Matthew Parrish fails to demolish socialism

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Times columnist Matthew Parrish suggests socialist economics should be as discredited as believing the earth is flat, AIDS denial and eugenics.

This century’s intellectual consensus should show Marxism the door. Whether strictly defined as public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, or more loosely as state direction of the “commanding heights” of the economy, socialism must be counted as definitively discredited. Over almost a century that theory has been tested — in every case — to destruction. 

He goes on to mention a list of 20th and 21st century socialist experiments - Albania (Hoxha), Argentina (Kirchner), Chile (Allende), pre-capitalist China, Cuba, Eritrea, Mozambique (Machel), North Korea, North Vietnam, Venezuela - to show that socialism never works.

Is he right? It's very easy to take examples of Stalinist central planning, Mao's Great Leap Forward and some of the African socialist experiments to show that there are huge deficiencies in attempting to control economic activity from the centre without a free market. And it is true that Venezuela, the most high profile recent attempt at "21st century socialism" has run into a lot of trouble with price controls, despite having reduced poverty and inequality.

So clearly there is something to that old argument that a state controlled economy will not produce prosperity, and cannot know what millions of consumers want, and that much of this can be left to markets.

His particular beef is with the English distaste for making profit, which he urges the Tories to come out in open defence of rather than skirt around. It's true that profit can be a dirty word, but it is the capitalist system in general that needs to be understood, rather than simply the pursuit of profit. Parrish's argument seems to be a slight aunt sally. After all, state firms under socialism in many cases make a profit but the wonderful thing about a state company, as against a corporation run for shareholders, is that it can cross-subsidise so that unprofitable but socially necessary activities are subsidised by profitable ones. Royal Mail made a profit for the UK treasury until George Osborne flogged it on the cheap, while also supporting loss making postal services.

Profit per se I don't see as a universal bad, even though it does occupy a level of hell in classical marxism, since it derives from surplus value taken from workers. In this sense, I agree with Parrish that the pursuit of profit should not be seen as the primary bad. However, what happens to profits once they are made is a legitimate question for society and will remain so. If our entire economic system is devoted to profit making at the expense of all other social goals, the results will be the same old bad ones - massive inequality, rising poverty, economic bubbles and the economic irrationality of failing markets, such as we saw in 2008. It is a fact that the state cannot substitute itself for markets across the whole economy - and will likely end up causing distortions if it tries to control the price of say, food, as has been seen in the Venezuela case. Subsidies - to individuals or producers - have been shown to be far more effective than price controls.

But it is one thing to claim that the abolition of the price mechanism and private profit making does not work if it is applied to the whole economy. It doesn't lead magically to the opposite being true: that letting unfettered markets control all aspects of economic life will lead to prosperity for all. That too is idiotic and flies in the face of all evidence. Market failures happen all the time, and can sometimes be catastrophic. While Stalin and Mao both created mass famines with rapid and forcible collectivisation of agriculture, Britain's 'free market' policy of selling grain from India and potatoes from Ireland on the world market when the indigenous people were starving led, not surprisingly, to the death of millions. According to Amartya Sen, the Indian Nobel Prize winner, the common factor here was the absence of democracy, rather than too much market or too much state (given that most so-called free markets require a very large amount of state cohersion to enforce them).

And contrary to what Parrish implies, state direction of the “commanding heights” of the economy is still widely practiced - in many Asian countries, including those rich Gulf Arabs, energy, transport, health and education are still largely state controlled.

Some industries are natural monopolies or quasi monopolies and privatising them simply allows for massive rent-seeking at the expense of the rest of society. The joke of state subsidised 'competition' on Britain's railways is a classic case in point. Certain models of socialism have been discredited, and price controls are sometimes ineffective and counter productive - although rent regulation works perfectly well in Germany, enabling it to avoid the housing bubbles that felled the UK and US in 2008, and also nearly did us in the early 90s. Markets often fail but the free market fantasy continues, despite the evidence that very few free, competitive markets exist - most are dominated by large companies who bully and destroy the competition.

Parrish attempts to caricature socialists as believers in a defunct ideology, but only in a bubble universe can the believers in classical free markets continue to uphold such an abstract model in the face of reality: most markets are distorted by the massive power wielded by large companies and the very rich. And that is something that capitalism and profit motive can never fix. Enter the state - or perhaps the democratic will of the populace harnessed in new forms of social ownership and control.

Long live the mixed social democratic market economy!

