Polanyi and Red Vienna

Karl Polanyi for President  by Patrick Iber and Mike Konczal

Red Vienna

Trump and democracy

What Trump’s Rise Means for Democracy by Jedediah Purdy

Jeremy Corbyn

Enter Left by Sam Knight

Thee astonishing political emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the British Labour Party, is the sort of thing that passes for normal in Western democracies these days. Since the economic crash in 2008, anti-establishment types have cropped up everywhere. Corbyn, a sixty-six-year-old socialist, had never held a position of authority in his party or in government before being elected last summer on a platform of benign economic populism. He is Syriza in Greece; he is Podemos in Spain; he is Sanders in America. His politics rebel against a Britain that is eager to join foreign wars and pallid in the face of social inequality. “There has to be some kind of a reckoning,” Corbyn told me recently. “You actually have to run an economy for the benefit of people, not run for the benefit of hedge-fund managers.” 

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McDonnell was Corbyn’s campaign manager last summer and is now the shadow Chancellor. (In British politics, the opposition creates a “shadow” cabinet to respond to the Government.) When I asked him if he could convey just how improbable it was that he and Corbyn were now in charge of Labour, McDonnell quoted Fredric Jameson, an American literary theorist and Marxist scholar. “It is easier for people to imagine the end of the earth than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” he said. “And that is what we are about, aren’t we?”