The Digger

This is a very long essay, in three parts. I'm going to post the introduction and first part for discussion and then, if there is interest, the second and third. In its entirety, the link for "Socialism for Realists" is  https://catalyst-journal.com/vol2/no3/socialism-for-realists - in case you want to read it all at once or access the footnotes.  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society has become an existential challenge. Without a renewed and grounded belief in the possible functioning of socialism, it’s near impossible to imagine reviving and sustaining the socialist project. This essay picks up this challenge by presenting a set of illustrative institutional arrangements and social relations that advance the case for socialism’s plausibility.  When, some four decades ago, Thatcher arrogantly asserted “there is no alternative,” a confident left might have turned that declaration on i...

Excerpt : Why I Don’t Support Corbyn Anybody who has read my earlier essays on Corbyn will probably have already sussed my views on the man and more especially, the political party that has been his life-long domain (35 years or so in Parliament as a Labour back bencher).[2] Before that, a full-time trade union worker. The major reason that most of the left advance for supporting Jeremy Corbyn appears to boil down to the fact that there is simply no alternative, that Corbyn is the best we’ve got to offer. That even a bad Labour government is better than a Tory one. But is this really true? This is, after all, the argument that has been used to justify voting for Labour, literally for decades. If true, then there is no alternative to the endless, first this then that approach to (no) real change. The end product of this view is an endless spiral downwards to the bottom, with the idea of socialism receding ever further into the distance with every election that passes. At the e...

"T he ongoing melodrama of the Brexit negotiations has lived up to its  billing  as one of the great shit-shows of our time. But the whole tragicomic affair has shown us the clear political premium of nationalist ideas today: Both UKIP’s Nigel Farage and certain socialist contributors to   Jacobin  magazine share a basically national definition of sovereignty, and so too of democracy. Both sides accept the assumption that withdrawing from the European Union is the way to rejuvenate democracy. Both right-wing “Brexit” and left-wing “Lexit” presume the national state to be the only possible terrain of genuine self-rule. Sensing the wind blowing toward a broader neo-nationalist revival, the thought leaders of the American center-left call for a similar recovery of national democratic integrity against the failures of globalization. Recent years have seen a cascade of earnest center-left think pieces pleading for an  inclusive ,  responsible nationalism ...

"One of the supreme issues for our movement is summed-up in the contradictions of the term “white working class”. On one hand there is the class designation that should imply, along with all other workers of the world, a fundamental role in the overthrow of capitalism. On the other hand, there is the identification of being part of a (“white”) oppressor nation. Historically, we must admit that the identity with the oppressor nation has been primary. There have been times of fierce struggle around economic issues but precious little in the way of a revolutionary challenge to the system itself. There have been moments of uniting with Black and other Third World workers in union struggles, but more often than not an opposition to full equality and a disrespect for the self-determination of other oppressed peoples. These negative trends have been particularly pronounced within the current era of history (since WW2). White labor has been either a legal opposition within or an acti...

Excerpt: By way of background, the main current of what is called “libertarianism” in the United States, and “liberalism” elsewhere, treats the Gilded Age as a satisfactory proxy for the “free market.” See, for example, Jacob Hornberger’s  characterization  of that period as a close approximation to laissez-faire because… well, read it for yourself: So, here you have, Richard, a society where there was no income tax, no welfare state to speak of. I mean, there was land grants to the railroads, but there was no Social Security, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no education grants. I think the only real welfare program was pensions to Civil War veterans. And so here you had a society where government didn’t take care of anybody. No, the government didn’t take care of anybody — except the Robber Barons who got those land grants, whose extent was larger than entire European countries. And the plutocracy as a whole, who inherited the property distribution, wage system, and other ...