North-Atlantic Left Dialogue

Click here for a video of the December 1, 2011 panel with Leo Panitch, Stephanie Ross, Albert Scharenberg and Bill Fletcher, Jr.

In Memory of Hermann Scheer

This text has been developed within the ISM’s steering committee together with the active participation of other colleagues. Our aim is to advance the process of programmatic and strategic agreement, which is already under way in the social and political left as well as in critical scholarship and culture and which has recently gained new impetus from the turn in nuclear policy. In this, we are less concerned with a possibly exhaustive listing of the various single steps toward a social-ecological reconstruction. Rather, we would like to make clear that such a reconstruction can only be designed as a comprehensive social, cultural and political project, in the end as a project of another society – of a solidariy modernity. For the ongoing elaboration and carrying out of such a project, a broad alliance of diverse protagonists has to evolve. Through a discussion of the present text we would like to open up a first opportunity for such an alliance. The text itself is therefore conceived as an invitation to participation. More…

The RLF Policy Paper by Hans Thie – a participant in the December 2011 NALD seminar in Toronto – can be found on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s site at:

http://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Standpunkte/policy_paper/Policy_Paper_3-2011.pdf

Michael Brie discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Erik Olin Wright’s new book.  Click here to read the review.

This brochure contains rich discussions of actually existing partial attempts to replace GDP with other economic measurements and of the struggles around this. Here are excerpts – click here to read them. The full brochure can be seen at

http://www.transform-network.net/uploads/media/transform__the_left_between-growth_and_degrowth.pdf

In this key paper for Die LINKE’s strategic discussion on growth, GDP and green capitalism, Dieter Klein addresses the question of alternatives to GDP as an economic measurement. In this context he sees green conversion within capitalism as a moment that makes one last phase of growth possible while the left pushes for a transition to non-growth.

(A PDF of the article can be accessed here.)

For article in Word: More…

With the crisis now in its fifth year, it’s plain that the rich and powerful have restructured society toward ever-greater inequality. Guardian, May 27, 2011

In this succinct piece Cornelia Hildebrandt captures the contradictions in Die LINKE’s considerable potential, the various double binds it finds itself in, due to its mixed reality as a Volkspartei in the East and largely protest party in the West, along with the paradoxical implications of the crisis for the party. The statistical data help in forming an idea of the party’s reality. More…

This text is based on Frank Deppe’s lecture at the conference on this theme organized by wissentransfer and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in June 2010 in Berlin. Click here to read it.

In this reflection, Bill Fletcher, Jr. suggests a way to connect a transformative socialist politics, including organizational project, to the mass left potential that exists in the US, but largely outside the ambit of the organizational left, and this in a non-revolutionary period and with the regressive electoral laws that make it unlikely that the left can contend for power under its own name. He touches on the need for a left counter-narrative, the need for the left to promote a public identity for those disparate forces that see themselves as part of a diffuse left, not of the socialist left with its specific history. More…

In this contribution to the 2010 NALD seminar, Michael Brie points out the left’s tendency to retreat from the challenge of a redistributive politics and at the same time the problems with a narrow traditional approach to wealth redistribution. Click here to read it.

In their pieces posted on this site David Harvey and Christina Kaindl point to what strikes me as one of the central questions, if not the central question, for movements of the left today:  the gap between the social transformation that we envision and the capacity of existing movements to carry it out.  More…

If the crisis of 2007-2009 opened up a window of opportunity for policy proposals of a Keynesian sort, or of any other kind emerging to at least be heard outside the neoliberal homelands, this window is rapidly closing. The order of the day is an aggressive confirmation and reiteration of the established canon, and what remains is not only those who are defending their material interest—unabated accumulation of wealth—, but also the insecure masses longing for reassurance. The latter all the more that they are provided with easy targets on which to project their sense of unease: those movements and self-represented individuals sailing on the latest wave of racism, xenophobia and social exclusion under the flag of Anti-Islamism can be seen as the German and European parallel to the Tea Party. Regression is the response to challenges unmet. More…

Saturday: political crises and stalemates, political shifts, the political right (e.g. tea party) 

Karl Rove announced a day after the mid-term elections in the U.S. (November 3, 2010) “Climate is Gone.” The crises and stalemate around US climate and energy policy is a significant component of the present political reality in the US – one that presents opportunities as well as difficulties for the left.   More…

Looking back to over 2 years of crisis-related politics we have to recognize that the crisis has done little to overcome the fragmentation of the left. We have not yet succeeded in transforming into components of a mosaic the fragments that have the potential to coalesce. More…

In response to Jan Rehmann’s November 6 post, I can briefly embellish my proposal.

The entry project of a major public employment program to “solve” the mostly private sector unemployment in the US would go beyond the usually level of reform (as, for example, in Obama’s 2009 stimulus program) in four dimensions. More…

This piece by Jan Rehmann is a critical attempt to find connecting points between the papers by Dieter Klein, Michael Brie/Dieter Klein, David Harvey and the papers posted by William K. Tabb, Richard D. Wolff and Bill Fletcher, Jr. It offers a synthesis that absorbs their various strengths and articulates the problem with a different point of view. Click here to download it.

November, 2010

We all seem agreed that we need both (1) immediate, short-term, popular entry projects and simultaneously (2) a clear anti-capitalist, social transformative project. Whatever program we develop must somehow combine or at least include both (1) and (2). More…

The Conjuncture and Class Struggle

William K. Tabb

Saturday: political crises and stalemates, political shifts, the political right

The discussion of electoral politics needs to be positioned in the context of the continuing economic crisis, the decades-long stagnation of working class real income and growing insecurity with regard to a future which Americans feel is less likely to contain the American Dream future for themselves and their children. Global shifts make the prospects of most workers in the territorial United States bleak even as US-based transnationals and international financiers look to so-called emerging markets for new opportunities. More…

Saturday:

Political crisis and stalemates: There are efforts underway by the transnational capitalist class to rebuild neo-liberalism but through a transnational infrastructure.    This is vehemently opposed by both right-wing populists as well as the Left, but the right-wing populists could serve as shock troops to suppress the progressive forces, thereby advancing the objectives of global capital. Download…

Central issues dominating politics in North Atlantic nations today include the impact of the economic crisis, its causes, state responses, and who will pay for the state responses. The crisis exemplifies capitalism’s inherent instability. It carries both risk and opportunity for capitalism. The risk is that its victims will question capitalism per se and possibly seek a different post-capitalist class structure. The opportunity lies in a devaluation of means of production and labor power that creates conditions for renewed capitalist growth. Supporters of capitalism work politically to minimize the risk and take advantage of the opportunity. More…