Crunch Times: Politics And The Crisis ILP Round Table Seminar Esplanade Hotel, Scarborough 13th-14th June 2009 Saturday 13th June 2.00 – 5.00pm Sunday 14th June 9.30am – 12.30pm Session 1: The economic crisis • What just happened? • What does it tell us about capitalism? Session 2: The mess we’re in...
Is there a song for solidarity?
SARAH BRACKING unpicks the liberal agenda behind Live8 and the G8 summit. The majority of the people attending Live8, and the demonstrations surrounding the G8, wanted no more nor less than to reduce poverty. But helping poor people in other countries raises problems, particularly when the language of benevolence doesn’t explain the structural issues...
Picking at the pensions pickle
JONATHAN TIMBERS appreciates a useful contribution to the left’s developing approach to the pensions debate Anyone who believes that we can continue to exist as we do now with our current pension system is living in a dream world. In 2002, there were 3.35 working people for every person of pensionable age. By 2050...
Labour’s illusory reforms
DEXTER WHITFIELD argues that by marketising our public services Labour is eroding democratic accountability The Labour government has launched a series of ‘reforms’, which place a new emphasis on market-based modernisation of public services. Democratic accountability and transparency will be further eroded. Although there is euphoria for ‘citizen engagement’ this is participation limited to...
dot.com/sustainedgrowth?
WILLIAM BROWN sifts through the remains of an e-commerce party that never was, and warns that the ill-winds of an economic downturn could soon be blowing across the Atlantic. Maybe it was the end-of-the-century party mood, or a kind of millennium bug which affected economic forecasters, but the 1990s were awash with optimistic economic...
Making the mutual state
The New Economics Foundation is influencing the government’s agenda with its ideas for democratising the public sector. MATTHEW BROWN spoke to NEF’s executive director, Ed Mayo. Last year an “independent think tank”, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), published a small pocket book called The Mutual State: How local communities can run public services, which...
Africa: Imperialism goes naked
SARAH BRACKING and GRAHAM HARRISON argue that imperialism is a far more useful concept than globalisation for understanding Africa’s relations with the global economy. ‘The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its home, where it assumes respectable form, to the colonies, where it goes naked.’...
The temptation of honest mutuality
DAVID BYRNE examines the recommodification of the welfare state, and says mutuals must decide which side they are for – corporate capital or socialism. “He who sups with the devil had best use a long spoon.” (Traditional) We are at a crisis point in the trajectory of welfare capitalism. It is worth dwelling for...
There is an alternative
Carl Davidson shares his thoughts on reading After Capitalism by David Schweickart In this short book, building on his earlier work, Against Capitalism, David Schweickart has given us an excellent breakthrough in finding the road to a new socialism for the 21st century. Using both practical and ethical arguments, his main objective is to...