As Labour veers right, the left needs to learn from the Leninist neocons

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The world has crept into my new dad bubble and now I must respond with political analysis...

Chris Leslie, Labour's Treasury spokesman turned shadow chancellor, comes across with all the political passion of a smooth-talking bank manager.

His interview in last Sunday's Observer was a manifesto for a post-Miliband Labour economic policy that eschews anything remotely radical in favour of pure managerialism. It's an unashamed bouquet of promises to do absolutely nothing that ruffles the feathers of big business.

Sadly, Labour doesn’t seem to get that it is perfectly possible to be left wing and also believe that free markets are actually necessary and good - within the framework of a mixed economy. Alas, an economy in which public and private co-exist in healthy competition was abolished by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

Leslie used to run the New Local Government Network, a think tank that spent the 2000s arguing for deregulation and privatisation of local government services. In the interview, Leslie takes an axe to all of Ed Miliband's progressive policies - rail nationalisation is out, as too is rent control, capping banks' market share, even the mansion tax was "too crude". Deficit reduction, predictably, is a favourite. Market "transparency" is his watchword.

Instead of supporting competition in the private sector combined with strong public regulation of natural monopolies and essential services (health, education, housing, utilities, rail etc), nice Mr Leslie offers blind support for big business.

Leslie may or may not continue to be Labour's economic spokesman, but with this approach, he clearly puts himself to the right of Ed Balls and anyone with a hint of pinkish social democracy. This man is cut through like rock with neoliberalism and the promise of never being outflanked to the right by Osborne or anyone else.

It is a peculiar thing that Labour politicians always see electoral defeat in terms of failing to appeal to middle England Tory voters. Yes, the Tories won the most votes in the south, but if you combine Ukip, SNP and Green votes, that's nearly 6 million people who actually want left-of-centre economic policies that favour working people, such as a living wage, nationalisation of rail and utilities, rent control and so on.

Labour is not interested in these voters, and it wants nothing to do with the emerging progressive alliance of parties - SNP, Green, Plaid Cymru - as witnessed by Miliband's fatal refusal to make a deal with Nicola Sturgeon. (Once voters saw that Miliband was blind to the inescapable fact that Labour needed the SNP’s support to form a government, he was toast.) Amazingly, Labour’s tribalism and blinkered hostility to new political forces meant it cut itself off from potential allies, and left itself adrift and without credibility come election day.

So, if Labour refuses to reach out to the parties who do win progressive votes – or to adopt policies that win back working class votes from Ukip, eg rail nationalisation and strict enforcement of the minimum wage – then where does that leave the hopes of non-Tory Britain?

As the pitiful Labour leadership campaign has already shown, whoever wins the Labour leadership will focus on reaching out to big business and Tory voters in order to win back those marginals. It’s a narrow, opportunist politics that eschews fundamental principles and long-term thinking in favour of pure electoral machination.

This idea - to see politics purely as a short-term electoral game under current badly broken rules - is a fatal aspect of Labourism, and can be contrasted with the long-term hegemonic strategies of the Right to not just win the immediate battle but to win the class war.

Learning from the Neocons 

Since the 1970s at least, neoconservatives and their UK counterparts in the Tory party have approached politics with a Leninist, revolutionary focus that uses emergent crises as opportunities for “clean breaks” – and for reshaping politics in their own interests.

This was seen in the aftermath of the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974, when chief ideologue of the Tory right Nicolas Ridley came up with a plan to break the miners by enticing them into a confrontation and then smashing them. This was part of a plan to break the back of the labour movement, and so move Britain away from socialism, which at the time was seen as a mortal threat to the British capitalist system. They used the global oil crisis of 1979-81 to begin a process of deindustrialisation, a brutal form of social engineering that gutted the communities that were the rock-bed of the post-war social democratic consensus.

Neoconservatives were never parochial or short-termist in their outlook. Like good Leninists, they were internationalists – 1989-91 was a key moment in the victorious march of western-led globalisation, when first the east European communist states, then the Soviet Union, collapsed after a long period of armed confrontation. Afghanistan and a bankrupting arms race finished off the Soviets. After 1991, neoliberal economic specialists moved in to radically overhaul the post-Soviet economy, causing devastation to millions. Since then, the 9/11 attacks, and more recently the 2008 crash, were both huge crises in the international system that neoconservative forces used to re-engineer society toward militarisation at home and abroad, and ever increasing concentration of wealth and corporate power.

