I have my darker political moments, the days when it becomes difficult to hold onto that progressive optimism in an age when every main party is talking the language of austerity and cuts whilst banks are given blanks cheques signed by the taxpayer. Socialism, it would appear, can be ever so attractive to the rich when their precious market crashes and burns.
Quite what we here on the ‘Left’, whatever that highly generic term means anymore, are supposed to think when one of our last great public services struggles for a cash injection to modernise whilst banks only to need click their fingers to gain instant financial relief, is not clear. No one seems to be asking that vital question of why the hell it is the irresponsible rich have screwed up and receive instant recompense whilst men and women across the country are now faced with picking up the tab.
For years we’ve had the same story of low public expenditure, low taxation and liberal job markets and have enjoyed our secular worship of the twin gods of supply and demand. As our generation has been indoctrinated in this market run society in which wages drifted into murky waters of insufficiency we’ve all accepted that if we want to get anywhere in life we’ve got to take onboard a lifetime’s worth of debt.

One David Harvey, wrote about this bank bailout being a massive consolidation of the banking industry at the expense of the populace in general; nothing new there. In fact there is a particularly relevant precedent in the case of Mexico in 1982 when the IMF mandated austerity for the populace in order to protect the banking industry and the New York Stock Exchange. However the real point he made was that credit finance has been a mainstay of our economic system since the late 1970’s as a means of covering the shortfall between what the labour force has been earning and what it has been spending. Since we live in a consumer society, which lets face it, loves to hate the poor, spending was always likely to run ahead of the earnings that have been sunk by the declawing of the Unions in the mid 1980’s.
Given that we have a Labour party who “are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” and seem to have, at a basic conceptual level, gone for the self-interest virtues of the market over any fuzzy socialist notions of co-operation; it becomes difficult to see its current political compass as being part of the solution at all.
Of course it was quick to rediscover Keynesian policies and exhume them when the banks came rattling their collection tins outside Parliament, which leaves a lot of us who now face higher taxes, a higher retirement age and a future in which we’re all going to struggle under the ‘burden’ of increased public expenditure wondering just why it is that our government were happy to enforce this on us after years of telling us that to they couldn’t afford to raise taxes to pay for public services, or education or health or maybe even the poor, which to be honest don’t seem to have got any richer recently.
What this situation has entailed is the now cast-iron certainty of a Conservative administration stepping into power come the next general election and even more reasons to despise tax and despise government ‘meddling’.
Lest we forget, we’ve got a generation of people singing songs of market supremacy when they owe their health and their education to the large-scale edifices of the socialist experiment of the Attlee administration. I for one know that if it were not for the social democratic institutions that exist within this country I’d be lucky if I could read, let alone write this little rant, let’s not even go into the health side of things.

Most importantly, none of this was achieved by simply giving up.

Renewal and change, pleasant buzzwords in a world of class division and social injustice; if I could make such words mean something I would make them mean the rediscovery of Democratic Socialism, and the recollection that we’ve a duty not just to the under-privileged of today but to those of tomorrow. I don’t think that socialism is about bowing to the market or a mere managerial style of government, I happen to think it is about continuing the work towards a classless and equal society. So if like me you’re subject to the doubt that comes when faced with a looming Conservative government the message is; “This is our chance to reclaim our party, reclaim our principles and carry on this fight.”