaign about the alienation of working-class whites from the Democratic Party. Michael Pierce shows this is a path long traveled; Bill Clinton undermined the budding multi-racial labor coalition in 1970s Arkansas.
Europeans who think the current crisis is unique forget that between 1845 and 1848, 1.5 to 2 million Irish fled their famine-blackened land (while another million or more starved to death) in large part due to the same kind of economics Europe is currently trying to force on countries like Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus. Today, the migrants are from Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, but the policies are the same.
'Malcolm in the Middle' showed that the promises of neoliberalism had always been false.
Five books by neoliberal authors extolling glories that never were, the essayist eviscerates a state of mind that flatters a cosmopolitan liberal tolerance that has been more at home with nationalism, imperialism and even racism and a worldview that presupposes a chasm between civilized whites and uncivilized nonwhites. even accusing leftists of enabling racism by such affronts as squashing alleged dissimilar people together on buses, trains and subway cars.
It was the left who diagnosed the ills of globalization. So why is the right eating our lunch? Today global capitalism is in a period of long-term stagnation following the global financial crisis. The newer protests represent a far broader disenchantment with capitalism than the protests of the 2000s. The building blocks of an alternative economic model are there - sustainable development, de-growth, and de-globalization.
There is no denying it: The last few months have been disastrous for the French left. As the gospel of neoliberalism goes up in flames across the Channel, French voters have handed over the republic to one of its true believers. These will be trying times for the French working class, and really anyone concerned with the country's collective well-being. Macron's electoral success does not equate with a broad democratic mandate for his policies.
It's an old idea, but the people who will make it happen are young - and tired of the unequal world they've inherited. I will come of age in the era of Trump. It's a bleak generational landmark, but ideological capitulation and despair are not the answer. In the 1930s and 1940s, many of the most dedicated antifascists were communists. The antidote to radical exploitation and exclusion is radical egalitarianism and inclusion.
Spread the word