The left naively believed 2008 would mark the end of neoliberalism. But where were the left-wing Leninists plotting to bring down the system thanks to its own fundamental weaknesses when it was on its knees? They certainly were not in the Labour cabinet – Gordon Brown, rather than seize the moment and bring the banking system to heal with a new model of state-regulated and socially responsible finance, rushed to the rescue of the banks, leaving them largely unreformed. He was not thanked for saving capitalism, instead the voters rejected him - and the Tories managed to make Labour’s economic record an election issue in 2015.

It is remarkable how the Tories were allowed to get off scot-free for their support for financial deregulation since the 1980s that ultimately led to the crash of 2008. If Labour had any political sense, it would have mercilessly slayed Osborne for his restoking of the housing bubble, rather than weakly echo the homeownership myth. Miliband, to his credit, saw that housing was a major issue, but the mansion tax was too ad hoc a policy to sound coherent (compared to land value tax), and rent control was only announced in the last month of the campaign.

There is no short cut to a revival of social democracy in Britain. But looking to Labour as a vehicle for radical change is almost as daft as expecting Fifa to reform itself. Labour needs to embrace the fact that the era of its big battalions is over and it will never again be given a mandate to rule without the support of other parties.

The next crisis

Governments lose elections, oppositions rarely win them.

The lesson taught by the neoconservative strategists is to look ahead to the next crisis and prepare for a political offensive when it comes, so that for once, the left can seize control of the political narrative. We can’t know what or when it will be exactly, but capitalism goes through a slump on average every ten years. Cameron and Osborne have recklessly reflated the housing and credit bubble and that bubble will burst. International crises can be expected – the Middle East is slipping towards apocalypse, while a new cold war is flaring in Europe.

The message of progressives must be one of hope, always, but hope not built on an unsustainable model of financial capitalism, ever-rising debt, climate crises and endless war. All these factors points toward disasters down the road but also the possibility of a saner, greener, more equitable politico-economic model that could replace this broken one.

Either the movement against neoliberalism will be ready to fight back when the next crisis comes, or, as in 2008, the financial oligarchy and their neocon allies will once again turn it into a new assault on what’s left of society to further enrich the 0.1 percent.

Labour's hegemonic paradox: which is the party of working people?

