UK ELECTION RESULTS: Jeremy Corbyn says he will not lead the UK's Labour party in the next general election, as voting results come in and add up to a crushing defeat for Labour at nationwide polls. Read the rest
Thomas Piketty, the French economist behind 2014's game-changing Capital in the 21st Century, has a new book, Capital and Ideology (out in France now, coming in English in 2020), which uses the same long-run economic series that Capital 21C benefited from to understand the relationship between wealth and ideology. Central to Piketty's thesis: that it's not enough to use class to understand how people vote -- you also have to take account of peoples' beliefs about class (this is a neat way of resolving the tension between traditional left class analysis and contemporary "identitarian" theories of leftist politics). Read the rest
Labour leader and PM-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn has promised that when he is Prime Minister, his government will introduce regulations that ban the finance-driven, asset-stripping hostile takeovers of UK companies, in a bid to make finance the "servants of industry not the masters of us all." Read the rest
Back in the days of the Howard Dean campaign, it seemed that the political left had a near-monopoly on brilliant, technologically sophisticated "netroots" activists, a situation that carried over to the Obama campaigns. But by 2016, the Pepe-slinging alt-right showed that earlier right-wing cybermilitias weren't just warmed over jokes with an unhealthy appreciation for Conservapedia -- they, too, could fight effectively by forming decentralized open source insurgencies that allowed autonomous activists and groups to change the political landscape. Read the rest
Morgan Stanley is one of the world's largest banks, so naturally it has racked up a long list of frauds, crimes, and misdemeanors, which it has emerged from largely unscathed, thanks to the unwillingness of governments to tackle corporate crime, especially in the finance sector. Read the rest
A frequent criticism of Jeremy Corbyn and the revitalised, principled, post-Blair Labour Party is their lack of clarity on Brexit -- some speculated that Corbyn felt that Brexit would, at least, allow for re-nationalisation of privatised industries, something the EU might block -- but at Wednesday's Prime Minister's Questions, Corbyn shredded Theresa May and the Tories with a series of relentless, devastating questions about the slow-motion train-wreck that is the Tories' bungling handling of Brexit. Read the rest
The Europe Together conference in Brussels brought together party leadership from "centre-left" parties across Europe; Jeremy Corbyn got two standing ovations for a barn-burning speech in which he called on European left wing parties to abandon Blairite anti-union/pro-bank policies and embrace policies that helped working families and reduced inequality. Read the rest
Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond called the Labour Party an "existential challenge to our economic model"; to which Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said, that is "absolutely right" and that Labour would destroy the current model, which "allows homelessness to double, 4 million children to live in poverty and over a million older people not getting the care they need." Read the rest
Thirty years ago, the collapse of the USSR and the ascendancy of the neoliberal policies of Thatcher, Reagan, Pinochet and Mulroney sent the left into retreat, and what has passed for the left ever since has been dominated by Bill Clinton/Tony Blair-style "triangulation" or "humanized capitalism," whose core hypothesis might be summed up as, "Rather than allowing 150 white male CEOs to run the world, we should ensure that at least half of them are women and/or people of color." Read the rest
In Public opinion in the post-Brexit era, the centre-right thinktank Legatum reveals that 83% of Britons favour re-nationalising water companies; 77% want to re-nationalise electricity, and 76% want to re-nationalize the railroads. Read the rest
In an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn, Neil Wilson explains how Labour can frame its policy on student debt forgiveness after they take power and abolish tuition fees. Read the rest
Naomi Klein (previously) is the author of several voraciously readable, hugely influential books about radical politics, most recently No is Not Enough, which calls for a positive vision for a different, better future, going beyond the idea of replacing Trump, May and other neoliberal leaders with slightly less neoliberal leaders who might be slightly better on climate change or women's reproductive rights -- as the joke goes, "A conservative wants the world to be run by 150 white, male CEOs; a liberal wants to be sure half of them are women and/or people of color." Read the rest
Nearly two weeks after the Tories lost their majority in an own-goal election lost despite the use of allegedly unassailable media-manipulation techniques, Prime Minister Theresa May has been edged out in the polls by Jeremy Corbyn, who is now the person the largest proportion of Britons would like to see in Number 10. Read the rest
...and they're likely to vote for the "unelectable" Jeremy Corbyn, a guy significantly to the left of, say, Bernie Sanders, who has survived multiple attempts by the finance-capital wing of his own party to unseat him, and who is riding on a national wave of disillusionment with Thatherism, Neo-Thatcherism, and May-Thatcherism. Read the rest
Games for the Many sends us Put on Your Corbyn Face, "A web game where you are challenged to match the emotions of a photo Jeremy Corbyn. Possibly the first web game you play with empathy and emotion." Read the rest
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn -- re-elected in an unprecedented landslide despite back-stabbing from party grandees and MPs -- inaugurated his new term with a hell of a conference speech. Read the rest
