The National Education Union general secretary speaks to Ben Chacko on growing calls to protect children from a toxic online culture
Latest editorial
Is it possible to vote socialism into power in a ‘free-market democracy’?
The revival of socialism has come with an unwelcome renewal of faith in the ‘democratic’ system. The system is anything but democratic, explains NICOLAS LALAGUNA
While Iranians take to the streets en masse to protest sky-high inflation, Trump and Netanyahu are threatening military intervention. The Iranian population is trapped between a repressive regime, a suffocating economic war from the outside, and a history of dark alliances, argues MARC VANDEPITTE
Unison Scotland’s BRENDA AITCHISON says her union won’t tolerate further cuts to public services
The Danish Communist Party’s Lotte Rortoft-Madsen assesses the fallout from US threats to annex the huge Arctic island
Trump threatens war and punitive tariffs to recapture Iranian resources – just as in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh and US corporations immediately seized 40% of the oil, says SEVIM DAGDELEN
Once derided by Farage as a ‘fraud,’ Jenrick has defected to Reform, bringing experience and political ruthlessness to the populist right — and raising the unsettling prospect of a Farage-led movement with a seasoned operative pulling the strings, says ANDREW MURRAY
FOR several years now there has been a resurgence of socialism and a subsequent political main-streaming of progressive radicalism.
This is probably best exemplified by the phenomenon of an actually socialist-led Labour Party in the UK, democratic socialists within the Democratic Party in the US, Syriza in Greece and of course Podemos in Spain.
And in light of this trend, it is worth understanding not only what kind of society it is that we are all trying to build but whether the systems we are using to try and build it are capable of doing the job. For me the question is, whether the ‘state’ in the ‘free-market democracy’ model, is fundamentally capable of delivering a society built on compassion, freedom, equality, and sustainability or is it simply not fit for purpose?
In 1918, when the sociologist Max Weber was asked what is a state, he answered that it is a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”
This, as I understand it, means that the state is a minority within a wider population that argues that it and it alone has the right to use violence.
A few years later in 1931, educator and philosopher John Dewey wrote: “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”
To put it another way, while the political system is fundamentally beholden to the wealthy elite, acting within the system approved by the political establishment will have little if any impact on the true nature of power in society.
Similar stories
RICHARD BURGON MP points to the recent relative success of widespread opposition to the Labour leadership’s regressive policies as the blueprint for exacting the changes required to build a fairer society
From Gaza complicity to welfare cuts chaos, Starmer’s baggage accumulates, and voters will indeed find ‘somewhere else’ to go — to the Greens, nationalists, Lib Dems, Reform UK or a new, working-class left party, writes NICK WRIGHT
There is no doubt that Trump’s regime is a right-wing one, but the clash between the state apparatus and the national and local government is a good example of what any future left-wing formation will face here in Britain, writes NICK WRIGHT
Despite liberal whining that Trump threatens the ‘international rules-based order,’ the historical record shows Western nations have repeatedly overthrown democracies, backed genocides and violated sovereignty, writes IAN SINCLAIR