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It's easy to forget now, but during the last election, Miliband had the Tories worried. Fearing the Labour leaders slight move toward populism, putting inequality and the Tory millionaire government on the agenda, they did a clever bit of reframing. They started calling themselves the party of working people. This was a radical shift in language. It seemed to work. I talked to a number of working class voters - mostly men - in recent weeks who voted Tory in the election. More or less, they did so for perceived economic self interest. The economy appeared to be doing well, and they didn't want to risk a change to Labour. Traditional loyalty among working class voters to Labour no longer exists, each vote has to be won on merit.
Since Blair, a conventional wisdom has it that Labour must overtly and explicitly appeal to middle class southern voters, even at the cost of alienating some core working class supporters, in order to win elections. This appeared to work for Tony Blair, although at a cost - 4 million votes lost between 1997 and 2005. More were lost in 2010, when Brown went down to defeat on 29 percent of the vote.
Even more seriously, the strategy opened the way for the SNP to defeat and supplant Labour as the leading left-of-centre party in Scotland, while in England UKIP has picked up millions of votes from Labour. The Greens have also benefited from this centrist strategy.
The problem with first past the post is it encourages the main parties to imitate each other in order to woo swing voters. This auction for the centre denies the electorate a real choice. The Tories' new 'party of working people' presents a challenge to Labour, but also clearly shows that the political discourse has changed since the great crash of 2008. While previously issues of inequality and excess wealth concentration had been off the agenda, they were back with a vengeance. The Tories had to respond and they did.
But the Labour answer can't be to become the party of millionaires. Labour was born as the party of labour, the trade unions and the working class. It used to have clause four - the goal of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
In the past, it was possible for Labour to represent its base of working class voters, with a sizeable chunk of the middle class, including teachers and others in the public sector, toward a common goal of a democratic socialist society achieved by electoral means.
However, in the last three decades, de-industrialisation, the decline of organised labour, the end of communism and fragmentation of politics has made this a tougher proposition.
There was, of course, always a sizeable part of the working class who voted Tory and supported the established social hierarchy, the monarchy and the empire. This was because the Tory party, in Gramscian terms, had ideological hegemony over the nation. To paraphrase Marx's words, the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas of a society, and those ideas are Tory.
After the fourth Labour defeat in 1992, Tony Blair decided to shift Labour to the centre ground - stop trying to shift Britain leftwards, and instead move to the pro-business 'centre'. That consensus held until the 2008 crash once again put capitalism's failings into bold relief - rising inequality, boom and bust, the destruction of well paying jobs.
The Blairites and their supporters in the media have attempted to turn the 2015 defeat into a call for a return to new Labour, but clearly this is a false solution, and will lead to a dead end. Without rehearsing all the reasons Labour lost, it is clear both the candidate and the offer were not strong enough to convince the majority of voters to change course so soon into a recovery from such a deep recession.
But most important of all, Labour wholly failed to effectively challenge the Tory narrative of the recession and deficit. They effectively blamed Labour for both, and avoided the taint that Tories too supported deregulation of banks that caused the crisis. Labour did not have the courage to admit that it was responsible for the neoliberal catastrophe of allowing the financial sector to become too big to fail.
Claiming that it was a 'global financial crisis' was, and is a cop out. Brown and Blair bought wholly into the idea of a 'new economy' based on financial services and free flow of capital with light touch regulation. Labour should admit this was a disaster - and propose a new financial system, using the publicly owned banks as German-style industrial banks, that support small and medium businesses, while moving to curb the behaviour of the financiers who asset strip great companies and will, inevitably, lead us into another crisis at some point in the near future.
An economy based on debt is one that will inevitably crash. Labour should relentlessly point to the record level of private debt in the economy and move the argument away from the government deficit - which is a red herring. It's the debt, stupid, not the deficit. The Tory chancellor has failed to rebalance the economy, and with Help to Buy and stamp duty reductions is preparing the ground for the next crisis. Labour need to understand this, stop following the media and Tory narrative on the deficit and start attacking this economic model built on low wages, too big to fail finance and ever increasing debt.
Unfortunately Balls and Miliband were timidly only tinkering with this model, and perversely relying on the economy not recovering to delivery them the keys to Numbers 10 and 11. This is a doomed strategy - if you need the economy to be tanking in order to win, you are in a kind of desperate doomsday scenario. The misery strategy failed. Capitalism always recovers - boom and bust - remember that Ed Balls as you nurse your coco.
What Labour lacks is a hegemonic strategy - in the sense understood by Italian communist Antonio Gramsci - a framing narrative that shows it can be the party for the vast majority, changing the values of the country to its values. The SNP has such a strategy in buckets, claiming for it the mantle of the cross-class progressive majority in Scotland.
Such a strategy is a tougher challenge in the Tory heartlands of southern England, but Labour has no choice but to try. It should push aggressively for a return to a low inequality, mixed economy, where monopolies like rail and energy - and even banks - are commonly owned, not in an old fashioned centralised way, but as modern socially responsible companies. Take the battle to the Tories, change the narrative, get out of this fatal, defensive, self-flaggelating mode.
Labour does best when working people are confident, as they were relatively in the 1940s, 1960s and 1970s. Conversely the party has found it harder in periods of recession and austerity, like the 1930s and 1980s.
Of course, if Labour can't find such a strategy and solve its hegemonic paradox - if they remain in thrall to the rightwing media and Tory framing of the debate, they will go into decline, and new political forces will seize that role.

