The Digger

Venezuela: The Epicenter of the "Pink Tide" and Now of the Right-Wing Rollback The effort to rollback Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution must be seen as part of a determined effort to pry open all economies to transnational capital - it's about access, says sociologist of globalization William I. Robinson

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...

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 ...

Bernie Sanders, we hear, is interested in running for President in 2020. Bernie has once again shot himself in the foot before the starter’s gun goes off. Sanders best known Trump-like statement was calling Venezuelan revolutionary President Hugo Chavez  “a dead communist dictator.” Now Sanders, while bucking the establishment on regime change in Venezuela, remains woefully uninformed about neoliberalism’s effects on a global level, and therefore cannot be taken seriously as an agent of radical change. Sanders released a statement on Venezuela that had nothing of substance in relationship to the 1%, neoliberalism, neocolonialism or any of the driving forces of a clear political crisis in the country. Instead, Sanders merely echoed right-wing talking points on Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, and then, almost as an aside, said the U.S. intervening in Latin America, well, it ends badly. And perhaps, one could argue, that a non-intervention response, no matter how you get th...

"The European Left have voted against the resolution on Venezuela presented by the European People's Party, Social Democrats and Liberals." A withering critique of the ruling Anglo-Atlanticist, right wing mafia. 

Excerpt: State intervention has been seen as a counter to the failings of capitalism, but you seem to be suggesting that it is an aspect of fascism. Have I understood, and if so, are there any alternatives? Yes, State intervention has shown to be historically and presently a pillar of fascist ideas and practices. Historically, Paul Einzig (1933), recognizes in Hegel’s doctrine of the state the ideological grounding of fascism and imperialism. Presently we experience the fact that all State regimes call themselves liberal, whereas they carry out corporatism, a set of laws and controls. The practical implication is that, despite the new media communication in present day capitalism, most individuals and groups still have as their main reference the nation state; the masses are fully integrated in the political life of an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy and its corporatism. The alternatives can be constructed only outside capitalism as we know it against its homo...

Excerpts: This text deals with strategy, but strategy cannot be seen separate from people and their histories and actions. SYRIZA has always been an uneasy conglomerate of groups of many political persuasions, but ever since it came to power in January 2015, until its capitulation seven months later, two main fractions fought a fierce fight. On one side, there was the heterogeneous left, which wanted to make good on the electoral promise (the Thessaloniki program): there was going to be no austerity any longer, Greece would negotiate a debt write off and if the Troika pushed the country to the brink, the group advocated leaving the euro zone. The leadership, on the other side, also wanted to end austerity. But under no condition was it willing to exit the euro zone. As Lapavitsas explains, the Syriza leadership convinced itself that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of financial and political unrest. The mastermind of this strategy was Yanis...

Excerpts: Inequality is an issue everywhere. Corporate profits have never been higher, labor’s share of national income has almost never been lower, and inflation has been replaced by deflation. Is there a set of economic ideas, a new economic paradigm that can help to reverse this situation? I do not think that it is helpful to think in terms of paradigms. Paradigms imply giant interconnected sets of ideas where everything presents itself neatly, and you choose between clear options. Think about neo-nationalism. We’ve just mentioned that there are two strains. According to the country you look at, you may find even more strains. Let’s take the case of Sweden. Why are the Swedish extreme right doing so well? To me the most convincing explanation is not immigration, because that does not really move that much in the polls. And it is certainly not inequality because Sweden is still one of the most equal societies on the planet. The answer has to do with the fact that for many yea...

The Russia collusion narrative is on its last legs. Brexit has vaguely shown up in the MSM while the ‘gilets jaunes’ movement has been unceremoniously buried. As expected, Theresa May has survived Corbyn’ no-confidence vote in her government by 19 votes. Of the 256 Labour MPs 81 (the neoliberal Blairite wing) support a fresh Brexit referendum. The Maastricht model rules their undemocratic World Order.   And two socialist strategists; “pragmatic” reformist Leo Panitch and revolutionary socialist Costas Lapavitsas’ diverging tactics indirectly butt heads on Labour’s socialist path to socialism in the Brexit context. The differences in their respective understanding of the fierce and indomitable power of the anti-democratic, liberal-illiberal, neoliberal EU technocracy confronting socialists seem to lie at the core of their irreconcilably divergent opinions. If socialism in its final democratic form is to have a chance socialists must come down from their lofty ac...

What, if anything, is wrong with this picture? Excerpt: "I’m English, which means I have European blood and believe that my country ‘belongs’ in Europe. And I’m interested in our history. It is a matter of record that for millennia Europeans have continually fought each other, culminating in two devastating world wars. There’s a lot wrong about the European Union; most EU citizens, including myself, want to see some reforms. But this, for me, is the most precious thing about the EU - that since its foundation we have had peace. And of course, the EU is the largest trading bloc in the world. It makes no sense for a small country (admittedly far too self-important) to leave it. The very thought frightens me. And this increases my fear: that we will be at the mercy of the rise of populism, right-wing politics and corporate bullying. I’m left-wing; I want politics that put people first. But the Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, the man who put together a Party ma...

Excerpt: "...But, seriously, all that actually happened back in the Summer of 2016 was the global capitalist ruling classes recognized that they had a problem. The problem that they recognized they had (and continue to have, and are now acutely aware of) is that no one is enjoying global capitalism … except the global capitalist ruling classes. The whole smiley-happy, supranational, neo-feudal corporate empire concept is not going over very well with the masses, or at least not with the unwashed masses. People started voting for right-wing parties, and Brexit, and other “populist” measures (not because they had suddenly transformed into Nazis, but because the Right was acknowledging and exploiting their anger with the advance of global neoliberalism, while liberals and the Identity Politics Left were  slow jamming the TPP with Obama  and babbling about transgender bathrooms, and such). The global capitalist ruling classes needed to put a stop to that (i.e, the “populist”...

Ralph Nader, left liberal, and Jimmy Dore, a near-inexorably socialism drifting progressive, are, IMO, tuned into the working class mood of the era; in touch and woke.  Are their demands sufficient? Not, IMO, by a long stretch, if socialism is the ultimate cure. But, if we keep in mind that revolution is not an event in time marked by historians, but a process culminating in such an historical event, then let's intelligently and purposefully participate in tearing down the capitalist edifice with all currently available forces which may stop shy of what socialists envision but will have brought socialism within range of possibility.  Currently, socialism resides well beyond the horizon of the working class "shlep's" comprehension and imagination. If the best some doctrinaire socialists can do is tell a "one year old": shape up junior, stop pissing in your bed, or else... socialism as a project is doomed.

Setting capitalism aside, the outrage with right-libertarian economic dogma on the "left" is well deserved and justified. What has been persistently missing and not appreciated by this, for the most part, partisan "left"  is that, to a large extent, neoliberalism - the ideology of the "post ideological" duopoly - unlike right-libertarianism which rejects the agency of the state, has availed itself of all power vested in state institutions to reify an otherwise merely pernicious and mostly aspirational political-economic dementia while, simultaneously, catapulting the only redeeming right-libertarian anti-war and anti-imperialist conceit. IOW, neoliberalism represents the more effective and far greater evil of the two. ------------ "Last Friday, November 9, saw the big  “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration  at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. It was a big day for fans of one of the Founding ...