#Campaign for Social Justice & Economic Justice-Jamaica

[serious2020]

Open Letter to the United States Embassy on U.S. Involvement in Haiti

To the Honorable Representatives of the United States Embassies in the Caribbean: November 18, 2024 Open Letter to the United States Embassy The core principle of the 1951 Convention on Refugees is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life orfreedom. This principle was expanded by the 1967 Protocol Relating…

[berniesrevolution]

The politics of Britain and the U.S. can have a strange, synchronized rhythm to them. Margaret Thatcher was a harbinger of Ronald Reagan as both countries veered suddenly rightward in the 1980s. Prime Minister John Major emerged as Thatcher’s moderate successor as George H.W. Bush became Reagan’s, cementing the conservative trans-Atlantic shift. The “New Democrats” and the Clintons were then mirrored by “New Labour” and the Blairs, adapting the policies of the center-left to the emerging consensus of market capitalism. Even Barack Obama and David Cameron were not too dissimilar — social liberals, unflappable pragmatists — until the legacies of both were swept aside by right-populist revolts. The sudden summer squall of Brexit in 2016 and the triumph of Trump a few months later revealed how similarly the Tories and the Republicans had drifted into nationalist, isolationist fantasies.

But what of the parallels on the left? What’s generating activist energy and intellectual ferment in both countries is an increasingly disinhibited and ambitious socialism. Bernie Sanders’s strength in the Democratic Party primaries two years ago was a prelude to a new wave of candidates who’ve struck unabashedly left-populist notes this year, calling for “Medicare for all” and the end of ICE, alongside a more social-justice-oriented cultural message. Some, like the charismatic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have achieved national visibility as an uncomplicated socialism has found more converts, especially among the young. Moderate Democrats have not disappeared, but they are on the defensive. A fight really is brewing for the soul of the Democrats.

And so it seems worth trying to understand what has happened in the Labour Party in Britain in the past few years. In 2015, in a flash, Labour became the most radical, left-wing, populist force in modern British political history. Its message was and is a return to socialism, a political philosophy not taken seriously there since the 1970s, combined with a truly revolutionary anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist foreign policy. This lurch to the extremes soon became the butt of jokes, an easy target for the right-wing tabloid press, and was deemed by almost every pundit as certain to lead the party into a distant wilderness of eccentric irrelevance.

Except it didn’t. Today, Labour shows no sign of collapse and is nudging ahead of the Tories in the polls. In the British general election last year, it achieved the biggest gain in the popular vote of any opposition party in modern British history. From the general election of 2015 to the general election of 2017, Labour went from 30 percent of the vote to 40 percent. It garnered 3.6 million more votes as a radical socialist party than it had as a center-left party. Hobbled only by a deepening row over anti-Semitism in its ranks, Labour will be the clear favorite to form the next government if the brittle Tory government of Theresa May falls as a result of its internal divisions over Brexit.

This success — as shocking for the Labour Establishment as for the Tories — has, for the moment at least, realigned British politics. It has caused Tony Blair, the most successful Labour prime minister in history, to exclaim: “I’m not sure I fully understand politics right now.” It comes a decade after the 2008 crash, after ten years of relentless austerity for most and unimaginable wealth for a few, and after market capitalism’s continued failure to meaningfully raise the living standards of most ordinary people. When the bubble burst ten years ago, it seemed as if Brits were prepared to endure an economic hit, to sacrifice and make the most of a slow recovery, but when growth returned as unequally distributed as ever, something snapped. The hearing the hard left has gotten is yet more evidence that revolutions are born not in the nadir of economic collapse but rather when expectations of recovery are dashed.

Revolution is not that much of an exaggeration. In the wake of capitalism’s crisis, the right has reverted to reactionism — a nationalist, tribal, isolationist pulling up of the drawbridge in retreat from global modernity. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before the left reacted in turn by embracing its own vision of an egalitarian future unimpeded by compromise or caveat. This is the socialist dream being revived across the Atlantic, and not on the fringes but at the heart of one of the two great parties of government.

Democrats should pay attention. Labour’s path is the one they narrowly avoided in 2016 but are warming to this fall and in 2020. It’s an English reboot of Clinton-Sanders, with Sanders winning, on a far more radical platform. And, politically, it might just work.

At the center of this story is a 69-year-old socialist eccentric, Jeremy Corbyn, who never in his life thought he would lead any political party, let alone be credibly tipped to be the next British prime minister. The parallels with Sanders are striking: Both are untouched by the mainstream politics of the past 30 years, both haven’t changed their minds on anything in that time, both are characterologically incapable of following party discipline, both have a political home (Vermont; Islington in London) that is often lampooned as a parody of leftism, and both are political lifers well past retirement age who suddenly became cult figures for voters under 30. But this doesn’t quite capture how marginal Corbyn had long been. The better American analogue to his sudden ascent as Labour Party leader would be Dennis Kucinich beating Clinton in the 2016 primaries in a landslide.

Born into an upper-middle-class family, Corbyn was a classic “red diaper” baby. His parents were socialists, and Yew Tree Manor, the 17th-century house in rural Shropshire he grew up in (which his parents renamed Yew Tree House), was a bohemian, left-leaning, capacious, book-filled salon. As Rosa Prince’s biography Comrade Corbyn details, he rebelled at his high school, joined the Young Socialists at the age of 16, and has told a journalist that his main interests as a teen were “peace issues. Vietnam. Environmental issues.” He graduated with such terrible grades that college was not an option, so he joined Britain’s equivalent of the Peace Corps and decamped to Jamaica for two years, then traveled all over Latin America. Appalled by the rank inequality he saw around him, he radicalized still further, and when he came back to Britain, he moved to multiracial North London, with a heavy immigrant population (today, less than half of those living in his district identify as “white British”). It was as close to the developing world as Britain got. And he felt at home.

Even then, he was an outlier on the left. Sympathetic to the goals of the Irish Republican Army, hostile to the monarchy, supportive of Third World revolutionary movements, campaigning for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the young Corbyn was also opposed to Britain’s membership in NATO and what was to become the European Union, because he despised the American alliance and the EU’s capitalist ambitions. He was ascetic: averse to drink and drugs, a vegetarian, interested in hardly anything but attending meetings, and meetings, and meetings. His first wife left him in part because he was never home, always building the movement; his second because he refused to agree to send their son to a selective high school, rather than to a local one open to all abilities. He was the perpetual organizer, the kind who made sure everyone had a cup of tea before a meeting and for whom no fringe activist group was too small to tend to. Decades later, Corbyn has barely shifted on any of these beliefs — and has only recently agreed to sing the national anthem (he long refused to because it invokes the queen). As Labour leader, though, Corbyn has compromised some: The party’s official position in the Brexit referendum was for remaining, and the party manifesto in 2017 supported NATO. He first became a member of Parliament for Islington North in 1983, at the height of Thatcherism, and has held his seat ever since, his majority increasing in all but two of his seven campaigns. (In 2017, he won with a crushing 73 percent of the vote.) His fierce local support tells you something else about Corbyn. Despite his extreme views, he is, by all accounts, a model in attending to the concerns of his local voters and has made remarkably few political enemies of a personal nature. He’s soft-spoken, sweet, invariably cordial, and even his foes concede his deep personal integrity. When I was in London recently, I spoke with people across the political spectrum, from Blairites to Tories to Corbynistas, and I couldn’t find anyone who disliked him personally. Politically, sure — with venom. But as a human being? No. That’s rare for someone who’s been in Parliament for 35 years.

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