Post-Miliband meltdown, the Blairites are back

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Charles Clarke, Alan Johnson, all the Blairites are hitting the airwaves saying Miliband's 'left wing' platform is what lost it for Labour and saying they need to go back to 'aspirational' new Labour. Who can argue with aspiration? Everyone wants a good life, obviously. But aspiration under Blair and Cameron is code for a false either-or - that solidarity (collectively ensuring everyone has access to the essential elements of a good life - education, healthcare, a home) is anathema to economic success. You can't have both. We've been told that for 35 years and looking at the electoral map today, it appears that most of England agrees.
But really, was that it? It could simply be that Miliband comes over like a north London policy wonk with no connection to the real world - and he fatally refused the hand of the only ally who could have helped him into Downing St - Nicola Sturgeon. Labour was arrogant enough to think it could win alone - and have nothing to do with the other progressive parties.
Miliband's narrative was feeble and unclear for so long - even the Mansion Tax was a Lib Dem policy, not exactly nationalisation of the commanding heights. In fact if he had come out for rail and energy nationalisation, rather than the feeble price freeze, he might have sounded like he had a coherent policy for returning to a mixed economy and breaking with neoliberalism.
It's obvious that aside from Brighton, left wing voters are no more than 10% of the country (or 5% if you exclude SNP Scots). Left-wing candidates scored almost nothing.
But a lot of how you win people over to more social-democratic policies is framing. In Scotland, SNP speaks the language of social democracy and won 50% of the vote.
Saying you will build social housing and regulate private rents is not incompatible with 'aspiration' - it's for aspiration (not to hand all your money over to rapacious landlords), for everyone, not just the middle class. It's saying that everyone should have the elements of a decent life. After all, the Tories have no problem subsidising the rich: housing benefit is a massive taxpayer subsidy to landlords, as is low wages and zero hours - its 'taxpayers' subsidising big business.
Miliband (or whoever replaces him) could have said it's time to stop wasting billions of 'your hard earned money' on subsidies to business and landlords and instead bring in a living wage and fix the housing market - and cut those rich people benefits. Flip the Tory welfare scrounger language on its head. He never articulated that because Labour is forever terrified of being portrayed as 'left wing.' The Blairite view is based on four Labour election defeats from 1979-92: they concluded that you can't change the right-wing narrative, so you must mirror it and sneak in your policies under the radar. But that policy has major drawbacks - it ultimately feeds right-wing ideological domination (as well as leaving the economic model mostly untouched, which came a cropper in 2008 with the financial crash). It's tough accepting that you live in a right-wing country, but if an opposition can link personal interests with a wider narrative of social solidarity, it can win millions of votes - just look at Scotland. May be the Labour party should throw the leadership election wide open - come on Nicola!

The QT election debate - Poor Ed's final trip

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Poor Ed Miliband, being harangued and bullied by some pretty unpleasant members of a 'representative' audience. He stood there, slightly rabbit in headlights, before launching into his creepy crawly 'what's your name' I'm-a-man-of-the-people routine.
Come on, Ed. This American style coaching - looking mad-eyed into the TV camera, walking up close to the audience like a preacher in the Deep South, rather than a British politician in dire need of some likability.
I felt sorry for him. I don't like bullying. Minutes before a confident, smooth-talking David Cameron was able to hammer home the Tory message of cutting the deficit and making sure all you hard-faced hard-working voters don't let those horrible scroungers get any more of your hard-earned cash. They lapped it up.

Miliband didn't do himself any favours. When it came to coalition talk, he just claimed that he would not negotiate on his manifesto and never do a deal with the SNP. The audience weren't buying it. One guy said, "have you thought how much more respect you would get from this audience if you were honest about what deals you will make after the election?' Miliband just carried on lying regardless.

It was as if he was saying to Scottish voters, I dare you to vote SNP. Go on. To English voters, he desperately wanted them to believe he was as much an English nationalist as any of them. The art of politics seems to come down to who can lie with a straight face. The more Miliband-Balls say they won't truck with the nationalists, the more it feels like the loser in Monopoly kicking over the table. If you're going to take all the money (votes), I won't give you the pleasure of winning. They seem to think that the SNP will simply be forced to back a Labour government - a minority, weak government, on current polling - from the sidelines. They could, as others have said, just abstain and watch Labour crumble.
But as one audience member in QT said, what about the voters? If voters don't want to give either party a majority, that means you should listen to them. They don't want a single party dictatorship. Listen to them. They've had tweedledum tweedledee for decades. They want something new. Just holding your hands over your ears and going 'la la la la la' is not going to change that.
At the end of Miliband's 28 minutes, we were none the wiser. He made a few noises about standing up for working people against non-doms and big corporations, but it rang a bit hollow. You can't just declare class war if there is no one standing behind you (although at least he does now have his new mate Russell Brand backing him), nothing in your armoury.
The small businesswoman didn't look that impressed. He should have just been a lot tougher on these critics - voters can be wrong, and they can just be deep down, rightwing Tories and there is little point in trying to win them over - just demolish them so your supporters can see that you know how to fight. But Miliband doesn't have the killer instinct. He doesn't even seem to have all the arguments.
He should remind people that zero hours contracts, low wages and sky-high rents are all subsidised by taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of pounds. That's ordinary people's money being funnelled to business and landlords because they are exploiting people with low wages and high rents.
After getting a couple of laughs - more than Cameron - at the end Miliband tripped as he left the stage. What a symbolic exit. I felt sorry for him but more than anything I felt like the election was already over. I'm going to hold out for some small victories - the decapitation of Nick Clegg, a thumping majority for Caroline Lucas. But when I looked at that "representative audience" it felt like they wanted something right-wing, hard, Tory-like. And as they say, the people get the government they deserve. And the Scots will just have to wait for the next referendum to leave us to it.

