Skip to main content
Bad ideas: why is the left so keen to champion every idea that avoids confrontation with capitalism?
The class struggle is a zero-sum game, argues ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
assertive workers

HISTORY is a corrective of ideas, serving as a reality check on intellectual inflation. Sometimes it takes years, decades, even centuries for big and even not so big ideas to be properly deflated.

I remember fondly many heated arguments with the late Fred Gaboury, a former union logger from the north-west United States, who became an organiser for Trade Unionists for Action and Democracy, editor of Labour Today and World Federation Trade Union representative to the United Nations. Fred was a serious thinker in ways that many of his contemporaries missed.

When the eurozone — the European monetary union — was about to be established, I argued that between nationalism and uneven European development, a common currency was not sustainable. Posthumously, I conceded to Fred. But, today, there is plenty more reason to doubt the eurozone’s future sustainability. History has yet to speak definitively.

Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Confetti and flowers are dropped from a military helicopter
Opinion / 1 April 2025
1 April 2025
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
10 - AFL-CIO_Headquarters_by_Matthew_Bisanz
Features / 9 January 2025
9 January 2025
ZOLTAN ZIGEDY reflects on the lessons from two books looking at the US labour movement and the recent history of spontaneous mass uprisings – and finds two pernicious ideologies working against the interests of the people
11 - Trump supprt
Features / 22 November 2024
22 November 2024
ZOLTAN ZIGEDY argues Trump’s victory shows the deep failure of liberal calculations that write off huge swathes of the electorate and mirrors the worldwide rise of right-wing populism amid Establishment collapse
Cringeworthy words in the battle of ideas
OPINION / 31 October 2024
31 October 2024
From ‘middle class’ to ‘microaggressions,’ from ‘fascism’ to ‘terrorism,’ ZOLTAN ZIGEDY makes an anguished cry for us to turn away from the most misused and misleading terms and tropes – or at least use them accurately
Similar stories
MONEY TALKS: A general view of City workers on Bank Street a
Full Marx / 6 April 2025
6 April 2025
Labour’s fiscal policy is already in trouble. But simply printing money is not a solution, says the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School
Vladimir Lenin, revolutionary leader of the first government
Features / 17 September 2024
17 September 2024
The left’s retreat from class, embrace of ‘hyphenated capitalisms’ and tepid reformism in tropical settings needs to be finally dumped in favour of a bold socialist programme and Leninist party organisation, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
endgame
Books / 5 September 2024
5 September 2024
WILL PODMORE is intrigued by an analysis of capital that emphasises the deadening impact of financialisation on the US and UK economies