Newsgroups: uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Ewan MacColl
From: Dick Gaughan <dickg (@) dickalba.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 17:44:12 +0100

In <3B2389BC.CFCAAF30 (@) virgin.net> on Sun, 10 Jun 2001 15:52:44 +0100, Ted Tann-Watson <ted.tann-watson (@) virgin.net> wrote:

>What happened to Socialism?

If you mean within the British Labour Party, nothing happened to it :) Although the Labour Party has always had a number of Socialists within its ranks, and continued to pay lip service to some vague theoretical notion it called "socialism", in practise it has been a Social Democratic party since the purges of the Left in the 1920s. (I would say "right of centre" but we appear to have moved the goalposts marked "centre" to somewhere on the right so that anyone to the left of Genghis Khan can now be accused of being an extremist.) Neil Kinnock was merely carrying on an established LP tradition. One of the more amusing consequences of the lurch to the right under Blair has been the wiping out of the memory of the likes of Ramsey McDonald. There's nothing new going on, Labour's been here several times before. Which is why I have never been a member :) The dominant philosophy of Labour has always been Fabianist, not socialist.

If you mean in global terms I would point out that, throughout history, no revolutionary change has been succesful at the first attempt; Capitalism had several attempts before gaining the ascendency. There is no evidence that the contradictions within Capitalism have been resolved or the effects of those contradictions reduced, indeed the contrary is only too clearly evident.

As they used to say, watch this space - to paraphrase Charlie Marx, it is not how any individual human being, or even the human race as a whole, perceives itself that is important; it is what humanity is and what it will therefore be forced to do - if only in the pure selfish interests of its own survival - that counts. Stupidity and greed notwithstanding.

--
DG

 

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