How to lose an election in the last 2 weeks of the campaign

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Answer: do what Labour is doing. Attack the SNP, and go round shouting how you won't make any deals with them because they are such separatist nationalist b******ds. Balls's "absolute 100 per cent total firewall" between Labour and the SNP is the most stupid statement he has made in some time. Doesn't Labour see this is a Tory trap to make them distance themselves from the SNP, and refuse to be part of a progressive coalition or agreement. The left social-democratic voters across the UK include SNP voters - SNP voters have abandoned Labour for being too right wing and Westminster focused. Labour, as a Westminster establishment party, don't want a coalition with any of the new progressive forces Green, SNP, Plaid - they want to jump into bed with Nick Clegg's Lib Dems - that's their comfort zone, where nothing will change. That is how to demobilise that left-of-centre anti-Tory vote. Go on, throw the election! I hope I am wrong but this right-wing narrative can only increase the Tory vote. What a pathetic excuse for a strategy.

Marx and Soviet anti-fascism – a tenuous link

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The Soviet role in the war was unique and heroic, but the ‘socialism’ it built bares little relation to Marx’s revolutionary ideas, says Joe Gill 

On the 132nd anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, communists and marxists commemorated the great thinker's contribution to social ideas and for a new society in various ways.

Some gathered at his grave and drew a link between his life's works and the struggle against fascism that ended in a costly victory in 1945, led by the Soviet Union, which paid a terrible price in millions of lives to defeat nazism.

But in reading the Morning Star's editorial on the day, I had a terrible sinking feeling. The leader stated that only one of those states fighting the nazis was socialist: the USSR. It continued: “The Britain that fought the genocidal racist regime in Germany itself ruled a vast empire and treated many of the peoples it kept prisoner as subhumans."

While this was undoubtedly true, it can, in some ways, also be said of Stalin's Soviet Union - officially according to its 1936 constitution, the Soviet Union upheld the highest democratic ideals. In reality by the late 30s, it was a dictatorship in which neither the working class or any other class enjoyed full democratic and social rights.

This was discovered by visiting delegations of trade unionists, who were shocked at working conditions in factories, and was recognised by the writer of the introduction to the 1948 centenary edition of the Communist Manifesto published by the US communist party, which contrasted the ideals of Marx with the realities of the Soviet Union in which basic human rights were lacking.

 The editorial paints a picture of the battle against fascism that upholds the Soviet Union as a model of socialism that directly inherited the ideas of Karl Marx. This is profoundly misleading. Marx, as a synthesiser and revolutioniser of the ideas of English political economy, French socialism and German philosophy, did not envisage, nor would have uncritically approved of the USSR under Stalin (I suspect he would have hated it).

 It is true that the anti-fascist alliance was a triumph that also, via the victories of the Red Army, introduced millions of workers to the ideas of socialism. But the post-war division of Europe did not fulfil those dreams. The carve-up created a series of satellite states that built a deficient model of socialism.

That model lasted 40 years – and required the intervention of Soviet troops on two occasions to suppress rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslavakia - before collapsing under a weight of economic and political stagnation. It is difficult to argue that this version of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the one that Marx had in mind.

For the sake of left unity and progress in Britain we should not resurrect false utopias but stick to analysing the complex reality of 20th century history, in which the Soviet Union, especially under Stalin, represented an iron wall against nazism, but ultimately also a negative example (we can cite the prevalent use of terror, cult of personality, forced collectivisation, slave labour, national chauvinism) that held back socialist advance and distorted the states that were created in its mirror image.

We are still living out the legacy of that inheritance in terms of negative views of socialism, that are not simply the result of anti-communist propaganda. Of course, there are examples from the era that we can uphold as better versions of the model. Yugoslavia, Cuba and Vietnam, as independent revolutions with their own national and social base, were able to circumvent the worst excesses of bureaucratic dictatorship and imbue the construction of socialism with more humanity. The Chinese revolution, under Mao, exhibited examples of the best and worst.

 But it is in new thinking and participatory models of socialism and democracy along the lines attempted today in Latin America, that hope lies, and perhaps here in Europe too in the coming years.