fellow nettimers long time no write - been busy surviving and promoting the book.
as DSA makes its (positive) electoral debut, i'd like to discuss with you a question: Why there is socialism in America, while there is no more socialism in Continental Europe where it originated? Before WWI Werner Sombart famously investigated the question of the relative weakness of socialist parties (Debs notwithstanding) and trade unions in America with respect to Europe. He argued that socialism had floundered because the promise of material prosperity kept the US working class mostly within the narrow confines of business unionism. Today we have come full circle. In the two former central powers of neoliberalism socialism is all the rage, propelling Corbyn's socialist Labour close to government power in the UK and upsetting the defeatist moderatism of the democratic party by entrenching the Bern effect in the US. Also in Great Britain the appeal of socialism (and communism) had traditionally been minority currency with respect to Fabian reformism and non-marxist social democracy, so that the absolute boy's dazzling political trajectory also breaks with the historical reformist and pragmatist bent of the english working class. In both cases, (precarious) millennials have been pivotal in boosting consensus for the two anglo-american 68ers. The picture couldn't of course be more different in europe, where French socialism, German socialdemocracy, Dutch labor etc etc are either disappearing and/or will be excluded from power for the foreseeable future. Still, euros and anglos have the same paramount concern for inequality, due to the aftermath of the capitalist crisis known as the great recession. So why socialism has appeal in the former brain center of neoliberalism, and has completely lost it in the eurozone? And if the red star has faded from europe, what polar star will orient anticapitalist struggles and social reform on the continent? best ciaos and visca catalunya: down with the bourgeois monarchy and the francoist state, shame on europe for not protecting the rights of catalans, lx
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