Subjects Archives: Socialism

The election in Ireland in early February marked a clear acceleration of the country’s ongoing left turn over recent years. Then came the virus.

Given the exponentially rising death toll from COVID-19 and the devastating social and economic effects of brutal lockdowns, what could a humane and progressive response to the global pandemic look like?

To marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Lenin we’re sharing the latest installment of Paul LeBlanc’s series Revolutionaries Reviewed, on Vladimir Lenin – a central leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew tsarist rule and attempted to bring about a new socialist society.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says that the Great Lockdown, which has no end date, could very well lead to a loss of $9 trillion to global Gross Domestic Product over the entirety of 2020 and 2021; this number is greater than the combined economies of Japan and Germany. This scenario, the Fund’s managing director Kristalina Georgieva admits, ‘may actually be a more optimistic picture than reality produces’.

SDS, along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), had been in the vanguard of the new left in the 1960s, and some of these oldsters now want to challenge a position taken by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), currently the foremost organization on the left today. They tell us “this is an all hands on deck moment,” and that supporting Joe Biden in order to defeat Donald Trump “is our high moral and political responsibility.”

The same proposals that were demonized yesterday as radical socialism are embraced today to save the society from collapse.

Today in the United States, there has been an upsurge in social democracy/democratic socialism (I use these terms interchangeably; I don’t see much difference between them, at least in the U.S.) The main current of social democracy is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose overall political perspective can be described as follows.

Rohan Grey and Nathan Tankus join Money on the Left to discuss the flurry of debate about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) arising out of the Coronavirus crisis. We focus, in particular, on the Modern Money Network’s multi-pronged efforts to illuminate and remedy the resulting economic devastation. At the center of our conversation is Rohan’s contribution […]

As COVID-19 grips the world, in country after country, there is socialization of healthcare and of production of some essential goods, which markedly departs from the capitalist norm

In a pandemic, a rational person would much rather live in a society governed by the norms of socialism than of capitalism, a society where people rally together to overcome a virus; than to live in a society where fear pervades and where stigmatization becomes the antidote to collective action.

GOOD question! Look up the term in a dictionary and you’ll find a definition something along the lines of “an ideology that advocates or supports political, social and economic interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a representative democracy and capitalist economy.”

This month’s Money on the Left episode departs from the show’s regular interview format to reflect on the past, present and future of the Money on the Left project as a whole. We focus, in particular, on a recent special scholarly journal issue dedicated to Money on the Left, which was published by Liminalities: A […]

When 60 Minutes (2/24/20) asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about his past support for aspects of Cuba’s socialist revolution, as well as for Nicaragua’s 1979–90 leftist Sandinista government, Sanders responded by saying he opposes what he described as the “authoritarian” features of the Cuban government, while noting that after the 1959 revolution,  Cuba launched “a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing?”

“All people of conscience must condemn this anti-Semitism against the most visible Jewish politician in the country.”

Unlike capitalism, socialism avoids any waste or slack, such as is caused by an over-production crisis, by raising the consumption of workers appropriately to avert it.

On May 3, 2020, the Bolivian people will go to the polls once more. They return there because President Evo Morales had been overthrown in a coup in November 2019.

In In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou defined love as a form of “minimal communism [where] the real subject of a love is the becoming of the couple and not the mere satisfaction of the individuals that are its component parts.”(1) Earlier in the book, Badiou provided a more elegant statement, associating the act of loving to “learn[ing] that you can experience the world on the basis of difference and not only in terms of identity.”

Big news, everyone! Billionaires don’t like socialism.

The Global Ecosocialist Network (GEN) is being launched at a moment of extreme danger for humanity. The intensity of the crisis and the scale of the danger is hard to grasp or express adequately because, unless you are in one of the parts of the world currently experiencing extreme weather, it cannot yet literally be seen. And even where the danger is actually being experienced there are very powerful forces at work to obscure its real causes.

With Senator Bernie Sanders surging in the polls, DNC chair Tom Perez has put forward a cartoonishly neoliberal cast of foreign policy hacks and corporate lobbyists to sabotage his nomination.