On 4/5/21 7:17 PM, Gary MacLennan wrote:
Well Donal there is a long tradition in UK Labour of accepting
knighthoods and of course elevation to the House of Lords. And that
probably tells you all you need to know about the Right of Labour.
comradely
Gary
In doing some research for the article I wrote about Ralph Miliband a
while back, I discovered that someone part of his circle turned out to
be Keith Starmer. Is this an indication that the idea of building a
socialist party in England is a process that is best left out of the
hands of academics and lawyers? Maybe so. Not as long as they know their
place.
Starmer’s Socialist Alternatives
<https://www.thesocialreview.co.uk/2020/05/28/starmers-socialist-alternatives/>
By David
Klemperer<https://www.thesocialreview.co.uk/author/davidklemperer/>Labour
Leadership
<https://www.thesocialreview.co.uk/category/labour-leadership/>,Realities
<https://www.thesocialreview.co.uk/category/realities/>28th May 2020
Musing on the future of the Labour Party in 1986, one
twenty-four-year-old activist denounced centrism, insisting that the
future lay with the grassroots Left. “Instead of heading towards an SDP
Mark II”, he wrote, “we would be better to go forward to re-build and
develop the party as an instrument of socialism, capable of integrating
into its project the emergence of the new social movements of the last
twenty years”. That activist was a young Keir Starmer, and he was
writing for a journal called/Socialist Alternatives/.
Described by Chartist as the “human face of the hard left”,/Socialist
Alternatives/spent the period of its brief existence from 1986 to 1987
seeking to promote a “redefinition of the socialist project”. In
response to the ongoing triumph of Thatcherism and the social changes of
the era, it sought to develop a “British counterpart” to the
“Alternative movement” then emerging across the continental European
Left. Although it claimed to be simply a “forum for debate” with an
“editorial emphasis on open questions rather than definite answers”, the
magazine’s origins lay in Pabloite Trotskyism, and it represented a
minority libertarian tendency on the British grassroots Left. Starmer
was a member of the editorial collective, and over the magazine’s five
issues his name appears under eight articles.
Despite its fringe position, the themes and arguments developed
in/Socialist Alternatives/are worth exploring today. (And not just
because little-read publications in which earnest twenty-somethings
debate the future of socialism always deserve more attention…) Once
again, a Labour Party in opposition is forced to confront the hegemony
of a new kind of conservatism, and the ideas of the young Starmer and
his comrades feel strikingly relevant to an age of pandemic and climate
emergency.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#7778): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/7778
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/81859518/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[arch...@mail-archive.com]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
