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URGENT: Please Sign up for your FREE SUBSCRIPTION NOW. On Right Column.* Why The USA Didn’t have a 1945 Moment
by Ian Williams The MaximsNews Global Pundit is also a journalist, U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and the past president of the United Nations Correspondents Association.
Of
course it did, in the sense of celebration of VJ
and VE days and the return of the millions of
troops to civilian life with renewed
expectations, but there was no VL day in the We now take it for granted that the United States is a socialist- free zone, but it was not always so. At its peak in 1912, the indigenous Socialist party had 118,000 members spread across the country. It
claimed 323 English and foreign-language
publications with a total circulation probably
in excess of two million, one of which alone,
out of That
same year Eugene V. Debs polled 6 percent of the
Presidential vote and Socialists were mayors in
79 cities. Then, in the wake of the Russian revolution, sectarianism based on inappropriate foreign models infected the socialist movement. The
Communists split from it and then successive
waves of Trotskyists infiltrated what was left
and then quit leaving it shattered, while
between them all the various Leninist factions
replaced egalitarian and populist American
socialism with a Leninist transplant. The
final death blow to socialism as an effective
political influence in the They
would much rather argue about US policy towards
Kosovo or Indeed
much of the avowed American left, in its
ideological purity, was pretty much cheering for
a Labour defeat in Britain this May, and many of
them now scorn Bernie Sanders, the one member of
Congress actually elected as a socialist,
because of what they see as his compromises. That, of course, comes to the nub of the issue. As an elected representative, Sanders, who is now running for the Senate, has to deal with reality, and be accountable for his actions. Only
unelected ideologues have the luxury of ignoring
reality in their formulations. The core difference between the fate of the American Socialist Party and the British Labour Party is the union connection. The
unions and their members, the cooperative
societies, and other such organizations
preserved the Labour Party from Leninist
irrelevancy and ensured that it had to deal with
real issues of real concern to the mass of
working people, whose support it could keep. The
ILP, and its leader James Maxton, (according to
Gordon Brown’s reverential biography) had
pioneered the original “ George
Orwell, former ILP member and self-proclaimed
Labour supporter, pointed out that even in For
most working people, “Socialism means, or at
least is associated with, higher wages, shorter
hours, better houses, all-round social
insurance,” he wrote in 1947, advocating a
united socialist He anticipated that the loss of empire would reduce working class living standards. In fact, it didn’t, and the 1945 Labour Government in that sense exceeded expectations. It
saw the beginning of new and unprecedented
prosperity and security for most British people.
Certainly
anyone who compared the results achieved by
British Labour and West European
social-democracy and with those achieved by
their more millenarian comrades in the former
Communist countries or indeed in the Despite
Thatcherite and indeed Blairite erosion, the
basic 1945 principles of health care, housing,
social security and free education have
contrived to make Britain, the monarchy and the
House of Lords notwithstanding, a more open
society than the US, which has yet to provide
paid maternity leave for women workers, and
where most workers get two weeks holiday a year
– if they dare take it. In
the Intriguingly, recent statistics show that Europeans are on average taller than Americans, reflecting better nutrition and health care. And
actual employees in the There
was indeed a fork on the road in 1945, and Despite the attempts to divert us onto other tracks, any comparison with the US, or the tattered remnants of the Soviet Union shows that this original Third Way is the road with the best prospects – as long as we keep moving forward and do not go into reverse. And for all its problems, the Labour Party is still the best vehicle for the trip, if we can keep it out the hands of the sects - both left and right. The
American lesson is that the union
connection is essential to keep the show on the
road.
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