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The excerpt below is about the UK/Europe but does it not also sound like the U.S and Jamaica that could be what is being discussed.?
Most people in Western Europe are, even if they don’t know it, social democrats. Survey after survey has shown that people want a strong welfare state, health care accessible to all, sound pensions and a good system of education.
The social democrats do not heed this because they are now, as much as the frankly neoliberal parties of the right, representatives of big capital, and not of working people at all. They do not heed it because they are unwilling and unable to challenge the dictatorship of the European Central Bank and the European Commission.
For socialists to support such people is to indulge in a pessimistic nostalgia which has no real relationship to the world as it is now. Electoral politics in the context of European Union member states, hidebound as parliaments are by the Lisbon Treaty and all it represents, can only ever be protest politics.
Movements are stirring – Spain’s indignants, UK Uncut, the Greek resistance – which promise to be far more effective than the passive strategy of putting a cross next to the name of the candidate whose party will, you hope, close down the fewest hospitals.
This is not an argument against voting. If you have real socialist parties in your country, vote for them. If you think the social democrats will at least put a barrier up to the rise of the far right, by all means vote for them.
But do it without illusions – and understand that the struggle for socialism, for decency, equality, solidarity – for simple dignity – is happening somewhere else entirely.
Most people in Western Europe are, even if they don’t know it, social democrats. Survey after survey has shown that people want a strong welfare state, health care accessible to all, sound pensions and a good system of education.
The social democrats do not heed this because they are now, as much as the frankly neoliberal parties of the right, representatives of big capital, and not of working people at all. They do not heed it because they are unwilling and unable to challenge the dictatorship of the European Central Bank and the European Commission.
For socialists to support such people is to indulge in a pessimistic nostalgia which has no real relationship to the world as it is now. Electoral politics in the context of European Union member states, hidebound as parliaments are by the Lisbon Treaty and all it represents, can only ever be protest politics.
Movements are stirring – Spain’s indignants, UK Uncut, the Greek resistance – which promise to be far more effective than the passive strategy of putting a cross next to the name of the candidate whose party will, you hope, close down the fewest hospitals.
This is not an argument against voting. If you have real socialist parties in your country, vote for them. If you think the social democrats will at least put a barrier up to the rise of the far right, by all means vote for them.
But do it without illusions – and understand that the struggle for socialism, for decency, equality, solidarity – for simple dignity – is happening somewhere else entirely.
